by Tim Flannery
During the time of my first visit, few Irianese had jobs at the mine and, of those that did, several I spoke to complained of harsh treatment at the hands of some of the Indonesian supervisors. Things are now a little different, and an increasing (though still small) number of Irianese are finding employment with Freeport or affiliated companies.
It is hardly surprising that the situation has led to social unrest. The only way in which the Indonesian Government has been able to maintain authority in the area (and thus allow Freeport to operate) is through a large and increasing military presence. The result has been a smouldering civil unrest, which occasionally breaks out into small-scale war.
Although I heard many stories about things that have happened to Amungme and other tribal people, it was not until I became embroiled in an incident myself that I fully understood their situation, and the anger of the mountain people at it.
The management of PT Freeport Indonesia were generous to me during my visit. They supported me in all my requests for travel and other assistance, were candid and open with me concerning their operations and gave me freedom (in what is otherwise a highly regulated environment) to pursue my research.
I, on my part, assured them that they would be the first to know of my findings, but made it clear that I could promise them nothing more. I'm certain that they would have liked more control over the information I collected, but I could not agree to remain silent about the work I did or what I saw while doing it.
Freeport's support was particularly important for my plans to climb to the Meren Glacier, as permits to enter the area are strictly controlled by the Indonesian Government. Indeed, without support from the highest levels of the company, I doubt that I could have obtained permission to make the ascent.
I intended to ship our equipment into a camp in the Meren Valley by helicopter, to spend four or five days working at 4,300 metres elevation (mostly to study rats) and then ascend to the foot of the glacier to determine which mammals (if any) exist in that hostile environment. To see the Meren Glacier with my own eyes was a life-long ambition.
We awoke before dawn and assembled our equipment at the helipad in the pale light. We were the first job on the schedule, so after a rather extensive safety briefing we loaded up and lifted off. The excitement of helicopter travel in such places is not easily communicable. The high whine of the starter motor, the smell of leather and sweat in the thin cold air, the helmet with its radio—then the uncanny feeling of the lift-off, the short ascent and the swooping departure to places unknown.
The morning we flew into the Meren Valley was crystal clear. Before reaching our destination we had to fly over the mine site itself. It is an awesome spectacle, highlighting the power of the modern transnational economy to extract resources from wherever they might be.
In 1936 a Dutch geologist discovered a 300-metre-tall mountain of copper. The trouble was that it stood atop this great limestone range in the most remote and inaccessible corner of the earth. In the 1970s American capital financed a road, the construction of which defies the imagination. Where even it could not go, American engineers constructed the world's longest aerial tram to link the roadhead with the mine itself, which is perched at nearly 4,000 metres elevation. Travelling on this tram, suspended in an iron box high over a great chasm on a mile of steel cable, is an unforgettable experience.
The infrastructure needed to support the mine is enormous. A town of 10,000 or more, an airline and shipping line, not to mention the extensive equipment sheds, dumps and mining materials, are all financed by this powerful machine. It, in turn, is fed by a flow of ten million dollars worth of minerals every day.
In 1994 the annual budget of PT Freeport Indonesia was larger than that of most of the Pacific island economies. The programs it ran were almost as comprehensive as those of a national government. Today the company has divested itself of many of its peripheral businesses, such as airlines, caterers and shipping, in order to concentrate on mining. It is still, however, an awesome enterprise.
As we passed over the yawning pit, I thought of a story I had heard about an Amungme leader who believed that wealth beyond reckoning lay locked inside a mountain. He could gain access to that wealth, he claimed, by the use of a magical rodent tooth. Of course his cargo-cult came to nothing, but the man had been right. Vast wealth did reside in mountains—the Amungme's mountains. It's just that their technology could not unlock it, and they have been dispossessed of it.
In a few moments’ flying we had passed the mine site and were ascending a steep rocky slope which led to the Meren Valley. As we crossed the tussocks and rhododendrons of the barren landscape I felt at home once again, surrounded by the mountain scenery I know and love. And then, only a few seconds later, I was standing in a boggy alpine meadow, the helicopter already gone, with near freezing water seeping into my boots and an icy blast on my face. The quiet was divine.
We were set down beside an almost luminous green lake which is fed by glacial meltwater. Below it lay a smaller, bright blue lake. The ecology and chemistry of each of these glacial waters, which impart to each its particular colour, opacity and luminosity, are unique.
A few hundred metres away a huge limestone overhang reached out across the valley. The sheer wall, over a hundred metres tall, rose at an angle of about eighty-five degrees from the horizontal. For a distance of about five metres, the ground at its base was completely dry and sheltered from the rain. This extraordinary feature, which was to serve as our campsite, must have been cut by the Meren Glacier during the last ice age. Countless millions of tonnes of rock must have been carved up and carted away by the ice, only to be dumped kilometres away. I wondered at the sharpness and power of ice. It dwarfs even the might of a mining operation to wreak change.
On reaching this campsite, we were dismayed to find the ground littered with sheets of silver foil and food scraps. Some very messy people had clearly camped here a few days before. At that time, take-away lunches wrapped in foil were available to Freeport employees who were working away from a canteen, and I took the mess (wrongly, as it turned out) to be the result of insensitive littering by company employees.
After we set our traps and nets in the surrounding alpine scrub, the hunters fanned out from the camp with their dogs. I set to exploring the valley and organising our equipment, and did not see the hunters again until evening. When they returned, they brought the disturbing news that they had found two people camped in a rockshelter a few hundred metres downslope. They were, I was informed, very sick.
Surprised and concerned at this news, Alex and I began to gather medical supplies and some food, then asked Vedelis and Yonas to show us where they were. The Meren Valley ends in a steep rocky slope composed of glacier-carried boulders. The slope is, I suppose, part of the terminal moraine of the great glacier which formed when it extended to this point some 12,000 years ago. There are hollows under some of the house-sized boulders, and it was to one of these hollows that Vedelis led us.
There, in the dim light, we made out two small, almost naked black figures lying in the dust. Their fire had gone out and they had nothing by way of food, blankets or extra clothing with them. Looking closer, I was disturbed to find that they were children.
As I stepped into the cave a girl, who at about fifteen was the older of the two, rose to her feet. It appeared from her dazed expression and disjointed speech that she was in shock. The boy, she said, was her brother, and he was badly hurt. He coughed as he sat up, then told me in a low voice that his name was Arianus Murip. He was a Lani from Ilaga, and he was thirteen years old. I offered the kids some chocolate biscuits, which they took, but to my great surprise did not eat. After treating a few superficial cuts and giving them some warm clothes, I asked them to tell me their story. This is what they said.
They had been part of a group of about ninety people who, after visiting the villages of Waa and Banti, near Tembagapura, decided to walk home over the range to Ilaga.
I knew that these vi
llages act like magnets to people from all over the mountains. They come to see the mine and its white people, and perhaps to obtain some goods, such as food, clothing or kerosene, which, in Irianese eyes, the mine workers seem to discard in great quantity. The villages near the mine often become overcrowded. This is a problem for the Amungme inhabitants, for by tradition they must feed and shelter the visitors. When the crowding becomes critical, the village head-men come to Freeport and ask for help in relocating people who wish to leave.
Freeport organises the exodus by supplying buses which ferry the people from the villages, via Tembagapura and the mine site (which are normally off-limits to them), to a walking track which begins at the far side of the mine. This track, after crossing the range at almost its highest point, leads on to Ilaga.
On this occasion, the children said, the company supplied lunches to those who were undertaking the walk—which explained the piles of silver foil and uneaten food along the track. (The practice of wrapping take-away lunches in silver foil has now ceased, largely because of the visual pollution the cast-offs cause.)
Arianus and his sister had kept up with the group until they came to the steepest part of the track. There, Arianus had begun to have difficulty breathing. He also suffered frostbite on his right foot, which slowed him. His sister stayed with him, even when it became apparent that he could not go on. In doing this, she put her own life at risk. The path near the summit is strewn with the bones of people who were caught on the high pass during a cold snap without adequate protection. Melanesians are particularly susceptible to hypothermia, as they typically have almost no body fat and limited energy reserves. The scattered skulls, being slowly overgrown by moss, must have reminded her of the fate she risked in remaining with her brother.
It had become clear that their only chance of survival lay in returning quickly to Tembagapura, as a night spent exposed on the mountain would surely kill them both. They descended into the Meren Valley, and were about to enter the boulder-strewn slope which leads to the mine, when they encountered security guards in the employ of PT Freeport Indonesia.
These men had been posted at the end of the valley to ensure that none of the people being repatriated to Ilaga returned to the mine. As Arianus explained to them that he felt ill and could not go on, one of the guards (another Melanesian, from the island of Biak) lashed out with his fist and struck him across the face. The guards then kicked and beat him on the chest and the back of the head and left him, in the fading evening light, to die in the freezing grassland.
Yonas told me what happens to people who die in the high valleys. The wild dogs of the mountains come to feed on them. Yonas himself had once come across the remains of a group of thirteen people who had died of exposure following a rapid change in the weather. Their bodies had lain near where we were camped now. Yonas noticed that one appeared to have a long, hairy object protruding from its belly, which was moving grotesquely from side to side. On his approach, a wild dog, covered in blood, emerged from deep inside the body cavity where it had been feeding, and fled into the forest.
The victims had been recovered by Freeport and buried.
Arianus's sister was in shock after the assault, but she helped her brother to the crude rockshelter, where they spent the night without light, food or fire. The following day a few Lani men (who had heard about the incident) risked the wrath of the security forces to carry some firewood up to the children and light a fire for them. This action doubtless saved their lives.
It was now a day or two later.
The discovery of the children and news of their story posed a dilemma for me. It was clear that Arianus had to receive medical attention, and the sooner the better. He did not seem to be seriously injured, but I suspected that he had a bronchial infection and I was unsure how he would hold up after another day in the shelter.
I knew the children would be better off there, with a fire burning through the night, than at our freezing camp. We cut firewood for them, gave them some food, and promised to take them down to safety the next day.
Clearly the expedition had to be aborted. Yet I had waited a lifetime to see the Meren Glacier, and the chance to do so might not come my way again. All night I lay awake, wondering what the morning would bring.
Dawn spread into the valley and melted the ice on the ponds by our camp. I arose to the sounds of a very cold Boeadi claiming that the thin air and freezing conditions had doubtless taken a decade off his life—and that he needed a boiled egg for breakfast to restore his failing health. Yonas proclaimed equally loudly that his teeth had chattered so violently during the night they were now all loose in their sockets, while his waterworks had completely seized up.
I wandered out across the still frozen tundra to collect my traps. Each one had a rat in it. There were three species. One was my old friend the Moss-forest Rat, which I had encountered on my first trip to New Guinea. The second was new to me. It was a lovely rat. A little larger than the Moss-forest Rat, it had flesh-coloured tail, hands and feet, long, dense and fine bluish-brown fur, and a gentle disposition. It was the Glacier Rat (Stenomys richardsoni), which is only found in this region, and is a delight to handle. The third species was a small, chunky, short-tailed rat with a pinched face, the likes of which I had never seen before. With a million things to do, and some hard decisions to make, however, I lacked the time to examine it closely.
Back in camp, everyone's spirits seemed restored somewhat by the warmth of the morning light. Boeadi had eaten his egg and was at peace with the world, and Yonas's teeth had survived a breakfast of sweet potato. I gathered everyone together and announced my decision. Boeadi, Alex and all but one of the hunters would take the children and proceed down the valley to the security post at the upper end of the mine. I, along with Yonas, would make a dash for the glacier, and meet them at the post that afternoon.
Setting off up the valley, I felt a terrible guilt gnawing at me. Had I deserted the children just when they needed me most? But surely Boeadi, as a senior Javanese scientist, would be capable of pulling rank on the security guards if they obstructed our attempts to help the children.
My mind was in turmoil as I walked along, trying to take in the sublime beauty of the scene. The Snow Mountains rose all around, their icy peaks glinting in the sunlight. I could see cliffs, moraines and lakes everywhere. Tiny tussocks poked up through the boulders we passed.
Rice spilled out of discarded foil wrappings had attracted a multitude of birds to the side of the track. I saw the near-legendary Snow Mountains Quail (Anurophasis monorthonyx) several times, a great green honeyeater I had not seen elsewhere, and a number of other birds which are restricted to such high elevations. As we ascended the valley, we left the vegetation behind and began to travel over bare rock. Amid a pile of boulders near some glacial lakes I had a brief sighting of the Snow Mountains Robin (Petroica archboldi). This beautiful, red-breasted creature is unique to the area around the glaciers in Irian Jaya. It is, perhaps, the rarest bird in Melanesia and one of the rarest on the planet. It is a rather sluggish little creature, yet seeing it fulfilled what was, for me, another life-long dream.
The track now passed beside a recent glacial moraine, from which we could see a vast hanging wall of ice perched on the mountain to the left. The eerie milky aqua colour of the craggy ice face was mesmerising. Its size and luminosity dominated the scene. It somehow looked unreal, and I had to remind myself that we were just four degrees from the equator. We slowly advanced up the steepening moraine until I felt ice under my feet. A few metres more and we were standing on a solid sheet of ice: the farthest tip of the Meren Glacier itself.
I sat down on a rock. Between my feet, a strange shape in a greenish piece of rock caught my eye. It was the remains of a kind of sea urchin which had, I knew from my training in geology, lived at the bottom of a shallow, tropical sea some twenty-five million years before. Time, fate and the irresistible forces of plate tectonics had lifted it to the top of New Guinea, almost 5,000 metres
above sea-level. It was exposed in just the right place for me to ponder its journey during the few minutes I spent on top of the world. It had probably broken free of the rock just a few weeks before. A few weeks longer and frost, ice and water would obliterate it.
Yonas interrupted my meditations with a concerned expression on his face. ’Rumah tuan tanah,‘ he whispered, as he pointed to the side of the ice sheet. ‘The home of an earth spirit.’ What did he mean?
I followed him to the edge of the ice. Suddenly its colour changed below my feet, from a deep to a paler blue. Jumping off the glacier, I saw that we had been walking atop a ledge, below which was an ice cave.
I had never seen such a thing before, and was enchanted by the rounded lines and subtle blue, aqua and white of the backlit ice sculpture. Yonas was reluctant to enter the cave, but seeing me go first he jumped down beside me. We sat there in freezing contemplation of our very different worlds.
The sky was darkening. The time for our dash to the security post had come. We set out at speed down the slope with the weather quickly closing in. Yonas was suffering from a severe altitude-induced headache, but he continued to push on.
The last part of the walk to the security post led us through a ghastly quagmire of human making. Just above the mine site lies the once beautiful Carstensz Meadow. Beginning in the 1930s, this meadow was repeatedly studied by a series of researchers, and it and its adjacent glaciers are the only sites in the mountains of Irian Jaya with such a long history of documented environmental change. This, of course, makes them scientifically invaluable, for long-term changes to flora and fauna (such as those arising from global warming) can be measured there.