This story is true, as close as a story about terror in the jungle can be. Interoil may send lawyers after me for posting this, but I was there, and I have the documents, as much as there are documents in a mostly illiterate town in Papua New Guinea. The Wildlife Conservation Society won't be happy to see this come out, but their program in PNG is dieing anyway. The government of PNG doesn't notice much, and likely won't notice this. The others, those who were hurt, will I hope, stay anonymous.
It was a long, hard, dangerous hike for even a very fit westerners to get from Herowana to the Crater Mountain Biological Research Station in one day. The jungle is thick, the mud is deep and everywhere you look there is either a thousand foot cliff, an embankment with mud flowing down it or a raging river. Even for the locals it is a long walk to the station. Which is why the Wildlife Conservation Society chose that site for the station in the seventies. Pristine old growth rainforest. Tree kangaroos, echidnas, cassowaries, harpy eagles, more kinds of birds of paradise and parrots than I could learn the names of.
But they didn't just plunk down and start building. They got together representatives of all clans in all the surrounding villages, and negotiated an agreement. The WCS would pay the landowners for the use of their land, hire workers from the surrounding villages, and buy supplies from the villages. The various villages would allow WCS to use a portion of their land, would leave a specified area around the research station as a natural preserve, and guarantee the safe passage of the researchers WCS brought to Crater Mountain. And it worked well for a few decades. WCS built up a huge collection of information about the biodiversity and ecology of PNG. There was economic growth in the villages. WCS helped to found a local non-profit that put in rainwater collection systems and helped build schools. The men who owned the land WCS used, or controlled access to the airstrips and workers started to get rich. Avit, the leader of the biggest clan in Herowana, and the man who pretty much single handedly built the air stip (on his own land) gradually got richer, gathered influence. He was the head of the management committee and the tourism committee. He opened a second hand store and made a handsome profit selling clothes. He bought a pedal powered sewing machine and made his wives fix clothes for a profit. He charged for the right to store coffee in his house by the airstrip. Any coffee not stored there didn't make it onto the airplane and could not be sold, as there is no road to Herowana save a long dangerous foot path. He built a community house with an artifact market and sold bows and shields to the tourists and researchers WCS brought in. He opened a tradestore selling matches, instant noodles and cooking oil. He gave gifts to all the important people in town. He bought wives for his clansmen. He became the de facto chief.
WCS had very little choice but to work with Avit. He not only controlled the town, the airstrip and the stores, he was the only person able to get anything done. Ask one of the other clan leaders to find you two men to carry supplies, and they would think on it for a few days and maybe you wouldn't get any carrier, or maybe ten carriers, expecting to be paid at four times the agreed rate. Ask Avit, and you would have as many workers as you wanted, when you wanted them, and they would do what they were told and accept the negotiated wage. Of course, they were usually Avit's sons and nephews, but that didn't seem as important as getting food out to the people at the research station in a timely manner. Avit made the difference between total logistical collapse and the manageable logistical headache that is the best one can hope for in PNG.
And this system was fairly stable as long as people needed to be on Avit's good side to make any money. Those who opposed Avit, or whom he considered untrustworthy or lazy, were cut off from work, their coffee rotted in the bags, researchers were steered away from their land. They lost the ability to buy wives and presents, they lost status.
Until Interoil came to town. Interoil is listed in Canada because they get tax breaks in PNG for being from a Commonwealth country, but they are based in Texas. Their main operations are in PNG, based around an oil refinery shipped in pieces from Alaska after the Exxon Valdez disaster. They went around the Pacific to find the government willing to give them the most profitable deal for setting up a refinery. PNG gave them tax breaks, exploration rights, profit guarantees and the kitchen sink. They told the government, written on the backs of $1000 bills, that they would make PNG energy independent.
It hasn't quite worked out that way. Interoil has acquired a reputation for being very good at exploring for oil, but very bad at actually finding any. Part of their deal with the PNG government is that they get tax credits just for exploring, whether or not they actually find any oil. So the more forest they bulldoze, the more test wells to nowhere they drill, the bigger their profits. And one day a couple of years ago, they decided they were going to explore for oil right under the Crater Mountain Biological Research Station. Right through all that pristine forest. So a bunch of helicopters drop out of the sky one day and they hire a whole bunch of villagers to cut a big exploration pad near the research station. They give the men boots and hats and machetes and tell them to start cutting. Tell them their land is full of oil, they are all going to be rich. No questions about who owns the land, or can we cut your trees. So all the disaffected young men in Herowana are suddenly off to the oil camp, cutting down someone else's forest without permission. And as long as they are there the oil company line bosses teach the men how to gamble, and drink (both of which Avit had outlawed.)
WCS, horrified to see the ancient forest falling around them just to give Interoil a tax credit, organized a letter writing campaign. Hundreds of well known researchers around the world have worked at Crater Mountain, and many of these wrote to Interoil promising a great deal of negative publicity in the US and Canada unless the oil exploration was moved outside the protected area. Interoil agreed, at least in part, and moved most of their exploration a few miles away.
I was aware of only bits and pieces of this when I arrived in Herowana last spring, just before it all blew up. I was working in the agricultural lands around the village, because that is where it is easiest to observe pitohuis, the poisonous birds I was there to study. I thought I was on really good terms with the whole village. I got a grant to bring them a huge pile of mosquito nets, and I made sure they were distributed equally among the clans. I hired workers from clans Avit doesn't usually let have work, and I walked around the whole village every two weeks shaking peoples hands and asking them what they thought about my work. I made the babies laugh and praised the skill of the women who wove the bilums. They called me Anelo (a parrot whose beak was, in their minds, similar to my nose) and I laughed with them when I fell on my ass in the mud for the 4,327th time. I saw the Interoil hardhats and boots, but I didn't think too much about it. Until the morning the helicopter landed. Emergency medical evacuation. Piloted by the Governor of the province, who was friends with one of the researchers who was at the research station a day's walk, but only a few kilometers by air, away.
I ran out of the researcher house to see what was going on. The governor, his face bright red with anger, yelled under the roar of the rotors. "Question them!" He pointed to two Herowanas just getting out of the chopper. "Find out who did this and I'll be back with armed police tomorrow." He grabbed my arm and shook me, then jumped back into the helicopter and flew off towards the nearest hospital.
Everyone was running and shouting, all in the village language I hadn't learned yet. I grabbed Avit and demanded to know what was going on. He was questioning the two men who the governor had dropped off. They had been working for the researchers at the station. There had been an armed attack. No one was killed, people were injured. The two workers claimed they didn't know who the attackers were, Avit said they were lying. He sent runners all over the village to find out who was missing. I sent runners to tell all the other researchers working in the area to return to the village at once, and prepare for evacuation.
I won't go into all the details of my stay in Herowana over the next few days. It was the longest I have ever gone without sleeping. Screaming, drums beating, clans facing each other down, machetes at the ready, helicopters circling and unable to land because of the fog, then landing, and not having enough fuel to evacuate everyone. Avit stomping around with a rifle in one hand a bullhorn in the other. I stayed and played detective.
What I, along with various others, found out is the real point of this story. An Interoil line boss passed through Herowana two days before the attack. He stayed with two of the five men who carried out the attack on the research station. He sold them two guns. He told them that it was because WCS wouldn't let Interoil drill in that area that they were not rich, and that if WCS left, Interoil would come back. All five men who attacked the station were recently laid off Interoil employees, and all were from clans or families that Avit wouldn't let work for researchers.
I made it out unscathed, left almost everything behind. The police officers who went in to arrest the five men whose names I had given them ransacked the storage boxes I asked them to salvage for me. One of the attackers ended up dead, the other four are rotting in jail, awaiting a trail that could still be years off. WCS abandoned the area, and all of the expats involved have left PNG. No more planes went in or out. No more researchers or tourists came. No one in Herowana got rich off of oil money. The school is closed, the medical post is closed, the stores are closed. Avit took his money and most of his wives and fled to the provincial capital.
The funny thing is, when all this happened, I was reading "Things Fall Apart."
Now Interoil has signed deals to build a Natural Gas Pipeline from PNG to Australia, and they are ramping up exploration to find gas to put through that pipe. They have recently announced their first big natural gas find, and I fear this will give them the investment money they need to send their exploration teams to more villages. WCS is not blameless in what happened to Herowana, but their mistakes were oversites of overworked staff, despite an honest effort to understand and deal fairly. To Interoil, Herowana was just a blip on a map a few klicks from a tax break. The people were cheep labor, and willing pawns. The ancient rain forest was a minor annoyance.
WCS and the governor covered the story up, to protect the innocent, and maintain good relations with the national government, which is heavily bought by Interoil. The US State Department helped keep things quiet. After more adventures and close calls I left PNG. A year later, WCS let go the people who had built and run their program there. Their is now serious question whether there will be a continuing WCS presence in PNG. I do not expect to return to PNG.