Standardizing icon names: flags

[Daniel Stone]

On Wed, Nov 10, 2004 at 08:23:17PM +0000, Frans Englich wrote:
> Could you read my mail, or do it one more time? You don't even contradict.

If you acknowledge the existence of the Indonesian flag (ISO country
code: id), but not that of the West Papuan flag (an ethnically
Melenesian people, as opposed to Javanese/Sumatran), you make the West
Papuans *very* upset.  If you acknowledge the West Papuan flag at all,
you make the non-Papuan Indonesian people *very* upset, and in many
cases this can and has been used as justification for entirely avoiding
organisations/products/whatever.  The same applies to Indonesia/Aceh.

And if you want to say that it's all hypothetical, then fine, do that.
But think of East Timor, which was annexed by Indonesia in 1975, and
only became independent a couple of years back.  East Timor now has a
flag and a country code, great.  But you're going to upset people,
whether or not you do or don't include it, and you always would have.

And this is Indonesia, which is a small part of the world.  Think about
how well this would go if you extended this policy to the entire world
(specifically -- what about the Middle East, Korea, the Balkans?).
Suddenly not such a good idea.

Thing is, we haven't upset anyone at all by just not dealing with this
issue?  Why are you suddenly so keen to start pissing people off by
going through and drawing an arbitrary line through issues which are the
direct cause of the death of many millions of people -- military and
civilian?

-- 
Daniel Stone                                            <daniel at freedesktop.org>
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