Indonesia

How can Indonesia be a country?

It is an archipelago of 13,677 islands, sprawling 6,400 km through a part of the western Pacific known as the Ring of Fire, because it is home to over 400 volcanos, about 75 of which are still active. There is an average of ten major eruptions a year and the two greatest volcanic cataclysms (Krakatoa and Tambora) occurred in this area. There are up to three earthquakes a day.

At one end of the archipelago, the island of Sumatra has always fought for its independence, against the various nations who tried to colonise it, including the government of Java. Sumatra is the fifth largest island in the world and the most fiercely independent part of Sumatra is the province of Aceh, which continued to fight against the government of Java, which continued to supress them brutally, until the area was hit by the tsunami in 2003.

At the other end of the archipelago Irian Jaya, formerly West Papua, is part of Papua new Guinea, an independent country  just north of Australia, until  the government of Java decided to ship thousands of landless peasants from Java to West Papua, where they “gave” them plots of land and left them to get on with building houses and growing food. They re-named West Papua Irian Jaya. The West Papuans fought to defend their country, but armed only with spears, they were defeated by the superior numbers and weapons of the forces from Java.

On the other side of the Malaysian peninsula the island of Borneo was arbitrarily carved into two parts, the northern part ‘belonging to’ Malaysia while the southern part ‘belongs to’ Indonesia. I feel sure that Borneo would prefer to be a country in its own right.