Latter day gold rush brings prosperity to Irianese town
Latter day gold rush brings prosperity to Irianese town
By John Owen-Davies
TIMIKA, Irian Jaya (Reuter): Indonesians are flocking to this mosquito-blown coastal town in remote Irian Jaya to seek jobs and fortunes in what resembles a latter day Gold Rush.
Five years ago, Timika was an insignificant dot adjoining swamps on maps of the remote province, which forms with Papua New Guinea the world's largest island after Greenland.
Today, it is a thriving mining-type town with over 50,000 people scattered over an area of formerly untamed jungle, and with the possibility of many more joining them in coming years.
The magnet to this all is one of the world's most profitable copper and gold mines, run in nearby mountains by PT Freeport Indonesia, an affiliate of U.S.-based Freeport-McMoRan Copper and Gold.
Apart from some armed police, there were no overt signs of a security presence in Timika, unlike on the road to Freeport's Grasberg mine, 70 km (44 miles) away, after several incidents involving separatist guerrillas since June last year.
Freeport has denied charges by the Australian Council for Overseas Aid and other groups of cooperating with the army.
But at least one off-duty soldier was seen on a Freeport helicopter at Tembagapura, near the Grasberg. Sources in that town said they believed eight soldiers were deployed there.
"Timika was a sleepy little coastal town on the south coast but it has literally exploded in the past five years. It is now the fastest growing area in Irian," said American John Cutts.
"So many people are migrating in the hope of getting jobs but many are still unemployed," added Cutts, a former Christian missionary who has spent most of his 44 years in Irian.
Bars, brothels and shanty shops, selling goods from clothes and food to spare parts, are springing up, some houses have satellite television aerials and traffic jams occur.
Timika's first major hotel, a Sheraton Inn, opened last year. Rooms at more than US$100 per night are out of the range of most local Indonesians, many earning less than $5 a day.
Some residents fear the influx might be sowing seeds for discontent in an area that has brought together a diverse mix of people from some of Indonesia's 300 or so ethnic groups.
American and Australasian mine workers and their families mingle in the main market with tribespeople still emerging from the Stone Age, Javanese migrants and Sulawesi traders.
"Life here is OK. I like Freeport because they generate jobs. I don't have one yet but I am hoping," said Martinus, an Irianese, as a plane landed at the local airport.
The airport, a Japanese World War II base still pockmarked with craters from Allied bombs, is used for regular commercial flights and by Freeport.
Already, complaints are being raised over the soaring cost of living -- a shirt costing Rp 10,000 ($5) on the tourist island of Bali is double that in Timika -- and a lack of jobs.
"It is difficult for people to find jobs with Freeport. People who work there are happy. But, if they do something wrong, they are out," a local legal aid official said.
Freeport has some 14,500 people in Irian, three percent expatriates. Phase one of its purpose-built town for up to 20,000 workers and families outside Timika is nearly complete.
Briton Stan Batey, working with Cutts on Freeport's community development program, said "This is the Yukon to people from Java. It is the other end of the world to them."
He was referring to Canada's famous Gold Rush in 1897-98.
Spurring the search for jobs is what bankers say is over 40 percent under-employment in the Indonesian archipelago.
Irian Jaya, just north of Australia, is home to only 1.7 million of Indonesia's 188 million people, 60 percent of whom live on Java, 3,000 km (1,870 miles) west of Timika.
Seven migrant camps are north of Timika. They house about 20,000 people from Java and elsewhere in the archipelago, stretching from west of Malaysia to a line south of Tokyo.
The government's controversial transmigration scheme has resettled more than 4.5 million people on outer islands, about 180,000 in Irian, since 1950.
Rabu and his wife, Wati, were among the first people to leave their homes in Java in 1985 to seek new lives in Irian.
Like others in the camps, they were given a wooden house and two hectares (five acres) of land to grow their own food.
But life in camp SP-1 has not turned out as they expected. They make around Rp 80,000 ($38) a month from a food and drink stall attached to their home and rarely go into Timika.
"Quite a lot of people here work for Freeport but there is no feeling of jealousy between the 'haves' and 'have-nots'," said Rabu, 50, eying the brick house of a Freeport worker.
American Wesley Gleason said: "I think Timika is no different from any other mining town the world over. It is growing by leaps and bounds, drawing people at a rapid pace."
"Most of our men enjoy it here but for wives there is very little to do," Gleason, Freeport's logistics foreman, added.
He will be among the first of 2,000 or so to live in Freeport's new town, Kota Baru, within the next year. The $600 million town will also have shopping centers and theaters.