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The International Status of West New Guinea Until 1884*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 August 2009
Extract
In the years between 1949 and 1963 the clarification of the international status of West New Guinea, now officially included within the borders of the Republic of Indonesia as Irian Barat, constituted a perennially active and confusingly complex item on the agenda of world territorial disputes. While the protagonists involved were new, the general situation was a familiar one for the territory in question. For it has been the island's curious destiny to be a passive but disputed pawn of history from the time of its first mention in Javanese court chronicles until the presumably “permanent” settlement of its international status in the seventh decade of the twentieth century.
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- Copyright © The National University of Singapore 1964
References
1. Actually, of course, only the western section of the island, the area most accessible from the Indonesian archipelago and the South-East Asian mainland, aside from the casual visits of explorers elsewhere,-has been at all involved in world history. There seems to be some evidence to indicate that as early as the time of the compilation of the Ramayana, (c. 300 BC) New Guinea was known to the Indie world. For comment on a possible reference to the island's snow-capped mountain peaks in the Ramayana, see Kern, H.'s “De invloed der Indische beschaving op Java en omliggende eilanden,” Verspreide Geschriiften ('s-Gravenhage, 1928), XV, 182–183.Google Scholar
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3. If this hypothesis be true at all, it seems probable that Salawatti and the coastal areas of the Vogelkop were involved.
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