This week Cambodia marks the 50th anniversary of the fall of Phnom Penh to the murderous Khmer Rouge, and Vietnam celebrates the fall of Saigon to North Vietnamese forces in April 1975.
They are being commemorated very differently; after all, there’s nothing to celebrate in Cambodia. Its capital Phnom Penh was emptied, and its people had to then endure the “killing fields” and the darkest years of its modern existence under Khmer Rouge rule. Over the border in Vietnam, however, there will be modest celebrations for their victory against US (and Australian) forces at the end of this month.
Russian President Vladimir Putin. Moscow has defended its military ties with Jakarta but has not denied claims that it sought access to an air base in West Papua, Indonesia.Credit: AP
Yet this week’s news of Indonesia considering a Russian request to base aircraft at the Biak airbase in West Papua throws in stark relief a troubling question I have long asked – did Australia back the wrong war 63 years ago? These different areas – and histories – of South-East Asia may seem disconnected, but allow me to draw some links.
Through the 1950s until the early 1960s, it was official Australian policy under the Menzies government to support Holland as it prepared West Papua for independence, knowing its people were ethnically and religiously different from the rest of Indonesia. They are a Christian Melanesian people who look east to Papua New Guinea (PNG) and the Pacific, not west to Muslim Asia. Australia at the time was administering and beginning to prepare PNG for self-rule.
World War II had shown the importance of West Papua (then part of Dutch New Guinea) to Australian security, as it had been a base for Japanese air raids over northern Australia. Early in the war, Japanese forces made a beeline to Sorong on the Bird’s Head Peninsula of West Papua for its abundance of high-quality oil. Former Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam served in a RAAF unit briefly stationed in Merauke in West Papua.
By 1962, the US wanted Indonesia to annex West Papua as a way of splitting Chinese and Russian influence in the region, as well as getting at the biggest gold deposit on earth at the Grasberg mine, something which US company Freeport continues to mine, controversially, today.
A view of the Grasberg mine in West Papua, Indonesia.Credit: Alamy
Following the so-called Bunker Agreement signed in New York in 1962, Holland reluctantly agreed to relinquish West Papua to Indonesia under US pressure. Australia, too, folded in line with US interests. That would also be the year when Australia sent its first group of 30 military advisers to Vietnam. Instead of backing West Papuan nationhood, Australia joined the US in suppressing Vietnam’s.
As a result of US arm-twisting, Australia ceded its own strategic interests in allowing Indonesia to expand eastwards into Pacific territories by swallowing West Papua. Instead, Australians trooped off to fight the unwinnable wars of Indochina. To me, it remains one of the great what-ifs of Australian
strategic history – if Australia had held the line with Holland against US moves, then West Papua today would be free, the East Timor invasion of 1975 is unlikely to have ever happened and Australia might not have been dragged into the Vietnam War.
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