![]() |
Vanuatu Prime Minister Moana Carcasses Kalosil (left) with Papuan journalist Victor Mambor in Noumea. Photo: Tabloid Jubi |
SHAME on New Zealand politicians. With the courageous exception of the Green Party’s Catherine Delahunty, most of the rest offer a shameful silence over Indonesia’s human rights violations in West Papua.
The Melanesian brothers and sisters of the colonised region, forcibly invaded by Indonesian paratroopers in 1962 and annexed under the fraudulent United Nations “Act of Free Choice” in 1969, have suffered under Indonesian atrocities and brutal rule ever since.
But it took the Prime Minister of Vanuatu, Moana Carcasses Kalosil, to take the podium at the United Nations Human Rights Council and condemn Jakarta for its past and ongoing crimes in West Papua, before the world took notice.
This not only shames New Zealand, it also exposes most Pacific leaders for their lack of spine over Papuan human rights.
When Vanuatu became independent from the British and French joint colonial condominium, better known as “pandemonium”, in 1980, founding Prime Minister Father Walter Lini was a champion for West Papuan independence.