Neither Asian nor Pacific
West New Guinea's uneasy border identity
The imaginary line that bisects the island of New Guinea, separating the sovereign states of Papua New Guinea and the Republic of Indonesia, is one of the most arbitrary and yet symbolically powerful of international boundaries. With the exception of a short detour along the Fly River, the boundary follows the 141st meridian east, running from north to south across the island with little regard for either the social or physical landscapes. New Guinea is renowned for its cultural and ecological diversity, but this line enforces distinctions of an altogether greater significance, marking the point of separation between 'Asia' and the 'Pacific'.
* By CHRIS BALLARD
The communities to the west of this line, along with local administrations, missionaries, and scholars amongst others, orient themselves towards Jakarta, and beyond to Southeast Asia; while to the east, parallel communities address questions of their national identity in terms of their relations with other Pacific Island states, and with Australia and New Zealand to the south. Perhaps the most striking evidence of the success of this division between Asian and Pacific identities is the use of two quite different linguae franca: Bahasa Indonesia in the west, which links its speakers to Malay discourses and literatures; and Tok Pisin in the east, which is closely related to the pidgins of the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu.The history of this border is one of a slow and uneven process of materialization. Proclaimed as the eastern limit of their possessions in New Guinea by the Netherlands in 1828, and then effectively acknowledged by counterclaims on eastern New Guinea by Britain and Germany between 1884 and 1885, for many years the border existed only on paper: a line of which the initial purpose was not so much to distinguish between different localities or communities on the ground in New Guinea, as it was to establish a formal bureaucratic structure for exchanges between The Hague, London, and Berlin. Thus Sir Garfield Barwick, Australia's Minister for External Affairs, observed that Jakarta's accession of Netherlands New Guinea in 1962 created for Australia 'a common land frontier... with a people of Asia'. It was not that the boundary had moved, or that the communities on either side of the border had altered substantially in composition, but rather that the border had shifted in its diplomatic axis. It would do so again, in 1975, when Papua New Guinea gained its independence from Australia, and the border came to represent a diplomatic membrane between Port Moresby and Jakarta.
For the young Republic of Indonesia, possession of the province of Irian Jaya was a necessary condition for full independence, insofar as its inclusion within the republic completed the anti-colonial project of ousting the Dutch from their East Indies empire. Considerations of ethnicity, language, or other bases of identity were entirely secondary to the overwhelming importance of the wholeness of the Republic as the successor state to the Dutch colonial administration. In the aftermath of Indonesia's loss of East Timor in 1999, Irian Jaya (or West Papua as its inhabitants prefer to call their land) has again assumed a central role in national and nationalist politics: Soekarno's daughter, Megawati Soekarnoputri declaring that, 'Without Irian Jaya, Indonesia is not complete'.
Benedict Anderson has argued that Irian Jaya plays a critical role in the Indonesian 'logo map', an emblematic outline of the archipelago which exceeds the traditional function of the map as guide, coming to stand as a sign of national identity in its own right. Here Irian Jaya and Aceh serve to anchor the eastern and western extremities of the logo map, graphic analogues of the verbal dictum 'From Sabang [in Aceh] to Merauke [in Irian Jaya]'. Soekarno famously claimed that a child looking at an atlas could hardly fail to recognize that the Indonesian archipelago possessed a visual integrity. However, the apparent 'naturalness' of this logo-map is belied by its termination along with the border with Papua New Guinea, which is either represented in a grey tone, as a ghostly twin to the reality of the Indonesian province, or omitted altogether, disappearing off the map's edge.
Since 1962 the border has increasingly assumed a more concrete significance on the ground, both literally through the installation of cement boundary markers, and in terms of its effects on the populations on either side of the line. Contrasts in economic and educational opportunity, and in the rule of law and the rights of citizens, have recreated the border as a margin which Papuan people on either side have sought to play to their advantage, whether by fleeing repression or by seeking benefits not available in their own country. Papuan nationalists or separatists now insist that other considerations ethnic, linguistic, and even racial differences mark them out as distinct from other Indonesians, and that an independent West New Guinea would assume a Melanesian or Pacific identity. Armed resistance to Indonesian rule by indigenous Papuans in Irian Jaya has seen waves of refugees cross the border, particularly in the aftermath of two widespread uprisings in 1977 and 1984. Guerillas of the Organisasi Papua Merdeka (OPM), or Free Papua Movement, continue to launch raids from bases within Papua New Guinea, generating a heightened politics of the border that frequently embroils not just Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, but also their common neighbour to the south, Australia. The symbolic power of this arbitrary line through the jungle is finally being matched by material consequences; yet if the border, slowly, has come to assume a more tangible and often deadly form, its significance and validity have also begun to be tested by the people who inhabit its margins.
Dr Chris Ballard is a fellow at the Division of Pacific and Asian History at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.
E-mail: chris.ballard@anu.edu.au