Charles Scheiner – Imagine a vast land mass, laden with gold and timber and populated only by a few "primitive" tribes. Imagine an overpopulated, expansionist neighbor eager to reap the harvest next door. In North America from 1492 through 1849, the result was enslavement and genocide of Native Americans and a United States that now stretches from sea to shining sea and exerts global economic, military and political power.

Indonesia aims to repeat the saga, and the parallels are striking.

But instead of the Homestead Act giving Native land to Easterners who move West, the Indonesian government subsidizes transmigration from Java to Indonesia s outer islands. Instead of rugged individualist 49ers rushing to California with pickaxe and pan, New Orleans-based multinational corporation Freeport-MacMoRan uses the latest in 20th-century technology to run the world's largest gold mine in West Papua. Indonesia's treatment of the West Papuans, particularly its lack of respect for their human, civil and economic rights, is a macabre reminder of our own national history, with the US Cavalry superseded by the tanks, helicopters and machine guns of ABRI, the Armed Forces of the Republic of Indonesia – and with the corpses black instead of red.

We can no longer avert the genocide that accompanied European expansion over our continent. But we can be aware of the repetition of that history now occurring in West Papua – and of the key role the United States played in laying the groundwork for this reprise. It is not too late to stop history from repeating itself to the bloody end.

The colonial history

Most of Southeast Asia was colonized by Western powers in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Japanese occupation of the area (French Indochina, British Burma and Malaya, the US Philippines, Dutch Indonesia and Portuguese Timor) during World War II, coupled with the growth of indigenous liberation movements, led after the war to revolutions and independence formany of those countries.

Indonesia (formerly the Dutch East Indies) was no exception, declaring independence in 1946 and achieving it three years later. The United States encouraged the Netherlands to leave the colony, thereby opening it up to freer international trade.

In neighboring resource-rich Dutch New Guinea (West Papua), which had been ruled as a separate colony, independence did not come so readily, as much of the territory was still isolated from international contact. But by 1957, the Dutch – with deliberate slowness – promised West Papua it would be self-governing by 1970 and belatedly began to develop local infrastructure and skilled personnel.

Indonesia was not so patient, however; assimilating West Papua became a major cause for the Sukarno government, despite the fact that the 1.5 million West Papuans who live in the territory are religiously, culturally and racially distinct from Indonesians. In 1962, the United States averted a possible war by negotiating the so-called "New York Agreement" between the Netherlands and Indonesia. It provided for eight months of transitional UN rule, then Indonesian control, to be followed by a plebiscite to be held before 1970. Jakarta named the territory "Irian Jaya," an acronym for "Follow Indonesia Against Holland."

Although West Papuans were not included in the negotiations leading up to the New York Agreement, the pact was sanctioned by the United Nations and the world community. Indonesia took over the territory May 1, 1963. Two years later, Indonesia itself was taken over in the cataclysmic military coup that put still-reigning General Suharto in power. Suharto followed up with mass killings of alleged supporters of the mass-based, formerly legal Communist Party of Indonesia; the slaughter claimed upwards of a million lives.

No choice

The misnamed "Act of Free Choice" of 1969 that ostensibly implemented the New York Agreement gave the people of West Papua no choice at all. In a travesty of a plebiscite, Indonesia allowed only 1,025 carefully selected "traditional leaders" to vote on the question; they unanimously chose for their country to remain a province of Indonesia. Journalists were excluded from the meeting, although leaked UN and diplomatic reports convey its coerced, uninformed and undemocratic nature.

Angered by this betrayal and receiving no support from the international community, West Papuans began to organize guerrilla resistance under the Organisasi Papua Merdeka, the Free Papua Movement. Although the OPM occasionally engages the Indonesian military, usually resulting in reprisals against neighboring civilian populations, its resistance is primarily symbolic; it is difficult, with spears and captured handguns, to win against a modern army equipped with the latest in US-supplied helicopters and munitions. But the OPM knows West Papua s jungles and mountains far better than ABRI does and continues to control significant areas in the bush.

Casualties are hard to estimate, but the pattern is familiar. In addition to military retaliation, forced relocation, coerced labor and imported diseases have taken their toll; a hundred thousand or more West Papuans have died from the Indonesian occupation, and tens of thousands of Indonesian troops remain in West Papua to preserve control and order.

Transmigrasi policy

One of Indonesia s greatest needs (and part of West Papua's attraction for Indonesia) is relief for overpopulated Java, an island with 30 percent the area of West Papua but almost 100 times as many people. Since the early 1970s the 20th-century version of the Homestead Act (often financed by the World Bank) has enticed more than 200,000 people to move to West Papua, threatening to outnumber the locals.

Inaria Kaisiepo, a young West Papuan woman living in exile in the Netherlands, put it this way:

"The Papuans have always led a self-sufficient way of life. They have their own agricultural systems. The Indonesian authorities do not show any respect for the Papuans and are only interested in [West Papua's] minerals and other natural resources. They say West Papua has little people and is practically empty. The multinationals are being allowed to come in. Papuans have no place in this development process. They are considered backward and primitive, and they become second-class citizens in their own country.

"There are 240 languages in West Papua, and even more tribes. The people try to defend their land. For instance, the Moi people are very strongly resisting a logging company in their area. There is also the transmigration policy in Indonesia. A lot of immigrants come to West Papua, and the Papuans are being pushed aside for the immigrants, who have better education opportunities. There is a lot of discrimination going on. At the moment it is difficult to get exact figures because the Papuans are not allowed to call themselves Papuan, and everyone is supposed to call themselves Irianese. But there are estimates of a 3.5 percent population growth in West Papua but only 0.2 percent among the Papuans, so in a few years, the Papuans may become a minority in their own country.

"Papuans have no right to their own culture. They are not allowed to practice their own culture except when they are forced to practice it for tourism, like in woodcarving, where they are forced to do woodcarving all day and then these are sold for a hundred times more than they were paid for it.

"It is difficult to organize for indigenous peoples because they are not recognized. There are supposedly no Papuans in Papua so they are not allowed to organize. We are struggling for a right to self-determination."

Resistance continues

In addition to the military resistance, the West Papuans often use nonviolent and cultural tactics – and are met with violence. In 1984, for example, West Papuan anthropologist Arnold Ap was killed by Indonesian troops after a ceremonial raising of the West Papua flag in Jayapura, the capital. Subsequent Indonesian military "exercises" caused 10,000 refugees to flee over the border to Papua New Guinea.

In December 1988 Dr. Thomas Wainggai (a US- and Japanese-educated Papuan scholar) led about 70 people, including many church leaders, in a similar flag-raising at a Jayapura sports stadium.

Although military leaders were invited to attend, they chose to participate by arresting those present. Dr. Wainggai was sentenced to 20 years for his peaceful protest. After his March 1996 death (probably of natural causes) in a Jakarta prison, 4,000 people rioted when they were prevented from holding a public funeral.

The cracked golden egg

Although West Papuan land and lumber are valuable commodities, the real prize is the gold and copper reserves estimated to be worth more than $60 billion. And the winner is: Freeport Pacific Indonesia, a joint venture of the Indonesian government and Freeport MacMoRan, the largest US investor in Indonesia. Freeport s huge gold mine in West Papua processes more than 120,000 tons of ore daily, netting $200 million profit in 1995 alone. With the help of Freeport director and consultant Henry Kissinger, they recently obtained rights to an even larger area of West Papua and have arranged with the British RTZ mining company to increase by half again their rate of conversion of West Papua s mountains into gold, copper – and river silt. More than 90 percent of the mined mountains end up as tailings, clogging rivers and destroying the environment for miles and miles downstream.

Freeport was the first US company to rush into Indonesia after Suharto's brutal takeover, and it continues to front for the regime.

Its active presence in the US Congress – opposing any pressure on Indonesia (and lobbying to hasten the demise of the Endangered Species and Clean Water Acts, among other environmental protections) – is little noticed outside the Beltway. But the bluntness of Freeport CEO James R. "Jim-Bob" Moffett is having repercussions as the company has come increasingly into the spotlight for its involvement in human rights violations.

In April 1995, the Australian Council for Overseas Aid documented the killing or disappearance of 15 alleged OPM guerrillas and 22 civilians in Freeport-controlled territory. In one incident, ABRI attacked a peaceful flag-raising ceremony on Christmas Day, 1994, killing at least three and arresting and torturing more than a dozen. Although Freeport denies that its own people were involved, it works closely with ABRI, providing equipment and transport for the soldiers who "protect" Freeport s facilities. Other reports (including one by the usually compliant Indonesian National Human Rights Commission) have confirmed the Australian Council s findings, as well as the fact that ABRI used Freeport-provided containers as torture chambers.

At the same time, Freeport s destruction and dishonesty about its operations effects on the West Papuan environment became better known back in the United States, where the company is renowned for flouting local and federal anti-pollution rules. Things got so bad that the Overseas Private Investment Corporation of the US government took the precedent-setting action of canceling Freeport s $100 million "political risk insurance" policy, even after President uharto personally urged President Clinton to forestall the action.

Freeport appealed the ruling, and an arbitrator worked out a settlement that restored the insurance only until the end of 1996 – but not before anti-Freeport riots this March shut down the mine for several days.

Following the riots, Moffett met with local leaders, and Freeport's aggressive public relations people falsely claimed a settlement had been reached. Tom Beanal of the local Amungme Tribal Council is currently suing Freeport in New Orleans federal court.

Meanwhile, at the University of Texas in Austin, Moffett promised a multimillion donation in return for a building to be named after him and his wife. As student and faculty activists raised questions about the appropriateness of an academic institution honoring such an individual, Freeport wrote several professors and journalists, threatening lawsuits if they continued to write about Freeport s activities. The controversy grew so intense that the University s Chancellor William Cunningham had to resign his $40,000/year post as a Freeport director.

At Loyola in New Orleans, Freeport had endowed a $600,000 chair in "environmental communications." But after some students demonstrated at Jim-Bob's home (some signs read "Jim-Bob Moffett kills for profit"), he demanded the return of the money. The Wall Street Journal opined that Freeport's "Wielding a Howitzer against a mosquito is a dangerous strategy," but Forbes Magazine depicted Freeport as victim, railing against the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and US and Indonesian environmental groups for "using their power in the US bureaucracy to impose their own standards on other countries."

Desperate measures

Freeport is not the only West Papua story deemed more newsworthy than ongoing genocide. An OPM guerrilla group near the Freeport mine seized 26 hostages Jan. 8, including seven Europeans, and demanded independence for West Papua. Although a few were released quickly, half were still captive four months later, as the Red Cross tried to resolve the situation, promising to keep the military out. A settlement had nearly been reached when Indonesian military helicopters came flying over the site in violation of the Red Cross promise. In response, OPM guerrilla leader Kelly Kwalik (several of whose relatives had been killed by ABRI/Freeport forces in 1994) withdrew his promise to free the hostages. The Red Cross gave up May 9, and a few days later a massive Indonesian military operation freed all of the European and most of the Indonesian and West Papuan hostages. Several OPM people were killed by the military, and two Indonesian hostages were apparently killed by their captors. At this writing, the actual events are still unclear, and many fear military reprisals against the neighboring civilian population.

The hostage drama and its ambiguous ending illustrate the despair felt by many West Papuans at their inability to effectively challenge the Indonesian and corporate rape of their land and people. Many OPM leaders in exile criticized the hostage-taking as wrong and/or counter-productive, but the personal histories and isolation of some guerrillas in the jungle made them unable to see that Indonesia would not accede to their demand for independence.

Although the incident did put West Papua s independence struggle on the front pags (especially in the British, Dutch and German home-country press of the captives), its resolution was a serious setback for the OPM.

As in East Timor, invaded and occupied by Indonesia since 1975 with genocidal results, it will take sustained pressure from many quarters – international solidarity, foreign governments, the developing democratic movement in Indonesia and the West Papuan people themselves – to bring Jakarta around. But the first step, for Americans, is learning about a drama that is disconcertingly similar to one of the most shameful aspects of our own nation s history.

Fast Facts about West Papua: http://www.warresisters.org/nva796-5.htm

Further Information: http://www.warresisters.org/nva796-5.htm£moreinfo

[Charles Scheiner, formerly of the WRL Executive Committee, has worked on Pacific peace and sovereignty issues for more than a decade and is national coordinator of the East Timor Action Network. The opinions in this article are his own and not those of ETAN.]