Indonesia would like to convert Biak into a lucrative “Space Island.” In December 2020, Indonesia offered the use of part of the island to SpaceX as a spaceport for launching satellites. SpaceX would like to launch and maintain as many as 42,000 satellites in order to provide high-speed wireless Internet everywhere on earth. This would require almost daily rocket launches forever into the future. Until now, SpaceX has been launching its satellites from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, where the above photograph was taken. The spaceport at Cape Canaveral is surrounded by a wildlife refuge and has already done a lot of environmental damage.
“This spaceport,” said tribal chief Manfun Sroyer of plans for the island of Biak, “will cost us our traditional hunting grounds, damaging the nature our way of life depends on. But, if we protest, we’ll be arrested immediately.”
Biak’s location holds several attractions for SpaceX. Its location at the equator is ideal for launching satellites because less fuel is needed for them to reach orbit from there. And the vast reserves of copper and nickel on West Papua would supply some of the materials. Copper and nickel are two of the metals used in building rockets.
Indonesia has also offered Biak Island to the Russian space agency Roscosmos, which plans to develop its own spaceport on the island by 2024. Russia is planning its own fleet of 640 satellites, also to provide wireless Internet everywhere on earth.
The environmental effects of mining in West Papua are well-documented. “From the Grasberg mine,” wrote Antonopoulos and Cottle, ”one of the biggest copper and gold mines in the world, hundreds of thousands of tonnes of tailings contaminate the vital Ajkwa delta system every day, destroying the environment which the Kamoro tribe relies upon for food and trade. So devastating to the environment is the Grasberg mine that apart from the 80 million tonnes of waste debris which it dumps into the Ajkwa river system every year, the open cut mine can be seen clearly from space.” What was formerly the top of a glacier-covered mountain is now a mile-wide crater one-third of a mile deep.
The open cut operations were finally closed in 2020, but the underground mining operations at Grasberg are expanding, and the contamination of rivers, forests, fisheries, and coastal waters, as well as the destruction of tribal communities, continues unabated. A 2012 report from Earthworks and MiningWatch Canada stated that mine waste from Grasberg had “buried over 166 square kilometres of formerly productive forest and wetlands, and fish have largely disappeared.” The poisoned river is no longer a source of drinking water for the area’s villages.
West Papua’s mines will also be used to build Tesla’s electric vehicles (EVs), if Musk has his way. Nickel and copper are also needed for the long-range batteries used in EVs. Musk told Indonesian officials last July that Tesla would offer a “giant contract for a long period of time if you mine nickel efficiently and in an environmentally sensitive way.”
Musk and the government of Indonesia may come to an agreement as to what “environmentally sensitive” means, but West Papua’s native population may beg to disagree. It still means pulverizing and processing billions of pounds of rock, and depositing all the resulting tailings somewhere. In West Papua somewhere means virgin rainforest, pristine rivers and tribal lands.
Roads, Electricity and Cell Phones In Papua New Guinea, the independent state to the east, most of the vast interior still has no roads or electricity -- or cell towers. And that was still the case only 5 years ago in West Papua too. But in the last few years, all of that infrastructure -- electricity to every village, a modern highway system bulldozed through the wilderness, and widely available cell phone service -- has been built by Indonesia and it has not been for the benefit of the native population, who do not want it and are gunned down or bombed if they protest.
Journalist David Robie calls the 4,325-kilometer Trans-Papua Highway “West Papua’s highway of blood.” According to John Martinkus, whose moving book, The Road: Uprising in West Papua, was published last May, the highway brings military occupation, more mining and timber cutting by foreign corporations, environmental destruction, and replacement of native villages by settlements of Indonesian immigrants.
“On December 1, 2018,” writes Robie, “a ceremony marking the declaration of independence from the Dutch in 1961 by raising the Morning Star flag of a free Papua -- as Papuans do every year -- ended in bloodshed.” Every previous year, at least in the remote Nduga region, this ceremony had taken place peacefully and been ignored by Indonesians. But this year, road workers and soldiers came into Nduga on the new highway and took photos and videos of the crowd on their cell phones. The resulting conflict left 19 road workers and a soldier dead. Since then, reprisal raids by the Indonesian military have forced some 50,000 people to flee their villages and become refugees. Two thousand soldiers, helicopters, and 650 commandos are involved in “protecting the highway.”
“It is the helicopters that are the worst,” writes Martinkus. “They are used as platforms to shoot or drop white phosphorous grenades or bomblets that inflict horrible injuries on the populace.” |
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