2. Papua JOHN BRAITHWAITE, MICHAEL COOKSON, VALERIE BRAITHWAITE AND LEAH DUNN1 Papua is interpreted here as a case with both high risks of escalation to more serious conflict and prospects for harnessing a ‘Papua Land of Peace’ campaign led by the churches. The interaction between the politics of the Freeport mine and the politics of military domination of Papua, and military enrichment through Papua, are crucial to understanding this conflict. Replacing the top- down dynamics of military-political domination with a genuine bottom-up dynamism of village leadership and development is seen as holding the key to realising a Papua that is a ‘land of peace’ (see Widjojo et al. 2008). Papuans have less access to legitimate economic opportunities than any group in Indonesia and have experienced more violence and torture since the late 1960s in projects of the military to block their political aspirations than any other group in Indonesia today. Institutions established with the intent of listening to Papuan voices have in practice been deaf to those voices. Calls for truth and reconciliation are among the pleas that have fallen on deaf ears, which is an acute problem when so many Papuans see Indonesian policy in Papua as genocide. Anomie in the sense of withdrawal of commitment to the Indonesian normative order by citizens, and in the sense of gaming that order by the military, is entrenched in Papua. Background to the conflict Troubled jewels of cultural and biological diversity The island of New Guinea and the smaller islands along its coast are home to nearly 1000 languages (267 on the Indonesian side) and one-sixth of the world’s ethnicities (Ruth-Hefferbower 2002:228). It is the place we should go to think most deeply about the effect of ethnic fractionalisation on warfare and on peacebuilding with plurality. In this chapter, we use ‘Papua’ in the way most indigenous people of the western half (the Indonesian half) of the island of New Guinea use it. This might confuse in several ways. First, we will see that this 1 The first draft of the paper was written by John Braithwaite with Valerie Braithwaite and Leah Dunn. Michael Cookson led the reworking for the next draft of the paper and contributed additional insights from the literature and from his various fieldwork visits to Papua between 1994 and 2008. We wish to thank, in addition, our advisory panel members, Rika Korain and Thomas Petersson for assistance they provided with making contacts for our fieldwork. 49 Anomie and Violence region currently comprises two provinces of Indonesia: West Papua, with its capital in Manokwari, and Papua, with its capital in Jayapura. Second, ‘West Papua’ is a politically loaded term, which has been used since 1961 by Papuans at home and in exile to denote their aspirations for a sovereign state. Finally, Papua was historically the name given to the southern part of the eastern half of the island of New Guinea. That former colony is now part of the independent nation of Papua New Guinea. When we say ‘Papuans’ in this chapter, we mean the indigenous peoples of the Indonesian provinces of Papua and West Papua. We call residents of these provinces who have moved there from elsewhere in Indonesia (mostly since the mid-1960s) migrants. Papua is the most troubled part of Indonesia today, suffering the greatest extremes of inequality and poverty, arguably the most debilitating levels of corruption and the worst conduct of the Indonesian military. Papua struggles through its fifth consecutive decade of intermittent armed conflict. It is one of the places in the world with a risk of civil war in the next few years. Three colonial powers—The Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom— split the island of New Guinea down the middle, creating what is today Indonesian Papua and Papua New Guinea (see van der Veur 1966). New Guinea was once one of the most advanced regions of the world. Jared Diamond (1997:153) identified New Guinea as one of the three regions of the globe where food production arose independently, allowing the shift from hunter-gatherer to sedentary agricultural societies.2 The other two regions of independent invention of food production were the Fertile Crescent of today’s Middle East and what is today the eastern United States. The civilisational transformation to which intensive agriculture gave birth spread more widely from the other two regions than from Melanesia, from where it did not spread even to nearby nomadic Australia. This is surprising because 40 000 years ago, Australian Aborigines seem to have been more technologically advanced than Europeans, developing the earliest hafted stone tools (that is, mounted on handles) and by far the earliest watercraft in the world (Diamond 1997:297). Austronesian languages spread from Taiwan- Malaya-Indonesia across Papua and New Guinea to New Zealand and all of Polynesia and Micronesia, but not to southern New Guinea and Australia. Variations in topography, culture and physical environments, appear, however, to have vitiated against the rapid development and diffusion of new agricultural technologies from New Guinea’s highland communities to the wider region.3 2 A fact recognised in 2008 when Kuk Swamp in the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea was included on UNESCO’s World Heritage register (see <http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/887>). 3 The challenges to the transfer and development of such knowledge among cultural groups in New Guinea is apparent to linguists who have, for decades, sought to link non-Austronesian languages across the rugged interior and southern swamplands of the island (the ‘trans-New Guinea hypothesis’) (see Pawley 2005). 50 2 . Papua Today, it is not possible to drive into many highland regions of Papua, where two-thirds of the indigenous population live.4 Flying into the central highlands, you see something similar to what the first Westerners ‘discovered’ in 1938: the ‘Shangri-la’ of the Baliem Valley (see Archbold 1941). What they saw then and what you still see today is extraordinarily rich agricultural land producing a diversity of vegetables and fruit and supporting large populations of pigs. The pigs are auctioned through independently invented economic trading systems that parallel institutions that in the West in the past century made stock exchanges the drivers of capitalist development. Wholesalers and retailers of pigs at Jibama market on the outskirts of Wamena negotiate shareholdings in pigs and litters of pigs and deploy sophisticated arrangements for sharing the profits from the sale of pigs and pork. A large proportion of the men involved in this negotiation to this day wear only their penis gourd (koteka or holim) as clothing.5 The people of the highlands of Papua continue to be rich in their culture and agriculture and it is hard to find places on the planet less touched by globalising influences. In large areas of these highlands, sustained contact with ‘white’ or non-Papuan Indonesian ‘foreigners’ came only in the 1960s or early 1970s. Poverty in historical perspective Many Papuans living outside larger towns or district capitals have no electricity in their village (therefore no mobile phones or information technology),6 no piped water or road network and limited incomes to purchase basic foods that they do not grow themselves, such as rice.7 In the highlands, improved agricultural technologies are needed to deliver food security in the staple of sweet potato (especially to cope with drought-related famine and other factors that adversely affect food production) (see Ballard 2000; Bourke et al. 2001). The poverty rate in Papua is more than twice the national average and the Human Development Index (HDI) in the central highlands is the lowest in the country.8 Children might have access to primary school education but sadly it is very common for 4 There is a four-wheel drive/truck track from Nabire to Enarotali in the Paniai Lakes region of the western highlands and a road from Wamena towards the western highlands. 5 While some of the men at the Jibama market and in the streets of Wamena are dressed in koteka to pose for tourists (for money), many Dani come to Wamena for business or pleasure wearing their traditional koteka as they would in their village. 6 All district capitals now have local mobile phone coverage and some highland capitals today benefit from micro-hydro power and other hybrid forms of electricity generation. 7 Many Papuans have lacked sufficient protein and trace elements (such as iodine) in their diet, resulting in chronic disease in many communities. Recent socio-cultural changes have also redefined the diet for many (semi-)urban Papuans, shifting the staples for lowland/highland Papuans from sago/sweet potato supplemented by fresh fish/meat respectively, to rice or noodles with tinned fish or meat (pork). 8 The poverty rate in Papua is 41 per cent compared with a national average of 18 per cent (UNDP 2007a:1). The 2006 Annual Report of the UN Development Program for Indonesia gives the extremes for the HDI in the country—with Jakarta at 0.76 and Papua’s central highlands district of Jayawijaya at 0.47 (UNDP 2007b:5). 51 Anomie and Violence teachers to not turn up to school.9 Teachers dislike, even resent, postings to a comfortless life in highland villages remote from townships and most consider their remuneration for such postings inadequate. There are similar constraints on the provision of medicines and professional health care in many highland villages, where this is extremely limited or unavailable. This could be read as meaning many lowland and highland Papuans are neither better nor worse off than they have been for millennia. The reality, however, is that many are worse off.