BY DOUG COOPER
SYDNEY, Australia - In a victory for democratic rights August 29, all charges were dropped against four civilian leaders of the March 17-26 mass protests in Papua New Guinea sparked by a mutiny among big sections of the PNG Defence Force.

Demonstrations by youth, students, rank-and-file soldiers, workers, and shantytown dwellers forced then prime minister Julius Chan to step aside pending an inquiry into the hiring of foreign mercenaries.

Chan, his stand-in replacement, and many other Cabinet ministers lost their seats in the June national parliamentary election.

Jonathan Óata, national general secretary of the PNG Watch Council; John Napu and John Kawowo, leaders of Melanesian Solidarity (MelSol); and Powes Parkop, a lawyer and leader of the Individual and Community Rights Advocacy Forum (ICRAF), faced a range of "unlawful assembly" charges stemming from the March protests. In a sign of the government's weakness, however, court proceedings were postponed numerous times since the arrests in early May.

Offices of the three groups were raided by cops and files and records were confiscated on May 5. In recent years, the groups have been prominent in leading protests with others against the previous government's deep-going austerity program, the mushrooming debt to the imperialist banks, and moves to register land held communally - the great majority of the country's land area - as the first step to be able to commodify it.

In a May 13 statement Parkop explained, "These charges are really an attack on [the] constitutional right to free speech, free association and free assembly. These constitutional rights and freedoms will be meaningless if the police are successful in the prosecution of this matter."

On August 29 Parkop said the prosecutor "simply did not have any evidence" and noted, "The case itself was more political than anything else. They did not have a case from the beginning."

Doug Cooper is a member of the Australian Manufacturing Workers' Union in Sydney.  
 
 
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