New York Agreement

An Agreement signed by the Netherlands and Indonesia regarding the administration of the territory of West New Guinea. The first part of the agreement proposes that the United Nations assume administration of the territory, and a second part proposes a set of social conditions that will be provided if the United Nations exercises a discretion proposed in article 12 of the agreement to allow Indonesian occupation and administration of the territory. Negotiated during meetings hosted by the United States, the agreement was signed on 15 August 1962 at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City.

The agreement was added to the agenda of the 1962 United Nations General Assembly and precipitated General Assembly resolution 1752 (XVII) granting the United Nations authority to occupy and administrate West New Guinea. Although agreements are not able to negate obligations defined in the Charter of the United Nations, and the agreement asserted that it was for the benefit of the people of the territory, some people believed that the agreement was sacrificing the people of the territory for benefit of the foreign powers. A United States Department of State summary from 1962 asserts the "agreement was almost a total victory for Indonesia and a defeat for the Netherlands", that the United States "Bureau of European Affairs was sympathetic to the Dutch view that annexation by Indonesia would simply trade white for brown colonialism", and that "The underlying reason that the Kennedy administration pressed the Netherlands to accept this agreement was that it believed that Cold War considerations of preventing Indonesia from going Communist overrode the Dutch case."

"... if Java, Sumatra, etc., should be severed from the Netherlands within the foreseeable future—which God forbid!—then that does not need to be the case of New Guinea. New Guinea does not belong to the Indies Archipelago either geographically or geologically.... Neither the Javanese, the Acehnese, nor the inhabitants of Palembang have any right to this 'empty' country. The Dutch were the first to occupy it, and have the right to use it for the population surplus of the Netherlands ..."

The origins of the dispute over Dutch New Guinea are agreed to have originated in the pre-World War II need to find a homeland for the Eurasian Indo people. According to C.L.M. Penders, "None" of the other reasons, including to develop the island, "advanced by the Netherlands for the continuation of their rule of West New Guinea" rationally served the Dutch national interest enough to hold a territory that would lead it to lose so much business and international goodwill. Beginning in the 1920s, large numbers of unemployed Indo people in Java persuaded the Dutch government to set up colonies in northern West New Guinea, which eventually failed to give the colonists the prosperity they expected. However, New Guinea was conceived of as a "promised land" in the imagination of groups such as the Vaderlandsche Club and the Dutch Nazi Party who lobbied for a "white Dutch province in the Indies". Although this province was never achieved, the Indos maintained a privileged and resented position in Indonesia, such that they were the strongest advocates for an autonomous New Guinea. From 1945 during the Indonesian National Revolution, the Netherlands tried to negotiate for a special place for New Guinea in various conferences with Indonesian nationalists, with the Linggadjati Agreement among other things reserving New Guinea as a place of settlement for Indos.

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