hell’s paving stones

In the past few weeks there’s been some interesting developments on the ’shoe incident’ - the diplomatic quibble that’s acting as a proxy war for tensions between Australia and Papua New Guinea over the forms of aid to PNG.

On Tuesday, Sir Michael Somare, the PNGuinean PM, made a speech to his Parliament saying that he would not continue seeking an apology from the Australian government:

If the Australian government had said sorry to indigenous people in Australia, they would say sorry in this case, he said.

Says it all, really. For his part, here’s what Alexander Downer had to say on the 10th as he tried to giggle the issue away on Meet the Press:

Look, you know, look, you have to understand that there are cultural differences here. One of, I suppose, the characteristics of Australian culture is we’re fiercely egalitarian. One of the characteristics of Papua New Guinean and Melanesian culture more generally is that they have the notion of what they call the big man. The leaders and chiefs and so on fall into that category. So they expect special treatment for people who fall into that category.

Talk to any anthropology student and they’ll tell you this is a gross distortion of the ‘big man’ role in Melanesian societies. Downer’s counter-posing “fiercely egalitarian” Australia to the “special treatment” that prevails in PNG society. He may as well say start calling Somare ‘His Royal Backwardness’.

Somare’s probably seen the way the terms of the debate have changed over the past month. To the Australian press, the issue is now less another example of Australia’s diplomatic oafishness towards certain neighbouring leaders (a similar thing happened Helen Clark at Sydney Airport, Malaysia’s top dogs have never been popular here, and East Timor’s brass is being “ungrateful” for trying to renegotiate the Timor Gap Treaty). Instead, it’s portrayed as a bemusing but ultimately tiresome display of histrionics by a spoilt tinpot chief. What other choice does Somare have? Climb down and hope to recapture the moral high ground. He’s probably going to re-engage us directly on the issue of aid, and the most effective way of doing that is to point out how our 200-copper stipulation isn’t necessarily making law ‘n order in the country any better.

However, there may be a more desperate reason for Somare to back off - in the middle of all this, the foreign investment ratings agency Standard and Poor’s indicated that it would probably downgrade PNG’s rating if the country cancelled the Enhanced Cooperation Program (ECP). So Somare would have no aid coming into the country, and no foreign investment either.

Update update: However, he’s already set a ball rolling: towards the end of last year, a challenge to the ECP was mounted in the PNG Supreme Court by a provincial governor, Luther Wenge. The substance of this challenge is that under the provisions of the ECP, Australian police officers are granted immunity from prosecution, and argues that it isn’t constitutional. If the challenge goes through, then presumably the Aussie coppers are gonna have to go, Downer and Foreign Minister Rabbie Namaliu are gonna to have to do some talking, and that investment rating is gonna look shaky.

So now, bizarrely, the talk from the PNG government is that they think the ECP will withstand the challenge, and that:

“I’d imagine, we’ve got the political will, we’ve got the support for the ECP,”

as the Internal Security minister, Bire Kimisopa, says. Just a few weeks ago, Namaliu was threatening to suspend the ECP! More strangely still, on the same day that Kimisopa made those remarks, another senior member of the government, Chief Secretary Joshua Kallinoe, said that the ECP has been completely irrelevant to the country’s recent economic stability. Aaaarrgghh!!!

HPS thinks this is all fascinating stuff: we don’t like our own country’s arrogance and “here, let me do it” attitude to aid (which Papua New Guinea is dependent upon). However, we also think that the PNG government is acting strangely. A few weeks ago, it seemed they were reclaiming their own sovereignty and arguing for more independence in solving their country’s problems. Now, they’ve been stuck into an embarrassing rhetoric of contradiction. We’ll keep an eye on developments, but since some of our less fascinated readers have been grumbling of late, we’re also about to post a shiny, colourful update about Rove.

If you want an excellent summary of the shoe issue and the wider aid debate, read this.

Alma, who commented in the original post, provided HPS with a link to an fascinating and comprehensive article on aid in Papua New Guinea. Read it here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 4th, 2005 at 9:56 am and is filed under Politics, Paving stones, Updates, Papua New Guinea. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.