“Don’t Use Your Data as a Pillow”

S. Eben Kirksey

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1.      A small feast had been prepared for my going away party: salty sago pudding, fish broth, fried papaya leaves, boiled yams, and chicken. It was a modest affair, organized by Denny Yomaki, a human rights worker, to mark the end of my field work in May 2003. The event was scheduled to take place a few days before I returned to graduate school to begin writing up my findings. I expected the party to be a rite of passage marking a smooth transition into a new network of obligations and duties. What actually awaited me was a confrontation in Denny’s living room that would question the basic value of my research. Here, at my own going away party, some of my basic methodological approaches and guiding principles were about to meet a head-on challenge.

2.      I first came to West Papua some five years earlier, in 1998, to conduct research for my undergraduate honors thesis at New College of Florida. Then “West Papua” was officially known as “Irian Jaya.” Initially I intended to study an El Niño drought that had hit the region. By the time I arrived, the rains had come. There was a marked lack of enthusiasm for talking about the drought. Indonesia’s long-time ruler, Suharto, had just been deposed by a reform movement. The subject of the day was merdeka (freedom). Once the rallying cry of Indonesian nationalists in their struggle for independence from Dutch colonialism, merdeka was inspiring movements for independence from Indonesia in Aceh, in West Papua, and in East Timor. Initially I was perplexed. With a popular reform movement flexing its muscles throughout Indonesia after the ousting of Suharto, why bother to form new break-away governments?

3.      After witnessing a series of Indonesian military massacres – where a student was shot in the head and dozens of other unarmed demonstrators were dumped into the sea to drown – I began to understand why many Papuans wanted to take the path of independence, not reform. A systematic campaign of genocide had been taking place (Brundige et al. 2003). The Indonesian military had recently unveiled plans to increase its presence in West Papua to 50,000 troops; about one soldier for every 24 Papuans. By comparison, as the US occupation in Iraq hit a record high number of troops in November 2007, there was approximately one soldier for every 157 Iraqis.

4.      As a graduate student at the University of Oxford, and then at the University of California, Santa Cruz, I made repeated trips to West Papua where I recorded distinctive indigenous stories. Some stories I heard will be familiar to anyone who follows daily news reports from other conflict zones – stories about torture, about the role of the US government in supporting a military occupation, and about aspirations for independence. Other stories surprised me. I learned about a campaign of terror triggered by “Dracula” and about how my ancestors, the Whites, stole the magic of modernity from indigenous Papuans. Unexpected discoveries forced me to rethink the terms of my research. Strange bedfellows – multi-national corporations and even covert Indonesian military operatives – have provided support to Papuan independence activists. Collaboration, rather than resistance, was the primary strategy of the indigenous political movement in West Papua.

5.      Many Papuans sought me out as an ally, a potential collaborator. I found myself being drawn into the very movement that I had come to study. Human rights activists encouraged me to research campaigns of terror by Indonesian security forces. By studying the cultural dimensions of violence, I thought that I might help Papuans achieve freedom from terror within the current regime of Indonesian occupation. At my going away party my role was contested.

6.      After Denny said a brief Christian prayer in formal Indonesian – giving thanks for our health and wishing me a safe journey – we heaped our plastic plates with food and sat around on the floor of his living room to eat. Once the plates were cleared away, we moved out to the front porch to chew betel nut – a green palm-tree seed that produces a mild, relaxing buzz. We begin swapping jokes in Logat Papua – the regional creole language. Propped up on my elbows and idly swatting at mosquitoes, I began chatting with Telys Waropen, a member of Komnas HAM, the National Human Rights Commission. Even though we had not met before, Waropen was invited to my party by Denny, the host. Waropen was a young firebrand in his late 20s, around my own age at the time, whose government post had been recently created in response to demands by Indonesia’s reform movement.

7.      Waropen originated from Wasior, a place where Indonesian police had recently conducted a sustained assault on alleged Papuan separatists aptly named “Operation Isolate and Annihilate” (Operasi Penyisiran dan Penumpasan). In the past weeks I had visited Wasior with Denny. We investigated rumors that Indonesian military agents were covertly supporting a Papuan militia.

8.      Our research in Wasior took place under conditions of intense surveillance. We only interviewed people who wanted to risk the chance of being seen with a foreign researcher in order to tell their stories. Denny and I used an elaborate protocol to protect the identity of our interviewees: we contacted them through back channels and set up meetings in the houses of neighbors in the dark of night.

9.      Our ambitious research agenda had also initially included plans to interview renowned shamans in nearby mountains. Some of these shamans had been claiming responsibility for causing recent earthquakes in Indonesia’s central island of Java and for downing an airplane carrying top Indonesian military brass. Since we were under surveillance, Denny and I did not risk contacting the shamans.

10.  Weeks later at my going away party I learned that Telys Waropen had studied the Wasior shamans for his undergraduate thesis at a local university. As we were chewing betel with full bellies on Denny Yomaki’s front porch, I began to see Waropen as an important source who might help fill in some gaps in my research. Here was my chance to learn about the shamans whom I had been unable to meet.

11.  I asked Waropen for an interview, explaining in a well-rehearsed spiel that I would keep him anonymous, like the rest of my sources. Waropen recoiled. “What kind of research are you conducting,” he asked, “where the identity of your sources doesn’t matter? Wouldn’t your data be stronger if you quoted credible sources?” By the time of my going away party at Denny’s house, I had conducted more than 350 Indonesian-language interviews with Papuan politicians, survivors of violence, political prisoners, guerrilla fighters, human rights activists, and indigenous leaders. All of these interviews had been anonymous. As he questioned the value of my research a sinking feeling spread in my gut.

12.  Informal advice from peers and mentors had led me to keep all of my sources anonymous in order to obtain an exemption from the institutional review board of my university. The guidelines state: “research involving surveyor interview procedures is exempt if in the researcher’s private data (including field notes) as well as in any published material, responses are recorded anonymously and in such a manner that the human subjects cannot be identified, directly or through identifiers linked to the subjects.” Conducting fieldwork in West Papua had brought me to the conclusion that keeping sources anonymous was not just a means to avoid bureaucratic rigmarole. Lives were and are at stake. But, by keeping sources anonymous was I erasing their identities altogether? Clearly some Papuans, like Waropen, want to be quoted – they want to be recognized as public intellectuals. This confrontation forced me to reconsider tangled personal, professional, legal, and ethical obligations.

13.  Anonymous sources are viewed with a sense of suspicion and mystery by readers of newspapers and magazines. Journalists and editors usually use a rigorous set of guidelines to determine when to use an anonymous source (Boeyink 1990). These criteria guard against the fabrication of stories by unethical authors and the dispersal of misinformation by sources who gain the ear of reporters. Such citation strategies can also have an important juridico-legal function: this is how journalists and publishers protect themselves in libel lawsuits. Following standard ethnographic practices, I had approached my interviews with the idea that I might learn something even if my sources were anonymous, or even deliberately lying. There are some things that are well known – about lived experiences of terror or the disappeared – that cannot be spoken about in public or on the record.

14.  When Waropen confronted me about the reliability of my “data,” I tried to show him how insights from cultural criticism and post-structural theory might offer fresh perspectives on the confl  ict in West Papua. One route to merdeka (freedom), I suggested, might be understanding how rumors produce fear. He was already well aware that rumors help generate terror. But this insight was not helping him get traction in legal realms where a different standard of evidence prevails. He told me that he wanted to see members of the security forces prosecuted in Indonesian courts. Razed villages needed to be reconstructed. Waropen saw me as a potential ally, but one who needed some serious re-schooling.

15.  I sat up as the conversation suddenly heated up. Initially I quibbled with Waropen: Surely there are cases in human rights reporting where the identity of survivors and witnesses must be protected. I also found myself trying to explain why a broad reading public would be interested in the shamans he had researched as an undergraduate. Then, after getting tired of arguing my case and justifying my research, I rested back on my elbows to listen. “Don’t use your data as a pillow and go to sleep when you get back to America,” Waropen insisted. “Don’t just use this as a bridge to your own professional opportunities.”

16.  In part, Waropen was provoking me to become a reliable regional expert – someone who would know things with certainty and someone who would take questions of accountability seriously. Following Edward Said’s critiques of Orientalist experts (1979), and Gayatri Spivak’s characterizationof liberal intellectuals who speak for subaltern subjects (1988), many cultural anthropologists are understandably wary about using their research to speak to power. Knowledge of Others can be used to further colonial, imperial, or professional agendas. Regional experts often ignore demands for accountability from the people they study. Opening up any issue of the New York Times illustrates that most people who are fashioned as regional experts by the media – government representatives, economists, and political scientists – appear untroubled by post-colonial critiques of knowledge production. The knowledges and concerns of people who occupy structurally marginalized positions continue to be underrepresented in the public press.

17.  Waropen asked me to rethink what counted as “data” in cultural anthropology. He was prompting me to be a better, more authoritative, translator. Along related lines, Charles Hale has recently urged anthropologists to take positivist methodologies seriously in activist research: “To state it bluntly, anthropologists, geographers, and lawyers who have only cultural critique to offer will often disappoint the people with whom they are aligned” (Hale 2006). Waropen was challenging me to know about things that mattered and to know them well. This confrontation at my going away party prompted me to translate underrepresented forms of knowledge into legible narratives that might travel abroad.

18.  Simply publishing my findings in a peer-reviewed journal, or otherwise using my data to advance my own professional opportunities, was clearly unacceptable to Waropen. Would writing about these issues in the popular press be enough? By the time I met Waropen, I had already published a number of newspaper articles about West Papua. For  The Guardian of London I had written an experimental piece that explored how resistance to logging schemes and military troops was being inspired by a syncretic fusion of environmentalism and indigenous ritual practice (Kirksey 2002). Was this the right kind of “data” to be sharing with wider audiences? Waropen was prompting me to stick to the facts, more narrowly construed. He was also challenging me to take concrete action. This confrontation led me to think about how I might begin to do more than just write words – how I might begin to bring my knowledge about West Papua to the seats of global power.

19.  While traveling to Wasior with Denny Yomaki, I researched rumors linking BP to recent violence. This company, formerly “British Petroleum,” spent over £100 million to rebrand itself as “Beyond Petroleum.” BP had just begun to exploit a natural gas field in West Papua that is expected to generate more than $198 billion (Vidal 2008). Reportedly, Indonesian military agents were provoking violence in an unconventional bid for alucrative “protection” contract. Militia members, who claimed to be Papuan freedom fighters, had just killed a platoon of Indonesian police officers in Wasior. Rumors linked this militia to the Indonesian military. From afar, the identity of the different players was difficult to sort out: military provocateurs, police victims, and Papuan double-agents. Struggling to keep these people straight, I was skeptical. Why would one branch of the Indo-nesian security forces stage an attack on another branch? Why would Papuan “freedom fighters” collaborate with the Indonesian military? How is this related to BP?

20.  In Wasior I managed to secure interviews with Papuan double-agents, the “freedom fi  ghters” with alleged ties to the military. One of these men admitted, while my tape recorder was rolling, to murdering the Indonesian police officers. He also admitted to getting logistical support and intelligence from the Indonesian military. Through this source, and other interviews, I managed to substantiate the rumors linking the recent violence in Wasior to the BP project. This same man also told me that his life was in danger. He said that an active-duty military officer had tried to assassinate him because he knew too much. He looked to me for help in escaping his present situation – help which I was not able to provide.

21.  Two weeks after Telys Waropen demanded that I do more than “use my data as a pillow,” I found an opportunity to serve as an expert-in-action back in England, where I was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford. In late May 2003 John Rumbiak, a Papuan human rights defender, asked me to attend a meeting at the London headquarters of BP with Dr. Byron Grote, the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of this petroleum giant. BP was training a “community-based security” force – a group of Papuan security guards who would minimize the need for collaboration with Indonesian security forces. Rumbiak had secured a meeting to talk about how BP’s security policy was affecting the human rights climate in West Papua. Rumbiak asked me to join the meeting so that I could present my findings about militia violence in Wasior. With a gentler hand than Waropen, Rumbiak was fashioning me into a reliable witness – an expert on West Papua who would be prepared to make strong claims to knowledge.

22.  Before the appointment at BP’s headquarters I met up with Rumbiak, a thin man who is always quick to smile, in a coffee shop in central London. Not wanting to spring for a taxi, we got lost on the way to the meeting with BP. Walking around, we swapped stories about our recent travels, code-switching from Indonesian to English. After asking for directions from the guards at Saint James’s Palace, the official residence of the Queen, we found the BP office. We were 20 minutes late.

23.  Entering through the revolving glass doors of 1 Saint James’s Square, a squat brick building, we were met by a smartly dressed young woman. She checked our names on a computer terminal, issued us visitors’ badges, and instructed us to wait for our escort on some plush couches. When the escort arrived we were instructed to file one by one through a turnstile where we swiped our badges. Up in an elevator, down a hallway, and we found ourselves in a cramped room with CFO Byron Grote and John O’Reilly. O’Reilly was BP’s Senior Vice President for Indonesia. Both Grote and O’Reilly had previously worked for BP in Colombia, where the company was embroiled in controversy when paramilitary death squads began assassinating environmental activists (Gillard 2002). Suddenly face to face with some of the most powerful men in Europe, I felt adrenaline rush through my veins.

24.  Dr. Grote opened the meeting with a request that our conversations be off the record – that we treat the discussion as strictly confidential. Rumbiak immediately countered: “I’m sorry, that just is not possible. When I meet with you, the people of West Papua want to know what we talk about.” Rumbiak wasted no time. He immediately presented a clear message: the BP community-based security policy was inciting violence. The Indonesian state security forces made approximately 80 percent of their revenue from contracts to “protect” companies and BP’s policy cut the military out of a lucrative deal. “Since this policy will establish a precedent that other companies in Indonesia might follow,” Rumbiak said, “covert agents in the Indonesian military are determined to provoke violence until you relent and give them a security contract.”

25.  “Violence is bad for business,” Dr. Grote responded. “Open societies are good and they create environments where business thrives. Working in West Papua is a huge challenge – one that we have to take. We are convinced that the community-based security policy will still work. If we cancel this project then another company that doesn’t share our code of ethics will step in and develop this gas fi  eld.” Grote’s language was seductive, inviting. I found myself wondering if maybe this company could become a force to help sideline the Indonesian military in West Papua.

26.  Rumbiak asked me to present my findings from Wasior. With my heart pounding, I tried to encapsulate a series of exceedingly complex events. I recounted my interview with the Papuan militia member who was afraid for his life: “He claims to have killed a group of Indonesian policemen with the assistance of Indonesian military agents. The Indonesian police later used this incident as a pretext for launching Operation Isolate and Annihilate. Both the police and the military want a protection contract from BP.” The murder took place the very same day that John O’Reilly, the Vice President who was sitting in the room with us, had been visiting the gas project site with British Ambassador Richard Gozney.