Concerning the implicit comparison of the Freeport Grasberg mine and the Tangguh LNG project, we shall appoint a student group to work on this problem and report back. The practical insight in the Freeport-McMoran Grasberg situation was that the Papuans as Melanesians from a stone age culture within living memory faced off against a Western investor and (mostly Javanese) Indonesians from a modern culture, and as a result were essentially placed in the same position as nineteenth century American Indians. There was a struggle for land in which the locals were largely moved off their traditional lands to enable its exploitation by the newcomers, at the same time as Papuans largely lost their demographic majority in the overall local population through government programs encouraging inward migration from Java and other more developed areas of Indonesia. Meanwhile, viewed as a case study BP’s Tangguh project turned out differently. Why was that?

The Indonesian government adopted a somewhat paternalistic attitude towards the Papuans, while letting be known their impatience at their seeming lack of gratitude for its development efforts, especially in the Freeport case. Meanwhile, the Papuans tend to be regarded less than favorably by many ordinary Indonesians. They look different as Melanesians, they speak different languages, and are regarded as primitives not least because their customary attire may consist solely of a penis gourd (nonetheless, there are Westerners who praise them as a sophisticated culture from which we should learn, see Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday (2012)). There is a small but stubborn guerrilla independence movement among some Papuans, drawing heavy-handed Indonesian military responses from time to time (against separatism, but in practical terms pressuring local villagers to reveal their haunts). However, the Papuans’ biggest grievance is essentially loss of traditional lands and so their way of life (as opposed to what might be called impingement on any sense of budding Papuan nationalism). So are mostly academic claims of indigenous peoples’ third generation rights under a human rights analysis recognized as a matter of state practice, and what is the legal significance of such a failure?

Tangguh is a multi-billion dollar BP project located also in Irian Jaya, Indonesia like Freeport’s Grasberg project, but it is the antithesis of Freeport Grasberg, and they recently signed contracts on expanding Tangguh from one to three LNG trains at a cost of several billion dollars.  This differential treatment is partially a factual predicate for saying that Freeport lost several billion dollars essentially because of their questionable longer term behavior leading to them being forced to divest a majority of the Grasberg project in order to secure an extension of their mining concession. As lawyers, you should be able to reverse engineer BP’s concerns that Tangguh not turn into another Freeport, and to understand the structure of the social and environmental framework to avoid another Freeport, or more generally the kinds of cases that formerly were filed regularly under the ATCA. So first reread closely BP’s efforts under the linked sources on environmental and social effects of the Tangguh LNG project, then please articulate in detail the legal basis of BP’s strategy and approach with a view to being able to replicate it elsewhere. What are its key elements, and how was it implemented?

Copyright 2020–21 © David Linnan.