One No, Many Yeses

by Paul Kingsnorth

  In theory, this ‘development’ should be about improving the material standard of living of everyone on Earth – providing them with enough to eat, clean water, health care and all the rest, and dragging them from the slums which the expansion of industrial capitalism had itself dumped them in. In practice, it has often amounted, in the words of American historian Emily Rosenberg, to a deeply ideological project which uses ‘the rhetoric of peace, prosperity, and democracy to promote Americanising the world in the name of modernisation’.9 In short, turning ‘them’ into ‘us’. Coincidentally, this is not a million miles away from the Victorian notion of the White Man’s Burden – the moral duty of the advanced races to help lift the savages out of the dirt.

  It rarely looks like this to its promoters, of course, but whatever the truth, the Papuans want a rethink of what ‘development’ means before they decide that they will meekly adopt it as their national raison d’être. Why, say many, should they follow the path which the powerful define as ‘developed’? Why should they allow rich nations to snatch their resources at bargain prices, use them as cheap labour, set their terms of trade, guide them on a path of the West’s choosing? Why can they themselves not define what ‘progress’ is?

  ‘We refuse any kinds of development,’ say the OPM, at the extreme of the debate; ‘religious groups, aid agencies or governmental organisations. Just leave us alone please!’ While others are not so isolationist, Papuan resistance is increasingly defined by a determination to re-think the model of top-down, industrial urban ‘development’ that has long been a sacred cow of both left and right. It is a re-think that is going on all over the world.

  We drive on, up between the grey crags, past power plants, pylons, a steel workshop, a vocational training centre. We also pass a military base. When Freeport moved into the region in the late 1960s, Suharto sent his troops to help them secure what they needed. Under Indonesian law, tribal land could be seized by the government, with no compensation, in the name of national development. Almost a million hectares of ancestral lands were requisitioned for the Freeport mine and surrounding developments, and in order to prevent any of the uppity locals from trying to get it back again, Suharto sent in the army.

  Today, Timika is the most militarised region in Indonesia, and ever since the Indonesian invasion, military atrocities have been regular and sickening. In the past, the military have strafed mountain villages from British-built Hawk jets, napalmed the highlands, dropped suspected separatists from helicopters back on to their villages as a warning to their people and, just a year before my visit, thrown them from warships to the sharks in the Pacific. In that same year, 2000, Wamena, the tiny capital of the highlands, descended into war when armed police attacked the Papuans for raising the Morning Star. Nearly forty died, and ninety were injured. Galile found himself in the local hospital, sewing limbs back on to Papuans whom doctors had refused to treat.

  But while the soldiers in West Papua are ruthless in defence of their motherland, they are equally determined when it comes to protecting the interests of multinational corporations. One reason is clear: the soldiers are keen to supplement their meagre pay with handouts of corporate cash – or ‘off-budget funding’ as it is more professionally known. Thus it is that, according to an academic expert on the Indonesian military – herself later arrested and imprisoned by Indonesia for researching another separatist revolt in the province of Aceh – Freeport has paid the military in Timika a lump sum of $35 million, with promises of a further annual bonus of $11 million, in exchange for ‘security’ around the Grasberg site. It has been estimated that at least a third of this money has gone straight into the pockets of the top brass.10

  According to a candid source within the Indonesian government, this ‘security’ regularly involves deliberately inciting community anger around the mine, thus providing an excellent excuse to quell it with violence.11 Often, such violence has the added bonus of providing entertainment for the bored troops. One ex-Freeport employee reported that soldiers around the mine would ‘shoot tribals for sport and get pictures of themselves resting a foot on the chest or head of the kill, like trophy hunters’.12

  If ever there were a military–industrial complex, this is it. Yet Freeport is not alone. Abuses like those in and around Grasberg can be found at mines, dam sites, logging concessions and oil patches all across the ‘developing’ world; they are the true price of the copper in our electric wires and the gold around our necks. This is the side of the system that we are not supposed to see, and with good reason. For the wheels that keep the global market rolling are often oiled with blood.

  An hour or so further on, high up in the mountains, we round a corner and see ahead of us, framed by weeping rocks, Freeport’s final mega-development: Tembagapura – ‘Copper Town’. A squat, grey collection of high-rise blocks, machinery sheds, workshops, bars and not much else, Tembagapura is where the mine’s manual workers live during their shifts. Hunched below the corpse of Grasberg, it looks like a particularly grim Soviet township somewhere in deepest Siberia.

  But Tembagapura, to everyone’s frustration, is to be the end of our journey. We stop there to pick up some food, and when we pile back into the jeep it has decided to give up the ghost. Two hours of pushing it up and down slopes, poking around beneath the bonnet and making futile calls on walkie-talkies get us nowhere. It’s dead, and we’re not going to make it to the pit. Steve and I are horribly disappointed.

  We spend the rest of the day in Tembagapura, in the room of a Demmak miner, lounging on dirty bunkbeds watching American films on satellite TV with a gang of bored pit men. In the evening, we catch a miners’ bus back down to Timika. Like so many others before, Grasberg has seen us off.

  The next day, there is compensation. We are sitting in the Demmak gang’s kitchen, eating bananas and rice for breakfast, when a message arrives from the forests: the OPM will see us. A thrill shivers through the room. It is rare for the guerrillas to talk to outsiders. We will be meeting, we are told, the ‘operational commander’ of the Timika branch of the TPN – the OPM’s armed wing. His name is Goliar Tabuni, he is the rebels’ chief military strategist for the region and he has seen, in his decades as a forest outlaw, his fair share of action. His most recent kidnapping was in June 2001, when two Belgian journalists were snatched. In return for their release, the OPM wanted an international platform to demand freedom for West Papua. They didn’t get one, because nobody paid the slightest bit of attention to them. So they released the Belgians anyway, unharmed.

  Sadly for the OPM, most of its sorties are similarly fruitless. Goliar Tabuni’s ramshackle army have launched numerous kidnappings, attacks on army bases and raids against the Freeport mine, and have always been met with crackdowns by Indonesian troops. Their most successful attempt to shut down Freeport was in 1977, when the OPM sliced through the mine’s slurry pipeline and briefly shut down the site. The government responded by strafing highland villages with warplanes, and torturing and killings thousands of suspected OPM supporters all across the highlands.

  It might seem that the OPM are alone in such actions: a small bunch of extremists (there are no figures, but there seem to be a few thousand guerrillas at most) roaming the woods with stone age weapons. But the professed support for their actions by the Papuans is almost total. In and around Timika, such support may be spurred on by the fact that the idea of Papuans driving out a mining company that is destroying their lives is not an impossible dream. In fact, it has been done.

  The nearby island of Bougainville, owned by Papua New Guinea, contains a copper reserve almost as big as that of Grasberg – the Panguna copper mine. Like Grasberg, this deposit was turned over in the 1960s to a multinational mining company – in this case, Rio Tinto – without the permission of the tribal people who actually owned the land. Like Grasberg, the mining company was supported by troops, and the environment and the local culture were ravaged.

  Unlike Grasberg – so far, anyway – the tribes fought back, an
d won. In 1988, locals rose up against the miners, storming the mine and blowing up its equipment with the company’s own dynamite. The Papua New Guinea army was sent in, and soon driven out again by the tribes. The Australians – the Rio Tinto subsidiary which owned the mine is an Australian company – arrived to help with soldiers and gunships, and the conflict escalated into civil war, with the Bougainvilleans declaring independence from PNG. Almost a decade later, in 1998, a peace agreement was reached, and negotiations began on independence. The miners have gone, probably for good. The OPM looks on in awe.

  I was rather hoping for a dangerous and clandestine trek into the forests to meet the OPM in their jungle camp, but it seems the guerrillas will not be indulging my fantasy heroics. Goliar and his men will be coming to us – ‘too dangerous for you’, says one of our hosts. Too dangerous, more importantly, for the guerrillas, who are some of the most wanted men in Indonesia.

  They are also, apparently, superheroes.

  ‘Goliar,’ says one of our hosts, with a very straight face, ‘is seven foot tall. He has a very big beard – big like this’ – he stretches his arms out on either side of him, to full length. ‘When you see him your hair will stand on end.’

  ‘It’s true!’ says another. ‘He has done many magical things. Once the Indonesians put him in prison, and he escaped by slipping through the bars. Then he flew back on a plane, but the Indonesians couldn’t see him, because he made himself invisible.’

  ‘He can walk across the whole country in two days.’

  ‘He flies!’

  ‘No, he walks on the leaves of the trees. Nobody can see him!’

  ‘He is a magic man!’

  I look at Steve, who is translating all this for me.

  ‘Are they having us on?’

  ‘No, they mean it. They seem to believe it – well, maybe not all of it, but they believe the OPM have special powers.’ I discover later that this belief is widespread. Trained OPM soldiers are said to have the spirits of the forest fighting on their side. Indeed, nature itself is often an ally – mosquitoes and snakes, say the Papuans, will bite the OPM’s enemies but not the guerrillas. She-demons of the forest tempt Indonesians into the trees and kill them. Even some of the Indonesian soldiers believe in the unearthly powers of people like Goliar Tabuni.

  They arrive after dark. Two jeeps pull up outside, their headlights causing a flock of birds to rise, squawking, from the orange trees. Our hosts scamper around the lounge, arranging chairs, preparing coffee, straightening the rugs.

  ‘When they come in,’ says Steve, ‘we all have to stand and shake their hands and be very serious. It’s like meeting the Queen.’

  Outside, car doors slam, and we all stand, expectantly. And then, they come. From the forests, their feet bare, their hair wild, their clothes torn and caked with dust, three figures pad up the porch steps and through the screen door towards us. Past a shelf full of fake Wedgwood china plates, past family photographs, past cheap sofas covered in cheap chintz, they come. We smile, in a serious kind of way, as they move along the line shaking hands, then sit down on three plastic chairs lined up for them directly below a framed photograph of two sickeningly cute kittens in a wicker basket.

  None of them are seven feet tall, after all. Like most Papuans, in fact, they are all about five foot in height, and their beards are pretty standard. Goliar Tabuni has a deeply lined face, cut-off denim shorts and bare feet with angled toes that look anything but human. His neck, biceps and wrists are strung with coloured beads. He wears a Freeport T-shirt. There is a wary intensity in his eyes as he scans the two white boys facing him – not unfriendly, but questioning.

  On Goliar’s right, in a filthy MTV T-shirt, identical shorts, even more beads, conch shells and bracelets and with a broad headband pushing his dreadlocks back from his face, sits his deputy, who barely says a word all evening. On his left sits a deep-black man-mountain, a major, we are told, who glowers at us from under the brim of a wide green hat as he leans, wordlessly, on an enormous axe. A two-foot knife of cassowary bone is strapped to his right bicep. I decide to ask my questions politely.

  Introductions are made, names are named, and we get down to business, as our visitors explain to us what they are doing with their lives, and why.

  ‘We,’ says Goliar, grandly, ‘fight for freedom. Nothing else. There is nothing else. Some people ask us why we fight, and we say, what else can we do? Yes, there are other ways – diplomacy is important, but fighting is important too. The Indonesians come here and they see that our land is sweet, like milk, and they want it for themselves. They have not been interested in diplomacy, they have taken our land and killed our people. And so, we fight.’

  This seems reasonable. In any case, I am not here to argue, especially not with the man-mountain fingering his axe blade six feet from my nose. But I do want to know how they keep it up. It all seems so – well, hopeless.

  ‘We are a strong people,’ says Goliar. ‘Our food and our culture make us strong. We will not give up. But I will tell you something, my English friends. We need weapons. We have so little. I will show you something.’ From a knitted, rainbow shoulder bag, he pulls what looks like a Second World War revolver. Its barrel is stuffed with a red handkerchief. He waves it around, disconcertingly.

  ‘This,’ Goliar announces, ‘is our only gun! This is all. I have been in the forests for twenty years. Shall I tell you how many Indonesians I have killed? I have killed 3,606 – with axes, spears, knives, arrows – and this. With one bullet, I can kill eight people. All Indonesia knows how dangerous I am! But it is not enough.’ It sounds more than enough to me, but the major and the deputy are nodding their assent as Goliar leans towards us, conspiratorially.

  ‘We want to know,’ he says, ‘what you activists are doing in England. Can’t you get us guns? We don’t need many. Get us some guns, and we will drive these Indonesians and these corporations out of here.’

  Steve and I exchange looks.

  ‘I have seen a film!’ announces Goliar. This seems startlingly unlikely. ‘Yes, a film. This man, Rambo. He has these arrows which he can set on fire. Have you seen these things? We want those!’ There is general assent from the military command on this point. The major’s eyes light up excitedly.

  ‘We all agree,’ continues Goliar, ‘that England has the best weapons. On the television, we have seen you killing these people in Afghanistan. You have planes that can hover. We want those, and we want to know if you can get them for us. We have come to ask you for help.’

  Everyone is sitting around the visitors in a circle on the floor, listening to the conversation in awe. The air in the room is hot and heavy, tropical rain is crashing down on to the red tin roof, huge rats are pounding across the flimsy ceiling panels at regular intervals, choirs of tree frogs are chorusing wildly in the trees outside. And we are being asked to be gun runners.

  There is a short pause.

  ‘Er,’ says Steve. ‘Well, we’re not fighters. We don’t know where to get guns. But we can try and tell people in England what is happening in Papua, which we hope will help you to get free. We think that if the world learns what is happening here they might begin to help you.’

  Goliar sniffs, to hide his disappointment. The major sits back in his chair, sighing sadly, and I feel suddenly guilty. These bedraggled warriors have walked for miles to beg from people they have never even met. They have spent twenty years in the woods fighting a genocidal modern army with sticks and stones. It all seems so futile. Maybe if I just had a few teeny guns to give them . . .

  Further discussion of the armaments issue is curtailed when a boy carries in, from the kitchen, a tea tray loaded with sugared doughnuts, china cups, sugar, milk and a blue teapot, containing coffee. Everyone helps themselves – the guerrillas with a delicacy of touch that suggests a finishing-school education. The three wanted outlaws sit delicately sipping coffee from china cups under a picture of a pair of Athena kittens. They seem to be enjoying the doughnuts.


  We don’t have much time left, so we ask them about the corporations in West Papua. What does the OPM think of them, and what should be done? Goliar’s answer is bracingly unsophisticated.

  ‘Corporations?’ he says. ‘If we can, we will kill them. The OPM has already said this: we want no more companies here. We have already warned these people to go. Why should these corporations be able to come here and take our land and our resources? Freeport are killers. If we could, we would close them down. When we get free, we will. The OPM will be making decisions about these things. We will be the government. We will make the choices. If I want you in the government, Mr Paul’ – he points at me – ‘I will put you in the government.’ I’m flattered. The major grins impishly at me from under his hat. He has doughnut sugar all over his beard.

  Really? I say. But what about the Presidium?

  ‘The Presidium,’ sniffs Goliar, ‘have never given us anything. In our culture, if you have food, you share it with everyone. The Presidium are the sort of people who keep their food to themselves.’ In Papua, this is a serious insult. ‘We have no cars, no guns, no money,’ Goliar says. ‘The Presidium have all the money they need. They are not pure, or where would they get it from?’

  Steve and I exchange looks again. Then we tell them that the Presidium’s funding comes from the very corporations that the OPM apparently wants to drive into the sea. Goliar’s eyebrows raise, very slowly.

  ‘These companies,’ he says, deliberately. ‘Who are they? When we get free, we must get free from them too. Freedom is not just about Indonesia. I have heard that there are people in other countries now who say this too – that these corporations must go. I have heard there are many people in the world now fighting these corporations. Well, the OPM have always said this, and we will fight with them. Freedom for us from these people of money who destroy our land. That is all.’