Empire of the East (39 page)

John knew all about these people. They were hunters and gatherers, as people down in the tropics always were, but at most times in the year there was little to hunt and gather so they lived rather miserably by fishing in the lagoons, eating the heads of the few fish they caught themselves, and selling the rest to the restaurant in Timika. The only problem was to persuade them to better themselves by becoming cultivators producing for the company, and in effect break them of age-old habits. I had read somewhere of the resettlement down in Timika of Amungme tribespeople displaced by the mine, and of their escape back to the mountains before they were picked up once more and sent back to Timika. A number of these were said to have died from malaria, which is a speciality of the region, and later, according to a Jakarta newspaper, two hundred and twelve children of an unspecified tribe had succumbed to an epidemic. Were the people we saw here, I wondered, the survivors of the original Amungme? It was a matter to be gone into, I decided, perhaps at a later date.

There was a certain appropriateness in this approach along a preposterous road to a preposterous mine. There had been nothing quite like the mine on earth before, and the same could be said of the road. Not even the Incas of Peru had attempted a road of this kind, despite the millions of tons of rock shifted by their Stone Age methods. This bull at a gate attack on the copper mountain called for audacity as well as a sense of adventure. The Pancak Jaya-Grasberg Mountain complex is quite unlike the alpine scenes with which we are familiar. There are no foothills. The peaks themselves rear up from the valley bed, bursting through the mists into the sky in the manner of the awesome mountain profiles painted by the Chinese artists of the past. They are packed closely together, and are described by geologists as young and dynamic, which is to say that they are only three million years old and are thrusting upwards at the incredible speed of about one inch a year. There was no way of squeezing a road through mountain gorges up to the seven-hundred-foot pinnacle of almost solid copper discovered by Jean Dozy, a Dutchman, in 1936. This being so, the road had to go over the top, and the engineers that took it on believed they were making road-building history.

What is different is that the Freeport road makes use of the nearly straight line of a ridge joining high peaks, and this was done by shaving away the sharp edge of the ridge until this was wide enough to allow the passage, first of one, then two cars. There is a point during the approach to this section of the road when it appears in the distance as a glistening thread drawn in the gloom through the mountain shapes and clouds. Cars, their lights on, crawl up and down, passing each other in endless procession. There are extreme gradients, bottle-necks and once in a while a lay-by where one could pull into the side and enjoy a moment of release from the drama. In the ridge area there are precipices on both sides. The road twists ahead like narrow braiding into the peaks, and the view over both edges is of great chasms of shadow from which the tops of lesser mountains soar up in rumpled folds. I asked Greg Probst if anyone ever went over the top, and he replied, ‘Once in a while.’ And did they ever survive? No, he said, not as far as he knew. Indeed, where we pulled in there was a memorial stone to just such a tragedy. The previous year, a car carrying two nurses down to Timika had lost its brakes on the bend, and plunged into the abyss.

The stop provided an opportunity to examine the one-hundred-and-twenty-kilometre-long slurry pipeline laid by the roadside. This carried the flow of concentrates which were the end product of herculean labours down to the company port of Amamapare on the Arafura coast, where it would be shipped away to Japan. It seemed surprising that the efforts of ten thousand men, the fleets of specialized vehicles, the squadrons of earth-movers tearing off the mountain-tops way up in the clouds, the mill’s pulverization of thousands of tons of rock, could be directed towards this visually mediocre end, and that so narrow a throat could disgorge so vast a treasure. Stopped for the second or third security check, where at a lower level a turning off to the west joined the company road, the explanation given was that this led to a block of rainforest about to be logged by a foreign concessionaire — a circumstance of which Greg and John showed that they thoroughly disapproved. The guards at the gate here were supposedly to exclude any possibility of piratical attacks by the loggers on the company’s trees. Perhaps, in addition, although this was not mentioned, the security of the pipeline came into the question. In the troubles of 1977 it had been sabotaged, theoretically by local villagers in support of the OPM. It was another piece of disputed history which I was sure that Freeport, in its new mood of frankness, would be willing to clear up.

The final climb, with the Toyota’s bonnet pointed at the sky, was into the level of alpine tundra which in the mountains of Irian Jaya can take on aspects of spectacular arboreal agony. Here the invasion of moss had spread a species of netting over the vegetation through which stunted oaks and pines gesticulated with their distorted branches. Landscapes were weird and surrealistic. A grey, shining dome of rock arose like a tonsured head from suffocated lavender scrub, waterfalls piddled everywhere from rock faces. In one place a yellow smear spread on a distant mountain flank, and this, John said, was the sulphide content of a landslide, which were numerous and dangerous in this area of dynamic mountains.

Tembagapura, enclosed in this narrow valley, came suddenly into sight below. After the accounts I had heard, the view came as a disappointment, although John, parking in the space provided for its appreciation, clearly regarded it as memorable. Families from the town travelled up here in good weather for a refreshing glimpse, he said, of its order and beauty, but although I would have expected such an extraordinary human settlement to have impressed by its uniqueness, it failed to do so. Apart from the cliffs and peaks, it might have been Wamena viewed from the air.

Hemmed in though it was, the town was spreading up the lower slopes into whatever space could be found. Multi-storeyed buildings were going up in the background but the heart of the town was a matter of bungalows of identical size and shape, laid out in rows that awoke memories of a railway marshalling-yard or, at one point on the slope down to the town, of a mining settlement in the Peruvian Andes. This Peruvian similarity was heightened by the fact that almost all the few pedestrians we saw in the streets were small men in blue dungarees, yellow Wellington boots and white miner’s helmets. Most of them carried furled umbrellas and bent over slightly as if unable to free themselves psychologically from the constrictions of the mines. This was far from being the quintessential American small town of its description. It was at first sight very quiet, plain and withdrawn, and without any visible attempt to draw attention to itself, or control the overpowering theatricality of its surroundings. Apart from the slowly mooching little miners in the streets, the only sudden, and quite surprising sign of life we came upon, on turning a corner, was the spectacle of ranks of Indonesian children in Boy Scouts’ and Girl Guides’ uniforms, lined up in an early evening ceremony to salute the lowering of the Indonesian flag.

John delivered me to the company house where I was to lodge. Although a standard bungalow in a row, this proved to be spacious, comfortable and fitted with all conceivable household appliances. The windows were clean and the floors polished. There were calm pictures in good frames on the walls, and, to my huge satisfaction after a longish stay in a dry country, a shelf of Foster’s beer from Australia, in a version containing practically no alcohol, which was all that was permissible in Tembagapura. Yellow wellingtons in assorted sizes stood by the door, a miner’s padded jacket and helmet awaited me on a clothes peg, and a smiling Indonesian maid hovered in the background.

There was even a small front garden in which etiolated busy-lizzies strained towards the last of the light. Here John and I stood to take the measure of the weather. Today, he said, had been exceptionally good — that was for Tembagapura. Even as he spoke the few hunched-up little miners coming into sight opened their umbrellas, and cold, thin rain slightly perfumed with industrial workings began to fall about us.

Guide-book accounts of Tembagapura describe it as a typically prosperous American town, in which all that has been made familiar by the movies and come to be accepted as the American way of life, is accentuated almost to the point of caricature by its isolation. The picture is an imaginary one. In reality the atmosphere is austere, and there seems little at first sight in the way of entertainment, consumerism or gracious living to compensate for the bleakness of the physical environment. On all sides one encounters the stern virtues of our days. Everything in Tembagapura works.

Meals were taken in a canteen in which, as in every other area, company efficiency was reflected in the most trivial of details. A notice on the door said that breakfasts were served from 3 a.m. Early starts were the order of the day here. There were no roads apart from the one on which we travelled, and all journeys outside town had to be made by helicopter. By 5 a.m. the lights were on in most windows, and at dawn the sky was full of the sound of the choppers pounding through the air. Normally the day’s weather started with a show of promise, but by midday the slow signs of deterioration were to be detected, with mists gathering in the afternoon, and the start of a wetting at about four. All the streets were steep, and the evening rain kept them slippery. Company cars were available for most journeys of more than a hundred yards. During my short stay in the town I never saw anyone obviously exercising himself by going for a walk, and never saw an American wife on foot at all.

Like Wamena, Tembagapura would appear to have no centre, the nearest thing to one being a small shopping arcade containing an ill-stocked supermarket and a municipal office of a kind. Here a notice in English, although addressed to the Indonesian majority, and referring to the indigenous Amungme and the way they should be treated, refers to them a little contemptuously as ‘the natives’. The town is dominated by a truly enormous sports complex, which at a distance resembles photographs of the Kaaba at Mecca. There are no dogs or cats to be seen in its streets.

With the rapid and successful spread of its mining activities, Tembagapura is expanding as fast as it can, with new bungalows jammed up against one another, and wild trees dangling their moss-clogged branches over rose-gardens newly hacked out of rock. Its latest population figure has jumped to ten thousand, of which approximately seven hundred are American citizens and almost all the rest Indonesians. A handful of the Amungme, the original tribal occupants, were supposed to be tucked away in the holes and corners of the town, although I never saw anyone who by his dress or features I could identify as a tribal. When forced by circumstances to attend a clinic at the superbly equipped local hospital, I would have been certain that of the two hundred or so persons attending for treatment, one hundred per cent were Indonesians. The normal explanation for the non-employment of members of the original population is their lack of even the most basic of skills. It is generally accepted that recruitment of labour on the lower levels of proficiency is controlled by the Indonesian authorities who see it in their interests to organize the employment of as many immigrants as possible.

An endless wrangle has gone on between Freeport and its many critics over the circumstances by which it acquired the area of the mine and the extraordinary fact that the Amungme people, who previously lived by hunting and cultivating their crops where the mountains have been removed and Tembagapura built, should have been forced to surrender ten thousand hectares of their land for which nothing has been paid. This happened two years before the Indonesian occupation of West Papua had been legally ratified by the Act of Free Will. The Indonesian Constitution guarantees that ‘The earth, the waters, along with the natural resources contained therein, shall be regulated by the government, and are to be used to promote the utmost welfare of the people’. The government also promises to respect traditional rights to land, but it is a promise that has rarely been kept. Legal quibbles, evasions and the manipulations of the law are used against tribal peoples like the Amungme who have been ousted from their lands. Yet how simple, how inexpensive it would have been for the company to have settled the whole affair on the spot with some sort of compensatory arrangement. How preferable such a solution would have been to throwing the dispossessed Amungme into the arms of the OPM resistance, thereby provoking the sabotaged pipeline, the ‘Daisy Cluster’ bombs said to have been used in retaliation by the Indonesian Air Force against the Amungme village of Ilaga, and Amnesty International’s scarifying report of prisoners held in the mine in steel containers, darkness, and near-freezing temperatures.

This perhaps is the one area in which Freeport, whose engineering achievements have amazed the world, may be said to have revealed an Achilles heel of ineptitude, when a provision from its huge revenues small enough to escape notice in its balance sheet would have embellished its reputation, and put the matter right. But perhaps the government is at the back of its refusal to make reparation. Concessions have been granted to carry out logging operations in Indonesia wherever rainforest exists, all of which are bound to involve disputes over traditional rights, and the government is likely to avoid precedents, such as compensation to the Amungme, over rights many tribal peoples are certain to claim. While refusing to pay even small compensatory sums to those they have dispossessed, Freeport claims to have built schools ‘so that the indigenous peoples can contrive to live where they are, while having the option to educate their children’. But as the Amungme have already been removed, the schools can be of no benefit.

All these minority people who have populated the innumerable islands of Indonesia and have developed their own separate languages and culture, are now to be persuaded or compelled to surrender to the central government the resources upon which they and their ancestors have lived.