http://www.economist.com/node/16524650?story_id=16524650#day_two
Day two
FROM Jayapura I book a flight to Wamena. The town lies in the central highlands where the Papuan guerrillas keep their strongholds. The aeroplane passes over a landscape crazed with meandering rivers. Now I understand why there are no roads leading to Wamena. The place is isolated in the extreme. Even eggs have to be flown in. On the outskirt of town, a pick-up truck is waiting. I stop to buy presents for the villagers and rebels I intend to visit. My young companions—most of them are students and members of the National Committee of West Papua—ask for betel nuts and some snacks. They say we will need cigarettes too, for the army checkpoints on the way, and they wouldn’t mind having some for themselves either.
We drive slowly through the scenic Baliem valley. The Dani, the local tribe, were not “discovered” by white men until 1938. Temperatures on the valley floor, with an altitude of approximately 1,600 metres, can get chilly. Our driver has to stop several times to pick up more passengers as well as a plastic tarpaulin, to protect passengers sitting in the bed from the occasional lashing of cold rain. After each stop the car leaves a mark on the road’s surface: a rectangle of red spatter, betel juice spewed out by the passengers.
The farmsteads along the road are surrounded by fences that are capped with thatched roofs to protect their posts. Gardens on the steep hillsides are fenced in the same way. We pass several checkpoints without trouble. At one roadblock, however, I am asked to accompany a soldier to an office. The ambience is relaxed. I show my travel permit and my driver places two cigarette packs on the table. More discreetly, he lays a few banknotes—the equivalent of about ten dollars—on a chair next to the officer in charge. We are then allowed to proceed.
After some hours we leave the road behind and continue on foot. We cross irrigation channels and fields planted with sweet potatoes. Coffee trees grow in the shade of a light forest. Wading in single file through a swamp we reach a fenced village. There is a guard at the gate. Although he has no shoes he tries to click his heels and salutes one of the men in our column, clearly a commander among the guerrillas. Inside the fence about two dozen villagers are standing under a big tree. As we approach them they start crying. For several minutes tears stream down their faces, some of which are marked with clay. My companions explain that this is a way of mourning the many Papuans killed during the struggle for independence. Smearing one’s face with clay is a sign of grief.
Soon after, a squad of about 30 militiamen arrive. They carry wooden spears, bows and arrows, all fashioned without a single bit of metal. Two colonels, both barefoot, also form part of the detachment. One of them wears a long beard and carries a suitcase. He says he came from neighbouring Papua New Guinea where the guerrillas’ supreme commander, Mathias Wenda, has his headquarters. The villagers bring out a pig in my honour. While two men hold the poor animal’s feet, a third shoots an arrow made of bamboo right through the heart. I have never seen a faster and more effective way of slaughtering. While the meat is barbecued, the fighters and villagers sing and dance. Some of the women are dressed in grass skirts, and one of the men wears nothing more than a traditional penis quiver and a woollen cap.
The students prepared a speech that one of the two colonels will read aloud for the rest of us. They want to give me a copy too, but first they need to put the official seal on it. With their first effort, they stamp the paper with the seal of the National Liberation Army of West Papua (TPN). But this rebel outfit, the armed wing of the Free Papua Movement (OPM), has been renamed the Revolutionary Army of West Papua (TRPB). No matter, the rebels quickly find the right rubber stamp and correct the error. The colonel from Papua New Guinea draws another document from his suitcase. It is a neatly done booklet about the rebel movement, including displays of all its insignia.
Villagers and militiamen take turns joining in a rallying cry: Papua merdeka! Because many hundreds of languages are spoken on the island of New Guinea, the rebels here converse in Bahasa Indonesia, the national tongue of their enemies, in which merdeka means freedom or independence. The militia pick up their weapons to perform some military drills. It is not easy to pivot briskly with a three-metre-long spear on one’s shoulder or to present arms with a bow and a loose bundle of arrows. The only modern weapon I see on this day is an air rifle used to shoot birds. The guerrillas also have a few automatic rifles, according to photos they show me.
Once the pork is cooked, I am given the honour of distributing the meat. With the first few drops of a rainfall we retreat into a hut with a floor of matted straw. The men begin to tell stories of their struggle. I have been told that this can last hours, and it does. Just before dawn I find the chance to explain that we need to make our way back to the vehicle. Some of the fighters and villagers accompany us to the road. We say good-bye and one of the commanders asks me to tell the world the story of the Papuans’ struggle.
Day three
THE next trick is to find a way out of Wamena. The only airline with seats available is a company whose track record includes ten crashes and forced landings. Flying can be hazardous anywhere in Indonesia, and the same is at least as true of Papua. If I am to move on quickly, however, I have no choice. When the aeroplane does arrive, after a long delay, I quickly learn that the carrier is looking out for the safety of its passengers, at least as far as crash landings on water are concerned. A sign on each seat kindly asks the passenger to refrain from stealing the life vest.
Airborne and soon approaching the Timika airport we cross over a river. Crowds of Indonesian men stand knee-deep in running water working their jigs. They are panning for nuggets of gold that might have been flushed down from the nearby mountains. Upriver lies the Grasberg mining complex, one of the biggest and most lucrative gold and copper mines in the world. The mine has been dug out over decades by Freeport-McMoRan, the American copper-and-gold giant.
Freeport’s name is omnipresent at the airport. Timika owes its existence to the mining company. Before heading to Timika proper I stop at the nearest police post to have my travel permit stamped. The police who issued me the permit, back in Jayapura, granted me permission to visit Timika but not Tembagapura, the town next to the Grasberg mine. “This is the area of the Americans. You cannot go there,” the officer in charge explained.
Since last July there have been several shootings along the road linking Timika with Tembagapura. Three men were killed: a Freeport employee, a security guard and a policeman. There were scores of wounded as well. This is why security is tight in Timika. There are almost no police or soldiers in sight but my rebel contacts assure me that there are plenty of plainclothes officers around. It is difficult to arrange my meeting with local representatives of the guerrillas and activists of the National Committee of West Papua. At last a car picks me up in front of a supermarket. We drive a meandering route to confuse or evade the security forces who might be watching us or following.
The passenger in the front seat, a man wearing a beard, dreadlocks and a black T-shirt, seems to be the commander. He welcomes me and expresses his hope that my work will contribute to the liberation of Papua. At one point he even asks me whether I could help him with the purchase of weapons. Like the other guerrillas I have met, he talks at length about Papua’s history: mainly about Indonesia’s efforts in the years after the second world war to annex Dutch New Guinea, including their threat, in 1961, to stage an invasion. The Netherlands were reluctant to relinquish the territory but the Americans convinced them to talk to the Indonesians. Those talks eventually evolved into the so-called Act of Free Choice in 1969. A handpicked group of around 1,000 tribal leaders were forced by General Suharto’s government to vote for unification with Indonesia, or so the rebel insists.
Official documents released by America’s National Security Archive in Washington, DC, reveal what the Americans were thinking at the time. They knew perfectly well that there was no element of free choice in the Act of Free Choice. In July 1969 the American embassy in Jakarta sent a confidential cable to Washington saying that the Act of Free Choice was unfolding “like a Greek tragedy, the conclusion preordained”. Jakarta could and would not permit any resolution other than the inclusion of Papua into Indonesia, the memo stated. America’s ambassador offered an estimate: as many as 85-90% of all Papuans favoured independence. But, this being the height of the Vietnam war, the Americans saw Indonesia as an indispensable ally in the region. And their tacit support for Indonesia’s position on Papua had already been rewarded handsomely: in 1967, a year after Suharto seized power in Jakarta, a new foreign-investment law was passed. The first company to take advantage of the new opportunities was Freeport. It has maintained the Grasberg concession ever since.
The helicopter to GrasbergThe Americans make a lot of money with the Grasberg mine but we Papuans get nothing, complains the rebel, from the car’s passenger seat. Though Freeport employs many Papuans, the company remains hugely unpopular with the natives who live in the mountains surrounding the mine. Later I meet Freeport employees who tell of angry villagers shooting volleys of arrows at the helicopters that fly overhead, ferrying exploration teams into the hills. Around 3,000 Indonesian soldiers and police are on guard to protect the mining facilities. The army has a financial interest in the smooth continuation of mining operations, says one foreign mining worker. “They take their cut from the restaurants we visit in Timika, and even the brothels are owned by army officers,” he explains. Indonesia has become a democracy but in Papua the army still seems to function as a state within the state. Because of the huge amounts of money that change hands in the mining and natural-gas business, it is hard to imagine that this will change anytime soon.