Empire of the East (40 page)

At best they will become unskilled labourers working in mines, or in the plantations that are to replace the vanishing rainforests, or growing rice for the surplus population of Java dumped in their midst. Those like the Amungme who refused to accept this future can expect to be shoved away out of sight and forgotten. In this way the empire is consolidated.

W
E SQUEEZED INTO
Greg’s Toyota Special, and the last six miles of our journey to the mine was a charge up an impossible gradient and a final squeeze through a narrow tunnel which brought us to an absolute barrier at the foot of the peaks. At this point, fully disguised as miners in their working gear, we clambered into an iron belvedere from which the aerial tramcar is hauled into the newly levelled plateau in the sky at the centre of the drama. Peering into the abyss below, then up into the misted pinnacles ahead as the tramcar was lifted aloft, I recalled the pleasant qualms of childhood when subjected to some fairground adventure, and wondered if whoever planned this soaring approach nurtured a secret passion for the theatre.

The climb to about thirteen thousand feet takes an unnaturally prolonged four minutes. We got out, stiff in our miner’s gear, breathing a little faster than usual, and blanched in the mist. Suddenly all the colours had gone, reduced to a bluish monochrome, and the meandering haphazard shapes of the familiar world were tamed by the simplicities of the mine. Two enormous mountains, the Ertzberg and the Grasberg, had stood close to each other, and their rugged profiles were now replaced by pale geometrical shapes. They had been mountains of limestone, with cores of igneous rock, and littered here, in a spread of soft white light among clearings of mist, was what was left of them, the ‘overburden’ which one-hundred-and-thirty-ton earthmovers were tidying away along the perimeter. Thus in one corner of vision a ghostly step-pyramid had formed, and in another the dunes of a vaporous Sahara.

Enormous vehicles picked us up in their haloed headlights as they took shape, rumbled away and were blotted out. I looked down from the surrounding wall into the vast cavity from which someone had described the Ertzberg Mountain as having been torn up by the roots. Greg thought it was a kilometre across. It was now full almost to the brim with countless millions of tons of water, the colour of Reckitt’s blue, which would be put to some industrial use.

At this point Victor Holm, a senior mining engineer newly arrived from the States, took over; a man with a trick of quiet but convincing emphasis, and the expression of a high churchman untroubled by doubt. ‘I guess there’s not much to see,’ he said. ‘Most of the action is underground these days. Ertzberg is kind of fading out but we still take fifteen thousand tonnes of ore a day out of the pit. You probably heard we’re going to ninety thousand tonnes a day. Most of that’s Grasberg. We have a two-hundred-and-fifty-ton digger on its way from the States. That’s the biggest in the world. Any of the kind we’re using at this moment can pick up a twenty-five-ton mouthful of ore and dump it ready for the mill in under a minute, so you can figure how it will be when the big boys get to work. Know something? A single tyre for one of those sonofabitches costs forty thousand dollars. Give you some idea of the expenditure, when we actually make roads of them. Soon as a tyre shows signs of wear it goes into roadmaking. We’re a godsend to the tyre industry.’

We had been swinging up and down the slopes in the fog and I had lost all sense of direction. ‘Where does this road go to, Mr Holm?’ I asked.

‘Right now we’re down in the Grasberg pit,’ Holm said. ‘We’re probably about six hundred feet down in the mountain. There’s a system of roads running round it at different depths, and it’s quite possible to take a wrong turning and lose your way. Just imagine losing your way in a pit.’

‘Like Dante’s Inferno up in the sky,’ I said.

He laughed. ‘Well, maybe you’re right,’ he said. ‘We aim to go down three thousand feet. Could be more if it turns out to be mineralized. That’s one helluva hole.’

‘What are those vehicles doing down there?’ I asked. Earthmovers with blazing headlights were charging in one direction and another like a squadron of battle tanks.

‘That’s the Grasberg working level,’ Holm said. ‘The surface has been blasted to loosen it up, and now they’re scooping away the ore. They go down nine metres at a time, then the charges go in to blast the next level.’

Holm manoeuvred past a hill of fog-shrouded rubble. ‘Is all that ore?’ I asked.

He picked up a lump of rock and handed it to me. It was very heavy, its surface veined with the glitter of metals fused in the volcano three million years ago. ‘That yellow you see isn’t gold,’ he said, ‘although there’s a substantial gold content. The other stuff you were looking at was the overburden.’

‘The original mountain,’ I said.

‘If you like,’ he said. ‘A general mix-up. Earth, rocks, vegetation and what have you.’

A few minutes earlier, while touring the perimeter with Greg, I had seen an earthmover snatch up a bit of useless scenery to which a small pine tree was still attached and rumble away with it out of sight. ‘A bit of a headache for you,’ I said.

‘We have a problem,’ Holm said. ‘Two and a half billion tons of it.’

‘You mean
million
tons,’ I said.

‘No, billion. We have one hell of a lot of overburden on our hands.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘Well, eventually push it into the next valley, and forget about it,’ Holm said. ‘What else can we do?’

‘So what’s the future of all this?’ I asked.

‘Rosy,’ he said. ‘Put it this way, we have high hopes. Mr Ward expects to have a dozen mines in the area, but the great question is what we’ll come up with elsewhere. Most igneous rock is barren, but when metallization exists it tends to occur in a belt. These mountains go all the way to Papua New Guinea where they’ve made encouraging assays. All I can say is the possibilities are limitless.’

‘And will you be staying on here?’ I asked.

‘Well, maybe and maybe not. Most of our people find seven or eight months is about right. The scene is very confined, and the wives who come here find it hard to take. They’re usually warned that it’s their duty to occupy themselves. They can go to sewing classes or sign up for watercolour painting. Everyone goes to church on Sunday and after that they go to each other’s houses for any new video that happens to be about. The work is what counts, and outside that it’s not much of a life.’

John Cutts was in constant attendance. He was an interesting man with a fine Sioux face, an excellent amateur anthropologist, flew alone in his microlite through these deep and land-locked valleys, and took the best videos of tribal ceremonies I had ever seen. He had had some accidental trouble with insurgents at a time when the OPM had been strong in the area, five years before. Villagers had implored him to come to their aid when guerillas had surrounded a post defended by five policemen — a circumstance setting off a panic among the villagers who had reason to fear a retributory attack by counter-insurgency aircraft. Rushing towards the post in the hope of persuading the OPM to hold their fire, John stopped a bullet in the upper arm which nearly carried away his shoulder. This proved to have been fired by the police, and he pulled up his shirt to reveal the hideous muscular turmoil caused by an Armalite wound.

I would have said that John Cutts was incapable of a downright lie. His method of defending the company’s position was to stage a diversion designed to draw away the attention from an unsatisfactory fact. John knew full well that those who took the difficult road to Tembagapura were likely to have a social or political axe to grind. The company had been charged with seizure of traditional land, of filling valleys with the wreckage of mountains and polluting a major river, and that was what concerned them. Even Indonesian newspapers had been known to make reference to the wretched Amungmes living not quite out of sight in Tembagapura under plastic sheeting stretched across sticks in the fairly constant rain. John, as he was bound to, deftly avoided such topics.

In a letter to Freeport McMoran of New Orleans, Rainforest Action Network complains that ‘most trips to the Tembagapura mine appear to be propaganda blitzes, designed to exhaust and astound the visitor — in all cases accompanied by Freeport representatives, in company vehicles and with company drivers’. ‘Schedules’, adds the writer, ‘were tightly packed, so as not to allow for private interviews.’ I myself was given a guided tour, probably similar in most respects to one provided until recently for visitors to the Soviet Union. It is hard to see how it could have been otherwise. No cars are available in Tembagapura other than somewhat specialized models adapted to deal with difficult conditions, and even were those to be available for general use, there are no roads other than the highway linking the mine with the coast. Travel otherwise can only be in one of the company’s helicopters. To be able to conduct private interviews I would have had to arrive with an Amungme interpreter, who might not be allowed in, and would certainly have been hard to find. Schedules in my case were certainly not tightly packed. I was made welcome for as long as I was able to stay, which was one week. But all contacts are official. There is no investigation to be done.

A high spot of the visit was to the mine itself, a great engineering feat of our times, which when it is all over will inevitably leave one of the greatest messes on the face of the earth. No hesitation was shown in driving me all over it. It is there. Nothing can be done to cover it up. Holm’s hunch that there might be more such mines to come was revealing indeed, if unintentionally so.

In Tembagapura I briefly succumbed to a lung infection, which caused me to miss what must have been a pleasant interlude by way of a helicopter trip to a local feast. This was held in the village of Araonup where an assortment of tribals were celebrating the opening of a school. On his return John showed me a video of professional quality he had taken, and there was no doubt that all concerned were having a wonderful time. They ran about in all directions, garlanded with leaves, waving branches like Victorians on Palm Sunday, thereafter, by local custom, clubbing festive pigs to death before cooking them in the usual way. I was interested in the commentary accompanying the video, which came over as a set speech from a policy document issued by the Summer Institute of Linguistics, the largest and most powerful Protestant fundamentalist mission in the world. ‘You can’t sit here and protect little pockets of people, and think that you’re doing them the privilege of protecting them from the outside world. It’s changing, and it’s going to change. What better way to help these people than to help them understand these changes, and maybe develop some skills they can market?’

The little pockets of people in this case are the Amungme. Fifteen years ago in Bolivia, where I had been sent by the
Observer
to investigate reports of the enslavement of forest Indians in the North, I was told to my astonishment at the Bolivian Ministry of the Interior that I would require the permission of Mr Victor Halterman, Bolivian head of the SIL, before I could visit the area. The permission was not forthcoming. Mr Halterman came straight to the point. ‘A number of Indians remain in forest areas designated for white occupation,’ he said gently. ‘They are a dangerous nuisance as it is, and they must go. Our task is to ease their passage.’

As a fundamentalist Mr Halterman agreed with the doctrinal statement warning of ‘the unending punishment of the unsaved’, which consigns to hell not only those millions brought up as Jews, Muslims, Hindus or Buddhists, but all the unimaginable multitudes of good and great men and women born into this world before the advent of Christ. ‘I am a member of the SIL,’ Cutts admitted to me in our last interview, and he too — and most emphatically — was of Mr Halterman’s fundamentalist view. It occurred to me how extraordinary it was that Indonesia, a Muslim state, with an enormous preponderance of non-Christians among its citizens, should support an organization which assures so many of them that hell’s fires await them beyond the grave.

This conversation took place on a natural rock platform above Tembagapura, to which people shut away in the depths of the valley would escape when they could to refresh themselves with a new view of a prosaic reality, transformed in the charm both of distance and a novel aspect.

John never failed to be impressed by the vista and its garnish of industrial romance. ‘There’s almost ten thousand people living in this town. It’s just chiselled right out of the side of a mountain — you’ve got fourteen-thousand-foot peaks up above these.’

The view was indeed majestic, all the more so in the strong, lugubrious colour-wash of evening light. Stubby fingers of cloud were reaching down through the peaks, and here and there the lights began to twinkle in the windows.

‘It’s expanding as fast as it can,’ John said, referring to the town.

‘Don’t the Amungme regard these mountains as holy?’ I asked.

He laughed it off. ‘Let me say this,’ he said. ‘What’s a mountain to them? These mountains are not even as valuable as a pandanus nut tree. When we go into an area and explain what the exploration programme is they say to us we’re happy if you find a mine so we can experience some advancement in our area. We have an incubation programme to teach these people entrepreneurial skills. They feel like they want to be part of the changes they see.’

‘And how is the exploration going? I hear the new lease goes most of the way to Papua New Guinea.’

‘They’ve done a large project,’ John said. He smiled unflagging enthusiasm. ‘There have been a few spots they’ve decided to take a second look at.’

‘I would have been happier to hear you say that what they have here already will take them a few years to digest,’ I said. ‘Victor Holm thought it might be the year 2000 before they get down three thousand feet to the bottom of Grasberg. I suppose a world collapse in the price of copper is the only hope.’

It was clear from John’s expression that he was unable to take such remarks seriously. We walked together towards the car. Disappointingly the weather closed in on us a little before time. The houses in their rows slid beneath the mist, and there was the faintest of smells in the nostrils of industrially flavoured rain.