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.