Corridors of Control: Grasberg Mine and the Militant Exploitation of West Papua

 

Penulis: Niall Earle**

(Studying at the University of New South Wales and Involved in envrionmental justice)

Introduction

Neoliberalism operates in extractive and exploitative ways and is discursively supported by

atemporal narratives of violence and displacement. Functioning as a global framework for

development, neoliberalism ignores localised nuance in pursuit of capital, while itself

morphing to the idiosyncrasies of particular contexts. A collective challenge lies in how we

represent its cultural and environmental damage in terms that are both spatial and temporal.

Grasberg mine, owned by Freeport McMoran (Freeport), located in the Waa valley of West

Papua, stands today as the largest goldmine in the world, and a site in which the dominant

workings of neoliberalism play out (Rifai-Hasan 2009). The traditional land (Tanah Adat) on

which it is built belongs to the Amungme and Kamora (Visser 2014). By situating the

complex history of Suharto’s military regime and its co-constitutive relationship with

Freeport, we can begin to map the environmental ills that have spread through space and

through time. West Papua’s struggle for independence has become inextricably linked to

Freeport’s operations (Simpson 2003). Through Rob Nixon’s conceptualisation of “Slow

Violence and Environmentalism of the Poor”, we can unpack the unravelling heritages of

Grasberg, locating it within a complex political ecology. As a framework it adopts a view of

displacement as the loss of land and resources from beneath, leaving communities stripped of

the characteristics that made their land inhabitable (Nixon 2011). Applying a time scale to

Grasberg goldmine can help to examine the extent of environmental injustice.

Grasberg in Time

It is 1936, buried deep in the West Papuan forest that a tale of colonial neoliberalism begins.

Working for Shell Oil, a Dutch geologist was struck by the sheer magnificence of the

Carstenz Range, what he described as “a mountain of gold on the moon” (Leith 2002, p.69).

Eight decades hence, this site, embroiled in the hailstorm of global neoliberalism, has been

transformed in ways that transcend the merely physical. Understanding Grasberg’s existence

today involves understanding Freeport’s entangled history with Suharto’s military regime. By

1962, the United States (US) believed the only permanent solution to avoid Jakarta being

“driven into the arms” of the communist bloc was Indonesian control of West Papua (RifaiHasan 2009, p.131). This set-in motion two key events. First, the support under the New

York Agreement of 1962 for the Act of Free Choice (Penentuan Pendapat Rakyat), otherwise

known as the Act of No Choice, where a vote was taken in 1969, under duress, for West 

Papua’s sovereignty (Leith 2002). Second, and interlaced with this vote, was the US

supported coup, bringing to power Suharto’s New Order Regime (Orde Baru) in 1967.

Having politically secured the “open veins” of West Papua, Suharto’s Orde Baru saw it as

what Gomez-Barris calls an “extractive zone”, a site where the existing life forms exist

beneath the gaze of economically rationalised state and corporate mega-projects (GomezBarris 2018). A 30-year contract was agreed between Freeport and Suharto’s regime in 1967

(talks had begun in 1965), which included no obligations to traditional landowners and no

environmental regulations (Leith 2002). This inflow of foreign capital helped stabilise

Suharto’s regime in the early years and its continuation helped maintain the dictatorship for

three decades (Leith 2002). In these years a murky conglomerate of Suharto, his Indonesian

Defence Force (TNI), Freeport and the US government was formed, subsuming West Papua

to the hegemonic discourse of development (Gibson-Graham 2006, p.257). By examining

how the legacies of neoliberalism outlasted the Suharto regime, we can demonstrate the

importance of temporality in narratives of violence and displacement.

Atemporal Narratives of Landscape and Suharto’s Freeport

Neoliberalism acts as a hegemonic discourse, erasing localised nuance and evading justice

through narratives of atemporal displacement. In Amungme’s cosmology, Grasberg mountain

is the sacred head of their mother and its rivers her milk; to them Freeport is digging out her

heart (Abrash and Kennedy 2005). By contrast, at an annual meeting in 1997, CEO James

Mofett told shareholders Freeport’s operations were like taking "a volcano that's been

decapitated by nature, and we’re mining the oesophagus" (Abrash and Kennedy 2005). These

contrasting views demonstrate what is a case of a “vernacular landscape”, one shaped by

historically textured maps devised over generations, being forcibly replaced by an “official

landscape”, one which “writes the land in a bureaucratic, externalising and extraction driven

manner” (Nixon 2011, p.17). At the core of these contesting views of landscape is

temporality; the economic “short termers” arrive to extract, despoil and depart, leaving the

“long-termers” with the ecological aftermath (Nixon 2011). These contesting views of

landscape where wealth is weighed differently in time’s scale have led Grasberg to be

bookmarked by a bloody struggle for independence. Multiple attacks have been carried out

on the site by the Free Papua Movement (Organisasi Papua Merdeka or OPM), a group fed

by the outrage over the dispossession, displacement, environmental degradation and lack of

political participation over the resource exploitation (O’Brien 2010). In order to continue

business as usual, Freeport has relied on the TNI. Estimates suggest they have spent $35 

million dollars on this military protection, only exacerbating tensions (Abrash and Kennedy

2005). International attention has increased since successive human rights reports have

exposed the tactics of intimidation, brutality and torture adopted by the TNI (Leith 2002). A

testimony before the US Federal district court in 1999 heard from Amungme woman and

community organiser Ms Yosepha Alomang:

“I myself have experienced torture at the hands of Indonesia and the giant mining company Freeport. I have been kidnapped by security forces…and carried in a Freeport automobile, and held for one month in a 'bathroom' which was full of human faeces” (Abrash and Kennedy 2005)

This symbolises the extent to which both Indonesia and Freeport are willing to go in pursuing capital through constructing an “official landscape”. If Grasberg represents the workings of neoliberalism turbo-charged by Suharto’s jingoistic Orde Baru, the newly constructed TransPapuan highway represents neoliberalism’s ability to outlast political heritages. This 4000km stretch of road opens up swaths of traditional land (Tanah Adat), to logging, mining and farming (Martinkus 2020), in other words, to the economic “short termers”. If justice is to be realised at Grasberg and in West Papua, temporal understandings of displacement must attach a community’s livelihoods to the history, sustenance and culture of the land beneath them.

Atemporal Narratives of Violence and Grasberg’s Tailings

The slow pace of violence can only be understood through applying a time scale to

environmental harm, overcoming the powerful hegemonic narratives of violence as

spectacular and instantaneous. Understanding Freeport’s operations in West Papua involves

“converting into image and narrative the disasters that are slow moving and long in the

making, disasters that are anonymous and that star nobody” (Nixon 2011, p.3). Of the

multifaceted harms spiralling outwards from the Grasberg mine, the impact of tailings is a

salient point. Tailings are the toxic residue from finely ground ore that valuable metals are

extracted from (Rifai-Husan 2009). Grasberg sits in the world heritage site Lorentz, 4100km

above sea level, and since its conception operations have become so large and profitable that

they run 24/7, requiring satellite tracking of the mining trucks that operate shrouded in cloud

(Leith 2002, p.76). 700,000 tonnes of earth are sifted through every day, and 230,000 of it is

discarded in the local river system as tailings (Leith 2002, p.76). By examining this tailing

waste, we can see how Freeport has mobilised scientific expertise and conventional 

understandings of violence to downplay the scale of environmental degradation. By 1990

Freeport tailings had polluted 84,158 hectares of off-shore and 35,820 hectares of onshore

river systems, namely the Aikwa delta system (Rifai- Husan 2009). Aside from toxicity and

destruction of the river system, this dumping has “consumed local population gardening,

fishing, and hunting areas and wildlife, and separated people from their resources and

livelihood” (Rifai-Husan 2009, p.133). The hegemonic narrative of neoliberalism separates

humans from nature, supporting “economic rationalism” over evidence of destruction and

cultural dislocation (Plumwood 2001). Two predominant pieces of research conducted by

Freeport on the impact of Grasberg’s tailings indicate “no great change” (Brunskill et al

2004, p.2535) and “long term geochemical stability of deposited tailings” (Rusdinar et al

2013, p.56). This is a case of well-funded anti-science by a force with commercial interest in

disseminating doubt (Nixon 2011) and has been a response to the concerns raised by the

Amungme, Kamora (and Ekari, Dani, Nduga, Moni, Damal). Here, when enquiring about

tailings, we are asking which side of key dichotomies the tailings have been identified with,

and we see just how key bodies of knowledge and expertise are mobilised in reinforcing

resulting rationalities (Gille 2010, p.1056). Freeport’s operations within neoliberalism rely

on profiting from land, which is best achieved by ignoring environmental ramifications.

When faced by communities with lived experience of these ramifications their established

wealth allows them to reinforce their position through production of recognised knowledge,

displacing focused attention and action. From this perspective, production of false-knowledge

acts as “temporal camouflage” confirming the larger narrative of corporate self-exculpation

(Nixon 2011, p.60) Nixon suggests that “contests over what counts as violence are intimately

entangled with conflicts over who bears the social authority of witness, which entails much

more than simply seeing or not seeing” (Nixon 2011, p.16). In a climate where West

Papuan’s cultural narratives of living with land are discounted by hegemonic narratives of

development under neoliberalism, stories of violence that are bloodless and slow moving

become buried (Nixon 2011).

Neoliberal Parochialism and the Political Ecologies Produced

An inability to bear witness to the slow processes of violence and displacement that are

reinforced by neoliberal parochialism has created a disparate political ecology in West Papua.

The braided history of violence and displacement has been labelled by Anderson a “slow

motion genocide” where West Papuans have had their “identity, autonomy, and physical

security substantially undermined through the neo-colonial policies of the Indonesian state”

(Anderson 2015, p.9). Freeport’s exploitative and extractive history in West Papua can be

seen as an extension of the Indonesian state, connecting Suharto’s Orde Baru with their

contemporary development plans. Under contemporary development traditional land (Tanah

Adat) is often deemed not “effectively used”, becoming acquisitioned as state-owned land

under Article 33 of the constitution to provide for “the greatest welfare for the people” (Sloan

et al 2019). As Amungme tribal leader Tom Beanel posits “could it be that the Indonesian

government is drawn to Irian Jaya (West Papua) not by its people but by its natural

resources?” (Philpott 2018). Indigenous perspectives are kept in the peripheries as Indonesia

imposes modernity as a universalised mode of governance, only acting to perpetuate racial

capitalism (Gomez-Barris 2018). With cultural living with land practices that extend

thousands of years (Kirksey 2013) disregarded, Papuans are forced to conform to the new

landscape created. This complex political ecology has seen Papuans migrate to the

downstream flows of the Aikwa delta, using handcrafted sifters to search for scraps of gold,

while poisoning their bodies in ways yet undocumented (Soares 2004 and CJPC 2016). The

problem becomes rethinking the standard form of neo-liberalisation; as internalising profits

and outsourcing risks in spatial terms, to include temporal terms so that we recognise the full

force of these externalised risks on the geographies yet unborn (Nixon 2011). Freeport is

symbolic of a parochial US worldview working hand-in-hand with a militaristic governance

to camouflage lasting environmental damage whilst reaping the benefits. It has constructed a

geography around Grasberg, and more broadly West Papua, steeped in the untold

consequences of slow violence and displacement. The enduring challenge becomes how do

we imaginatively and strategically represent “the vast force fields of interconnectedness

against the attenuating effects of temporal and geographical distance?” (Nixon 2011, p. 38).

Conclusion

Understanding the environmental injustices at Grasberg must involve situating it within a

context of global neoliberalism and representing consequences in terms of temporality. The

slow pace of harm is a counternarrative to hegemonic conceptions of violence as slow which

are mobilised by corporations who seek to camouflage environmental harm. Only by

understanding the complex history of a particular context can the resulting political ecology

be mapped in ways that capture the full scale of injustice. Neoliberalism, as seen in West

Papua, employs context specific tactics in its pursuit of capital. At the Grasberg goldmine, we

see a US company working hand-in-hand to stabilise and benefit a military regime, in its

extraction from and exploitation of a land and its people. Since “The Act of No Choice” we 

see how Indonesian governments have profited from tapping the natural wealth of West

Papua, and how this extraction is intimately tied to foreign capital and aided by military

control. Post Suharto, Freeport’s operations have morphed, where once it could escape

questioning of killings and degradation of land, they now mobilise expertise as cover. How to

both expose and represent the environmental damage involves an imaginative foray that rubs

up against dominant perceptions of violence and displacement. Perhaps the answer lies in

working to represent the Indigenous voices whose knowledge extends thousands of years and

on whose land these operations take place.

***

Total word count: 2,162

In-text citation words: 145

Word count: 2,017

***

In this essay I don’t unpack many of the injustices playing out including:

- The extent of the torture and intimidation being conducted by Freeport and the TNI

- The spread of HIV through surrounding communities with the introduction of brothels

in Freeport’s company towns (Kirsch 2002)

- The early history linking the US congress to Freeport McMoran and Suharto’s regime

- The die-back of Nothofagus forests from the development of the new road through

lack of care about the spread of Phytophthora cinnamomi

- The recent military confrontations during the construction of the road and the

retributive killings by the TNI

- Australia’s strategic stance in relation to Indonesia, in particular the Lombok Treaty

which prevents Australia from helping West Papua (Day 2015)

References:

Abrash, A., Kennedy., 2005. Moving Mountains: Communities Confront Mining &

     Globalisation. D.Capital & Class 29(1), pp.159-161.

Anderson, K., 2015. Colonialism and Cold Genocide: The Case of West Papua, Genocide

     Studies and Prevention: An International Journal: Vol. 9: Iss. 2: 9-25 

Brunskill, G., Zagorskis, I., Pfitzner, J. and Ellison, J., 2004. Sediment and trace element

     depositional history from the Ajkwa River estuarine mangroves of Irian Jaya (West

     Papua), Indonesia. Continental Shelf Research, 24(19), pp.2535-2551.

Day, R., 2015. West Papua and the Australia-Indonesia relationship: a case study in

     diplomatic difficulty. Australian Journal of International Affairs, 69(6), pp.670-691.

Catholic Justice and Peace Commission (CJPC) of the Archdiocese of Brisbane., 2016. WE

     WILL LOSE EVERYTHING A Report on a Human Rights Fact Finding Mission To

     West Papua

Gibson-Graham, J.K. 2006. End Of Capitalism (As We Knew It) : A Feminist Critique of

     Political Economy, University of Minnesota Press

Gille, Z., 2010. Actor networks, modes of production, and waste regimes: Reassembling the

     macro-social. Environment and Planning A, 42(5), 1049–1064.

     https://doi.org/10.1068/a42122

Gómez-Barris, M., 2018. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives

     by Macarena Gómez-Barris. Journal of Latin American Geography,.

Kirksey, E., 2013. Freedom In Entangled Worlds: West Papua And The Architecture Of

     Global Power. Pasir Panjang: Institute of Southeast Asian.

Kirsch, S., 2002. Rumour and Other Narratives of Political Violence in West Papua. Critique

     of Anthropology, 22(1), pp.53-79.

Leith, D., 2002. Freeport and the Suharto Regime, 1965—1998. The Contemporary Pacific,

     SPRING 2002, Vol. 14, No. 1 (SPRING 2002), pp. 69- 100 University of Hawai'i

    Press

Martinkus, J., 2020. The Road. Collingwood: Schwartz Publishing Pty, Limited.

    Massey, D., 1991, “A global sense of place”, Marxism Today (38), pp. 24-29

    Nixon, R., 2011. Slow Violence And The Environmentalism Of The Poor.

    Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

O’Brien, P., 2010, The Politics of Mines and Indigenous Rights; A Case Study of the

    Grasberg Mine in Indonesia’s Papua Province, Sacred Earth, Georgetown Journal of

    International Affairs

Philpott, S., 2018. This stillness, this lack of incident: making conflict visible in West Papua.

    Critical Asian Studies, 50(2), pp.259-277

Plumwood, V 2001, “Nature as Agency and the Prospects for a Progressive Naturalism”

    Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 12(4), p. 26. 

Rifai-Hasan, P., 2009. Development, Power, and the Mining Industry in Papua: A Study of

    Freeport Indonesia. Journal of Business Ethics, 89(S2), pp.129-143.

Rusdinar, Y., Edraki, M., Baumgartl, T., Mulligan, D. and Miller, S., 2013. Long Term

    Performance of Hydrogeochemical Riverine Mine Tailings Deposition at Freeport

    Indonesia. Mine Water and the Environment, 32(1), pp.56-70.

Simpson, B., 2003. Power, Politics, and Primitivism: West Papua's Struggle for SelfDetermination,             Critical Asian Studies, 35:3, 469-475

Sloan, S., Campbell, M., Alamgir, M., Engert, J., Ishida, F., Senn, N., Huther, J. and

     Laurance, W., 2019. Hidden challenges for conservation and development along the

    Trans-Papuan economic corridor. Environmental Science & Policy, 92, pp.98-106.

Soares, A., 2004. The Impact of Corporate Strategy on Community Dynamics: A Case Study

    of the Freeport Mining Company in West Papua, Indonesia. International Journal on

    Minority and Group Rights, 11(1-2), pp.115-142.

Visser, L., 2014. Remaining Poor on Natural Riches: The Politics of Environment in West

   Papua. Antropologi Indonesia, 0(64).