2 x 20 - 48pt Bodoni

2 x 20 - 48pt Bodoni

Papua's autonomy test:
The Tangguh LNG project

Ignas Kleden
Sociologist
The Center for
East Indonesian Affairs
Jakarta

The messages of the law no 22/1999 and the law no 25/1999
regarding political decentralization and economic deconcentration
has been, for the past one year, so to speak, hanging "on air".
There has been much criticism raised against the two laws so far
with regard to both their logical consistency as well as to their
supporting legal products needed to guide their implementation.

There are also still many other problems concerning
conflicting perceptions and misperceptions of the regions on what
regional autonomy is all about. What is still obviously lacking,
however, are political and economic initiatives at the national
and regional level which purposely aim to translate the spirit of
decentralization and de-concentration into political decisions
and economic policy.

Needless to say, the two laws have got more serious attention
from foreign foundations and foreign companies operating in
Indonesia. Concerns about the attitude of regional government
towards business contracts or economic cooperation which have
been made between Jakarta government and foreign companies
operating in the regions cannot be overestimated.

In that connection any attempt by big companies - national or
multinational - which aims to put economic de-concentration and
political decentralization into realization should be attended
to, appreciated, and critically supported. A good case in point
is the construction of LNG Tangguh Project in Berau Bay, in
Bird's Head region of Papua.

Processing facilities will be built in southern shoreline,
between the two rivers, Saengga and Manggosa. The site for
processing facilities covers no less than 3,266 ha. The
construction is planned to begin in late 2002 with pre-
construction preparations starting in 2000. Its operation will
commence in 2005 and the first drop of LNG is expected to fall in
the last quarter of 2005.

As mentioned above, the LNG Tangguh Project has two main
stages, namely construction stage (2000 - 2005) and operation
stage (2005 - 2025). The construction work will absorb 5,000
workers, a great part of which come from local labor force. To
that extent the question of employment for the people from local
communities is partly resolved.

The real problem, however, will arise in the operation stage,
in which the whole production and maintenance will be run by a
staff of 500 skilled persons. This is the case because the
project will be a world class plant equipped with highly
automated facilities. The question is then: what to do with the
local people especially those living in Bintuni and Berau Bays
which will be directly affected by the industrial plant?

This question seems to concern those who are responsible for
the project because of some related reasons. First, we cannot
forget the case of Freeport which is faced with a number of
serious social problems. The people of Papua do not want to have
the same problems with any other big companies which want to
operate on their lands.

Some intellectuals from the University of Cenderwasih,
Jayapura, and the University of Papua, Manokwari, say that if
Freeport is a phenomenon of economic concentration and political
centralism, LNG Tangguh Project should become a benchmark of
economic de-concentration and political decentralization. This
opinion was made explicitly clear during a two-day workshop in
Sentani, on Nov. 27-28.

Second, the project resulted from a collaboration of nine
partners which are respectively Pertamina, British Petroleum
(Indonesia) or BP (Indonesia), British Gas Plc (BG), Mitsubishi
Corporation, Kanematsu Corporation (KG), Nippon Mitsubishi Oil
(Nisseki Mitsubishi), Nissho Iwai, Genting Berhad Cairns Ltd, and
the Provincial Government of Papua. Among them Pertamina and BP
(Indonesia) become the Tangguh Project operators.

It seems that the operators are fairly aware of the social
changes which will be driven by the project and the social costs
which they are likely to have to pay if the local people are not
seriously integrated in the results of the projects, if not in
the workings of the project.

This becomes all the more urgent for the people of Papua who
have abundant natural resources and yet still live in relatively
very poor conditions. Papua is one of the four provinces in
Indonesia which are ready for regional autonomy as far as natural
resources are concerned. The other three are Aceh, Riau, and East
Kalimantan. However, per capita Gross Regional Domestic Product
of Papua (1997) for example is no more than Rp. 4.3 million.

Third, the operators of LNG Tangguh want to see how political
decision concerning political decentralization and economic de-
concentration can be translated into corporate governance. In
that connection, Pertamina and BP (Indonesia) have worked out a
development strategy which is expected to better fit local needs.

This strategy is called Diversified Growth Strategy (DSG),
which sometimes is also called Distributed Growth Strategy. The
first term refers to the expected multiplier effect in terms of
sectors, whereas the latter refers to the regions.

Some related aims of the strategy as propounded in its
conception are as follows.

First, it aims to prevent economic concentration, this being
done by means of multiplying growth centers in terms of both
territory as well as sectors. In order to reach this aim policy
will be made whereby non-local job-seekers are not allowed to
submit their application for work at the location of the project.

People from, say Tanimbar or Ternate island who want to look
for a job are only allowed to apply in Sorong, Manokwari or Fak
Fak, and if they succeed they will be employed in one of these
towns. In the same way other dependent employment and economic
activities will be carried out by people from local communities.
Cultivation of vegetables, food stalls, small shops and the like
are expected to be run by the local people.

Needless to say, this idea can be realized if two
prerequisites are met. On the one hand local human resources
should have sufficient technical and managerial know-how. On the
other, local government officials should be correct enough to
stick to this policy. In other words, the plan and policy will
not work if the old practices of corruption, collusion and
nepotism (the so-called KKN) are able to distort all the
procedures so much so that the local government officials allow
the outsiders to come in and to work at the location of the
project, this being done in exchange for some venal benefits.

The writer attended the above mentioned workshop in Hotel
Sentani, Jayapura, held by BP Indonesia and Pertamina in
cooperation with locals on Nov. 27-28.

2. FUNDAMENTAL:
Encouraging vengeful fundamentalism
1 x 28 36pt Bodoni

Disillusion breeds bitterness

Jeremy Seabrook
Guardian News Service
London

You see them everywhere on the streets of Dhaka, Jakarta,
Karachi, the boys with their qualifications: a Master's in
personnel, a diploma in management, a degree in marketing. You
meet them on the battered buses, in the dusty parks, in the
flyblown eating-houses, clutching copies of their ``biodata" in
plastic folders.

They are on their way from house to house, giving tuition to
the children of the middle class. These are the representatives
of the pinched under- employment of a generation raised on the
promise that if only they study business, they will be sure of a
managerial job, big money, a security greater even than that
guaranteed by government service.

Business culture has seized the imagination of the young all
over the world. It has brought new hope to a generation whose
educational aspirations have been transformed by its revelations
of wealth- creation. They carry textbooks, published in the U.S.,
pages of which they learn by rote. Many are from poor families,
from small towns and distant villages, who have sold precious
land or gone into bottomless debt for the sake of a better life
for their children.

For them, to study in the capital enhances prestige - distance
from the homeplace, it seems, adds value, no matter how
academically thin the object of study, no matter how shaky the
institution. It is already clear that most of these young men
will not find the place they covet in the global economy. They
are dupes of the latest fad to reach the third world, a reach-me-
down form of study formulated in the west, and now a major
export, of only marginal value to the countries whose young have
taken it up with such zeal.

Global business culture is calculated to pacify yet another
generation of impatient young people. Bangladesh, Indonesia,
India are full of unemployed graduates. Twenty-five years ago,
their counterparts would have been studying politics and
sociology, while their grandparents applied themselves to
liberation and neo- colonialism. At that time, they would have
been quoting Marx and Fanon, animated by a shining-eyed
conviction that they would inherit the earth.

In the process they are committed to a learning as remote from
their experience as the study of Tudor history was in the
colonial era. Many of the devotees of business have already been
disillusioned, embittered that their efforts have yielded no
tangible reward. There are no prizes, no salary, no job. They
prowl the streets of the capital, hungry, predatory, angry, their
trousers frayed, fake logos on their dusty trainers, haunted by a
social injustice which the dogmas of their teachings require them
to interpret as personal failure.

One consequence of all this has been a profound disturbance to
their sense of self. Some deal with this by a determination to
leave the country, to find a job, any job, as long as it is far
from personal witnesses to their humiliation - a driver in
Riyadh, a security guard in Singapore, a cook in Abu Dhabi.

But other able young men have been readily enlisted by
criminal gangs, often attached to political parties. Extortion,
blackmail, protection money are part of the daily life of the
slums. When the Bangladesh National party won the elections in
October, the first big changeover of personnel was not in the
ministries, but among the mastaans, or gangs, running the river
ghats, railway terminals and bus stands.

Gang warfare, fallout from the corruption which occupants of
real jobs (especially in the police, customs and excise, the
bureaucracy, property speculation and transport) are in a
position to practice, do sometimes lead to business opportunities
for former students in the lengthening shadow-world cast by the
market economy. Killings are to be made, it turns out, often
literally: bodies are found on garbage dumps from kidnappings
that go wrong, contracts for the murder of territorial rivals or
disputants over smuggled goods.

But there is an alternative for those repelled by a world
which has rejected their attempts at self-improvement. The
politicising of religion offers another kind of self-expression.
The money that has poured in from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf
states in the past two decades has led to the construction of
thousands of madrasas (Islamic schools) and mosques, and the
setting up of Islamic charities, many of which are informed by
fundamentalist ideology. The courtyards of the big mosques are
full of elderly beggars and orphans, the sick and disabled,
leprosy and TB patients, who receive food and shelter provided by
no other agency.

The number of children educated in Islamic schools has
increased dramatically, especially since governments have been
under pressure from western financial institutions to implement
structural adjustments, and have cut spending on education,
health and nutrition. It is said that in government schools, the
teachers don't show up.

Those who see symbols of decadence in western culture are led
to the austere purification rituals of a backward-looking version
of Islam. The "purely" economic prescriptions of the IMF, World
Bank and WTO have repercussions far beyond the merely economic
sphere: they profoundly affect social relationships, culture,
religion. Many people see in these a fundamental assault on the
sensibility and tradition of the people; a form of the very
fundamentalism which they call forth in response, and which is
met with astonished incomprehension in the west.

In this way, the very ideology of business serves indirectly
as a recruiting agent for a vengeful fundamentalism, for versions
of religion and faith unrecognisable to tradition and piety
alike. The purveyors of these elegant doctrines of self-
enrichment dissociate themselves from the consequences of their
apparently secular preachings; with the results that we have
seen.

There are, of course, other elements in the business
development model and the reactions it provokes. In Bangladesh,
the battleground of the warring ideologies of modernised
colonialism and politicised Islam is an older, rooted Bengali
culture. The Islam of Bengal was generous and inclusive. It co-
existed, not only alongside Hinduism, animism, Buddhism and
Christianity, but also the humanism of a thousand-year-old
Bengali tradition, with its song, poetry and drama of Lalon,
Nazrul Islam and Tagore, as well as the ancient music of the
paddy fields of Bengal. This culture is being ground between
alien ideologies, its antique beauty a dwindling force in lives
to which it not so long ago gave meaning.

It was stated by the U.S. and the coalition against the terror
of Sept. 11 that the response would be military, diplomatic and
humanitarian. No question of any effort to deepen an
understanding of the roots of fundamentalism; and for a very good
reason. If it were our objective to anticipate, and perhaps even
to forestall, such developments, this might require an
acknowledgment of our own role in the creation of the cycle of
hope, disappointment and anger.

In the vacuum left by the extinction of socialism and the
decay of secular cultural identities, people have found in the
disciplined asperities of a regressive version of Islam a
hopeful, and sometimes, murderous alternative. It seems we are
content to rest in an idle laissez-faire of the spirit, which
permits events to take their course, and only then to seek to
rectify them by intensifying a violence which we have already
helped to unleash in the world.