Goodwill Tour

From NNG

Prom our Hollandia Correspondent Plans were almost completed by the end of July for several members of the New Guinea Council (the Nieuw Guinea Raad, as the Dutch call it) to visit foreign countries on goodwill missions.

DROMOTER of the politico * economic missions is Councillor Herman Womsiwor, who wants Netherlands New Guineans to go to Australia, NZ, Philippines, Japan, Pakistan, India, Malaya and the USA.

He believes that, because of the situation between the Dutch and Indo nesia, NNG Papuans should go abroad and present their point of view to other nations. Said Womsiwor: “Nobody can better defend our rights as a people than we ourselves”.

Womsiwor, now 32, is one of the few indigenous people of NNG who know something of the world outside their own territory. He was sneaked °ut of Biak in an old US Army ambulance in 1945 when the Ameri cans moved northwards by troopship to Japan in 1945. For over seven years he worked with US occupation forces in Japan, latterly as an in terpreter, having learned to speak Japanese and English fluently. On his return to Biak in 1954, he became a prominent businessman, and still makes regular business trips to the Ear East. (See p. 26 this issue).

Reports of the goodwill mission brought growls of protest from Indo nesia > which considers its own leaders are °nly ones entitled to make goodwill missions in the cause of the nght for “West Irian”.