Famine and Fraud

9/1/2014 Famine and fraud

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Famine and fraud

A story of mass starvation tells us much about media coverage and local government in Papua

Bobby Anderson

The road from Sorong to Tambrauw Bobby Anderson

In early April of 2013 it was reported that at least 95 indigenous Papuans had died of starvation in Kwoor sub-district,Tambrauw District, Papua Barat (West Papua). Another 553 were said to be seriously ill and at risk of imminent death. Thedeaths had begun in December of 2012 and most of the victims were concentrated in Tambrauw’s remote villages ofBaddei (alt: Bakdei), Jokbi Joker (alt: Jokjoker) and Kasyefo.

Tambrauw lies on the northern coast of the Kepala Burung or Bird’s Head peninsula. This starvation report was particularlyironic in that Tambrauw is located next to some of the richest fisheries in the world. Although much of Tambrauw’spopulation is concentrated on, and makes their living from, the sea, the starvation-affected villages are all inland, with theclosest a six-hour walk from Kampung Kwoor, and the furthest a three-day walk. This story resonated: it was indicative ofthe Indonesian government’s callousness toward the indigenous citizens of its easternmost and most under-developedperiphery. And for many it was more evidence to support allegations that genocide is occurring in Tanah Papua.

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An old ‘ABRI Masuk Desa’ Memorial in Kwoor, circa July 1993 Bobby Anderson

The story grew more worrisome with news that two Papuan activists, Yohanis Mambrasar and his father, Hans, werearrested in the Tambrauw capital, Sausapor, for compiling a dossier of local deaths, apparently due to lack of medical care.The Asian Human Rights Commission reported that the two were interrogated for hours about separatist activities in thearea and an urgent appeal was issued by AHRC on their behalf. Implicit in the news of this arrest were two things: that thestarvation must be much more widespread than initially reported, and that the authorities were attempting a cover-up.

After a few weeks of attention to this starvation in select media outlets and independence listservs, the story faded from thenews - yet another example of structural violence perpetuated against Papuans by the state, while brave activists trying touncover such crimes disappear into police custody.

This incident is even more important because the alleged starvation didn’t actually happen.

Origins of the story

The story of starvation in Kwoor was first published in Suara Papua, a purported online news service provider. It wasauthored by Oktovianus Pogau and the source was attributed to Indonesia’s foremost coalition of ‘indigenous’ peoples,Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara (AMAN). The story was duly picked up and disseminated by activists including theAustralia West Papua Association, the Free West Papua Campaign, West Papua Media, ETAN, and other groups, andsoon it received coverage in Suara Pembaruan, Radio New Zealand International, Scoop, Jakarta Post, The Jakarta Globe,Kompas, Waspada and other Indonesian media.

When this starvation storywas first reported, itappeared to be quiteplausible. Food security isan issue in Papua andthere were significantemergencies, mostly inhighland areas, from themid-1990s up until around2005 that necessitatedoutside responses. In themore remote highlandswhere I travel, I continueto see evidence ofchildhood malnutritionand stunted growth. Whatwas so unusual aboutTambrauw was that it ison the coast, and that theremote inland areas,while difficult to access,are walkable within amatter of days. How,then, could people starveto death there?

In April 2013 – on thesame day that a friendwith connections toforeign independenceactivists in New Zealandalerted me to the story – Icontacted two Sorong-based volunteer health and education foundations with programs and staff in Tambrauw. I hadworked with these foundations on service projects in 2012, and I knew them to be passionate advocates of Papuan rights.These are groups that are attempting to provide health services where the government does not.

Neither of these foundations or their staff was aware of any starvation in Kwoor, and this includes workers based in thevillages named in the initial article in Suara Papua. In the meantime, the Indonesian government was issuing denials whichwere hardly taken seriously: when the government first responded to the story, it could only say that it was not aware of thecases and would follow them up. Such a statement is an implicit acknowledgement that there is no governmentrepresentation in the areas concerned. Such a neglectful answer was taken as evidence that something terrible must have

http://suarapapua.com/2013/04/aman-negara-melakukan-pelanggaran-ham-berat-di-tambrauw

http://awpasydneynews.blogspot.com/2013/04/1-smith-off-to-jakarta-security-talks.html

http://freewestpapua.org/2013/04/16/95-papuans-starve-to-death/

http://www.suarapembaruan.com/nasional/95-anak-papua-mati-karena-busung-lapar/33252

http://pacific.scoop.co.nz/2013/04/95-children-dead-due-to-malnutrition-in-papua/

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2013/04/05/ngo-presses-govt-investigate-death-95-papuans.html

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/news/conflicting-claims-in-west-papuan-deaths/



A market in Kwoor, built and forgotten Bobby Anderson

been occurring.

Over the next week, the staff of these two foundations searched for purported starvation deaths - not just in Jokbi Joker,Baddei and Kasyefo, but also in Syubi, and a day’s walk from there, in Kweserer and Kwekrisnos, the apparent epicentre ofstarvation’s victims, but they did not find a single starvation casualty. And they were diligent, not just cynically investigatingthe veracity of a claim. Rather, they were chasing down an alleged crisis in order to respond to it, as they would in anyother humanitarian crisis.

One of those involved in the search was an expatriate doctor, a fluent Abun speaker, who has lived and worked for 14years in Tambrauw’s Kwoor / Abun language areas. These workers found only a few fever-related deaths in Jokbi Joker, asix-hour walk from Kampung Kwoor and the coast. The workers were flummoxed, especially over how the number of 95dead and 553 at –risk-of dying was calculated. Fever-related deaths in Jokbi Joker occur regularly. But was 95 the totalnumber of deaths from fever over the last three or so years? They didn’t know. They still don’t.

I wanted to know how such a story could start and how it could simply end without closure or follow-up among bothjournalists and activists. If health workers rapidly concluded that the story was a fraud, why couldn’t the people who haddisseminated the story in the first place?

A road trip to Tambrauw

In January 2014, I drove with a colleague from Sorong to Sausapor, the capital of Tambrauw, and then continued to Kwoor.The road into Tambrauw starts to fall apart just into the hills above Kota Sorong, up where the city’s garbage dump andsurrounding recycler’s shacks are. But then one begins to encounter vast tracts of new roads and retaining walls from aspecial autonomy-funded construction boom. New bridges replace older ones made of earth and entire trees. It becomespainfully obvious, the more one drives into remote Sorong and then Tambrauw, that these roads have one expresspurpose: to aid in the felling of these virgin forests. Independent logging camps and shacks nestle in distinctive clustersalongside small sawmills. Stacks of planks are visible on the roadsides while other trees are floated downriver.

Leaving the hills forthe coast, weencounter anatrocious road,hemmed in on oneside by jungle and onthe other by kudzu.Far below, therelentlessly poundingsurf keeps us awakeat night even a halfmile from the water.Sausapor is reachedfive hours afterleaving Sorong. Itmay be one of thedullest towns inPapua, built aroundan airstrip theAmericans created atthe end of WWII, witha few streets andshuttered shops. Twohours beyondSausapor lies Kwoor.

Kampung Kwoor, thesub-district capitalwhere services

should be most available and most professional, hosts a local primary school with most of the windows smashed out. Asecondary school, operated by a private foundation, still functions. From the writing on the chalkboard it seems the youthare learning about Indonesia’s role in ASEAN - a lesson intended possibly to teach the children that there are positiveaspects to the state which are missing from their lives.



Evidence of previous failed development projects was in abundance: waterless outhouses; broken water tanks; a failedgenerator; a bare ‘traditional market’ used as a motorcycle parking lot; and so on. Kwoor’s bureaucratic centre isdistinguished by derelict services, absentee civil servants, and empty government buildings: the insecurity that comes withtoo little state rather than too much.

To the east of Kwoor lies a series of villages that were once part of Kampung Kwoor. They became villages throughpemekaran (the proliferation of administrative units). Unlike so many negative examples of pemekaran, the dissolution ofKampung Kwoor into multiple units makes complete sense - these units are up to a day’s walk from each other.

We attempted to go east, and we thought this would be easy, as my map indicated a bridge across the river immediatelyeast of the kampung, and a road stretching along this coast. But the map was a fiction: the road ended where there wasonce a bridge but it was long gone. We crossed the river one-at-a-time in a skiff piloted by a 12 year old girl who paddledquickly because of her fear of crocodiles. Once on the other side, we walked for 45 minutes on a beach before using vinesto scale a steep hill. We then reached the kudzu-entangled remains of a pioneer road which had been lost to arroyos (flashfloods) in a matter of months. We walked on it for a half an hour before we realised it was once a road.

After another few hours we realised that the man leading us had no concept of space or time. He had only one answer forany query related to distance: ‘an hour and a half’. Further to the east of coastal Tambrauw lie the greatest leatherbackturtle nesting areas on earth. Further inland lies a huge logging area, held under a 45-year concession, by a Jakarta-basedcompany, PT Multi Wahana Wijaya.

The increasing friction of such topography makes travel difficult, but not unduly so. For us it was a question of time, notterrain. Were I to try to live off this land, I would fare badly, due to a serious lack of protein, but I could survive on fruit, rootcrops and water. The biggest threat would be from the irate owners of the root crops I would dig up, followed bymosquitoes. But for the locals who know it, Tambrauw’s jungle, rivers and ocean, all function as nature’s supermarkets.

How to starve to death

It is no cliché to say that Papua is a rich and fertile land. The same also applies to Tambrauw. The district is sparselypopulated and its bureaucratic sustainability as a separate district is tenuous at best. Despite the advent of logging,Tambrauw is still heavily forested, and these forests abound with wild pig, tree kangaroo and a large rat that is considered adelicacy. This is to say nothing of cassava, taro, sago and sweet potato in the higher elevations, along with bananas,papayas, buah merah (a local red fruit shaped like a large carrot) and other fruits.

Starving to death is not an easy way to die. It is a long, drawn out process of macro-cellular breakdown, muscular atrophy,diminishing eyesight and organ failure. Those who die quickly in the right conditions die from a combination of starvationand dehydration, with the latter being the primary cause of death. For starvation with an unlimited access to water – whichTambrauw essentially has in abundance during the rainy November-March period, (when the 2012-13 starvation wasalleged to occur), it would take over a month to die.

During famines, the elderly and the young are the first to succumb, followed by adults who will die according to their pre-starvation physical condition and reserves of muscle and fat. In theory, the 95 alleged to have died in Kwoor would havebeen already the weakest. They would have been abandoned en masse as the stronger ones relocated, with those theycared enough to assist. Even a few weeks into such a famine, the strongest would have reached the coast, dragging alongor carrying their weaker members and children. Once on the coast the news of the exodus would have spread, throughmobile phone cameras, sms, and the frantic movement of ailing humanity to Sausapor and Sorong. A story such as SuaraPapua’s would have been the beginning of a deluge.

Such a condition of mass starvation, in such a land of plenty, would be impossible unless people were purposely deniedfood through the seizure of livestock and forest crops. However, such crops are notoriously hard to confiscate because,unlike rice, they are not stored between harvest and consumption. The only way this could happen is through detention inan area where the ability to forage was denied. A precedent, created by the Indonesian military, occurred in Lalerek Mutin,East Timor, in 1983, so the starvation allegation is more plausible to those viewing Papua through the prism of genocidefavoured by many advocates of independence. We often associate genocide with images of physical structures like campsor barren fields surrounded by concertina wire. In Papua, of course, such images are absurd.

In my time in Tambrauw, I did not see a single soldier or police officer. The only evidence of the military in Kwoor is amossy old concrete monument from the nationwide Suharto-era ABRI Masuk Desa(the military enters the village)campaign, circa 1993, where soldiers from the Cenderawasih Military Command conducted a ‘winning hearts and minds’exercise by constructing new buildings and providing health services. Instead of the military, in Tambrauw I saw what Iusually see in pemekaran districts: failure and absence. Papuans in Kwoor go about their lives as they always have, on footor by boat and paddle, with only the slightest airbrushing of the state upon them, mostly visible in shuttered buildings,

crumbling roads,



The ‘road’ stretching east from Kwoor Bobby Anderson

uselessinfrastructure andstacks of planedwood destined forthe outside world.

Theconflictingroots of thestory

The indigenoushead of Baddeivillage – one ofthe villagesnamed in theSuara Papuastory – is stillirritated by thestarvationallegations, asare numerousordinary PapuansI spoke to inKwoor andSausapor. Butthe head ofBaddei has noidea that the storywas picked upoverseas or wasused asanecdotalevidence of theIndonesiangovernment’s

crimes against its people. Instead, he and others believe that the allegation was created in order to discredit the districtleader of Tambrauw, Gabriel Asem, and the local Golkar structure.

This was part of a local political struggle, they think, started by persons unknown. One person made the unsubstantiatedclaim that perhaps the story was created by one of the men who was arrested in Sausapor, allegedly for compiling dossierson the deaths. It was speculated that Hans, the older of the two arrested men, may have acted out of positive intentions: hemay have tried to bring pressure on the district government to provide urgently needed services in the remote areas namedin the story. Just as in the Papuan highlands, sick people or even children who want to go to school – have to walk out ofthese areas and seek services in places where the roads actually reach.

The community health centre in Sausapor maintains a helicopter for emergencies in these remote areas but even this isineffective: there is no SSB radio or mobile phone coverage in the areas where the alleged starvations occurred, and sonews of a sick person in those places must travel via word of mouth, first to Kampung Kwoor and then to Sausapor. In anyacute emergency, a person either would have recovered or died in the time it took for the news of their illness to reach thehelicopter.

Upon my return to Jayapura, I was surprised to hear that the two Sorong-based foundations were not the only organisationswhich had tried to respond to that fabricated crisis. A health worker from one of the UN ‘sister agencies’ told me that hisagency’s Manokwari-based medical staff had also been mobilised in April 2013 to verify the starvation reports and hadtravelled to the remote villages mentioned in the Suara Papua story.

A small team headed to Sausapor and used the district government helicopter to visit each of the villages where thestarvation was alleged to have occurred. This team went so far as to count graves and visit family members of the recentlydeceased. While this team found a complete lack of services, they also found absolutely no evidence of starvation deaths.That agency wrote an internal report which was disseminated to the provincial and national governments, but no further.



Two village heads discussing the starvation story, Kwoor Bobby Anderson

Lessons to be learned

The story of Tambrauw’s (non) starvation is relevant for a few key reasons. It illustrates how uncritically people -Indonesians as well as foreigners - think about Indonesia, and about Papua. This story was accepted without reservation bynumerous journalists and human rights activists the author is acquainted with, even though Oktovianus Pogau, the authorof the initial story in Suara Papua, is well known for his sympathies with Papuan activist groups.

For many Papuans –motivated by the MemoriaPassionis which theyundeniably bear – there isno malice which thegovernment, national orlocal, is incapable of.Papuan students inYogyakarta demonstratedagainst this reportedstarvation. They wereaghast and frankly, theyhad a right to be. The lackof accountability betweenthe government and thecitizens of its easternmostprovince over the natureof Papua’s incorporationinto the Indonesian state,and the suffering of all thevictims of thatincorporation, give themevery reason to besuspicious. Thatalienation leaves a spacefor such stories to takeroot.

Whilst Papuans mightsuspect malice, for mostother Indonesians, thestory was one ofgovernment dysfunction.For most Indonesians,there is no act ofincompetence that thegovernment is incapableof – especially when it comes to new local governments and the absentee bupatis (regional rulers) who behave like littleprinces. Friends in Yogyakarta, Jakarta and Makassar believed the starvation reports because they believe localgovernment in Indonesia is rotten to the core.

But observers of Indonesian affairs, those who care about Papua and Papuans and the Indonesians themselves, have aresponsibility to be suspicious and critical. This story was not true. Whatever goal this fiction had – either to supportallegations of genocide and therefore an independent Papua, or to discredit a local leader – it weakened that goal. Nor didthe allegation improve health services. Moreover the Indonesian government does itself no favours by not refuting what itknows to be untrue. That UN sister agency’s report apparently made it as far as the vice president’s office. Why no further?

Such sloppy and unverified reportage is often justified, post-exposure, as a device that serves to capture other previouslyunreported incidents. Papua has many such stories of neglect, and of starvation, with the last verifiable cases dating from2006. The author has seen such malnutrition in the highlands in 2011 and 2012. But propagating fiction is not acceptable.

So much of Papua remains remote. Outside of the towns, there is a lack of health and education services, communicationnetworks, good phone reception and passable roads. Stories emerge from these distant corners – of clan fights, of foodemergencies, of sicknesses. The lack of development that prevents these stories coming out quickly and accurately is theresponsibility of both national and local governments. And for that they deserve censure. But stories need not be invented



in order to further excoriate government. In Papua, there’s enough truth to choose from without resorting to fiction.

Bobby Anderson ([email protected]) works on health, education, and governance projects in Eastern Indonesia,and travels frequently in Papua and West Papua. This and other articles on Indonesia can be found athttp://independent.academia.edu/BobbyAnderson/.

Inside Indonesia 117: Jul-Sep 2014

Regions: PapuaPolitics: Local Politics Decentralisation SeparatismSociety: Health Marginalised GroupsEconomy: Poverty

http://independent.academia.edu/BobbyAnderson/

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Famine and Fraud