PNG-Indonesia ties must be boosted

WHEN Prime Minister James Marape visited Indonesia in 2022, President Joko Widodo said the two close neighbours must step up their relationship to one of trade and investment.
It is good to see that Widodo reciprocates the visit today.
There is a history behind his sentiments to Marape last year.
For four long decades now Papua New Guinea has seen its closest and biggest neighbour through the lenses of others — human rights organisations, separatist agents and even other countries in the region.
Indonesia, for all intent and purposes, might have been on the other side of the globe instead of sharing the only common land border PNG has with another nation.
The separatist aspirations of its Melanesian brethren in the Indonesian province of Papua have been an open secret that has permeated PNG’s bilateral engagement with Indonesia.
The so called ‘act of no choice’, a plebiscite conducted under UN auspices between July and August 1969 which many believed was rigged to place the province of Papua in the hands of Indonesia, has always been a sticking point.
That plus an old map, alleged to exist somewhere in a secret military backroom in Jakarta which shows the whole island of New Guinea to be under Indonesian sovereign rule.
Another and perhaps more genuine concern of more recent birth has been the fact of PNG’s nine million people being entirely Christian sharing a common border with the largest Muslim nation on earth.
Excepting this last point, without tangible evidence and relying upon some unfounded hearsay, PNG’s conduct of diplomatic relations with its bigger neighbour has always been under an open air of suspicion.
That, unfortunately, has been to PNG’s detriment.
Indonesia entered into diplomatic relations with PNG on the day of Independence on Sept 16, 1975. Both countries have had a Basic Agreement on Border Arrangements from the early 1980s on but there has not been much progress on common border issues.
The border agreement was reviewed last in 2013 which the Indonesian parliament ratified almost immediately but which the PNG Parliament did not ratify until it fell due this year when Parliament rushed the ratification in March.
A Treaty of Mutual Respect, Friendship, and Cooperation was signed in 1986.
Under the terms of the agreement, the two countries have agreed not to threaten each other and not to cooperate with others in hostile or unlawful acts against each other or allow their territory to be used by others for such purposes.
Each side agreed to consult and negotiate with the other in the event of any dispute arising.
This was again a reference to the sticking point of the West Papuan separatist movement.
This is where PNG has lost out in the rapid development that has been undertaken in Indonesia which has now placed that country now as the 4th largest economy in the Asian region and the 7th in the world.
It had presidency of the G7 in 2022.
The Indonesian economic miracle is a wonder to behold and to emulate.
In around 1964 when PNG’s House of Assembly was first assembled, Indonesia’s huge population spread across a vast archipelago was querulous, hungry and desperately poor with separatist movements in a good number of the spread-out islands.
Indonesia’s second President Sukarno begin a program of economic recovery and integration of the population in order to unite the country.
Through economic transformation, it halved poverty and grew the economy to what it is today with a US$1.9 billion (about K6.8 billion) GDP and a per capital income of US$4,000 (about K14,341) as at December 2022.
The huge population of Indonesia is a market, one that could be fed by PNG food and fresh fruits, one that could be living in homes built of PNG timber.
Indonesia’s newly made millionaires could be enticed across the border to invest in PNG’s Special Economic Zones.
There could be exchange of students in each other’s universities. Cross border trade, now booming at Wutung and mostly in favour of Indonesian businesses could be two-way and formalised.
It is time Indonesia and PNG both fast tracked their diplomatic relations to one of real mutual respect, friendship and cooperation.
Much can be mutually gained were that to happen.