Even if Bob Carr isn’t drafted into the job, most pundits think that Craig Emerson won’t be staying on as foreign minister. Which may be just as well, because he hasn’t exactly covered himself in glory in his short tenure so far.
Yesterday morning, Emerson told caucus that MPs should not attend a meeting of the new Australia-Pacific group of International Parliamentarians for West Papua. Apparently a number of his colleagues told him to mind his own business, and at least three of them went anyway. One of those, Laurie Ferguson, described Emerson’s position as “unprecedented, ridiculous and ill-informed”.
For Emerson it’s quite possible that this was less a matter of kowtowing to the Indonesians and more a matter of venting his dislike of the Greens, who organised the meeting. Either way it was not a success: the meeting made headlines in Jakarta and also provided some good publicity for Greens senator Richard Di Natale.
As he said, “It’s disappointing that there is any division over protecting the fundamental human rights of our neighbours in West Papua.”
But in Emerson’s defence, his position is thoroughly consistent with the attitude taken by both sides of politics to West Papua. Just as with the parallel case of East Timor, Australia connived at Indonesia’s imperialism and then pretended for decades that the problem did not exist.
At least East Timor, having been invaded by a right-wing Indonesian government, had a devoted band of supporters on the Australian left (who were repeatedly sold out by the ALP). West Papua lacked even that, having been occupied (courtesy of a rigged UN process) by a left-wing Indonesian government a decade earlier.
But appeasement has long since become bipartisan. Even after the Howard government, with extreme reluctance, had been driven to support East Timorese independence, it failed to learn the lesson and continued to deny any concerns about West Papua. In 2006 our ambassador in Washington went out of his way to endorse Indonesian rule.
Which raises the interesting question of where the Coalition MPs were at yesterday’s meeting. None of the reports mention them, so if any attended they are keeping very quiet about it. Sad to say, being tagged as a supporter of human rights is not a good career move in today’s Liberal Party.
Rather it’s the Greens, regularly smeared as advocates of dictatorship, who end up making the running on issues of self-determination — not just West Papua, but Tibet, Palestine, Western Sahara and others. Labor has the occasional backbencher who will put their hand up (Michael Danby on Tibet deserves particular credit), but no word at all from the opposition.
It’s a common pattern; Labor gets the bad publicity for trying to rein in its dissenters, but the Liberals get a free pass because conformity has been so well enforced that they have no dissenters in the first place.
Just as our East Timor policy eventually collapsed under its own weight, one day the reality of West Papua will have to be recognised as well.
When its people finally get their freedom, the Australian government of the day will probably try to take credit and hope our long and discreditable record can be quietly forgotten.
I don’t usually find myself in agreement with Mr Richardson but today I’m pleasantly surprised.
Which is worse, Indonesia’s brutal empire building or the Aust Govt’s lickspittle approach?
Personally, I’m chronically disgusted with the approach and behavior of successive Aust Govts towards the people of Timor and New Guinea.
Fair to say though that I feel this way towards almost the entire ‘2 party’ system.
A pox on them.
I think the continuing view of Indonesia “Bad” indigenous West Papuans as “Good” is simplifying the issues in West Papua to the same extent as viewing Israel the bad guys and Palestine as the good guys (or vice-versa depending on your view). It is a distorted view that continues to be rolled out in the local Australian media where it is always too easy to take the underdog’s view of the world without examining the situation more closely.
Yes I whole heartedly agree there have been some shocking abuses of human rights and power by the Indonesian authorities and military but there are also many examples of the Papua freedom fighters (OPM etc) behaving no better than stand-over men extorting villagers, raping women etc. I’m speaking from experience having spent some time in West Papua including speaking to the locals not just in the provincial cities such as Timika and Sorong but also hiking through the highlands including around the area of the Freeport mine.
There are undoubtedly some within the OPM who have good intentions at heart, just as there are within the Indonesian Governments at all levels. I think independence would be a mistake. Greater authority maybe yes (as has happened already with the de-centralisation of Indonesian governance under democracy), but the ease of which many of the indigenous population quickly tends back to tribal allegiances would not give me comfort that as a stand alone country it would be able to prosper, let alone the continuing issues Indonesia as a whole faces because of de-centralisation such as increasing corruption and the lack of the rule of law.
@Tomm: Sure, I’ve got no doubt there have been atrocities on both sides. But I think it’s a mistake to posit some sort of moral equivalence between imperialism and anti-imperialism – there’s a difference between fighting to be left alone and fighting to keep control of someone else’s land. You may be right that the West Papuans would be better off with autonomy than independence, but that’s their decision to make, not ours.
Indonesia achieving independence cited “the ethnic, linguistic, religious and social cohesion & unity of the people”. None of which applies to West Papua.
This government, as did Whitlam, Frazer, Hawkeating & Howard (until “events, dear boy, events” overtook him) due to East Timor’s off-shore oil, will kow-tow to the real power in the world, megabiz, because of the the massive mine at Freeport.