Betrayed by the world’s silence, the Papuans have been left to sink into a slow, acquiescent extinction. But they have other ideas.
West Papua’s crumbling capital, Jayapura, is a colonial town. Most of its shops, time-warped hotels, noodle bars, industries – even the schools, the hospital and the museum of Papuan culture – are owned and operated by Indonesians. It is a grotty, malfunctioning place, sweltering in the malarial lowland heat between the end of the highland mountain ranges and Pacific beaches studded with the wrecks of Second World War landing craft. Not the sort of place you’d come for a holiday, which is why nobody does.
Except me. Officially, I am a tourist. Try and be anything else in West Papua and life gets difficult. Since the occupation, the Indonesian government has maintained a strict policy of keeping outsiders away from any part of West Papua they don’t want the world to see. A year before my arrival, a Swiss journalist was thrown into a Papuan police cell for ‘illegal journalistic activity’, then deported – though not before he had witnessed some ‘unspeakably shocking’ scenes in prison: Indonesian police torturing suspected Papuan separatists with clubs, staffs, bamboo whips, boots and fists; blood spraying the walls as they beat three Papuans to death over a period of hours in front of his eyes.2
Needless to say, I can’t afford to let the authorities know what I’m really here for. So I’m here to see the exotic indigenous culture. Even this means a visit to the police station, and an application for a surat jalan – a visitor’s pass – on which the police will write the names of the places you are officially allowed to visit this month.
I am sweating from a combination of nerves and heavy, thirty-five-degree heat as I stand before a fat policeman in Jayapura’s steaming police station. He doesn’t seem to have noticed.
‘How you like Indonesia?’ he asks, as he bangs out my surat jalan on a typewriter that would probably get a favourable reception on Antiques Roadshow.
‘Very nice.’
‘What you do here?’
‘Just tourism.’
‘Tourism? Here?’
‘Er . . . yes.’
‘Just as long as you not work. Not doing any journalism maybe, any bad things like this. You engage in any activity like this, you go to jail. Five years. I just warn you.’
‘No, no . . . just a holiday. You know, many interesting tribes, forest, er . . . animals.’ I gesture vaguely at the ceiling and wonder if I have any incriminating notebooks on me.
‘You want tourism, my friend, you should not be here. You should be in Bali. Many beaches, nice girls, Bintang . . . you know. Why you come here? This place full of savages. Bad place. I would be in Bali if I could. My job, you know.’ He grins, sadly. Less than a year later, when a terrorist bomb killed dozens in a Bali night-club, he was probably more grateful for his posting.
‘Enjoy yourself in our country.’
The irony of Jayapura, and all the other Papuan towns, is that while the Papuans lose economic power, control over their own destiny, and their cultural identity to the Indonesian occupiers, many of those ‘occupiers’ don’t get much from it either. Thousands of miles from home, in a ‘backward’ land they don’t understand, many of the migrants came here through the Indonesian government’s programme of ‘transmigration’ – a massive state effort to shift people from Indonesia’s overcrowded central island, Java, to ‘underpopulated’ outer islands like Papua. Many transmigrants were given no choice by the government about whether to move – when they did, they found themselves dropped on to ‘farms’ carved out of the forest, with no running water or electricity, and patchy land that dried up within a few years. But the programme (which is now being wound down) had the pleasing effect of both ridding Java of people for whom there was not enough land to support, and ‘Indonesianising’ West Papua.
But there is another irony, too, in Jayapura. While this Indonesian town, in a Melanesian land, is a symbol of the ethnic cleansing that the Indonesian government has been inflicting on the Papuans, the Indonesians are undergoing their own version of ethnic cleansing: their culture and values whipped from under them by the powerful iconography of Western consumerism. TV ads show smiling Javan families sitting down in jeans to dinners of packet noodles. Computers in the two local Internet cafés are run on American software in the English language (or would be if they worked). Outside the slowly collapsing cinema, a six-foot mugshot of George Clooney twinkles down at the Muslim women in their veils and long white dresses. Outside the school, kids – Indonesian and Papuan – mill about dressed in uniforms straight out of middle America, right down to the baseball caps. While the Indonesian government is busily wiping out the identities and culture of the Papuans, Papua’s Indonesian migrants are busy trading theirs for a photocopied Americana that they will never experience.
I am here to meet my contact, Amunggur,3 a key figure in the Papuan resistance. I have come to West Papua, at his urging, to see how a tribal people are resisting the forces of globalisation. Amunggur has told me that the Papuans – some of the most ‘undeveloped’ tribal people anywhere – are just beginning to engage with the global movement and its concerns. He thinks they need to, and quickly.
There has never been an international popular movement that has included, involved and taken up the concerns of tribal people. For centuries, the fate of such ‘savages’ has been to be passed over, ignored or exterminated in the name of progress. Throughout the twentieth century both right and left, empire-builders and International Socialists, champions of either labour or capital, tended to see the remaining tribal peoples in the forests and the mountains and plains as awkward, embarrassing impediments to a glorious industrial future.
This movement is different. Indigenous concerns have been at its heart from day one. Because it is a movement that was born in the ‘developing’ world, because of its culture of diversity, because land and cultural identity and giving voices to the overlooked are key to its concerns, tribal people have played a key part in it. In India and Bangladesh, thousands of adivasi tribal people have gathered to oppose dam-building projects, protest against GM crops being grown on their land and fight for their rights and cultures. In Nigeria, tribal groups in Ogoniland and elsewhere have fought for years against Shell oil’s destruction of their communities, and against the global economy that allows them to do it. Amazon tribes fight logging and land theft, and join up as they do so with Thai hill tribes, Maoris, North American Indians, Ecuadorian tribes, Colombian forest people, Australian aborigines and many others in taking their concerns to the global level, linking up with each other and influencing the ideas, direction and values of the growing global movement.
Amunggur has been all over the world trying to forge these links, and to persuade his people that they are worth making – and has become persona non grata with the Indonesian government as a result. His people, he explained to me, when I met him before I arrived in Papua, had been fighting the symptoms of globalisation for years: now they were beginning to turn their attentions to its causes.
I am here to find out if this is true. If anyone can show me, it has to be Amunggur. The only trouble is, I can’t find him.
For two agonisingly hot days I have been tramping the streets of Jayapura, looking in all the places he promised I would find him and finding only taxi drivers, market traders and half-naked old men trying to sell me pig-tusk good luck charms, carved wooden ancestor poles and conch shell necklaces. After two days of poking into corners, asking dangerous questions and roaring around dirt tracks on the pillions of motorbikes driven by Papuans who are sure they know where to find Amunggur, but then turn out to be thinking of someone else, I am about to give up and go home. Then, by sheer luck, I meet an old man who claims to know where to find Amunggur’s cousin and, amazingly, turns out to be right.
Galile is short and stocky, with a brief beard and the trademark Papuan features: broad, flat triangular nose, heavy brow topped with a mat of short, tightly curled black hair, and a mouth which breaks into a delightfully
wide, guileless grin when he is told what I am here for. He shakes my hand for what seems like a full five minutes, then ushers me into his weathered, clapboard house and closes the door behind me. ‘Many spies,’ he confides, furtively, sitting himself cross-legged on the floor. ‘When in Jayapura, you must be careful. Some Papuans betray their country; paid by Indonesians, in rupiah or whisky. Pheeew! We must be careful.’
I am desperately pleased to have found Galile, for it turns out that Amunggur is not even in the country. ‘He in big trouble,’ says Galile, seriously. ‘Police and army all look for him. He is trying to tell the world about Papuans and their suffering. He is brave man, and if police get him’ – he runs his finger across his throat in a motion that anyone in the world would instantly understand. ‘Pheeew!’ he says again. ‘Bad trouble. He cannot come back to Papua until it is safe. I not know where he is now. But I can help you talk to the people. Anything I can do for you, I will do it.’
Galile is Amunggur’s cousin, but he might as well be his brother, his brother-in-law, his best friend, his son. In Papua, none of these words mean much; everyone is ‘family’ – in the loop or outside it. Right now, Galile is hundreds of miles from the forest village he grew up in, working and studying in Jayapura – ‘for the future’. But his new surroundings have not divested him of the patterns of life he was born into, among which the importance of family – extended families, numbering in their hundreds – is paramount. At heart, Galile remains a Papuan tribesman.
Now, though, he is sitting on dark floorboards, swatting fat, heavy mosquitoes and smiling at me disarmingly, openly, trustingly, as if he has known me for ever.
‘So,’ he says, ‘what you want to do?’
I tell him.
The Papuans’ resistance to their occupation takes several forms. For decades after the Indonesian takeover, the only form of organised resistance came from the Organisasi Papua Merdeka (OPM) – the Free Papua Movement. The OPM, formed in 1970, is a broad-based social movement to which almost everyone in West Papua, if you get them alone, will admit to ‘belonging’. To the rest of the world, though – those few who are listening anyway – the letters ‘OPM’ mean the organisation’s armed wing: a mysterious and determined bunch of guerrillas who live, Robin Hood-like, deep in the forests, moving their camps regularly to escape army manhunts and occasionally emerging to attack a mine or kidnap a few unsuspecting foreigners. OPM guerrillas talk the talk of hardened soldiers but, small in numbers and armed with little more than spears, knives, bows and arrows and the occasional stolen gun, they have never been more than irritating crumbs under the bedclothes of Indonesian rule.
In the last few years, though, things have changed in West Papua, as they have in Indonesia as a whole. General Suharto ruled Indonesia unchallenged for over thirty years, but in 1998, in the financial maelstrom that was sweeping South-East Asia, popular resentment finally bubbled to the surface and swept him from office. Two short-lived presidents followed him, then, in 2001, in what she no doubt saw as poetic justice, Megawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of the man Suharto had deposed in 1967, became president of Indonesia.
Taking advantage of a new, tentative climate of openness in Jakarta after the dictator’s fall, the Papuans began to call openly for independence. In 1999, for the first time since 1969, they publicly raised the symbol of their national hopes – the banned Morning Star flag – without widespread retribution from the Indonesian authorities. Then, in May 2000, they held the biggest public show of national aspiration that had ever been allowed. Three thousand delegates came to the Papua People’s Congress in Jayapura, some of them hiking barefoot through the mountains for weeks to get there, to demand independence and to set up a new organisation to work towards it – the Papua Council. The Council, made up of 500 tribal leaders, was exactly what the Papuans had never had – a respectable, non-violent lobby group calling, openly, for independence. The Council’s executive, the oddly named ‘Presidium’, announced that it would work alongside the OPM and others, united in pursuit of merdeka – freedom.
When I arrived in West Papua, six months after the People’s Congress, it seemed as if the Papuans had their best chance ever of real change. In Jakarta, the government had noticed it too, and had come up with a dual strategy to dampen down demands for independence.
First, it had offered the Papuans something called ‘special autonomy’ – more control over their affairs within Indonesia, including changing the province’s name from ‘Irian Jaya’ to ‘Papua’, creating a Papuan parliament with indigenous people in its ranks and giving West Papua some use of the revenues generated on its soil. Secondly, in case this didn’t work, ministers in Jakarta drew up a secret plan to crush demands for independence at the grass roots. They included using the army to train pro-Indonesian militia and buying off potential separatists with government jobs. So far, neither has worked: the Papua Council, the OPM and other organisations working for independence have dismissed the special autonomy powers as an attempt to buy them off. Only merdeka, they say, will satisfy them.
What form it will take is a question I am going to put to the newly formed Presidium. It’s not a good time to be talking to them, though. Barely a fortnight before I arrived in West Papua, the Presidium’s leader, the charismatic Theys Eluay, had been murdered by the Indonesian army – apparently as part of that plan to destroy the independence movement. Despite the resulting turmoil in the Presidium, however, Willy Mandowen has agreed to talk to me. Willy is middle-aged, cunning, highly educated, well travelled and very influential. He is one of the key thinkers and strategists in the Presidium, and if West Papua ever becomes the independent nation that so many of its people want it to be, Mandowen will undoubtedly be one of the key figures in its government.
I perch myself on the edge of a sofa in Willy’s living room as he tells me that the Presidium would govern the country in a very different way from what has gone before.
‘You see,’ he says, quietly, ‘we don’t want to get independence, and then find that capital is regulated by someone else. We are aware of this threat. How will we tackle it? By ensuring that tribal leaders play a full role in any government. So a company may want to open up a mountain for mining, but if the people and their culture say “no, it is our mother”, then no. Papuan customs will check our government.’
I ask if he really believes that the customs of tribal people could take precedence over resource extraction and the enormous power of the global economy.
‘Well, yes, it could,’ he smiles. ‘From a just point of view we can’t allow so-called “developed” countries to continue dominating smaller countries through regulations and things like the WTO. This is just a new form of colonialism. And what is so developed about these places? When I walk through New York, Sydney, San Francisco – even Jakarta – I see very high, tall, empty buildings and most people moving to the suburbs to escape. Why don’t you build small houses which are healthy? Why make a city a place of waste – all steel and having to fight over the price of oil? In Papua, we have enough space to live healthily – not like you. We want fish from the coral reefs and meat from the jungle, not fish that has been in a refrigerator for a month.’
‘Do you know,’ he goes on, ‘that in America they have this television programme – Survivor I think it is called – which spends millions putting people into the jungle for a week? In LA, I have seen jungles created in hotel lobbies. Why should I develop into the sort of country where people want to become like me again? We must have a clear vision, and that vision must be to localise globalisation. This is Papuan development. We don’t need to be American. Development for the world should be like building a house. Here is the window, here are the bricks, here is the roof. All these materials are different and are made by different people. All contribute to the finished building. Similarly, countries must be made up differently, to contribute to the whole world.’
A world, in other words, with many worlds in it. Talking to Willy, as to Amunggur before him, I
realise just how far across the world this thinking about globalisation, economics, independence and power has spread, in such a short time.
Meanwhile, Willy has a plan, he says, to rein in corporations. If a company wants to work, or invest, in West Papua there would be strict rules under which it could do so – rules decided at community level. Local communities would have the final say over whether corporations came in to work on their land. If they did, it would have to be in a way respectful of their customs and way of life, and the community – and the Papuan government – would have to receive the benefits. Finally, each corporation operating in West Papua would have to contribute money to a trust fund, controlled by local communities, with community leaders deciding how the resulting money would be spent to the benefit of their communities.
It sounds good. If it worked, it probably would be. But there’s something I want to ask Willy about – a rumour I have heard that could make the difference between the success and failure of such ambitious ideas. I have heard that the Presidium is being funded by some of West Papua’s biggest multinational corporations; precisely those corporations which people like Amunggur and the OPM – and Willy, in his milder way – say are responsible for the raping of this nascent nation. There is Freeport, Shell, the loggers – corporations whose atrocious environmental and human rights records speak for themselves. Now, there is also BP, the rebranded oil company which claims it is moving ‘beyond petroleum’. BP wants to drill for liquid petroleum gas in Bintuni Bay on the western tip of West Papua, but it wants to do it, it says, in partnership with the people. Mindful of the mistakes made by others, BP is keen to avoid attacks by the OPM, condemnation from environmentalists and nasty leaks about human rights abuses on its turf.
‘Yes,’ confirms Willy, with no hint of a conflict of interest in his tone. ‘BP and Freeport help pay for transport and meeting places and accommodation costs for the Papua Council. Other companies have approached us too. We are in intense communication with BP.’ Willy’s idea about corporate trust funds, on further investigation, turns out to have come straight from the oil company, who use the same model elsewhere. I ask him if he sees a conflict of interest. ‘No,’ he says simply.
One No, Many Yeses Page 18