Decolonisation Interrupted: The West Papuan Campaign for independence and the United Nations, 1961-69

Abstract

Throughout the 1960s, West Papuan activists engaged in a political campaign for West Papuan independence at the United Nations. West Papuans were marginalised by the bilateral dispute between the Netherlands and Indonesia over the future of the territory. The Netherlands attempted to control the process of decolonisation in West Papua, while Indonesian nationalists waged an aggressive campaign to ‘liberate’ West Papua from Dutch control. West Papuans argued for decolonisation apart from Indonesia and advocated for their direct participation in the negotiations over the future of the territory. The West Papuan campaign for independence was interrupted by the signing of the New York Agreement in 1962, which transferred the territory to Indonesian control after a period of UN administration. Conditions in West Papuan quickly deteriorated under Indonesian rule and many West Papuan nationalists were forced to seek refuge in Papua New Guinea and the Netherlands. However, Indonesian oppression only propelled the movement and from 1963-67 West Papuan leaders established transnational activist networks connecting the territory to West Papuan diasporas in PNG and the Netherlands. West Papuan activists then deployed these networks in the lead up to the Act of Free Choice in 1969 to draw attention to Indonesian rights abuses and the political oppression of the West Papuan people. This thesis examines the strategies used by West Papuan activists in their transnational campaign for West Papua independence to the UN. I focus on how the West Papuan activists attempted to utilise growing discourse on race and rights as a strategy to advocate for independence while navigating the rise of Afro-Asian politics and the changing nature of anticolonialism during the Cold War. Drawing on West Papuan petitions and oral history interviews, I position this history in relation to diverse West Papuan perspectives. Many accounts of the struggle over West Papua in the 1960s have focused on the diplomatic conflict between Indonesia and the Netherlands and Indonesia’s conduct of the Act of Free Choice. By focusing on the West Papuan campaign itself, I resist a geopolitical framing of the 1960s, which places the perspectives of international diplomats above those of West Papuans. In doing so, I reject the colonial infrastructure that defined West Papuans’ lives, instead allowing actors to define their activities on their own terms. More broadly, I argue for Pacific islands to be included in international histories of decolonization, as they challenge our understandings of colonialism and conventional chronologies of decolonisation. This history forces historians to confront the question: did colonialism in West Papua ever end?