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	Workers Vanguard No. 989	28 October 2011

West Papua, Indonesia

Strikers in Bloody Clash with U.S. Mining Giant

OCTOBER 22—For more than a month, some 10,000 workers at the giant Freeport-McMoRan Grasberg gold and copper mine in West Papua have been engaged in a hard-fought and increasingly bitter strike for higher wages and better conditions against the company’s local subsidiary, PT Freeport Indonesia. On October 10, when more than 1,000 angry workers marched toward buses carrying scab labor, Indonesian police opened fire, killing one worker and injuring others, including one striker who reportedly died five days later. Working in dangerous conditions, with some miners toiling up to two and a half miles underground, the mostly indigenous Melanesian workforce is paid as little as $1.50 to $3 an hour, the lowest pay at any Freeport mining facility in the world. Leaders of the Trade Union of Chemical, Energy and Mine Workers have extended the strike until November 15.

West Papua is a literal gold mine for the likes of the U.S.-based Freeport-McMoRan and a living hell for the populace, not least the Grasberg miners. A September 26 statement by the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers’ Unions (ICEM) calls for “solidarity and support of all miners and all trade unions in mining and other industrial sectors,” including messages of support to the PT Freeport Indonesian Workers Union. But it will take more than paper messages of support for the Grasberg miners to win this battle. It is in the interests of workers internationally to come to the defense of the Grasberg strikers, including by refusing to handle scab product.

Freeport-McMoRan is one of the largest mining companies in the world, raking in a profit of $1.37 billion in the second quarter of 2011. On September 29, more than 1,200 workers at the Freeport-McMoRan Cerro Verde copper and molybdenum mine in Peru also launched a strike for wage increases. U.S. workers have their own history of battling against this mining conglomerate. Freeport’s West Papuan mine is a joint venture with Rio Tinto, which last year locked out International Longshore and Warehouse Union members at its U.S. Borax mine in Boron, California, in a failed attempt to bust the union (see “ILWU: Don’t Handle Scab Borax!” WV No. 956, 9 April 2010). In 2007, Freeport merged with Phelps Dodge, which from 1983 to 1986 waged a vicious war at its Morenci, Arizona, copper mine to drive out the United Steelworkers union, whose membership was mainly Latino and Native American.

The Freeport miners are seeking not just a wage increase but also conditions and facilities for local workers equal to those of foreign workers at Grasberg, including housing, health care, education and pension funds. The Freeport bosses arrogantly dismissed strikers’ demands for a wage increase of $12 to $37.50 an hour as “unrealistic” and began running the Grasberg mine with scabs. The union has since pared back the pay demand to a five-fold increase. At the same time, Freeport was forced to stop production this week after a pipe carrying gold and copper concentrate from the mine to the company’s port facility was severed. With a workers’ blockade cutting off access to the mine, the company has been ramping up its intimidation and repression, with 500 to 600 cops mobilized against the strikers.

Over the years, Freeport has paid tens of millions of dollars to the military and police to ensure its continued ability to exploit West Papuan labor. “There is no alternative to our reliance on the Indonesian military and police,” the company told the New York Times (27 December 2005). “The need for this security, the support provided for such security, and the procedures governing such support, as well as decisions regarding our relationships with the Indonesian government and its security institutions, are ordinary business activities.” The company has also engaged the security firm G4S (formerly Securicor) to help break the strike. This outfit, which operates prisons and detention centers around the world, is known in Australia for its viciously brutal treatment of Aborigines and refugees.

Striking Grasberg miners have been threatened with dismissal, and the company has been “isolating union leaders from workers by posting security guards around them,” according to an ICEM report. On September 11, the chief negotiator of the All Indonesia Workers Union Freeport Division was shot at by “persons unknown.” In West Papua, this is often code for the Indonesian military (TNI) and its Kopassus special forces, which are notorious for their torture and murder of perceived opponents of Indonesia’s capitalist rulers.

With its enormous gold, copper and oil reserves, West Papua is a place of brutal superexploitation, where largely tribal subsistence farmers have been driven off their land without compensation. Freeport Indonesia is the largest single taxpayer to the Indonesian government, contributing billions of dollars a year. While the comprador Indonesian capitalists, corrupt governmental bodies and TNI all take their cut of the profits, mining conglomerates like Freeport take the lion’s share, exploiting cheap labor and ripping out resources under the protection of the imperialist-funded military. Along with its Australian junior imperialist partner, the U.S. has been rebuilding its military alliance with the Indonesian regime. This is not just to secure the flow of profits from Indonesia. For the U.S., the Indonesian armed forces serve as part of the military encirclement of the Chinese bureaucratically deformed workers state, which the imperialists seek to destroy by one means or another.

Not surprisingly, the Freeport strike has galvanized support from long-suffering West Papuan independence fighters. For decades, the Indonesian bourgeoisie, centered on the island of Java, has ruled over myriad oppressed nationalities through military terror with the backing of their imperialist masters. This is the case not least in West Papua, the western half of the island of New Guinea, where abuses include forced removal of villages and massacres by military and police personnel. Just three days ago, military and police forces dispersed several thousand delegates to the Third Papuan People’s Congress after they declared independence from Jakarta. Up to six people were killed. Activists were savagely beaten and 800 were arrested. While many were subsequently released, those still in detention face charges including treason and rebellion, which can carry sentences of up to 20 years in prison. Indonesian troops out of West Papua now! U.S., Australia: Hands off!

Resistance to Freeport’s exploitation of local workers and plunder of natural resources has long been intertwined with the struggles of the West Papuan independence movement. In 1962, the Dutch colonizers ceded West Papua to the Indonesian bourgeois-nationalist regime of Sukarno under the so-called New York Agreement, which was overseen by Washington. While the deal supposedly obligated Jakarta to conduct an election on self-determination no later than 1969, the military, once it was in control, acted to repress any political dissent.

In 1965-66, the butcher Suharto and his military henchmen, aided by the U.S. and Australian imperialists, rose to power through the crushing of the powerful Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). Over a million Communists, workers, peasants and ethnic Chinese were slaughtered—a direct result of the PKI’s treacherous class-collaborationist alliance with Sukarno (see “Lessons of Indonesia 1965,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 55, Autumn 1999). Suharto quickly moved to open up the Indonesian economy to greater Western imperialist investment. It was in this context of blood-drenched repression that Freeport’s first contract with the Indonesian government was signed in 1967.

Two years later came the farcical referendum on West Papua’s independence, conducted under the title “Act of Free Choice.” Some 1,000 hand-picked tribal leaders were told by the military to vote for Indonesian rule or have their tongues cut out, guaranteeing the outcome: 100 percent “support” to West Papua’s incorporation into Indonesia. Australia’s rulers, worried about instability spreading across the border to what was then their Papua New Guinea colony, played a leading role in having the “Act of Free Choice” accepted without debate at the United Nations in November 1969.

As with the mines and plantations in Papua New Guinea, the Freeport mine operations combine savage exploitation with racial subjugation. While Freeport reaps fabulous profits, the West Papuan people remain in dire poverty, with AIDS rapidly spreading and the mortality rate for women and children the highest in Indonesia. Schools are empty much of the time, as teachers are subjected to wretched living conditions and children are too poor to travel long distances or purchase the books they need.

In the Indonesian prison house of peoples, the fight to emancipate the deeply exploited working class is bound up with the struggles of the oppressed minority peoples, from West Papua in the east to Aceh in the far northwest of Sumatra, and of women and the rural poor. In dependent countries such as Indonesia, where the capitalist rulers are thoroughly tied to the imperialists, only a socialist revolution establishing the dictatorship of the workers, leaning on the poor peasantry, can satisfy the basic needs of the masses: freedom from imperialist subjugation, agrarian revolution, liberation for oppressed national minorities, social equality for women, alleviation of poverty. To prevent its strangulation by imperialism, overcome the backwardness of the society and lay the basis for developing toward socialism, a proletarian revolution in Indonesia must be extended internationally to the advanced capitalist countries in Europe, Australia, Japan and the United States.

This is the perspective of permanent revolution, as developed by Leon Trotsky, co-leader with V.I. Lenin of the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia. To successfully lead the workers in this fight requires the building of a revolutionary workers party, an Indonesian section of a reforged Fourth International.