Ex-hostage Daniel Start looks back on Irian Jaya

Ex-hostage Daniel Start looks back on Irian Jaya

By Adrian Smith

JAKARTA (JP): Since the beginning of June two Belgian filmmakers have been held hostage in Irian Jaya. One person who knows what they are going through is Daniel Start, who survived such an ordeal and wrote about the experience.

Now 28, the Englishman was the leader of the ill-fated 1995 Lorentz expedition. Eight weeks into their conservation work, all 12 members of the international scientific team were taken hostage by Irian Jaya separatists from Free Papua Movement (OPM).

The group was held for more than four months, constantly moved from place to place and their fate held in limbo as their captors' demands frequently changed. Two Indonesian members of the expedition were murdered by the separatists during the final military operation to free them.

Start wrote vividly of his experiences in The Open Cage, published in 1997. In the book he gives a detailed description of the events surrounding the hostage-taking and the group's eventual release. And, as the title suggests, he examines the complexity of his feelings toward his captors and the wider issues and tortured history surrounding the events into which his expedition unwittingly stumbled.

Start talked about his experience as a hostage and his life today from his home in London.

Question: Have your feelings about the hostage experience changed over the last five years?

Start: I wrote in the epilogue of my book that very quickly it felt as if I was telling a story rather than it being a real experience. The story got told so many times and the conditions were so distant from modern living in the United Kingdom that it became very difficult to see it as a real experience.

Over a period of time, that only increases and you end up looking back at parts of the experience through "rose-colored spectacles". Perhaps, myself more so than the other members of the expedition.

Are there moments of your ordeal that are particularly vivid?

Most of the hostage-taking was quite serene and boring, but it was punctuated by extreme moments. There was the initial kidnapping when the tribesmen rounded us up and we thought we were going to be executed. There was the Army attack at the end when the Army (Kopassus troops) finally came in and bombed the valley and the villages. There were the executions and murders at the end. All of those events are still very vivid.

The things that really stick in my mind, though, are the happier moments; playing with the children in the villages, swapping stories with the women, the gifts that the older people would bring to you like food, such as tree kangaroos, which they would come and share with you.

The generosity of the Papuan people was incredible, they would share everything with those around them. They were such warm- spirited people, sitting around the fire singing songs, telling folktales.

Also, the natural beauty; sitting by the river, watching the birds. So there are a lot of very special memories as well.

Would you say such an experience has made you value your personal freedom more?

I don't think it had any particular effect on my desire for freedom. I have always been a traveler and I still am. If anything, a lot of people thought it might have killed some of my "wanderlust", but it hasn't.

We actually had a certain degree of personal freedom and we were treated very reasonably by the people who were holding us. If anything, the general feeling was of frustration; that the situation was not going to resolve itself easily and we could tell that. But I didn't particularly feel like I was a prisoner, that I was being locked up every day.

Throughout the book you mention how the demands of the hostage-takers changed from day to day, that they would move you to a new location and not tell you why. That, for me, would be the worst part of it -- never knowing what would come next.

That was definitely the most unnerving feeling. It was more a feeling that we were in a situation that was totally unpredictable. It had no logical sequence, no logical end. In a way, what it did do is give one a much greater capacity to accept and adapt to whatever life brings your way, to stop planning quite so much.

What kind of state of mind do you think the Belgian filmmakers are in at this stage of their ordeal, given the fact that they have been held hostage now for two months?

There would be a lot of frustration, a lot of hunger. You think it is going to be over in a day and then after a lot of false starts you realize that you cannot possibly predict when it is going to end; it could be a month, it could be a year. And that is pretty frightening when you realize that you might be there for a very long time.

There are just the two Belgian filmmakers, while your group was larger. Was there some security in numbers?

These (the Belgian filmmakers) are two fairly fit males and they may find that they are treated a bit more roughly, in terms of the amount of walking they have to do and the amount of food that they get. I imagine they are good friends, they'll take a lot of support from each other, they will get lonely though and miss their families.

We were in a bigger group. We also had a lot of weaker people, including a pregnant woman. In a way, we became family to each other. I don't think we were ever concerned that they were going to start killing us off one by one. Certainly, as foreigners, we never feared that they had anything against us. They always treated us with the utmost respect.

Are you still in touch with other members of the group?

We are still, more or less, in contact. We actually went out to a restaurant a couple of months ago to mark the fifth anniversary of our release and the deaths of Navy and Tessy (two Indonesian scientists on the expedition).

And that was quite strange (because) we had obviously gone through a strong bonding experience. We dealt with it in different ways, though, and we now have quite different lives.

You strike me as a remarkably level-headed person. Did other people take it worse?

I may have dealt with it more proactively than other members; writing a book, revisiting Irian Jaya. But a lot of people generally assume that it was all a terrible experience. They ask you how you managed to put it behind you and eradicate it from your life.

My answer there is that one doesn't put that sort of thing behind you, you sort of incorporate it into your life and you move forward with the lessons that it has taught you ... it wasn't all bad as an experience.

How do you view your captors?

They didn't take us hostage to punish us. They took us hostage because they felt we could help them in the most important issue in their lives, which is to try and gain their freedom.

Don't get me wrong, we didn't want to get ourselves kidnapped or want to be taken hostage, which is often an accusation against foreigners kidnapped by the OPM. But certainly we had respect for the people and the place, and to spend time with them was a fascinating experience.

I learned a huge amount about myself. I learned a huge amount about the Papuan people, about why people struggle for their freedom and really what struggling for freedom is all about. I had kind of thought (before) that they were a bunch of terrorists who didn't have anything better to do, but when you see how much these people yearn to have their rights back and how humiliated and traumatized they are by what's happened to them you just wonder how on earth people can just sit in Jakarta and just send in more troops.

Whenever I've talked to people in Jakarta about them (the Papuans) they have always seen them as very primitive people who need to be civilized ... that until the Javanese have come and taught them how to behave ... they are not going to find themselves.

Every time there is violence and repression it breeds more resentment, hatred and ethnic conflict and makes peace and reconciliation an even more distant prospect. And that resentment and hatred is something that carries through generations, so the troubles being created in Irian Jaya will be problems inherited by future generations of Indonesians. It is a legacy for Indonesia's children.