One No, Many Yeses

by Paul Kingsnorth

  This picture is repeated wherever protesters gather; as a rule – one which is occasionally but rarely broken – the mainstream media either report violence or, if there is no violence, they report nothing. In Genoa, 300,000 people marched and demonstrated; the street battle became the news and the issues were forgotten. The next year, in March 2002, 500,000 showed up in Barcelona to discuss and object to the European Union Summit. There was no violence and, consequently, virtually no coverage. This, to activists, is only the most obvious and widespread example of a media that regularly refuses, or seems unable, to represent their concerns properly. Their solution to this is straightforward: they create their own media.

  This, in itself, is nothing new – political movements have always done it, from little magazines, newsletters and free papers through to party propaganda sheets. The differences today are two-fold. First, in a movement obsessed with diversity and decentralisation, alternative media tend to reflect these principles – there are no newspapers, radio stations, websites or anything else which can claim, or would claim, to represent ‘the movement’ as a whole. Like the movement’s political organisation, its media are not centralised.

  Secondly, though, the new technology that has developed symbiotically with the globalisation process has enabled alternative media to flourish in a way that it has never been able to before. In a world in which digital cameras and camcorders cost only a few hundred pounds, desktop publishing programmes can produce professional-looking magazines in a few hours and a homemade website can give a handful of committed people the ability to communicate with millions of others, worldwide, in a matter of minutes, alternative forms of information distribution at last have a chance of becoming genuinely influential, and genuinely popular. How long this will last – how long the Internet, for example, will remain a largely free and democratic medium – remains a hot topic for debate. But while it does, the potential to, in David Barsamian’s words, ‘get going on our own media’ exists, in spades.

  The best and most systematic attempt to do this so far has been the rise of Indymedia, an increasingly global network of locally controlled websites (and in some cases, radio stations and video projects) which aims to offer ‘grass-roots, non-corporate coverage’ of events. Indymedia (favoured slogan – ‘Don’t hate the media, become the media’) began life during the Seattle protests in 1999, when a group of writers, web designers, activists, filmmakers and others put together a website to provide the news from the WTO meeting and the attendant protests that the mainstream media weren’t providing. The site received 1.5 million hits during the summit, and in the four years since then, Indymedia has gone global.

  At the time of writing, there are ninety-one Indymedia sites in thirty-one countries, ranging from Israel to Finland, Nigeria to Spain, Indonesia to Colombia, India to Russia. Indymedia provided up-to-the-minute coverage in Genoa and were viciously attacked by the police for their pains. Indymedia Chiapas provides the latest on the Zapatistas, and while I was in South Africa, I attended one of the first meetings of the country’s Indymedia centre, which was in the process of being born.

  And yet Indymedia, as such, doesn’t exist. There is no central office, there are no paid staff, there are no rules, not even any one agreed mission statement. Funding comes from donations, no advertising is sold and no political party, creed or corporate line is toed. Some people involved are trained journalists, but most are not, there are no official hierarchies. Its journalists do their meeting, planning and co-ordinating by e-mail and in chatrooms. Anyone can publish anything on an Indymedia site, and the various Indymedia centres are linked with each other only in loose, unofficial ways. What really links them together is a desire to tell the news that the mainstream media is not telling, or to provide unnoticed or ignored angles that you won’t read elsewhere.

  Thus Indymedia will run the stories behind events like Genoa, Prague, Seattle or Durban which don’t get into the papers or on to the TV bulletins. It will tell the story of the siege of the Church of the Nativity in Jerusalem from the point of view of those inside. It will run features on the street-level popular assemblies springing up in Argentina as a result of that country’s IMF-inspired economic collapse. It will showcase resistance to water privatisations in India and anti-Zionist demonstrations in Israel that you would otherwise be very unlikely to hear about.

  Indymedia is built around a virtual obsession with two things – horizontal organising and open publishing. The first is self-explanatory – it is that old loathing of hierarchies that Indymedia activists share with the movement as a whole. The second is a direct response to the increasing control of information by profit-making corporations, and their use of that information to promote consumerism, globalisation and the values that come with it.

  Indymedia journalist Matthew Arnison describes open publishing as a ‘revolutionary response to the privatisation of information by multinational companies’.27 The principle, as demonstrated on Indymedia sites, is simple: anyone can publish anything. There are no professional journalists or editors who decide what is or isn’t news, no corporate filters and no one line – though a dissenting, anti-globalising tone is shared by all Indymedia outlets. What this means, as anyone who has used Indymedia will tell you, is that there can be an awful lot of crud among the better quality material: lies, mistakes, conspiracy theories, the odd bit of hate-mongering.

  In this sense, Indymedia is like the journalistic version of a group conversation rather than a monologue; it is the reader creating the news. Not all of it will be worth reading, but Indymedia assumes that most people are intelligent enough to tell good journalism from nonsense. ‘Media corporations assume the viewers are stupid,’ writes Arnison. ‘In their eyes, the total creative potential of the audience is Funniest Home Videos. Creative people do not buy more stuff, they make their own. This is a problem for media multinationals. They do not trust their audience to be creative. It might be bad for profits . . . but it’s OK. The audience doesn’t trust the corporate media either.’

  Indymedia is hardly set to replace mainstream news reporting. It has neither the reach, the resources, the expertise, the audience or the desire. But it is a phenomenon, and an important one. In Indymedia – which is replicated in kind if not in scale by other open publishing outlets on the Internet – the movement has found at least the beginning of an answer to the fears that the Reverend Billy, Kalle Lasn, the Billboard Liberation Front, Agent Apple and David Barsamian all articulate. Fears which, with everything I’ve seen, I can’t help sharing. Fears which can be wrapped up in two words: cultural enclosure.

  We are in the midst of a global information revolution which is leading not, as its proponents claim, to more ‘choice’, better quality media and more perspectives on the world, but to an ever-contracting group of Earth-encircling corporations mediating the stories that shape our world. We become consumers not just in goods, but in ideas, philosophies, ideologies. They entertain us, we sit and listen – but not until we’ve paid them. Stories have always defined the way societies and cultures see themselves. Now the lens through which we view the world is owned by CNN and our fairytales are told by Disney, with merchandise tie-ins at Burger King.

  This, at its starkest, is the privatisation of imagination. To counter it, activists posit an alternative that requires all of us to take back the colonised space within our minds. Be your own media. Write your own news. Define your own space, both public and cultural. Tell your own story, lest it be told for you; packaged and sold in a global mall where everything, from running shoes to democracy to the tales your granny told you, is a product with a price tag attached.

  5

  the penis gourd revolution

  ‘If the mountains and nature are harmed, our mother is hurt as well. The mountain we see as our mother is sacred. It is where the souls of men go when they die. We keep this place holy, and worship it in our traditional ceremonies.’

  TOM BEANAL, AMUNGME TRIBAL LEADER

  ‘In a co
untry of mountains, why shouldn’t one be sacrificed in the name of progress?’

  SPOKESMAN, PT FREEPORT INDONESIA

  Two lanky, sunburned, six-foot Englishmen are nervously leading a troupe of war-painted, whooping five-foot tribesmen through a thatched arch into the centre of a roadless village in the highlands of New Guinea. The mountains that encircle them on all sides are layered with untouched rainforest and hung with ribbons of cloud. Before them jog two painted men, bones through their noses, dried white mud patterned on to their lean torsos, feathers of hornbill and bird of paradise in their matted black hair. They dance ten steps forward and five steps back, motioning ritually with hardwood spears. On each side of them dance two ancient women, bare-breasted, similarly painted, wearing nothing but grass skirts, swaying their hips and thrusting sticks at the sky.

  The whoops and whistles grow louder as the two white men reach a semicircle of village leaders drawn up to greet them. They halt, and the warriors behind them sit down as one. They remain standing, awkwardly, in the high, thin sunlight, trying to look honoured.

  Slowly, painfully, one of the men in the centre of the semicircle begins to cry. It starts with a forced sniff and graduates to a circling, howling sound, the tears flowing freely. Soon, the thirty or so men and boys with him are crying too; an unearthly rolling barrage of sobs and wails punctuated with words and phrases in their distinctive highland language. The sound punctuates the short grass, the dewdropped ferns and the low, round thatched huts that dot them on all sides.

  Three minutes later, the crying stops, eyes are dried and we are officially welcome, and honoured, guests in this remote Lani village, two days’ walk from the nearest track. It’s moving, in a way that neither of us has ever been moved before.

  ‘Wow,’ I say out of the side of my mouth, to Steve. ‘That was . . . strange.’

  ‘They haven’t finished yet,’ he replies, out of the side of his. And they haven’t. Galile, our friend, guide and translator, steps between us. The villagers are moving off towards another clump of people arriving through the gates, carrying bows and arrows, spears – and four live pigs trussed up and strung on to wooden poles, carried across the shoulders of eight lithe tribesmen.

  ‘Now,’ says Galile, ‘you must kill pig.’

  ‘Who, me?’

  ‘You must both kill pig. With bow and arrow.’

  ‘Shit, Galile,’ I say, ‘I can’t kill a pig.’

  ‘It is traditional. To welcome you into our tribe.’

  ‘But I’m a vegetarian. Anyway, I’d miss.’

  Galile turns to Steve, who is standing next to me looking equally uncomfortable.

  ‘I think I’d miss too,’ he says. ‘Do we have to? Really?’

  ‘OK,’ says Galile, ‘they will kill pig. But we must eat it. And now you must watch.’

  Two pig carriers approach us with their struggling load.

  ‘You must take the pole,’ Galile instructs us. Steve and I struggle with the pole, and the extremely unhappy pig, and heave it on to our shoulders as instructed. Then, at Galile’s prompting, in unison, we say ‘Wa, wa, wa, wa, wa . . .’ – the ubiquitous highland word for both thank you and hello. The hundred-strong crowd bursts into riotous applause and another round of whistling and uncanny animal noises. Now I really do feel honoured.

  Then an old man, wearing nothing but a koteka – the cultivated gourds which highland tribal men wear as sheaths on their penises – kneels before us and thuds four arrows nonchalantly into the hearts of the unfortunate animals. They flap about frantically for a minute or so, then subside into stillness.

  A village elder rises, bone-creakingly, from the crowd, and addresses us in Lani, as the pigs are gleefully carted off around the corner to where the women are building earth ovens.

  ‘Now,’ Galile translates, ‘he says you are Lani family and Lani tribe. He says this is your village and any time you want to build house here, land is yours. Anywhere in jungle forest, you may build your house, and live with your tribe.’ Everyone grins, and so do we.

  ‘But first,’ says Galile, ‘we must get free.’

  When the Netherlands claimed sovereignty over half of the planet’s second-largest island, New Guinea, in 1824, they were just one of the nations taking part in a colonial scramble for territories all over the ‘East Indies’. Across the sparkling archipelago that now makes up the state of Indonesia, the Dutch government had been relying for its territorial plunder on the work of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie – the Dutch East India Company – a state-sponsored multinational corporation that made the targets of today’s activists look like a bunch of social workers. With the power to colonise new territories, make treaties and issue currency, and with its own private army, the Dutch East India Company succeeded in two hundred years in colonising most of what is now Indonesia, and seizing control of its lucrative spice trade. The market had come to the East Indies.

  Over in what the Europeans called New Guinea, meanwhile, no one had really noticed. This vast, forested island had little to offer the European colonists. Passing by in 1526, the Portuguese explorer Jorge de Meneses named it ‘Ilhas dos Papuas’ – ‘island of the fuzzy hairs’. A later Spanish explorer, deciding that its inhabitants looked a bit like those of Guinea, in Africa, on the basis that they were black, named it ‘New Guinea’.

  Those inhabitants, who would later come to know themselves as ‘Papuans’, had been there for at least 40,000 years, split into over a thousand separate tribal groups, each with their own language (a fifth of all the world’s languages are still found in New Guinea, some spoken by fewer than 500 people). They lived, as most still do, in tiny highland villages, swamps and rainforests, subsisting on sweet potatoes and sago. With 600 plant species, 200 bird species and 200 reptile species found nowhere else, home of the bird of paradise and with some of the last great intact rainforests on the planet, Papua was, and remains, a place apart.

  Life only really began to change for the Papuans after the Second World War, when the European colonisers began to leave. The Dutch East Indies were to become a new nation-state – Indonesia. But the Dutch wanted West Papua to become an independent state. The black, Melanesian Papuans, the departing Dutch argued, had as little in common with the fair-skinned Asiatic Muslim Indonesians as they did with the Europeans. They were a different race, living in a different ecological zone, with a different culture and different values. They should have their own country. In 1949, the Dutch ceded sovereignty of the Dutch East Indies to the new nation of Indonesia – but excluded West Papua from the deal.

  But the Indonesians were having none of it. Their first president, Sukarno, wanted his new nation to be the greatest in Asia. Everything the Dutch had owned, he said, should now be Indonesian. Indonesia and the Netherlands broke off relations. On 1 December 1961, the Dutch formally ceded independence to West Papua. A new Papuan flag – the Morning Star – was raised as its people, only recently aware that they inhabited what the Europeans called a ‘nation’ at all, proclaimed their independence. Celebrations were to be short-lived. The UN, under pressure from the US, Indonesia’s newest ally, refused to recognise the new nation or the Dutch action, and in 1962, an Indonesian invasion force parachuted into the forests.

  From then on, the outcome was in no doubt. Though the UN intervened and promised the Papuans a referendum on independence, the Indonesians, with what was to become their trademark brutality, forced a ‘representative’ group of 1,000 tribal leaders to ‘unanimously’ vote, at gunpoint, to become part of Indonesia. In 1969, West Papua – or ‘Irian Jaya’, as the Indonesians were to rename it – became Indonesia’s twenty-sixth province.

  The next thirty years were to prove the most brutal in Papuan history. Under their new dictator-president, General Suharto, who toppled Sukarno in a coup in 1967, the Indonesians embarked on a campaign to ‘Indonesianise’ the new province and to wipe out Papuan culture. Those who resisted this ethnic cleansing were murdered, tortured or ‘disappeared’ with a horr
ific ferocity. Officially, more than 100,000 Papuans have been killed by the Indonesians since occupation; unofficially, the figure is said to approach 800,000.1

  But as with all colonial occupations, there was another reason behind the Indonesians’ ferocious campaign to gain control over West Papua: resources. It is the glory and the tragedy of the Papuan people that their land is positively dripping with just the kind of things that make the global economy tick. Timber, oil, gas, copper, gold: it was all there, in abundance. Anyone could see what was coming next.

  Even before it took control of West Papua, Indonesia had been negotiating with the American mining company Freeport, which wanted to open up what looked like a vast copper deposit in West Papua. In 1969, Freeport moved in. In, too, came the Anglo-Dutch oil company Shell, and a clutch of other mining and oil prospectors. The Indonesian government, thousands of miles away in the capital, Jakarta, laid out some maps of West Papua on a table and drew lines on them to designate the forestry ‘concessions’ – taking up much of Papua’s vast primal rainforest, second in size only to the Amazon – which they were going to hand out to logging companies. Within a few years, West Papua had been doubly colonised: by the Indonesians, and by some of the biggest, and most destructive, corporations of the age.

  Today, West Papua is Indonesia’s most polluted, ignored, exploited province. Its tribal people have become second-class citizens in their own ancestral land. Indonesia and its friendly multinationals take $500 million out of the country every year. The Papuans see virtually none of it. They are a people at the very tip of the global economy’s sword: the point where the resources that the rest of us use every day are taken, by force if necessary, from the people they belong to.