Police Association Warns: RPNGC Works for Private Patrons

Blinked and you would have missed it, but here is a very interesting posting by NBC news that appeared on Facebook last Sunday:

The Police Association, meanwhile, alleges, a lot of money is being used to keep the Police force responsive to orders the political masters involved in the current political developments. Association General Secretary Clemence Kanau says, the Association is serious concerned, this should not be the case, since the police force is only responsible to the national constitutional. 

"When our police members came in from the highlands region,they are not reporting to one or reporting or advocating for the constitution but they are reporting for the interest of individuals. And we are told, lot of funds, lot of money has been used in terms of making sure our policemen are being responsive to the cause of money but not the cause of the constitution. We have tirelessly in the last couple of years, raised salary and allowances of the policemen, three consecutive times and we are happy that the policemen today are highly paid, but because of the money and because of their interest to serve the politicians of the day, force is now divided, we are very much concerned"

Readers will recall similar concerns were raised in 2010 and 2011, when it was found the RPNGC was on Esso Highlands payroll. Indeed on the 10 November 2010, LNG Watch wrote: "A figure of K2 million has been cited as the per month subsidy Exxon Mobil are/will provide the RPNGC for security services". 


Unfortunately, it appears from Kanau's comments the problem persists. This raises the question, if the police are working for their political and economic paymasters, who is policing the powerful?

Yep this is sustainable! Global Energy Demand 1990-2040.

A Touching Post from Tingtingblokantri Blog

The Bone Dagger

http://www.tingtingblokantri.blogspot.com/2011/12/bone-dagger.html 

Simon, a leader of his clan,  is an elderly man who has no use for shoes and the clothes that the white man brought in more than 50 years ago.  This proud Hela elder is one of hundreds whose world revolved around traditional symbols of wealth and status.But all that is being torn to shreds as the whiteman's cash takes precedence over headresses, bird plumes and pigs.  The whiteman's law has also rendered centuries old  traditional commandments  unapplicable in the 21st century.

These days Simon refuses to leave the confines of his village and venture into the Tari township -the capital of the new Hela province. His whole world - the world of the Hela man - is slowly crumbling around him.

For laws enforced to the letter by armed police dictate that he abandon his cassowary bone dagger that a Hela  man always  carries after initiation. The whitemen from gas project are fearful of the Hela with their strange headresses and their "offensive weapons," -the cassowary bone daggers. Police tell him that he can wear everything else but the bone dagger. Some of his tribesman have chosen. To wear shorts and trousers to avoid hassles with the police but not Simon. He doesn't care much about Exxon Mobil's multibillion dollar gas project but what worries him are ancient prophecies of strife and turmoil that will befall his people if the land is disturbed and the "fire" given to the outsider.

What also worries him is that his land is being invaded and trampled on  by foreigners and he is unable to defend it

Population Growth and Conflict in PNG: A Warning

See below, an interesting report on PNG’s population growth and the problems it creates. This dilemma is particularly important in areas facing natural resource developments. Indeed, one of the primary causes of the Bougainville conflict was a population bottleneck. A large generation of young people, who gained maturity in the 1980s, found core economic opportunities had been monopolized by previous generations. As a result they searched for new ways of organising their local political economy, one that would see a fairer redistribution of resources.

As we know this led to a bloody civil war, as neither local businessman or BCL would consent to the demands of the young people. We wonder then with all the new gas and mineral projects, whether 10 to 20 years from now we will see another Bougainville bottleneck. Of course by then Exxon will have pocketed the profits and the tax revenues will have lined the coffers of the corrupt elite, thus it will be left to the grassroots people, the PNGDF, the RPNGC and civil society to somehow resolve.

PAPUA NEW GUINEA: Population growth fuels conflict

IRIN – A Service of UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

GOROKA, 21 December 2011  - Unchecked population growth is fast proving an additional source of conflict in Papua New Guinea (PNG), a country with a history of clan violence and clashes over land, experts say. 

“Without doubt, rapid population growth is adding to the risk of conflict,” Max Kep, director of the PNG’s national Office of Urbanization, told IRIN, noting that various types of conflict are fuelled by limited resources, including a shortage of land. 

As PNG’s population nears seven million, comprised of nearly 700 ethnic groups speaking some 800 languages, communities are increasingly fighting over smaller plots of land, while city dwellers in swelling urban areas are clashing with nearby owners of traditional land, Kep said. 

Over the past 30 years, the country’s population has more than tripled, from 2.1 million to 6.7 million, government figures reveal. 

At the same time, the average total fertility rate of 4.4 births per woman remains one of the highest in the Pacific region, says the UN. 

According to a recent government task force report on maternal health, PNG’s population will probably double in the next 25 years. 

Pressure on towns 

Adding to this challenge is PNG’s increasing youth population, with more than half of the country’s population now under the age of 20, according to World Bank figures.  

“It’s like having wild grass lying around waiting to be struck by lightning for a brushfire,” Helen Ware, a professor at the University of New England in Australia who has studied and practised peace-building in PNG, explained, noting the risk of so many idle, underemployed men. 

Migrants - drawn to towns and cities for jobs and services - are fuelling population growth in urban areas, Kep said, adding that urban areas are now growing at an average of 4.5-5 percent a year. 

Some 97 percent of the country’s land is under customary tenure law, meaning it is reserved for traditional land owners and the state has no jurisdiction over it. Land owners often are unwilling to release land for urban growth, so PNG’s cities have nowhere to expand, according to the UN Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT). 

The Eastern Highlands city of Goroka, for example, is facing critical land shortages which have caused rapid and informal urbanization, according to a UN-HABITAT report. 

Kep, with the Office of Urbanization, said a government initiative to encourage landowners to lease their land to municipalities is aimed at empowering them, with increased income and access to government services. 

Many of those flocking to urban areas today are the young. But with few job opportunities when they arrive, the country has also witnessed an increase in urban youth gangs, known as `raskol’ gangs, who often turn to crime, according to residents. 

Violent clashes have erupted between local landowners and `raskols’, Albert Sams, a 24-year-old health worker from Ifiufa, a village 20km from Goroka, explained. 

Family, community feuds 

Significantly, land disputes between family members and communities are also now more common under the strain of population growth, residents and international agencies say. 

“Villages which once were separated are now bordering one another, and conflicts are definitely arising through competition for resources,” said Chris Turner, from Marie Stopes International, an NGO providing family planning and reproductive services in PNG. 

In fact, in and around Goroka, fighting between families is also turning violent. 

“There are a lot of land disputes between families - some verbal abuse, and sometimes they fight with knives, sticks, stones or guns,” Sams said. 

Jeffery Korowa’s story is typical of large families struggling to live off the land. Hailing from a family of five siblings, the 49-year-old says all his brothers and sisters have had several children, leading to more than 15 offspring arguing over smaller and smaller pieces of property. 

“I’m already fighting with my brothers over land,” said Korowa, a nurse who owns land outside Mount Hagen, the provincial capital of West Highlands Province. “I can take my brothers to court. But I’m pretty sure if it comes to push and shove, it will become violent.” 

Dependency theory or why the world’s poor remain poor

LNG WATCH PNG: Dependency theory attempts to explain why under capitalism it is virtually impossible for the developing world to close the global inequality gap. One conclusion forwarded is that this inequality is built into the basic structures of the capitalist economy, thus any resolution of this state of affairs requires a determined revolutionary effort from below. While dependency theory has been subjected to substantial critique, modern reformulations – see below – offer a nuanced analysis of the global political economy relevant to countries such as Papua New Guinea.  The following article offers a brief formulation of dependency theory, which is drawn from Development After Globalization: Theory and Practice for the Embattled South in a New Imperial Age by John Saul.

Dependency

By John Saul and Colin Leys

Dependency refers to the way in which the “South” was subordinated to the needs and requirements of the “North” during the latter’s capitalist revolution, especially through colonialism, and to the severe price the South continues to pay for the legacy of this today … At the heart of dependency approach is the view that ‘developing’ countries are not just “behind” the economically advanced countries but remain subordinated to them by various mechanisms that must be abolished by radical change from below ...

The continuing relevance of the concept of dependency lies above all in the analyses it produced of the impact of imperialism, past and present, on the former colonies. Their economic structure tend to reflect the original reason for making them colonies: the production of primary commodities for export, and the creation of an infrastructure of railways, roads, ports and telecommunications oriented to exports, not the promotion of an integrated national economic offering viable internal markets for more than basic goods.

The well-known decline in the terms of trade for developing countries is closely related to the unbalanced nature of their economies … the decline in the terms of trade contributed significantly to growing indebtedness, which eventually obliged so  many countries to accept the ‘structural ‘adjustment’ programmes imposed as  a condition of further aid by the IMF and the World Bank. Not only was this a new form of dependency, but structural adjustment also tended to reinforce many of the features of these countries’ economies – especially their reliance on a few commodity exports – which were at the root of their economic difficulties.

Economic dependency is also reflected in the social structure. Primary commodity production in the colonial era was based on family labour on independent smallholdings, or on very low-wage labour on foreign-owned estates or mines. The typical result is, one the one hand, a large, poor and poorly-educated majority, still engaged in relatively low-skill work or, increasingly crowding into cities with unemployment rates of up to 80 per cent, and still heavily dependent on domestic substance production by relatives in the countryside; and on the other, a small local professional and business elite, deriving its income from state revenues or from the intermediately tasks they perform for foreign firms and agencies.

This kind of social structure in turn accounts for the well known political weakness of so many countries in the south. Urban elites dominate political life, and the ‘civil society’ institutions that are taken for granted in industrialized countries (such as trade unions, business associations, craft associations, nation-wide churches and national newspapers, not to mention democratic parties) , and which in various ways make the elites more accountable to the popular majority, are often weak or even, in some cases, absent. Especially in periods of economic retrogression … people fall back on local and ethnic attachments, making national politics of any kind, let alone democratic politics, extremely difficulty …