CHAPTER 4 PART 3

> Recent News and Comment

> The Production of Oppression

> Song For West Papua

> Christmas Is. Celebrations

The Production of Oppression

The Multinationals

For the Indonesian state based on high technology transnational investment West Irian has turned out to offer an unexpected bonanza. The main areas of exploitation are all natural resource-based industries and the assumption is that the Indonesian state, not the West Papuans own the resources of that colony. Forestry, oil and mining operations have commenced with virtually no regard for village land rights. One writer who visited West Irian in 1975 has claimed that all the forestry reserves have been allocated to Indonesian exploiters without any regard to Papuan land righs.¹⁸ Fishing agreements are most liberal so far as the fishing companies are concerned. 'Payments' for land for mining operations have been with tobacco and other goods and employment on construction sites and in later extraction operations has favoured non-Papuans.

Most important for national revenues so far have been mining and oil operations. Freeport Sulphur is mining copper at Mt. Erstberg on the south coast, the largest base metal outcrop in the world. Freeport, one of the world's most profitable business ventures, was given a free hand in the thirty eight square mile contract area and a three year tax holiday under Indonesia's Foreign Investment Law, drawn up in 1967.¹⁹ Based on the possible price of refined copper of 40 cents (U.S.) per pound, the value of the copper alone was more than two thirds of a billion dollars. In 1976 and 1977, the world copper price had plummetted, as did that for other base metals; in July 1977, it was around 55-60 cents (U.S.) per pound. By 1974 Freeport's entire equity of $20.9 million had been recovered; the mine began producing in February 1973.²⁰ Based on multinational collaboration in interdependence with national states, Japanese and West German corporations are taking all the copper, U.S.-based Freeport is taking the profits, while U.S. and German government agencies have taken the risks by guaranteeing the loans to finance the project.²¹

Like Bougainville Copper (BCL) in North Solomons, Freeport has suddenly become a major source of revenues. Yet unlike the BCL mine at Panguna, where 40 per cent of the workforce are from North Solomons, where there is trade union organization and where BCL boasts of its showpiece wages and conditions and fringe benefits in the town of Arawa, conditions of Indonesia's repressive police state, mean that there is no redress for West Papuans for the taking of their land and for those few Papuans who work there there are virtually no wages at all. Following the determined and publicly supported protests of villagers against BCL's encroachment on their lands, the keynote of company policy has been repressive tolerance; given the overriding importance of political stability for uninterrupted mining activities, the general circumstances in Bougainville and the activities of Australian-based trade unions with members at Panguna made it essential for BCL to project an image of a multinational 'with a human face'.²² By contrast, given the totally beleaguered situation of the West Papuans, it was 'open go' for the mining company at Mount Erstberg.

As a capital-intensive project, only 731 workers are employed in the Freeport project area, of whom 150 are Papuans.²³ At the height of construction, the company employed 850 foreign and 1200 Indonesian workers and several hundred Papuan villagers in unskilled jobs who were paid in kind at the rate of eight to ten cents an hour, an arrangement made by the Indonesian government.²⁴

Other mining contracts signed in December, 1972, by a number of foreign consortiums, include PT Pacific Nickel (U.S. Steel owns 43 per cent of shares) at Gag Island off Sorong and the Cyclops mountains near Jayapura, PT Lake Panai, oil exploration near Enaratoli, PT Baliem Valley, molybdenum exploration in the central highlands.²⁵

Multinational exploitation is only in its early stages in West Irian. As those national economies dependent on high technology run short of resources, the most rugged countries in the world, like West Irian are seen as increasingly 'accessible'. For the West Papuans, this can only mean further encroachment on their lands, without even the conventions of compensation that occur in the islands of Papua New Guinea to the east. Profitable exploitation of resources provides a new reason for continued Indonesian occupation. Of course it also provides the answer to those who claimed that a separate Papua was economically unviable; after all those yet 'untold riches' really belong to the Papuan people.

NOTES

18 Special Correspondent, Pacific Islands Monthly, (1975), op. cit.

19 See Lenny Siegel, "Freeport Mines", Pacific Research and World Empire Telegram (Jan./Feb. 1976) p. 8.

20 Pacific Basin Reports (August 1974) p. 165.

21 Ibid.

22 For a fuller discussion of the 'two faces' of BCL. see Nonie Sharp. "Bougainville Coppers", Arena, no. 38, 1975, p. 3-6.

23 Lenny Siegel (1976), op. cit. p. 11.

24 Garnaut & Manning (1974), op. cit. p. 74.

25 Ibid., p. 73.