JUST IN: MELANESIAN LEADERS BATMAN AND ROBIN TURN TO RACE CARD

Vanuatu and Solomon Islands PMs are realizing their flawed West Papua case  

23 September 2017
New York, United States
ABCMelanesia

Burt Ward as Robin (left) and Adam West as Batman in the 1960s popular series

Sources inside the Solomon Islands PM office has revealed to ABCMelanesia that leaders of Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) realise that their West Papua case is flawed.

Government officials in those mainly Melanesian countries are conscious that under international law, West Papua is a legitimate and legally part of Indonesia. 

For over five decades, the United Nations have reaffirmed that Papua and West Papua are legally and internationally recognised provinces of Indonesia.

"Using the failing line of argument that Indonesia somehow 'annexed' West Papua half a century ago is not going to fly. The vast majority of the community of nations know that under international law, West Papua is a rightful part of Indonesia. Period." 

The officials is now pushing for another tact. Race purity.

The Guardian reported that "The people indigenous to the province (Papua and West Papua of Indonesia) are Melanesian, ethnically distinct from the rest of Indonesia and more closely linked to the people of Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji and New Caledonia."

In their recent United Nations General Assembly statements, the leaders appealed to the international community arguing that West Papua is Melanesian like Solomon Islands and Vanuatu while the majority of Indonesia is "Asian".

Anthropological and demographic reality of the region is however not as simple as that.

While it is factual to say that West Papua is mainly populated by Melanesian descent, three other provinces of Indonesia are also Melanesian: Sulawesi, East Nusa Tenggara and West Nusa Tenggara. Together with West Papua, there are close to ten million Melanesians inside the Indonesian border. 

Most of Southeast Asia and South Pacific heritage trace their origins to the Austronesian and Polynesian group of peoples. 

Australian National University (ANU) archaeologists pointed that although Vanuatu is now populated mostly by Melanesians, 

"The people of Vanuatu today are descended from Asia first of all. Their original base population is Asian. They were straight out of Taiwan and perhaps the northern Philippines." said Professor Matthew Spriggs of the ANU School of Archaeology and Anthropology.

The ANU reported that:

"The study, which was published in the scientific journal Nature, presented compelling evidence that Vanuatu's and Tonga's first people arrived 3,000 years ago from Taiwan and northern Philippines, and not from the neighbouring Australo-Papuan populations of Australia, New Guinea and the Solomon Islands."

New Zealand Maori, Tuvalu, Tonga and Samoa on the other hand are mainly populated by Polynesians, a subset of Austronesian peoples. 

Polynesians share the same origins as the inhabitants of maritime Southeast Asia including Indonesia, Madagascar and Taiwan.

Saint Vincent and the Grenadines is of course mainly populated by African-descent.

Dwayne Johnson as the voice of Maui and Auli'i Cravalho as the voice of Moana in the Disney's 2016 'Moana'. Why PMs of Vanuatu and Solomon Islands did not watch Moana is incomprehensible.

It seems that the leaders of Tuvalu, Solomon Islands, SVG and Vanuatu did not watch Moana, the Disney animation about Polynesian voyage in the Pacific.

PM Charlot Salwai Tabimasmas of Vanuatu and his Solomon Islands counterpart Manasseh Sogavare seems content to play their Batman and Robin roles.

The dynamic-duo made the right step by realising their flawed argument on West Papua. 

However, by using the race card, they are adopting language used by Islamic State (IS).

Tabimasmas' and Sogavare's call to ban Indonesia from the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) and their determination to build a wall around the MSG to preserve the grouping's racial purity are borrowed straight from the IS playbook.   

It seems that Batman and Robin escaped from one trap but fell into another.

The late Heath Ledger as Joker (left) and Aaron Eckhart as Harvey Dent/Two-face in the 2008 The Dark Knight

Now it is not yet clear whether they are the real dynamic-duo or Batman's nemesis Joker and Two-face? Watch this space.


ABCMelanesia