By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, May 21, 2006; A19
SIGERAU, Indonesia -- It was afternoon, and Yulianus Tiri lounged on a shady bench next to his house, nursing a half-empty bottle of whiskey.
Tiri recalled wistfully how the Malaysian timber merchants came to town and paid Tiri and other native Papuans for rights to log in jungle that their clans have long considered their own here on the island of New Guinea, in one of Southeast Asia's great tracts of tropical forest.
"People bought televisions, washing machines, CD players -- you could do karaoke in your own home!" the Sougb tribe member exulted, his bare feet swinging beneath him.
But then the Indonesian government was alerted by environmentalists that the forests, once thick and green, were being ravaged by the timber merchants' chain saws. So the government cracked down last year, sent the foreigners fleeing and yanked the licenses that had been issued by the provincial governor.
"And now -- " Tiri said, holding out his empty hands.
As the world's tropical forests shrink in the face of economic development, many environmentalists say that the best way to defend what remains is to give the impoverished local peoples who live in their shadow limited rights to cut trees for their own profit. Millions will be lifted from poverty this way, advocates say, and will acquire along the way an incentive to preserve most of the wood for future generations.
From Mexico to China and Indonesia, governments are adopting this approach. But the results can be unwelcome: scarred forests and shattered communities. Advocates say problems arise from lack of government foresight, unclear or conflicting laws, exploitation by unscrupulous timber barons and the villagers' own lack of sophistication in dealing with the outside world.
"Indonesian law recognizes traditional rights, but clear regulations on how that's going to work have never been developed," said David Kaimowitz, director general of the Center for International Forestry Research, based in Bogor, Indonesia.
Most of the world's tropical forests are government-owned and -managed, despite long-standing claims to the forests by local peoples and the limited ability of governments to protect them, said Andy White, president of the Rights and Resources Group. It is a coalition of conservation and anti-poverty groups, including the forestry research center, that this month launched a global campaign for stronger community rights to forests.
Bintuni Bay, a verdant district in West Irian Jaya province, offers lessons on the dangers and benefits of this approach.
For centuries, the Sougb people lived with the forest, sometimes cutting trees for firewood or shelter but never taking more than they could use, villagers here say. By the late 1960s, Indonesia had taken away those rights, designating about 70 percent of the archipelago's landmass, including the tribal lands of Papua, as state-administered forest area.
Following the ouster in 1998 of Suharto, the authoritarian president, a democratizing Indonesia began to grant more power to its provinces. A 1999 Forestry Ministry decree opened the door to subsistence timber-harvesting by local communities. The idea was to give native Papuans, among the poorest of Indonesians, the opportunity to benefit from their own jungles.
Three years later, the ministry issued a decree clarifying that it alone had the power to issue logging licenses. Nonetheless, Papua province claimed the authority to grant such permission on its own.
Soon afterward, Wong Sie King arrived in Sigerau. Mr. Wong, as everyone here calls him, is remembered as a tall, smooth-talking timber merchant from Malaysian Borneo. He wore polo shirts and shorts, drove a pickup and was disarmingly direct.
"He always asked, 'What do you want from us? What do you need?' recalled Yunos Horna, 28, a member of a Sougb clan. " 'We will provide it, as long as you sign.' "
And sign the villagers did. At least 25 native Papuan clans in the area set up cooperatives and signed contracts with Wong's company, PT Marindo. It agreed to pay the cooperatives $12 to $15 per cubic meter of merbau logs, a burgundy-grained wood prized for use in flooring, according to villagers and copies of contracts.
Wong didn't tell the villagers that the wood was far, far more valuable in international markets. According to the Environmental Investigation Agency, a Washington- and London-based nonprofit group that has researched illegal logging in Papua, the wood fetches $900 or more per cubic meter in China after being processed into planks.
Still, the money Mr. Wong's operation brought to the community was seductive. "I bought a jeep and a truck," said Tiri, who has two wives, eight children, and never finished grade school. "All the goods I got, I got from Mr. Wong."
Clan members rarely took part in the logging themselves. They let Marindo's crews, which included Indonesians hired locally, bring in trucks and chain saws and do the work.
Sometimes Marindo logged in conservation areas outside the permit boundaries, police said. Even when they logged within the boundaries, they took down more trees than allowed as they cleared paths for their trucks through the forests, conservation officials said.
But in 2004, as reports surfaced of contract violations, a provincial police investigation scared Wong and his men off. A police officer is now standing trial in Papua for allegedly receiving bribes from the Malaysian. But the cooperatives, unwilling to give up the income, struck deals with other companies and the logging continued.
Then last year, following a report by EIA of a massive timber smuggling operation in Papua, the central government launched a highly publicized crackdown.
"Operation Forest Protection 2005" netted 72,000 logs, 20,000 cubic meters of sawed timber and 850 logging trucks, and resulted in about 100 court cases, most involving Indonesian truck operators and crew foremen, police said.
Some researchers say that a substantial illegal trade continues, masked by timber mills that underreport the amounts of wood logged and processed. But police report that the rampant illegal logging has stopped. "Generally, it was a positive result," said Max D. Aer, deputy police chief in Jayapura, in Papua province, the crackdown's operational chief. "But there was an unfortunate impact for the local community."
Aer acknowledged that left unresolved were the deeper issues: unclear land rights and questions of whether the communities could really manage their forests. In some cases, cooperatives were being granted permits to log up to 37,500 acres apiece, even though one community of several dozen families could reasonably be expected to manage only about 1,000 acres, forestry experts said.
Today, the national forestry ministry, local government and nongovernmental groups are attempting to revise conflicting forestry and land laws in Indonesia. Forestry officials are trying to clarify overlapping land boundary claims.
Abraham Wekabury, coordinator of a tribal council of seven indigenous tribes in Bintuni Bay district, said that villagers planning to contract with logging companies should be guided by community organizing groups, to ensure that village rights are protected and that the forests aren't ravaged.
Wekabury's council tried but failed to win the clans' confidence when Wong was courting them. He said that the communities were blinded by Wong's easy cash and failed to grasp the need to log in a sustainable fashion. "They just cut the trees without understanding it's for future generations," he said.
On a forest floor near Tiri's house, giant merbau logs still lie where the logging companies left them. Some are sawn in half, lengthwise.
Tiri, meanwhile, rested on his bench with his bottle of whiskey. He is waiting, he said, for Mr. Wong to return.