INFO PAPUA: Papua Barat Berita
Indonesia Timor Timur selanjutnya?
New Statesman
26 Maret 2010, 15:04
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Emas terbesar dan tembaga di dunia berdiri di antara Papua Barat dan harapannya untuk kemerdekaan. Julian Evansreports
New Guinea yang merupakan pulau terbesar ketiga di dunia, namun kita tahu sedikit tentang hal itu. Setengah bagian timur, Papua Nugini, dilihat sebagai masalah australia anak, mandiri tapi tidak mandiri. Setengah bagian barat, Papua Barat, kita tahu bahkan kurang.
Blipped negara ke barat berita-peta pada tahun 1996, ketika empat Inggris lulusan ilmu disandera oleh "Organisasi Papua" gerilyawan, tapi surat kabar diberhentikan orang Papua sebagai "Zaman Batu teroris". Dan ketika, pada tanggal 4 Juni tahun ini, Kedua Kongres Rakyat Papua dengan suara bulat menyatakan kemerdekaan Papua Barat dari Indonesia, hampir tak ada gumaman di pers Inggris.
Jakarta bereaksi lebih tegas, mengutuk kongres itu sebagai "tidak sah", peringatan Papua bahwa kemerdekaan adalah "bukan pilihan" dan bahwa pasukan keamanan akan bertindak untuk menjaga ketertiban. Amerika Serikat dan Jepang, diikuti oleh Uni Eropa, yang didukung Presiden Indonesia, Abdurrahman Wahid; Australia mengeluarkan pernyataan yang mengakui integritas teritorial Indonesia. The Indonesia kehadiran tentara dan polisi di Papua Barat telah diperkuat dari 8.000 menjadi 12.000, dan Jakarta telah memperingatkan lebih untuk datang.
Ada laporan di Asian pers bahwa, seperti yang terjadi di Timor Timur, milisi pro-Indonesia telah muncul. Belajar dari Timor Timur, Papua telah menyusun dan milisi mereka sendiri, di jalanan, di mana terdapat gangguan biasa, muncul sisi berimbang.
Bagi Indonesia, proklamasi kemerdekaan lain begitu cepat setelah kehilangan Timor Timur akan sulit untuk menelan. Namun kepedulian terbesar sejauh ini adalah Papua Barat sumber daya alam yang luar biasa.
Tersembunyi pada 4.000 meter di biru-hitam kisaran interiornya, Papua Barat memiliki cadangan terbesar emas di planet ini. Dalam laporan tahunan 1998 dari perusahaan pertambangan Inggris Rio Tinto plc, saham emas di New Guinea diberikan sebagai lebih dari 19 juta ons. Rio Tinto memiliki 12,5 persen saham di Grasberg Papua, ditambah lagi 40 persen saham dalam ekspansi. Tambang ini dimiliki oleh Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold, yang berbasis di New Orleans, yang cadangan emas di Grasberg berdiri di 85 juta ons. Emas Grasberg is worth $ 21.5bn. Tambang juga merupakan sumber terbesar ketiga tembaga, dengan cadangan sebesar 32 juta ton.
Papua Barat adalah sebesar Spanyol, tetapi sebagian besar itu begitu padat dengan hutan dan rawa bahwa mereka tidak pernah dipetakan. Hanya lebih dari satu juta orang Papua (sisanya transmigran) milik ratusan suku klan, banyak yang tinggal jauh di hutan, tanpa ikatan etnis atau agama mereka penguasa muslim. Di dataran tinggi, orang-orang berburu kasuari dan kanguru pohon dengan busur dan anak panah, sementara para wanita tenaga kerja di kebun, memasak dan perawat: itu tidak jarang menemukan ibu menyusui dengan seorang anak di salah satu payudara dan di sisi lain anak babi . Untuk melihat hal-hal ini adalah untuk melihat awal kita kemanusiaan.
Padang gurun ini Freeport-McMoRan datang pada tahun 1967, dengan restu dari pemerintah Indonesia. Tidak ada tambang di bumi bergerak sebanyak batu setiap hari sebagai Grasberg. Ketika saya mengunjungi Papua Barat pada tahun 1986, perusahaan memproduksi 16.000 ton bijih per hari dari tambang di dekatnya. Dua tahun kemudian, Grasberg diungkapkan plug yang besar dari tembaga-bijih emas, yang telah berdiri di batu selama tiga juta tahun sebagai gletser khatulistiwa maju dan mundur di sekitarnya. Sekarang produksi adalah antara 200.000 dan 300.000 ton bijih per hari.
Freeport kontrak pertama ditandatangani dengan Indonesia pada bulan April 1967. Papua Barat telah datang di bawah pemerintahan Indonesia sementara empat tahun sebelumnya. Belanda tidak ingin menyerahkannya dengan sisa kerajaan Hindia Timur mereka, tapi Presiden Soekarno mulai memamerkan persahabatan baru dengan Uni Soviet, dan Amerika Serikat mengambil ketakutan. Persetujuan New York tahun 1962, ditengahi oleh Perserikatan Bangsa-Bangsa, tetapi koreografer oleh Washington, membayar layanan bibir ke Bahasa Belanda desakan terhadap penentuan nasib sendiri. Berdasarkan perjanjian tersebut, Indonesia diizinkan enam tahun kekuasaan sementara sebelum itu untuk berkonsultasi di Papua apakah atau tidak mereka ingin dicaplok. Seperti di Timor Timur, pasukan Indonesia diberikan tanggung jawab untuk keamanan.
Yang konsultasi, yang dikenal sebagai "Act of Free Choice", diadakan pada 2 Agustus 1969. Papua yang 1.025 anggota dewan yang berkumpul di markas besar tentara di ibukota, Jayapura, diberitahu oleh utusan Presiden Suharto bahwa siapa pun yang memilih melawan Indonesia akan dicabut lidahnya atau akan ditembak di tempat. Pemungutan suara untuk integrasi bulat. Provinsi Irian Jaya telah dibuat, dan dunia disuguhi sebuah absurditas geopolitik: anti-kolonialisme dan neokolonialisme yang digunakan secara bergantian dalam kepentingan Amerika obsesi komunisme.
Antara tahun 1963 dan 1969, ada banyak operasi untuk memecahkan Bahasa Indonesia Papua protes, termasuk semak berdarah perang oleh OPM - Organisasi Papua Merdeka ( "Papua Merdeka") - perlawanan pejuang. Dalam 37 tahun sejak pasukan Indonesia tiba, setidaknya 45.000 diyakini telah tewas, kebanyakan di desa-desa dibom dan dibakar dan di depopulasi sistematis, pemerkosaan dan pembunuhan di luar hukum dari populasi. Pada tahun 1967 saja, 3.500 orang Papua dibunuh. Laporan kekejaman oleh tentara Indonesia telah menjadi begitu gigih itu, pada tanggal 5 April 1967 di House of Lords, Tuhan Ogmore menyerukan penyelidikan PBB. Itu juga merayakan hari bahwa Freeport penandatanganan kontrak.
Hubungan antara dua peristiwa ini lebih dari kebetulan. Perusahaan pertambangan ada menumpuk pada nilai. Tambang Grasberg pembangunan - tidak melupakan kontribusi Rio Tinto - begitu erat karier mirror Indonesia di Papua Barat itu patut dipertimbangkan dua secara paralel. Ada pertanyaan, misalnya, dari legalitas kontrak Freeport tahun 1967, sebuah kontrak Indonesia mungkin tidak memiliki hak legal untuk hibah. Terdapat juga ayat-ayat itu, antara 1991 dan 1997, perusahaan menyediakan jaminan pinjaman $ 673m untuk tujuan membeli saham Freeport selama tiga Indonesia memiliki hubungan dekat dengan Presiden Suharto atau para menteri (salah satu pengusaha yang terlibat, Muhamad "Bob" Hasan, ajudan Soeharto yang memperkenalkan CEO Freeport Jim-Bob Moffett ke lingkaran keluarga presiden, ditangkap tahun ini sehubungan dengan kasus penipuan).
Pada bulan Juli 1999, saya terbang dari Darwin melintasi Laut Arafura ke Timika, timah yang mengepak-dan-beton kekacauan yang adalah titik pendekatan terdekat tambang; dari sebuah desa yang terdiri 200 orang 25 tahun yang lalu, sekarang memiliki populasi mendekati 80.000 .
Aku melakukan perjalanan pertama ke Aikwa sungai, semen leher berwarna air beberapa kilometer lebar yang menerima ribuan ton tailing tambang (batu bubuk kiri dari proses penggilingan) per hari. Aku berdiri di tanggul dengan manajer lingkungan Freeport, mengamati pemandangan terpencil di bawah langit menggelegar. Akhirnya, diperkirakan, 220 kilometer persegi dataran rendah Papua akan ditenggelamkan oleh tailing. Aku menunjuk ke cakrawala di jauh bank, terluka oleh pohon mati kilometer. Manajer berkata dengan riang: "Oh, mereka baru saja memiliki sistem akar mereka dicekik oleh tailing. Tak sedap dipandang, bukan? Tapi kami akan memotong mereka."
Pemandangan hilir tidak dapat mempersiapkan Anda untuk tambang. Pertama, ada jalan akses yang spektakuler. Tidak ada kaki bukit: puncak biru rentang Jayawijaya meledak secara vertikal ke atas melalui titik beku kabut sutra, jadi insinyur hanya Freeport mencukur puncak-puncak dari garis tepi pisau-pegunungan sampai permukaannya cukup lebar untuk dua 40-ton truk untuk berlalu. Lebih tinggi, saluran pipa tambang tersebut berjalan telanjang di pinggir jalan, membawa pergi berkonsentrasi bijih besi tanker yang sedang menunggu di pantai. Pada tahun 1977, sebagai pembalasan expropriations tanah dan hanya bersenjatakan pisau gergaji besi, OPM pejuang dan penduduk desa memotong pipa ini. Tentara membalas dengan Operasi Tumpas ( "Operasi Annihilation"), pengeboman, meroket dan pemberondongan desa dengan US-disediakan OV-10 Bronco pesawat tempur.
Di Mile 68, ada Tembagapura, tambang tampak membosankan kotapraja; di Mile 74, sebuah trem kabel transport Anda kilometer terakhir dan satu setengah melalui awan ke puncak Grasberg. Iris seperti telur rebus, kerucut terbalik besar di tengahnya adalah pendalaman dari tahun ke tahun sebagai bijih besi yang terkutuk dan terbawa ke permukaan dalam yang tidak pernah berakhir kafilah dari 200-ton truk.
Untuk suku Amungme dataran tinggi, di tambang yang tanahnya berdiri, hasilnya telah menjadi bencana rohani. Bumi mereka berjalan pada nenek moyang mereka adalah ibu, gunung kepalanya. Setiap kali seseorang meninggal, mereka dulu dibawa ke puncak Grasberg. Tambang adalah mencongkel keluar otak ibu mereka di depan mata mereka.
Tambang dan infrastruktur adalah karya teknik yang tak diragukan, namun orang Papua 'kebencian datang di bawah beberapa judul: perusahaan pemindahan paksa di dataran tinggi di dataran rendah berawa; rumor berlebih hubungan dekat dengan militer Indonesia; dengan catatan lingkungan dan dugaan tanggung jawab untuk pelanggaran hak asasi manusia; dan uang. Mana uang? Papua Barat harus menjadi provinsi paling bankable di republik, namun tetap ekonomis mundur, kekayaannya tersedot ke Freeport pemegang saham dan ke Jakarta.
Namun mungkin pertanyaan utama bahkan bukan tentang uang. Sebagai kepala kantor keuskupan Katolik, Bruder Theo van den Broek, dikatakan: "Ini adalah: tanah saya. Aku. Di mana aku dalam seluruh cerita ini?"
Mungkin karena bau Freeport perubahan politik, pada tahun lalu, telah bergerak cepat batu. Sebulan yang lalu, sebuah slide batu limbah ke Danau Wanagon dikuburkan empat karyawan kontraktor dan melukai 18 lainnya. Bruder Theo percaya bahwa kecepatan ekstraksi besar yang menyebabkan masalah-masalah lingkungan. Meskipun perusahaan telah menyatakan tagihan bersih kesehatan dari audit lingkungan hidup yang independen, walikota wilayah Timika baru-baru ini memerintahkan masyarakat setempat untuk berhenti makan Tambelo - bekicot air yang merupakan pokok dari makanan dataran rendah - karena dicurigai kadar tembaga tinggi. Pada konsentrasi kurang dari dua bagian per juta (ppm), tembaga dapat menyebabkan kerusakan usus dan lainnya. Aikwa's tembaga yang tingkat sekitar 10ppm; logam lainnya yang berkaitan dengan bijih emas-bantalan termasuk merkuri, arsenik, barium, kadmium dan timah. CEO bersemangat Freeport membubarkan dampak lingkungan dari tambang sebagai "setara dengan saya kencing di Laut Arafura".
Tetapi sumber utama kemarahan tetap perusahaan hubungan dengan militer Indonesia. Freeport tidak dapat memisahkan diri dari tentara: tentara adalah karena Freeport ada di sana. Reguler Papua protes terhadap tambang secara rutin dipenuhi oleh tentara pembalasan. Sebuah laporan Gereja Katolik mengikuti serangkaian serangan militer di 1994-95, bagian dari "operasi pembersihan" terhadap OPM, tercantum pembunuhan, penyiksaan, penahanan dan penghilangan orang Papua. Kasus yang paling terkenal adalah tentang lima orang dari keluarga Kwalik. Ditangkap dan disiksa, mereka kemudian menghilang dan masih hilang. Beberapa bulan kemudian, Kwalik lain, seorang mantan guru bernama Kelly, diculik dan disandera kelompok riset Inggris ilmuwan.
Sehari sebelum aku pergi Timika, saya bertemu dengan Kelly Kwalik ibu, Ibu Josefa, seorang tokoh kuno terikat di kain terang, seperti dipoles dan dibungkus dengan hati-hati antik. Dia telah menemukan dirinya dalam penjara pada tahun 1995 "karena mereka pikir aku memberi perintah. Aku berada di dalam penjara selama satu bulan dan tiga hari. Ini adalah toilet dengan air sampai ke lutut." The "toilet" Josefa disebutkan adalah wadah pengangkutan baja beku. Dia dan sembilan orang lain yang harus berdiri di kotoran mereka sendiri selama satu bulan. Dia menjadi buta mata kirinya sebagai hasilnya.
Bruder Theo berpendapat bahwa ada antara 2.000 dan 4.000 tentara dan pasukan khusus pasukan di sekitar Timika, lebih banyak di desa-desa sekitar tambang. "Mereka meminta mobil dan fasilitas, dan Freeport setuju. Salah satu eksekutif senior berkata kepadaku:" Kami tidak menyukainya, tapi kami merasa aman. "" Selama kunjungan saya, saya diperkenalkan kepada sejumlah pejabat Freeport, termasuk seorang Amerika bernama Tom Green, yang bertanggung jawab atas "kantor penghubung masyarakat". Kemudian saya menemukan bahwa, sebelum bergabung dengan Freeport, ia pernah menjadi atase militer di kedutaan AS di Jakarta.
Kembali di London, saya menerima beberapa surat dari pengacara Amerika yang mewakili orang-orang suku Amungme. Lengkap tetapi mengungkapkan, mereka mengandung bukti bahwa Freeport telah dianggarkan untuk melengkapi militer untuk memungkinkannya melaksanakan peran kekerasan. Pada tahun tersebut - mungkin pada paruh kedua tahun 1990-an - perusahaan keuangan budgetingto bangunan markas militer, rumah jaga, barak, lapangan parade, amunisi-penyimpanan, air, listrik dan bahan bakar instalasi, bola voli dan tenis, tiang-tiang bendera dan tulisan isyarat. Dalam daftar persyaratan untuk proyek Freeport arsitek, draughtsmen dan insinyur, penyediaan telah dibuat selama dua tentara penasihat. Jumlah yang besar, mengingat bahwa surat-surat tidak lengkap: untuk tentara $ 5.160.770, untuk polisi $ 4.060.000.
Pada akhir bulan lalu, ketua Kongres Rakyat Papua, Theys Eluay, dan wakilnya, Tom Beanal, yang akan bertemu Presiden Wahid di Jakarta untuk menyampaikan proklamasi kemerdekaan kongres. Pertemuan itu dibatalkan, dan Eluay dan Beanal mungkin segera menghadapi tuduhan pengkhianatan. Tidak ada pihak yang memiliki ruang untuk manuver. Jika nasib Papua Barat masih merupakan masalah dalam negeri, Presiden Wahid kemungkinan akan tunduk kepada para jendral, dan nasionalisme Papua akan terkandung oleh penindasan militer. Tapi ada masalah, juga, dalam mengambil isu Papua Barat menentukan nasib sendiri kembali ke Perserikatan Bangsa-Bangsa.
Karena setiap diplomat PBB tahu, Indonesia telah memiliki pelajaran baru-baru ini dalam konsep keadilan internasional - di Timor Timur - dan tidak akan mentolerir lain. Papua Barat bahkan lebih penting ke Jakarta, dan Papua nasionalisme lebih berpotensi tidak stabil, di dalam dan di luar Indonesia. Grasberg, 4.000 meter di selatan-barat dataran tinggi, adalah tempat berpijak ekonomi. Freeport adalah salah satu terbesar di Indonesia pajak dan royalti sumber-sumber dan memiliki lisensi untuk calon pelanggan lain-hektar 2,6 juta daerah, sejauh perbatasan Papua Nugini. Kemungkinan kekayaan mineral mengungkapkan bahwa Jakarta tidak akan meninggalkan tanpa perlawanan.
Perkelahian Oleh karena itu, semua juga mungkin. Jika poli-vertikal bergerak untuk mengamankan kemerdekaan Papua goyah gagal atau terlalu lama, komandan OPM mengindikasikan bahwa strategi masa depan mereka akan berkonsentrasi pada penargetan ekonomi. Freeport adalah rentan terhadap serangan gerilya: Grasberg pekerja ingat, mengingat bahwa ada yang bekerja di sana, bagaimana Panguna menguntungkan tambang di Bougainville dekat Pulau ini ditutup pada awal 1990-an: semua Tentara Revolusioner Bougainville harus dilakukannya adalah meledakkan pembangkit listrik dan pembunuhan beberapa ekspatriat. Panguna belum dibuka kembali. Tanpa kehadiran tentara Indonesia dan kesiapan untuk menimbulkan pembalasan, yang perkasa Grasberg akan terekspos seperti Panguna.
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Senin, 29 Maret 2010
INFO PAPUA : West Papua News
Indonesia's next East Timor?
By New Statesman
Mar 26, 2010, 15:04
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The biggest gold and copper mine in the world stands between West Papua and its hopes for independence. Julian Evansreports
New Guinea is the third-largest island in the world, yet we know little of it. The eastern half, Papua New Guinea, is seen as Australia's problem child, independent but not self-reliant. Of the western half, West Papua, we know even less.
The country blipped on to the western news-map in 1996, when four British science graduates were taken hostage by "Free Papua" guerrillas, but newspapers dismissed the Papuans as "Stone Age terrorists". And when, on 4 June this year, the Second Papuan People's Congress unanimously declared West Papua's independence from Indonesia, there was barely a murmur in the British press.
Jakarta reacted more forcefully, condemning the congress as "illegitimate", warning Papuans that independence was "not an option" and that security forces would act to maintain order. The United States and Japan, followed by the European Union, backed Indonesia's president, Abdurrahman Wahid; Australia issued a statement acknowledging Indonesia's territorial integrity. The Indonesian army and police presence in West Papua has been reinforced from 8,000 to 12,000, and Jakarta has warned of more to come.
There are reports in the Asian press that, as happened in East Timor, pro-Indonesian militias have appeared. Learning from the East Timorese, Papuans have assembled their own militias and, on the streets, where there are regular disturbances, the sides appear evenly matched.
For Indonesia, another proclamation of independence so soon after the loss of East Timor would be hard to swallow. But its greatest concern by far is West Papua's extraordinary natural resources.
Hidden at 4,000 metres in the blue-black ranges of its interior, West Papua possesses the largest reserve of gold on the planet. In the 1998 annual report of the British mining company Rio Tinto plc, gold stocks in New Guinea are given as just over 19 million ounces. Rio Tinto has a 12.5 per cent shareholding in Papua's Grasberg mine, plus a further 40 per cent share in its expansion. The mine is owned by Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold, based in New Orleans, whose gold reserves at Grasberg stand at 85 million ounces. Grasberg's gold is worth $21.5bn. The mine is also the third-largest source of copper, with reserves of 32 million tonnes.
West Papua is as big as Spain, but large parts of it are so dense with jungle and swamp that they have never been mapped. Just over a million Papuans (the rest are transmigrants) belong to hundreds of tribal clans, many living deep in the bush, with no ethnic or religious ties to their Muslim rulers. In the highlands, the men hunt cassowary and tree kangaroos with bows and arrows, while the women labour in the gardens, cook and nurse: it isn't uncommon to find a nursing mother with a child at one breast and a piglet at the other. To see these things is to glimpse our earliest humanity.
To this wilderness came Freeport-McMoRan in 1967, with the blessing of the Indonesian government. No mine on earth moves as much rock each day as Grasberg. When I visited West Papua in 1986, the company was producing 16,000 tonnes of ore a day from a nearby mine. Two years later, Grasberg disclosed its huge plug of copper-gold ore, which had stood in the rock for three million years as equatorial glaciers advanced and retreated around it. Now production is between 200,000 and 300,000 tonnes of ore a day.
Freeport's first contract was signed with Indonesia in April 1967. West Papua had come under interim Indonesian rule four years earlier. The Dutch had not wanted to hand it over with the rest of their East Indies empire, but President Sukarno began to flaunt his new friendship with the Soviet Union, and the United States took fright. The New York Agreement of 1962, brokered by the United Nations but choreographed by Washington, paid lip service to Dutch insistence on self-determination. Under the agreement, Indonesia was allowed six years of interim rule before it had to consult the Papuans as to whether or not they wanted to be annexed. As in East Timor, Indonesian troops were given responsibility for security.
That consultation, known as the "Act of Free Choice", was held on 2 August 1969. The 1,025 Papuan council members who assembled at the army headquarters in the capital, Jayapura, were told by President Suharto's envoy that anyone who voted against Indonesia would have his tongue torn out or be shot on the spot. The vote for integration was unanimous. The province of Irian Jaya was created, and the world was treated to a geopolitical absurdity: anti-colonialism and neocolonialism being used interchangeably in the interests of America's obsession with communism.
Between 1963 and 1969, there were countless Indonesian operations to break Papuan protests, including a bloody bush war by OPM - Organisasi Papua Merdeka ("Free Papua Movement") - resistance fighters. In the 37 years since Indonesian troops arrived, at least 45,000 are believed to have been killed, mostly in villages bombed and burned and in the systematic depopulation, rape and extrajudicial murder of the population. In 1967 alone, 3,500 Papuans were killed. Reports of atrocities by Indonesian soldiers had become so persistent that, on 5 April 1967 in the House of Lords, Lord Ogmore called for a UN investigation. That was also the day that Freeport celebrated the signing of its contract.
The connection between these two events is more than coincidental. Mining companies exist to pile on value. The Grasberg mine's development - not forgetting the contribution of Rio Tinto - so closely mirrors Indonesia's career in West Papua that it is worth considering the two in parallel. There is the question, for example, of the legality of Freeport's 1967 contract, a contract Indonesia probably had no legal right to grant. There have also been revelations that, between 1991 and 1997, the company provided loan guarantees of $673m for the purpose of buying Freeport stock for three Indonesians with close ties to President Suharto or his ministers (one of the businessmen involved, Mohammed "Bob" Hasan, the Suharto aide who introduced Freeport's CEO Jim-Bob Moffett into the president's family circle, was arrested this year in connection with a fraud case).
In July 1999, I flew from Darwin across the Arafura Sea to Timika, the flapping tin-and-concrete mess that is the nearest approach point to the mine; from a village of 200 people 25 years ago, it now has a population approaching 80,000.
I travelled first to the Aikwa river, a cement-coloured throat of water several kilometres wide that receives thousands of tonnes of mine tailings (the rock powder left from the milling process) per day. I stood on the levee with Freeport's environmental manager, surveying a desolate spectacle under a thunderous sky. Eventually, it is estimated, 220 square kilometres of Papuan lowlands will be drowned by tailings. I pointed to the horizon on the far bank, scarred by kilometres of dead trees. The manager said cheerfully: "Oh, they've just had their root systems suffocated by tailings. Unsightly, aren't they? But we'll be cutting them down."
The sight downriver cannot prepare you for the mine. First, there is the spectacular access road. There are no foothills: the blue peaks of the Jayawijaya range burst vertically upwards through the freezing silken mists, so Freeport engineers simply shaved off the crests of a line of knife-edge ridges until the surface was wide enough for two 40-tonne trucks to pass. Higher up, the mine's pipeline runs bare by the roadside, carrying away the ore concentrate to the waiting tankers on the coast. In 1977, in retaliation for land expropriations and armed only with hacksaw blades, OPM fighters and villagers cut this pipe. The army retaliated with Operasi Tumpas ("Operation Annihilation"), bombing, rocketing and strafing villages with US-supplied OV-10 Bronco warplanes.
At Mile 68, there is Tembagapura, the mine's dull-looking township; at Mile 74, a cable tramway transports you the last kilometre and a half through the clouds to the Grasberg's summit. Sliced like a boiled egg, the huge inverted cone at its centre is deepening year by year as the ore is blasted out and borne to the surface in a never- ending caravan of 200-tonne trucks.
For the highland Amungme tribe, on whose land the mine stands, the result has been a spiritual cataclysm. The earth they walk on is their ancestral mother, the mountain her head. Whenever someone died, they used to be taken to the Grasberg's summit. The mine is gouging out their mother's brains before their eyes.
The mine and its infrastructure are an undoubted engineering masterpiece, yet the Papuans' resentment comes under several headings: the company's forcible resettlement of highlanders in the swampy lowlands; the rumours of over-close ties to the Indonesian military; its environmental record and alleged responsibility for human-rights abuses; and money. Where is the money? West Papua should be the most bankable province in the republic, but it remains economically backward, its riches siphoned off to Freeport stockholders and to Jakarta.
Yet perhaps the main question is not even about money. As the head of the Catholic diocese office, Brother Theo van den Broek, puts it: "It is: my land. Me. Where am I in this whole story?"
Possibly because Freeport smells political change, in the past year, it has been moving rock fast. A month ago, a slide of rock waste into Lake Wanagon buried four contractor's employees and injured 18 others. Brother Theo believes the enormous speed of extraction is causing environmental problems. Although the company has claimed a clean bill of health from an independent environmental audit, the mayor of the Timika region recently ordered local people to stop eating tambelo - a water snail that is a staple of the lowland diet - because of suspected high copper levels. At concentrations of less than two parts per million (ppm), copper can cause intestinal and other damage. The Aikwa's copper level is around 10ppm; other metals associated with gold-bearing ores include mercury, arsenic, barium, cadmium and lead. Freeport's ebullient CEO dismisses the environmental impact of the mine as "the equivalent of me pissing in the Arafura Sea".
But the chief source of anger remains the company's ties with the Indonesian military. Freeport cannot dissociate itself from the army: the army is there because Freeport is there. Regular Papuan protests against the mine are routinely met by army reprisals. A Catholic Church report following a series of army attacks in 1994-95, part of a "cleansing operation" against the OPM, listed killings, torture, detention and disappearance of Papuans. The most notorious case was of five men from the Kwalik family. Arrested and tortured, they subsequently vanished and are still missing. Several months later, another Kwalik, an ex-teacher named Kelly, abducted and held hostage the group of British research scientists.
The day before I left Timika, I met Kelly Kwalik's mother, Ibu Josefa, an old- fashioned figure bound in bright cloth, like a polished and carefully wrapped antique. She had found herself in jail in 1995 "because they thought I was giving orders. I was in jail for a month and three days. It was a toilet with water up to my knees." The "toilet" Josefa mentioned was a freezing steel freight container. She and nine others had had to stand in their own excrement for a month. She became blind in her left eye as a result.
Brother Theo reckons that there are between 2,000 and 4,000 army and special forces troops around Timika, more in the hamlets surrounding the mine. "They ask for cars and facilities, and Freeport agrees. One senior executive said to me: 'We don't like it either, but we feel safe.'" During my visit, I was introduced to a number of Freeport officials, including an American called Tom Green, in charge of the "community liaison office". Later I found that, prior to joining Freeport, he had been a military attache at the US embassy in Jakarta.
Back in London, I received some papers from an American lawyer who had represented the Amungme people. Incomplete but revealing, they contained evidence that Freeport has budgeted to equip the military to enable it to perform its violent role. In the year in question - probably the second half of the 1990s - the company was budgetingto finance military headquarters buildings, guard-houses, barracks, parade grounds, ammunition-storage, water, power and fuel installations, tennis and volleyball courts, flagpoles and signwriting. In a list of requirements for Freeport project architects, draughtsmen and engineers, provision had been made for two army advisers. The amounts are substantial, given that the papers weren't complete: for the army $5,160,770, for the police $4,060,000.
At the end of last month, the chairman of the Papuan People's Congress, Theys Eluay, and his deputy, Tom Beanal, were due to meet President Wahid in Jakarta to present the congress's independence proclamation. The meeting was cancelled, and Eluay and Beanal may soon face treason charges. Neither side has room for manoeuvre. If West Papua's fate remains an internal matter, President Wahid is likely to defer to his generals, and Papuan nationalism will be contained by military repression. But there are problems, too, in taking the issue of West Papuan self- determination back to the United Nations.
As every UN diplomat knows, Indonesia has had a recent lesson in the concept of international justice - in East Timor - and will not tolerate another. West Papua is even more vital to Jakarta, and Papuan nationalism more potentially destabilising, inside and outside Indonesia. Grasberg, 4,000 metres up in the south-west highlands, is an economic beachhead. Freeport is one of Indonesia's biggest tax and royalty sources and has a licence to prospect another 2.6 million-hectare area, as far as the Papua New Guinea border. It is likely to reveal mineral wealth that Jakarta will not abandon without a fight.
A fight is, therefore, all too likely. If poli-tical moves to secure Papuan independence fail or falter too long, OPM commanders have indicated that their future strategy will concentrate on economic targeting. Freeport is vulnerable to guerrilla attack: Grasberg workers remember, given that some were employed there, how the profitable Panguna mine on nearby Bougainville Island was closed in the early 1990s: all the Bougainville Revolutionary Army had to do was blow up a power plant and murder a couple of expatriates. Panguna has not reopened. Without the Indonesian army's presence and readiness to inflict reprisals, the mighty Grasberg mine would be as exposed as Panguna.
http://www.newstatesman.com/200007100026
Indonesia's next East Timor?
By New Statesman
Mar 26, 2010, 15:04
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The biggest gold and copper mine in the world stands between West Papua and its hopes for independence. Julian Evansreports
New Guinea is the third-largest island in the world, yet we know little of it. The eastern half, Papua New Guinea, is seen as Australia's problem child, independent but not self-reliant. Of the western half, West Papua, we know even less.
The country blipped on to the western news-map in 1996, when four British science graduates were taken hostage by "Free Papua" guerrillas, but newspapers dismissed the Papuans as "Stone Age terrorists". And when, on 4 June this year, the Second Papuan People's Congress unanimously declared West Papua's independence from Indonesia, there was barely a murmur in the British press.
Jakarta reacted more forcefully, condemning the congress as "illegitimate", warning Papuans that independence was "not an option" and that security forces would act to maintain order. The United States and Japan, followed by the European Union, backed Indonesia's president, Abdurrahman Wahid; Australia issued a statement acknowledging Indonesia's territorial integrity. The Indonesian army and police presence in West Papua has been reinforced from 8,000 to 12,000, and Jakarta has warned of more to come.
There are reports in the Asian press that, as happened in East Timor, pro-Indonesian militias have appeared. Learning from the East Timorese, Papuans have assembled their own militias and, on the streets, where there are regular disturbances, the sides appear evenly matched.
For Indonesia, another proclamation of independence so soon after the loss of East Timor would be hard to swallow. But its greatest concern by far is West Papua's extraordinary natural resources.
Hidden at 4,000 metres in the blue-black ranges of its interior, West Papua possesses the largest reserve of gold on the planet. In the 1998 annual report of the British mining company Rio Tinto plc, gold stocks in New Guinea are given as just over 19 million ounces. Rio Tinto has a 12.5 per cent shareholding in Papua's Grasberg mine, plus a further 40 per cent share in its expansion. The mine is owned by Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold, based in New Orleans, whose gold reserves at Grasberg stand at 85 million ounces. Grasberg's gold is worth $21.5bn. The mine is also the third-largest source of copper, with reserves of 32 million tonnes.
West Papua is as big as Spain, but large parts of it are so dense with jungle and swamp that they have never been mapped. Just over a million Papuans (the rest are transmigrants) belong to hundreds of tribal clans, many living deep in the bush, with no ethnic or religious ties to their Muslim rulers. In the highlands, the men hunt cassowary and tree kangaroos with bows and arrows, while the women labour in the gardens, cook and nurse: it isn't uncommon to find a nursing mother with a child at one breast and a piglet at the other. To see these things is to glimpse our earliest humanity.
To this wilderness came Freeport-McMoRan in 1967, with the blessing of the Indonesian government. No mine on earth moves as much rock each day as Grasberg. When I visited West Papua in 1986, the company was producing 16,000 tonnes of ore a day from a nearby mine. Two years later, Grasberg disclosed its huge plug of copper-gold ore, which had stood in the rock for three million years as equatorial glaciers advanced and retreated around it. Now production is between 200,000 and 300,000 tonnes of ore a day.
Freeport's first contract was signed with Indonesia in April 1967. West Papua had come under interim Indonesian rule four years earlier. The Dutch had not wanted to hand it over with the rest of their East Indies empire, but President Sukarno began to flaunt his new friendship with the Soviet Union, and the United States took fright. The New York Agreement of 1962, brokered by the United Nations but choreographed by Washington, paid lip service to Dutch insistence on self-determination. Under the agreement, Indonesia was allowed six years of interim rule before it had to consult the Papuans as to whether or not they wanted to be annexed. As in East Timor, Indonesian troops were given responsibility for security.
That consultation, known as the "Act of Free Choice", was held on 2 August 1969. The 1,025 Papuan council members who assembled at the army headquarters in the capital, Jayapura, were told by President Suharto's envoy that anyone who voted against Indonesia would have his tongue torn out or be shot on the spot. The vote for integration was unanimous. The province of Irian Jaya was created, and the world was treated to a geopolitical absurdity: anti-colonialism and neocolonialism being used interchangeably in the interests of America's obsession with communism.
Between 1963 and 1969, there were countless Indonesian operations to break Papuan protests, including a bloody bush war by OPM - Organisasi Papua Merdeka ("Free Papua Movement") - resistance fighters. In the 37 years since Indonesian troops arrived, at least 45,000 are believed to have been killed, mostly in villages bombed and burned and in the systematic depopulation, rape and extrajudicial murder of the population. In 1967 alone, 3,500 Papuans were killed. Reports of atrocities by Indonesian soldiers had become so persistent that, on 5 April 1967 in the House of Lords, Lord Ogmore called for a UN investigation. That was also the day that Freeport celebrated the signing of its contract.
The connection between these two events is more than coincidental. Mining companies exist to pile on value. The Grasberg mine's development - not forgetting the contribution of Rio Tinto - so closely mirrors Indonesia's career in West Papua that it is worth considering the two in parallel. There is the question, for example, of the legality of Freeport's 1967 contract, a contract Indonesia probably had no legal right to grant. There have also been revelations that, between 1991 and 1997, the company provided loan guarantees of $673m for the purpose of buying Freeport stock for three Indonesians with close ties to President Suharto or his ministers (one of the businessmen involved, Mohammed "Bob" Hasan, the Suharto aide who introduced Freeport's CEO Jim-Bob Moffett into the president's family circle, was arrested this year in connection with a fraud case).
In July 1999, I flew from Darwin across the Arafura Sea to Timika, the flapping tin-and-concrete mess that is the nearest approach point to the mine; from a village of 200 people 25 years ago, it now has a population approaching 80,000.
I travelled first to the Aikwa river, a cement-coloured throat of water several kilometres wide that receives thousands of tonnes of mine tailings (the rock powder left from the milling process) per day. I stood on the levee with Freeport's environmental manager, surveying a desolate spectacle under a thunderous sky. Eventually, it is estimated, 220 square kilometres of Papuan lowlands will be drowned by tailings. I pointed to the horizon on the far bank, scarred by kilometres of dead trees. The manager said cheerfully: "Oh, they've just had their root systems suffocated by tailings. Unsightly, aren't they? But we'll be cutting them down."
The sight downriver cannot prepare you for the mine. First, there is the spectacular access road. There are no foothills: the blue peaks of the Jayawijaya range burst vertically upwards through the freezing silken mists, so Freeport engineers simply shaved off the crests of a line of knife-edge ridges until the surface was wide enough for two 40-tonne trucks to pass. Higher up, the mine's pipeline runs bare by the roadside, carrying away the ore concentrate to the waiting tankers on the coast. In 1977, in retaliation for land expropriations and armed only with hacksaw blades, OPM fighters and villagers cut this pipe. The army retaliated with Operasi Tumpas ("Operation Annihilation"), bombing, rocketing and strafing villages with US-supplied OV-10 Bronco warplanes.
At Mile 68, there is Tembagapura, the mine's dull-looking township; at Mile 74, a cable tramway transports you the last kilometre and a half through the clouds to the Grasberg's summit. Sliced like a boiled egg, the huge inverted cone at its centre is deepening year by year as the ore is blasted out and borne to the surface in a never- ending caravan of 200-tonne trucks.
For the highland Amungme tribe, on whose land the mine stands, the result has been a spiritual cataclysm. The earth they walk on is their ancestral mother, the mountain her head. Whenever someone died, they used to be taken to the Grasberg's summit. The mine is gouging out their mother's brains before their eyes.
The mine and its infrastructure are an undoubted engineering masterpiece, yet the Papuans' resentment comes under several headings: the company's forcible resettlement of highlanders in the swampy lowlands; the rumours of over-close ties to the Indonesian military; its environmental record and alleged responsibility for human-rights abuses; and money. Where is the money? West Papua should be the most bankable province in the republic, but it remains economically backward, its riches siphoned off to Freeport stockholders and to Jakarta.
Yet perhaps the main question is not even about money. As the head of the Catholic diocese office, Brother Theo van den Broek, puts it: "It is: my land. Me. Where am I in this whole story?"
Possibly because Freeport smells political change, in the past year, it has been moving rock fast. A month ago, a slide of rock waste into Lake Wanagon buried four contractor's employees and injured 18 others. Brother Theo believes the enormous speed of extraction is causing environmental problems. Although the company has claimed a clean bill of health from an independent environmental audit, the mayor of the Timika region recently ordered local people to stop eating tambelo - a water snail that is a staple of the lowland diet - because of suspected high copper levels. At concentrations of less than two parts per million (ppm), copper can cause intestinal and other damage. The Aikwa's copper level is around 10ppm; other metals associated with gold-bearing ores include mercury, arsenic, barium, cadmium and lead. Freeport's ebullient CEO dismisses the environmental impact of the mine as "the equivalent of me pissing in the Arafura Sea".
But the chief source of anger remains the company's ties with the Indonesian military. Freeport cannot dissociate itself from the army: the army is there because Freeport is there. Regular Papuan protests against the mine are routinely met by army reprisals. A Catholic Church report following a series of army attacks in 1994-95, part of a "cleansing operation" against the OPM, listed killings, torture, detention and disappearance of Papuans. The most notorious case was of five men from the Kwalik family. Arrested and tortured, they subsequently vanished and are still missing. Several months later, another Kwalik, an ex-teacher named Kelly, abducted and held hostage the group of British research scientists.
The day before I left Timika, I met Kelly Kwalik's mother, Ibu Josefa, an old- fashioned figure bound in bright cloth, like a polished and carefully wrapped antique. She had found herself in jail in 1995 "because they thought I was giving orders. I was in jail for a month and three days. It was a toilet with water up to my knees." The "toilet" Josefa mentioned was a freezing steel freight container. She and nine others had had to stand in their own excrement for a month. She became blind in her left eye as a result.
Brother Theo reckons that there are between 2,000 and 4,000 army and special forces troops around Timika, more in the hamlets surrounding the mine. "They ask for cars and facilities, and Freeport agrees. One senior executive said to me: 'We don't like it either, but we feel safe.'" During my visit, I was introduced to a number of Freeport officials, including an American called Tom Green, in charge of the "community liaison office". Later I found that, prior to joining Freeport, he had been a military attache at the US embassy in Jakarta.
Back in London, I received some papers from an American lawyer who had represented the Amungme people. Incomplete but revealing, they contained evidence that Freeport has budgeted to equip the military to enable it to perform its violent role. In the year in question - probably the second half of the 1990s - the company was budgetingto finance military headquarters buildings, guard-houses, barracks, parade grounds, ammunition-storage, water, power and fuel installations, tennis and volleyball courts, flagpoles and signwriting. In a list of requirements for Freeport project architects, draughtsmen and engineers, provision had been made for two army advisers. The amounts are substantial, given that the papers weren't complete: for the army $5,160,770, for the police $4,060,000.
At the end of last month, the chairman of the Papuan People's Congress, Theys Eluay, and his deputy, Tom Beanal, were due to meet President Wahid in Jakarta to present the congress's independence proclamation. The meeting was cancelled, and Eluay and Beanal may soon face treason charges. Neither side has room for manoeuvre. If West Papua's fate remains an internal matter, President Wahid is likely to defer to his generals, and Papuan nationalism will be contained by military repression. But there are problems, too, in taking the issue of West Papuan self- determination back to the United Nations.
As every UN diplomat knows, Indonesia has had a recent lesson in the concept of international justice - in East Timor - and will not tolerate another. West Papua is even more vital to Jakarta, and Papuan nationalism more potentially destabilising, inside and outside Indonesia. Grasberg, 4,000 metres up in the south-west highlands, is an economic beachhead. Freeport is one of Indonesia's biggest tax and royalty sources and has a licence to prospect another 2.6 million-hectare area, as far as the Papua New Guinea border. It is likely to reveal mineral wealth that Jakarta will not abandon without a fight.
A fight is, therefore, all too likely. If poli-tical moves to secure Papuan independence fail or falter too long, OPM commanders have indicated that their future strategy will concentrate on economic targeting. Freeport is vulnerable to guerrilla attack: Grasberg workers remember, given that some were employed there, how the profitable Panguna mine on nearby Bougainville Island was closed in the early 1990s: all the Bougainville Revolutionary Army had to do was blow up a power plant and murder a couple of expatriates. Panguna has not reopened. Without the Indonesian army's presence and readiness to inflict reprisals, the mighty Grasberg mine would be as exposed as Panguna.
http://www.newstatesman.com/200007100026
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