Dotocracy

PNG News #11: Bougainville Crisis explained
Some of the instructors that I work with blame the current failing economy on the Bougainville crisis. Both the closing of the profitable foreign owned copper mine and the national funds required to help establish law and order have cost the country dearly. Bougainville people are distinctive looking. Many consider other Papua New Guineans brown skinned not black like themselves and would like to establish an independent nation. Some of my colleagues believe that this will lead to other provinces wanting the same and the dissolution of the nation building.

Br Pat Howley, fms - Reasons for the Crisis - Peter Mekia
This story was posted on January 9, 2002
This week's story comes from Bougainville, Papua New Guinea. Nasioi is a major language group in Central Bougainville. The Chairman of the Nasioi Council of Chiefs is Peker Mekia. Peter Mekia was working with Theo Miriung on Community Government during the crisis. It was during this time that the Nasioi Council of Chiefs (CoC.) formed a crisis and evaluation committee to find out what actually caused this crisis. In this statement, Peter Mekia gives his understanding of the reasons for the Bougainville

Haus meri

crisis.

We called in all kinds of people to get their opinions and this is what we came up with:

• 1. The first cause was the colonial administration, which did not believe in consultation. We had our own ways of dealing with problems and discussing things and when the colonial administration refused to consult and consider our ideas it left us in an impossible position. Their way was quite opposed to our normal way of dealing.
  
  
• 2. The second reason was the distribution of the wealth. The mine was producing an enormous amount of money and very little of that was coming to Bougainville. Bougainville was not receiving its correct share of the money. We tried to negotiate with the Prime Ministers Julius Chan, Rabbie Namaliu, and Pius Wingti. But none of them would listen to us. All the money was going out of our country and very little was being kept here to meet our own needs. There was no money going into the infrastructure. The company was doing infrastructure development but that was only for their own purposes.
  
  
• 3. The next reason was the social problems. There was an influx of people from other
  
  Dots
  Children jumping from the tree
  parts of the country and our own people were not free to go about their business. This was especially so for women who were liable to be attacked and raped. They couldn't go fishing, they couldn't go gardening and they couldn't go anywhere unless there were men with them to protect them. Wherever they went they were likely to be molested. This is not our custom. It blew up when some outsiders actually killed a nurse from Arawa hospital who was visiting her sister near Aropa airport for the weekend. This lady was working in the garden and some men came in and killed her. Not only did they kill her, they chopped her up and mutilated her body.
  
• 4. Opposition rose over the environmental damage caused by the mine [Bougainville Copper Limited. BCL.] They talk about the river of tears and the mess that was made of the Jaba River and of the damage that was done to the food crops and the fish in the rivers and the fish in the seas. Bougainville Copper would not admit that the place was being environmentally damaged and the whole area was polluted. They denied the environmental destruction. [We could see
  
  Bigger Dots
  Children jumping from the tree
  that] flying foxes were dying and the fish in the rivers were dying and the mine people were saying, 'No! No! It is not the mine that is causing this damage.' On this side of the range, the fish and the bananas were not dying but on the other side, the outflow from the mine was filling up the Jaba River and all the fish on the Western side of the range were affected. People made their own experiments. They used to get a bucket of water from the Jaba river and a bucket of water from this side. They used to put fish into both of them and wait. Always the fish from the Jaba river water died.
  

PNG- News
(March 13, 2004)

In these times where individuals in the US are blaming MacDonald’s for their obesity and producing sound alibi generators, I am sure there is an explanation for my writer’s block. You remember last week the words just couldn’t come, I sent pictures attempting to show my refreshing cave experience. I don’t think it is because I have run out of new observations. You know the fake fur steering wheel covers we had in Winnipeg? Well they have the same thing here only for the opposite purpose- to keep the heat away from your hands, instead of the cold.
I am feeling cramped with my world within the university compound and went to inspect a house sitting arrangement with a US middle age couple. You know the scenario, he has a gray ponytail and she has long white hair. They are selling their four properties in Indiana (the reds for those who play Monopoly?) for a condo in Hawaii. E. and J. both work for the Bible Translation Association. It takes about 25 years to render the bible into each language. And there are over 800 languages in PNG. This is an ambitious project!
E. had disparaging words for the US Bible belt and J. works for his wife. He claims PNG is the place for upwardly poor to afford daily domestic help- “haus meri”.

Unfortunately I will have to pass on this escape out of the uni compound- it is too far away (unless of course they throw in the big red truck!) and probably too dangerous to drive at night.
I was grocery shopping yesterday and a young man managed to lower the back window of the yellow Hilux truck. He was just eyeing my prized grapefruit juice when I returned from the market and asked him to make room for me. I find this never shame, never confront, cultural ‘database’ so odd.
Paradoxically I am heading a committee investigating conflict in our Information Technology Services (ITS) Department. The department for the last 10 months has been C. , and his wife M., both Sri Lankan. A young Polish couple L. and his new wife A. arrived to work in ITS. L. hired for his expertise, speaks very little English has been relegated to fixing problems in the student labs. He is angry, has been warned that he is “expected to co-operate” or failure to do so will result in his contract being terminated with immediate effect and deportation back to Poland. Not surprisingly he is ready to quit.
I have an experienced mediator elder on the committee. Brother Pat, an experienced meditator from the Bougainville crisis (see above) using a method of ‘Getting to Yes’ in a Melanesian way, is teaching me a lot. Sister Miriam, who returns to Poland at the end of the semester to become a Mother Superior, serves as translator for L. Br.Pat would like to the parties involved to participate in a mediation process. Each party will have a ‘wantok’ in the room for support, translating and someone to talk to. The process he usually follows includes each party having their entire extended family in the room, however considering there is only one person from PNG (the VP Administration) he is paring down the process. If all the parties end up being willing, it should be an interesting experience. It is too bad that I am so poor at picking up language I have the opportunity to learn Polish!
Thursday night I went swimming with Father R., the visiting Champlain and A. a volunteer from Austria. The pool was filled with Polish speakers playing in the rain. Last night, chicken salad night we splurged and shared a bottle of Australian Shiraz. Sat on the beach listening to the waves as fishermen paddled their boats. The moon rose late last night, so the fishermen took advantage of the moonless night to paddle their outriggers while fishing for sardines. Each boat had a kerosene lamp that made the scene look like Trout Lake ceremony of launching paper boats with candles.
Ah the Pacific Ocean!

PNG- News: Dots
(March 18, 2004)

· Another day, another dot.
Each day I wake up with at least one new bite. It is a good morning if it is only one. They are itchy too. By the end of two years my body will be an intense constellation- no need for tattoos, I can hardly wait for the Southern Cross to appear.
As I write one dot moves across the page, showing that my writing is actually alive. Does that allow me to say without arrogance that the writing is lively?
Dots came up in our last University Examination Committee meeting. That’s right Quality Assurance makes sure that all examination are reviewed before giving them to students. Confidentially, students should pay me for this service. During the meeting I recommended to the Physiotherapy Department to put “periods at the end of each sentence. The Head of the Department, S., a VSO Englishwoman who will be leaving in a couple of weeks, looked at me with glazed eyes. She wasn’t sure what I was saying. When I said it yet another time, she said, “Oh, you mean full stop.” Another examination review, an Austrian puts exclamation marks after each question that asks the student to explain.
· Another day, or not!
Carolyn Lawson died this week. Vibrant, organized and planning to the end. Overtaken by the out of control cancer. The Baden Powell Trail will never be the same. For me Carolyn will always be at San Joseph Bay, the Grand Canyon and Manning Park.
· Photos are of course made of dots.
Canoeing last weekend, I managed to photograph only four of the dozen young boys climbing the tree and splashing down into the water. One of our group a 37 year old Austrian pilot (there are no jobs for pilots these days) slowed the whole process down.

Will you connect the dots for me?


PNG- News
(March 31, 2004)

Weeks back I wrote you about Air Niugini’s slogan: ’PNG expect the unexpected’. I have read a more appropriate slogan for my experience. “Everything is simultaneously possible and impossible.”
Next month, on April 29 John Howard, The Prime Minster of Australia and Sir Michael Somare, the Prime Minster of PNG are expected at our university to open the Friendship Library.


This is possible as organized religion is the most effective instrument in PNG at least for the attainment of wealth, power and renown. However it is impossible to take a book out of the library or actually turn on the high tech air conditioning system or the computers. And who knows whether these illustrious officials will actually turn up!

Last week the university hosted a conference, in association with the State, Society and Governance in Melanesia Project, Australian National University. The conference was titled - Foreign Policy, Governance and Development: Challenges for Papua New Guinea and the Pacific Islands and filled with distinguished politicians. The list of challenges is endless, the direction unclear. The whole country has immersed itself totally in the supreme task of development through foreign aid, relishing the thrusts and turns of international funding games. People have had to shelve their sense of self-respect and assume another more attuned to the newer permanent role as a first-rate, expert beggar.
As the author Epeli Hau’ofa so lightly puts it, these islands are surrounded by the Pacific tidal wave of D-E-V-E-L-O-P-M-E-N-T. The people have become surfers riding the waves to shore.
What was not stated directly at the conference was PNG’s enormous untapped potential for work. Unfortunately the country has a love for energy conservation, which they succeed with enviable success simply by doing as little as possible or by doing nothing at all. The import of the Protestant Ethic seems to fall on deaf ears. And they may have a point!
And of course I am but just one of the foreign aid strategies, which does the work for nationals. Besides volunteers on bicycles, there are Overseas Experts & Foreign Advisers who travel by limousines, and representatives of AusAid and European Union who are given Land Cruisers, generous remuneration including allowances for living away from home, for the inconvenience of having to live with heat, ants, mosquitos, bugs, scrawny dogs, and for risking contraction of such foreign diseases as malaria, TB and typhoid.
Democracy like the Protestant Ethic is a foreign idea and is even more difficult to get. Democracy and PNG don’t dance. Democracy must be earned the hard way and it takes time, not in this life. I recently read an article suggesting that 3 percent of the population have birth certificates. We are very far from a legitimate voting list, even if we wanted one.

I spend my extra time reading academic papers on globalization and neo-colonialism, and diving. This weekend underwater I saw my first black and white very long poisonous sea snake and deep green razer fish who swim together in a vertical school hanging out in vertical branches of pink coral. I am missing home!

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