Ministry in Australia
Tripartite meeting Ñ Port Moresby, August 1989
The situation of the refugees in PNG unfortunately did not improve. My last effort in international affairs was a Tripartite meeting between the DGI, MCC and the ACC in Port Moresby, in August 1989. The theme was SHAPING THE FUTURE. I was one of four delegates from Australia, three only from Indonesia, and 23 from Papua New Guinea. My first reaction was, that the DGI didn't take the meeting very seriously, judging from the delegates it had sent. There were none of the former members participating, no staff of the DGI, no one from the GKI nor from the Timor church, nor from the Roman Catholic Church, which had been particularly requested. It was not surprising, therefore, that very little progress had been achieved since our last meeting in 1985.
The Irian Jayan minister for the refugee camps was in Papua New Guinea, but he was settled in a parish in Port Moresby, not in the border district. When I asked him, why he hadn't gone to the border camps, he said that he had never been to any of them, nor did he indicate to me that he wanted to go there in the future. He was more interested in finding a scholarship for his daughters.
When the subject of Melanesian identity came up at one discussion, the leader of the Indonesian delegation asked me in a whisper: "What is that?" I felt that he genuinely didn't know, but then I asked myself, what was he doing here at this Tripartite meeting, when this subject was so fundamental to our understanding of the conflict!
During breakfast one day I spoke to a church's youth leader from Bougainville. He told me about the desperate conflict between the Bougainvillians and Papua New Guineans. By then the situation had already escalated to a civil war. Australian helicopters, on loan to the PNG army, were being used to shoot villagers and burn their homes. The conflict had started when locals protested about the foreign owned mine, which had dispossessed them without any compensation and which was releasing toxic wastes into the river without filtering, killing all fish and poisoning people.
In my report to the ACC I suggested that future meetings with the DGI should include in the agenda reports on what the churches response was on some specific issues. In Australia the death of Aborigines in custody remained a problem. In Indonesia, delegates should know what happened to the protesters who were jailed because they didn't agree with a dam being built on their land. There was also the restriction on freedom of expression in the case of the poet and writer Pramoedia Ananta Toer, who had been jailed. Some Irian Jayan refugees had been returned against their will and subsequently jailed. Delegates should know what their fate would be and who was looking after them. Such an agenda would provide future meetings with specific subjects for discussion. I also suggested that efforts
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