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Andrew Johnson
May 02, 2021 12:02 PM

Indonesian reprisals have continued to escalate since the OPM began finding political & legal avenues in 2005 when the US Congress wrote a bill (sec.1115 of the 2005 Foreign Relations Authorization bill) asking questions about the welfare & sovereignty of West Papua since Indonesia asked America in 1962 to help Indonesia get the Dutch to sign a "special United Nations trusteeship" agreement known as the 'New York Agreement'. In response to that Indonesia had to exercise its influence inside the US to get the US Senate to overturn and remove section 1115. Then five years later in 2010 the OPM wrote a draft UN General Assembly motion that the Vanuatu government agreed to present asking that the Assembly request the International Court of Justice for its legal opinion whether West Papus is or is not part of Indonesia as Indonesia claims; and again Indonesia had to quickly exercise its influence to convince Vanuatu not to present that motion for the past ten years. And finally in 2013 OPM determined that West Papua is a UN trust territory that legally the United Nations is meant to be protecting from abuse and that the organisation has been illegally withholding news of the 1962 United Nations trusteeship agreement from the agenda of the UN Trusteeship Council.
Since then the OPM spokesperson has died under questionable circumstance and there has been an international effort to undermine & sidetrack the OPM plan asking for the United Nations to put news of the 1962 UN agreement on the agenda of the Trusteeship Council.
This latest retribution against the OPM and West Papuan independence advocates appears to be another escalation of the strategy Indonesia has been using since 2005. The Papuan people need help to be heard and to get the UN to comply with its legal obligations for what it has been doing since 1962 to West Papua's administration.