“The bodies were discovered at around 8:45 a.m. local time. Both were found intact, in the same location, buried under landslide material,” he said here on Saturday.
The two victims were identified as Irawan (46) from Cilacap, Central Java, and Wigih Hartono (37) from Tulungagung, East Java. Identification and post-mortem examinations are currently being conducted by the Mimika Police forensic team.
“Following the examinations, both bodies are scheduled to be flown back to their respective hometowns today,” he added.
The discovery brings the total confirmed fatalities to two, while five workers remain missing. Rescue operations are ongoing at the underground site, which has been filled with wet mud since Monday evening (September 8).
“Search efforts for the remaining workers are still underway,” Budiman stated.
Of the seven workers initially trapped, five are employees of PT Redpath Indonesia, and two are electrical technicians from PT Cipta Kontrak under the PTFI Operation Maintenance Division.
Earlier, PT Freeport Indonesia VP of Corporate Communications Katri Krisnati said the team has been working tirelessly using remote loaders, drills, and drones, despite extreme risks.
She explained that the largest challenge is the massive volume of active wet material, which is significantly higher than in previous incidents. This made the process complex, high-risk, and required additional time to remove a large amount of debris.
“This operation is extremely difficult and risky. However, we remain committed to doing everything possible,” she affirmed.
Related news: Freeport continues rescue mission at Grasberg underground site
Related news: Rescue underway after mudflow traps 7 at Freeport's Grasberg mine
Translator: Evarianus, Kenzu
Editor: Primayanti
Yet this movement – which seeks independence from Indonesia – also seeks independence from the international companies that are involved in extracting its resources.
A report that I authored, and was reported in The National last week, reveals that many of those companies are British, and at least one is Scottish.
In 1832, two Scottish merchants in the East India Company – William Jardine from Lochmaben and James Matheson from Lairg in Sutherland – founded the trading company Jardine Matheson.
The company was to become one of the most powerful trading houses for the British Empire in Asia during the 19th and early 20th centuries.
It played a key role in the opium war and allowed the British to capture Hong Kong. This 19th-century Scottish company remains in Hong Kong, from where it directs a global commercial empire. And this is where the little-heard-of struggle for West Papua comes in.
Jardine Matheson is one of the largest palm oil planters in Indonesia and operates plantations in West Papua. Those palm oil plantations are very often the site of militarised interventions, the displacement of people and have been the site of extrajudicial killings.
The independence struggle in West Papua resists both the political repression of the Indonesian state and the environmental destruction. In other words, this independence movement seeks sovereignty over its own government and over the industrial exploitation of its forests and rivers.
There is good reason for this. Ordinary Papuan people rely on their access to natural resources for water and food sources; West Papua is the home of the third-largest rainforest in the world, after the Amazon and Congo basins. And the rapid capitalist development of those resources is destroying the capacity of Papuans to live.
BP’s huge liquefied natural gas processing facility at Tangguh is located in the middle of one of the world’s largest continuous mangrove forests. West Papua’s largest mine, Grasberg, is one of the single worst polluters in the world, churning an estimated 300,000 tons per day of toxic tailings, largely untreated, and depositing them straight into the Ajkwa river’s large and complex network of tributaries, poisoning drinking water, fishing grounds and local crops.
Repression, extrajudicial killings and collective dispossession are the prerequisites of this industrial model that is killing the capacity of the people to live sustainably.
Human rights defenders on the ground estimate that there are more than 100,000 internally displaced people in West Papua, mostly as a direct consequence of capitalist development led by foreign investors.
For example, BP’s huge liquefied natural gas processing facility in Tangguh involved the forced relocation of 10 villages as the facility has severed local people from their ancestral fishing grounds.
Since production began, BP has faced accusations by NGOs, including Amnesty International, of colluding with Indonesian authorities, through security ties, in the repression of the Papuan population.
The Grasberg mine has been a regular site of militarised struggles with workers; striking workers have been forcibly evicted from company-owned homes, with access to hospitals and schools denied, and access to bank accounts and credit services blocked.
Indonesian security forces have also arrested strikers unlawfully and subjected them to torture and criminal prosecution.
As The National reported last week, I, along with Samira Homerang Saunders at the Centre for Climate Crime and Climate Justice at Queen Mary University of London, have written, for the first time, an audit of Britain’s involvement in this conflict.
In this audit, we name the British companies – including Jardine Matheson – and British investors that profit from mining, gas extraction and agricultural plantation projects that are staunchly opposed by those who live there.
Those companies include 14 major British investors in West Papuan palm oil plantations, including Prudential, HSBC, Legal & General and Aberdeen Group, as well as British firm Unilever which sources palm oil from two mills located in West Papua. We also name 20 major British investors in Freeport-McMoRan, the company operating the Grasberg mine.
Until the people of West Papua – rather than foreign investors – are given control over their own resources, it is impossible to see how the repression, mass displacement and continued poverty for the West Papuan people will end.
For Scotland, the lessons of the West Papuan independence movement need to be more widely known and discussed, not only because of Jardine Matheson and Aberdeen Group. This is a politically sophisticated movement that understands independence will not be achieved unless sovereignty is secured over transnational capital.
And the West Papuan independence movement is seeking to build a new nation that does not depend on predatory investment. Any investment in an independent West Papua will only be permitted on the terms set by the people.
In other words, they have strengthened the kind of approach to independence that has been weakened in the relatively privileged and rarefied politics of Scotland.
They talk about economic sovereignty based upon a radically different banking system, economy and industry that works for people, not for foreign investors.
It’s time for us to take inspiration from this independent movement that seeks real sovereignty over its future.
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