🚀 go-pugleaf

Taken from the World Socialist Web Site of the International Committee
of the Fourth International (ICFI):  http://www.wsws.org

Eye-witness account of West Papua massacre

"We saw terrible slum-like conditions and a very strong army presence"

Part 2

By Mike Head
1 December 1998

On July 6, the Habibie regime in Indonesia killed more than
150 people in the remote West Papuan town of
Biak, after hundreds had participated in raising a West
Papuan independence flag.

Indonesia armed forces chief and Defence Minister, General
Wiranto denounced the flag-raising as a "revolt against the
government" and sent in troops from Ambon island to conduct a
slaughter. Soldiers opened fire with automatic weapons on a
defenceless crowd, hauled residents from their homes, beat and
tortured scores of people, including children, and later used
naval gunships to dump bodies and victims in the sea.

The events in Biak took place against a background of severe
social deprivation. After almost a century of Dutch occupation,
followed by 35 years of Indonesian rule, West Papua's 1.8
million people have some of the worst living, health and
education conditions in the world, and these have been
intensified by Indonesia's economic crisis over the past 18
months. At the same time, West Papua is rich in gold, copper,
oil and timber.

News of the massacre has emerged largely because of the
presence in Biak of two Australian aid workers, Rebecca Casey
and Paul Meixner. In the second part of an interview with Casey
and Meixner, the World Socialist Web Site asked them to
describe the social, economic and political situation in Biak and
West Papua as a whole.

Paul: Conditions are pretty bad, and a lot worse than many
Javanese towns and villages that I have seen. On the surface it
looks OK. You expect to see poor quality houses, and they are
there. But it's things like health that show the real situation.
People can catch a cold and die, or a mild case of malaria and
die.

Rebecca: Four people that we knew died while we were there.
That was just in two months. Basically they died from not getting
medical treatment--just from getting sick.

While we there, when the economic crisis started, there were no
medicines anywhere in Indonesia. One of the big problems was
that the hospitals and pharmacies ran out of medicine. No-one
could get anything.

There is very little medicine and people cannot afford to buy it
anyway. We bought some anti-malarial tablets at a pharmacy,
and it was reasonably cheap, but like many things, it was
out-of-date stock from developed countries. So what is the point
of taking that? And people don't know what to take. There is
no-one there to advise them on what to take, how much to take
and when to take it.

Paul: There is a hospital at the naval base but otherwise there is
just the one small hospital. It has only eight medium-sized
buildings. We saw the intensive care ward and it was just a big
room with about 20 bare beds. We did not see any equipment at
all.

Rebecca: So conditions are really poor. I was shocked. I lived in
Papua New Guinea when I was younger and it was like a
developed country compared to West Papua.

WSWS: What about food and malnutrition?

Rebecca: I did see many kids with swollen bellies. There is
malnutrition. But most of the Biak people will grow their own food.
So they may have vegetables and taro, some cassava, but they
won't necessarily have meat, unless they went fishing themselves.
Things like chicken, pork and fish were very expensive in the
markets and getting more so.

Paul: They might eat rice with a few vegetables once a day. They
just don't get the right nutrition. That is why they get sick easily.

Rebecca: You would see people buying a big sack of rice for
their family but often they would not have the money for food. Even
people that we worked with would tell us that they had not been
paid and could not feed their families, so we would give them
money. We always had people asking us for money and it was
always for things like malaria medicine and food. No-one had
anything.

That was the case due to the economic crisis, but it is always
hard, because people have to pay for everything--even for their
kids to go to school. Parents have to find the money somehow to
send them to school, and for their books on top of that. Teachers
we talked to--other volunteers teaching English--said sometimes
kids would turn up for school who had only eaten once a day and
had never ever been able to buy books.

WSWS: Tell us about the conditions in the schools.

Paul: The only school is a group of bare-looking buildings around
a grassless patch of earth. There are no windows. They have
desks and chairs on a concrete floor and a board, but often they
could not even afford blackboard paint, so the teachers could not
use the boards properly.

There is no electricity, so when it gets dark and stormy you can't
see; and when it rains heavily on the tin roof you can't hear the
teacher. There is electricity in Biak but not in the classrooms that
we saw.

When we went to Bali we saw some comparatively first-rate
schools, and even then their conditions were a lot lower than
Australian schools. But the schools in West Papua are even
worse.

Rebecca: On Biak there is nothing beyond primary and high
school. The only university is in Jayapura, the West Papuan
capital on the mainland. Most people we knew had only gone to
the end of primary school. Some of the lucky ones had obtained
scholarships or had been sponsored by someone and had gotten
to Jakarta or Jayapura for a university education. But they were
very few.

There are no computers in the schools. There is no way for
people to have access to the Internet via schools and libraries.
There are some libraries with very few books in them.

WSWS: What is the housing like?

Paul: [Showing a picture of a house on the beach] This is a typical
house, although it is out along the beach. There is no electricity and
water. In Biak itself most homes had electricity but not water. Water
usually came from a communal tap supplied by the government.
The government would pump it in for a couple of hours a day. That was
the case in the house where we stayed. You would still have to boil the
water.

In Jayapura, the capital, we saw hundreds of people living in
slums, in one case alongside a brand new bank building. [See
picture] Both West Papuans and Indonesian transmigrants were
living in the shanties. It was like walking through Soweto. The
shantytown goes quite a way--there are markets and shops in
there as well.

WSWS: How are the conditions in Jayapura?

Paul: We saw terrible slum-like conditions and a very strong army
presence. We also saw rich people, who were usually
Indonesians. The army would march up and down every Friday,
on the main street, with soldiers jogging with their shorts off. The
jogging wasn't just for exercise; it was a show of force.

Rebecca: That intensified in the leadup to the so-called elections
in March, when Suharto was returned by the MPR [national
assembly]. Alcohol was also taken off sale at that time--not that it
was a problem because no-one could afford it anyway.



WSWS: What was the scale of the troop presence?

Paul: There are a lot of bases, even on Biak island. We don't
know the numbers but there were always soldiers around. They
did not march up and down and parade with tanks as they do in
Jayapura, but they are there in their barracks and you would see
them marching around. There was also a naval base.

In Biak it was a more relaxed display of the military, compared to
Jayapura, partly because the Biak people had been subdued
some time earlier.

WSWS: According to the government's statistics, some 80,000
Indonesian families have been relocated in West Papua from
other parts of Indonesia under the transmigration program since
1969. Can you tell us about the conditions of the transmigrants?

Rebecca: A lot of the people who had come over were living very
poorly. We heard quite a bit about this from across West Papua.
They had come in and attempted to grow crops, but that did not
work because of the land on which they were put as
transmigrants. They would move to the nearby towns and try to set
up work there. Sometimes it would work and other times it would
not.

A lot of them were living just as poorly as the West Papuans, in
slums as well. They were usually poor farmers. People who are
rich come over to West Papua on their own steam and some of
them will make money. Even then, they are not wealthy by
Australian terms.

Paul: Nearly every West Papuan person we spoke to did not like
transmigration. They saw it as another way to get rid of them and
annihilate the West Papuan people.

Those who come to West Papua by their own volition tend to
have commercial skills and dominate the markets. So in the
markets, the Indonesians generally have the big stores and the
West Papuans are outside sitting on the ground selling smaller
amounts.

WSWS: Is there much open political discussion in West
Papua? Are there parties, factions and a political life? And what
is the state of the media?

Rebecca: There is no political discussion.

Paul: There is one Indonesian-language newspaper based in
Jayapura and satellite TV from Jakarta. It is all in Indonesian. If
you don't have a satellite all you can get is the Indonesian family
channel.

There is no local language media. In any case, there are about
300 languages across West Papua.

Rebecca: Most people are probably using Indonesian anyway.
For most people it is their first language, with their local language
as a second. On Biak there is one language and that extends to
other islands as well.

Paul: Quite a few people listen to Radio Australia's Indonesian
language broadcasts. There are telephones available. Email and
the Internet exist, but only for well-educated people and church
organisations. Some human rights activists have access.

WSWS: West Papua is the site of one of the richest copper and
gold mines in the world--the Freeport mine, owned jointly by the
Freeport McMoRan company of the US, Rio Tinto of Britain and
Australia, and the Jakarta regime. Did you get to see it?

Rebecca: No, but we flew over it. You could see how the waste
tailings had wiped out the trees downstream for kilometres. There
was a big river coming down from the mine, with stalks of dead
trees sticking out.

Paul: Everybody we talked to resented the mine, but many
wanted to work there because the wages were high, compared to
the levels in West Papua.

Rebecca: Resource-wise West Papua is not a poor place. It is
rich. We heard that 10 percent of the Indonesian government's
income comes from the Freeport mine and that the mine does not
pay taxes.

We saw one failed economic development project on Biak island.
It was the holiday resort. There is an international airport there. It
used to be a stopover to other places in Indonesia, particularly for
those coming from America, but not any more. The resort has
something like 500 rooms, 300 of which have been closed up
because there is nobody staying there. At any one time there are
about five people staying there.

The government wanted to make it another Bali. There were
plans for six international resorts on Biak. It was a Habibie plan
for a duty-free resort town, even though it rains for seven months
of the year, every day. This was the development plan for Biak. It
is a beautiful place though, with coral and fish.

WSWS: What should happen in West Papua?

Rebecca: It is hard to say. People talk about independence but
their idea of it is that everyone from Indonesia leaves. We asked
about whether they had enough knowledge to function on their
own. They said all the educated people from Biak would come
back. I just don't know.

Paul: The people there need justice and health, and appropriate
development. I can't be more specific. Independence may be
good if it is well managed but I fear ethnic tensions.

Rebecca: There might be a cargo-cult mentality, with people
thinking they would have what the Indonesians have immediately.
There might be disappointment. I don't think there is a clear-cut
answer.

WSWS: If the underlying economic order did not change, would
it make any difference?

Rebecca: That would still be the danger. West Papua might get
independence but who controls the mine? Who takes care of
those things? You might end up with a few big fish in a small pond
and so there would be no equity anyway.

See Also:
Eye-witness account of West Papua massacre: Part 1
"People were shot, bleeding and lying on the ground"
[28 November 1998] at : http://wsws.org/news/1998/dec1998/pap-d01.shtml

Readers: The WSWS invites your comments. Please send e-mail to :
editor@wsws.org