By David Hutt
April 26, 2024

ASEAN BEAT | SECURITY | SOUTHEAST ASIA
Indonesian Imperialism Is Alive – And Brutal – in West Papua
In the restive eastern province, Cold War realpolitik continues to reverberate.

David Hutt
By David Hutt
April 26, 2024
Indonesian Imperialism Is Alive – And Brutal – in West Papua
Supporters of the independence of the West Papua shout slogans during a rally
commemorating the 59th anniversary of the failed efforts by Papuan tribal
chiefs to declare independence from Dutch colonial rule in 1961, in Jakarta,
Indonesia, Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2020.

Credit: AP Photo/Achmad Ibrahim
Last month, videos emerged of 13 soldiers from an elite Indonesian battalion in
West Java torturing a Papuan man, Definus Kogoya. According to Human Rights
Watch, Kogoya “had his hands tied behind him and been placed inside a drum
filled with water. The soldiers taunted Kogoya with racist slurs, kicking and
hitting him. In another video, a man used a bayonet to cut his back. The water
turned red.” The military, while apologizing for the incident, insisted that
Kogoya was a member of the West Papua National Liberation Army and that he and
two comrades – one of whom “died when he jumped from a military vehicle after
arrest” – had burned down a clinic. Later, the police released the two alive
men without charge.

At least 10 Papuan teenagers were killed by Indonesia’s military last September
alone, while the implications of the 2019 Papuan uprising, the largest
pro-independence mobilization in decades, are still being felt. Douglas Gerrard
produced an excellent article on the conflict (“Indonesia Is Stepping Up Its
Repression of West Papua’s Freedom Movement”) last year.

When the rest of Indonesia won independence in the 1950s, West Papua remained
part of Dutch New Guinea. Jakarta wanted the entire territory. Sukarno’s first
foreign minister demanded that Jakarta and its forces “get them down from the
trees,” a racist notion of West Papuans that aped the racism of the European
colonizers and which continues today. In the 1950s, Indonesian troops led some
incursions into the Dutch colonial holdout but they were rebuffed, in part
because Washington was unsure of which side to take, not least because Sukarno
was still flirting with the communists.

But by the end of the 1950s, as the Cold War became more intense and Indonesia
was seen as a country that had to become an ally, by hook or crook, the
Americans made it known to the Dutch that they could no longer count on U.S.
support for the status quo. Knowing that its empire would soon end and motivated
to maintain some influence in Southeast Asia once it did, the Dutch cautiously
favored independence for the West Papuans and supported the formation in 1961
of the New Guinea Council, which drafted a manifesto for Independence and
Self-Government and declared the territory Papua Barat – “West Papua.”

Still, Washington wouldn’t support the effort. Instead, it orchestrated talks
that led to the August 1962 New York Agreement. Jakarta gained control of West
Papua (renamed West Irian), and after a brief transitional period overseen by
the U.N., things were supposed to climax in (and Indonesia was obligated to
hold) a referendum on self-determination.

Starting in July 1969, U.N. officials oversaw the so-called “Act of Free
Choice,” an Orwellian term if there ever was one. The U.N. claimed it would be
a fair election conducted under international scrutiny and by international
norms. And all adults from West Papua were supposed to have a vote, per the
U.N.’s rules. However, that wasn’t the case. Jakarta upped its attacks on West
Papuan separatists, especially after Suharto became dictator in 1965. Having
already decimated much of the separatist movement, Jakarta then handpicked
1,022 West Papuans to vote on behalf of the region’s 800,000 people in the
plebiscite, despite committing to a universal ballot. Naturally, they voted
unanimously in favor of integration with Indonesia.

In July 2004, on the 35th anniversary of this Act of Free Choice, the U.S.
National Security Archive released declassified documents on U.S. policy
deliberations, which I quote liberally from below. The violation of the Act of
Free Choice was obvious long before the 1,000 or so Jakarta patsies were led
forcibly into the polling booths. In 1968, U.S. embassy officials visiting the
region noted that “Indonesia could not win an open election.”  The U.S.
ambassador, Marshall Green, fretted at the time that U.N. officials might “hold
out for free and direct elections,” while Green stressed that all U.S. and
Western officials should make known to their U.N. counterparts the “political
realities,” meaning that Washington needed the vote to go Jakarta’s way because
it was a committed anti-communist ally at the time.

By October 1968, months before the election, the U.S. Embassy wrote back to
Washington in relief that U.N. officials had conceded “that it would be
inconceivable from the point of view of the interest of the U.N., as well as
the [Government of Indonesia], that a result other than the continuance of West
Irian within Indonesian sovereignty should emerge.” Even still, Green’s
successor as U.S. ambassador, Frank Galbraith, noted in 1969, the year of the
“referendum,” that “possibly 85 to 90%” of the West Papuan population “are in
sympathy with the Free Papua cause.”

Nonetheless, Nixon and Kissinger visited Jakarta in July 1969 while the
referendum was underway. Kissinger instructed his boss, “You should not raise
this issue” of West Papua, and advised that “we should avoid any U.S.
identification with” the matter of independence or integration. This was from a
man who described Suharto as a “moderate military man … committed to progress
and reform.” (Or was that said by U.S. officials of Prabowo today?) In any
case, Indonesia’s control over the region was accepted by the international
community, West Papua became a formal part of Indonesia, and six years later
Kissinger masterminded, shadowing another U.S. president, America’s support for
Indonesia’s colonization and occupation of Timor-Leste.

Why do I write all this? For starters, it’s a story often forgotten. How many
people have heard of West Irian or West Papua or know that there remains a
separatist movement? And there remains the notion that Indonesian imperialism
ended in the 1990s with the death of the Suharto regime. That’s true for Timor-Leste,
though Indonesians traipsed off only through pools of blood. Indonesia’s
imperialism is also back in the news as Prabowo Subianto, the incoming
Indonesian president, is accused of war crimes during his time in occupied
Timor-Leste as head of the Kopassus special forces. As I argued some months
ago, it’s not always healthy to pick at history’s healing wounds, and
Indonesia’s relations with Timor-Leste, despite its barbaric past, had been
healing for several years. But it’s quite another thing for the majority of
Indonesians to elect an alleged war criminal, which must surely re-open those
wounds.

But, also, this history serves as a reminder that American foreign policy is at
its most heinous and brutally hypocritical when it wants to appease dictators
and tyrants for a greater cause. A few months ago, after the death of Henry
Kissinger, I was asked by a newspaper to write an obituary. A family emergency
meant I hadn’t the time. But, for research and pleasure, which aren’t mutually
exclusive, I did re-read a number of biographies, including Niall Ferguson’s
sonorous first volume “Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist,” and its polar
opposite, Christopher Hitchens’ “The Trial of Henry Kissinger,” a short
pamphlet that dedicates a chapter to how Washington (and Kissinger) sold out
East Timorese independence and permitted an Indonesian invasion in order to
appease Suharto and to keep stoking anti-communism in Southeast Asia. Hitchens
had no space, though, for West Papua. Yet he did write: “Those who willed the
means and wished the ends are not absolved from guilt by the refusal of reality
to match their schemes.”

Realpolitik didn’t die with Kissinger last November. It is found – although not
to the same extremity as in the 1960s and 1970s – in U.S. policy in Southeast
Asia today. It’s quite obvious that Washington doesn’t just tolerate but
provokes the worst excesses of the Communist Party of Vietnam because of
China’s hostilities with Hanoi. Equally, Washington is now seeking to make
friends with Phnom Penh because it has realized that it cannot condemn
Cambodian authoritarianism at the same time as deterring Cambodia’s friendship
with Beijing, so support for Cambodian democracy has been ditched. Elsewhere,
all effort is now on rivaling China. Liberation and liberty, not least in
Myanmar, are the casualties.

Contributing Author

David Hutt is a journalist and commentator. He is a research fellow at the
Central European Institute of Asian Studies (CEIAS), and a columnist at The
Diplomat and Radio Free Asia.

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