Battleground West Papua

BATTLEGROUND WEST PAPUA | 4 June 6:30 for 7pm

Lavalla Centre, Paddington
6:30 for 7pm start
58 Fernberg Rd, Paddington, Qld 4064

Presented by Magda Productions P/L, with the co-operation of the 17 Group and Leon.

Speakers are Greg Poulgrain (and Amatus Douw, representative of the OPSM – resistance organisation of West Papua.)

Short summary:

Greg will discuss the ‘how and why’ West Papuan people were denied independence in the 1960s.

Unpacking interviews with Joseph Luns (NATO Secretary-General/Dutch Foreign Minister); Adam Malik (vice-President of Indonesia); Colonel Fletcher Prouty (CIA/State Department liaison); Nishijima (Japanese naval intelligence); George Ivan Smith (UN Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjold’s adjutant). All were involved in one way or another in the saga of West Papua being denied independence.

One reason why independence was denied was that West Papua was declared bereft of natural resources, yet in 1936 a US/Dutch mining company there had found a huge gold deposit – today the world’s largest goldmine. Poulgrain interviewed Jean Jacques Dozy who discovered the gold for the joint company set up by Rockefeller lawyer Allen Dulles. He became head of the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1950s – a crucial figure in ousting the Dutch in 1962.

Two close associates of Dulles, Marshall Green and Henry Kissinger. Kissinger in 1969 arranged an Anschluss of West New Guinea – the Indonesian military gained control. It was ‘colonisation by proxy’. The death toll in this tragedy on Australia’s doorstep exceeds even the decades of ethnic cleansing in Palestine.

Short biographical notes:

Greg Poulgrain:

Greg is an adjunct Fellow Law and Society at University Sunshine Coast (USC) and adjunct Professor of History at University of Malang, East Java.
His work across 25 years has focused on Indonesia and Papua.
he has a double-major in Literature (UQ) before PhD at JCU.
in May 1998 he was the last person (the only foreigner) through Jakarta airport before it closed due to anti-Suharto unrest. he participated in student occupation of parliament leading up to Suharto’s resignation.
In the 1980s, in the Anti-Slavery Society, London, Greg did on-site research in West New Guinea and represented the Society at the UN meeting in Geneva 1984.
in 2005 he arranged for 43 papuans to attend bellingen folk festival
In 2008 Greg helped arrange filming in Papua of Lake Sentani Folk Festival http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iugeUWtKE6I (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iugeUWtKE6I)