Tomorrow we’ll get to our annual end-of-year review of the year’s top elections. First, though, a quick look at a story from an earlier year – in fact, four years ago – that’s shown a striking lack of progress: the Bougainville independence referendum of 2019.
Bougainville, nominally part of Papua New Guinea since that country became independent from Australia in 1975, voted 98.3% for independence in the internationally supervised referendum. But PNG was not formally committed to implementing the result, only to negotiations with the Bougainvilleans. According to a story last week in the Channel Nine papers, Bougainville’s president Ishmael Toroama says that agreement has been reached for independence “no earlier than 2025 and no later than 2027.”
The fact that the story is by the Washington correspondent, Farrah Tomazin, rather than someone in the Pacific can be explained by Toroama being there on a visit, but it’s symptomatic of the way the story is framed: in terms of the west’s security interests rather than justice for the people of Bougainville. And it’s hard to resist the conclusion that Australia has encouraged PNG’s foot-dragging on the issue, both before and since the referendum, whether from strategic concerns or simply a knee-jerk hostility to self-determination.
That said, the eventual outcome is not really in doubt. PNG has tried before to suppress Bougainville nationalism by force and did not come out of it well; it’s not likely to try again. And the Bougainvilleans have been waiting for their independence for a century and a quarter – they can wait until 2027, even if there’s no rational reason why they should have to.
It’s even possible that a successful transition to independence will create some momentum in the region for tackling the much larger and more explosive self-determination question, that of West Papua, where again Australia has taken a leading role in support of imperialism. But don’t hold your breath.
The World is Not Enough 
West Papua was not a viable state in 1962, when the Dutch were forced out, and Indonesia had a valid claim to the territory as part of the former Netherlands East Indies. Indonesia is now a fairly successful and increasingly prosperous multi-ethnic state, and also is the only genuine democracy in ASEAN.
The Melanesian Papuans would be much better advised to find their future as part of that state than to pursue futile separatism – particularly futile since they are now a minority of the population. Would they really be better off in a small, weak, ethnically divided Papuan state? The lessons of Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans suggest not. (It would also be very much not in Australia’s interests to see Indonesia break up, which is why Australia does not and should not lend any official support to separatism in Papua or anywhere else.)
It’s true that the Indonesians are guilty of many human rights violations in Papua, but this is a self-fulfilling prophesy. Because Indonesia is a large, scattered, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-faith country, the Indonesians are not surprisingly paranoid about separatism, so they suppress it when they see it. If there was no separatist agitation, there would be no pretext for repression. The successful resolution of the Aceh separatist situation should be a model for Papua.
LikeLike
Well, by my count West Papua is more populous than 79 of the members of the UN and bigger in area than 136 of them, so I can’t see on what basis you can say it’s not viable. Of course it didn’t have the full range of necessary institutions at the time, but that’s like saying you shouldn’t go into the water until you’ve learnt to swim.
The question of whether its people would be better off under Indonesian rule than independent is a legitimate one, but it’s a question for them, no-one else. To quote Simon Jenkins again, “No nation seeks independence to get rich. It seeks independence to get free.”
You’re quite right about Indonesia’s paranoia, but that’s all the more reason why its neighbors should be firmly insisting that “separatist agitation”, as you put it – that is, peaceful campaigning for self-determination – is a basic human right that every government should respect. The neglect of that principle does a lot of harm throughout the world.
LikeLiked by 1 person