WorldView/John D'Arcy May: The second round of voting in Indonesia's presidential election on Monday prompts some old questions about government by consensus and the effectiveness of the UN.
Now the pretext that the war in Iraq was a war on terror has worn thin, and the US President and the Australian Prime Minister face elections in which their manipulation of intelligence to justify the war is an issue, it is worth focusing on two much larger questions that were obscured at the time by political hype.
They are the future of democracy and the role of the United Nations.
The misguided project of force-feeding western-style democracy to a nation which is little more than a colonial cobbling together of Kurds, Sunnis and Shias should make us reflect on how serious we in the west are about democracy.
The contempt for the UN by the present US administration at the height of the crisis showed just how fragile and - let's face it - unconvincing the UN is as the guarantor of world peace.
Turning the clock back 40 years, we find precisely the same issues at stake in one of the most shameful chapters of international diplomacy, the Indonesian takeover of the territory now known as West Papua (previously West Irian, then Irian Jaya, and now Papua in Indonesian terminology).
To recapitulate a story that has been told in this newspaper before but cannot be repeated often enough: on being liberated from the Japanese in 1945, Indonesia was determined to win its independence from the Dutch, whose Netherlands East Indies had stretched from the easternmost tip of Sumatra to the western half of the island of New Guinea.
Sukarno whipped up support for a move to "liberate" West Irian, if necessary by force. As the Dutch were unwilling to fight a war to retain their distant possession and the Americans were nervous of Sukarno's nationalism and communist sympathies, they exerted pressure on the Dutch to reach a settlement known as the New York Agreement in 1962, and the Australians, who had favoured the Dutch, caved in.
According to this agreement, Indonesia was to entrust West Irian's preparations for self- determination to the first ever UN-mandated administration, the United Nations Temporary Executive Authority (UNTEA).
As is now well known, thanks to researchers such as John Saltford and a retired US Foreign Service officer, Edmund McWilliams, the Indonesians did everything in their power to obstruct this body and the UN representative, Ortiz Sanz, as they went about setting up a so-called Act of Free Choice at a time when most observers agreed that more than 90 per cent of West Papuans would choose independence from Indonesia in a free vote.
Far from being politically illiterate, the West Papuans had held elections in 1961 which returned pro-independence candidates to 22 out of 28 seats in their assembly, and despite internal conflicts and splits their Free Papua Movement has offered increasingly desperate resistance ever since.
It was at this time that the name West Papua and the distinctive Morning Star flag were adopted, and since then various bodies seeking conciliation between ethnic and religious groups and dialogue with the Indonesians have been created.
One of the most recent is the Papua Presidium Council, whose leader, Theys Eluay, was murdered by the military in November 2001. It is here that our twin concerns, democracy and the UN, come into play.
In 1969, under the pretext of doing things the Indonesian way, by "consultation" (musjawarah) rather than a genuine plebiscite, the Indonesians were allowed by the US and UN to coerce 1,022 arbitrarily chosen Papuan tribal leaders into giving consent, under threat of death, to the annexation of a territory which constitutes 20 per cent of the Indonesian land mass and had a population of 800,000 at the time.
The UN's own observers and Ortiz Sanz portrayed this procedure as a whitewash and a farce, and Papuan representatives were prevented from passing through the Australian Territory of Papua and New Guinea to make their case at the UN.
But political expediency dictated western acquiescence in this blatant denial of the most fundamental rights of a people.
The Indonesians had already removed all available infrastructure and even food supplies to Java.
The army was ravaging the territory, and concessions had been granted to huge mining interests such as Freeport McMoRan, which began operations in 1967, its mines protected by the Indonesian army and police from the reprisals of the dispossessed Amungme and Kamoro people.
The democracies had looked the other way while a travesty of democracy was carried out with their consent, and the UN had failed its first test as an international arbiter of human rights.
The most disturbing aspect of all is the reason given for the betrayal: the West Papuans simply didn't count, neither the estimated 100,000 killed in direct resistance, nor the 200,000 more thought to have died from malnutrition and disease.
In accordance with the Indonesian policy of transmigrasi, over the next 40 years the territory was swamped by 773,000 immigrants - mainly rice growing Muslims - from the densely populated islands of Java, Madura, Bali and Lombok, to whom some one million hectares of land were eventually ceded.
More recently, transmigration has been intensified, with an estimated 5,000 arrivals a week, mostly young Muslim males.
Among these it is thought that some 10,000 members of militant Islamist groups such as Laskar Jihad and Jemaah Islamiya, as well as the pro-Jakarta Satgas Merah Putih (Red and White Militias), have been infiltrated.
This has happened with the connivance of the Indonesian army to foment inter-ethnic rivalries and Muslim-Christian tensions, thereby creating situations of conflict in which the army can show how indispensable it is to the economic prosperity and territorial integrity of Indonesia.
Despite all this, West Papua is still a long way from being included in the UN's list of territories awaiting decolonisation, and in March 2002 West Papua Action in Ireland initiated an international campaign urging the UN to review the 1969 Act of Free Choice.
Whereas the Portuguese never renounced their claim to East Timor, the Dutch washed their hands of the West Papuans in 1962 and paved the way for UN acknowledgment of Indonesia's dubious claims to sovereignty.
In doing so the UN sowed the seeds of doubt about its own legitimacy, just as the democracies betrayed their own principles by condoning Sukarno's "guided democracy" and Suharto's "new order", which was little more than a military fiefdom. No wonder neither the Dutch nor the Americans nor the Indonesians appreciate having these old issues reopened.
John D'Arcy May is associate professor of interfaith dialogue at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin