Borderless instability in New
Guinea By Jacob Zenn
The year 2011
was a tumultuous one for the island of New Guinea,
the world's second-largest and perhaps most
politically divided island. Papua New Guinea
(PNG), the independent country on the island's
eastern half, suffered from a four-month political
standoff that was at least temporarily resolved in
late December.
On the island's western
half, consisting of two Indonesian provinces, what
started out as a strike over wages at the Grasberg
mine spiraled into four months of protests which
fueled a revival of the Papuan independence
movement. While relative peace had been restored
on both sides of the island by
year's end, lasting stability
will depend on a number of mutable factors in the
year ahead.
The key figure in the PNG
political crisis - and also the key figure in the
country since its independence - is Sir Michael
Somare. Somare headed the first "indigenous"
government from 1972-1975 before PNG acquired
official independence from Australia in 1975. He
was then PNG's prime minister from 1975-1980,
1982-1985, and again from 2002 until June 2011.
Somare's family announced his retirement from
politics last June due to ill health and he left
the country for Singapore for three months to
recover from heart surgery.
Sam Abal
became the acting prime minister while Somare was
recuperating out of country, but was ousted on
August 2 in favor of Peter O'Neill, the head of
the opposition People's National Congress Party,
when 73 pro-O'Neill members of the 109-member
parliament declared the government legally vacant
and elected O'Neill as prime minister. Parliament
then passed retroactive legislation formally
recognizing O'Neill as the premier.
After
returning to PNG, Somare challenged the legality
of what he termed a "bloodless coup" to the
Supreme Court. The court then had to decide which
of the two competing prime ministers - Somare or
O'Neill - had the right to power and whether
Somare's or O'Neill's governor general, police
commissioner, and cabinet could rightly rule. In a
hotly contested 3-2 decision, the court held that
the election to install O'Neill as prime minister
was unconstitutional.
On December 14,
Governor General Michael Ogio swore Somare and his
cabinet into power, but in response the O'Neill
loyalist dominated parliament voted to suspend
Ogio and chose Speaker of Parliament Jeffrey Nape
as his replacement. Nape swore in O'Neill in as
prime minister later in the day of December 14.
O'Neill had extra police flown into the capital of
Port Moresby to take control of government assets,
including the Government Printing Office,
Treasury, and Government House while Somare's
faction occupied other government offices.
The stand-off and potential for violence
threatened to spark a crisis, one with
geostrategic implications in light of intensifying
competition between Chinese and American companies
interested in PNG's resources. In March 2011, for
example, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham
Clinton accused China of trying to "come in
behind" the US and undermine Exxon Mobil's US$15
billion liquefied natural gas project in PNG.
An autocratic turn in PNG could have
played favorably into China's position, especially
if PNG followed the way of nearby Fiji. A 2006
military coup there led by Commodore Frank
Bainimarama undercut Fiji's civil society and
established a new military dictatorship that has
engaged China as its new patron. The Commonwealth
banished Fiji from its membership in 2009, but
that only pushed the country further into China's
orbit.
Different dynamics are in play in
PNG, however. Ogio, who is also the Queen's envoy
for PNG in the Commonwealth, declared the swearing
in of Somare "wrong and invalid" on December 20,
thus paving the way for O'Neill to ascend to the
premiership. While it is unclear what internal
discussion the British Crown and Ogio may have
held, the final result was that Somare, despite
his insistence that he was the country's rightful
leader, lost significant international support.
For the time being, political stability has
returned to PNG under O'Neill's leadership.
Political strikes While PNG was
embroiled in a potentially volatile political
dispute, its neighbor, Papua Indonesia, was rocked
by an intensifying labor dispute that acted to
galvanize a long simmering insurgent movement. A
workers' strike at the Grasberg mine over wages
and other issues that started on September 15
evolved into a four-month standoff pitting at
least 8,000 Indonesian miners, most of whom were
indigenous Papuans, against the Indonesian
subsidiary of the US mining company
Freeport-McMoRan.
One month into the
strike, Freeport was forced in October to declare
force majeure when it could not meet its
contractual obligations on shipments of copper and
gold concentrate under sales agreements from its
Grasberg mine. Grasberg had been operating at only
5% capacity because of the strike and the workers
were blocking off main roads from Porsite Harbor
to the towns of Timika, Kuala Kencana and
Tembagapura, which cut off food, production
equipment, medicine and other supplies needed for
the mine's operations.
The strike led to
protests and violence between the miners and
Indonesian security forces which came down on the
side of Freeport. Indonesian police and
paramilitary fighters opened fire at a large
demonstration in Timika, the town nearest to the
mine, killing two at least strikers in October. As
the violence escalated and the acrimony between
the miners and the Indonesian government
intensified, decades-old Papuan resentment over
heavy-handed Indonesian rule boiled to the
surface.
On November 31, hundreds of
Papuans converged in a rally in Timika where
groups of indigenous Papuans hoisted the flag of
Papuan independence, a move that had provoked
violent security force responses in the past.
After allegedly shooting warning shots, the police
then fired on the crowd, killing at least four
people. Smaller rallies then broke out throughout
cities in Papua in which at least one more Papuan
was killed.
In total, eight people were
killed in protests during the four months before a
deal to settle the strike was reached on December
13. The agreement led to a 40% wage increase over
two years for the miners, improved benefits, and a
promise by Freeport to base future wage
negotiations on cost of living and competitor
benchmarks. In addition, workers were reimbursed
for lost wages during the strike by a one-time
three month "signing bonus".
Unlike in
PNG, however, the deal the deal between Freeport
and the miners failed to contain the protests for
Papuan independence or settle the wider crisis.
Less than a week after the deal was reached, a
helicopter flying at 600 feet over the Grasberg
mine site was shot at allegedly by Papuan
independence fighters. One of the 23 passengers
was injured and the helicopter was forced to make
an emergency landing in Timika.
The rebel
Panai Free Papua Liberation Army (TPN-OPM)
justified the attack by claiming that the
helicopter was on the way to carry out attacks on
Papuan villages in areas the group controls. In a
December 16 report by the West Papua Media group,
it was claimed that over four full strength combat
battalions of the Indonesian army, paramilitary
police and the elite counter-terrorism unit
Detachment 88 launched an offensive where
villages, schools and other buildings were burnt
down in a bid to surround the TPN-OPM's
headquarters under the command of General Jhon
Yogi. The news group claimed at least 18 people
were killed in the government assault.
Whether the rebels' claims are more
propaganda than truth could not be independently
corroborated, but the messaging shows how Papuan
fighters have exploited the Freeport issue for
their political purposes.
Despite New
Guinea island's vast untapped resources and
economic potential, PNG has struggled to chart a
stable path as an independent country, while Papua
remains pitched in a struggle against Indonesian
rule. The tentative resolution of PNG's political
crisis and the Papuan miners' strike brought both
sides of the island back from the brink, but there
is still unfinished business in both geographies.
Papuan independence fighters are now more
active than before the Freeport strike and PNG is
on guard against a potential sudden attempt by
Somare to retake political power by force. If both
PNG and Papua can accommodate the different
political, labor, and cultural interests within
their respective borders, 2012 could present both
parts of the island with opportunities for peace
and development. However, recent history shows
reaching such a complex accommodation will be
difficult and new bouts of instability can not be
ruled out.
Jacob Zenn is a
lawyer and international security analyst based in
Washington, DC. He was also a US State Department
language scholar in Indonesia in 2011. He runs an
open-source intelligence, due diligence, and
translations team at http://zopensource.net/.
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