As things fall apart in Papua New Guinea

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Date: July 04 2009

Dave Tacon in The Age

IT IS midday in Kerema, the capital of Papua New Guinea's Gulf Province on the country's south coast. The sun is too fierce for most of the street vendors, whose trade is busiest in the late afternoon. Not that Kerema ever gets particularly busy. It's a ramshackle coastal town of less than 6000 people at the mouth of an estuary with dark sandy beaches, mangrove swamps, two general stores, a hospital and an airstrip.

Kerema's only bank was robbed on May 15, 2008. It was an inside job organised by the entire senior staff together with local street criminals known as raskols. The bank has not reopened but has been replaced with a bank agency with prohibitively high fees for most locals.

Detective Andrew Mokoko, 35, walks the street outside the bank agency office in plain clothes, nonchalantly toting a pump-action shotgun. A local identity, he chats with passers-by and the betel nut vendors. Although he is officially on duty, he is earning a little extra as a security guard with a weapon from the police armoury.

This is explained to me by a former police officer. When I ask why Mokoko is out of uniform, the reply is: "Well the raskols often wear police uniforms."

In Papua New Guinea, corruption is taken for granted. Still, Kerema is tame compared with the country's more populous regional centres, where a largely uneducated population flock in the hope of work. Unemployment is rife. Violent crime, driven by poverty and tribal allegiance, is out of control. In recent weeks there has been sustained rioting throughout the nation. The targets are mainly Asian-run businesses — convenient scapegoats for the disenfranchised.

Commenting on recent rioting in the nation's capital, Port Moresby, Prime Minister Sir Michael Somare acknowledged the perception that his Immigration Department is so corrupt that "a six pack (of beer)" is accepted tender for a passport.

Papua New Guinea, a country with more than 760 distinctly different languages, was ill-prepared for the independence granted by Australia in 1975. To this day, the prevailing political system is based on wantok — the support of one's friends and family above all others. Superimposed into government, wantok is a system of pure cronyism and nepotism.

Although the country is blessed with abundant natural resources — a multitude of minerals, forests and fisheries — the profits most often remain in the pockets of a corrupt few who amass offshore real estate assets while their children are educated abroad, usually in Australia.

Port Moresby already has a reputation as one of the world's most unliveable cities for expatriates, partly due to an annual survey conducted and published by The Economist. Most recently, it ranked 137 out of 140 rated cities, and it's not difficult to see why. Few areas are deemed safe outside the fortified compounds that house expatriate resource industry employees and the like. The settlements, ghettos that sprawl amid the hills beyond the port, are no-go zones even for police. Gangs of raskols, no longer satisfied with robbery, rape and murder, have begun to diversify into kidnapping. The most popular targets are executives and their families. Four weeks ago, the 13-year-old daughter of a prominent Melbourne-educated businessman and two others were abducted from his Port Moresby home. They were released when their kidnappers were captured.

Residents of Lae, Papua New Guinea's second most populous town, assert that their home is even more dangerous than Port Moresby. The criminals, according to a recent police petition, have more high-powered weapons and ammunition than law enforcement officers, who are unable to even write up reports on the crime wave on broken typewriters in termite-infested barracks that have not been maintained for more than 30 years.

Even more troubling is an HIV/AIDS epidemic that is the worst in the Pacific region. An estimated 2 per cent of the adult population is HIV-positive. Despite the best efforts of Australian and international aid agencies, PNG fails to provide adequate health care for its people.

In the last week of May, Ialibu District Hospital in the Southern Highlands, which serves more than 30,000 people, was forced to close. Starved of funds, the hospital defaulted on its electricity bill and had its power cut. In consequence, about 180,000 European Union and AusAID-donated vaccines for measles, tuberculosis, tetanus and hepatitis B were destroyed.

Bodies had to be removed from the morgue. The hospital's medical superintendent, Dr Youngpu Samo, made pleas to his local MP that went unanswered. The best the hospital could do was to place public notices in Ialibu township advising of the closure, recommending the community avoid sickness and accidents.

The country's slide into chaos has not gone unnoticed. The United Nations has recommended that PNG be demoted from its list of developing countries to the unenviable position of least developed. Not only would PNG join the Solomon Islands on the list, but also the likes of Haiti, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan.

The small Catholic station of Kanabea is a world away from many of the ills that beset Lae and Port Moresby. Kanabea's church, rural hospital, school and handful of timber dwellings are a mere 27 kilometres from coastal Kerema. It is, however, situated in some of the country's most inaccessible terrain. Kanabea lies in the least developed area of PNG's least developed region, the Gulf Province. Sprawling river deltas, swamp and then a mountain range covered with rainforest divides it from its provincial capital. There are no roads, only perilous bush tracks passable only to the toughest bushmen.

Aside from two-way radio, the settlement's main contact and sole means of bringing in cargo is by air, a method of transportation that is expensive and dangerous. Rain clouds can envelop the mission for months on end. Air accidents have claimed the lives of two priests, two lay missionaries and several local parishioners over four decades.

AS THE single-engine Cessna breaks through the clouds, the mission comes into view. Alarmingly, so does a mountain slope directly ahead. The experienced pilots of North Coast Aviation bank hard and guide the craft in for a jolting landing on the long, grassy airstrip carved into the side of Mount Eruki.

Mission staff and about 60 members of the local Kamea community greet the plane. Young children make up the majority of the welcoming party, dressed in an incongruous combination of T-shirts handed down from Melbourne's Catholic community, grass skirts and tapa cloths — a felt-like material crafted from bark.

Such was the fearsome reputation of the Kamea that the native Papua New Guineans who accompanied the first missionaries refused to disembark fearing that they would become main course for one of their country's few cannibalistic tribes. The disdain held by many Papua New Guineans for the Kamea remains, although the arrival of Christianity and corned beef put an end to cannibalism.

All of Kanabea's infrastructure, including the hydroelectric generator, has been built by Australian charity — mainly from the Catholic Church. In some respects, the facilities at Kanabea Rural Hospital surpass those of many regional hospitals. Pilots are known to fly themselves in for X-rays rather than brave the anarchy that is Port Moresby General Hospital. Here, vaccines are kept safe by a back-up power supply sourced from solar panels.

The visiting fee for patients is about 20 cents, although garden-grown vegetables are also accepted. Until recently, the hospital had no doctor. The previous one, Australian priest Maurice Adams, succumbed to leukaemia 14 years ago. In May, Kanabea welcomed 26-year-old Dr Magdelene Taone of Port Moresby, who agreed to a three-year posting. She faces a great challenge, serving a mountain community with little awareness of primary health. Malaria leads a host of preventable diseases including tuberculosis and dysentery. One problem that is conspicuous in its absence is HIV/AIDS.

But although the rural hospital's AusAID-funded HIV/AIDS counselling centre remains empty, the disease is gradually making inroads into the mountains. Of 1000 HIV rapid tests administered last year, five returned positive in Bema, a Catholic mission, either an arduous 12-hour trek or a seven-minute flight from Kanabea, weather permitting. The disease poses a great threat to the traditionally polygamous Kamea, but for the time being, their isolation is their greatest protection. Despite this, the community is attempting to build a road to Lae.

Enga Province, in the highest part of the highlands, is unique in PNG in that its people consist predominantly of a single ethnic and linguistic group. While Enga is free of the cultural fragmentation evident in much of the country, tribal warfare is widespread and governance dysfunctional. A local-born woman, Dr Maryanne Amu, wants to help her people in the regional centre of Wapenamanda. A specialist in public health, she hopes to change health policy from inside the government. In 2007, she ran unsuccessfully as an independent candidate in elections marred by deceit and intimidation.

In Amu's account of events, the winning candidate installed his own supporters as electoral officers. When voters arrived at the polling station they found that their forms had already been filled in for them. Amu also claims that opposition groups were terrorised by thugs provided with guns by the candidate.

Of her 89 fellow female candidates, only former Australian teacher Carol Kidu claimed a seat in the 109-member parliament. Kidu's attempts to pass legislation that guarantees 20 seats for women have so far been unsuccessful. Women's rights in PNG have a long way to go in a country where, according to Amnesty International, about 150 women are killed each year in the highlands province of Chimbu on suspicion of practising witchcraft. Despite this, Amu plans to run in the next general election in 2012.

In the meantime, she is tackling her community's own AIDS crisis through the Wapenamanda Centre for Primary Health Care, which she founded in 2006. The centre has largely been funded from Amu's own pocket, with money saved from employment in Australia.

She has also engineered partnerships between her health centre and a number of non-government bodies outside PNG. One such group is Melbourne-based Cabrini Health. On the last weekend of May, Catherine Garner, Cabrini's mission integration manager, visited the centre.

She was welcomed as a dignitary in true highlands tradition in a ceremony that approached three hours. Before a crowd of more than 100, lengthy speeches were given by local leaders including a former minister for Enga. This was followed by a mumu — a feast of pig, chicken, bananas and sweet potato cooked in a pit.

As the sun set, Garner was driven to a mothers' group outside town. She and Amu sat before a crowd of about 60 on a grassy clearing in a mountain valley. An older member of the audience raised his hand to speak and said, in Engan, "Papua New Guinea is like a child that thought it was strong enough to go into the world on its own, but it was not. Now Australia is like the parent who returns to help. We thank you for coming back."

Dave Tacon is a Melbourne-based freelance writer and photographer