A Force For Peace

Opinion

A worried world could play its part containing PNG’s

deadly border dispute.

AUSTRALIA’S new Foreign Affairs Minister, Senator Gareth Evans, has won delighted support in the region for his recent extended tours of the South Pacific. Though his predecessor Bill Hayden (now Governor-General) was the vehicle of a long-overdue rapprochement be tween Canberra and the region’s states, his interests were clearly more metropolitan and he was an easy target for Australia’s Opposition for his alleged ‘neglect’ of the country’s Pacific neighbours.

And it is in that context that the Government, in its willingness to be a friend at all, has tripped over its own feet. While Australia donates massive amounts of aid, provides significant foreign exchange through trade and tourism, and cultivates a resources-purchasing relationship with the Republic of Indonesia, it is at the same time attempting to assure Pacific neighbours in particular Papua New Guinea of its unshakeable commitment to

their sovereignty.

At the same time as it offers military aid to PNG and rattles its somewhat blunt sabre in the direction of Indonesia’s military aggressiveness, the Au stralian Government fails to take realistic steps to counter the violence, border incursions and apparently racist-based arrogance that has seen Te PNG/Irian Jaya border become as hazardous to its residents as Viet n’s bloody Demilitarised Zone was in the 1960 s and 19705. It seems more important that Australia can purchase Indonesia’s oil and that Australians can continue to holiday in Bali than it is to be an effective brother to Papua New Guinea.

PNG’s outmoded, undersupplied and poorly equipped Defence Forces, though unquestionably well trained, highly motivated and competent, cannot mount an effective deterrent to Indonesia’s ceaseless violations of the Irian Jaya border, supposedly in search of OPM ‘bandits’. In the best Boy’s Own tradition of the heroic last stand, PNG’s soldiers are facing numerically superior forces that are better supplied, better armed and without compunc tion; no prizes for guessing which force has the higher number of ‘victories’ to its credit. As senior correspondent Frank Senge points out on Page 9, PNG’s uncomfortable relationship with its populous neighbour has deterio rated into what some observers fear is a desperate attempt to halt provoca tion designed to provide a casus belli for land- and resource-hungry In donesia.

There is no doubt that the PNGDF, in anything remotely resembling an equal contest, could give a good account of itself. Its soldiers are hardened by constant training in country that more than any Allied effort was re sponsible for the defeat of Imperial Japan’s confident, battle-experienced troops. But with obsolete weapons (and without the cash to upgrade im mediately), outdated transport (a numerical imbalance in helicopters, for example, of hundreds to one) and the certain knowledge that Australia would dither for as long as possible before throwing its own undermanned forces into the fray in support, PNG has had to resort to ineffectual interna tional forums such as the United Nations to protest the wanton killing of civilians, the deliberate violation of surveyed borders, and a series of ‘raids’ that have as their unstated aim the brutalisation of the civilian population on which the Free Papua Movement depends for its existence.

Liberal supporters of the OPM may coyly refer to ‘West Papua’ and dream of a day of liberation for that scarred territory; but Indonesia has already shown itself more than willing to ignore world opinion.

One possible solution is an adaptation of the proposal first voiced by Sir Julius Chan, repeated by former Defence Minister James Pokasui and re cently endorsed by Foreign Minister Michael Somare.

Instead of an unwieldy and limited PNG involvement in UN peacekeeping missions, or indeed in a proposed Pacific peacekeeping force, there is an obvious role for a UN-sponsored Pacific peacekeeping force (including a hefty PNGDF element) in supervising the troubled border. Indonesia may well listen a little more closely to an international force . . . which could also have as part of its duties the control of border incursions into Irian Jaya from Papua New Guinea. Such an action would remove, or at least render open to public scrutiny, the central justification for a hidden war that has seen many hundreds of innocent villagers killed, wounded or terrorised. □