The arrival of the 43 West Papuan asylum seekers in Australia in January forced Australians to confront two blights on this country's history: the government's appalling treatment of refugees and the same government's ongoing support for the Indonesian occupation of West Papua. The nation held its breath (and some of us kept up the protests) while Canberra sent the West Papuans off to Christmas Island and decided on what to do next.
Clinton Fernandes's latest book follows hot on the heels of his first, Reluctant Saviours, where he discussed the reservation with which the Australian government deployed its troops to root out its Indonesian military allies from East Timor in 1999. The case of the 43 Papuan asylum seekers is not the focus of this book. Instead Fernandes seeks to inform us more about the history of West Papua and the political situation that these people fled from.
Reluctant Indonesians extends Fernandes's earlier writings on the nature of Australian imperialism, as manifested in its foreign policy towards Indonesia. In this book, Fernandes describes the oft-repeated mantras regularly doled out to the Australian public about why our government does nothing to prevent human rights abuses from occurring in West Papua. Ostensibly, we can do very little because it is not in the "national interest" to do so, it would be meddling in Indonesia's internal affairs and it would result in disintegration and instability just to our north.
Fernandes shows how meddling and destabilisation have in fact been cornerstones of Australian foreign policy in ways that have not brought about positive outcomes for the people of Indonesia or Papua. Western powers, chiefly the United States, aided sections of the Indonesian military in the Outer Islands Rebellion of 1958 against the nationalist and anti-imperialist president Sukarno. According to Fernandes, weapons were supplied to the right-wing military leaders by the US via the Caltex oil plant in Pekanbaru in Sumatra. Australian Foreign Minister R. G. Casey supported these US actions, going so far as to argue that covert bombing of Indonesia might be necessary.
The rebellion was quashed by the Indonesian military, but in 1965 the Sukarno government was overthrown by a US-backed coup. The mass killings of leftists that accompanied the coup were another instance of US-Australian meddling in Indonesian politics. Wholesale repression was easily tolerated in the interest of regime change in Indonesia. The coup transformed Indonesian society and installed the Suharto regime, which held onto power for the next 32 years.
Fernandes then shifts his focus towards West Papua itself. He examines the history of Papua before the so-called "Act of Free Choice" in 1969 and during its life as an Indonesian province. He points out that as a "treasure trove" of mineral and environmental riches, it has been a lucrative target for Indonesian and international capital. Its wealth of biodiversity is threatened by the rampant exploitation of its natural resources and its status as a territory under occupation.
Fernandes outlines the fate of West Papua in the post-Suharto period, including the response of West Papuan society to the post-authoritarian period. While Sukarno claimed West Papua as part of Indonesian territory due to its status as a former Dutch colony like the rest of Indonesia, its forcible integration into Indonesia was carried out under the Suharto New Order government.
The Suharto regime's end in May 1998 promised much across the archipelago in addressing past human rights abuses. Instead, during current Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's presidential tenure, West Papua has been divided into several provinces and still goes without even the promised reforms under the very limited Special Autonomy package. This has made it more difficult for the pro-independence forces to organise. To make matters worse, the Indonesian military has been rehabilitated thanks to the "war on terror" and the ad hoc human rights courts in Jakarta have failed to stop human rights abuses.
Fernandes's book is a good, succinct yet reasonably comprehensive introduction to the issues and the broad political landscape of West Papua. Importantly though, it has a message of hope. It argues that no matter what geopolitical grouping those currently residing in the Indonesian archipelago choose to live within, the key issue is that people want to live in freedom, free from repression and from being forced to live as "reluctant Indonesians". Until then, the 43 West Papuans who have since been given temporary protection visas will probably not be the last to arrive on Australian shores.