Non-indigenous Papuans now hold relatively few elected positions
Grenville Charles
A response to Jim Elmslie and Stuart Upton
By Richard Chauvel
Stripped of the obvious differences in rhetorical tone and values, the articles by Jim Elmslie and Stuart Upton have much in common. They both agree that:
• Papua has experienced a large scale demographic transformation since 1963
• the modern economy is dominated by Indonesian settlers and Papuans are marginalised
• Papuans suffer disadvantage in education, employment and health
• there have been significant human rights abuses by the Indonesian security forces
One of the useful contributions that both articles make is that they place Papua in a broader regional context. In comparing the markedly different rates of population growth in Indonesian Papua and Papua New Guinea, Jim Elmslie asserts that the two are ‘comparable Melanesian societies’. Looking west to the rest of the archipelago, Stuart Upton argues that population change in Papua looks like ‘the normal pattern of inter-island migration rather than genocide’.
Comparing Papua and PNG
Had Jim Elmslie’s comparison been related to New Guinea prior to intensive Dutch, British/Australian and German intervention in the last decades of the nineteenth century, it would have been more convincing than it is today. However, over the last one hundred years, the heterogeneous Melanesian societies in the two halves of the island of New Guinea have come into contact and interacted with the world beyond New Guinea through very different colonial and post-colonial governance structures. This has made them very different places.
In the case of PNG, Australian colonial rule and, since 1975, an indigenous Papuan political elite have been the mediating agencies. PNG was the sole Australian colony. The western half of the island was colonised by the Dutch as part of the Netherlands East Indies. Prior to the Pacific War, it was ruled through various administrative structures based in the neighbouring Maluku Islands. In the Australian territories, Australian administrators interacted directly with all levels and regions of PNG society. On the other side of the island, particularly before the Pacific War, there were more east Indonesian officials, police, teachers and missionaries than there were Dutch. The missionary education, the Christianity and the dialects of Malay that developed in Papua were those of the east Indonesian teachers and missionaries. Papuan contact with Indonesians in Papua and with Indonesian society outside Papua has intensified greatly since 1963.
I am not suggesting, however, that the different patterns of change in the two halves of the island over the past century or so explain the difference in population growth rates. The poorer levels of health care in Indonesian Papua, especially in the highlands and remote and still predominantly Papuan regions compared to the ‘failed state’ the other side of the border is one factor that helps explain the differences in population growth. The most obvious difference generated by the divergent patterns of change is that PNG has remained a predominantly Melanesian society, while the western half of the island has become more ‘Indonesian’ through education, language and religious change as well as a demographic transformation. With these great changes, Indonesian Papua and PNG now have much less in common than before colonisation.
Comparing Papua and East Indonesia
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