Mercenary issue to dominate PNG election

By Ratih Hardjono

PORT MORESBY: The current general election in Papua New Guinea (PNG) has been an opportunity for the people to demand change. Two of the four prime ministers PNG has had since independence have been ousted. Both Paias Wingti and Julius Chan have been in politics for more than two decades and were old hands at electioneering, but the voters threw them out.

The Sandlines mercenary crisis in March has been a catalyst for change. Hiring mercenary soldiers symbolized the fact that many things were wrong with the country, and that if change was not achieved now, PNG would sink deeper into the abyss. Two issues emerged from the Sandlines crisis, which became themes in the election. One was PNG's deteriorating good governance, where it has eroded the foundations of democracy. Second is corruption. In the major cities, many of those newly elected have honest and clean reputations.

Openness and transparency have been features of life in PNG since independence. In fact, sometimes the debate on issues is so robust that many decisions are held up and bottlenecks occur. The Sandlines decision was made by Chan in a cloud of secrecy, and can almost be considered oppressive. It is alleged that the contract with the Sandlines was put on the table at a cabinet meeting, but ministers were not allowed to read it. The whole process was in the firm grip of Chan and his deputy, Chris Haiveta, who kept details to themselves, despite advice from bureaucrats against the whole deal.

I have asked around Port Moresby why it took an Australian newspaper to break the Sandlines story. The standard answer is fear of Chan in PNG media circles. Lawyers, academics and politicians have said that they knew there was a plan to hire mercenaries long before the whole crisis erupted. But as one businessman who was elected to parliament said to me, "We know and have seen how vindictive Chan is to people. He never forgives. In the end he always gets back at you. He has always gets what he wants."

This deterioration has been so pronounced that the former Deputy Secretary General of the Commonwealth, Sir Anthony Siaguru, established Transparency International (TI). Siaguru only recently returned to PNG. He said that PNG had never had a "culture of secrecy", and that this has only developed in the last three years in the political arena. Siaguru saw this as a worrying feature starting to take hold in PNG. He felt he had to take action.

Transparency International was founded in Berlin in 1993 by a World Bank officer who saw that many of the funds the bank provided to developing countries were being siphoned off. As an organization, it is nonpolitical and nonconfrontational in its approach. It derives its strength from building coalitions in the country, embracing all government departments, churches, think tanks, the judiciary system, police, the military, all the institutions that make a civil society function properly.

When the Sandline crisis erupted, Siaguru sent out two TI teams. One was to PM Chan and the other was to the chief of the PNG armed forces, Jerry Singirok. The brief of these two teams was to give advice, with the aim of preventing bloodshed in an already tense and explosive situation. These teams made themselves constantly available to these two leaders to try to find a way out of the constitutional deadlock that had occurred. TI succeeded in averting bloodshed, but the final chapter of this crisis has not been written and will only be decided when a new PNG government is in place.

During the elections, TI also played a role in urging citizens to vote for honest people. Politicians cannot be bought with money to form a government, which has been the case in the past few elections.