BIAK, Indonesia — For 15 generations, members of the Abrauw clan have lived much like their ancestors. They farm in the rainforest with wooden plows, gather medicinal plants, and set traps for wild boar and snakes.
Biak island is home to their identity, livelihood and connection to their forebears. As Indonesia continues its long-held quest to join the space age, the small clan fears that it will lose its position in the world.
The Indonesian government claims to have acquired 250 acres of the clan’s ancestral land decades ago and has planned since 2017 to build a small-scale spaceport there to launch rockets. Clan leaders claim that the project would force them to leave their homes.
Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo, personally pitched SpaceX’s founder, Elon Musk, last year on the idea of launching rockets from Indonesia, without mentioning a site. Mr. Musk has not yet made any public comments or committed to a deal. But the possibility of his involvement has spurred a flurry of activity by Biak officials to promote the location, as well as renewed opposition from the island’s Indigenous people.
Building a spaceport is part of Mr. Joko’s push to modernize the Southeast Asian island nation with new airports, power plants and highways, often with little regard for environmental consequences. It is also part of the country’s checkered history of using questionable methods to acquire land from Indigenous people, leaving some groups destitute while benefiting influential Indonesians and international companies.
Biak tribe leaders say that building a spaceport would mean cutting down trees in a forest protected, disturbing habitat for endangered birds and evicting Abrauw.
“The position of the Indigenous people is clear: We reject the plan,” said Apolos Sroyer, chief of the Biak Customary Council, an assembly of clan chiefs. “We don’t want to lose our farms because of this spaceport. We don’t eat satellites. We eat taro and fish from the ocean. This has been our way of life for generations. Tell Elon Musk that’s our stance.”
Biak, nearly the size of Maui, sits just north of the island of New Guinea and is part of Indonesia’s Papua Province. The Japanese were defeated there by American forces during World War II. This was when Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who fought to retake Pacific. Biak became Indonesian in the 1960s, when the United Nations gave West Papua to the Dutch under the condition that Indonesia had a popular election.
Instead, in a 1969 vote regarded by many Papuans as rigged, Indonesia rounded up a thousand tribal leaders — including chiefs from Biak — and held them until they voted to join Indonesia in what paradoxically became known as “The Act of Free Choice.”
The Abrauw clan, one among 360 on Biak’s islands, has dwindled to 90 members. Most live in the village of Warbon, on the island’s northeastern side, about a mile and a half from the proposed spaceport site.
The ocean is the center of clan life.
Waves gently lap on the white sand, while black, brown, and white butterflies fly among its branches. Clan members consider the tree sacred, and believe it is the source of the Abrauw. They often pray to their ancestors and offer offerings to the tree. Sometimes they camp there for several days. The tree, as well as the beach where the Abrauw fish often, and the forest where their farms are located, would be out of bounds if a spaceport were built.
“For Papuans, land is identity,” said Marthen Abrauw, the clan chief, as he sat in the shade of the sacred tree on a recent afternoon. “We will lose our identity, and no other clan will accept us on their land. Where will our children and grandchildren go?”
While some clan members have found work elsewhere in Indonesia, others remain in Warbon and rely on the fish they catch as well as the taro and cassava they grow. The clan practices nomadic agriculture, which involves clearing the forest to plant crops in a new place every two years.
Some commute by bike or foot to Korem to attend the Pniel Evangelical Christian Church. Warbon is home to over 1,000 people. It also includes members from many other clans that have married into Abrauw, but still retain the clan identity. The spaceport is also opposed by the church.
Officials from Indonesia support the project and say that Biak, which is located just 70 miles south-east of the Equator, and faces the Pacific, would be a great location to launch rockets. SpaceX plans to launch tens of thousands more communications satellites in orbit within the next few years.
“This is our wealth,” said Biak’s regent, Herry Ario Naap, who is pushing for the spaceport. “Other regions may have oil or gold. We are given a strategic geographical location.”
In wooing Mr. Musk, Mr. Joko suggested that his car company, Tesla, could also collaborate with Indonesia to make electric vehicle batteries, as Indonesia is the world’s largest producer of nickel, a key component. Officials said that SpaceX sent a team to Indonesia in early 2012 to discuss potential cooperation.
In February, Tesla submitted a proposal for a battery manufacturing plant to Indonesia. However, the government refused to reveal details. Mr. Musk and his companies didn’t respond to requests for comment. In September, Mr. Joko added twentyfold to the budget of the space program and placed it under his new National Research and Innovation Agency.
Laksana Trihandoko, the agency’s chairman, visited the Biak site and said that it was still viable, but that the land needed to build the large spaceport he imagined would be 10 times more. He could choose to move to Morotai island, which is about 550 miles northwest from Biak, if there is any controversy over the Biak site.
A key factor, he said, will be making sure the government has “clear and clean” title to the land. “Biak is not the one and only place,” he said. “We have many options.”
Government maps show that nearly all the Abrauw clan’s ancestral lands, including some homes, are within a proposed buffer zone that would be cleared of people should the small spaceport be built. The maps also show that almost all of the original project site is within a protected forest.
The space agency claims it bought the 250-acre site, which was originally owned by the Abrauw clan, in 1980. But the clan insists that it never sold this land. Clan leaders claim that the four men who signed a document granting agency title were not clan members. They had no right to sell.
They said that the older generation was too scared to object because the Indonesian Army was conducting military operations in Biak and anyone who criticised the government could face imprisonment as a separatist.
“Silence was the only choice,” said Gerson Abrauw, a Protestant pastor and cousin of the clan chief. He rejected government assurances that a satellite port would provide employment.
“They say the spaceport project will create jobs, but there is no space expert in our clan and in our villages,” he said. “What they mean is three years of cutting down trees, removing roots and digging foundations. After that, there will be a feast to say goodbye to us and then only those with an access card can enter the area.”
Dera Menra SijabatBiak, and Richard C. PaddockBangkok
Source: NY Times
