Letter to President Obama From West Papua

Letter to President Obama From West Papua

Jacob Rumbiak
Foreign Affairs, West Papua National Authority
Provisional government of West Papua

President Barak Obama
White House, Washington
United States of America

Your Excellency Mr President,

We Melanesians of West Papua welcomed your entrée to the White House last year, and like many around the world now look to your administration for leadership of more humane and principled ways of engaging with nations around the world.

Our country is the western half of New Guinea, a few miles north of Australia. We are first-nation people, and the first navigators of the Pacific Ocean, sailing our small wai from the west to the east, occupying all the uninhabited islands, reaching Hawai’i in 1AD.

In 1962 the United Nations, led by the Kennedy administration and Australian government, removed the colonial-Dutch and passed us to the Indonesian Republic. We were the pawns of a geo-political strategy to reduce the influence of Russian communism in Indonesia, and we have suffered terribly ever since. In 2008 Dr Jim Elmslie from the Centre of Peace and Conflict Studies at Sydney University calculated there are 564,126 missing Papuans, seventy percent of our population at the beginning of the Indonesian occupation.

We were heartened by the legislation adopted by the US House of Representatives in May (Foreign Relations Authorization Act 2410). In response to the H.R. effort to discern "the extent to which the Government of Indonesia has certified that it has halted human rights abuses in West Papua" I attached a photo-report I received from West Papua last night (Report on the assassination of YAWAN WAYENI on Monday 3 August 2009). The report shows one brave activist dying after being shot and bayoneted by Indonesian Police. This is not an isolated incident, there are stories like this every day in West Papua, this is what we have endured since 1962, this is what we describe as our ‘current political status’.

We note and appreciate the House of Representatives called for a report on the UN Act of Free Choice (1969). An investigation by the U.S. State Department of the procedures and processes before during after the referendum would complement the campaigns for review of the New York Agreement of 1962 by which Holland, Indonesia, and the United Nations agreed to the referendum within six years of the Indonesian occupation on 1 May 1963.

We also note the House of Representative calls for a report on ‘the development and administration of Special Autonomy’ in West Papua. While we always considered Special Autonomy as little more than a smokescreen for the government’s reluctance to face our socio-political realities, there are few now, even in Indonesia, who would argue against its failure across all measurable sectors in West Papua. There has been no law in West Papua since the ‘introduction’ of Special Autonomy, and little hope either. Even the Australian Labor Party, whose relations with Indonesia arc back to 1949, passed a motion last week mentioning special autonomy only in terms of ‘re-starting discussions.

During World War 2 Mr President General McArthur parachuted us guns and ammunition so that we could assist in fighting the Japanese military. During the Cold War our well-funded well-managed self-determination project was aborted so that South-east Asia and the Pacific could be saved from communist influence. Since 1966, our gold and copper has been extracted by the American mining company Freeport McMoran.

Sir, it is my hope that one day soon Americans will realize there is so much they can do to help us in West Papua and respond to our calls for help.

Yours sincerely

Dr Jacob Rumbiak
Foreign Affairs, West Papua National Authority

ENDS

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