Town Hall, Sydney City, October 2, 2016.
Speaker 1: Julian Mckinlay King.
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For those who aren’t fully aware, I’ll just go through the details of the history of West Papua.
It’s our closest neighbor with Papua New Guinea, just on the edge of our continent.
It was a former Dutch colony in the 1800’s and it was really on the road to independence right up until 1960.
The Dutch established the indigenous New Guinea council and they set up their own flag, the morning star flag, with the intention to become an independent country, they chose the name West Papua, They wrote their national anthem and a national seal. This was recognized and accepted by the Dutch on the first of December, 1961 when a ceremony was held in Hollandia, now Jayapura and other major cities around West Papua for the first time and the morning star flag was raised alongside the Dutch Netherlands flag.
After that we had the New York agreement where America stepped in supporting Indonesia to take control of West Papua.
What it did thou was transfer the colony of the Netherlands to the United Nations, so the United Nations set up an administration in Hollandia and then it gave that administration to Indonesia, So the legal framework of West Papua is still under the administration of Indonesia, and if you look at the United Nations resolutions, it’s illegal to transfer a colony from one colonizer to another colonizer. So we believe that West Papua is still a United Nations trusteeship territory and it’s the responsibility of the United Nations to put West Papua on that decolonization committee and report yearly on the status of West Papua.
We believe that the United Nations with the support of Australia, America and the West in general has conspired to deceive the world about West Papua’s status.
The United Nations has the legal obligations under article 76 of the UN charter to promote independence but they’re failing to do so.
Instead what we are seeing in West Papua is the worst case, in the world’s history, of genocide. For fifty four years the atrocities of torture, intimidation, abductions, rape, distributing HIV and AIDS through the community, forced sterilization of women.
It’s been studied ( also a report) by the Yale University and there is a similar report by the center for peace and conflict studies at the University of Sydney where they detailed that what is going on in West Papua is, in fact, genocide.
Augustinus Aud is a young West Papuan in Sorong and on the 24th of September at 3am in the morning he was surrounded by at least ten plain clothes men whose faces were covered with scarves and claimed to be police officers. They banged on his door and windows shouting orders for him to come out. After some of the men smashed some parts of his windows, Augustinus Aud saw two men armed with M16 rifles. He managed to call his mates who came around to his house shortly after, after which the police left the premises.
This happened on the 24th of September, just a week ago, and this sort of thing is happening every day, day in day out of course media is not allowed into West Papua. It’s very hard to get these stories out.
And what are we doing? Australia? We’re supposed to be a democratic country, we’re supposed to be having wars against terrorism, we go and invade Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria under the guise that they are terrorists and right on our border we’ve got the worst atrocities occurring in this world.
The Indonesian military is a dictatorship. It always was and it’s still is. We’ve got the case of General Wiranto.
Wiranto was responsible for the deaths, the murders, the tortures in East Timor for years and years and years and now he is a minister, a member of parliament under the current Jokowi regime and here we have our glorious minister, our attorney general, Brandis shaking hands with this war criminal.
We train the Indonesian military; we train the police detachment 88 and this people cause the ongoing murder and oppression of our neighbors.
So who are the real terrorists?
And it’s not just West Papua; anyone who’s been to Indonesia knows the people are all suffering under the hands of this military dictatorship and our government supports them.
We’ve had surveys in Australia, We know that 75% of Australians support West Papua and yet our government supports the Indonesian occupation and the ongoing genocide.
West Papua is a microcosm of the world’s stage; the illegal invasion of East Timor, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Syria is all in breach of the Geneva Convention and the United Nations charter.
And what’s it about?
The only reason this is going on is so western corporations can steal the resources in the world.
West Papua is one of the richest areas per square meter of resources. It’s got Australian corporations, American corporations, European corporations, and UK corporations and let’s face it; it’s a lot easier to steal resources when you’re using a gun than dealing with a democratic country.
So please, tell your friends and try and encourage Australians to address this issue. We have to get rid of these so called government representatives that we have. They do not represent us; they represent the corporations of the world.
ENDS. SOURCE