Papua New Guinea Lines Up with Putin and Russia - on the Right Side of History

(Photo: Miklukho-Maklay was one of the few people who treated the Papuans as his equals)

It is 1800s. Miklouho-Maclay wrote about a paradise lost. 

He was a Russian humanist scholar and anthropologist. Although Miklouho-Maclay continued his scientific studies in New Guinea and Australia, the last ten years of his life was mainly devoted to defending the rights of indigenous peoples. In 1879 he wrote to the British and Russian governments demanding the recognition of the indigenous people to their land. The script would be the same today.

Paradise Lost - in the 21st Century?

Miklouho-Maclay became more and more concerned with protecting the people of Astrolabe Bay from the impending threat of British and European colonial expansion. In 1879 he wrote the first of several letters to the British and Russian governments demanding recognition of the rights of the Astrolabe Bay people to their land. He explained that "each piece of ground, each useful tree of the forest, the fish in each stream, etc., etc., has a proprietor".

Under his "Maclay Coast Scheme" of 1881, Miklouho-Maclay proposed the formation of a "native Great Council" and the establishment of plantations that the local inhabitants would work, with "reasonable remuneration". His position within this paternalistic scheme was to be as adviser and foreign representative. His plans never came to fruition.

In 1884 the German anthropologist Otto Finsch, posing as Miklouho-Maclay’s friend, settled at Astrolabe Bay and claimed the area for Germany. By the end of 1884 the eastern half of New Guinea had been divided between Germany and Britain.

(Photo: Russian Warship, Perekop, Port Moresby, 2018; the Russian Bear re - tracing history)

It is 2018, and rewind the time capsule. 

Russia is back on our shores which may or may not provoke controversy and debate. After the end of the Cold War era, the clash of political ideologies seemed to be over in which the prescient analysis of religious fundamentalism, politics, scientific progress, ethical codes, and war is essential for a world fighting fundamentalist terrorists. But,  what contemporary liberal democracy stands for failed to come to pass, and flies in the face of world history. Due to the end of clash of political ideologies, viable alternatives to liberalism, and human history itself was seen as reaching an end - game.  

The question of how to forge a rational global order that can accommodate humanity's restless desire for recognition without a return to chaos is not the issue. It is unsettling for the West and proponents of the liberal world order in the aftermath the Cold War era from the 1990's on wards that there is compelling and confronting evidence which shows the opposite, the re - surging, and therefore re - visit of the same human history with the return of the Russian Bear. In Melanesia, the indigenous people's claim to sovereignty and royalty status in the 21st Century would irk the Russian Bear. 

West Papua and Kanaky are two nations in Melanesia whose dream of freedom has evaded them since the 1800s. This was a time in history in which colonialism was mapped out, paving the way forward for dreams to come true, or become a ghost, a catastrophe. 

Yet, it was paradise lost for the two Melanesian and Pacific Islands nations. So, the war against terrorism is being re - invented with a spark of divinity, a' poke in the eyes of the US.' And, right on Australia's doorstep.  

Nikolai Miklouho – Maclay saw it coming and was a supporter of indigenous people’s rights to self – determination in the 1800s, long before the UN saw the arguments to ratify international protocol for indigenous people’s issues in the 21st Century. According to him, there is a genesis to the West Papua issue. In his  New Guinea Diaries( Kristen Press, 1975), he wrote:

‘I am perfectly convinced that acts of injustice from the white men, and disregard of their customs and family life, will lead to an irreconcilable hatred, and to an endless struggle for independence and justice.’

Miklouho-Maclay was on a mission then, and would do the same today to fight and save indigenous lives in New Guinea and Australia in the mid 1800s. Nicole Steinke(2013) wrote about  the effort of Russian born humanist, naturalist and proto-anthropologist who fought for the rights of colonised peoples at a time when a  volatile mix made his aim to secure indigenous people’s rights difficult during the 1870s and 1880s. This was a period in which there was a state of excitement over New Guinea in the Australian colonies; it was regarded as the last unknown and the next big thing. 

Today, the Russian and Eastern European world – view still contrasts with the Western European one on the New Guinea settlement question with a Papuan nation divided. West Papua became a ‘Greek Tragedy’(Forbes Magazine, 2012). Indonesia invaded in the 1960s, and its illegal military occupation began, and a whole race faces obliteration today as we see a shift in indigenous population from majority demographic composition of the population in the former Dutch colony to a minority by 2000. 

In independent Papua New Guinea, the story also gathers dust. It lays off the Australian radar, yet its closest neighbour, usually forgotten unless tourists are being attacked there or the government is looking for somewhere to process asylum seekers.  West Papua means less. But this was not always the case. 

In scientific circles throughout Europe, Miklouho-Maclay was well – known and became one of the most enigmatic figures in the South Pacific during the mid to late 19th century, and the legacy he left behind was full of disturbing contradictions. He became best known for his fierce support of indigenous peoples, for establishing a world class scientific research station on Sydney Harbour and for having dissected his Polynesian servant, Boy, after he died of disease, because he wanted the brain of a dark skinned person. 

In the 1800s, the people of New South Wales and Queensland in particular were eager to lay claim to New Guinea, hoping to strike it rich with gold, timber and pearl shell taking the cue from public meetings with travellers and missionaries recently returned from New Guinea who drew crowds in the hundreds.  They lobbied the British government to colonise the island before the Germans, Dutch or Russians could get their hands on it. Nobody was asking the people of New Guinea what they thought. 

Miklouho-Maclay read the signs correctly in the 1800s. For instance, the West Papua issue is now internationalized, and has gone back or about to go back through MSG intervention to the drawing board of the UN for resolution. It is the UN’s colossal blunder in the 1960s that has come back to haunt humanity, as the world finds out about the fraud. 

(Photo: Russian Warship, Perekop, Simpson Harbour 200 years after Miklouho-Maclay lived among Papuans)  

Andrew Johnson(2016) writes that the UN – supervised plebiscite called Act of Free Choice in 1969 that sold off West Papua to Indonesia had been stage – managed by the West. For instance, following the refusal by black African nations led by Ghana to recognise the result of the vote, the General Assembly made amendments to the UN resolution on West Papua in which 30 nations wanted to make to the text for General Assembly resolution 2504; it calls for a referendum to be held by 1975. Unfortunately the motion failed, 30 in support, 42 against, and 42 abstained. In the wake of the controversy, the UN ‘noted’ that some type of consultation with the international community took place to decide the fate of West Papua. 

Russia was one of those countries who voted for a referendum for West Papua to be properly conducted by 1975. Let us take up the discussion on the Russian position on West Papua. 

Russian Position on Papuan Destiny - and West Papua. 

It begins with Nikolai Miklouho – Maclay, who saw it coming and was a supporter of indigenous people’s rights to self – determination even far back in the 1800s. He was a hero then, and remains a hero in Russia today. Leo Tolstoy, with whom he exchanged letters, wrote: ‘You are the first to prove by experiment that man is man everywhere, a sociable being with whom one should communicate with kindness and truth—and not with guns and vodka. You have proved this with a feat of true courage.’

Tolstoy went on to write: ‘For the sake of all that is sacred, describe in the minutest detail and with the strict truthfulness so typical of you, all your man-to-man relations with people there.’  

Miklouho-Maclay moved to Sydney in July 1878, after living for three years among people regarded as cannibals and head hunters on the north-eastern coast of New Guinea. Until his arrival with two servants, the local people had not encountered a European. Those local people became his friends, as well as the subjects of his research. He was determined to protect them from the worst excesses of white colonisation.

He travelled extensively in the South Pacific and South-East Asia between 1871 and 1886 using the Maclay Coast in New Guinea as the base for his fieldwork and Sydney as a second home. By this time most of the South Pacific had either been colonised or had forcibly resisted colonisation. The pressure was on New Guinea from all sides.

In Sydney the white population did not take much notice of the enigmatic Russian, whose stories did not register much because he was seen as a foreign aristocrat who had lived in wild places and his imagined land of riches to the north was just an exotic tale. The Eurocentric world – view was not dented, and even one of his greatest supporters, Sir William John Macleay, politician, gentleman-naturalist and a member of the family that established the Macleay Museum which is now part of Sydney University, wrote in March 1879, ‘Baron Maclay has been soliciting subscriptions today for a Zoological Station at Watsons Bay—a very foolish scheme.’

He did make a point. His view was that the biogeography of the Pacific region is not to be taken for granted. Although cash was a problem, in the end he successfully acquired the backing of the Linnean Society and the NSW government to establish the world’s second marine biological research station, locating it on the shores of Sydney Harbour. The European world – view was dominant, but did not distract Miklouho-Maclay from his passionate struggle for New Guinea's indigenous people, and his vision that they enjoy independence rather than colonization—or failing that, a benevolent form of protectorate that would not remove the local people's autonomy. 

And, he lobbied in the local papers, writing letters. An excerpt from a letter he wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald was to the point:

‘During my stay among the natives... I had ample time to make acquaintance with their character, their customs, and institutions. Speaking their language sufficiently, I thought it my duty as their friend (and also as a friend of justice and humanity) to warn the natives... about the arrival, sooner or later, of the white men, who, very possibly, would not respect their rights to their soil, their homes, and their family bonds.'

He went on, ‘should annexation of the south-eastern half of New Guinea be decided by the British Government, I trust it will not mean taking wholesale possession of the land and its inhabitants without knowledge or wish of the natives, and utterly regardless of the fact that they are human beings and not a mob of cattle.'

‘I am perfectly convinced that acts of injustice from the white men, and disregard of their customs and family life, will lead to an irreconcilable hatred, and to an endless struggle for independence and justice.’

(Photo: Miklouho-Maclay monument, Vanimo: He wrote a letter to German Chancellor Bismarck calling on him to protect the Pacific islanders from “white exploitation”. 

Miklouho-Maclay was disturbing the momentum, and contradictions, of white civilization in the region. He knew that the colonial powers had no time for him, and they distrusted him as a foreigner on the streets of Sydney with his proposal when he approached a number of colonial powers in attempting to broker a deal for the New Guinea people. He failed. New Guinea was colonised by the Dutch, the Germans and the British, and the colonies in Australia formed a federation that became Australia today. Indigenous people’s rights did not matter, and Miklouho-Maclay soon vanished from history.

In Russia, however, he became a national icon - although not during his lifetime but in the Soviet era when he became a symbol scientific discovery and humanitarian ethos, a giant. His legend grew after he died while on a rare trip to Russia with his wife Margaret and their two children. He was aged just 41 and had not yet written the major book he had planned, based on his researches in New Guinea. 

Tolstoy wrote to him before he died, ‘I don’t know what kind of contribution your collections and discoveries have made to the science that you serve, but the experience you have gained in communication with savages, forms a whole epoch in the science that I serve, the science of how people should live with one another. Write your story and you will do mankind a good turn.’

Miklouho-Maclay kept journals throughout all his voyages in the South Pacific including the original field journals written in numerous languages. Most of his papers went missing, or were destroyed by his wife after his death in St Petersburg in 1888. In Russia, Miklouho-Maclay's story was later used for propaganda purposes during Stalinist times. He was acclaimed as a man who saw beyond racial difference to the fundamental equality of all people and was used as a symbol of how the Soviet Union dealt with indigenous people in a more humane way than Western powers. Stalinist-style revised versions of his New Guinea diaries were published as evidence of this. Words such as ‘primitive’ were replaced with the word ‘indigenous’.

In post-Soviet times his lustre has dimmed with the younger generation, as Soviet icons are toppled, but Miklouho-Maclay’s scientific reputation lived on. In 1884, he married his wife Margaret Emma Clark, widowed daughter of Sir John Robertson at her father's home, Clovelly, Watsons Bay, and on a trip back to Russia, they were married by rites of the Russian Orthodox Church in early 1886. He planned to return to Sydney but his health deteriorated and he died in his wife’s arms on 2 April 1888. Margaret  returned to Sydney, and worked on publishing his New Guinea Diaries. She died in Sydney on 1 January 1936 survived by their two sons. The publication finally appeared in English in 1975, published by a PNG publisher, Kristen Press. 

Australia Mandate from the League of Nations  - Rule of German New Guinea, 1945 

(Image: the colonies that became Australia and Papua New Guinea,1885)

In 1920 Australia received a mandate from the League of Nations to rule German New Guinea and in 1945 Papua and New Guinea were combined in an administrative union. Papua New Guinea was ruled by Australia until its independence in 1975. Tens of thousands of Australians worked  in the eastern half of New Guinea over those years. Now, Papua New Guinea is the only evidence of the UN dream of the birth of a Papuan nation that stretched from Sorong to Samarai. It is the last unknown of the world, and like Nikolai, is largely forgotten by Australians. 

Yet, he made a strong statement on the fate of New Guinea then, as if he saw neo – liberal capitalism pushed by the West in the region today which was a sign post already in the 1800s. In 1879 he wrote the first of several letters to the British and Russian governments demanding recognition of the rights of the Astrolabe Bay people to their land. 

He explained that "each piece of ground, each useful tree of the forest, the fish in each stream, etc., etc., has a proprietor". Papuans who are indigenous to New Guinea from Sorong to Samarai have no other world – view. Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay spoke of the Russian world – view on the fate of indigenous people and approached Tsar Alexander III to organize a free Russian colony in New Guinea. It did not happen. Today, MSG options on West Papua through international arbitration may or may not yield, that the theatre of global geopolitics has pushed the Global South into a corner. One might argue that MSG options on West Papua must be located in the context of similar Western meddling which began in 1800s to foment unrest and destabilize BRICS nations in an effort to ensure the continuation of Western economic and political control over the Global South. 

According to this argument MSG could connect with Russia because the global geopolitics paradigm has shifted, and its member states could enjoy comparative advantage of multipolar diplomacy with BRICS as opposed to APEC and TPP. Or, exploit existential pluralism to cash in on the superpower rivalry. 

However, one should not miss the forest for the trees. There are powerful forces aligning behind Indonesia and other Western proxy political forces in order to destabilize MSG as a partner of the BRICS project. 

The MSG will be the target of a multi-faceted, asymmetric campaign of destabilization through soft coup in which economic, political, and psychological forms of warfare -- each of which has been specifically designed to inflict maximum damage on any move by the Global South to escape from US hegemony. For example, in Brazil the fancy anti-corruption rhetoric is really an assault on President Dilma Rousseff’s leftist government, and is the result of a coordinated campaign by business interests tied to Washington and Wall Street. 

In other words, the fancy anti-corruption rhetoric was a cover – up for the assault as the result of a coordinated campaign by business interests tied to Washington and Wall Street, and neoliberal capitalism, as it broadens its engagement with the non-Western world as well as use multi-faceted strategies to contain, isolate, and destabilize Russia and China. In Brazil, the government of Dilma Rousseff is facing a major destabilization campaign orchestrated by powerful right-wing elements in the country and their U.S. backers. MSG could orchestrate a move in anticipation for a similar storm that is orchestrated to stop the West Papua agenda from reaching the UN General Assembly.

Today, Papuanism and therefore Melanesian identity is on the precipice, and West Papua burns in the vortex of a global armed conflict. We remember Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay, and the sins of Western civilization as we forgive. He was one of the earliest followers of Charles Darwin, and a humanist scholar who, on the basis of his comparative anatomical research, was one of the first anthropologists to refute the prevailing view that the different 'races' of mankind belonged to different species.By the end of 1884 the eastern half of New Guinea had been divided between Germany and Britain. It is now the independent state of Papua New Guinea. Australia continues to look the other way. The 250 indigenous Papuan tribes in West Papua face obliteration as a race under Indonesian colonial rule since its invasion of the former Dutch colony in the 1960s. 

Let West Papua Vote!  

When all things are said and done, Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay was a Soviet cultural hero whose influence flowed into 20th century after the Russian revolution. During Stalinist times (long after his death) he was adopted by the state bureaucracy and raised up as a hero for political purposes, therefore a national hero who sprang from Russia’s past. It was a time then to reinterpret him during the course of Russia’s history. He has been a part of Russia’s rich culture that graced our shores in Melanesia, and the Pacific region in the late 1870s. 

In our region, it is time now to reinterpret him as a Russian who fought to save indigenous lives. The national liberation struggle in West Papua is an endless struggle for independence and justice by Papuans, and justice was denied for a long time. His advice, in the 1800s, and today is simple. 

Miklouho-Maclay - like New Guinea – is almost completely forgotten. It must be the disturbing contradictions that white civilization in the region just wants to leave behind, a moral universe that is contaminated, beginning early. Today, West Papua and Kanaky are still waiting to claim their inalienable right to sovereignty and royalty, and on the precipice. The former is burning in the vortex of a global armed conflict. We remember Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay, and the sins of Western civilization as we forgive. In the 1800s, the Russian Bear was here. After 200 years, and Vladimir Putin took over as Russian leader, Eastern Christianity has come knocking on Christian country, Papua New Guinea.

Ask the people of New Guinea what they think. Let West Papua vote!  

(Photo: 7000 tonne Russian warship, Perekop, is loaded with 200 cadets, and armed with anti - submarine rockets and anti - aircraft guns; ' a poke in the eyes of the US', it was docked in Port Moresby from Wednesday 16th to Saturday 19th May 2018)