Accidental ecotourists

Julian Evans talks to Daniel Start, the leader of the Cambridge graduates held hostage in West Papua, about the dangers of scientific expeditions stumbling into complex political minefields. Wrapped in the flag of scientific eco-geo-research, many students depart the shores of overpopulated, over-familiar Britain each year on naive quests which some might see as an excuse for career-enhancing, expenses-paid adventures.

Encouraged by sponsors and professional organisations, student explorers who set out to test their limited social conception against the reality of foreign parts are unlikely to agree. At the same time, a planet of cheap air travel is a planet more easily disturbed. Scientific research, whatever its usefulness, is hardly an incorruptible reason for doing so. Science is perfectly capable of forgetting that it, too, is a variety of tourism.

The abduction of the four Cambridge science graduates in West Papua (Irian Jaya) by Papuan guerrillas in January is both a bad and a good case in point. Their plans, prepared with exemplary logistical thoroughness, were admired by their many sponsors (including the Royal Geographical Society, BirdLife International, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, and the Indonesian Institute of Sciences). The students' leader, Daniel Start, went to Indonesia to reconnoitre a year before they set off; eight months were spent selecting the team of Start, Anna McIvor, Annette van der Kolk and Bill Oates.

There was participation from the host nation, in the form of a group of young Indonesian scientists. Several months later, those organisations must have been soul-searching to know what went wrong.

Start and his friends were unlucky to be taken hostage by OPM fighters (Organisasi Papua Merdeka, the Free Papua Movement). Hostage-taking had not been a central plank of OPM strategy in its resistance to Indonesian occupation.

In a Hertfordshire pub six weeks after his release, Mr Start said: "Huge networking was done to secure permits and permission to get in, which was the number one priority. We were so set on getting in, I suppose to a certain extent we didn't really think too much about the security aspects."

What lured the expeditioners to the Lorentz nature reserve of West Papua was a staggering array of cultural and biological diversity. Pockets of unexplored territory, more impenetrable than the Amazon or Congo basins, are left. Primary forests contain marsupial cats, huge mirror-winged butterflies, at least 80 species of birds of paradise. The interior of Indonesia's easternmost possession was discovered by Europeans less than 50 years ago: a double belt of high limestone mountains capped with equatorial ice, and railing valleys filled with the gardens of outstanding neolithic agriculturists who had lived undisturbed for 6,000 years. A population of just over a million Papuans exists in hundreds of tribal clans, most of which speak four or five of the 300 languages of the island. Anthropologists have not come anywhere near assembling the fragments of this structural panoply.

Papuan social life revolves around the improvising of long humorous poems. For physical recreation the men wage small ritual tribal wars with nominal casualties. But after the country was handed over to Indonesia in 1963 by the United Nations at the behest of the United States, some fighters joined the independence movement. Since then the Indonesian government has been putting down resistance with all the ruthlessness that has made it a litmus test for neo-colonial repression.

The Cambridge expedition had no problems with the Indonesians. Working in and around the village of Mapnduma on a range of multidisciplinary projects they spent a great deal of time with local Papuans, as a rule hospitable people. What went badly wrong was that Papuan identity is altering very fast - West Papuans are having to take on "Western" notions of the future as their world is threatened; they are being forced to take collective decisions about the level of resistance to take against increasingly ruthless occupation.

The students did not consider this highly volatile political cocktail; it could be argued that it was not their business to be involved in local politics. But culture - a people's way of solving its problems - is always in movement. West Papua's problem is not sustainable development, but a terrible occupation. From a political standpoint, a scientific expedition at this point in West Papuan history could look like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Daniel Start, not surprisingly, regards the OPM as irresponsible. "We also had the opinion they were a fairly disorganised, rag-tag bunch of people who didn't amount to very much." He had heard of them before he left and read some of the literature. He has recovered from his ordeal, though his puzzled look of a man whose natural compass has been mislaid has not worn off. He may be right when he repeats: "It's an area that does not want to fight, doesn't want more bloodshed, doesn't want more violence. They were very much against this staunch attitude the OPM have which is the only honourable thing to do is fight until you're dead."

The villagers' take on the situation he summarises as: "Okay Indonesia has taken this territory, let's just make the best of it, let's keep our cultural identity, let's get our children educated, let's try and get ourselves a bit more wealthy and develop it in some ways, go with the flow, it's going to be easier that way." His understandable mistake, to assume a "rag-tag bunch" of warriors posed no threat, was unfortunately connected to another decision to work with a group of Indonesian researchers, which had fatal consequences. It may have been the provocative presence of Indonesians in a territory where transmigration has forced thousands of ethnic Papuans off their land that forced the OPM's hand. In the hostage rescue on May 19, two of the group's Indonesian colleagues were executed.

But there is a more important point. Father Theo van den Brock, head of the Catholic diocese office in the region, has expressed the plight of the Papuans vis-a-vis the Indonesians. "Land has been taken without valuing that it is my land, that the top of that mountain is the head of my mother. Where am I in this story? I am nowhere. People with different beliefs, different values, although in a certain way more human than any values we have, are bypassed as if they are not there."

In a minor way, the Cambridge students similarly entered into and became part of a world whose risks they did not fully understand. Reverse the situation, and their expedition was not far off having a couple of Papuans come in unannounced and sit down in your front room. As scientists, students like Daniel Start, conscientious, highly motivated and ambitious, have a great deal to offer. Politically, he now admits he was naive. "We knew there was OPM activity in the area. It was pretty bad timing." He adds: "I think it is fair to say we should have been more in touch with the human rights organisations."

But his research programme was carefully laid, technologically super-adequate: the party was equipped to radio an airlift for an injured member within a couple of hours. He learned certain alarming facts during the preparations but was not deterred. "We always thought up to the last minute that the security people would say, no, this can't happen, especially with what was going on in May 1995. We knew that in Hoea, [about 100 miles to the west] there'd been a sort of semi-massacre."

In fact, in Hoea just before their arrival, Indonesian Army soldiers had fired on a church congregation, killing 11 Amungme civilians. The leader of the Britons' kidnappers was an Amungme, Kelly Kwalik, who had five members of his family killed by the army. These considerations were converted by lively intellect into problems of access and security clearance; though it is unfair to single out the Start expedition, in the manner of youthful European optimists in the Third World, its members possessed the conviction that their adventure of a lifetime was invulnerable to real, life-upsetting risk.

It seems necessary to say it: the global destinations headed for every summer by independent, clever researchers from our universities are not just decor. The West Papuan hostage-taking contains the seed of something a bit embarrassing - that the hostages (and their sponsors) seriously misconstrued local reality. Members of the OPM or not, the Papuans are struggling for a new identity against occupiers who are trying to erase it - and at the same time against the unintentional disturbance of Europeans with their extravagant array of wealth. Research in such terrain might be useful (though university authorities admit that it is of highly variable quality). At the same time, without mature comprehension of the political background, it runs the risk of being not only perilous but reactionary - science-tourism, in which the privileged products of our universities travel as residents of the free world patronising the poor. Certainly, sci-tourism is not encouraged by the Royal Geographical Society and other advisory bodies. But the foreignness students find abroad, what they and their sponsors have paid for, is half the story - without the difficult effort to understand their own alienness in this decor, they reduce the people they are among to the status of geeks of the contemporary world. I retain one image from the hostages' story: as the OPM warriors descended on the village, faces blackened in the traditional mask of attack, Daniel Start raised his camera to film what he automatically assumed to be a traditional tribal ritual. It could not have anything to do with him.

Scientists have become consumers of travel, like package holiday-makers or the independent hiker in Melanesia (as I was ten years ago, in the Baliem Valley of West Papua). My own view is that a certain amount of discouragement of young explorers would not go amiss. There is world enough, and time, and it might prevent their falling into a yawning discrepancy between fashionable British notions of multiculturalism and brutal international reality.

Julian Evans is a travel writer whose latest book is Transit of Venus: Travels in the Pacific. Next week, Daniel Start argues the case for student expeditions.