Mercenary issue to dominate PNG election

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.