One No, Many Yeses

by Paul Kingsnorth

  Some Papuans are already beginning to get uneasy about this sort of talk; and I have heard all this somewhere before. I arrived in West Papua from Johannesburg, where I had asked the ANC government why their plans for national reconstruction had crumbled before the might of the market. Now, here, I can already see the corporations that control the Papuans’ destiny hedging their bets; trying, it seems, to gain a hold over those who might one day have the power, and the popular support, to hem them in, control them, even expel them. It is a sobering sight. Unseen, yet-to-be power is gathering itself around Willy and his friends in the Presidium like gnats around a twilight brook. Will they be able to handle it, or will they be sucked in, as so many others were before them?

  It could be, of course, that I’m getting carried away. Perhaps BP is just trying to help; engaging in ‘stakeholder dialogue’, as the latest business jargon has it. But John Rumbiak doesn’t think so. Rumbiak is head of ELS-HAM, a leading Papuan human rights group, and he is worried about corporate involvement in the Papuan struggle.

  ‘My strong critique of the Presidium,’ he told me, when I spoke to him after meeting Mandowen, ‘is that if you don’t have very clear values – what you are fighting for and against – you’re going to repeat the same mistakes once you have your own state. In many ways this struggle is not against the Indonesians, it is against a system and its values. Replace the Indonesians who run that system with Papuans, without changing the system and the values, and you have the same problem.’

  Rumbiak doesn’t like what the Presidium – so early in its life – is getting itself into. ‘What worries me,’ he said, ‘is the naïveté of some of my Papuan brothers. They don’t know the track record of these companies, or what they want. Recently, I spent two hours in London with John Browne [BP’s Chief Executive]. He said to me, “Of course we have done things wrong in Colombia and other places, but we don’t want to do the same in West Papua. We want to be good neighbours.” And I said, come on – you’re not a humanitarian organisation, you’re not a church, you’re a business. You want the gas, you want money money money. You have a culture of money and our culture is different.’

  In West Papua, the presence of corporations, the way they operate, their disregard for the people they affect and the ‘culture of money’ they bring in are crucial in fomenting resistance both to what they do, and to what they stand for. It’s one thing to know this, though: it’s quite another to see it with your own eyes.

  Walter Goodfellow was the sort of explorer that only the British could produce. He arrived in West Papua in 1910 to lead an expedition to its highest mountain. To get there, he and his right-hand man, Dr Alexander Wollaston, decided to plough on foot through the hundred miles of steaming swamp forest that separated the shore from the mountain ranges. With an army of 400 foreign guides and coolies who, like them, had never set foot on the island before, they met with obstacle upon obstacle as their underprepared and overburdened expedition trudged through the malarial mires.

  ‘Heavens, how it rained!’ wrote Wollaston, later, of the rainforest. ‘Can this forest, with its horrible monotony and impregnability, be equalled by any other in the world?’ After a few weeks of trudging through the horrible monotony of one of the richest ecosystems on Earth, trailed by a morose army of porters, Goodfellow died of malaria. His successor as expedition leader, Cecil Rawling, stumbled across some members of the local Ekagi tribe and, rather than asking them how to get to the mountains, decided instead to take them prisoner, announce that he had ‘discovered’ them, and christen them, for reasons best known to himself, ‘Tapiro pigmies’.

  When it became clear that they would not reach the mountains, the expedition turned back and sailed dejectedly for home, taking with it, as compensation, a collection of ‘ethnographical objects’ in the form of the corpses of hundreds of rare birds, mammals and reptiles.

  Twenty-six years later, Dutch geologist Jean-Jacques Dozy did make it to the mountains, where he began sketching and taking samples of what he saw. He was intrigued by two vast, emphatic peaks, which he named ‘Grasberg’ and ‘Ertsberg’ – grass mountain and ore mountain. The latter, as the name suggested, appeared to be rich in copper ore.

  Nobody thought any more of it until, in 1960, Forbes Wilson, a geologist from the New Orleans-based Freeport mining corporation, arrived in West Papua. He had come across Dozy’s reports, and had persuaded his company to send him to this remote landscape to follow up an excited hunch. And what a hunch. In Ertsberg, Wilson confirmed what Dozy had only suspected – the largest above-ground copper deposit ever discovered.

  One morning in 1960, Wilson’s group of geologists emerged from their tents to find their camp surrounded by pointed sticks topped with skulls and snake skins. Taboo poles. The local Amungme people had visited them in the night. Nervously, they made their way down to the tribe’s village to talk. They were met first with a hail of arrows and then, when a translator was hurriedly found, with a simple message: this is our land, this land is sacred, we do not want you here.

  But the men from Freeport were pioneers, entrepreneurs. They weren’t about to see their company’s future hampered by savages. So they gave the tribal leaders a few metal axe heads, which they stared at in wonder, took some kids up for a spin in their helicopter and promised that any more white men who turned up would have plenty more such goodies for the Amungme to play with. It bought them the time they needed to find what they wanted. Then they went home. But they soon came back.

  Fifty years separated the expedition of Wilson from the expedition of Goodfellow, but in many ways, nothing had changed at all.

  The first thing you see when your unstable, rusty prop plane touches down at Timika airport, a few miles from the spot where Walter Goodfellow and his doomed expedition struck off into the swamps, is a giant sign above the ‘arrivals lounge’ (a hut) painted with a riot of national flags, celebrating the construction of the world’s biggest copper and gold mine here by workers from two dozen nations. Forbes Wilson’s dream has come true in West Papua – and more so. After his geologists reported their findings to Freeport headquarters in the early 1960s, the company began to talk to the likely new owners of the country in which Ertsberg nestled – Indonesia. In 1967, a full, and mysterious, two years before the Papuans officially ‘decided’ to become part of Indonesia, Freeport became the first foreign corporation to sign a contract with the Suharto regime.

  It moved into West Papua and began mining Ertsberg in 1973. By 1988, by which time the black rock pillar had been reduced to a deep hole, Freeport’s geologists made another discovery, which knocked even the metal miracle of Ertsberg into a cocked hat. The nearby Grasberg mountain contained the largest gold reserves, and the third-largest copper reserves, anywhere on the planet.

  The story of what Freeport did – and continues to do – to the people and the environment around the Grasberg mine is emblematic of what the corporate invasion has done to the Papuans. The figures alone are staggering. In 2001, the Grasberg mine produced more gold in three months than most gold mines produce in a year. Every day, Freeport shifts 700,000 metric tonnes of rock: the equivalent of moving the Great Pyramid of Cheops every week. PT Freeport Indonesia – a subsidiary of the US-based multinational Freeport McMoran – provides a fifth of Indonesia’s entire tax base and accounts for half of West Papua’s GDP. In 2001, the pay of Freeport’s chief executive, ‘Jim Bob’ Moffett, squeaked in at just under $7 million (not including an extra $4 million or so in stock options).4

  Freeport Indonesia employs 9,000 workers, of whom at least three quarters are non-Papuans. The Indonesian government has requisitioned almost a million hectares of tribal ancestral land for the mine and its surroundings. Thousands of families have been ‘resettled’ without compensation to make way for the mine, which operates in an area of 3.6 million hectares, and uncounted numbers have been killed by Indonesian soldiers, paid by Freeport to guard the mine site from disgruntled locals. The company has violated, according to t
he mine-monitoring group Project Underground, at least eight of the human rights contained within the UN declaration of human rights. By the end of Grasberg’s life, Freeport expects to have dumped three billion tons of waste rock into the valleys surrounding the mine – twice the volume of earth extracted during the construction of the Panama Canal. It has, according to observers, damaged 30,000 hectares of rainforest in the last three decades, and every day it dumps up to 200,000 tons of mine waste, laced with acid and heavy metals, into the sacred Aikwa river, from which local people used to drink and fish.5

  It is facts like these which have made the Freeport mine the lodestone of Papua’s struggle. Freeport – a corporation which the Far Eastern Economic Review has called ‘the most maverick American multinational in the world today’6 – is central to OPM resistance, central to the Papuans’ resentment of corporate invasion and central to the clash of worldviews which the global market has brought to these people.

  In the late 1980s, Timika was a nondescript village, home to a few hundred inhabitants. Today, it is the fastest-growing town in Indonesia, with a population of 110,000, less than a third of whom are Papuans. The result of this rapid urban explosion is depressingly apparent: Timika is a dump. It is a box grid of rubbish-strewn roads, black, greasy, open sewers, tin-roofed noodle bars, breeze-block hotels and chaotic rickshaw ranks. Most of the shops are Indonesian; the Papuans are reduced to selling their bananas, durian fruit, melons and sweet potatoes from plastic sheets laid out by the roadside, next to grey pyramids of mine waste which are dumped, seemingly randomly, throughout the town. Packs of motorbikes hunt along the dirt roads, skidding to avoid dogs and schoolchildren, and belching black smoke into the dripping forty-degree heat.

  Galile and I arrived at the airport with two friends we picked up in Jayapura: Gubay, a member of the Alliance of Papuan Students (AMP), a pro-independence group for the young, and Steve, a fellow Englishman working to raise the profile of the Papuan struggle back home. We soon found ourselves in the back of a jeep driven by four of Galile’s ‘family’ – he had never met any of them before, but they were hugging and laughing like long-lost brothers in seconds – through verdant gardens to the door of one of the tin-roofed houses built by Freeport for its employees.

  These four men are members of Demmak, which translates roughly as ‘penis gourds assembly’ and claims to be an umbrella group representing all the tribes of West Papua. Since it started in 1999, Demmak has made progress, particularly in persuading the Presidium to stick to its radical guns – partly by hinting darkly that it would be more than happy to take over the Presidium’s role if it started to look like it was selling out the people. The Indonesians, sensing danger, have responded by banning it.

  Demmak members, like OPM soldiers, are persona non grata to the Indonesian government, and, of course, to its friendly corporations. So it is with great pleasure that our hosts inform us that, not only are they in contact with Freeport employees who can get us, undercover, into the mine, but that they can arrange a clandestine meeting with an OPM guerrilla who would usually rather kidnap journalists than answer their questions. With any luck, they may even be able to persuade him to come to us.

  Six o’clock the next morning, and we are ricocheting around the interior of a Freeport jeep like jumping beans in a tin can, being driven up bone-shaking, foggy mountain roads towards the mine. Freeport’s Grasberg site is a miracle of engineering, built with pioneering techniques and technologies in one of the most inaccessible places on Earth. The mine itself – the open-cast hole that used to be the Grasberg mountain – is one of the biggest in industrial history, a place with a kind of arrogant, awesome beauty.

  To the Papuans, though, there is no beauty here. What Freeport didn’t know when they first arrived in West Papua – and what they later learned but ignored – was that the mountain they called ‘Grasberg’ was a holy site for the local Amungme tribe. Amungme mythology tells of a woman who sacrificed herself in the midst of a famine to save the lives of her children. She asked them to kill her, to cut up her body, to throw her head to the north, the right side of her body to the east and the left side to the west, and to cast her feet south towards the river. The next day, the children awoke to find a great mountain – Grasberg – where their mother’s head had been. Where they had thrown her body and feet they found gardens full of fruit and broad expanses of hunting land. Today, the remaining Amungme still live on what they see as their mother’s torso – the place nearest her milk, where children can sleep in her lap and where her people can be comforted by her embrace.

  To Freeport, the mining of Grasberg is a miracle of modern technology. To the Amungme, it is, quite literally, the slicing off of their mother’s head, and the spiritual equivalent of drilling for oil under the altar of St Peter’s.

  On the way to the mine, we stop in at Kuala Kencana, the model town which Freeport has built for its employees and their families, at a cost of $500 million. It is the most surreal sight in West Papua. Smooth lawns, a great church, a mosque, libraries, a shopping mall, gyms and acre upon acre of housing, have all been carved out of virgin rainforest and filled with clean-shaven consumers, wandering around in trainers with plastic shopping bags. Suburban America has come to tribal New Guinea. We drive down a road which reminds me of California; all curved driveways, square pastel houses, post boxes, litter bins, hosepipes (in a rainforest?).

  Kuala Kencana’s crowning glory is its shopping mall, built, with no sense of incongruity, on the former hunting grounds of the Komoro tribe. Hemmed in on all sides by tall, elegant rainforest trees, its supermarket is a halogen-lit, buzzing hive of activity: trolleys, carrier bags, checkouts, bleeping barcode scanners, piped music and American-style uniforms. Blink, and you could be in Texas. Galile, who has never been here before, looks slightly ill; there is a look on his face which speaks of wonder mixed with distaste. Steve is laughing out loud at the absurdity of it all, and getting some odd looks from the happy shoppers.

  There is no doubt that Freeport is proud of Kuala Kencana. The company points out that its employees here get clean, spacious homes, running water, regular wages, shops, gyms, health care and schooling. There is no doubt, too, that the few thousand people who live in Kuala Kencana (of whom most, like the majority of the people Freeport employs, are Indonesian) enjoy a materially richer life than most Papuans. But even leaving aside the fact that this has only been provided for a select few, by means of mass dispossession and environmental vandalism, the Freeport model of ‘development’ bears closer examination. It tells us a lot about the assumptions on which the wider globalisation project is built.

  For the company’s attempts to provide for their workers and some of the local people are culturally loaded with heavy ammunition. For the men (and the few women) of this very American company, ‘development’ is about providing a carbon copy of the Land of the Free for the lucky people of less enlightened nations. This is not simply a matter of the design of the houses and the clothes people wear; it’s also about the worldview that comes with it. A worldview that ensures that even when Freeport do try their hand at a bit of ‘community development’ they tend to make a hash of it.

  One example: pigs. Pigs are central to Papuan highland culture. In every village, pigs mingle with the people and are killed and eaten only on special occasions such as a war feast or the return of a long-lost family member. If a man wants to marry, his fiancée’s family will expect to receive ten pigs as a dowry. If one tribe messes with another tribe’s pigs, the men will paint themselves for battle. Pigs are central to war, marriage, status and wealth. It’s even possible to pay for a plane ticket in the remoter highland areas with a couple of good pigs.

  Freeport, though, didn’t like the Papuans’ pigs. Not only were they smelly and flea-ridden, they were also distressingly inefficient. So after rebuilding some Papuan villages with nice, square tin-roofed houses, rather than the traditional but ‘scruffy’ round, thatched huts, they decided to help the Papuans with th
eir pig problem. In one village, Banti, they built a pig shed on the outskirts, rounded up the animals and locked them into it. In other places, they exiled the small, black, bristly indigenous pigs altogether and imported fatter, faster-growing, pink American animals (‘not as tasty’, grumbled one local villager to me). In one fell swoop they had knocked away the central pillar of Papuan village culture – one which had stood for centuries. It took the hurt corporation a long time to work out why their kindness had not been received with the gratitude they expected.

  Across the world, the cultural conflicts engendered when multinational corporations meet traditional peoples, who simply do not think the same way, often give birth to physical conflicts as the people resist both economic and cultural colonialism. This is what Freeport has brought to West Papua, and it is far from unique. In Indonesia alone, half of the country’s international mining operations were shut down, destroyed or evacuated as a result of community resistance between 1999 and 2001.7

  This is, to reheat an overcooked phrase, a genuine clash of civilisations, and, while it is not unique to West Papua, it has led the people here to question, and begin to rethink, the whole concept of ‘development’.

  ‘Development’ is now an idea so ubiquitous that it is rarely, if ever, questioned – to question it is to be against the poor, against progress, against the future. In fact, ‘development’ is a late arrival in human history. It wasn’t until 1949 that US President Harry Truman decided that the world could be divided up into ‘developed’ – Western, industrialised, consumerist – and ‘underdeveloped’ areas – everywhere else, where ‘greater production is the key to prosperity and peace’.8 At a stroke, Truman had decreed that the purpose of progress and the aim of history was for every civilisation in the world to become like the West. The world has never looked back.