Diarmid O’Sullivan from Global Witness raises further concerns about Freeport and the Indonesian military

Jon Entine [“Mining and NGOs: Breaking off the engagement”, March 2008] makes some acute observations about the tensions between NGOs and mining companies but misses a key aspect of the Freeport McMoRan story.

Freeport’s close relationship with the Indonesian military and police had long been a major cause of the company’s poor image on human rights, yet the first audit by the International Center for Corporate Accountability, published in 2005, said very little about the controversial payments made by the company to these security forces. The result was a gaping hole in the ICCA’s account of Freeport’s practices and their human rights implications.

Global Witness revealed in its July 2005 report “Paying for Protection” that Freeport appeared to have paid large sums directly to Indonesian military and police officers, rather than to the Indonesian government, up until early 2003. One of the biggest apparent recipients was a general with a profoundly unsavoury history on human rights, a history that Freeport was not responsible for, but undoubtedly knew about. This general had been the chief of staff of an Indonesian army command from which troops committed crimes against humanity in East Timor in 1999.

The New York Times published similar findings to ours a few months later and quoted Professor Sethi of the ICCA as saying that Freeport had not shown the ICCA its accounting records for payments to the Indonesian security forces. The article also quoted him as saying that direct payments to military officers would be “corruption”. 


The precondition for any constructive engagement between NGOs and companies is that the former ask the right questions and the latter are transparent about what they are actually doing. We are still waiting for Freeport to explain what happened to the payments that we detailed in our report. 



Diarmid O’Sullivan

Global Witness


www.globalwitness.org