Dublin - The former minister for foreign affairs, Mr David Andrews, said yesterday that the international community and the UN should revisit the "sham" of the "Act of Free Choice" by which the now troubled and separatist former Dutch colony of West Papua (Irian Jaya) was transferred to Indonesian control in the 1960s, writes David Shanks.
His comment follows an admission last week by the man in charge of the hand-over for the United Nations, Mr Chakravarthy Narasimhan, that the process of consulting 1025 elders was "just a whitewash". Mr Narasimhan was then undersecretary-general of the UN.
"The mood at the UN was to get rid of this problem as quickly as possible," he said. Mr Andrews also called for "a fully independent inquiry" into the recent murder of the separatist Papuan leader, Theys Eluay.