The naked city has 495,682 stories. Approximately.

Weird scenes not far from the gold mine

Patrick Guntensperger

Manado, North Sulawesi, Indonesia

Manado is the provincial capital of North Sulawesi, part of the island chain formerly known as the Celebes. The city of Manado has a population of around half a million people, the majority of whom are Christian with a Muslim minority, making this town a bit of an anomaly here in predominantly Muslim Indonesia. Although everyone here must identify himself or herself as being an adherent to one of the six (Islam, Protestant, Catholic, Buddhist, Hindu, Confucian) religions recognised in the constitution, these formal religions are a more or less thin overlay of conformity on top of ancient traditions of animism and pantheistic worship. Nevertheless, this part of Indonesia has long been relatively free of outright sectarian violence. The area continues to be populated by people of Minihasan descent.

Beautiful Buyat Bay on North Sulawesi

If Minihasa sounds familiar, it may because eighty miles south of here is Minihasa Raya, the enormous open-pit gold mine run by the Denver Colorado based giant resource extractor, Newmont. In 2004, Newmont was accused of polluting the spectacularly beautiful surrounding waters of Buyat Bay and, after a long-running trial for some 133 million dollars in damages sought by the Indonesian government and the people of the area, a 30 some odd million dollar settlement was reached. There is little realistic question that this entailed a multimillion dollar under-the-table payment to the officials who negotiated the deal on behalf of Indonesia. Billionaire financier and then-chief economics minister Aburizal Bakrie led the Indonesian negotiators.

Aburizal  Bakrie, 'Ical' to his friends;
'Jaws' to the rest of us

Rick Ness, Newmont's
man on the firing line

I knew Rick Ness, the president of Newmont Indonesia at the time, and I could see how strong the Indonesian position was. Forget whether there was genuine ecological damage done; Rick maintains it was all bullshit. Disregard the conflicting environmental assessments done by various scientific research teams representing and funded by different interests. Indonesia held a good hand. They had placed Rick under city arrest and he was to be tried in one of Indonesia’s notoriously corrupt courts and face a twenty-plus year jail sentence if some agreement wasn’t reached. Now that’s a negotiating posture.

***

When I first moved here for the year or so I expect to be in Indonesia, I thought that this small, provincial city would be dull and lacking in any interest after the climate, food, and the diving had been covered; as a journalist, I should have known better.

Please forgive this video...I accidentally hit the record button

 on my camera while I was lining up the shot below.

I'll leave it here just for the hell of it, but I'll do better in the future.

Just yesterday as I was negotiating the price of a new laptop at a computer show, I noticed groups of teenage girls walking around the mall and the streets dressed in white wedding dresses. In groups of three, four, ten or more, they were everywhere. I finally got the answer. According to a security guard at one of the many waterfront malls, there was going to be a mass wedding ceremony later that day at the provincial museum; there were over two thousand couples registered and they were going for a Guinness world record. Apparently Guinness is pronounced “gwy’nis” in Indonesia.

Their special day 

***

Even more intriguingly, later that same day, I ran across a story out of Manado that resonated because of my experience having taught journalism.

This dog-owner lost face
 because of his cruelty to animals

It is, or used to be, an axiom among reporters that “dog bites man” is not newsworthy whereas “man bites dog” on the other hand might have some publication potential. Not here in the Sulawesis. Here the story was definitely a “dog bites man” story. It seems that a Manado man went away for two weeks, leaving his collection of dogs without food or water. When he returned, he was apparently devoured by the famished animals. They had paid particular attention to his head, it is reported; the skull was found in a different room from the remainder of his body, stripped of flesh.

The leftovers

In a town where the people routinely eat dogs, and where they can be bought either dressed and butchered, or alive in most markets, there seems to be something faintly equitable about this story, as well as proving the exception to the journalistic rule. The dogs after all were almost certainly being kept for food; it’s a virtual certainty that they weren’t pets.

***

The naked city has half a million stories and these have just been a few of them; it leads me to suspect that there will always be something of interest here. So the time I spend between travelling on assignments and my personal business in Jakarta might not be as stultifying as previously feared; I’ll keep my ear to the ground.

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