BY JACOB ZENN
THE YEAR 2011 WAS A TUMULTUOUS ONE for New Guinea, the world’s second-largest and perhaps most politically divided island. Papua New Guinea suffered from a four-month political standoff that was at least temporarily resolved in late December.
On the island’s western half, consisting of two Indonesian provinces, what started out as a strike over wages at the Grasberg mine spiralled into four months of protests which fuelled a revival of the Papuan independence movement.
While relative peace had been restored on both sides of the island by year’s end, lasting stability will depend on a number of mutable factors in the year ahead.
The key figure in the PNG political crisis – and also the key figure in the country since its independence – is Sir Michael Somare. Somare headed the first “indigenous” government from 1972-1975 before PNG acquired official independence from Australia in 1975.
He was then PNG’s prime minister from 1975-1980, 1982-1985, and again from 2002 until June 2011. Somare’s family announced his retirement from politics last June due to ill health and he left the country for Singapore for three months to recover from heart surgery.
Sam Abal became the acting prime minister while Somare was recuperating out of country, but was ousted on 2 August in favor of Peter O’Neill, the head of the opposition People’s National Congress Party, when 73 pro-O’Neill members of the 109-member parliament declared the government legally vacant and elected O’Neill as prime minister.
Parliament then passed retroactive legislation formally recognising O’Neill as the premier.
After returning to PNG, Somare challenged the legality of what he termed a “bloodless coup” to the Supreme Court. The court then had to decide which of the two competing prime ministers – Somare or O’Neill – had the right to power and whether Somare’s or O’Neill’s governor general, police commissioner, and cabinet could rightly rule.
In a hotly contested 3-2 decision, the court held that the election to install O’Neill as prime minister was unconstitutional.
On 14 December, Governor General Michael Ogio swore Somare and his cabinet into power, but in response the O’Neill loyalist dominated parliament voted to suspend Ogio and chose Speaker Jeffrey Nape as his replacement.
Nape swore in O’Neill in as prime minister later in the day of 14 December. O’Neill had extra police flown into the capital of Port Moresby to take control of government assets, including the Government Printing Office, Treasury and Government House while Somare’s faction occupied other government offices.
The stand-off and potential for violence threatened to spark a crisis, one with geostrategic implications in light of intensifying competition between Chinese and American companies interested in PNG’s resources.
In March 2011, for example, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton accused China of trying to “come in behind” the US and undermine Exxon Mobil’s $15 billion liquefied natural gas project in PNG.
An autocratic turn in PNG could have played favorably into China’s position, especially if PNG followed the way of nearby Fiji. Different dynamics are in play in PNG, however.
Ogio, who is also the Queen’s envoy for PNG in the Commonwealth, declared the swearing in of Somare “wrong and invalid” on 20 December, thus paving the way for O’Neill to ascend to the premiership.
While it is unclear what internal discussion the British Crown and Ogio may have held, the final result was that Somare, despite his insistence that he was the country’s rightful leader, lost significant international support. For the time being, political stability has returned to PNG under O’Neill’s leadership.
Despite New Guinea island’s vast untapped resources and economic potential, PNG has struggled to chart a stable path as an independent country, while Papua remains pitched in a struggle against Indonesian rule.
The tentative resolution of PNG’s political crisis and the Papuan miners’ strike brought both sides of the island back from the brink, but there is still unfinished business in both geographies.
Papuan independence fighters are now more active than before the Freeport strike and PNG is on guard against a potential sudden attempt by Somare to retake political power by force.
If both PNG and Papua can accommodate the different political, labor, and cultural interests within their respective borders, 2012 could present both parts of the island with opportunities for peace and development. However, recent history shows reaching such a complex accommodation will be difficult and new bouts of instability can not be ruled out.
Jacob Zenn is a lawyer and international security analyst based in Washington, DC. He was also a US State Department language scholar in Indonesia in 2011. He runs an open-source intelligence, due diligence, and translations team at http://zopensource.net/.
Source: Asia Times - http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/NA13Ae01.html
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