The Papuans Say, This Land and Its Ores Are Ours
By JANE PERLEZ
Indonesia, April 2 Titus Natkime, 31, the son of a tribal leader who
encountered the first Americans to walk into the wilderness of Papua nearly 50
years ago, was clearly upset with his employer the American mining company,
Freeport-McMoRan.
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Jewel Samad/Agence France-Presse--Getty Images
Miming hunger, students protest in Jakarta against foreign mines in Papua,
which critics say destroy the environment.
Agence France-Presse--Getty Images
The Freeport-McMoRan and Rio Tinto mine, Grasberg, generates vast amounts of
waste.
For generations, Mr. Natkime's clan has laid claim to much of the land in
Papua, the Indonesian province where Freeport mines some of the world's largest
copper and gold reserves. Now it was time for a payback, he said.
He brought out a draft document showing Freeport's offer: $250,000 to set up
a foundation for the clan, plus $100,000 annually, a sizable amount in
Indonesia's most remote and poorest province.
"Why should I accept it?" asked Mr. Natkime, who works in the company's
government relations department, though he is hardly an ardent spokesman. "It's
an insult." In comparison, he said, Freeport was making tens of millions of
dollars every day. In the end, the family accepted the money, he said, but he
is planning a lawsuit and demanding royalties.
Such defiance is symptomatic of the growing troubles in Papua, where four
people have been killed in recent weeks in protests against Freeport. And it
shows that times are changing for multinational companies and governments long
used to working out concessions in remote areas with a handshake, over the
heads of local people.
In March, Citigroup echoed the theme, saying in a report that such companies
could no longer afford to ignore environmental and social issues. "In recent
years, a groundswell of public opinion has caused sustainable development to
become a serious business consideration for investors," the report said.
Mark Logsdon, an American geochemist who has visited the Freeport mine,
agreed. Mining companies must seek and take seriously the "consent of the
governed," he said. "Whether in Indonesia, Latin America or Africa, the
increase in communications capability means that the essential isolation of
'resource colonies' is largely a thing of the past."
The protests in Papua provide an example of what can happen when a natural
resource company, backed by an unpopular central government and a heavy-handed
military, fails to pay careful attention to the local people, whose lives have
been disturbed and who feel the riches in the ground are theirs, not the
foreigners'.
At one time, there was hardly a place more remote than Papua, where
Freeport's first explorers encountered Papuans armed with bows and arrows and
wearing penis gourds, practices that still exist. Yet, try as the government
might to preserve that isolation for the past two years it has banned foreign
journalists from the province, granting only very occasional permits the
extent of the problems is impossible to hide.
In March, long-simmering tensions exploded when Indonesian riot police
officers and several hundred Papuan protesters clashed in the provincial
capital, Jayapura, leaving three policemen and an air force officer dead.
Freeport's profits are soaring as gold prices have reached 25-year highs of
more than $550 an ounce. The company, which is based in New Orleans and is in
partnership in the Papua mines with the Rio Tinto group of Australia, is one of
Indonesia's biggest taxpayers, and has been for many years.
But Papuans argue that they have never received a fair portion of the
estimated $33 billion in direct and indirect benefits the company says it
provided to Indonesia from 1992 to 2004.
Repeated efforts to reach the spokesman for Freeport in Indonesia, Siddharta
Moersjid, were unsuccessful.
As evidence of the neglect, the Papuans, who are indigenous Melanesians with
broad features and curly hair that contrast with the Malay heritage of most
Indonesians, point to their relative lack of progress compared to the rest of
Indonesia.
In the current ugly mood, the people around the mine give short shrift to the
more than $150 million that the company says it has spent on community
development.
Instead, they complain that they have lost their most precious assets: their
land; their river system, which is used as a waste chute; and their sago
plants, which have disappeared under more than 90 square miles of mine waste,
accumulating at a rate of some 700,000 tons a day.
Resentment is compounded by the presence of the Indonesian military, an
almost entirely non-Papuan force that is often most intent on extracting its
own cut of the province's resources, which run not only to gold and copper but
also to timber.
"Freeport is being held hostage for its relationship with the armed forces
and the police," said Agus Sumule, a professor of agriculture at the University
of Cenderawasih, the province's main campus. "There is no way they can do their
operations without the armed forces, and that's because of their bad
relationship with the local people." The tight grip of the military fuels calls
for independence that send shudders through the Indonesian authorities, he
said.
The government knows it is in a tough position. The defense minister, Juwono
Sudarsono, justified the ban on foreign journalists in February, saying they
believed in human rights standards that did not necessarily apply in Papua.
"Papua is a very touchy issue for us," he said.
From the start, it has been sensitive for Freeport, too. The Natkimes are a
case in point.
Freeport has already paid for Mr. Natkime's travel across the United States,
financed his English language training in New Zealand and given him a house in
Jakarta. In a further effort to placate his family's claims, it offered him the
job in government relations.
But he wants more, not just for him but for all Papuans.
This contrasts sharply with how the company appeased Mr. Natkime's father,
Tuarek, in 1967. Balfour Darnell, a self-described roughneck who built
Freeport's first base camps, soothed Tuarek Natkime's suspicion of the
outsiders with a simple tool that was half hatchet and half hammer.
"Boy, that did it," Mr. Darnell said of Mr. Natkime's evident pleasure,
according to the account in the book "Grasberg," by George A. Mealey, a former
Freeport executive. "He was in seventh heaven with that thing."
With the promise of a few sacks of salt, the tribal leader said he would
clear a landing area for the company helicopter. "So we blasted off and that
was the end of that meeting," Mr. Darnell marveled. "We were safe."
Now, in the age of Tuarek Natkime's more educated, more worldly son, it is
not clear anymore how safe (DGYBO)
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