‘Civilization’ May Spell the End for the World’s Last Frontier

The single-engine Cessna belonging to U. S.-based Missionary Aviation Fellowship banked sharply as a forest-covered mountain loomed ahead. Then a balding grass airstrip appeared and pilot Rick Willms set the tiny plane down with practiced, though heart-stopping, skill.

As the plane thundered to a halt, a crowd of people converged on the end of the runway to watch curiously. About half of them wore no clothes: Some women had grass skirts and some men wore a cylindrical gourd called a koteka. Despite their nakedness, a few carried umbrellas. Others wore black plastic bags like hats.

Seven thousand feet above sea level, the small village of Tiom is set in a spectacular mountain valley. The checkerboard patterns of gardens growing sweet potatoes rise dizzyingly up the side of cliffs so steep that it is not uncommon for women working there to fall to their deaths.

As a visitor raised a camera to photograph the scene around Willms’ plane, people in the crowd simultaneously raised a forefinger. By silent consensus, the fee for a photograph is now 100 rupiahs (about 4 cents) per person.

“We get a lot of tourists through here these days,” explained Alan Speakman, an Australian missionary whose brown clapboard house overlooks the steep runway.

These are the highlands of Irian Jaya, a place that many people--anthropologists, missionaries and government officials--regard as the world’s last frontier.

A sizable number of people in Irian, whose interior was not explored or shown on a map until 50 years ago, still dwell in the Stone Age.

But after millennia of isolation, the 20th Century is now making rapid inroads here.

Lying at the eastern end of the sprawling Indonesian archipelago, Irian Jaya is as far from the capital, Jakarta, as Los Angeles is from Washington, but far more remote.

It has a population of 1.5 million spread over a bird-shaped territory the size of California. The region varies from the only year-round glacier in the tropics to malaria-infested swamps along the coast. Irian Jaya is the western half of New Guinea, the second largest island in the world after Greenland.

For Indonesia, Irian Jaya represents a vast storehouse of natural resources: oil, a mountain made of copper, and timber forests as far as the eye can see. Such resources will be increasingly in demand for exploitation as the country’s current sources of revenues, principally oil, run out over the next few decades.

“We must speed up development,” said Irian’s governor, Barnabas Suebu, “but we also need to take care to preserve our original culture.”

Irian Jaya also represents a political headache for Jakarta, as a tiny but influential separatist movement called the Free Papua Movement, armed principally with bows and arrows, continues to agitate for independence.

To the more than 200 missionaries in Irian Jaya, the province represents the ultimate test of faith on the edge of the world. With the missionaries have come education, medicine and a slow acceptance of Christian values in a country that is the world’s most populous Muslim state.

For the anthropologists, Irian Jaya stands like a remarkable textbook: people speaking 250 distinct languages who still chop trees with sharpened stones and yet can remember ancestors dating back eight generations. There are people in Irian Jaya who until 10 years ago did not know there was an outside world, who count in base 27, as opposed to 10, using elbows and ears, but have never seen a wheel.

Efforts to bring “civilization” to Irian have brought mixed success.

A few years ago the government decided the people would always be backward without clothes, so it launched Operation Koteka, dropping jogging shorts from the air to remote villages. The villagers promptly put the shorts on their heads.

One missionary in Jayapura, the provincial capital, said his group is now actively discouraging the wearing of clothes because the people had not been properly prepared for the change; there was an epidemic of skin diseases because many wore the clothes without ever washing them.

The remote villagers have recently been introduced to a cash economy for the first time, and, according to missionaries, have become avid consumers, especially prizing such items as portable radios and wristwatches.

But they have little to sell at the markets; in the highlands, for example, the Dani people prize their ability to raise pigs, but the townspeople are overwhelmingly Muslims who do not eat pork.

The people are agonizingly innocent.

One missionary recalled that a villager had approached him to change $2,000 that he said he had earned by catering to American tourists for several weeks. The villager then presented a wad of Monopoly play money.

While the missionaries generally are credited with stopping endemic tribal wars, cannibalism and the ritual killing of widows and newborn girls, anthropologists are beginning to wonder if the missionary process is leading to the destruction of Irian culture. One Western expert on primitive art lamented that many local artifacts had been burned by missionaries in the conversion process.

“Much of what the missionaries are doing is debatable,” said Angel Niesje Manembu, an Australian-educated anthropologist. “For example, they learn the local language, but it’s also a way of maintaining control because the missionaries become the people’s only contact with the outside world.”

The government and outsiders face enormous obstacles in their efforts to bring modern life to Irian Jaya. There are few roads in the interior--a Trans-Irian Highway is now slated for completion sometime in the 21st Century--so all goods must be flown in.

In fact, Irian Jaya was a strategic air base in World War II, occupied first by the Japanese and then by Allied forces. Gen. Douglas A. MacArthur kept his headquarters at Jayapura for two crucial years and the remains of landing craft and tanks still litter the beaches.

The reliance on aircraft has spawned a number of “cargo cults,” the belief by Irianese natives that white people have magical powers or know “the secret” where all goods are stored. So central is the role played by the airplane that some groups in the isolated highlands believe that everything that has arrived by plane, from tractors to house cats, have the same magic powers and can fly as well.

Most of the transportation to remote interior villages is still provided by missionary organizations. The Mission Aviation Fellowship and two other groups are the only means to reach about 250 remote airstrips. The government has neither the planes nor the pilots skilled in making treacherous landings and willing to work for low pay.

“Most of the stations would have to close without these air services,” said J. Melvin Isaac, a pilot from Manhattan Beach who has been flying here for 21 years. “We’re pilots and technicians, not reverends.”

Adds pilot David Marfleet, a former British army paratrooper who flew helicopters in Northern Ireland: “In some places I fly to, I am the only white man they see from one month to the next. The cardinal sin is to forget the mail bag.”

The dilemma posed by so-called civilization was illustrated in October, when an earthquake hit the region around Soba, killing more than 120 people in landslides, according to official accounts. The government then announced that between 2,000 and 3,500 people remaining in the area would be moved by helicopter to a new region out of the range of future earthquakes.

Missionary groups in the Soba area denounced the move, saying that the people who had lived for generations at 6,000 feet had no immunity to malaria, which was endemic in the new area. Even a government doctor sent to the new site had come down with the disease after a few days, they said.

“We must be concerned,” Suebu said in an interview. “If this new village succeeds, other people will move down the mountain to these fertile areas. If not, I think everyone will move back to their old village.”

Dr. Tigor Sudjito, the health director for the highlands’ Baliem Valley, noted that the single largest medical problem in the area stems from the breathing of smoke fires that the people leave burning in their house through the night to keep them warm and repel mosquitoes. Yet attempts to change the practice have been unsuccessful, he said, and the life expectancy is still only 40 years.

“While the people in the Baliem Valley outwardly seem to be assimilating Western ways such as wearing clothes, they really are privately resisting,” said anthropologist Niesje Manembu. “Among the people, belief in magic is still very strong.”

Other than the missionaries, the most pervasive influence in the remote towns of Irian Jaya is the Indonesian government. Elementary schools, often staffed by teachers from faraway Java, have been set up at virtually every mission station, with the government flying in bags of rice to its employees.

As Sudjito noted, the highlands of Irian Jaya are considered an extreme hardship post by most Javanese. Teachers and doctors receive no extra pay, although the cost of living is many times higher than in low-lying areas. As a result, the government has trouble attracting qualified staff.

The schools have brought a common Indonesian language to the province, where the barrier of tribal language, despite intermarriage, had made commerce difficult. Including the 770 tongues spoken in neighboring Papua New Guinea, the island contains one-fifth of the world’s known languages.

The school system has caused the population to shift heavily toward the towns, as parents seek more advanced education for their children. Irianese complain that the system of education often has little revelance to the people, teaching world history and reading books about trains with people who know sweet potatoes and pigs.

Another government presence is the police, who attempt to maintain order among the different tribes, which have been warring for hundreds of years. They have also been placed in the towns to prevent the rise of the Free Papua Movement, although Western diplomats in Jakarta doubt that the group has more than 100 hard-core supporters.

Irian Jaya, formerly a Dutch colony, was occupied by Indonesian troops in 1962. A year later, Indonesia was awarded the administration of Irian by the United Nations and in 1968 the government organized a meeting of chiefs to comply with U. N. demands for a free election to confirm the mandate.

In September, an American-trained lawyer, Tom Wainggai, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for raising a New Guinea flag during a soccer game. The government announced that the leader of the Free Guinea Movement has surrendered to authorities.

“Vigilance is still needed to maintain stability as a condition for developing Irian Jaya,” said the provincial military commander, Gen. Abinowo, who, like many Indonesians, goes by only one name.

While the separatist movement has few hard-core followers, officials in Jayapura acknowledge that there is growing resentment in the province about the number of non-Irianese Indonesians who hold key jobs.

“The local people are losing their chance; they don’t have the skills of outsiders,” said Tony Rahawarin, director of the Irian Jaya Rural Community Development Foundation.

One of the most controversial campaigns to develop Irian Jaya is a national program called Transmigration, in which farmers are moved from the crowded sections of overpopulated Java thousands of miles away to homestead farms in remote areas such as those along Irian Jaya’s border with neighboring Papua New Guinea.

The program’s results have been decidedly mixed: Some Transmigration communities near the port of Merauke in southern Irian Jaya have had no water for half the year and are so remote from markets that they have no place to sell their produce.

While Transmigration has been more successful in the north, the government has scaled back the program from 25,000 families in the last four years to just 400 new families this year. It says it now needs to spend money to develop existing communities.

Some Irianese are demanding equal money to develop their towns as well as Transmigration areas. There is also an increasing clamor for the central government to return to the province more of the money earned as the result of oil and mining concessions.

“We understand our weaknesses,” said a local planning official. “Growth has no impact if the local people are neglected and left in the same situation.”