Decolonization was far from finished in Southeast Asia. When the Dutch finally gave in to the revolutionaries in 1949, they ceded control of most of their territory to the young republic. But they did not give up their claim to a giant piece of land to the east of Java and north of Australia—that is, the western half of New Guinea, the second-largest island in the world. Indonesia as it stood was already an incredibly diverse country, but the people of Papua (or New Guinea) are visibly different both physically and culturally from people from the other islands.
