2) University of Wollongong Emeritus Professor Stephen Hill launches latest book Captives for Freedom
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1) Indonesia, Freeport still differ on valuation, other issues
Jakarta | Fri, October 27, 2017 | 01:07 pm
The Indonesian government and Freeport McMoran, a parent company of gold and copper miner PT Freeport Indonesia, have not reached an agreement on several issues, including the valuation of the company’s shares.
Freeport McMoran CEO Richard C. Adkerson said the valuation was only one of the several issues that had not been resolved in a negotiation with the government after the company agreed to divest 51 percent of its shares to Indonesia's entities.
Adkerson stressed the negotiation did not only focus on the valuation of PT Freeport Indonesia's shares, but also the divestment mechanism, including the government’s intention to buy the shares through state-owned enterprises.
Read also: Govt seeks close Freeport cooperation on Grasberg
The Freeport statement was seen at the expose of the company's third quarter performance received by kontan.co.id on Thursday.
It also denies the remark made by Energy and Mineral Resources Minister Ignasius Jonan, saying that the government and Freeport had reached an agreement on valuation at US$8 billion.
Adkerson said the value of PT Freeport Indonesia’s shares should be calculated comprehensively, by considering various elements, including equity and debt. “The Freeport valuation is close to $13 billion,” he added.
The figure was lower than the Freeport valuation stated in the fourth quarter of 2015, which was $16 billion.
Adkerson still proposed that the divestment process would be implemented through an initial public offering (IPO), despite the government’s intention to buy Freeport’s shares through state-owned enterprises. (bbn)
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2) University of Wollongong Emeritus Professor Stephen Hill launches latest book Captives for Freedom
Stephen Hill hopes his latest book reveals to readers the hidden world of one of Australia’s closest neighbour, who remains ‘Captives for Freedom’.
‘’Many people in Australia know very little about West Papua, even though it is pretty much our nearest neighbour and my concern is people should start to be able to see what’s happening, particularly with human rights, more or less on our border,’’ Hill said.
‘’The number of [West Papuans] people killed is very hard to tell. The most confident estimates suggest between 50 to 100,000 people were killed by Indonesian military at the time.’’
The University of Wollongong Emeritus Professor was just six months into a role with the United Nations in the mid 1990s, when two members of his staff were taken hostage by rebels in West Papua.
A senior UN official and Ambassador of the United Nations to Indonesia at the time, Professor Hill was responsible for the UN’s role in negotiating the safe release of the hostages and the subsequent aid initiatives.
But the key reason was that they wanted to bring world attention to the problems the West Papuans were having of basically being pillaged, raped and murdered by Indonesian military.Stephen Hill
When the group of tribal West Papuan freedom fighters find out one of their hostages is a pregnant woman, they decide that the baby is a “Gift from God” and must be their new “Messiah”.
They plan to keep Martha hostage until the baby is born, and then carry the baby, to be called Papuani, into battle as a mascot to protect them against the Indonesian military bullets.
‘’It took us about five months to secure their release. The woman from my office was pregnant so we were quite concerned about what would happen to her,’’ Prof Hill said.
He intentionally made his Captives for Freedom book read like a detective’s novel so as to give real-life accounts of the events that unfolded throughout the negotiation and release of hostages.
‘’I was reporting everyday to the UN Security Council about what was happening so I have contemporary reports of what we did at the time,’’ he said. ‘’I wanted readers to see the plot developing as opposed to being told in advance. I think it works pretty good.’’
Prof Hill, who worked for the UN for 11 years from the mid-1990s, believes there were a number of reasons why the freedom fighters chose to capture the two foreign UN workers.
‘’But the key reason was that they wanted to bring world attention to the problems the West Papuans were having of basically being pillaged, raped and murdered by Indonesian military,’’ he said.
Captives for Freedom: Hostages, Negotiations and the Future of West Papuais available from amazon.com and the UOW bookshop.
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