THE report of the 1961 Harvard Peabody New Guinea Expedition worried about the future of the Stone Age West Papuans, whose men wore little more than penis gourds and the odd bird of paradise feather.
They lived by sophisticated gardening and hunting, and indulged in "ritual warfare" as a means of dealing with aggression and of remembering their Melanesian traditions. The Dani people smoked their dead elders' bodies - as we would a salmon - to preserve their spirits, and had other habits we'd find strange, such as greeting honoured strangers with "I worship your faeces".
Since then, some of their number took up arms - spears, machetes and arrows mostly to resist foreigners intent on scooping up the enormous mineral wealth that lay under their sacred land, and to resist inclusion into the concept of an Indonesian nation.
The Papuan culture was hardly saintly but Mr Mark Doris, co ordinator of the Portlaoise based West Papua Action, thinks that the executives of the US/British mining company concerned, Freeport/ RTZ, are the real "savages", the "primitive" ones of the piece, because of the company's despoliation of the environment and more. Two huge mountains have literally been moved to get at the ore, according to the veteran travel writer Norman Lewis, who visited this virtual no go area in 1992.
Mr Paul Murphy, a Freeport executive, sees the company's role as "thrusting a spear of development into the heart of Irian Jaya". This onslaught has also included the kind attentions of Christian evangelicals with their own aircraft. (A week ago, one of them accidentally killed the chief of the Dani tribe, Ikulucak Itlay (51), during an emergency landing.)
Apparent Reluctance
The other day, on UN Human Rights Day, Mr Doris sent to the Tanaiste, Mr Spring, papers "documenting 30 years of human rights violations" by the Indonesian military and the "disappearance without trace" of an estimated 300,000 people. He has criticised an apparent reluctance by Mr Spring to take up the still disputed issue of Indonesia's take over in 1969, despite calls from solidarity activists in Ireland and Australia - and the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs.
West Papua Action presented a petition to the Minister for Foreign Affairs some time ago calling on him to sponsor investigation of the separatist issue in Irian Jaya province at the Decolonisation Committee of the UN. The Oireachtas committee made a similar call early this year. But a department spokeswoman has responded to my inquiries saying that the issue was "extremely complicated". It was "under review" but the department had "no comment" on the calls. Mr Doris says that so far the Government has done "absolutely nothing" on this issue.
Now he wants Mr Spring to raise the matter with the Dutch, the former colonists, as the EU presidency passes to them.
During the Irish presidency another call on the Tanaiste, to add this issue to his concern for East Timor, came from the Australia West Papua Association in Sydney and from a Papuan visitor to Dublin, Mr J. M. Ireeuw, a senior Netherlands based leader of the rebel Free Papua Movement (OPM).
The Irish and Australian solidarity groups, as well as the rebels, say an act of free choice" of 1969 was nothing of the sort. After it, the mineral rich territory was confirmed by the UN as part of Indonesia. The question of West New Guinea, or West Papua, or West Irian, or Irian Jaya, had been left over from 1949 when Indonesia gained its independence after a four year war.
The "act of free choice" was by 1,025 tribal elders - and, symbolically, the Irish petition included 1,025 signatures. They were collected over five days in Kildare, Portlaoise, Tralee, Cork and Dublin. West Papua was provisionally ceded to Indonesia in 1963 - Mr Ireeuw left then pending the "act of free choice" six years later. Mr Doris says: "1,025 West Papuans voting out of an estimated population of over 800,000 was not an act of free choice."
Human Rights Abuses
A similar - and also disputed - method of consulting tribal elders was used in East Timor, which Indonesia invaded in 1975. In both eases it's said that threats, often at gun point, to the elders' families did the trick. Another comparison concerns an apparent determination to make both peoples minorities in their own lands by planting "transmigrants" from Indonesian islands.
Mr Doris said, in a letter to the Tanaiste accompanying the petition, that the world's biggest mining operation, owned by Freeport McMoran Copper and, Gold of New Orleans, "is operating on and polluting tribal lands, backed by the Indonesian military". Since 1977 Indonesia had killed 43,000 Papuans, according to report the quotas.
To sidestep the scrutiny of the world community, he says, Freeport has cancelled political risk insurance policies worth $150 billion with a US Federal agency and the World Bank after whistle blowing started about its environmental record. "The World Bank was planning to send a team to West Papua to carry out an environmental audit on the Freeport/RTZ operation," Mr Doris says. Freeport "have run scared".
The audit, which the Oireachtas committee called on, the Government to support, would have proved the company's record of eco damage, Mr Doris believes. And he says: "Freeport equipment and vehicles were used in the detention, and torture of local people [late last year] as documented in a report by the Bishop of Jayapura."
Returning, to the separatist issue, he says, there is "substantial evidence" to suggest that commitments on rights, including free speech, given in the 1962 New York Agreement between The Hague and Jakarta and approved by UN General Assembly resolutions, were never implemented. This in spite of criticism to this effect expressed soon afterwards by the Secretary General's own representative, Mr Fernando Ortiz Sans.
Since Harvard Peabody in 1961, which was blessed by the anthropologist Margaret Mead, our society in the West has endured the trauma/excitement of moving from the wireless to the global village - via the Moon.
Now I suspect that this has left more of us than would cause to admit feeling that the least Stone Age Man could do is to move on a century or two - and yield up the wealth he has the misfortune to walk over, to our needy, greedy industrial culture of the 20th century. When you scratch us, are we really that "savage"?