Dr Kristian Lasslett, Senior Lecturer in Criminology, Ulster University

The recent shooting of university students brings home the incredible contrast that exists between the streets and the suites in Papua New Guinea. Police bullets don’t mince words, nor should we.

Decades of research and inquiry have established time and time again that the elite corridors of power in government and business operate through corruption, violence and theft. Many complicit individuals populate the most senior levels of government. Fact.

In stark contrast, when one ventures out into the cities and villages where the ‘little’ people reside, one discovers resilient values of honesty, hard-work, community spirit, sustainability, and social justice.

During my first visit to Papua New Guinea, over a decade ago, I met two unemployed electricians outside a lawyer’s office. I was lost. They helped me navigate my way across Port Moresby. They spent the entire day helping me. When I offered to pay them for their efforts, both men refused it outright. ‘You are a guest, that is why we help you’, they explained.

While out of a sense of hospitality and kindness these men refused a fair day’s pay for their hard work, inside business and government senior officials were helping themselves to the peoples’ assets, often preying on the most vulnerable targets.  

This isn’t speculation. It has been established in fact by commission of inquiries, anti-corruption investigations, scholarly research, media exposes, and judicial proceedings.

Two examples leap to mind.

The SABL Commission of Inquiry illuminated a world of graft, where private actors and government officials employed disparities in resources and commercial education, to defraud customary landowners of their most important resource, land. Still nothing has been done to right this wrong.

Almost a decade earlier, a little known special inquiry was conducted into the Public Curator’s Office, a government agency charged with responsibility for handling deceased estates. This inquiry uncovered a government institution that worked hand in hand with the private sector, to illegally expropriate assets held on trust during one of the most traumatic periods a family can go through.

These are just two examples of elite actors preying on the vulnerable, with absolutely no economic return to the masses – to the contrary, this culture erodes service delivery and facilitates unregulated industries that takes much, and delivers little.

There are many more examples that could be pointed to, to demonstrate this point.

How do these two realities coexist?

On one hand there is the hard working, honest majority who know value only comes from human toil, and on the other is a small venal elite, who toil little yet realise significant swathes of wealth. A dynamic in which it should be said foreign ‘investors’ often play an exploitative role – with honourable exceptions.

Every now and then these juxtaposed worlds collide. Yesterday’s shootings is a poignant reminder of this.

We could go further back in history.

It is commonly argued that the Bougainville war centred on a landowner struggle for more compensation from the mining company, Rio Tinto. This view fuels the false narrative that it is the ‘compensation culture’, not elite graft and misconduct, that decimates Papua New Guinea.

Yet for anyone privileged enough to have spent considerable time understanding the historical origins of this conflict, the uprising was decades old in origin, and it was directed squarely at challenging from below the forms of inequality, abuse and corruption that had undermined customary values of custodianship, balance and community in Bougainville’s mine affected area.

And it might be added, that again it was police mobile squads who entered the fray, guns blazing, an act that sent young Bougainvillean men scuttling into the jungle, where they formed a guerrilla force.

A decade later up to 20,000 people were dead. No state official was charged for war crimes, Rio Tinto escaped any significant censure for its role, and no attempt was made to reform the armed forces, including the police.

Since then the police have proven a law unto themselves. This violence is often in the service of paymasters, who have acquired community resources against the popular will. When these acquisitions are challenged, police are deployed to silence community activists.

Sadly those raising the siren over these types of issues are slammed by the politicians.

Take the example of Paga Hill. While students in his city lay bleeding on the street, the Governor Powes Parkop, decided to take a swipe at Paga Hill’s former residents, who were forcefully evicted from a place many had called home since the 1960s. He claims, ‘they chose to fight, question the land title, they tried to stop the [luxury property] development, they were more concerned about what they are loosing. And truly, they lost’.

They lost indeed, they lost their homes, possessions and bodily integrity, when police stepped in with guns blazing, and demolished their community. Yet residents were not simply protesting a luxury property development, they were contesting a land transaction that had been labelled ‘corrupt’ by parliament’s public accounts committee.

How a former ‘human rights’ lawyer, could launch such an attack on displaced residents, when even by the developer’s own admission the the original state lease was acquired in violation of the Land Act 1996, is a sign of the times at the very top.

Worse still the community was standing up to a real estate developer whose executives had been censured in four Public Accounts Committee reports, two Auditor General reports and two Commissions of Inquiry. And yet it is residents that are berated by the city’s Governor for impeding development!

None of these corrosive forces undermining Papua New Guinea’s democracy, can be combatted through a mere change of political leadership. It will simply continue unabated, under new management. What is needed is a much grander reform of the political and economic structures that underpin social life.

Historically Papua New Guinea was denied the chance to creatively explore, through extensive public debate, governance structures appropriate to Melanesian values and ways of life. It was set on a fairly rigid course by the Australian colonial regime, which centred the country on large-scale resource extraction coupled to a top-heavy Westminster style of government. Those seeds have now born poisoned fruit.

The floor must be opened up again for debates about a Melanesian way of political, economic and social life, that accords with the values and systems, that have made Papua New Guinea’s communities resilient centres of social life, in the face of many immense challenges.

Indeed, there are many ways of organising social life. The one bequeathed by colonial history is not necessarily the right one. If anything can come of this violence, perhaps it needs to be a creative, democratic debate that doesn’t simply play within the rules of the game established by colonial and post-colonial history. Perhaps an entirely new ‘game’ and new rules can be established, which do not systematically produce corruption, violence, inequality and environmental harm.

Communities have developed many such structures at an informal level. The answer may lie where it has perhaps always been, in the unchronicled life of the nation’s everyday people, who grow the food, rear the children and build the homes, that sustains life for the majority.