Claim on W. Irian in 1950s
This is a response to Mr. B. Ubany's letter published in The Jakarta Post on Sept. 4, 1995. I still stand firm by what I said in my previous letter (Aug. 31, 1995) that during the many years Indonesia was conducting a campaign to regain West Irian from Dutch control, I never saw any article or letter in the Australian press or talk on television by the Indonesian Embassy to counter the Australian opposition to our claim. Indeed, what I reiterated above was neither denied nor contradicted by Mr. Ubany in his letter. As for the talks he gave in Perth, Adelaide and Hobart or his talk televised on ABC, I am afraid I was not aware of them but, as intimated by Mr. Ubany himself, those talks were not about West Irian.
Mr. Ubany did indicate, however, that in view of the strong support given by the press and mass media to the Australian government's opposition to the Indonesian claim, the embassy found it difficult to present its views through the media. But if this was really the case, why was it that the leading newspaper in Australia, The Sydney Morning Herald, agreed to publish my long letter on West Irian in 1959, in which I pointed out that West Irian, being an integral part of the former Dutch East Indies, should now revert to Indonesia as the legal successor state of the Dutch colony? I also tried in the article to counter some of the Australian government's arguments about the ethnic and cultural differences between the indigenous peoples of West Irian and those of the rest of Indonesia by stressing that Indonesia was not a homogeneous state ethnically or culturally and never was intended to be so.
Coming back to Mr. Ubany's letter, I did hear about the shocking incident at the campus of the New South Wales University of Technology in July 1956. I must congratulate Mr. Ubany for his brave attempt to talk about the Indonesian claim on West Irian in the face of those wild hecklers specially brought in from outside. Nevertheless, I still believe that a campaign through the mass media would have been more effective than a direct talk to a relatively small audience.
MASLI ARMAN
Jakarta