The way that Walt Rostow tells the story, on Kennedy's trip to Indonesia Kennedy offered Sukarno Peace Corps workers, subsidized loans, technical assistance, favored trade relations, et cetera et cetera.
Sukarno's response was: "Mr. President, economic development takes too long. Give me Irian Jaya instead..."
Brad DeLong
>GUARDIAN (London) Thursday September 9, 1999
>
>by George Monbiot
>
>
>The west's concern for human rights, the Indonesian government has been
>promised, stops in East Timor. If the army stops massacring the East
>Timorese, suggests Don McKinnon, the New Zealand foreign minister
>hosting
>the inter-governmental conference, the global powers will turn their
>backs
>on butchery elsewhere. "We do not consider," he told the BBC yesterday,
>"any other parts of Indonesia in any way as being the same as East
>Timor."
>The west is still playing geopolitics with Indonesia's people.
>
>There is another occupied territory, whose existence lies beneath the
>scope of Mr McKinnon's elevated worldview, but whose story is almost
>identical to East Timor's. West Papua, or Irian Jaya as the Indonesian
>government calls it, is the western half of the vast island of New
>Guinea.
>Holland held on to it when the rest of the Dutch East Indies became the
>Republic of Indonesia, for it lies on a different continent, two and
>half
>thousand miles from Jakarta, and is peopled by a different race.
>
>New Guinea, its Melanesian inhabitants had long demanded, should be
>allowed to form a single, independent state. At length, the Dutch and
>Australians agreed. But in 1963, after this plan was disputed by the
>Indonesian government, the Dutch handed West Papua to the United
>Nations.
>In violation of every principle the UN was established to defend, the US
>insisted that it be given to Indonesia. When President Kennedy was asked
>how the handover could be justified, he replied: "Those Papuans of yours
>are some seven hundred thousand and living in the Stone Age."
>
>In truth, there were more than 1m West Papuans who, having failed to
>master the art of time travel, were living in the 20th century like
>everyone else. But Kennedy's racist realpolitik gave the Indonesian
>government the green light to pursue its own.
>
>The Indonesian army wasted no time in demonstrating the benefits of
>integration. The Papuans trained for political life were rounded up and
>kicked to death. Tribal villages were strafed and napalmed from the air,
>then machine-gunned from the ground. Detainees were electrocuted and had
>nails hammered through their feet. As Papuan men took to the forests
>armed
>only with spears and poisoned arrows, the Indonesian army, equipped by
>Britain, France and the US, began a full scale pacification programme.
>
>Girls were raped then killed with a bayonet in the vagina or a stick up
>the rectum. Tribal leaders were taken up in helicopters and dropped,
>alive, into their villages. The slightest spark of resistance would
>trigger off punishment bombings. As vast mineral and timber concessions
>were handed to British and American companies, the global superpowers
>raised not a squeak of protest.