Poachers’ Paradise in Papua

ABEPURA, Indonesia — In the dim light of the Indonesian warship, forestry police commander Otis Howay could hear the rare birds calling, their bright song reverberating in the metal chambers.

He and two of his officers hurriedly searched the navy troop ship for protected tropical birds being smuggled out of Indonesia’s Papua province, formerly Irian Jaya, by soldiers ending their tour of duty. They confiscated seven black-capped lories, beautiful birds of vivid red and green, but Howay is certain that there were many more.

“It was very dark on the ship,” he recounted. “I heard a lot of voices of the birds, but I could not see them. The time was very short, and the ship was about to leave.”

Illegally catching and selling protected wildlife are big business in Papua, the untamed eastern province of Indonesia that makes up half the island of New Guinea. Many indigenous islanders take part, especially in hunting and catching the birds. But the biggest smugglers, according to police and environmentalists, are members of Indonesia’s powerful military.

“They are untouchable,” said Roy Rindorindo of the World Wide Fund for Nature in Jayapura, the provincial capital. “They have their own ships and airplanes. They collect the birds, bring them back to Jakarta and sell them.”

Thousands of protected birds are caught or killed by poachers and smuggled out of the province each year, threatening the survival of the remote island’s rarest species, officials and environmentalists say.

B.G. Resubun, Howay’s boss at the Natural Resources Conservation Department, said the widespread involvement of soldiers and police in the wildlife trade--something law enforcement officials acknowledge--adds to the difficulty of cracking down.

“We are very scared, because these people intimidate us,” Resubun said. “I can’t prove it, but people know that high-level people have a hobby of collecting all the endangered species.”

Demand for birds is great in Indonesia. It has long been a symbol of prestige to own one, especially a lory or cockatoo, which sing or can be trained to talk.

Pet birds are most popular on the main island of Java, which is less than a third the size of Papua but has a population of 121 million.

According to Javanese tradition, a man must have five things to rise above the ordinary: a house, a horse or car, the traditional dagger known as a kris, a bird and, last of all, a wife.

Bakdi Soemanto, professor of cultural sciences at the University of Gajah Mada in Yogyakarta, said some Javanese believe that birds can bring enlightenment or serve as a symbol of a person’s character, much as a birth sign would. Some birds, such as the lory, are thought to ward off supernatural beings. But most of all, people like to hear them sing.

“Javanese people love birds,” Soemanto said. “But the way they love them is not by setting them free but by putting them in a cage.”

A recent trip to the Hamadi market in Jayapura showed that it was easy to find protected birds for sale, dead or alive.

Souvenir shops openly sold stuffed birds of paradise for the equivalent of $25. They offered headdresses and ornaments made with bird of paradise tail feathers, as well as decorated eggs of the cassowary, whose leg bones are used to make knives. One shop owner offered a black-capped lory for about $55, enough to support a family here for a month.

At an open stall, a trader named Mustafa was willing to sell a sulfur-crested cockatoo for the equivalent of $65.

He acknowledged that selling it was illegal but said taking it out of the province would be easy.

“You can carry it by airplane, by ship,” he said. “You just arrange it with the officer in the airport.”

So it seems. At the Jayapura airport and the harbor, a few of the passengers wait to board with special luggage--small cardboard boxes with holes cut in them. Sometimes, the boxes shake on their own.

The forestry police say that they have tried to search the market for protected birds but that every time they plan a raid, word leaks out and the creatures are hidden by the time they arrive.

“That’s one of our problems,” said Resubun, the head of the conservation department for Papua’s eastern region. “If we make an inspection, they know it in advance. We go to the market, and they just laugh. Maybe we have to change our system.”

Resubun acknowledged that his agency is largely ineffective in protecting wildlife.

The department has 54 officers to patrol more than half the province, he said. They share one car and one boat.

“We are lacking control, I can say honestly,” Resubun said.

The military, whose main role in Papua is to keep the local population in check, has operated with impunity here for decades. The brief search that Howay and his men conducted on the troop ship in March is rarer than the birds they are trying to protect.

Soldiers have been known to pull their weapons on the unarmed forestry police when questioned about their activities, officials say.

Despite widespread knowledge of military involvement in the illegal export of wildlife from the province, no soldier or officer has been arrested for capturing or smuggling protected animals.

“That is our weakness,” Howay said. “We can’t press charges against the military.”

Papua Police Chief Made M. Pastika acknowledged that the army plays a major part in smuggling wildlife from the province. Police officers are involved too, he said.

“Most of the illegal trafficking of the birds, endangered species, is suspected [to be] done with the backing of the authorities, like police and military personnel,” he said. “We are very concerned about this.”

One of the main army units allegedly involved in smuggling wildlife is Kopassus, the elite force that once received training from the U.S. military. Washington severed military ties with Indonesia in 1999 after army-sponsored militias destroyed much of East Timor, but some Bush administration officials and Indonesian generals hope to resume cooperation.

Maj. Gen. Mahidin Simbolon, the Indonesian military commander in Papua, said he has seen no evidence that soldiers or officers are involved.

He has advised his troops not to engage in the illegal wildlife trade, he said, and has authorized searches of their belongings.

Simbolon has also invited representatives of the World Wide Fund for Nature to speak to the troops about protected wildlife.

“There are indeed some accusations that the soldiers take them out,” the general said. “If that is true, then we have to take care of it internally, and that is what we are doing at the moment.”

Papua is one of the least explored places on Earth. Slightly larger than California, it has a population of 2.5 million, including many tribespeople only decades removed from the Stone Age. Some believe that there are still tribes in the rugged highlands of the interior that have never had contact with the outside world.

The diversity of the island’s species is remarkable. There are freshwater sharks and saltwater crocodiles, birdwing butterflies, and fruit bats with a 5-foot wingspan. Among the island’s mammals are egg-laying echidnas and tree kangaroos that probably migrated to the island from Australia when the two were linked by land 6,000 years ago.

A lack of mammalian predators has allowed the evolution of a great variety of bird life on New Guinea, including 30 bird of paradise species, renowned for their long, colorful tail feathers.

Papua is also home to the endangered palm cockatoo; the cassowary, with sharp claws that can disembowel a human; the Victoria crowned pigeon with its majestic feather crest; the hornbill, with its huge curved beak; and the brightly colored black-capped lory, a type of parrot.

Natives have long hunted the creatures, particularly the birds of paradise, whose feathers are favored for decorating headdresses used in ritual ceremonies and headhunting raids.

International trade in the birds of paradise dates to the 14th century, when their plumes adorned the headdresses of the sultans’ guards at the Turkish court.

In the late 19th century, the feathers were so popular in Europe that the birds became New Guinea’s most valuable resource.

Amid concern that the birds would be driven to extinction, trade in birds of paradise was banned in 1924, but hunting has never stopped.

Hunters catch most birds by stringing nets between trees, but the birds of paradise are among the hardest to nab. Usually, hunters simply shoot them and stuff them for decoration. The males’ spectacular mating displays, occurring regularly in the mornings and evenings, make them an easy target.

In January, one forest police officer, Elsama Anton Wakum, 30, confiscated five stuffed birds of paradise from a smuggler who allegedly was delivering them from one police officer to another.

Two nights later, Wakum was struck in the head with a piece of wood. His body was found by the side of theroad in the morning. The birds are missing. Police are investigating the slaying. Even when the conservation department manages to seize live birds, they are not always better off. Releasing a creature back into the wild requires a pile of paperwork and signatures all the way up to the provincial governor.

Instead of being set free, many of the confiscated birds spend the rest of their lives at a house in the town of Sentani, near the Jayapura airport. One aging palm cockatoo is chained up in the yard. A large hornbill has become a pet of the local children, who delight in carrying it around. Sulfur-crested cockatoos are kept in a room with windows too dirty to see out. Three Victoria crowned pigeons--inveterate pacers--are kept in a narrow wooden cage with barely enough room to turn around.

Down the road, Dr. John Manangsang has set up an alternative bird sanctuary.

It began when a soldier brought him a bird of paradise that he had shot in the wing.

Manangsang, a general practitioner, healed the bird and bought it. Word spread, and soon he had acquired 40 birds of paradise, sea eagles, hornbills and cockatoos, many of them wounded or ailing.

He built an aviary for the birds of paradise and allowed the public to come see them. He let his three crowned pigeons wander freely in an outdoor enclosure.

Manangsang said he was trying to protect the birds and keep them from being smuggled out of Papua, but the conservation department prosecuted him for possessing protected wildlife.

The doctor lost in a lower court but appealed to the Supreme Court and won. The conservation department issued him a license that allows him to keep the birds.

Now he dreams of building a facility where he can breed his birds of paradise and release their offspring into the wild.

“The birds are very threatened here, and I have to do something about it,” he said.

“I want to educate people to love nature so that when we release the birds, people will not kill them,” he said.

Before inspecting the warship in March, Howay notified the navy that he and his officers would come to search the soldiers’ possessions for illegal wildlife as the troops boarded. About 800 troops were scheduled to depart that day aboard the Teluk Penyu 535.

But when the officers arrived at the appointed time, the soldiers were already on board and the ship was about to leave. Howay and his men were given less than half an hour to search the ship. One officer, who was not in uniform, was not allowed on board. Howay, 30, said he had planned to arrest any soldiers found to be smuggling wildlife but decided that it would not be wise to try to take suspects off the ship.

“It is quite a risky thing to do,” he said. “People ask me why we can’t do anything about the military, but the forestry police are empty-handed while the military has weapons to scare people.”