Papuan Separatists, Indonesian Forces in Standoff Near Freeport Mine
November 10 2017 - 7:35AM
Dow Jones News
By Anita Rachman and I Made Sentana
JAKARTA--Gunmen seeking to disrupt operations at an Indonesian
mine owned by U.S.-based Freeport-McMoRan Inc. are occupying two
nearby villages for a fourth day as residents run low on food,
police said Friday.
Some 200 police and Indonesian soldiers have taken positions
around the area, according to authorities, who said they are
negotiating with the occupiers to leave without bloodshed.
According to police, they are members of a separatist movement that
has long opposed Freeport's giant Grasberg copper-and-gold mine in
West Papua, on the island of New Guinea.
Police spokesman Suryadi Diaz said the number of occupiers is
estimated at 30, about half of them with guns, and that some 1,300
villagers are trapped.
"People start to run out of food," Mr. Diaz said. "So the local
government has tried to carefully send supplies in with the help of
village leaders."
In recent months the group has tried to prevent Freeport
employees from working at the mine, including by firing at a bus
last week. One policeman was killed in those clashes, police
said.
Riza Pratama, a Freeport spokesman, said that the mine's
operations haven't been affected and described the situation as
safe.
The villages lie less than a mile from the Grasberg area, which
is guarded by security forces numbering in the hundreds. The
director of a local human-rights advocacy group, Elsham, said that
a relative of one occupier told him that the group hopes to get the
villagers to leave the area, not hold them hostage.
"They want to push them to a neutral area," said the director,
Ferry Marisan.
The separatist campaign stretches back to the incorporation of
the western half of New Guinea into Indonesia in the 1960s, and has
resulted in intermittent clashes near the mine for decades.
Grasberg has long been a target of protests--both in the province
and elsewhere in Indonesia--by nationalists who object to a foreign
company's profiting from local resources.
Freeport recently agreed to decrease its stake in the mine to
49% from more than 90%. It also agreed to build a smelter, as
required by the government, which is seeking to build a domestic
processing industry in place of exporting raw ore for processing
elsewhere.
Freeport, Indonesia's largest single taxpayer, has invested $12
billion in Grasberg since the 1970s.
Write to Anita Rachman at anita.rachman@wsj.com and I Made
Sentana at i-made.sentana@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 10, 2017 07:20 ET (12:20 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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