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Feedback: What About West Irian?
Re: Say sorry for policy of silence
Good story; but what has long, to me, been more surprising in the light of the considerable ( and entirely justified) publicity given to East Timor, is that the even more blatant and longstanding Indonesian grab of West Irian has almost no opposing champions at all.
Perhaps the reason for the almost total silence on this issue, is that unlike the relative sophistication and standard of education of the East Timorese, the people of the western half of the island of New Guinea have almost no voice at all on the international stage.
Unlike the Portuguese, the Dutch seem long ago to have given up claiming any interest in, or responsibility for, their former colony. And the people there, who were never a single nation but a collection of autonomous peoples, are in even less of a position than the East Timorese and the Tibetans to articulate their plight.
Terry Heffernan
Christchurch
Scoop
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