Matthew Moore – Glaciers appear to hang from the sky above Tembagapura, an improbable town squeezed into a valley perched nearly two kilometres above a lush Papuan rain forest. It's a crazy place to build. But Louisiana's Freeport McMorRan company needed homes for some of its 16,000 staff and contractors whose shifts are worked up near theequatorial ice, where they mine one of the earth's richest and most remote gold and copper reserves.
Over a period of 30 years, Tembagapura's residents – including more than 120 Australians – have turned their mountain mining camp into a lively community. They've built houses and apartments, a supermarket and club, tennis courts and a fitness centre, places where they can meet and jokeabout their unusual lives. Until last Saturday, they also had an international school where 10 teachers taught 75 mainly American and Australian expatriate children, aged from three to 15. The children are still there, but the teachers have gone; three shot dead and others injured in a vicious attack that has torn the heart of Tembagapura. Only the secretary is left.
The mining hasn't stopped, but the school is paralysed, and the community around it is grieving deeply. The counsellors have come, and volunteers are trying to hold things together while the company searches for a way to revive the place that's at the core of the town. But it's hard to find 10 teachers ready to start on Monday.
A week ago it was shaping up as a great year ahead. The new school principal, Edwin "Ted" Burgon, had experience in international schools all over the world. Well into his 50s, he'd come with his wife Nancy to Tembagapura in Indonesia's Papua province barely a month ago, ready for the mid-August start of the new school year. Friends believe they'd wanted to get to know their new colleagues when they decided on their fatal trip last Saturday morning. They chose as their destination a well-known picnic spot, with tables and barbeques, with a view over the forest below that stretches away to the Arafura Sea. Only four-wheel-drive vehicles can climb the steep road out of the valley and, with their eight teacher colleagues, the Burgons borrowed two Toyota Land Cruisers from the car pool. They were 11 in all, middle-school maths and science teacher Kenneth Balk and his wife and computer teacher wife Saundra Hopkins brought alongtheir six-year-old daughter Taia Hopkins, who'd just started first grade. All were Americans apart from Bambang Riwanto, the school's Indonesian teacher whose wife is expecting their first child.
It took them just over 10 minutes to ascend to the ridge where they passed the permanent army post with its soldiers on guard. For 10 minutes more they followed the road south, while mist hid the precipitous drops on either side that in fine weather can put your heart in your mouth. With the cloud cover still heavy, there was little to see from the picnic area, apart from the soft alpine ferns and flowers, so they turned for home heading back along the knife-edge ridge. After three kilometres, the road climbs gently before it swings around the side of the hill and runs flat for 80 metres. To their left was a steep wall of earth; on the right was a gentle grassed rise just above car window height. That hillock, only two metres from the road, became the shooting mound.
One survivor told police he saw four men on it; three were armed, two with army-issue automatic weapons. They were about 20 metres apart. They sprayed both cars, first through the windscreens then along the side, the bullets going straight through the vehicles and some of those inside. Two dump trucks were right behind them. Trapped in their cabs, with no place to hide, both Indonesian drivers were hit, one with a bullet that went close to his spine. When the semi-trailer driver with a load of liquid nitrogen came up onto the rise and saw what was happening, he tried to drive round the stationary vehicles, but a bullet through the door caught him in the buttocks and he lost control, his truck swerving to a stop at the front of the line of vehicles.
Freeport vice-president Andrew Neale and his wife were headed the other way, off for a relaxing weekend in Timika, when they reached the semi-trailer blocking the road, its hazard lights flashing. Neale jumped out and was met with the screams of the wounded and the sounds of a burst of bullets ripping past him. He leapt back into his car, turned it around and sped back to the army post about six kilometres towards Tembagapura. Dropping his wife there, he rushed back with six soldiers. Again he was fired on and again he escaped unhurt. The teachers were not so lucky. By the time the attackers fled, fourth and fifth grade teacher Ricky Spier, Ted Burgon and Riwanto were almost certainly dead. Five others had bullet wounds to the body, shoulder and leg, including Francine Goodfriend who'd taught pre-kindergarten for just a fortnight at the school and was shot near the spine. Only Saundra Hopkins, her daughter Taia and Nancy Burgon escaped serious injury. Ambulances rushed the wounded back to Tembagapura's hospital where doctors stabilised them for the drive to Timika and a night flight to Townsville for emergency surgery.
The attack was as ferocious as it was undisciplined. With 93 bullets fired from such close range, and no-one shooting back, it's amazing there were any survivors. With the long-smouldering tensions between the Papuans and Indonesians never far from the surface, it was always going to be impossible to agree on who was responsible. Each day has brought a new theory, but little evidence. Immediately after the attack, the military commander of Papua, Major-General Mahidin Simbolon, accused a faction of the Free Papua Movement (OPM), headed by Kelly Kwalik, of the ambush, widening his scope later in the week to include other OPM-aligned groups. His troops on Sunday killed one (still unidentified) Papuan in a gunfight at the scene of the ambush, proof he said of his claims that a separatist splinter group was behind it. Papuans concede locals may have done the killings, but insist they would have acted only under military pressure and direction.
Their broad theory is that the army sees such incidents as a way of proving they need extra money and resources. With a grossly underfunded military responsible for protecting all big developments in Indonesia, it's an argument levelled against the military across the country.
At the heart of Papuan suspicion of the Indonesian Government and military is four decades of often brutal repression and the Papuans' inability to get the share they want of the province's vast natural resources. Nowhere is that more obvious than around the Freeport area. For 30 years, Papuans have watched the riches from the fabulous mine go mainly overseas, to Jakarta or into developments like Kuala Kencana, Freeport's other town after Tembagapura. Hidden behind gates down on the lowlands, bike paths and mowed lawns connect housing estates for suburban homes carved out of the rainforest. Nothing highlights the wealth of the mine like Kuala Kencana's Ben Crenshaw-designed golf course, regarded as the most remote championship course in the world.
Papuans living in shacks must have watched in amazement as Freeport spent two years dumping river stones into two crushers running round the clock to make 560,000 cubic metres of sand for the fairways. To get the right feel for the greens, Freeport imported 50 containers of Canadian peat moss.
The vice-president of the Papuan Presidium Council, Thom Beanal, is also a commissioner for Freeport and has helped negotiate agreements on behalf of the local tribes, but he still feels cheated. Since 1996, Freeport has committed 1 per cent of its annual revenue, or up to $US14 million each year, providing more health, education and infrastructure services for the local Papuans, but according to Beanal, it's insultingly little. "Our people are being robbed because the mountain is mine. Is it right to give only 1 per cent to the owner of the mountain? I don't think so. I don't know how much they should give, but more than 1 per cent. " Ever since Freeport built its mine in the early '70's there have been sporadic attacks on its people and property. After some shootings in 1996, it was quiet until last December when two Freeport employees were shot. And then, in May, windows were smashed and petrol poured onto the carpet of its Kuala Kencana head office in an apparent attempt to burn it down. No-one was caught and no one knows if these events were linked to Saturday's killings. And no-one believes the incidents have ended.