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The arrival of United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres in Port Moresby on September 2 marked the first official visit by a UN chief to Papua New Guinea, a moment of historic significance.

Grand Chief Bob Dadae warmly welcomed him, praising PNG’s achievements in peacebuilding and democracy as the country nears its 50th anniversary of independence.

Beneath this historic visit and the diplomatic celebration lay a deeper story — one that exposes the UN’s double face in Melanesia. On one side stands Bougainville, where dialogue and international support birthed a fragile but real peace. On the other side lies West Papua, where the same institution abandoned an entire people to silence, militarisation and slow extinction.

Bougainville: The long road to peace

The centrepiece of Guterres’ visit was a peace and reconciliation ceremony with the Autonomous Province of Bougainville — a milestone reflecting decades of dialogue after a brutal civil war that claimed more than 20,000 lives.

In 2019, more than 98% of Bougainvilleans voted for independence in a referendum. While non-binding, this overwhelming result built on years of patient negotiation between the PNG government and the Autonomous Bougainville Government, supported by international mediators, including Jerry Mateparae, Aotearoa New Zealand’s former governor general.

The UN played a decisive role: funding local initiatives; guaranteeing transparent elections; supervising weapons disposal; and building the administrative capacity for Bougainville’s transition toward independence, now targeted for 2027. In Bougainville, the UN lived up to its creed. Dialogue replaced violence. Trust took root where hatred had burned. The voices of the people were honoured.

Bougainville stands as proof of what is possible when justice is not delayed.

West Papua: A nation betrayed

Across PNG’s western border, West Papua tells a starkly different story. West Papua — once promised freedom — has been betrayed and condemned to silent death.

The betrayal began in 1969 with the so-called “Act of Free Choice”. About 1000 men and women, handpicked by Indonesia, were forced under the gaze of armed soldiers to “choose” integration with Indonesia. The UN, though present, closed its eyes. It blessed a fraud that mocked every principle of self-determination written in its own charter.

Since then, West Papua has endured militarised occupation, systematic human rights abuses and widespread displacement and replacement of Indigenous communities.

Calls for UN special rapporteurs and independent observers have gone unanswered for decades, while Jakarta tightly restricts international access to the territory. Unlike Bougainville, where international mediation created pathways to peace, West Papua remains trapped in cycles of violence and enforced silence.

The international community has not remained passive. More than 110 countries have now demanded that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights be allowed to visit West Papua. This groundswell includes support from the Pacific Islands Forum, the Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States and the European Commission. Despite this unprecedented pressure, Indonesia continues to block access, directly defying international demands.

West Papuans remain grateful for Pacific solidarity, yet Jakarta’s intransigence undermines the credibility of regional diplomacy itself, exposing how Indonesia holds the entire Pacific Islands Forum hostage to its domestic agenda.

The UN’s original failure

To understand today’s crisis, we must confront the UN’s original failure. In the early 1960s, West Papua was formally listed in the UN decolonisation list as a non-self-governing territory with recognised rights to eventual independence. But the 1962 New York Agreement, negotiated between the Netherlands and Indonesia without any Papuan representation, tragically buried that status.

Under this arrangement, the UN handed administrative control to Indonesia in 1963, paving the way for Indonesian military occupation. The promise of genuine self-determination in 1969 became a carefully orchestrated deception. Instead of challenging this fraud, the UN legitimised an outcome born of coercion and fear.

For Papuans, this remains the moment of ultimate betrayal: when the very institution created to protect their rights instead sanctioned their subjugation.

Rather than adopting PNG’s collaborative peace-building approach, Indonesia has systematically worked to shield West Papua from international scrutiny. At the 46th ASEAN Summit in May, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto proposed full ASEAN membership for PNG.

While framed as regional integration, this initiative serves Jakarta’s strategic interests. Embedding PNG within ASEAN’s principle of “non-interference” strengthens Indonesia’s narrative that West Papua is purely a domestic matter, deflecting pressure for international oversight or a final UN-supervised resolution to restore West Papuans’ sovereignty.

Bougainville and West Papua represent two fundamentally different approaches to Indigenous struggles for self-determination. Bougainville proves that peaceful resolution is achievable when governments negotiate in good faith, international actors provide credible oversight and local voices are genuinely heard and respected.

West Papua illustrates the devastating alternative: militarisation, systematic exclusion and the denial of basic human dignity. Its continuing tragedy represents not failed peacebuilding, but deliberately unfinished decolonisation.

The UN’s unfinished business

The UN cannot celebrate Bougainville’s success while wilfully ignoring West Papua’s suffering. Its catastrophic failure in 1969 created unresolved political and humanitarian consequences that continue to push West Papuans into the brink of extinction.

The path to redemption requires concrete action: dispatching fact-finding missions to document the truth; deploying human rights monitors to protect Papuans; and creating conditions for peaceful, internationally credible resolution of this longstanding, neglected genocide.

Guterres’ historic visit to PNG demonstrated the UN at its transformative best — helping convert Bougainville’s devastating conflict into a viable path toward independence. But West Papua remains the organisation’s most shameful unfinished business, a betrayal that corrodes UN credibility throughout the Pacific region.

Guterres now faces a defining choice. If Bougainville is remembered as a triumph of international peacebuilding, West Papua risks being forever marked as the UN's greatest moral failure — unless decisive action is taken to ensure West Papuans’ survival.

History will ultimately judge whether this historic moment becomes a catalyst for long-overdue justice or merely another ceremonial gesture while Indigenous Papuans on the western side of PNG’s border face extinction.

[Ali Mirin is a West Papuan academic and writer from the Kimyal tribe of the highlands bordering the Star Mountain region of Papua New Guinea. He holds a Master of Arts in International Relations from Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia.]