of the Netherlands, although the government excluded an amendment that would have specified self-determination as the goal of Dutch sovereignty over the territory. Inside West New Guinea, the Netherlands liberalized political parties but banned pro-Indonesia parties as subversive. In response to the Netherlands' hardening, Indonesia's position on New Guinea gradually shifted to say that the people of New Guinea already exercised their right to self-determination with the Proclamation of Indonesian Independence in 1945. After the third and final vote in the United Nations General Assembly in 1957, in which a resolution urging Dutch–Indonesian dialogue, with the support of a majority of nations representing the majority of the world's people, was blocked by the colonial powers, the Indonesian Foreign Minister Subandrio said that it would no longer seek to resolve the "West Irian" (West New Guinea) issue at the United Nations. Mass strikes and illegal seizures broke out in Indonesia against Dutch businesses in 1958, organized by the Communist Party, youths and veterans' groups which led to Dutch nationals fleeing the country. Diplomatic ties were severed with the Netherlands in 1960. Negotiations During the 1950s, the United States had poor relations with Indonesia, because of its secret support of anti-government rebels in Sumatra and its unwillingness to support the Indonesian claim to West New Guinea. Indonesia was also displeased with the "virtually unanimous hostility of the American press" in its international campaign for West New Guinea. In early 1959, a counsellor wrote a memo on behalf of the US Ambassador suggesting a plan for "special United Nations trusteeship over the territory for a limited number of years, at the end of which time sovereignty would be turned over to Indonesia". At the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961, the United States Ambassador to Indonesia, supported by the White House National Security Council, proposed a seven-point plan "to prevent Indonesia from falling under communist control and to win it over to the west", which included promising Indonesia reunion with West New Guinea. The Government's Bureau of European Affairs, Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk opposed the plan, both because of hostility towards the Indonesian President Sukarno, who had collaborated with the Japanese, and support for the Netherlands, a NATO ally. The Dutch position argued that the native Papuan people were racially different from Indonesia, that incorporation into Indonesia would be "substitution of brown colonialism for white