Vol. 80/No. 27      July 25, 2016

 

Papua New Guinea gov’t attacks student protests

 
SYDNEY — In a move to end ongoing student protests, administrators announced July 5 that they were closing the University of Papua New Guinea for the remainder of 2016 and dissolving the Student Representative Council. The council had organized rallies and a boycott of classes since May 2 demanding the resignation of PNG Prime Minister Peter O’Neill over corruption allegations. The actions spread after police fired on demonstrators June 8, wounding eight.

The 5,000 students at the campus in Port Moresby, the capital, come from throughout the country and many will now have to return to their home provinces.

Some 1,000 students at the university planned to demonstrate at parliament June 8, but armed riot police blocked them. When they refused to allow the president of the student council to be arrested, cops opened fire with tear gas and live ammunition and then assaulted fleeing protesters.

As word of the cop violence spread, unrest developed across the city and nationally, including in the second-largest city, Lae. In the highlands, roadblocks cut the main highway in several places.

Eighty percent of PNG’s almost 8 million people live in remote mountain villages. A majority rely on subsistence farming. More than half the population is illiterate and a third of children do not attend school. There is only one doctor per 17,000 people compared to one per 300 in neighboring Australia.

A colony of Australia for seven decades, Papua New Guinea gained independence in 1975. Since then its vast mineral resources have been plundered, mainly by Australian-based mining companies.

At the end of June, in the wake of a slump in world mineral prices, the Australian conglomerate Rio Tinto shed its holding in its open pit mine on the PNG island of Bougainville. The copper mine, one of the world’s richest, has been closed since a rebellion broke out on the island in 1989. PNG troops fought a nine-year war to suppress the independence struggle, in which up to 20,000 were killed, 10 percent of the population.

There is tension between the Papua New Guinea government and Canberra over the Australian-run refugee detention center on PNG’s Manus Island. The camp was built in 2001 in return for promised “aid” from Canberra. It imprisons asylum-seekers from the Middle East and Asia while the Australian government processes their refugee claims.

On April 26 this year, the full bench of the Papua New Guinea Supreme Court ruled that the detention regime there was “unconstitutional and illegal.” Since then conditions for the more than 850 men being held there are said to have grown worse.

O’Neill said the Manus Island detention center was a “problem” that “damaged” PNG’s reputation. He said the onus was on Australia to resettle the men held there. Canberra has tried to claim the detainees are now PNG’s responsibility.  
 
 
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