Monthly Archive for May, 2008

Frivolous filings and vexatious litigation

Published on May 26, 2008 in Politics. 1 Comment

“PEOPLE OF POWER AND AUTHORITY must not use the Courts and the system to delay justice. People of power and wealth must not use the Courts as a means to hide behind the letters of the law and pretend that s/he can run away from the truth”. These words of admonition come from a self-described “Nationalist” who wrote into The National newspaper (24/10/08) from the Kagua-Erave area in the Southern Highlands Province of PNG.

The “Nationalist” was commenting on three theories of conspiracy that gained currency in Hagen recently following the burning of the famous Kapal Haus which houses the provincial government headquarters of the Western Highlands Province. The Kapal Haus was burnt down on the night of Tuesday (21/10/08). The cause of the fire is yet unknown and experts are seeking to establish the cause while security guards are being questioned for possible clues. Further details about this inferno can be found on The National (21/10/08). The belief that arsonists were at work to destroy this architectural landmark has fueled various theories of malicious intent and ill motivation which meant that the rumour mill in Hagen underwent an overload in the production and circulation of conspiracies.

What is captivating about the editorial letter is the theoretical connection the “Nationalist” of Kagua-Erave left implicit about the fire and the abuse of Court process. It seem as though the Court system could become clogged with frivolous filings and vexatious litigation so that it could go up in flames much like the Kapal Haus. This is not an overdrawn analogy. The two men who have been seeking the province’s highest political office have been battling an extended court case which ensue from a previous court of disputed returns after the last election in 2007 which saw the current incumbent Governor, Tom Olga’s election nullified. Governor Olga had defeated his renown predecessor, Paias Wingti, who contested the election in Court leading to the extended litigation process. One of the theories behind the Kapal inferno is that elements aligned with either of these two leaders could have been responsible for setting fire on the building. This is said here to only explain the analogy and not the relative merits of the extended court case let alone the suspicions or the true cause of the fire.

The “Nationalist” used the conspiracy theories as a pretext to comment on a trend in Papua New Guinea where people of power and wealth are using the Court system to avoid prosecution. No doubt every person has the right to access the Court to seek address and get redress, to secure defence and find protection, to prosecute the guilty or liberate the innocent; to obtain remedy or to harness restoration; to sanction truth or to enforce justice etc. Whatever it is, possessing or bearing the very right to elicit the attention and time of the Court introduces a moral dillema because of the fact that this very right can also help to deny and delay justice through the technique of prolonged and excessive litigation. The point is that possessing such a right does not mean it automatically sanctions a moral imperative for instituting legal action. 

The Prime Minister, Sir Michael Somare, for instance, has been going at lengths now to avoid being investigated by the Ombudsman Commission for allegations of breaching the leadership code. That case is currently in the Court and the Ombudsman Commission has been seeking to strike out the case on grounds that the weight of repetitive litigation is now amounting to an abuse of Court process and privilege. When the Julian Moti saga was investigated by a Commission of Inquiry, various court proceedings were instituted to either prolong and illegalise the establishment of the inquiry and even to annul the findings and conclusions of the inquiry. In the current Commission of Inquiry into allegations of mismanagement in the Finance Department, several legal hiccups have now been engineered to achieve similar objectives.

Frivolous filings and vexatious litigation is proving burdensome and will clog the capacity of the Court system to administer and deliver legal decisions in a timely manner. Ultimately it means that any move that works to delay justice is committed also to the object of denying justice. At the same time law firms are making a lot of money from people of power and wealth who could afford to bring their cases to the Court under such circumstances. Receiving hefty legal fees from the wealthy and powerful cannot mean that the right to seek legal address override the merits of a case at end. Lawyers and vexatious litigants should not routinely and habitually abuse the Court system for the sake of personal gain. The overload of cases the Court has been experiencing means that it is high time now that stringent legislative measures are enacted to curb vexatious litigation and frivolous conduct by litigants and law years alike.

International Parliamentarians for West Papua

Published on May 22, 2008 in West Papua. 3 Comments

A HISTORICAL EVENT committed to a free and independent West Papua took place in the Committee Room 13 Main Building of the UK Houses of Parliament last Wednesday 15th of October. The event was the launch of the International Parliamentarians for West Papua. This assocation of international parliamentarians was launched by Hon. Andrew Smith who is the MP for Oxford East in the United Kingdom. Mr Smith along with Lord Richard Harries, Bishop of Oxford, were instrumental in establishing the All Party Parliamentary Group within the UK Houses of Parliament. Several Members of Parliament attended the launching of the “International Parliamentarians for West Papua” including Moanna Carcasses Kalosil (Vanuatu), Lembit Opik (UK), Andrew Smith (UK); Lord Harries (UK). A long time human rights activist and MP in Papua New Guinea, Powes Pakop, was expected but didnot attend the event.

This association of international parliamentarians will strive to address the general cause for self-determination in West Papua by bringing this issue to the attention of international governments and organisations such as the United Nations. A similar organisation involving international parliamentarians played a vital role in the East Timor campaign for independence from Indonesia. We hope and pray that this group of parliamentarians can do the same for West Papua. Further details about this event can be found at http://www.freewestpapua.org.

Often when news of international support gets into the mountains, valleys, rivers and villages of West Papua, people there often rise up to express their anguish about how much they are tormented and repressed by Indonesian military and colonial presence. This has provoked a predictable pattern of violence inflicted by the Indonesian military because Indonesia sees any kind of Papuan resistance as a threat to its internal security. Indonesian security personnel are often deployed immediately to contain this swelling tide of resistance.

Last Thursday (16/10/08) about 2000 West Papuans gathered in Jayapura calling out for FREEDOM and INDEPENDENCE from Indonesia. The Indonesian Government reacted by sending in truck loads of security forces to quell the uprising. Some details about this protest march is provided by REUTERS. As the committee of the International Parliamentarians for West Papua was being launched in London, the Indonesian Embassy in Papua New Guinea organised a function in Port Moresby to call for closer military co-operation with Papua New Guinea on matters relating to the border and other security issues in the region.

A news article in the Post Courier indicated that there is an ongoing unrest in Jayapura and Papua New Guineans are warned against traveling into Jayapura because they would be easily mistaken for being West Papuans. No doubt the unrest that is going on in various parts of Jayapura, Abepura and Sentani are related directly to last week’s march for independence in Jayapura. Anecdotal accounts report that 3 West Papuans in the Waena area have been shot dead by Indonesian military as a result of these protests. The Indonesian military has beefed up its strength by increasing the number of soldiers in stations near the border. Papua New Guinea’s capacity to monitor the border has been lagging for a considerable number of years now.

Reform or deform?:education policy in PNG

Published on May 13, 2008 in Education. 2 Comments

AN ANONYMOUS PERSON from the Madang Province in PNG wrote in to The National  newspaper and made a stinging criticism against the policy of education reform in PNG. The general thrust of the letter decries the quality of education given to Papua New Guinean children under the present system of education reform. The letter reads as follows:

BEFORE the emergence of education reform system, speaking tokples and tokpisin was a punishable offence in primary and secondary schools. English was the only language that was allowed to be used for communication anywhere within the school’s boundary. As a result, students speak and write good English. Today it is different. Students are communicating in tokpisin and teachers are not strict anymore and, consequently, many students cannot master their written expression examinations. How can such a phenomenon boost effective learning? What is wrong with the old education system? It produced engineers, pilots, doctors, lawyers, political scientists, etc. Did that mean the old system had failed PNG? I cannot understand the education reformers with this confusing system. I urge the Government to immediately dissolve the new education reforms and bring back the old system.

So if the old system of education was delivering quality education and producing the kind of skilled manpower that PNG needs, why must it succumb to the seductions of a reformist philosophy which has frustrated effective learning and sponsored a policy that encourages intellectual degeneration? Part of the answer to this dilemma lies in the seductive abberations of numerical thinking that is bound up with a moral impulse to democratise universal education to all peoples. If that was the moral, the economics that came with it appears under the rubric of user-pay policy promulgated and prescribed as conditions for financial loans from organisations as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

The major site of concentration of the education reform in PNG has been at the level of primary education. The numerical logic behind this concentration stems from the assumption that there are lot of children at the lower levels of education compared to those in secondary and tertiary institutions. A kind of pyramid structure organises the number of educated people in different levels of education with a bulk of the population being illiterate or less educated being assigned their spot at the base of the pyramid while a small number of educated people are found at the higher levels of education. 

Given this apparent pyramidic configuration, a kind of utilitarian ethic was adopted as a remedial measure aimed at inverting the base of the pyramid based on the moral view of universal education. Although this ethical principle was never spelt out in the policy of education reform, its moral persuasion comes from the conceptual appeal that one might quantify happiness on the grounds that a policy is morally right if it has a methodological facility to deliver the mass happiness (universal education) for a mass number of people.

In this light, it seem morally right to educate as many children as you can find in lower levels of education because the higher you climb up the ladder of education, less people become educated. In PNG this saw a mushroom-like proliferation of top-up and secondary schools. Communities in many parts of rural and urban PNG were forced to go out and find their own ways of raising money to build their schools and at times they found themselves in competition with each other trying to get money from the same sources such as a Member of Parliament or from a donor agency. While it gives them a sense of autonomy and ownership over the creation of this educational infrastructures, the communities had little control over the issues of curriculum development and critical pedagogy. 

Concurrently major changes were made to re-order the grades or level of primary and secondary schooling in which some of us went through in the previous system. For instance, in the present reform, and in some parts of rural PNG only, kids go through some 3-4 four years of vernacular education before going into an English curriculum in the latter half of primary education. The teachers of vernacular education are not qualified teachers but handpicked volunteers who often commit themselves to teaching without being paid. The grades 7-8 of what used to be high school years is now relegated to the apex of the top-up schools and the teachers who teach there are not university trained but educated in lower teacher colleges.

While top-up and second-schools were mushrooming throughout the country, there was no corresponding physical growth at the higher institutes of learning such as colleges and universities to accomodate the number of graduates that were coming out of primary and secondary schools. This leads to a real bottle-neck situation that was not not foreseen and anticipated by the desire to invert the pyramidic structure of education. To cut the long story short, the present education reform in PNG has severly compromised the quality of education in PNG and kids who come out of this system will have to work much much harder to cope up with the demands of learning that their peers have elsewhere around the Pacific.

It is not just the quality that is being compromised, the numerical logic of utilitarian ethics is questionable. The moral of universal education is a virtue we may all subscribe to but it should not be pursued at the cost of compromising quality education to the point of submitting our children to a curriculum that is characterised by intellectual mediocrity and cognitve degeneration. The moral of user-pay policy also has got its mathematics wrong in some very critical ways. That is, it focuses on the number of heads being educated rather than on the output that graduates in various levels of education would bring to the workforce and the economy as a whole. The language and economics of education reform in PNG conceals an insidious deformity within its make-up and it is already time for PNG to re-evaluate the merits of this policy.

The return of tradition in plastics

Published on May 8, 2008 in History. 7 Comments

“THEY ARE MAKING PLASTIC VERSIONS OF OUR MONEY IN CHINA….THE WORSE THING IS WHEN THEY START TURNING TRADITIONAL ARTEFACTS INTO PLASTICS, then we really have a big problem…Our traditional drums, our warrior items are all coming back as plastics”. The words above come from Leliana Firisua who is the technical director for Small and Medium Entpreprises for Solomon Islands in Honiara. His concerns were raised in a workshop organised in Suva 3 months ago by the Pacific Islands Private Sector Organisation and the South Pacific Regional Economic Integration Program. While the words from Mr Firisua carry a familar ring of echoes throughout the Pacific (including Australia and New Zealand), they have a particular sense of urgency for his country.

I think Solomon Islands as a country that went through a crisis is in a vulnerable position because a crisis opens the door for outside individuals and entities to capitalise on things that would be in the best interest of the people to know…We already know that when there is a crisis, the government machineries are not very effective and the justice system is weak and exploitation usually happens.

Apart from the issue of a vulnerable state, the concerns of Mr Firisua reiterates ongoing efforts of Pacific Island countries to find appropriate legal mechanisms for the protection and exploitation of traditional knowledge and expressions of culture. A draft model law, developed by the South Pacific Forum, has been in circulation and member countries will have to make necessary adoptations. This model law takes its cue from copyright but privileges a particular view of perpetual ownership.

The news article that gives prominence to Mr Firisua’s concerns is written by Dionysia Tabureguci of Pacific Islands Monthly. The front-page news article, entitled as The Pacific Stolen Identity implicates a cluster of issues in intellectual property rights including those to do with trademarks, copyright and patents and the yet-to-be-developed, ‘traditional knowledge and expressions of culture’. 

The general moral of the article is phrased in the language of “identity theft” and links this particular kind of theft to the commercial exploitation of traditional knowledge and biogenetic resources. The image of converting and relegating an enduring tradition into a plastic and ephemeral commercial item is a part of the article’s message. It assigns cultural rights and ownership to the “owners” of traditional knowledge against those who are exploiting it. Exploitation is aligned with a logic of commercialisation where intellectual labour is converted into an item of exchange value: “our traditional…items are…coming back as plastics“. Conversion seems to create a rupture with tradition.

The story of appropriating and converting traditional items that have a monetary value is not unfamiliar. Presently In Solomon Islands we hear that Chinese have invented plastic versions of traditional shell money that are normally used in various parts of Solomon Islands. The factory-made plastic shell money is cheaper and is threatening to replace and displace the “traditional knowledge” that keeps “the shell money alive”.

More than hundred years ago, the Germans attempted to do the same with the Tolai shell money (tabu) in the East New Britain area of Papua New Guinea. When the Germans arrived in New Britain they found that the tabu permeated all aspects Tolai life and culture including its use in bridewealth, mortuary payments and land transfer etc. So the Germans thought that they could buy out all the land from the Tolai’s if they minted the shell money and bring it in huge quantities. The Tolai soon discovered the faked and artificial money and rejected it. The Tolai tabu has survived ever since.

In its endurance since colonisation, the tabu has measured itself against the German Deutz, the British Pound, the Australian Dollar, the PNG Kina and even now, the European Euro. It is generally renown for its abiding resilience as a local currency. Attempts have been made in East New Britain to make the tabu a legal tender so that it would co-exist with the PNG Kina. That attempt has yet to be formalised. 

However as it happens, the sources that traditionally supplied the Tolai for their tabu have now been depleted. Consequently, more and more Tolai people are going to Solomon Islands for their supplies of tabu. All the prominent Tolai people who have a name and standing in their society today would have imported several tonnes of tabu from Solomon Islands. Perhaps a reason behind the legacy of resilience with the tabu is because it emanates from and feeds into an economy of sentiments that motivates itself against the seductive and sweeping forces of a plastic commodity logic while displaying itself in the guise of a commodity form.

West Papuans entangled in a complex multiple-bind

Published on May 7, 2008 in West Papua. 2 Comments

THE VANUATU COUNCIL OF CHIEFS have opened their arms again to embrace a group of West Papuans who are seeking refuge in another country. This group of West Papuans, numbering 148 persons who come from 25 families have been forced out by the sanction of an eviction order served on them to vacate the land on which they have made their homes for the last 30 or so years in the 8 Mile settlement located outside Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea. Since their original eviction last year, these West Papuan families have been moving around various parts of Port Moresby seeking a more permanent home as they await the hope of a free and independent West Papua.

As it can be seen in a recent article in the National newspaper (07/10/08), the message from the Mal Vatu Mauri National Council of Chiefs is far from being a warm and sympathetic embrace. This group of West Papuans in PNG are entangled in a complex multiple-bind that would defer their hopes for a permanent settlement. While UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) granted them the status as refugees and the PNG Government gave them the status of permissive residency in 1980, both the UNHCR and the PNG Government now want these West Papuans to return home to West Papua.

The West Papuans do not want to return home as yet in fear of their lives. They explain that while the ”UNHCR wanted us to go back to West Papua but the sad fact is that we will be dead when we go back. UNHCR arranged for some of our Melanesian brothers to back to East Awin in 2001 and none of those who got repatriated are alive today; they are all dead”.

The question is if the UNHCR and the PNG Government want to see these West Papuans return home, what guarantee can they provide for their saftey and well-being when they return? Is this a means by which we can easily turn a blind eye to the situation in West Papua and pretend as if all is well and good while we sit back and in complicity, participate with the Indonesian soldiers to continue to kill and murder our fellow Melanesian brothers and sisters in order to suffocate their quest for a free and independent West Papua?

While Vanuatu has expressed its desire and willingess to accomodate this group of destituted West Papuans, international regulations on refugees would not allow this possibility to eventuate. A spokesman of this West Papuan group, Freddy Waromi, mentioned that while the “Vanuatu Council of Chiefs has indiciated to adopt us as Melanesian brothers and sisters, the only problem is that Vanuatu is not a signatory to the UN Refugee Charter”.

From the PLHIVs point of view

Published on May 3, 2008 in HIV/AIDS. 1 Comment

PLHIV IS ONE OF THE MANY KINDS OF ABBREVIATIONS that has sailed into public prominence as short-hand references to describe and conceptualise issues related to HIV and AIDS since the crisis became a pandemic in many Pacific Island countries. To begin with, the terms HIV and AIDS are already abbreviated symbols each of which is blown to the shape and sound of a single noun. Another common example of this kind of short-cut phrases is the popular alphabetised ABC (Abstinance; Be faithful or Believe in God and the use of Condoms) prescribed and publicly promoted as the best methods to avoid HIV infection.

I do not know where this penchant towards abbreviation comes from but perhaps we can account for it by the sheer need to simplify the intrusive technicalisation of scientific language in common parlance. Abbreviation keeps a coded language private and a public language intelligible but in both languages it creates its specialised set of lexicons as do all intelligible languages. Words and meanings migrate and populate public discourse and historical circumstances precipitate into verbal residues of specialised lexicons which can sometimes run dry with meaning much like our contemporary experience of the credit crunch. 

Interesting as the case maybe with the relativisation of meaning, what comes along with this conceptual scheme of abbreviation is a technique of classification that assigns particular definitions to a whole class of persons. Abbreviation precedes classification because it names and establishes boundaries around its definitions while classification sorts out the names into different types so that it could get people into the business of rational organisation, control and management. If abbreviation creates a subject through its power of naming, classification exercises the same to its desired objectives.

We are concern here with one such abbreviation called PLHIV which stands for Persons Living with HIV. I do not know if its definition also extend to include Persons Living with AIDS, and if not, this may has its own abbreviated form such as PLAIDS. According to a recent Post Courier news article (03/11/08), Port Moresby, is witnessing for the first time a Conference that involves the participation of 150 people living with HIV. This phase-setting event is funded by the AusAID and it brings in people not only from Papua New Guinea but also from places as far as the Cook Islands, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and the nearby Solomon Islands. Igat Hope, a popular non-government organisation in PNG that deals with HIV and AIDS issues, appears to have played a leading role in the organisation of this Conference.

The Conference was opened by Anglimp-South Waghi MP, Hon. Jamie Maxtone-Graham, who chairs the Special Parliamentary Committe on HIV/AIDS in Papua New Guinea. Co-ordinator of Igat Hope, Mrs. Annie Mac Pherson, made the following remarks when the Conference was opened. “Its fantastic! For the first time we are bringing the PLHIVs to develop a way forward on how they can work with each other in the national HIV response”. The Minister for Community Development in PNG, Dame Carol Kidu, was also also at this event and she was encouraged by witnessing the presence of many PLHIVs. She noted that, for some years in Papua New Guinea,

“it was difficult for such people to get together but this meeting was finally taking place because of the courage of a few people who revealed their HIV status in those years when there was still a lot of fear in doing so”.

This news of seeing that PLHIVs coming out in the open is very encouraging and should open up new avenues for thinking about the best possible strategies to respond to the HIV and AIDS pandemic that has now put all Pacific Island countries under a very serious threat. While the Conference is intended to cover issues such as universal access to treatment, leadership and the support for PLHIVS, I wonder if there is any hope of finding a new ethical direction when we listen to the concerns and experiences of PLHIVs. The comments from the Minister, Dame Carol Kidu, can be read in a different light.

The courage of some PLHIVs has daringly confronted the fear of revealing their status. When this fear is defeated, a new ray of hope and optism comes in. If more and more people reveal their status, sooner or latter, we might have the chance of fighting and naturalising stigma and prejudice associated with HIV and AIDS. Perhaps part of the counselling that PLHIVs sometimes receive once their status is established must be geared towards preparing them to have the courage to tell other people about their status.

Ultimately, I am hoping to see if this courage in revelation might give us a new ethical framework to manage our responses to the pandemic. What kind of ethical insight can be gained from learning from the experiences of taking on the point of view of the PLHIVs? The courage of revelation exposes the delicate nature of maintaining medical privacy relating to confidential health information. Because the courage of revelation works on individual choice and desire to reveal, it actually preserves the ethics of medical privacy by allowing PHLIVs to speak about their status with a spirit of care and concern about the health and safety of the public at large. 

This might therefore provide an alternative moral leeway out of the burdens imposed on our national responses to the pandemic by the ethics of maintaining patient confidentiality. If abbreviation keeps a coded language private and a public language intelligible, the courage of revelation appears to reveal two faces of privacy: one makes privacy an ethical burden to preserve and the other makes revelation a desirable and ethical responsibility to undertake. The courage of revelation brings visibility and responsibility into a single universe of ethical choice and moral action. It seems to me that the doom and gloom the HIV and AIDS pandemic offer for Pacific Island countries can be addressed with a courageous will to reveal. It make more sense when it comes from the PLHIVs point of view..!