New York Agreement - Background

Background

"... if Java, Sumatra, etc., should be severed from the Netherlands within the forseeable future—which God forbid!—then that does not need to be the case of New Guinea. New Guinea does not belong to the Indies Archipelago either geographically or geologically.... Neither the Javanese, the Acehnese, nor the inhabitants of Palembang have any right to this 'empty' country. The Dutch were the first to occupy it, and have the right to use it for the population surplus of the Netherlands ..."

The origins of the dispute over Dutch New Guinea are agreed to have originated in the pre-World War II need to find a homeland for the Eurasian Indo people. According to C.L.M. Penders, "None" of the other reasons, including to develop the island, "advanced by the Netherlands for the continuation of their rule of West New Guinea" rationally served the Dutch national interest enough to hold a territory that would lead it to lose so much business and international goodwill. Beginning in the 1920s, large numbers of unemployed Indo people in Java persuaded the Dutch government to set up colonies in northern West New Guinea, which eventually failed to give the colonists the prosperity they expected. However, New Guinea was conceived in the Dutch imagination as a "promised land", and various right-wing groups such as the Vaderlandsche Club and the Dutch Nazi Party lobbied hard for a "white Dutch province in the Indies". Although this province was never achieved, the Indos maintained a privileged and resented position in Indonesia, such that they were the strongest advocates for an autonomous New Guinea. From 1945 during the Indonesian National Revolution, the Netherlands tried to negotiate for a special place for New Guinea in various conferences with Indonesian nationalists, with the Linggadjati Agreement among other things reserving New Guinea as a place of settlement for Indos.

However, during the Dutch–Indonesian Round Table Conference of 1949, both Indonesia and the Netherlands could not agree on the status of New Guinea, with the Netherlands arguing that it should keep West New Guinea for the eventual self-determination of the natives, once those inhabitants had become sufficiently "mature". The resulting accord was unclear on the final status of New Guinea, although the Dutch Labor Party defeated an amendment that would have explicitly excluded New Guinea from Indonesian independence. From 1951, the Indonesian government interpreted the results of the Round Table Conference as giving it sovereignty over all of the former Dutch East Indies, including New Guinea. Throughout negotiations with the Indonesians, the Netherlands maintained it could give up sovereignty over Dutch New Guinea, because the conservative parties in the Dutch parliament, deeply humiliated by Indonesian independence and wanting to maintain a colonial stronghold in the area, would not vote to ratify any such agreement. When the Indonesian government withdrew from the Netherlands-Indonesia Union due to frustration at the slow pace of talks over New Guinea, the Netherlands felt itself relieved from any obligation to continue negotiations on the issue. Indonesia, supported by all of the African and Asian nations except nationalist China, tried to pass a United Nations General Assembly resolution urging the Netherlands to negotiate with it on the status of West New Guinea, but the resolutions were blocked by the opposition of all of the Western nations except Greece.

Indonesia gained more international support for negotiations with the Netherlands during the Geneva Summit and the Asian–African Conference in 1955, after which Dutch newspapers and churches, previously stalwartly in favor of keeping New Guinea, advocated bringing New Guinea "into a quieter sphere" of United Nations Trusteeship. Nevertheless, in 1956, the Netherlands amended its constitution to include West New Guinea as a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, although the government excluded an amendment that would have specified self-determination as the goal of Dutch sovereignty over the territory. Inside West New Guinea, the Netherlands liberalized political parties, but banned pro-Indonesia parties as subversive. In response to the Netherlands' hardening, Indonesia's position on New Guinea gradually shifted to say that the people of New Guinea already exercised their right to self-determination with the Proclamation of Indonesian Independence in 1945. After the third and final vote in the United Nations General Assembly in 1957, in which a resolution urging Dutch–Indonesian dialogue, with the support of a majority of nations representing the majority of the world's people, was blocked by the colonial powers, the Indonesian foreign minister Subandrio said that it would no longer seek to resolve the "West Irian" (West New Guinea) issue at the United Nations. Mass strikes and illegal seizures broke out in Indonesia against Dutch businesses in 1958, organized by the Communist Party, youths and veterans' groups which led to Dutch nationals fleeing the country. Diplomatic ties were severed with the Netherlands in 1960.