4 - Obstructing Self-Determination, 1962–1963

Summary

Chapter 4 highlights the long shadow of the Congo mission on the UN’s new operations in West Papua as the organisation weathered financial and reputational crisis throughout 1962. The UN leadership, seeking reputational repair, negotiated a peacekeeping mission to monitor the transfer of West Papua from Dutch administration to Indonesian annexation. Once on the ground, the mission administration actively delegitimised and dismissed Papuans’ political activism and rejection of Indonesian annexation. The UN staff prioritised the stable transfer of the territory over the human rights of the population, choosing to perpetuate and affirm colonial characterisations of the Papuan population as intellectually inferior and politically disconnected. This chapter challenges scholarship that has argued that the UN was manipulated by Indonesian or American governments and was passive in this process of Papuan re-colonisation. Instead, it establishes how the UN peacekeepers were motivated by organisational interests of stability and an embedded racial prejudice, serving to ‘other’ the Papuan population and suffocate Papuan activists’ demands for independence.