Sydney Life

It’s official, I am an ignoramus!! I feel utterly embarrassed that until this week, I have never ever heard of the state of West Papua. This is coming from me, Keren, who likes to flip to the world news of the newspaper every morning whilst eating her raisin toast with cottage cheese and drinking her V8 juice. I even occasionally read TIME magazine!!

When I read the headline the other day which mentioned Papua, I was misguided into thinking they were talking about Papua New Guinea. I was fooled. They were in fact talking about the 42 asylum seekers who arrived on Australia’s shores last week from Indonesian controlled West Papua. If 42 out of 43 asylum seekers were granted a visa for Australia, there must be serious problems on that half of the island. Not to mention the fact that there has been a media ban in West Papua for the past 3 years...

So of course, I need to find someone to blame.
I could blame my parents for not teaching me about worldly events such as this in the brief five minutes I pass them by each day on my way out.
I could blame myself for not enrolling in an arts degree and learning about imperialist Indonesia, or for not joining the human rights society on campus.
Or I could blame the media for failing to decently report any foreign news that does not stem from the Middle East.
I choose the latter!

I can also (to some extent) blame the media for me not knowing about the civil war in Sri Lanka with the Tamil Tigers fighting for an independent state. I can also blame the media for me not knowing who the hell is the leader of Pakistan. But I certainly can thank the media for reporting all about the Middle East. We all know about the Palestinian struggle for independence and we all know who the Prime Minister of Israel is. Well actually, you can be forgiven for the moment for not knowing who Ehud Olmert is, as he has only been the official Prime Minister of Israel for one day.

I have always wondered why this region received so much media attention. Understandably, there is a lot of vested interest by people in the west – Jews, Muslims, Socialists and even oil companies! Some people say the Middle East conflict will spark World War Three. But every single day there is an article in the paper related to Israel and the Palestinian Territories, even if is reporting about the Prime Ministers dog’s uncle who was eaten by a flying pig. Yet I have never heard of West Papua?

The Israeli/Palestinian conflict should not necessarily be more important than Tibet’s struggle against China’s imperialism or the Kurds fight for an independent Kurdistan. Yet it is the region that most people love to debate about (informed or not).

So my advice is to either continue blaming the media and your parents (kidding!), or take the opportunities that uni offers to expand your horizons and find out all about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, West Papua, and any other encounter that I am too ignorant to know about.

And learn to look at both sides of every story.