December 14, 1995

To: Thomas J. Egan, Senior Vice President, Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc., P. O. Box 51777, New Orleans, LA 70151

Dear Mr. Egan:

I have great difficulty understanding your letter of December 13, 1995 concerning the deplorable human-rights abuses in Irian Jaya (West Papua) in and around the Freeport mine area.

In the hopes of better understanding your letter, I request that you be much more specific about which parts of my work you find offensive. I am most happy to correct any errors, if I have made any, and to provide ample rebuttal space via hypertext features within my web page on this controversy.

As I mentioned to you on the telephone yesterday, over the last several weeks I have contacted Bill Collier twice by phone and contacted Greb Probst once by phone making the same offer: I am most happy to help Freeport get out its side of the story. Via the web page http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/boyer/fp there is great opportunity for us, working together, to permit Freeport to respond to such remarks as the following, from the ACFOA report:

• "ABRI and Freeport security engaged in acts of intimidation, extracted forced confessions, shot 3 civilians, disappeared 5 Dani villagers, and arrested and tortured 13 people after an OPM flag raising in Tembagapura on 25 December last."
• "Not long after, ABRI [Indonesian Army] and Freeport security suddenly spread around to cover the crowd. Without warning the people, they raised their weapons directly to the crowd and started shooting."

If you will send me Universal Resource Locators pointing to your web site, I will link to them prominently. By this technique, anyone reading the ACFOA report, for example, would have the choice of mouse-clicking to jump to Freeport's position, on your web page. If you would like to attach annotations to text on my web page, addressing specific words that you find offensive, we can easily arrange for that, and I believe you would find such links and annotations a very effective way to get Freeport's points out to the many who browse the web.

Having never been to Irian Jaya (West Papua), I am obviously not someone who is in a position to claim direct knowledge of human rights abuses that have occurred there. Furthermore, I do not believe I have ever done so. However, I believe I am speaking with truth and within my rights to say that the ACFOA quotations above constitute allegations of Freeport involvement in human rights abuses. If and when ACFOA withdraws those allegations, please let me know. If it is your legal opinion that by merely posting the ACFOA report on the web I am engaged in wrongful activity, please let me know. More generally, please make all your complaints very specific, and perhaps we can, case by case, work things out to your satisfaction, getting out Freeport's point of view as completely as you would have it.

I would like to point to one error in your letter. You accuse me of being uninformed about or choosing to ignore Bishop Munninghoff's recent statement. As I pointed out to you yesterday by phone, on page two of the document I handed out at Monday's Faculty Council meeting, of which you said you had a copy, I quote the Bishop as saying "My report is not about Freeport and does not contain accusations regarding Freeport." These remarks occur in his recent statement. On my web-page version of the same text, merely mouse-clicking on the immediately preceding word "letter" takes one to the full text of the Bishop's statement. But his recent statement does not change the fact that his report on human-rights violations mentions the word "Freeport" a number of times. For example "Of the 15 Dani who went on the Freeport bus to Timika, 4 were killed and the others were detained, tortured and then released." We could argue forever about whether this sentence means that Freeport was involved. But I think it would be more useful to annotate the Bishop's report by linking to Freeport's comments on these occurrences of the word "Freeport."

Other than arranging quotations from the work of others, I have written very little about this controversy concerning human rights violations. To help us both understand what it is you are complaining about, let me cite the two remarks of mine I can imagine you might have in mind concerning human rights violations.

• Given the recent allegations that Freeport is involved in murder and torture in Indonesia --- well that's just about all that UT needs to be disgraced among the universities of the world. -- Daily Texan, November 17, 1995.
• Within the document you will find the famous letter from OPIC alleging serious environmental damage caused by Freeport mining activity in Irian Jaya (West Papua), the report of ACFOA about torture, murder, and disappearances near the Freeport mine site in Irian Jaya (West Papua), and the reports of the Bishop of Irian Jaya (West Papua) and of the Indonesian Human Rights Commission about these shocking human rights abuses. -- Preface to a document entitled "Let's Name it Muller Hall" handed out at the Faculty Council Meeting on December 11, 1995.

The first remark uses the word "allegation." When I was writing that, I had in mind the ACFOA report, in particular the sentences from the ACFOA report I quoted above.

The second remark mentions, quite accurately, that the human rights abuses occurred in a certain part of the world. No one disputes that human rights abuses occurred in that part of the world, near the Freeport mine site in Irian Jaya (West Papua).

I am therefore led to speculate that your objections are based upon the presence either in my web page or else in my Faculty Council document of quotations of the work of others. As a scholar, I am working on the premiss that quoting the work of others, with full attribution, in a balanced way, is a most reasonable activity, a basic tool for finding the truth. If you see the matter differently, please let me know, case by case. If you merely think that my quotations should be more balanced with quotations from Freeport, please send me those quotations.

Finally, I wish to assure you that Freeport is badly mistaken if it thinks that the Bishop's recent statement is somehow clearing Freeport of all accusations of involvement in human rights abuses. As I wrote in the Daily Texan, December 6, 1995, referring to the report of the Indonesian Human Rights Commission, which followed the Bishop's report:

It is probably incorrect to read the commission report as exonerating Freeport, despite frequent Freeport claims to that effect.

In an article titled "Freeport's involvement has not yet been investigated" appearing in the Jakarta newspaper Kompas on Oct. 2, we find the statement "Asmara Nababan (a member of the commission investigative team) said that the findings confirmed by the Commission in the field only went as far as obtaining proof of the human rights violations and did not include any investigation of the involvement of Freeport."

We also read, "But, according to Bambang W. Suharto (another member of the investigative team), efforts to obtain evidence of Freeport's involvement in the human rights violations in the area of its concession would involve interrogations. 'And if anyone wants to get proof of Freeport's involvement, that could only be done by the police who have powers to undertake interrogations,' he said."

Sincerely,
Robert S. Boyer