Papua New Guineans survives political tremor

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Back in March, it seemed that Papua New Guinea was about to descend into the special hell inhabited by countries like Sierra Leone: a mutinous army was trying to depose an elected prime minister in a country where loyalties are still tribal. But the crisis is over, even though nobody knows yet how it came out.

Papua New Guinea's 4.3 million people begin voting on June 14 in an election that lasts two weeks. (85 percent of the population live in villages, some so isolated that they had no contact with the rest of the world until the 1930s.) But for most people, the 'mercenary' crisis of last March is no longer even an issue.

Analogies with Sierra Leone and talk of mercenaries suggest that Papua New Guinea is in Africa, but of course it is not. It's a former Australian colony, about the size of France (Japan, Yemen, Kenya, Paraguay, California) that occupies the eastern half of the island of New Guinea. (Indonesia rules the rest).

You could say, however, that Papua New Guinea's problems are African, indeed super-African: 750 different languages, no national consciousness beyond what the schools have inculcated in the past couple of generations, and not enough money to go around.

All of which explains the problem that led Prime Minister Sir Julius Chan to call in the mercenaries -- and unleash the crisis.

On the outlying island of Bougainville, 800 kilometers (500 miles) north-east of the capital, Port Moresby, the world's biggest copper mine has been shut down for the past eight years by a local revolt arising from land-owners' claims that they received inadequate compensation. The revolt has grown into a full-blown separatist movement, and the poorly armed, badly led PNG army proved completely incapable of re-asserting central control.

So Prime Minister Chan turned to Australia for aid in upgrading his forces, and was turned down flat. Canberra smelled a mini-Vietnam, and wanted nothing to do with it. "I had no choice but to go to the private sector," said Sir Julius.

The private sector, in this case, was Sandline International, one of the sleek new firms of 'security advisers', with brass plates in the Bahamas and glass-fronted offices in London and New York, that have replaced the old, macho mercenary world of alcohol-blurred types like 'Mad Mike' Hoare, 'Black Jacques' Schramme, and Bob Denard. Sandline's representative for the PNG deal was Lt.-Col Timothy Spicer OBE, ex-Scots Guards and Falklands veteran.

Spicer first met Brig. Gen. Jerry Singirok, commander of the PNG Defense Force, and Defense Minister Mathias Ijape in a coffee shop in Cairns, Australia in April, 1996. But it was only after Singirok's offensive against the Bougainville rebels failed disastrously in September, and Australia and New Zealand refused to help, that Chan signed the Sandline contract last January.

Sandline was to provide weapons and military equipment and send 70 military specialists, mostly from Africa, to train counter-insurgency teams that would "harrass the rebel patrols and deny them freedom of movement." Eighty percent of the contract was for equipment, but the controversial element was the trainers -- who might, under unspecified circumstances, even end up in combat.

When the deal became known in March, the Australian press, followed by the Western wire services, went nuts. Australian Prime Minister John Howard held four hours of talks in Sydney with Sir Julius trying to bully him out of the Sandline contract, and 'dogs of war in the South Pacific' headlines were the order of the day.

If Howard was not aware by March that France was recruiting Serbian and other mercenaries to defend the dictator Mobutu in Zaire, then he should fire all of Australia's diplomats and start again. Oddly, however, he did not summon President Chirac to Australia to hear the same lecture he gave to Prime Minister Chan.

Uncharitable critics might accuse Howard of patronizing behavior, a serious post-colonial attitude problem, or even racism, but let us not be uncharitable. What cannot be denied is that the international uproar gave army chief Jerry Singirok a pretext to move against the elected government of Papua New Guinea.

On March 17, Gen. Singirok arrested all the Sandline employees in the country and went on national radio to demand Prime Minister Chan's resignation, accusing him of corruption. As he spoke, his troops surrounded the parliament building. "I, as commander, am not going to play the game," he stated, as though he had not been involved in the Sandline deal from the start.

Singirok's opportunism was driven by the fear (probably well grounded) that he was about to lose his job: the PNG Defense Forces have not performed well under his command. It was all quite picturesque, with soldiers in camouflage paint shooting into the air in the middle of Port Moresby. But countries like Papua New Guinea walk a tight-rope, and in March it nearly fell off.

The facade of order is what makes ordinary life tolerable and development possible, but it is a very thin skin in a country with more ethnic groups than all of Europe. Sir Julius Chan instantly dismissed Singirok, and then stood aside himself until a two-month judicial inquiry absolved him of corruption charges. In the end, the constitutional order held, but it was a near-run thing.

So will Chan win this election? Who knows? There are 2,368 candidates running for only 109 seats, and over two-thirds of them have no party affiliation. In most of Papua New Guinea, the contest is between local 'big men' who spend heavily to win the support of their own tribe -- and then expect to be compensated for their costs by whichever coalition they ultimately join in Port Moresby.

"A party that wants to get a member probably will have to do so by reimbursing the member's expense," said Chan, sounding rather like an 18th-century English Whig. "I do not call that corruption. I simply say they're independent, they've spent that money."

Papua New Guinea will find out whether its next prime minister will be Sir Julius Chan -- or Paias Wingti or Sir Michael Somare, who have both held that office twice in the revolving-door world of PNG politics -- only when the new parliament meets and all the new members have been bought and paid for.

Which one it is scarcely matters. What does matter is that constitutional order reigns in the country. Papua New Guinea came close to the brink last March, but it managed not to fall over.