I have a friend Julian King, who Duncan Graham reports has been subjected to a stun grenade as our Australian Federal Police burst through his door to seize his PhD research, phone and computers. Reportedly, the AFP are concerned about OPM (Organisasi Papua Merdeka _Free Papua Organisation), the indigenous independence movement in West Papua.
I have been working with OPM for more than twenty years, Julian and I co-authored a paper in the Griffith University’s 2018 law journal titled “West Papua Exposed: An Abandoned Non-Self-Governing or Trust Territory”
To clarify, when I say Australia I am referring to the continent of Australia which is currently hosting three nation states; the continent’s southern 90% hosts our “Commonwealth of Australia”, the north-eastern 5% hosts “Papua New Guinea”, and the north-western 5% is a nation locally known as “West Papua”. However, while our Commonwealth and the state of “Papua New Guinea” (PNG) enjoy independence and international recognition, West Papua is not so lucky and is currently being administrated by the Republic of Indonesia.
For over sixty years Australian and other journalists have attempted to explain why & how the United Nations and then Indonesia entered and took control of the Dutch administrated north-western part of Australia; resulting in the current ongoing administration in which hundreds of thousands have died, suffered political & non-political extra judicial killings, and what the Yale Law School in 2004 assessed as a program of genocide.
This is what the OPM asked me to research, to discover the hidden truth.
My research revealed beyond any doubt that West Papua is legally not part of Indonesia, that West Papua is an United Nations trust territory which our governments are illegally concealing from the United Nations Trusteeship Council.
Although you might, like I, wish this was front page news and an issue that journalists in New York would press the current UN Secretary General to fix, to date journalist have appeared rather shy on asking the Secretary General to do his job of placing news of our UN General Assembly resolution 1752 authorisation for UN annexation of West Papua, on the Trusteeship Council’s agenda.
Indonesia had been sending small military incursions to West Papua throughout the 1950s, each time the soldiers were arrested and deported by the Dutch 3500km back to Java. But in 1962 there was a different result.
In the 1930s, the world’s largest gold and copper deposits were discovered in West New Guinea (West Papua), the two sacred homeland mountains of tens of thousands of Amungme and Kamoro clans people. For Americans to mine West Papua’s gold and copper, all they need to do was get rid of the Papuans and the Dutch administrators. After the Pacific War and creation of Indonesia, in 1959 a lawyer at the US Embassy in Jakarta proposed a “special United Nations trusteeship of West New Guinea” which would turnover the West Papuan people’s “sovereignty” to Indonesia.
N.B. When the lawyer John Henderson says “special”, the proper word is “illegal” because it’s illegal to transfer other people’s sovereignty without their consent.
By March 1961, the US Department of State ascertained that Indonesia would like to use the proposed trusteeship scheme, although they did not wish to call the proposed trusteeship a trusteeship. Lucky for Indonesia, six months later the UN Secretary General was killed, and because Indonesia two days earlier had announced it would refuse to accept the General Assembly’s 1961 Presidency, the popular Tunisia diplomat Mongi Slim was forced to accept the 1961 Presidency instead of being nominated as the new UN Secretary General. Irrespective of US pleadings, Indonesia’s Soviet-loving Burmese friend U Thant became the new UN Secretary General.
After a new Non-Aligned bloc friends of Indonesia demonstrated on 16th December 1961 that they could now block any UN Security Council motions, on 19th December President Sukarno announced his Operation Trikora invasion of West Papua. For this invasion there would be 1500 troops, not enough to capture any cities or survive in Papua because Indonesia had no means of supplying their troops with food and water; but it provided a pretext for U Thant in New York to press the US to force the Dutch to sign the agreement Indonesia wanted asking the United Nations to invade and annex West Papua.
The Dutch submitted to the pressure signing the request in August 1962, and now the new UN Secretary General only needed to get our governments at the UN General Assembly to authorise the proposal. Why? Article 85 part 1 of the UN Charter requires General Assembly authorisation.
A Security Council resolution would remain in public view, but using Chapter XII of the Charter of the United Nations a.k.a. “The International Trusteeship System” could be obscured. For trusteeship the United Nations only needs the current administrator (the Netherlands) to sign an agreement, and then get our governments to authorise the action (article 85 part 1).
Legally the purpose of UN trusteeship is to promote the “independence” (article 76b), and make yearly reports (article 88) about the colony. But if the UN Secretary General does not tell the Trusteeship Council, then the Council can not begin making those article 88 reports, and the other UN members will want to forget that they authorised the current UN annexation and later UN appointment of Indonesia as administrator of West Papua. In other words, without those yearly reports by the Trusteeship Council, Indonesia and others are free to kill and loot the people of West Papua.
For sixty years this has continued unabated. To end the deaths in West Papua, and remove Indonesia from the border of a Papua New Guinea that dare not build national road or other transit network in PNG for fear of the TNI crossing the border; we the public could pressure the UN Secretary General to do his job of placing news of UN General Assembly resolution 1752 on the agenda of the UN Trusteeship Council.
Our governments are in violation of article 76 of the Charter that requires they promote the independence of all territories that the United Nations has subjected to article 85 part 1 or any other part of Chapter XII of our UN Charter. But whether people will press their governments, or press the Secretary General to obey the law is yet to be seen.
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