Kanaky was given three options to decide for separation from France. The last opportunity was last year, 2021. Kanaks boycotted the last referendum. It is unclear if the Noumea Accord provides for a boycott but the freedom aspiration is still alive.
For Melanesian people in West Papua, the UN dream in the 1960s for an independent nation-state freed of the Dutch colonial yoke the promise of a Papuan nation was abandoned.
It was the Cold War that dictated how far the UN dream was delivered. For decades since the 1969 Act of Free Choice or ' Act of No Choice' as Papuan nationalists called it, resistance to the Indonesian occupation industry persisted.
And, the Free Papua Movement or OPM stuck to its modus operandi in which the Pacific region's oldest independence movement fought the Indonesian government authorities and its military to claim the inalienable right to self determination promised by the Dutch rulers
The OPM continued since the 1960's '...gentle as a dove, and fierce as a flame.'
It is long past time for freedom. But, the midnight cry the world refused to hear in the 1960s has become deafening with Papuan nationalists consolidating the way forward in the long road to freedom.
West Papua will be free.
