INDONESIA-ENVIRONMENT: Gold mining company launches p.r., pressure campaigns

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

WASHINGTON, Nov 22 1995 (IPS) - Freeport McMoRan, operator of the world’s largest gold mine located in Indonesia, is battling environmental protests and Wall street worries following confirmation of environmental and human rights abuses at the mine site.

The New Orleans-based company has launched a public relations campaign which includes buying extensive television air-time, flying Wall Street analysts to the mine site, and suggesting that it may cut contributions to universities whose students are protesting the company’s operations.

Three weeks ago, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), a U.S. government agency, canceled 100 million dollars in political risk insurance it provided for an expansion of the mine after investigators charged that the new activities posed “an unreasonable or major environmental, health or safety hazard” to the local rivers and forests on the island of New Guinea.

The announcement came a month after the Indonesian government’s human rights commission confirmed two independent reports that a number of indigenous people were massacred by soldiers guarding the mine site.

Students at Loyola college in New Orleans and the University of Texas in Austin, which both receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants from Freeport, reacted to these reports by holding demonstrations to press campus authorities to sever ties with the company.

Loyola students and faculty demonstrated outside the mansion of Jim Bob Moffett, Freeport’s chief executive, Nov. 4. They were joined by Catholic peace activists from a group called Pax Christi.

The protest was organised by John Clark, a philosophy professor. Clark also works with an environmental group called the Delta Greens which has protested the dumping of radioactive gypsum waste into the Mississippi river from Freeport’s phosphate processing plants in New Orleans.

On Nov. 8 Clark says that Freeport retaliated by demanding the return of a 600,000-dollar grant to fund a chair for environmental communications studies at the university.

Greg Probst, a Freeport spokeperson, confirmed that Freeport wanted its money back but denied any link to the protests. “We gave the university the money three years ago, but they have not used it. This is shareholders’ money and they should get it back,” he said.

Clark says that in recent months Freeport critics on campus have been harassed. “Emily Drew, the president of a local student group, has had her tyres slashed. She has received death threats, and the office has received bomb threats,” says Clark.

Clark says he has not yet been able to trace the source of the threats, but he suspects that right-wing activists may be behind the harassment.

Freeport is also a major sponsor of the University of Texas geology department from which Moffett graduated in 1961. The company gives the department one million dollars a year to send students to study the mine site in Irian Jaya.

Freeport has also given over two million dollars to the university for a new molecular biology building. In return,the university proposed to name the building after Moffett.

When the reports of human rights abuses surfaced, a group called Students for Earth Awareness (SEA) called on the university to drop Moffett’s name from the building. They also demanded that William Cunningham, the university chancellor, resign from Freeport’s board of directors.

On Nov. 14 Freeport called a press conference in Austin to present its ide of the story but refused to allow the students to attend. The next day the students held a 37-hour sit-in at the main university building to protest the university connections with Freeport.

“We have 3200 signatures from students calling for Moffett’s name to be dropped. Considering that 4100 students voted in the last election, we think that’s pretty impressive,” Hannah Gould of SEA told IPS.

Some University of Texas faculty have joined the students in protesting campus links with Freeport. Steven Feld, a professor of ethnomusicology, quit his job in protest against Freeport.

In the last few days,Freeport has stepped up its efforts to counter all the negative publicity. It arranged for a company film about the mine to be broadcast twice on local television station in New Orleans last week and once in Austin.

The company also organised a tour of the mine for 20 financial analysts. The group was flown in a Freeport Boeing 757 corporate jet to a company smelter in Huelva, Spain and then to the mine site in Indonesia where it stayed at the Sheraton Hotel, which is owned by Freeport.

“I think the OPIC letter is a crock. I looked at the river and I looked at other rivers nearby and they looked just the same to me. I think Freeport is one of the most environmentally responsible companies in the world,” Chuck Bradford, a mining analyst at Union Bank of Switzerland in New York told IPS.

“Mind you, I’m not an environmental expert but I’ve seen a lot of other mines around the world. I think that OPIC pulled out because of the reports of human rights abuses. But we were told that they happened 90 kilometres away,” he said.

“I came away with a very favourable impression from an environmental and social standpoint,” Andrew O’Connor, an analyst at CJ Lawrence, an investment firm in New York, said.

“We do these trips routinely. It takes a long time to put them together so I doubt that the company did this in reaction to the OPIC letter,” Probst told IPS.

INDONESIA-ENVIRONMENT: Gold mining company launches p.r., pressure campaigns

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

WASHINGTON, Nov 22 1995 (IPS) - Freeport McMoRan, operator of the world’s largest gold mine located in Indonesia, is battling environmental protests and Wall street worries following confirmation of environmental and human rights abuses at the mine site.
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