Buyat Pantai area: Portrait of a fishing village
Buyat Pantai area: Portrait of a fishing village
Harry Bhaskara and Jongker Rumteh, The Jakarta Post, Buyat/Manado/North Sulawesi
This is the first of a series of article on Buyat.
After a three-hour drive from Manado, the village of Buyat on
this northern arm of Sulawesi island does not look like a
tempting destination. It has one dirt road lined on each side by
wooden huts.
Visitors can take solace in the pristine beauty of Buyat Bay.
The horseshoe shaped bay seems too small to be at the center of
the global controversy that has surrounded it. At the bay's
widest point, there is only about a kilometer of beach. The
adjacent Totok Bay is about 10 times the size of Buyat Bay.
Buyat village, called Buyat Pantai by locals, is home to about
300 people. So, how did such a small village attract so much
attention? The answer lies in the huge gold mining company
located nearby, PT Newmont Minahasa Raya, a subsidiary of the
Newmont Mining Corporation, which is based in the U.S. city of
Denver. After eight years, the company stopped its operations in
Buyat in 2004, as scheduled.
Another reason for the attention is that Newmont dumped its
tailings in Buyat Bay rather than Totok Bay. Buyat Bay has been
the center of controversy for more than a year now. The National
Police, the Office of the State Minister for the Environment and
civic groups are suing Newmont for allegedly polluting the bay.
However, an international seminar last week in Manado
concluded that the bay had not been polluted. The seminar,
organized by the Manado-based University of Sam Ratulangi, heard
the views of 34 scientists on the issue.
The Associated Press reported in December that groups in Peru
were suing Newmont over a mercury spill near its Yanacocha mine
that allegedly sickened 1,100 people. The company says it has
spent US$16 million to clean up the site.
In Turkey, the company's Ovacik mine was shut down last August
over concerns about the use of cyanide to process ore. Newmont is
also battling environmentalists in the U.S. state of Nevada who
say its proposed Phoenix mine expansion will cause groundwater
contamination -- something the company denies.
The 120-kilometer trip southwest from Manado to Buyat takes
travelers over potholed and winding roads. In Buyat Pantai, the
single dirt road is barely 400 meters long.
"This used to be a heavily forested area," Busrin, 39, a
fisherman in the impoverished village, said. "In 1972, a
Philippine logging company came here and cleared away all the
trees."
After the trees had been cleared, fishermen arrived in waves
during the fishing season. Most left after the season was over,
others stayed on, according to Busrin.
Enter one of the thatch-roofed huts overlooking the water and
Buyat Bay is only a few meters from the backdoor.
Most villagers have other jobs apart from fishing. Some work
as manual laborers while others work as farmers, especially when
the fishing is bad.
The village may be small and poor, but the breathtaking
natural beauty of its surroundings, the clean air and the open
space is a far cry from Jakarta's slums.
It also has facilities that no doubt would be envied by
villages that do not have a multinational company as a neighbor.
Buyat has a community health center, a kindergarten, water
containers, a community toilet, a mosque, a soccer field and a
volleyball field.
On average, Newmont has provided $335,000 a year for community
development programs since 1996, according to Justinus Widodo,
Newmont's manager for community relations and the environment.
Not many of the about 10,000 impoverished villages in
Indonesia enjoy such a luxury.