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Article Excerpt
How many people have to die in West Papua before Australians take notice and act? After all, West Papua is our closest neighbour, lying less than 200 kilometres from Australian territory. Nevertheless, pick up any newspaper here and you're extremely unlikely to read about the bodies that are now turning up in rivers and fields there.
Is it because it's old news? After all, deaths started taking place in West Papua when the Indonesians replaced the Dutch back in 1963. Since then, the native Melanesian population has resisted their new Asian colonisers, more in spirit than with arms. To date, 100,000 West Papuans have been killed by Indonesian armed forces that do not want to let go of the territory.
This may be an old story for the press, but I don't remember reading about it when it was new news.
It could be that there have to be a lot of bodies reportable in a single incident before the issue starts stirring souls. How many? Ten? A hundred? A thousand? Then again, when an Indonesian and two US citizens were shot dead near US mining giant Freeport's operations in August 2002, pages of print were devoted to the issue for a full week afterwards.
So maybe it's because the Papuans have black Melanesian skin and are somehow not as worthy of protection as Western whites. Take the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2002: images that news watchers witness weekly. Contrast this with Papua New Guinea's nine-year blockade of Bougainville island during the 1980s and 90s--a blockade that kept away food, medical supplies, fuel and humanitarian assistance from the Bougainvilleans, which resulted in (in both senses) untold death.
With a few notable exceptions, reports in the Australian press were sparse; even though Bougainville was on Australia's doorstep; even though there was real drama--bloodshed ... guns ... loss of life; and even though there was evidence of Australian taxpayers' money being...
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