CHAPTER 4 PART 4

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The Production of Oppression

Future Prospects

The struggle for independence sprang from an imminent Papuan self-awareness. The effect of the Indonesian occupation has been to consolidate and to widen the sentiments towards this separate Papuan identity. This fact arises from the form which exploitation has taken: being at once based on high technology and an immigrant labour force. The social form of that mode of exploitation is expressed in the caste barrier.

A comparison with trends in Papua New Guinea underlines the divergence in the modes in which neo-colonial exploitation is increasingly being stabilized. Since 1972, in the name of 'the Melanesian way', Papua New Guineans have become the unwitting agents of unequal exchange derived from an export-oriented economy mediated by high level technology. The effects of drawing people into the cash economy have already begun to result in the formation of classes and in the structural features of underdevelopment - increasing impoverishment and an urban-based unemployed. In contrast to Papua New Guinea, where a division of labour based on class is creating a capitalist social formation, the trend in West Irian is in a different direction. Among West Papuans the totality of the caste barrier means that there is little movement towards the emergence of a national bourgeoisie, a comprador class, bureaucratic elites, a petit bourgeoisie or a proletariat.

The Dutch left behind embryonic urban-based middle classes, including an educated stratum, who had begun to fill positions in the public service. That class formation remained quite minimal at that time is illustrated by the findings of a survey of 774 students in West Irian in 1962, in which 66 per cent of the West Papuans surveyed came from the subsistence sector, the rest consisting of labourers, church ministers and evangelists, with only 12 government officials, 13 clerks and five persons in elected political portions.²⁶ Most of the overwhelmingly rural population remained subsistence agriculturalists with internal village economics based on barter and external 'economic' relations either based on barter or on a non-exploitative market economy of simple commodity circulation where "the individual or collective works of direct producers" re-distributed "their products by way of kinship channels and neighbourly intercourse".²⁷

The general assumption of the special state form in which Indonesia binds its diverse cultures into a 'unity' is exclusively elitist and technocratic: villagers are seen as crude and simple-minded, as being in need of leadership, education and instruction. Negara and desa, state and village are identified with halus and Kasar, refined and coarse.²⁸ While these are the official attitudes throughout the republic, they have special meaning in West Irian. For the Papuans are seen as secondary citizens and especially in the populous highlands, as relics of the past who need to be civilized into wearing clothes, dropping their tribal names and practices, calling themselves Indonesians and speaking in the 'mother- tongue' - Bahasa Indonesia, the official language of instruction in schools. A spokesman for the New Order living in Papua New Guinea sums up the official racism in his description of the grand prospects for tourism in West Irian among people "most of whom still live in a 'fossilised' state - relics of the Stone age". Despite high costs for scarce and below international standard hotel accommodation:

Nevertheless, it might be worth the tourist's money to visit Irian Jaya's 'Adventure Land' to see cultures of 5,000 years ago which will soon belong to the past, as the government plan to bring the primitive tribes to modern standards of civilisation is being actively pursued.²⁹

The contradiction for the Indonesian state is that total exclusion from the economy, neglect of the material welfare of villagers and forced acculturation may have unintended consequences. In Papua New Guinea those village people who are now educated and employed look in two directions: towards advancement in terms of capitalist social relationships and towards the aspirations of their village-based societies. For the West Papuans, the conditions of exclusion from the dominant economy are unlikely to create a movement of opposition based on class; the potential is for the further association of the diverse, regionally-based communities which have come to be called 'West Irian' into a movement for liberation.