Demokrasi
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The creation of the new districts in the interior tipped the balance of electoral politics in Papua away from the coastal and island people of the north coast and toward those of the highlands, embodied in the stocky figure of Lukas Enembe, who ousted his longtime coastal rival Barbabas Suebu to become governor in January 2013. With the electoral rolls apparently inflated by 30 percent more than the estimated number of voters, authorities had increasingly set them aside and resorted to a system known as noken, after the string bag traditionally used by village women to carry supplies, babies, and piglets. It allows community leaders to allocate all their votes in a block, supposedly after the widespread formation of a consensus. In this environment, Enembe won a landslide of votes. (The noken system was outlawed by authorities running the 2014 national elections, though its use in local ballots may still stand.)
Out of the fifty-six members of the provincial legislature, thirty are now highlanders. The mountain people pride themselves on being more practical and ready to work hard, because of their precarious traditional livelihood, which is based on cultivation—in contrast to that of the coastal people, who, they say, only have to pick fruit from trees and put a line or net into the sea. Whether this results in more effective governance or a version of the sometimes negative “big man” politics of the Papua New Guinea highlands remains to be seen.
For his part, Enembe is anxious to be viewed as an achiever. At a late-night meeting in Jayapura in October 2013, he addressed a visiting delegation from the national parliament about a $200-million-a-year scheme to build 6,000 kilometers of roads into the interior, including the long-envisaged trans-Papua highway linking the north and south coasts, through mountain ranges up to 4,500 meters high. “This will help our people living in remote areas, those left behind, to get out from poverty and underdevelopment,” he told this writer later that night, at the provincial government building on Jayapura’s waterfront. “It will let their produce be marketed outside. Now they can’t do that, because there’s no infrastructure access. They have to take flight to do that.”
Enembe insists he is “Indonesian and proud of it.” His voters would not necessarily feel a contradiction in taking part in elections under Indonesia’s auspices and simultaneously hoping for the right to secede. A more bizarre ambivalence came in the first election held in the new district of Puncak, which was reminiscent of Papua New Guinean politics at their worst. A man from the Dani tribe named Elvis Tabuni registered as a candidate for bupati, representing the Gerakan Indonesia Raya party (Gerindra, Great Indonesia Movement), but a man from the rival Damal tribe, Simon Alom, tried to list for the same party. When his registration was rejected, his supporters attacked with stones and arrows. After twenty-three people had died, including four from police firing, the two sides brought in more muscle. Simon enlisted fellow clansmen from a shadowy militia group, Satgas Rajawali (Eagle Task Force), run by Kopassus in the 1990s to fight the OPM. In response, Elvis called in the OPM group led by Goliat Tabuni. Six more died before lavish compensation payments achieved a ceasefire, allowing the vote to go ahead in February 2013. When Elvis Tabuni lost the election to a third figure, Wellem Wandik, he again apparently called on Goliat Tabuni to intervene, who obliged with an attack on three Indonesian army outposts, killing eight soldiers and four civilians. Despite an appeal by Elvis, Wandik was confirmed as the new bupati.
Goliat Tabuni’s group, operating in the mountains of the deep interior, is the most aggressive of the four main bands of the OPM, whose armed members might not number more than 200. Some are more bandits than guerrillas, says Tito Karnavian, the former head of the Indonesia National Police antiterrorist squad Detachment 88, who became police chief of the region covering the two Papua provinces in August 2012. He cites a group in the Paniai lakes region that had abducted and raped a group of schoolgirls and then demanded ransom.
Since mid-2006 the police have taken charge of security inside Papua, including the fight against the OPM, as consequence of the earlier separation of the police from the armed forces. The military presence is still substantial, according to military sources in Jakarta: about 13,000 troops, including the four battalions (2,500 soldiers in total) and an undeclared detachment of 100 to 200 Kopassus members. Tito insists that their role is border protection and civil aid, not offensive operations. “I see no role for the military in the use of a hard approach,” he said in an interview at his Jayapura headquarters.
The force got off to a shaky start. In mid-June 2006 a battalion of the Mobile Brigade (known as Brimob), a force of infantry-like police, was assigned from Jakarta to take over protection of the Freeport mine from an army battalion, a service that had earned the military many millions of dollars in payments. The Brimob troopers were soon found to be taking bribes from the thousands of illegal gold miners working the mine’s tailings. One of their officers was seen trying to break into a store of gold concentrates using a hijacked bulldozer. Things improved with the unit’s replacement by a locally based battalion after six months.
In December that year, the police showed themselves to be perhaps more effective than the military at tackling the OPM and more sensitive to local feelings. Using mobile phone intercepts, Tito’s Detachment 88 tracked and killed a local OPM leader named Kelly Kwalik, who was responsible for a string of fatal attacks against foreign and local personnel at Freeport. The police then held back as Kwalik’s body was draped in the Morning Star flag, for viewing by his many local supporters and clan members before burial.
In his first year heading Papua’s police, Tito says he has set out to steadily raise the proportion of indigenous officers in the 14,000-strong force from the present 30 to 40 percent to at least 50 percent. Meanwhile, the best Papuan officers are being given preference in sensitive commands, with locals heading the Mobile Brigade and the districts of Jayapura, Wamena, and Mimika. “In hot places I put Papuans,” Tito says. “To make sure that there is no issue of human rights or genocide. Maybe in 1977, when I read that report, but today there is no [such] fact.”
Tito has also called on the New Zealand and Dutch police forces to advise on so-called community policing, which he hopes will further shift the police mind-set from a military approach to a law-enforcement one. The police chief has also applied a version of the “softly, softly” deradicalization approach of his former antiterror command. In early 2013 he secretly hosted the leader of one of the smaller OPM groups—a man from the nearby Keerom district—at his home in Jayapura, after earlier providing medical assistance for the man’s family, though without achieving any immediate change in thinking.
Busting police corruption remains the police chief’s other big task. The 14,000 police in Papua have a budget of only $8.8 million. Their fuel ration is seven liters a day per vehicle. By contrast, a middle-ranking police officer arrested in May 2013 at Sorong for smuggling fuel oil and illegally cut hardwood was found to have had $132 million flowing through his bank accounts, with payoffs to thirty-three colleagues. There was outrage when this officer was acquitted of all the major corruption charges by a court and given only a two-year sentence for illegal logging. The widespread suspicion that military and police officers permit or actually run logging and other illegal activities on an even wider scale throughout Papua has only been deepened by the controls placed on outside monitors.
The gap between the politics of the Indonesian state and those of the Papuan resistance remains like a wildly flowing highland river, a formidable crossing. Yet a few lines have been thrown across. The young activist who had fled Merauke into Papua New Guinea, Paulus Samkakay, returned to his hometown. By 2014 a man of this name was prominent in local newspapers as head of a group called Tim Enam (Team Six) and was standing for the regional assembly. I wanted to confirm whether it was the same person I had met in East Awin and, if so, to find out about this new chapter in his life and what had led him to abandon the life of exile. But the “clearing house” vetoed my request to vis
it Merauke. E-mails to potential local intermediaries went unanswered. Finally, a telephone call got through to one of Samkakay’s relatives; on a connection cutting in and out, he confirmed it was indeed the same Paulus Samkakay.
Efforts to open a “dialogue” since the 2010 “return” of the special autonomy law, meanwhile, have had little result beyond some vague commitments in Jakarta. The theologian Neles Tebay, an articulate man born in a highland village in 1964 who went on to earn a doctorate at the Vatican, says the word “dialogue” carried a suspicion in Jakarta of signifying a willingness to discuss sovereignty. He insists it is unconditional.
At first, the only receptive listener in Jakarta was Jusuf Kalla, the patron of the Aceh peace accord. Then a wider range of parliamentarians and opinion leaders agreed it was worth a try, since a hardline approach was making no headway. In late 2011 and early 2012, President Yudhoyono declared a willingness for dialogue, nominating Vice President Boediono as a contact and two figures involved in the Aceh peace process, the diplomat Farid Hussein and the retired general Bambang Dharmono, to open contacts with the OPM and to coordinate Papua’s development, respectively. In 2013 Yudhoyono also received the elderly founder of the Papuan resistance, Nicholas Jouwe, who was allowed to return for a visit home from Holland after forty years in exile.
But who should speak for the Papuans? The existing laws on political parties allow no formation of a purely regional party, except in Aceh. In this absence, candidates run under the banners of national parties. The resistance is fragmented. Tebay told Indonesia’s leaders it was no use simply talking to such Papuan figures as the governors, who had already declared themselves for Indonesia. The dialogue had to be with the unreconciled.
Over 2010–11, a Papuan peace conference met and discussed who should start the dialogue. It decided that those who could talk freely and without fear were the exiled spokespeople. The conference nominated the Vanuatu-based John Otto Ondawame, Rex Rumakiek in Australia, Octavianus Mote in the United States, Benny Wenda in Britain, and Leonie Tangama in the Netherlands. The group is thought to have met twice since but has made no known approaches to the Indonesian government or received any from it. In late 2013 Tebay felt that time had run out for Yudhoyono to achieve anything in the remaining months of his presidency. With the 2014 elections looming, Papua had receded from thinking in Jakarta. “It is far away, not just in geographic distance but in their minds,” he said. “Indonesia stops at Makassar.”
Toward the end of Yudhoyono’s two permitted terms and on the president’s invitation, the two Papua governors forwarded drafts for a better administrative system, to be called Otsus-Plus. They proposed several important measures to protect and nurture the indigenous Papuans. The governors should have more control over private-sector activity, including involvement in renegotiating the Freeport contract. Papuan leaders should be given carriage of Indonesia’s participation in Pacific regional forums. The national and provincial governments should work to remove illiteracy within a set time, starting by making schooling free and compulsory up to junior high school, with policies to make sure teachers stayed at their jobs.
Most importantly, the draft by West Papua governor Atururi urged restriction of the right of non-Papuans to settle in the two provinces: they should come as temporary workers. Papuans should be guaranteed half of all employment, and maternal and infant welfare policies should be improved to build the indigenous population. Inside Papua, the reception was tepid: the proposals did not address the fundamental question of the region’s place in Indonesia, students said; political prisoners declared they would reject the clemency urged by Enembe, on the same grounds. By contrast, in Jakarta the ideas were seen as dangerously bold. With the original Otsus still not fully implemented, Otsus-Plus would be left for a new president to consider after the 2014 elections.
For a while, it seemed that the international understandings that had helped Indonesia gain and retain control of Papua were being modified. One was the Cold War rivalry that had made Indonesia such a prize. Another was the conflation of self-determination with decolonization, making colonial boundaries the rule for independent successor states, no matter how arbitrarily they were drawn. Failure of government is becoming a factor for questioning sovereignty in international law.
Since the early 1990s, there have been several cases of self-determination outside decolonization, notes Osaka University’s Akihisa Matsuo. Kosovo was one breakaway state. “The protection of people in Kosovo apparently had more weight than the territorial integrity of Serbia,” Matsuo says. In response, Russia, Serbia’s ally, sought the detachment of South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia. More recently came the separation of South Sudan from Khartoum’s rule. “The history of Sudan seems to suggest that lack or low level of integration, natural or historical, between areas ruled by the same colonial power can be a reason for the establishing of a separate state,” Matsuo says. The case of East Timor effectively created a precedent for a population under Indonesian sovereignty to ask the MPR for secession. In theory, Papua could become a reasonably self-sustaining independent state. As Jim Elmslie calculated from 2010 figures on the gross domestic regional product for its two provinces and their population, per capita GDP was $3,510, which was far above the Indonesian average of $2,452 and more than twice that of Papua New Guinea.
The moment for such thinking to pry Papua loose may have passed at the turn of this new century, however, when the New Order lay discredited and the Papuans had a more unified voice. But then Indonesia became a key ally in the West’s fight against jihadist terrorism. It became prominent among the emerging new economic powers and was then courted by Washington for cooperation in the strategic “pivot” to maintain its dominance in Southeast Asia. Its worrying neighbor in the south, Australia, meanwhile, became captive to its politicians’ need for Indonesian assistance in limiting the flow of asylum seekers by boat. As Tito Karnavian puts it, “Indonesia has become a nation with bargaining power.”
Still, Pieter Drooglever, the Dutch historian who turned over the poignant records of his own country’s involvement in Papua, thinks Jakarta does have an interest in making an agreement with the Papuans. In a reflection on his book, he writes:
Indonesia not only has a tradition of military and authoritarian rule, but also of cultured interaction and efforts to provide good government. We can only hope that the latter two aspects gain the upper hand. Finally, there is the consideration that the interests of Indonesia and the Papuans, because they are neighbours and have a shared history, are, in the main, the same. The two primary motives for establishing the administrative centres in 1898 were to secure the eastern border of the archipelago and to develop the Papuans and their country. These can still go together, by hook or by crook. A solution should be found that combines a better future for the Papuans with the proper regulation of the eastern border of Indonesia. It would, however, appear to be difficult to combine an open window onto the Pacific with a grumbling, misunderstood and maltreated population on the Indonesian side of the 141st meridian.
Anthropologists Brigham Golden and S. Eben Kirksey also point out that merdeka (freedom) has a much fuzzier meaning for Papuans than just separate statehood, as Indonesian officialdom understands the word. It can mean freedom from poverty, from racial inferiority, and from the perceived stigma of their “primitive” past, as well as control over their land, food, and water.
There is a scope here for negotiating a way forward, if Jakarta can free itself for a while from its “unitary state” mantra and accept that, in many respects, it is already federal.
12
The Burning Question
In the middle of 1997, as a foreign debt crisis ignited in Thailand and spread south to Indonesia and east to Korea, much of Southeast Asia found it hard to breathe. Fires raged through dried-out peat marshes in Kalimantan and Sumatra, through tropical forests and across semicleared lands. The smoke grew into a
thick white shroud that covered the region, from the northwestern end of Sumatra, across the great archipelago to the Philippines and New Guinea. Visibility dropped to a few hundred meters. An airliner crashed into a mountain near Medan. Authorities in several countries warned their populations to stay indoors and wear face masks to screen carbon particles. A Rand Corporation study later found that the death rate for the elderly in Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, had jumped over 90 percent during the period. It seemed an apocalyptic end to an era in which growth and development had been put above all else.
The fires and the smoke lasted six months, until the monsoon rains arrived in November. But this was just the start. The haze from Indonesian fires became an annual dry-season phenomenon, reaching another peak of intensity in 2006. By then, it was becoming more than a regional nuisance and health hazard. The first report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that deforestation and forest degradation contributed 17 to 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Indonesia has the third-largest area of tropical forest of any country in the world, after Brazil and Congo. But it also has the fastest rate of deforestation of any country.
Indonesia is barely industrialized, by comparison with North America, Northeast Asia, or Europe. Yet the greenhouse gas emissions from its plunder of the forests, amounting to 80 percent of its national emissions, give it the invidious distinction of being the world’s third-largest emitter, after the United States and China. The clearing of the forests and draining of the peat marshes in Indonesia, in which the fires were part of the process, became an international problem. For Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, at the start of his presidency in late 2004, deforestation and climate change became a challenge. He set out to make Indonesia at once a responsible world citizen and a beneficiary of the new global carbon-trading economy that was starting to emerge.