When
Bardina Degei cooks dinner, she doesn’t use a stove. She rarely even uses a
pot. In her wooden home in Enarotali, the capital of Paniai regency in the
restive Indonesian province of Papua, the housewife usually just places a sweet
potato — known locally as “nota”— directly into the fireplace.
After
half-an-hour, the charred tuber is retrieved and devoured with eager, unwashed
hands. Degei sits on the mud floor — she has no furniture — which is where she
also performs her daily chores, such as washing clothes with murky water from
the nearby swamp. A bucket in a roofless room serves as a latrine. As the
youngest of her husband’s four wives, she has been assigned no fields to tend. (Polygamy
is common here.) Of course, working late can be dangerous: Most of the village
men are unemployed and many drink heavily, plus there are the soldiers. “No one
dares to walk around the village after 5 p.m.,” she says.
It’s
a rare glimpse of daily life in the highlands of Papua, a former Dutch colony
that was absorbed into Indonesia in 1969 following a controversial referendum,
when just 1,026 elders were forced to vote though a public show of hands before
occupying troops. An existing movement agitating for independence against Dutch
rule swiftly turned its ire against the Jakarta government, which maintains
tight control over the region, barring foreign journalists or rights monitors. In
2003, the province was officially split into Papua and West Papua, with
independent Papua New Guinea occupying the eastern part of the island.
Enarotali
is as remote as it is desolate; the journey here involves a 90-minute flight
from the provincial capital Jayapura to Nabire, and then a stomach-churning
five-hour drive by hire car. (There is no public transport.) The town of some
19,000 people consists of wooden houses ringed by bamboo fencing, corrugated
iron roofs transformed by rust into varying tawny shades.
Very
few Indonesians have made the journey here, let alone journalists, and
practically no foreigners. Before Christian missionaries arrived, Mee Pago
Papuans worshiped a God named Uga Tamee. There were other changes, too. “We
were not used to wearing these clothes,” says Degei, indicating her vividly
colored, hand-woven turban, dark shirt and a bright skirt. “Before, we only
wore leaves on our bodies.”
Papua
is Indonesia’s poorest province, where 28% of people live below the poverty line and with some of the worst
infant mortality and literacy rates in Asia. But it is also Indonesia’s land of
gold. The world’s largest and most profitable gold mine,
Grasberg, owned by Phoenix-based Freeport McMoran, lies just 60 miles from
Paniai, a highland province around the size of New Jersey and home to 153,000
people. In 2015 alone, Freeport mined some $3.1 billion worth of gold and
copper here. In addition, Papua boasts timber resources worth an estimated $78
billion.
These
riches are, however, a source of misery for Papuans, ensuring Indonesia’s
powerful military maintains a suffocating presence. A 2005 investigation in The New York Times reported
that Freeport paid local military personnel and units nearly $20 million
between 1998 and 2004, including up to $150,000 to a single officer. Papuan
calls for greater autonomy threaten this golden goose, and are dealt with
mercilessly.
According
to rights activists, more than 500,000 Papuans have been killed, and thousands
more have been raped, tortured and imprisoned by the Indonesian military since
1969. Mass killings in Papua's tribal highlands during the 1970s amounted to
genocide, according to the Asia Human Rights Commission.
Photo:
An illegal gold miner sifts through sand and rock as he pans for gold in
Timika, Papua Province, Indonesia, on Feb. 4, 2017. Ulet Ifansasti—Getty
Images
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