March 1973, President Suharto gave Tembagapura its name and officially opened the operation. At the same time he ordained that the name of the province would henceforth be Irian Jaya ("Victorious Irian") instead of Irian Barat ("West Irian"), a decision which obliged the Freeport officials to send the dedication plaque back to the United States for re-engraving.
Although the initial investment in building the mine was recovered in just three years, low world copper prices kept profits to a minimum until 1979. From the start of operations in 1973 until the end of 1980, some 521,000 tons of copper concentrate were shipped out, containing 6 million ounces of silver and 463,000 ounces of gold, and resulting in $772 million in gross sales.
Community relations problems
The West Papuans living near the mine site were at first simply astonished by all the activity, then began to resent the huge disparity of wealth that existed between themselves and the Freeport workers. At times, groups have claimed ownership of the mine, saying that their land and minerals have been unfairly expropriated.
At one time, the West Papuans—who considered the mountain sacred—put up saleps, hex sticks in the shape of crude half-meter-high wooden crosses, all around Copper Mountain. Resentment still surfaces today.
In the first years of the mine's operation, a cargo cult grew up in the area. One man proclaimed that he would be able to open the warehouse inside the mountain where the whites and western Indonesians obtain their wonderful possessions, with only a special rodent's tooth. The tooth didn't work, but this longing for material goods continued to brew.
Separatist rebels—members of the Organisasi Papua Merdeka, or OPM, which had been fighting against Indonesian rule since the 1960s—recruited some West Papuans near Tembagapura, including a few of the company workers. The conflict came to a head in the summer of 1977, and the slurry pipeline was cut in several places, power lines were ruptured, an explosives magazine was burned and several trucks returned with arrows in their radiators.
Most of the problems the company faces today have to do with displacement, and a growing dependency on the mine. In its setting, the wealth of the Freeport operations is incredible, and even the garbage produced by Tembagapura is very attractive to the people of the surrounding mountains.
Shanty towns sprang up just outside the town border, housing at one time some 1,000 people. The squatters lived off Tembagapura's garbage, stole whenever possible and were a constant sore point with Freeport as well as the government, which tried to convince them to return home or settle in the transmigration site at Timika, 70 kilometers away in the hot lowlands. (Recently, a sudden flood wiped out the shantytowns, and the people were relocated.)
Freeport has regularly sponsored local development projects, but in the past has had little success. Often, the problem has been that the company rushes in with manpower and largess—for example, building a village with company carpenters and wood—and the villages are left with a project that is unsuitable, and for which they have no sense of ownership. New programs are attempting to work more closely with each community, allowing the people to build a political consensus for the type of development they would like to see. This process results in fewer of the kind of flashy projects that look good in a corporate report, but the results are more lasting and valuable.
WEST PAPUA TODAY
Dutch New
Guinea to Irian
'Victorious'
As the Japanese saw their fortunes slipping toward the end of the second world war, they openly encouraged anti-colonialist movements and, in a last-ditch effort to maintain eroding Indonesian support, promised independence after the war. Nationalist conferences were held and the political infrastructure for an independence movement was in place by the time Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945.
On August 17, nationalist leaders Sukarno and Mohammed Hatta declared merdeka, "independence."
The Dutch were unwilling to relinquish the territory, however, and it took four years of fighting on Java and the threat of a cut-off of Marshall Plan funds to Holland to make the declaration stick. The Dutch formally ceded sovereignty on December 27, 1949, and on August 17, 1950—five years after the original proclamation—the Republic of Indonesia was born. The Dutch East Indies were now independent—all of the Indies, that is, except western New Guinea.
Colonial holdover
The 1946 Linggadjati Agreement, signed by Dutch and Indonesian representatives, states that the Dutch were to relinquish the "whole territory of Netherlands India." But as fighting flared anew before the agreement could be implemented, the Dutch considered it null and void. For their part, Indonesian nationalists always believed that West Papua was an integral part of their country.
In the final document ceding control of Indonesia, the status of West Papua was purposely left vague. The Indonesians were anxious to get on with building their country, certain that the West Papua question would eventually be resolved in their favor. They took to heart Dutch negotiator Dr. Van Mook's assurances that "it is absolutely not the government's intention to shut West New Guinea out of Indonesia."
Holland soon found an excuse to withhold her half of New Guinea, however, when Indonesia turned its agreed-upon federal structure into a unitary republic with power concentrated in the capital and the president. The Dutch regarded this as a breach of the Round Table Agreements that had led to Indonesia's independence. But it was the internal politics of Holland, more than any other factor, that led to the retention of Netherlands New Guinea.
The monument to West Papua's independence in Jakarta.
Right-wing parties at home insisted that the Dutch flag remain planted in at least one portion of the former colony, and the presence of oil around Sorong was most certainly a factor as well. By portraying West Papua as an anti-communist bastion in the Pacific, the Dutch also sought and received U.S. backing.
Dutch conservatives wrung support from the Labor Party to obtain the two-thirds parliamentary majority needed to exclude West Papua from the Transfer of Sovereignty. Australia, also headed at this time by a coalition of conservatives, supported Holland. In 1952, the Dutch parliament even amended the constitution to incorporate West New Guinea (as well as Surinam and the Antilles) into the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
While the young Indonesian nation struggled to consolidate its scattered islands and peoples, the Dutch tried to make up for their years of neglect of West Papua. In the 1930s, 200 Europeans lived in West Papua. In 1949, following Indonesian independence, this figure leaped to 8,500—including thousands of Eurasians who fled here, worried about retribution in the young and still volatile Republic. A Dutch exodus from the rest of the archipelago also swelled West Papua's expatriate population. Newcomers settled in areas around Manokwari, Sorong and, particularly, Hollandia.
Before the war, Dutch posts along the coast were widely scattered and controlled little beyond their immediate vicinity, and the only inland post was one at the Wissel (Paniai) Lakes, established in 1938. This situation quickly changed after 1949. During the 1950s the Dutch set up a number of new centers in the highlands, and began to take oil out of the Sorong area, nutmeg and mace from Fakfak, crocodile skins and copra from Merauke, and copra from the Raja Empat Islands and the Bird's Head. A new sawmill at Manokwari began to exploit West Papua's huge forest reserves. The lion's share of exports headed to Holland and Singapore.
But the cash inflow from exports was dwarfed by Holland's massive subsidies to West Papua. While as late
