Meanwhile, the process of making Papua and its people Indonesian quickened, as did the extraction of its natural resources. The American mining company Freeport had reached its agreement with Jakarta on its gold and copper mine at Ertzberg two years before the vote and had evidently not been worried by any political risk. By 1973 it was extracting ore from an outcrop 3,500 meters above sea level, bringing it by aerial tramway to a crushing mill and township at an altitude of 2,750 meters, and then sending a concentrate in slurry form down a pipeline that crossed 116 kilometers of jungle and swamp to the coast. Within two years the operation was yielding huge profits for Freeport’s shareholders and a large flow of tax receipts for Jakarta.
In 1988, with the Ertzberg deposit reduced to an open pit two kilometers wide, Freeport announced that its activity would shift to the even larger Grasberg ore body, which contained the world’s largest known gold deposit (an estimated 91.4 tons), as well as 32 million tons of copper, with estimates of its value running to $80 billion. With the fiftieth anniversary of the company’s mining permit approaching in 2017, Jakarta’s politicians started agitating for a bigger share for the state. Amid rioting in 2009 by illegal miners, who were extracting remnant gold from the mine’s dumps of waste rock, Freeport executives privately accused political figures, such as Amien Rais and even unnamed Saudi-financed Salafists, of stirring up trouble as part of a shakedown.
Logging also got underway, supervised and taxed informally by the military, while significant oilfields were opened around the “Bird’s Head” extremity in the west. Eventually, in the first decade of the new century, the large-scale Tangguh liquefied natural gas field, operated by BP in Bintuni Bay, started exporting to China.
In early 1969 Suharto had announced a lavish long-term development program to make up for the earlier looting, but the beneficiaries were largely the migrants who began to flood in from other parts of Indonesia, either as “spontaneous” self-starters from places like Makassar or the quarter-million participants in the government’s transmigration scheme to reduce population pressures and poverty in Java and Bali. While the Papuan population grew at a moderate annual rate of 1.84 percent, rising from 887,000 in 1971 to 1.5 million in 2000, the migrant population grew from 36,000 in 1971 to 708,000 in 2000, an annual growth rate of 10.8 percent. At that point, the Central Statistics Bureau stopped making the indigenous-migrant breakdown because it was becoming embarrassing; in the 2010 census, it simply reported a total population of 3.61 million. Extrapolating from the previous three decades of respective growth rates, the Australian scholar Jim Elmslie has calculated that the Papuan population would be 47.9 to 49.6 percent of the total. Papuans have become a minority in their own land.
Migrants from outside Papua now make up two-thirds or more of the population in Jayapura and many other big towns. In Jayapura the migrants have most of the jobs in formal-sector commerce: the shops and restaurants, the taxis and ojek (motorcycle taxis), the hotels, the security posts. Papuans appear at dusk, laying out offerings of pinang (betel nut) on pavements and boxes. Papuan women sell vegetables and fish in a night market while their men play cards. In the administration, the elected political jobs are largely now filled by Papuans, but in the ranks of senior and middle officialdom there are many non-Papuans.
The condition of the bulk of the ethnic Papuans, located in the hinterlands, is still reported to be miserably poor, half a century after the start of Indonesian rule. In 2013 the Jayapura branch of Komnas-HAM was reporting scores of deaths during the year from starvation and treatable diseases. Like neighboring Papua New Guinea, Papua has a serious HIV/AIDS epidemic, spread in the African pattern by heterosexual encounters with prostitutes, combined with poor hygiene. Preventive campaigns have been inhibited by the unwillingness of some religious authorities to accept the reality of widespread casual sex. Outside the large towns, the extension of education and health services is undercut by the absenteeism of staff. In Wamena in 2006, a visiting US embassy team could find no one manning the civilian government offices. Anecdotal reports say Wamena is swarming with unaccompanied minors, billeted with relatives and clan affiliates, sent by parents desperate for them to get an education.
Large-scale army operations tapered off from the mid-1980s and were replaced by a murkier kind of small-unit warfare that used semiclandestine special forces and local paramilitaries, some of them masquerading as OPM groups. Yet the memory of past mass killings, the high rate of mortal illness and food shortages, the perceived tokenism of cultural representation, and the steady displacement by migration and plantation projects have combined to maintain the Papuans’ sense of “slow genocide”—an uncomfortable accusation for the more perceptive senior government officials.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, until the fall of Suharto, a growing number of highly educated Papuans tried balancing a form of cultural politics with engagement in the institutions, professions, and businesses created under the New Order’s development orientation. But they also supplied their martyrs. Arnold Ap, an anthropologist at the ethnological museum at the Cenderawasih University (which is filled with the marvelous collection of artifacts assembled by Michael Rockefeller before his 1962 disappearance in Papua’s southern jungles), led a cultural revival movement through traditional music. He was killed while in detention in 1984. Outbreaks of reckless messianism continued to grip the Papuans periodically. In 1988 Thomas Wanggai, the holder of an American doctorate and degrees from Japan, unfurled the Morning Star flag and declared independence at a football stadium in Jayapura. Sentenced to twenty years for subversion, he died in a Jakarta jail in 1996. The return of his body set off widespread rioting and destruction around Jayapura.
As Suharto’s grip weakened in 1997 and ended in May 1998, repressed Papuan sentiment was set to explode, as it did in East Timor, but without the unified leadership already formed by the Timorese resistance groups. Eventually, a “Team of 100”—comprising intellectuals, religious figures, students, and members of the provincial legislature—went to see the new president, B. J. Habibie, in February 1999. Having already decided to let the Timorese have a plebiscite on their future, Habibie was shocked to learn that the Papuans were demanding the same thing and urged them to reconsider.
His replacement later in the year, Abdurrahman Wahid, had more to offer. Having come to experience the dawn of the new millennium in Indonesia’s easternmost province, Wahid announced that the territory would be named “Papua” rather than “Irian Jaya,” and promised it extensive autonomy within Indonesia. Wahid’s announcement encouraged hopes at a Musyawarah Besar (Mubes for short, meaning “Grand Consultation”), attended by thousands of delegates in February 2000 to discuss the “correction of history.” This, in turn, led to the calling of a “second” Papuan People’s Congress (regarded as the successor to a meeting in 1961 under Dutch auspices) at the end of May 2000.
To lead its executive, known as the Papuan Presidium, the congress chose a political figure, Theys Eluay, whose career suggested opportunism. In the 1960s he had helped the Indonesian military track down and eliminate oppositionists, and he had then voted for Indonesia as one of the 1,022 handpicked delegates in the Act of Free Choice. His shift toward the pro-independence camp had been a recent development; even while declaring himself the “Great Leader of the Papuan People” and forming his own security force of young volunteers, he still maintained close contact with the Indonesian security apparatus.
By this time, according to reports said to be based on a leaked document, the military was moving to subvert Wahid’s conciliatory policies, stepping up its maneuvers to decapitate the Papuan movement with a version of the militia violence used in East Timor the year before. When Wahid was impeached and replaced by Megawati Sukarnoputri in July 2001, the plan was put into action.
A Kopassus unit invited Eluay to a dinner at its base near Jayapura. On his way home, he was escorted by Kopassus soldiers who had been ordered by their unit commande
r to talk Eluay out of making his planned declaration of independence on December 1, the anniversary of the 1961 unfurling of the Papuan flag. With Eluay insisting that mere autonomy was a lost cause, an enraged private soldier leaned forward and strangled him from behind. A following vehicle took the soldiers back to camp and Eluay’s body was left in the car for police to discover.
The uproar following Eluay’s death forced a court-martial, which was held in distant Surabaya in early 2003. It sentenced seven Kopassus officers and soldiers, including the three backseat passengers and their unit commanders, to jail for terms ranging between two years and three and a half years. It was not until 2013, a decade later, that Komnas-HAM in Jayapura managed to get a copy of the court finding to pass on to Eluay’s family. Whether the Kopassus soldiers actually served their sentences, or in what circumstances, the human rights agency cannot say. Among their colleagues, they were regarded as having carried out their patriotic duty. The man who was the army chief in 2003, Riyamizard Ryacudu, declared that “for me, they are heroes because the person they killed was a rebel leader.” Eluay’s young driver, Aristoteles Masoka, disappeared and is presumed to have been murdered that same night. The soldiers claimed he ran off into the night.
By the time Eluay was murdered, the Indonesian legislature had passed a special autonomy law (abbreviated as Otsus in Indonesian) for Papua. A panel of eminent Papuan personalities had sent a draft proposal for the law to the MPR in April 2003. When the central government sent its version to the MPR later, it looked similar: the provincial governor still had to be an indigenous Papuan; the province’s share of mining royalties was still 80 percent, and of oil and gas taxes 70 percent; there was the creation of a Papuan People’s Council, which would protect traditional customs; and the creation of new provinces had to be approved by both the provincial legislature and the MRP.
Yet it had been significantly watered down. There was no right to self-determination if a special historical commission found the 1969 process illegal; there was no regional police force; the Papuans had no control over inward migration, apart from a veto over any further official transmigration; a regional flag could have no connotations of sovereignty (ruling out the Bintang Kejora); and there were many more caveats on the transfer of powers. Nor did the law come into force immediately: this and many delegations of powers awaited enabling decrees and regulation. As the Australian scholar Richard Chauvel wrote, Otsus had become a battleground between the “old” authoritarian Indonesia and the “new” Indonesia of the reform and democracy era. The law itself expressed the more accommodating new Indonesia; its implementation, the old.
Before it came into force, Megawati signed a decree in January 2003 that split Papua into two new provinces, West Irian Jaya and Central Irian Jaya, in what was officially described as a process of pemekaran (flowering). It was a stunning act of bad faith that resonates to this day, seen as a classic divide-and-rule effort pushed by the intelligence community in Jakarta. “The damage the division did to Jakarta-Papua relations, let alone the idea within the Papuan elite that autonomy was an acceptable alternative to independence, is incalculable,” commented Sidney Jones, a leading analyst of Indonesian security conflicts.
The westernmost province came into being, but the central one was put aside after fierce local protest. The Papuan governor, Jaap Solossa, supported a legal challenge to the division in the new constitutional court. The court ruled in November 2004 that the decision to create West Irian Jaya had indeed been unconstitutional, but since it was already in operation, it should be allowed to continue. Yudhoyono, who had recently become president, was happy to accept this convenient compromise. A Papuan former one-star general in the marine corps, and later an official in the BIN, Abraham Atururi, became governor of this new province, which was confusingly renamed “West Papua.” Yudhoyono vowed to grant special autonomy to the two provinces, with a focus on improving the welfare of Papuans and using political rather than military means to solve problems.
Nonetheless, Otsus began inauspiciously and was suspect from the start among the Papuans. It was not long before ordinary Papuans and their leaders began wondering aloud what had changed. The flow of extra revenues seemed to stop among the portly politicians and senior officials of the two provinces and the ever-expanding number of districts. Many spent an inordinate amount of their time traveling lavishly outside the provinces, holding conferences, and equipping themselves with vehicles and other perquisites of office.
Dissidence and the repression of perceived challenges to Indonesian sovereignty continued. In 2005 a Papuan leader named Filip Karma earned a fifteen-year jail term for raising the Morning Star flag. As we have seen, in 2006 a boatload of dissidents, including a son of Thomas Wanggai, crossed the Torres Strait to seek political asylum in Australia, causing a serious diplomatic crisis and setting off a new security crackdown inside Papua.
Later that year, at a resettlement camp for Papuans inland from the Fly River in Papua New Guinea, this writer met Paulus Samkakay, a young activist from Merauke whose story seemed to epitomize Indonesia’s policy failure to that point. His late father, Boneffasius Samkakay, was one of the 1,022 delegates chosen for the Act of Free Choice in 1969. Paulus showed me the certificates of appreciation given to his father by Suharto and General Wibowo. But the son had joined protests against Indonesian rule as soon as he reached adulthood, earning a spell of detention, and when the Papuan Spring erupted in 1998, he became an organizer of students and dock workers in Merauke.
Later, his activities were closely surveilled, and after the Torres Strait crossing, he too decided to try to reach Australia, by walking along the coast and finding a canoe to cross. He succeeded but was promptly returned by Australian officials to Papua New Guinea, where his wife and two surviving children waited, their youngest having died during the jungle trek. Not surprisingly, his bitterness was intense. “I came to the land of the kangaroo with big hopes,” Samkakay told me, his eyes filling with angry tears.
For the 2,500 Papuans placed in dispersed clusters of self-built houses at the same place, East Awin, the remoteness of their surroundings signified the disinterest of neighboring countries and the world in their struggle. To reach the area required an expensive flight to the little town of Kiunga, a two-hour trip up the Fly River, and then a three-hour truck ride through axle-deep mud, and finally a twelve-kilometer walk when the road became impassable for normal vehicles. The flat, green scrubland and the lowering clouds varied little. The place appeared to have been chosen to be out of sight, out of contact. The exile must have seemed endless.
The people’s hope was kept up with hymns and unfurlings of the Bintang Kejora flag, while the forced togetherness of such groupings—which included people from many of Papua’s tribes—might in fact have been creating a bit of the unity that had eluded the resistance. An older woman, Afonsina Hambring, who had spent three years in the jungle with her husband, an OPM commander, before crossing the border in 1988, was taking a group from the women’s association she leads out to do repairs on the road. “Every second we pray that God will start a war to change us,” she said. “To make us one. Let’s not get to the position of East Timor, fighting against each other.”
Two strands of politics continued inside Papua—three, if the armed struggle by remaining OPM bands is counted. One was the nonviolent campaign for independence, or at least for some recognition of Papuan sovereignty and the right to a more convincing act of self-determination. That continues but has been dogged by division of effort between several organizations, one of the biggest among them the National Committee for West Papua (known by its Indonesian initials as KNPB). A second Mubes was convened by the newly formed Papuan People’s Council in June 2010. The gathering symbolically “returned” the special autonomy law to Jakarta, called for tighter restrictions on inward migration, and demanded a new referendum.
Open demonstrations in support of these goals, especially the r
eferendum, continue at the various anniversaries of events of the 1960s—most notably, the December 1 declaration of Papuan sovereignty under the Dutch and the May 1 arrival of the Indonesian administration. They are marked by small-scale violence, often with fatalities on both sides, as police try to prevent the flying of the Papuan flag. Then comes a trickle of cases through the courts, with judges handing out stiff sentences for sedition and assault. In one case, when a defendant retracted a confession he claimed had been made under torture, the judge ordered him to be charged with perjury.
In the structure of the Indonesian state, by contrast, the Papuans are being flooded by politics. What was just one province with ten kabupaten (districts) and municipalities in 1999 had by 2013 become two provinces with forty-two districts and townships. In August 2013 the relevant committee in the national parliament approved a plan to create three more provinces and twenty-two more districts, although Yudhoyono has been resisting any further provincial division, as has the Papuan provincial government and the Papuan People’s Council, whose consent is now required under the Otsus law. But already the pemekaran process has created a revolving class of about 1,000 elected politicians, drawn in many cases by access to the Otsus flow of revenue, while the bureaucratic ranks have grown from 37,000 in 2000 to around 115,000. It is a staggering drain on financial resources and is dispersing the limited talent. The push continues to create more subregional governments because of automatic funding arrangements for them. Since these transfers are based on population figures, there is an incentive to inflate the number of inhabitants. Not surprisingly, many of the regional administrations in Papua are ranked as Indonesia’s worst performers in delivering services.
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