There can be no greater contrast than the former Indonesian territory of East Timor, now the sovereign country of Timor Leste, the fledgling nation that commemorated the 20th anniversary of its independence referendum in August. Ironically, that jubilation was soon followed by the death of the very man who made it possible by requesting the United Nations for a referendum: Indonesia’s third president, Bacharudin Jusuf Habibie.

Connecting the Papua unrest, Timor Leste and BJ Habibie is not to suggest some inevitable consequence. It is their differences in terms of the issues and possible solutions that justify a review.

In 1949, when the Netherlands refused to hand over Papua — then called West New Guinea or West Irian — to Indonesia, and Dutch foreign minister Joseph Luns stubbornly maintained the territorial claim for a decade until the United States pressed him to negotiate, it had a profoundly significant long-term impact for both Indonesia and Papua.

That predicament enabled some Papuans, under Dutch patronage, to express their aspirations, stimulating the growth of Papuan identity and to a lesser scale, Indonesian nationalism.

Above all, it robbed Papua from becoming part and parcel of the nation-building that was taking place across the rest of the archipelago throughout the 1950s.

While Indonesia saw — and sees — as legitimate its territorial claim to Papua as part of the republic because it had been part of the Dutch East Indies, the Dutch viewed the issue in terms of its own racial classification and tried to keep the Papuans separate from the rest of the archipelago. They seemed to have forgottten that when they took over Papua, it was part of the Tidore sultanate (present-day Maluku province).

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