Photo by Mathias Reding

The United Nations has recently come under attack from the Trump Administration and, much as it goes against the grain, it’s difficult to argue with real-estate-developer-cum-ambassador-Representative for U.N. Management and Reform [sic], Jeff Bartos:

Over 80 years, the UN has grown bloated, unfocused, too often ineffective, and sometimes even part of the problem. The UN’s failure to deliver on its core mandates is alarming and undeniable.

Yet the problem isn’t really the UN. One notable symptom of its malaise is the Security Council and its five veto-playing permanent members—the US, UK, France, China and Russia—countries representing the world system that assist and cover up for their allies who commit human rights violations, war crimes, and genocide, and that also outsource such crimes. But lèse-humanité is the crime par excellence of the international system. It’s a basic principle of colonial “development”. So what follows isn’t about kicking the UN when it’s down, but about how the rulers of this system use any institution, democratic or otherwise, to achieve their own diabolical and white supremacist ends.

I’m sorry—in more ways than one—that this article is long.

It’s long because the list of UN (when I refer to the UN, I’m basically referring to the world system) offences against the people of West Papua is hideously long. Sadly, my list is by no means complete because there’s lots of “Classified” I don’t know about and many, many secrets, but I hope it gives a glimpse of how the international system works when it wants to get whole encumbering peoples out of its way.

I’m taking it as given that Indonesia is committing genocide in West Papua. It’s done stealthily but there’s plenty of evidence (for example, see here, here, and here) for it. However, the facts show that, in this six-decade-plus crime against humanity, Indonesia has been the tool of other interests, that the role of the United Nations (by which I mean some of its dominant powers and personalities) has been particularly egregious, and this is surely one of the reasons why the West Papua genocide has continued sub rosa, deliberately silenced, for more than sixty years. There are many aspects of the UN betrayal because they belong to big-power politics, and they’re convoluted because of the secrecy that surrounds them.

This isn’t about an isolated instance of genocidal violence. It fits into a world system where white supremacist brutality, going back at least to the period of early modern European overseas expansion from the 15th century, the so-called Age of Discovery (a quintessentially Eurocentric concept), turned into a “scientifically-based” system with the Enlightenment and didn’t end with decolonisation. I’d suggest, after reading documents from the time when West Papua was gifted to Indonesia, that the latter was less the West’s darling than a mere instrument unscrupulously used to favour the economic and geopolitical interests of white supremacy and its destructive notions of “progress and development”. It’s not only the various Indonesian regimes that are responsible for mass murder in West Papua, but also and especially their enablers in the international political system represented by the UN and the big powers.

I can only partially list the crimes committed against West Papua (and, here, I’m indebted to painstaking research by Julian McKinlay King, John Saltford, Greg Poulgrain, and others). But even an incomplete list gives an idea of the magnitude of this lèse-humanité, this core crime of international law. I’m not interested in “speaking truth to power” because I agree with Pankaj Mishra that this is a naïve exercise. Those in power know and control the truth. I studied Politics and am not an expert in international law so I hope I don’t misinterpret some aspects of it. In any case, the hard facts are enraging for any decent human being. Experts in international law are often too invested in, or too occupied with other aspects of the corrupt system to inquire into the evidence of Indonesia’s daily genocidal actions in West Papua, and too demoralised to try to stop them through the shoddy institutions at their disposal. Yet any non-expert person who cares to look at the documents can see quite plainly that, in the last almost 65 years of West Papua’s history, the UN has played a shameful role, not only allowing this to happen but deliberately colluding with it. The very forum that has the power to stop the genocide is complicit in it.

It was only recently that the UN finally acknowledged that Israel is committing genocide in Palestine, and I can’t help wondering whether all this fudging about the word is somehow related with fear of disclosure of the UN’s active role in abetting and silencing the West Papua genocide. I list forty-three aspects of this below.

1. RESOURCES: The scene was set by big power politics in the early 1900s. After the Dutch East Indies gained independence in 1949, Dutch New Guinea remained under Holland’s control until 1962. Greg Poulgrain details how Allen Dulles, CIA director from 1953-1961, aware of West Papua’s immense oil and mineral wealth before the Second World War, decided to bring the colony under Indonesian control, as part of a wider plan of directing Indonesian politics as well. From the early twentieth century, the U.S. Rockefeller-owned Standard Oil had been trying to take over Dutch oil interests in the Indies. After the Netherlands New Guinea Petroleum Company was formed in 1935, Dulles, as official representative of Standard Oil group, was able to use alarmism about Japanese intentions to obtain a 60% US controlling interest in the company. US geologists remained in West Papua for another decade after the Second World War but their findings of vast mineral and oil resources were kept secret by Dutch Foreign Minister Luns and Dulles, so neither Sukarno, nor Kennedy, nor the second UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld (1953-1961) were informed. The chief concern of Dulles and the Dutch colonial authorities was to wrest control of the gold, copper and oil in the colony they said had no natural resources. In 1961, a Freeport director, Robert Lovett (“architect of the Cold War” and director of Freeport McMoran, which holds 48.8% of the shares in the world’s largest gold mine and one of its largest copper mines in Grasberg, West Papua), got his friend McGeorge Bundy appointed as national security advisor in Washington DC where he could influence US foreign policy, which included playing a significant role in transferring control of West Papua to Indonesia. After Hammarskjöld was murdered (see point 2), McGeorge Bundy and Co. persuaded Kennedy that the handover of West Papua was a necessary measure to save the world from communism. Ideological gloss covered up real motives.

2. MURDER: There’s more to the story than oil and mineral greed. Naturally, it’s also about big power politics. An important factor is the death in a suspicious plane crash in Ndola (then northern Rhodesia, now Zambia) of Hammarskjöld and fifteen other people, eleven of them UN employees, and its subsequent coverup. In those Cold War years, Hammarskjöld was trying to democratise UN workings and was, in Poulgrain’s words, “an outspoken advocate for the economic development of poorer countries”. His plan, which included a Special Fund for these countries, greatly irked leading players on both sides of the Cold War, including Dulles and Nikita Khrushchev, especially when it seemed that President Kennedy supported Hammarskjöld’s approach to decolonisation. This project of “speedy and unconditional granting to all colonial peoples of the right of self-determination” meant that, with the addition of 88 newly independent territories, he would create in the UN a counterweight to the neocolonially ambitious Cold War powers.

3. COVERUP: All this directly pertains to West Papua. Greg Poulgrain reports Hammarskjöld was committed to intervening in the dispute between Indonesia and the Netherlands over sovereignty of West Papua, and planned to declare Dutch and Indonesian claims to the territory invalid at the UN General Assembly in October or November 1961. Kennedy supported him because this saved him from having to decide whether to hand the disputed territory of West Papua to Indonesia or, in these times of decolonisation, to the colonial power, NATO ally the Netherlands, in a thorny situation where the Soviet Union and China supported the Indonesian claim. There seems little doubt that Hammarskjöld and the fifteen other passengers in the plane were murdered. On 20 September 1961, two days after the crash former US president, Harry S. Truman, was quoted in The New York Times as saying, “Mr. Hammarskjold was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said ‘when they killed him’.” The UN huggermuggery about the deaths of its Secretary-General and eleven other staff members in Ndola is suspicious to say the least. West Papua is almost certainly enshrouded in all that secrecy.

4. DUBIOUS CLAIMANTS: Indonesia’s right to negotiate West Papua’s future was questionable. When it was admitted as a sovereign nation to the UN, General Assembly Resolution 448 (V) stated, “Noting the communication dated 29 June 1950 from the Government of the Netherlands will no longer present a report pursuant to Article 73 e on Indonesia with the exception of West New Guinea [my emphasis]”. The UN didn’t recognise West New Guinea as part of Indonesia. Before officially joining the UN in September 1950 but having sworn to respect its principles, and ignoring the fact that West Papua was to be decolonised under the name “Netherlands New Guinea”, Indonesia’s President Sukarno, in his speech of 17 August on the fifth anniversary of Indonesia’s independence, was agitating for “national” unity with the slogan “From Sabang to Merauke” (from the northwesternmost tip of the country, an island off Sumatra, to the eastern town in West Papua). Indonesia’s designs on West Papua were clear from the very start.

5. DEFILING “SACRED TRUST”: As a UN member, Indonesia was obliged to respect the UN Charter and the basic principles expressed therein. Article 73 e, states, “Members of the United Nations which have or assume responsibilities for the administration of territories whose peoples have not yet attained a full measure of self-government recognize the principle that the interests of the inhabitants of these territories are paramount, and accept as a sacred trust the obligation to promote to the utmost, within the system of international peace and security established by the present Charter, the well-being of the inhabitants of these territories”. The interests of the West Papuans were clearly not remotely paramount and, indeed, when Indonesia dishonestly, and evidently dishonestly, agreed to these obligations, the stage was set for an internationally orchestrated coverup of its subsequent serious human right abuses, and even genocide in West Papua, because the UN’s complicity also had to be covered up.

6. WEST PAPUANS EXPUNGED: The New York Agreement between the Republic of Indonesia and the Kingdom of the Netherlands Concerning West New Guinea (West Irian) was signed at the New York headquarters of the UN on 15 August 1962. No representative from West Papua was present. Article I stipulates that “both Contracting Parties, Indonesia and the Netherlands will jointly sponsor a draft resolution in the United Nations under the terms of which the General Assembly of the United Nations takes note of [not “ratifies”] the present Agreement, acknowledges the role conferred upon the Secretary-General of the United Nations therein, and authorizes him to carry out the tasks entrusted to him therein.” Article II says, “the Netherlands will transfer administration of the territory to a United Nations Temporary Executive Authority (UNTEA) established by and under the jurisdiction of the Secretary-General upon the arrival of the United Nations Administrator appointed in accordance with article IV. The........

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