Only a few kilometers upstream, the world’s richest gold mine empties its tailings directly into the murky river. Every day roughly 220,000 tons of waste gravel are discharged into the Aghawagon. The mine’s owner, a subsidiary of the giant American firm Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc., insists the river’s water is safe to drink. The locals don’t believe it. They regard themselves as beaten down and exploited, and almost everyone blames both the mining firm and the faraway Jakarta government. “Freeport and Indonesia are the enemy,” says Simon Bukaleng, a laborer at a Freeport-sponsored farm project in the valley. “They oppress us, pollute the environment and take away our riches. We want independence.”
Rebellion hangs in the cool, damp air. Inspired by the example of East Timor, which won its freedom from Indonesia last year, a long-suppressed spirit of separatism is erupting all over Irian Jaya. (The native New Guinea islanders prefer the name West Papua.) The incipient uprising is only one of the challenges facing Indonesia’s popular reformist president, Abdurrahman Wahid, as he desperately tries to avert bloody collapses on all sides: in Aceh (next story), in the Molucca Islands, where religious riots have killed more than 1,000 people, even within his own Army’s restive officer corps. In late February about 200 tribal, religious and community leaders from all over West Papua are expected to convene in the provincial capital, Jayapura, to name an official head for their separatist coalition. They promise to use only peaceful tactics–at first, anyway. John Rumbiak, a Papuan human-rights activist, warns: “If Jakarta doesn’t respond to our calls for a dialogue, our separatist feelings will grow stronger–and more dangerous.”
Danger is something Papuans can talk about from harsh experience. During the 32-year regime of President Suharto, his armed forces conducted a scorched-earth war in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to eradicate the Free Papua Movement (OPM), a tiny, disorganized and ill-equipped guerrilla army. Hoping to break the rebels, many of them armed with nothing heavier than bows and arrows, the Indonesian military bombed, strafed and burned hundreds of villages. Rebels were arrested, tortured and summarily executed–along with hundreds of innocent villagers. Many Papuans began to identify the military with Freeport. “For years Papuans saw the Indonesian military coming in Freeport helicopters, boats, trucks and jeeps,” says an American missionary. “So it’s hard for them to see the difference.” Human-rights activists say sometimes the prisoners were hauled away in Freeport buses and even jailed in Freeport shipping containers. Freeport vice president Paul Murphy denies that any of the company’s employees were involved. He says any company equipment had been commandeered by Jakarta’s military.
The government’s brutality has continued, even after the end of Suharto’s rule in 1998. Last November in the delta town of Timika, a group of protesters hoisted the Papuan independence flag in the yard of the local Roman Catholic church. Indonesian officials left it alone for nearly a week. Then, abruptly and forcibly, security forces tore it down, shooting nine protesters and killing one. “We will keep flying the flag,” promises Isak Onawame, a Protestant pastor who led the raising of the flag. “Even if the military keeps shooting us.”
For its part, Freeport is trying hard, if belatedly, to become the Papuans’ friend. In 1996 a routine traffic accident in Timika touched off anti-Freeport riots in which security forces killed several Papuans. Shocked into action, the company unveiled a new affirmative-action policy and pledged 1 percent of Freeport Indonesia’s gross annual revenues to bettering local conditions. Pastor Onawame is one of seven directors who administer the fund, which last year netted $15 million. Everyone agrees the investment is doing miracles. In Timika, for example, an antimalaria program has helped cut the infection rate from 80 percent of the population to 10 percent. The company also runs numerous public-service projects of its own, including a $3.5 million environmental lab and a new $4 million, 75-bed hospital, which one Freeport doctor proudly calls “the most modern in eastern Indonesia.” The company even sponsors the provincial rugby team, memorably named for the Papuans’ most distinctive cultural symbol–the Kotekas.
Most Papuans would hate to give up the company’s programs. Besides, Freeport provides nearly half of the province’s gross domestic product. But Freeport is also Indonesia’s biggest taxpayer. From 1992 through 1998, the company paid the Jakarta government a total of $1.27 billion in dividends, royalties and corporate taxes. Little of it has ever come back to the Papuans, company executives admit; almost none to the mine’s own district. Shutting down the mine would hurt Jakarta badly, and Papuan activists know it. “If Jakarta doesn’t give us independence–and soon–Freeport should be closed,” says Pastor Onawame. “We will return to our former lives as tribal people.”
Not likely. In the past three decades, thousands of tribal Papuans have trekked barefoot across the jagged Sudirman Mountains, 4,000 meters above sea level, to seek better lives in Freeport country. Many of them became dump scavengers rather than return home to their kotekas and grass skirts. Still, even some Freeport executives don’t blame Papuans for feeling fed up. “I think 60 to 70 percent of Papuans understand what we are trying to do,” says Stan Batey, head of Freeport’s community-liaison office. “But we can’t expect them to be grateful.” Fairly or unfairly, Papuans often hold Freeport responsible for a long list of unresolved grievances: decades of abuse by the Indonesian military; epidemic levels of alcoholism; wholesale destruction of indigenous cultures; dispossession from ancient tribal lands, and a massive influx of roughly 1 million Indonesian settlers in recent years. Many of West Papua’s 1.5 million or so indigenous inhabitants fear they may soon become a minority in their own land.
There are no answers in sight. Freeport says it’s searching, nonetheless. “We can’t simply be neutral, disengage and hope to continue making profits,” says Bruce Marsh, the company’s vice president for environmental affairs. “We have to bring good people on all sides together to talk.” Wahid himself visited the provincial capital on New Year’s Eve and offered to open discussions on issues from human-rights abuses to revenue sharing to partial autonomy–anything but full independence, which he insists is impossible. Already he has boosted the province’s share of the national budget 20 percent, to $47 million for this year. Tom Bernal, a front-running candidate to head the separatists’ coalition, just shakes his head. No one takes the Papuans seriously, he says. Not that he’s complaining. “Let them continue looking at us as being backward,” he says. “We’d rather be underestimated for now.” He’s glad of the chance to get ready for a long, hard struggle.
