West Papua making waves

The front pages of Australian newspapers have been awash with stories about asylum seekers travelling to our shores from Indonesia and the newly elected Abbott government's attempts to stop them. The tensions that have developed between Australia and Indonesia as a result have been well canvassed. The prominence of this issue has tended to overshadow a major development in regional geo-politics: the rise of West Papuan diplomacy and its consequences, specifically the aggressive entry of Indonesia into the domestic politics of the Melanesian countries.