With Indonesia preparing for elections next week, Human Rights Watch has sought answers from the three groups vying for the presidency on how they would resolve human rights violations.

Two of the three Indonesian presidential and vice-presidential candidates responded to a questionnaire on key human rights issues.

The presidential candidates Anies Baswedan and Ganjar Pranowo submitted responses on their policy before the February 14 vote, but Prabowo Subianto Djojohadikusumo, did not.

• READ MORE: Mounting criticism of Jokowi by academics – claims Indonesia near ‘failed state’
  
• Indonesia: Candidates speak out on human rights
• Other Indonesian elections reports

In response to the question: “What is your policy on government restrictions on access to West Papua by foreign journalists and international human rights monitors?”

Baswedan’s stance is that the issue of justice is at the heart of the security problems in Papua.

According to his response, there are three problems to deal with the situation.

“Resolving all human rights violations in Papua by strengthening national human rights institutions to investigate and resolve human rights violations in Papua, as well as encouraging socio-economic recovery for victims of human rights violations in Papua.

“Preventing the recurrence of violence by ensuring justice through; 1) sustainable infrastructure development by respecting special autonomy and customary rights of indigenous communities, 2) realising food security through local food production with indigenous communities as the main actors, 3) reducing logistics costs, 4) the presence of community health centers and schools throughout the Papua region, and 5) empowering talents from Papua to be actively involved in Indonesia’s development in various sectors and institutions.

“Carrying out dialogue with all comprehensively in ways that mutually respect and appreciate all parties, especially Indigenous Papuans.”

For Pranowo, he said he would “focus on the issue of fiscal policy and asymmetric development for Papua’.

This would be done through “Reducing socio-economic disparities due to internal differences growth, development, and access to resources between regions through resource redistribution, infrastructure investment, tax incentives, or special financial support for Papua in order to achieve more equitable economic growth, reduce poverty, and improve the standard of living of citizens to those who need it most.

“We also committed a special approach to preventing corruption and degradation of natural resources in Papua, especially in newly expanded provinces,” he said.

A service for Indonesians
Human Rights Watch’s Elaine Pearson says the two teams that responded had done Indonesian voters a service by sharing their views on the critically important human rights issues affecting the country.

She said voters should be able to go beyond the rhetoric to compare actual positions, and hold the candidates to their word if they are elected.

The questionnaire contained 16 questions focused on women’s rights, children’s rights to education, the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, labour rights, media freedom, and freedom of expression.

Other questions included policies on disability rights, protection of Indonesian migrant workers, and Indonesia’s foreign policy in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

There were also questions on policies that would address accountability for past violations including the mass killings in 1965, atrocities against ethnic Madurese on Kalimantan Island, sectarian violence in the Malukus Islands, the conflict in Aceh, the Lake Poso violence, the crackdown against student activists in 1998, and killings in East Timor.

All three teams have submitted their vision and mission statements ahead of the election, which are available with the General Election Commission.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

• Here is a Human Rights Watch summary of the responses received to the questionnaire. The full answers from the campaigns of two of the three presidential and vice presidential candidates can be accessed online at:
•  Ganjar Pranowo and Mahfud MD here
• Anies Baswedan and Muhaimin Iskandar here

Papua New Guinea’s literacy rate stands at 63.4 percent — the lowest in the Pacific — with the government planning for it to reach 70 percent by 2027, an official says.

Career Trackers chief executive Ellenor Lutikoe told the National Content Conference in Port Moresby that according to the medium-term development goal, the literacy rate should reach 70 percent by 2027.

She highlighted three skills lacking in the workforce:

READ MORE: Illiteracy: A growing concern in PNG

• Basic English skills;
• Basic business skills including digital literacy; and
• Relevant and practical working knowledge related to the role they apply for.

“Personally, I strongly believe that literacy is the foundation for an individual,” she said.

In 2000, PNG had a literacy rate of 57.34 percent, in 2010 the rate increased by 4.26 percent to 61.6 percent and today it was 63.4 percent — an increase of 1.8 percent.

It needs to increase by 6.6 percent to reach the 2027 target of 70 percent.

On-the-job training
Lutikoe said one of the ways to address these challenges was through on-the-job training programmes offered by companies, including Career Trackers.

Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) chief executive officer Darren Yorio agreed that one way of addressing such challenges faced by employees was through literacy programmes.

Yorio said many parts of PNG faced many social issues because illiteracy had continued to delay the progress of national development.

He said the literacy rate was low compared to other Pacific island countries, and the government must work with other players to address the issue.

“If there is a serious area we need to address, it is the issue of illiteracy. It is important that we maintain that level of rigorous focus on partnership to effectively continue the progress of development,” he said.

Dr Kilala Devette-Chee, a senior research fellow and programme leader of the Education Research Programme at the National Research Institute, said PNG could reduce its high illiteracy rate by implementing the strategies recommended in her research report “Illiteracy: A growing concern in Papua New Guinea“.

“The literacy level in different parts of PNG has continued to be a matter of national concern,” she said.

“Although the government has taken a number of measures to improve literacy in the country, more and more students who are dropping out of school are either semi-literate or illiterate.”

The strategies included:

• Reviewing the provision of free education to allow more children to attend school;
• Developing awareness on the importance of education;
• Encouraging night classes for working people ;and
• Re-establishing school libraries to promote a culture of reading.

According to Dr Devette-Chee’s study, the root causes of the poor literacy outcomes include weak teaching skills and knowledge, diverse languages, frequent teacher and student absenteeism’ and lack of appropriate reading books and teaching support materials.

The Outcome-Based Education (OBE) which promoted the use of vernacular languages in elementary schools with a transition period to English in Grade 3 failed a lot of students due to improper implementation of the programme.

Joy Olali and Max Oraka are reporters with The National newspaper. Republished with permission.

The 4300-km Trans-Papua Highway costing some US$1.4 billion was supposed to bring “wealth, development and prosperity” to the isolated regions of West Papua.

At least, that’s how the planners and politicians envisaged the highway far away in their Jakarta offices.

President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo is so enthusiastic about the project as a cornerstone for his infrastructure strategies that he had publicity photographs taken of him on his Kawasaki trail motorbike on the highway.

But that isn’t how West Papuans see “The Road”.

READ MORE: Indonesia’s development dilemmas – green info gap and budget pressure

In reality, writes Australian journalist John Martinkus in his new book The Road: Uprising in West Papua published today, the highway brings military occupation by Indonesian troops, exploitation by foreign companies, environmental destruction and colonisation by Indonesian transmigrants.

“The road would bring the death of their centuries-old way of life, previously undisturbed aside from the occasional Indonesian military incursion and the mostly welcome arrival of Christian missionaries.

“It was inevitable, really, that the plan by the Indonesian state to develop the isolated interior of the West Papua and Papua provinces would meet resistance.”

Nduga pro-independence stronghold
The Nduga area in the rugged and isolated mountains north of Timika, near the giant Freeport copper and gold mine, has traditionally been a stronghold of pro-independence supporters.

For centuries the Dani and Nduga tribespeople had fought ritualistic battles against each other – and outsiders.

That is, until the Indonesians brought troops and military aircraft to the highlands that “did not play by these rules”.

On 1 December 2018, a ceremony marking the declaration of independence from the Dutch in 1961 by raising the Morning Star flag of a free Papua – as Papuans do every year – ended in bloodshed.

Usually the flag waving – illegal as far the Indonesian authorities are concerned – goes unnoticed. But the highway has now come to this remote village.

Indonesians took photos on their cellphones of the flag raising and this sparked the kidnapping of 19 road construction workers and a soldier (although pro-independence sources argue that many of the workers are in fact soldiers) and they were shot dead.

The Indonesian military have carried out reprisal raids In the 18 months since then forcing some 45,000 people to flee their villages and become internal refugees. Two thousand soldiers, helicopters and 650 commandos are involved in security operations and protecting the highway.

‘Helicopters are the worst’
“It is the helicopters that are the worst. They are used as platforms to shoot or drop white phosphorous grenades or bomblets that inflict horrible injuries on the populace,” writes Martinkus.

The Trans-Papua Highway would realise the boast of the founding Indonesian President Sukarno for a unified nation – “From Sabang to Merauke”, is what he would chant to cheering rallies.

Sabang is in Aceh in the west of the republic and Merauke is in the south-east corner of Papua, just 60 km from the Papua New Guinean border.

The Indonesian generals, not wanting anything to interfere with their highway exploitation plans, have vowed to “crush” the resistance. However, the contemporary Papuan rebels are better armed, better organised and more determined than the earlier rebellion that followed the United Nations mandated, but flawed, “Act of Free Choice” in 1969 when 1026 handpicked men and women voted under duress to become part of Indonesia.

Martinkus, a four-time Walkley Award-nominated investigative journalist specialising in Asia and the Middle East, has travelled to both ends of this highway. He reported in the early 2000s from West Papua until the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan became his major beats.

His earlier book A Dirty Little War exposed the hidden side to the Timor-Leste struggle for independence.

The Road traverses the winding down of Dutch rule, early history of Indonesian colonialism in West Papua, the environmental and social devastation caused by the Grasberg mine, the petition to the United Nations, the Nduga crisis, the historic tabling of a 40 kg petition – 1.8 million signatures – by the United Liberation Movement for West Papua calling for a referendum on independence, the so-called 2019 “monkey” uprising that began as a student clash in the Java city of Surabaya and led to rioting across Papua, and now the coronavirus outbreak.

Tribute to journalists reporting
Martinkus pays tribute to the handful of earlier journalists who have risked much to tell the story that Australian and New Zealand diplomats do not want to hear and has been denied by Indonesian authorities. An ABC Foreign Correspondent programme, including West Papuan journalist Victor Mambor, last week was one of the rare exceptions.

Amnesty International has estimated that more than 100,000 Papuans have died since the Indonesian takeover. Four Australian-based researchers have embarked on a new project to map the violence in West Papua.

“Eventually in the 1980s and the 90s, writers such George Monbiot ventured into the areas cleared out by the Indonesians [for palm oil plantations and timber]. Robin Osborne also produced a landmark account of that time,” he writes.

“Filmmaker Mark Worth, photojournalist Ben Bohane and ABC-then-SBS reporter Mark Davis continued to try to cover events in West Papua. Lindsay Murdoch of Fairfax provided excellent coverage of the massacre on the island of Biak, off the north coast of Papua.”

As in Timor-Leste, Martinkus recalls, the fall of the Suharto regime in May 1998 provided a “period of confusion among the military commanders on the ground”.

“They didn’t know if they could expel, arrest or kill journalists as they had in the past, and it created an environment where it was finally possible for reporters to get to previously inaccessible places and speak to people.

“The turmoil in Jakarta had created a kind of stasis among the military commanders in the far-flung provinces.”

Nevertheless, the Indonesian military watched and waited – and noted and recorded who the Papuan dissenters were. Who to arrest and kill when political conditions became more helpful.

The Papuan story and gatekeepers
Why has it been so difficult to tell the Papuan story – to get past the media gatekeepers? There are several reasons, according to Martinkus.

First, the daily oppression that West Papuan people face – and have faced for half a century – was of little interest to news editors.

“But it [is] that daily fear, and the casual violence and intimidation, that [is] the story,” says Martinkus.

“For Papuans it [has] become a way of life: constant intimidation and violence and extortion by the Indonesian military, punctuated by short, sharp moments of protest and resistance, followed by the inevitable crackdown.”

Martinkus recalls his experience of when reporting in East Timor, “in order to get a story run you had to have more than 10 dead; the daily grind of one shot there, one beating there, one arrest there, never made it into the press.

“I’ll never forget the cynical words delivered down the phone by one Australian editor after I had watched a man – a boy, really – shot dead in front of my eyes as I cowered in a ditch to avoid Indonesian gunfire in East Timor.

“’So what are your plucky brown fellows up to today?’ he said. He didn’t run the story.”

‘Cosy relationship’ between Australia, Indonesia
Another factor is the “cosy relationship” between Indonesia and Australia (and New Zealand) and Martinkus describes how this was tested in January 2006 when 43 Papuan asylum seekers beached in Cape York, Queensland. They had sailed for five days from the southern coast of Papua to escape Indonesian “genocide”.

While they were detained on the remote Christmas Island centre for refugees, they were all – except one – eventually granted with a temporary visa.

Another reason for the media silence, according to Martinkus, is the “lingering memory of the Balibo Five” – the Australian-based journalists, including a New Zealander, who met their fate in East Timor in 1975.

“They were killed in cold blood in the border town of Balibo as the Indonesians prepared to invade, and [a sixth executed] at the wharf in Dili on the first day of the invasion.

“The ruthlessness of those killings, the utter disregard of any international norms and the spineless and reprehensible cover up of the circumstances of their deaths by both the Indonesian and Australian governments had spooked the journalists and media organisations.

“If the Indonesians said you couldn’t go to an area, you didn’t go; the assumption was that they would kill you and no one would intervene.”

Martinkus says that “same attitude prevailed” when he began reporting in Indonesia in the mid-1990s.

‘Random killings, endless arrests’
The author is critical of the “centrist” President Widodo who was elected in a landslide in 2014 – and for a second term last year – on a promise of a more relaxed policy on access to West Papua.

“Six years later, the random killings, endless arrests and egregious torture continue.

“One recent video shows a Papuan man being bound the sliced with a large military knife as Indonesian troops stand around laughing.

“Another shows a Papuan man restrained in a cell as Indonesian soldiers throw in a snake and take pictures of his terror.”

Martinkus questions the cruel rationale for the need of Indonesian soldiers and police to “drip-feed appalling abuses” on social media.

“Is it some kind of warning to Papuans not to support independence, or just a symptom of the moral vacuum they enter once they are deployed to Papua?”

Martinkus believes that, in spite of the bravado and harsh treatments, Indonesians are “fundamentally scared of the Papuans”.

Although Indonesians have been in West Papua for more than 50 years, “West Papua and its people are still very foreign to them.” They have tried to create a society that is a “mirror image of their own in a land they occupied against the wishes of the local population”.

The attempt has failed, and the Papuans will never stop resisting until they are free.

• John Martinkus (2020). The Road: Uprising in West Papua. 114 pages. Carlton, Vic: Black Books
• John Martinkus in conversation with Mark Davis
• Inside Indonesia’s Secret War for West Papua

Pacific Island Times Yap-based correspondent Joyce McClure won’t be kicked off the island as “persona non grata” as demanded by a body of traditional chiefs there.

And questions are being raised about the legitimacy of the letter conveying the chiefly demands to the Yap State Legislature and then on to the Federated States of Micronesia Congress.

On March 29, a letter was hand delivered to Vincent Figir, former governor and current Speaker of the Yap State Legislature, by the Council of Pilung, one of two councils in Yap whose members are traditional chiefs.

READ MORE: Pacific Media Watch’s earlier report on the Yap saga

The council has 10 members, one for each municipality in the four contiguous islands that make up the mainland and is charged in the state constitution with performing “functions which concern tradition and custom”.

Signed by nine of the 10 members, the letter called for the Speaker’s support in “requesting to the FSM Congress the granting of a persona non grata against this particular American citizen”. The citizen, a resident of Yap for nearly three years, is Joyce McClure, a marketing consultant and freelance writer who provides news and travel articles about Yap to the Pacific Island Times and other regional and international media.

A list of reasons was headed “Unethical Journalistic Behaviour.”

Similar letters were delivered to Yap Governor Henry Falan and Yap State Congressman Joseph Urusemal.

Facebook triggered media reports
The letter was posted on Facebook the following week and picked up by media from Guam, Australia and New Zealand, all of which called for freedom of the press and supported McClure.

Comments to the Facebook post also supported McClure and some called for the elimination of the COP or, at a minimum, that their attention be concentrated on “culture and traditions” as the law states.

Speaker Figir sent the letter to Senator Theodore Rutun who chairs the Committee for Government Health and Welfare and it, in turn, decided to submit it to the Council of the Whole which is comprised of the state’s ten senators meeting under relaxed rules.

On April 30, the COW met to discuss the letter and determine what, if anything should be done with it.

The COW found that the request from the council asking for the Legislature’s support was out of line and that they have no jurisdiction over the subject matter.

The accusations, they determined, had no basis in the first place. It was also noted that different font sizes and typefaces were used in the letter, indicating a high probability of plagiarism.

Journalist saddened
A member of the COW was appointed to respectively convey the message of its rejection back to the chiefs.

“It is with great humbleness and gratitude that I thank the committee for their decision,” said McClure upon hearing the news. “But I am saddened that the council was embarrassed by the letter.

“It is reported by several people who hold positions of high authority within the legislative and administrative branches of the Yap state government that the council was used by others who, remaining in the shadows, wrote the letter and got the council members to sign it.

“I hope the council brings them to task for their unconscionable actions that publicly embarrassed the many wonderful people of Yap whom I consider my friends, neighbors and family.”

This article was originally published by the Pacific Island Times on 1 May 2019 and is republished here with permission.

Some of Joyce McClure’s articles:

• China lavishes ‘sports diplomacy’ money on Yap
• Yap is having serious second thoughts about Chinese tourism
• Chinese target Yap fish with local help

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s cutback in services to the Asia-Pacific region has “weakened the thin link” that many parts of the region have with the “outside world”, says the Pacific Media Centre.

In a public submission to the government review of broadcasting to the region, the PMC said that the situation had impelled Radio New Zealand to “stretch their resources to do more, to ‘make up’ for what has been removed”.

The ABC switched off shortwave services to the region in 2017.

READ MORE: China takes over Radio Australia frequencies

Calling for the ABC to restore services, the PMC said “Australian broadcasting from the South Pacific is a sorry loss to people and cultures – as we know them well from the accumulation of studies and from our own media production exercises at this centre”.

The PMC at Auckland University of Technology publishes the independent Asia Pacific Report, Pacific Media Watch freedom monitoring service, Pacific Journalism Review and other publications.

AUT’s radio major coordinator in the School of Communication Studies, Dr Matt Mollgaard, stresses the importance of broadcasting services from countries such as Australia and New Zealand to the South Pacific.

“[Broadcasters] help to strengthen local media outlets in the Islands, further enhancing democratic developments in the region,” Dr Mollgaard said in his PJR research paper cited by the PMC submission.

Media freedom
He said broadcasting services like RNZ Pacific and Radio Australia were prime examples of upholding media freedom and encouraging democratic life.

The PMC submission was prepared by director Professor David Robie and centre research associate and PJR editorial board member Dr Lee Duffield.

Restoration of Radio Australia services and other ABC services that may be made accessible in the South Pacific region, would be “highly positive”, said the submission.

“It would be most widely welcomed in the island countries, valued, and made good use of as in the past, with assuredly benefits to the originating media service and to Australian interests.”

The review is looking at the reach of Australia’s media in the Asia-Pacific region and if shortwave radio has become an outdated technology.

The submission period closed last Friday and the review of Australian broadcasting services is currently underway.

Public submissions have been overwhelmingly in favour of restoration of services.

‘Tok Pisin broadcasts’
In one public submission published by Asia Pacific Report, development worker Elizabeth Cox, who has 40 years of experience of living and working in Papua New Guinea, appealed for the return of a “revitalised Radio Australia”.

“Bring back Radio Australia. Ensure it reaches all rural areas,” she said.

“Provide Tok Pisin broadcasts. This is one of the best forms of aid you can give PNG.”

“A revitalised Radio Australia will give the PNG and other international audiences a chance to shape content and direction – it can be linked to social media and inform and lift the quality of much of the local political conversation,” she said.

“The new Radio Australia should be a global friend and ally, not a coloniser or converter. It should encourage debate, conversation and support critical, independent and objective opinion.”

The Vanuatu Daily Post submission calling for restoration of services said broadcast communications were an essential projection of soft power.

“The lack of access to the eyes and ears—and therefore the hearts and minds—of Pacific islanders works to the detriment of Australian interests,” the newspaper said.

“It also works against the interest of Pacific nations.”

• The PMC submission to the Australian broadcasting review
• Short wave radio saves lives and foreign aid dollars
• ABC now little more than ‘croak into the ether’

I hope you are reading this with ease and a positive mindset to help change the course of this beautiful country of ours – Papua New Guinea. My first time experience here has made me  raise questions about how our economy has been mismanaged over the last 40years.

I’ve come to know this place from reading books, magazines, watching videos, documentaries and even looking it up on the internet.

From the countless travel magazines in secondhand shops in Lae in the 1990s to the LCD screens of the most sophisticated smartphones accessed by almost all school age kids in PNG today, Singapore has literally changed in front of our eyes.

I read with much interest about how Singapore has transformed itself from a small island nation to become one of the most developed countries in the world.

Singapore’s rise to power
Singapore has a rich history of civilisation. It was once colonised by the British empire. During the Second World War it was invaded by the Japanese, and later taken over again by the British after the war when Japan surrendered to the Allies.

The failure of Britain to defend Singapore during the war forced the people to cry for merdeka, or self governance. It 1963, Singapore became part of Malaysia, ending  144 years of British rule on the island.

Since gaining independence from Malaysia on August 9, 1965, Singapore has since progressed on to be the host of one of the biggest and busiest air and sea ports in the world.

Lessons for PNG
Papua New Guinea has some of the world’s largest natural resource deposits in gold, copper, timber and now the Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) or the PNG LNG Project which is worth US$19 billion.

Papua New Guinea’s GDP per capita in 2017 was US$2401. The highest so far was in 2015 when our GDP per capita was US$2402.

Singapore’s GDP per capita continues to grow annually and it is now US$55,235.

Singapore has been able to made its way to becoming a developed country in just under 53 years of Independence. Its government subsidises housing, medical bills, education, public transport and so on, and increases economic opportunities for middle to low income earners.

It is an island country without any gold, copper, nickel mines, LNG project, organic coffee, timber or any other natural resources. It is a very strategic port of transition where goods and raw materials are brought here first then transported elsewhere across the world.

We also have the Lae port in PNG, which is one of the the most most strategic ports in the Southern Hemisphere. It is where cargoes from across the world transit into the Australia and even the Pacific.

The Lae port and the production line of businesses operating in Lae generates well over K111 million for the national government coffers annually as internal revenue. The Lae port serves as the only seaport that controls import of raw materials and exports of organic coffee, cocoa and other organic products for international markets.

Better roads, schools
We could have better roads being built, good schools, hospitals and life improving facilities for every tax payer in the city. Our SME sector should have fully flourished by now if we have the government putting its paper policy to work.

Squatter settlements and law and order won’t be major impediments for growth and development. People’s mindset would have changed and people’s movement in search for better service delivery would have been narrowed down.

Everyone here in Singapore respects each other despite their color, ethnicity and religion. There is no littering, loitering or even people sleeping on the streets. You will get caned by the police if you don’t dispose your rubbish in the right place.

The Singaporean government has made it its responsibility to ensure every citizen learns to appreciate and look after the environment. There are separate rubbish bins for biodegradable and non-biodegradable. No smoking in public or even spitting as you will be fined and dealt with accordingly.

All this boils down is a need to for a change in attitude in Papua New Guinea. If we change our attitude and start respecting each other and the environment we live in, we will create a good future for our children.

Since we don’t change ourselves, we have kept on voting self-centered individuals to represent our interest in Parliament for the last 40 years.

A politician once told me, he has plans and dreams to reclaim the beauty of the city he grew up in the early 70s. But he added that that dream would only be achievable if the people changed their mindset. Also one member of Parliament won’t make the change happen, it needs the majority to stand up for the people’s needs.

Last generation
“represent the last generation of Papua New Guinean kids who have used a kerosene lamp, a payphone, drank from a Coke bottle and listened to music on cassette players while growing up. We have anticipated so much to change for the better, but we are seeing it the other way around.

Life is getting tougher.

Our politicians should stop coming to Singapore for medical treatment alone, they should start focusing on making PNG become the next Singapore.

A wise man once said, if we continue to tell lies, it will surely become the truth. If the government can fool us for 40 years, they might continue to sell PNG’s resources for their own interest.

Sylvester Gawi is a Papua New Guinean journalist and independent blogger who blogs at Graun Blong Mi – My Land.

Recently, Keith Jackson’s PNG Attitude has been publishing a discussion on some of the unhappy events that occurred as the colonial regime extended its control over the tribes of Papua New Guinea.

However, one marvellous and positive legacy Australia left to Papua New Guinea was that it did not allow the alienation of more than a very small area of land.

Even then, the land remained the property of the government as distinct from private individuals, who could only lease it.

The first Administrator of the then Territory of Papua, Sir William McGregor, insisted that only the government could buy land and that the policy of the colonial regime should be to restrict this to very small parcels.

My recollection is that he got this idea from his time in Fiji, where the policy had been put in place when Fiji first became a Crown Colony.

McGregor and his successors realised that, in a subsistence economy like that of Papua (and later New Guinea), land was a precious resource upon which people relied to live.

The administrators believed its alienation could lead to profound and very damaging socio-economic consequences as had been all too graphically demonstrated in Africa.

Ruthlessly dispossessed
Anyone familiar with the history of, say, Kenya, South Africa or Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) will understand that the native peoples were ruthlessly dispossessed of their land and suffered greatly as a result.

Now, amazingly, the government of Prime Minister Peter O’Neill has developed a “cunning plan” articulated by minister Justin Tkatchenko.

This plan must, by its very nature, result in the loss of control over communally held land for those Papua New Guineans foolish enough to allow its use as collateral for a loan.

This is a scheme that I think would never have seen the light of day in the colonial era.

It would instantly have been recognised as what it is: a licence for banks and others to progressively expropriate traditional lands in the name of “development”.

Wake up Papua New Guinea. Dr Clement Malau is right. This is a monstrous con job dressed up in the language of development and investment.

Please do not effectively throw away your ancestral heritage for the sake of money.

Republished from Keith Jackson’s PNG Attitude website. Chris Overland is a former PNG patrol officer and civil service administrator.

• Tkatchenko organising new land grab
• More PNG articles

ANALYSIS: By David Robie in Semarang, Indonesia

A vast coastal area of the Indonesian city of Semarang, billed nine months ago by a national newspaper as “on the brink of ecological disaster”, is fighting back with a valiant survival strategy.

Thanks to a Dutch mangrove restoration programme and flexible bamboo-and-timber “eco” seawalls, some 70,000 people at risk in the city of nearly two million have some slim hope for the future.

An area that was mostly rice fields and villages on the edge of the old city barely two decades ago has now become “aquatic” zones as flooding high tides encroach on homes.

Onetime farmers have been forced to become fishermen.

Villagers living in Bedono, Sriwulan, Surodadi and Timbulsloko in Demak regency and urban communities in low-lying parts of the city are most at risk.

Residents have been forced to raise their houses or build protective seawalls or be forced to abandon their homes when their floors become awash.

Environmental changes in Semarang have been blamed by scientists on anthropogenic and “natural” factors such as tidal and river flooding – known locally as rob, mangroves destruction since the 1990s, fast urban growth and extensive groundwater extraction.

Climate change
This has been compounded by climate change with frequent and extreme storms.

It has been a pattern familiar in many other low-lying coastal areas in Indonesia, such as the capital Jakarta and second-largest city Surabaya.

In February, The Jakarta Post reported that both Jakarta and Semarang faced environmental crises.

Citing Indonesian Institute of Science (LIPI) researcher Henny Warsilah, a graduate of Paris I-Sorbonne University in France, who measured the resilience of three coastal cities – Jakarta, Semarang and Surabaya – the Post noted only Surabaya had built sufficient environmental and social resilience to face natural disasters.

Jakarta and Semarang, Warsilah said, “were not doing very well”. Although Surabaya was faring much better with its urban policies.

The fate of some five million people living in Indonesia’s at risk coastal areas – including Semarang — was also profiled in the Indonesian edition of National Geographic magazine last month under the banner headline “Takdir Sang Pesisis” – “The destiny of the coast”.

The introduction asked: “”The disappearance of the mangrove belt now haunts seaside residents. How can they respond to a disaster that is imminent?”

Ongoing reclamation
According to The Jakarta Post, Semarang “has ongoing reclamation projects in the northern part of the city, which threaten to submerge entire neighbourhoods in the next 20 years”.

“The more [the city] is expanded, the more land will subside because the region is a former volcanic eruption zone, and it is a swamp area,” says Warsilah.

“With the progression of the reclamation projects, the land is not strong enough to withstand the pressure.”

With a team of international geologists and researchers attached to Semarang’s Center for Disaster Mitigation and Coastal Rehabilitation Studies (CoREM) at Diponegoro University, I had the opportunity to visit Timbulsloko village earlier this month to see the growing “crisis” first hand.

City planners might see the only option as the residents being forced to leave for higher ground, but there appear to be no plans in place for this. In any case, local people defiantly say they want to stay and will adapt to the sinking conditions.

One woman, a local shopkeeper, who has a three-generations household in the village with water encroaching into her home at most high tides, says she won’t leave with a broad smile.

I talked to her through an interpreter (CESASS director Dr Herman Indah Wahyuni) as she sat with her mother and youngest daughter on a roadside bamboo shelter.

“I have lived here for a long time, and I am very happy with the situation. My husband has his work here as a fisherman,” she said.

A local storekeeper with her mother and youngest daughter – three generations live in her Timbulsloko village home. Video: David Robie’s Café Pacific.

‘We don’t want to leave’
“We live with the flooding and we don’t want to leave.”

She also said there was no clear viable alternative for the people of the village – there was no plan by the local authorities for relocation.

Later, she showed me inside her house and how far the water flooded across the floors. Electrical items, such as a television, had to be placed on raised furniture. The children slept on high beds, and the adults clambered onto cupboards to get some rest.

The village has a school, community centre, a mosque and a church – most of these with a sufficiently high foundation to be above the seawater.

However, the salination means that crops and vegetables cannot grow.

The community cemetery is also awash at high tide and there have been reports of eroded graves and sometimes floating bodies to the distress of families.

Timbulsloko’s village cemetery. Video: David Robie’s Café Pacific

We were warned “don’t touch anything with your hands” as the flooding also causes a health hazard.

Research projects
The situation has attracted a number of research projects in an effort to find solutions to some of the problems, the latest being part of the 2017 World Class Professor (WCP) programme funded by the Indonesian government.

Two of the six professors on the University of Gadjah Mada’s WCP programme, in partnership with Diponegoro University, are working with local researchers at CoREM.

They are geologists Dr Magaly Koch, from the Centre for Remote Sensing at Boston University, US, and Dr David Menier, associate professor HDR at Université de Bretage-Sud, France, who are partnered with Dr Muhammad Helmi, also a geologist and director of CoREM, and Dr Manoj Mathew. Both Dr Mathew and Dr Menier are of LGO Laboratoire Géosciences Océan.

“At the regional scale, the rate of subsidence is related to the geological and geomorphological context. North Java is a coastal plain that is very flat, silty to muddy, influenced by offshore controlling factors (e.g., wave, longshore drifts, tidal currents etc.) and monsoons, and surrounded by volcanoes,” explains Dr Menier.

“Locally, anthropogenic factors can play a serious role as well.”

He says that coastal plains are dynamic. However, human activities are fixed – “the first contradiction”.

“Humans want to control and continue their livelihood, and are reluctant to accept changes related to their own activities or natural factors.”

Dr Menier says the subsidence is due to many factors, but some key issues have never been studied.

On a long term scale, the active faults of the area need to be examined in a geodynamic context and also volcanic activity with Mt Urganan and Mt Muria/Medak.

“We need to have a better understanding of the age of the coastal plain in order to reconstruct the past, explain the present-day and predict the future,” he says.

“Colonisation in the 17th century-Dutch period probably led to destruction of ecosystems (mangrove) and fine sediment usually trapped by plants has been stopped.”

Dr Koch adds: “Subsidence rates and their spatial distribution along the coastal plain need to be studied in detail using InSAR techniques. Groundwater abstraction (using deep wells) is probably happening in the city of Semarang but not necessarily in Demak.”

Mangrove restoration
Mangrove restoration and mitigation has been used successfully to restore coastal resilience and ecosystems in Timbulsloko.

While noting that “high failure rates are typical” due to wrong special being planted and other factors, Dr Dolfi Debrot, of a Dutch project consortium, argues “given the right conditions, mangrove recovery actually works best without planting at all.”

The consortium involves Witteveen+Bos, Deltares, EcoShape, Wetlands International, Wageningen University and IMARES.

However, community planting is also a strategy deployed in the lowland villages.

Mangroves revitalise aquaculture ponds for crab and shrimp farming.

A “growing land” technique borrowed from the muddy Wadden Sea in the Netherlands has also been used successfully at Timbulsloko and other villages.

Semi-permeable dams are built from bamboo or wooden poles packed with branches to “dampen wave action”. In time, a build up of sediment settles and allows mangroves to grow naturally.

“These eco-engineering seawalls are better than the concrete fixed barriers,” says Dr Helmi. “The permanent seawalls in turn become eroded at their base and eventually fall over.”

Dr David Robie is on the WCP programme with Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta.

• More on the Indonesian WCP project

ANALYSIS: By David Robie in Yogyakarta

In May, President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo of Indonesia raised eyebrows across the archipelago when he inspected the Trans-Papua highway while trail blazing with a motorbike.

Tempo magazine, Indonesia’s most authoritative news magazine, remarked that he did this while “wearing only a thick jacket without a bullet proof vest”. Mentioning this lack of a flack jacket was tacit acknowledgement of the uncertain situation given an exponential rise of pro-independence sentiment in Indonesia’s two most eastern-most provinces of Papua and West Papua.

But Jokowi’s unconventional style of launching infrastructure projects didn’t just end there. Earlier this month he cruised along in a four-wheel drive vehicle on the recently completed Becakayu toll road, which had been languishing uncompleted for 18 years until his presidency gave the project a hurry up.

Last month, while giving a speech at Diponegoro University’s 60th Dies Natalis in Semarang, Central Java, Jokowi declared that infrastructure development was vitally important for the future in Indonesia. He wanted the country to become more competitive than its neighbours, such as Malaysia and Singapore.

“Why is our infrastructure being built?,” he asked rhetorically about the rapid pace and emphasis that he and Vice-President Jusuf Kalla have given the strategy – a marked contrast with other presidencies.

“The answer is that we want our competiveness to be better than other countries. Our global competiveness must be improved,” he said. “This year is pretty good as we have soared from 41st to 36th among 137 countries.”

The latest edition of Tempo magazine has devoted 38 pages to its cover story on infrastructure projects, headlining the fairly comprehensive report “Devil in the details”.

Few environmental reports
But absent from the range of quality articles was any serious report on the state of the environment in Indonesia — or environmental journalism, given that 2000 of the country’s 17,000 islands and 42 million households in a population of 261 million are at risk of “drowning” by 2050, according to a Listening Post report on Al Jazeera last month.

As Al Jazeera reported, “when you look at the [Indonesian] mainstream media, it is hard to find stories that go beyond catastrophes like forest fires or mudslides, examining who and what is behind them.”

A leading environmental journalism advocate has blamed lack of climate change and environmental reporting skills in Indonesian newsrooms for the lack of coverage.

“It is easier for journalists to cover sports or the economy, because they have scores and numbers,” Harry Surjadi, head of the Indonesian Society of Environmental Journalists, told Listening Post. “Those stories are much easier to write than environmental stories, where journalists have to understand biology, ecology, waste and chemistry.”

Nevertheless, Jokowi was praised by The Jakarta Post in a recent editorial for both his development policies and his concern for the poor of the country with his popularity  climbing.

“His overwhelming attention to the basic needs of the people has made him rather obsessive with the objective of keeping the prices of food and other basic necessities stable, thereby keeping inflation below 4 percent,” the Post noted.

However, in its special development edition, Tempo said in an editorial that the Widodo administration was “racing against time” after three years in government to complete its raft of planned infrastructure projects costing an estimated RP4,197 trillion (NZ$415 billion) between 2014 and 2019.

Many ambitious projects with an emphasis on developing the regions, especially eastern Indonesia — including Papua, are being worked on at the same time.

Projects’ sustainability
“All these activities spark public excitement, but also raise questions about the projects’ sustainability,” the magazine said.

“Jokowi’s choice to develop infrastructure is certainly not misplaced. Several studies show that infrastructure development in Indonesia was relatively backward in comparison with neighbours. Even worse: previous administrations spent more on fuel subsidies compared to physical construction,” Tempo commented.

In his Semarang speech, Jokowi said: “Why must we build? Because our country is an archipelago state, the marine foundation base is a must. Airport development was equally important as many islands could not be serviced by ship.

“So, on the remote islands of Natuna, Miangas, we are building an airport. This is just one example because we are building lots of small airports,” Jokowi added.

Tempo seemed to agree with this view by stating in its editorial: “In order to reach a healthy and growing economy, Indonesia needs new roads, bridges, power stations, airports and ports. This in turn requires massive funding.”

Some 42 percent of the required funding — the budget from the 2017 year has been almost tripled from RP177 trillion in Jokowi’s first year in office in 2014 to RP 4011 trillion this year — depends on allocations from the state budget, the magazine noted, plus money from state-owned businesses and private partnerships.

Tempo praised Jokowi for cutting back on energy subsidies, saying this was the right move to make – especially over fuel costs.

Sounding a warning
While also complimenting Jokowi on the boost for several jumbo projects that had stalled in recent years to ensure they get completed, Tempo also sounded a warning.

“Jokowi is racing against time. Infrastructure construction generally takes a while, and its economic benefits are only felt three to five years after construction begins: a time span which does not align with our five-year political cycle,” the magazine said.

“The government should avoid giving the impression that it is impatient to reap its rewards from the projects, especially once the cycle of political succession comes around. Good governance must not be abused for the sake of earning points for the next general elections [in 2019].”

Infrastructure highlights:
National: RP1,320 trillion (two programmes and 12 projects).

Bali and Nus Tenggara: RP11 trillion (15 projects, including the North Timor border crossing and supporting facilities).

Java Island: RP1,065 trillion (903 projects, including the 81km Serang-Panimbang toll road, MRT underground in Jakarta and public trains/railway).

Kalimantan: RP564 trillion (24 projects, including border crossings and facilities and the Serang-Balikpapan-Samarinda toll road).

Maluku and Papua: RP444 trillion (13 projects, including development of the Tangguh Train 3 LNG plant and the Palapa ring broadband).

Sulawesi: RP155 trillion (27 projects, including the Manado-Bitung toll road).

Sumatra: RP638 trillion (61 projects, including five sections of the Trans-Sumatra toll road).

According to a breakdown chart published by Tempo, partnerships with private companies would provide more than half the projected budget – 57.5 percent, with SOEs providing 30 percent and the balance of 12.5 percent from the state budget.

In a four-page interview with the magazine, Jokowi said that after touring across the country, from Sabang to Merauke, “I saw for myself how grave the inequality was”, and he was convinced that an expanded infrastructure would help reduce the gap.

“This is a matter of equality and justice. Besides, our infrastructure development has lagged far behind our neighbours,” he said.

“Infrastructure is a foundation for tackling the problem of inequality. If we want it easy, we just have to allocate the budget for subsidies and increased social assistance, so purchasing power will increase and the public is happy.

“But do we want to continue this kind of strategy? I took the risk by not resorting to this kind of political move, and instead diverted resources to infrastructure development.”

Yet surprisingly nothing in this otherwise comprehensive report addressed climate change and environmental issues, a critical component of sustainable development in Indonesia.

Forest fire devastation
Al Jazeera’s Listening Post report stressed how in 2015 huge fires swept through Indonesia’s rainforests. About 2.6 million hectares of forest was set ablaze to make way for palm oil plantations.

“The fires produced – in just three weeks – more greenhouse gases than Germany does in an entire year,” Listening Post said.

“Forest fires have become an annual occurrence in Indonesia, and still, the country’s media seldom devote the column centimetres and airtime needed to explore the causes behind them.”

Merah Ismail, campaign manager for the mining advocacy network JATAM, was quoted as saying: “When [the media] do cover forest fires or the effects of mining, they leave out “subjects like ‘water poisoned due to toxic waste or air pollution’ because they don’t know enough about those subjects”.

While Jokowi had announced in September 2015 that Indonesia would cut the growth of greenhouse gas emissions by 29 percent by 2030, the nation’s news media have reported little on the progress, or lack of it, over this pledge — even with global debate on climate change at COP23 ongoing in Bonn this month.

With little media exposure or debate, the issue of the future of the rainforests has been framed as a tough choice – between the economy and the environment.

• How Jokowi has grown in the job
• Solving Indonesia’s infrastructure gap

The European Union and the Pacific Community have signed an agreement to build resilience to future El Niño-related droughts in the Federated States of Micronesia, Republic of Marshall Islands and Republic of Palau.

At the end of 2016, the EU confirmed its decision to mobilise €4.5 million (NZ$7 million) from the European Development Fund (EDF) global reserve for the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the Republic of Palau to build resilience for future El Niño events.

This is in recognition of the severe impacts of the 2015–2016 El Niño-related drought in the three Northern Pacific countries, especially in the outer islands, when disruptions to agriculture, tourism and industrial production caused severe economic losses, many households faced food and water shortages, and the provision of health and education services was severely impacted on.

The Head of Infrastructure and Natural Resources at the Delegation of the EU for the Pacific, Jesús Lavina, said: “The EU is committed to support the Pacific countries to face the negative impact of climate change. Extreme events, such as the 2015-2016 El Niño, severely affected the Pacific region: the EU works together with partner governments and regional organisations to answer in a timely manner their urgent needs.

“The European Union North Pacific Readiness for El Niño project is a clear example of EU commitment that covers a large range of EU-funded actions to strengthen resilience and promote climate change adaptation and mitigation measures.”

The Pacific Community (SPC) is implementing the project and is preparing to hold consultations with the North Pacific countries to design activities that will build resilience to future droughts in the water and agriculture sectors.

The Director-General of the Pacific Community, Dr Colin Tukuitonga, said: “We are very pleased to help build capacity in the three Northern Pacific countries to strengthen resilience and readiness for future El Niño-related droughts, which past experience has shown caused so many hardships for all residents, both those living in towns and those in rural communities.”

The 2015 – 2016 El Niño event was one of the most severe on record, comparable with the 1997-1998 and 1982-1983 events, and impacted millions of people around the world including in most of the Pacific Island countries.

According to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, the tropical Pacific Ocean is in a neutral phase with neither El Niño or La Niña expected to influence the climate this year.

• The SPC in Fiji

Another major road construction in Port Moresby, the Koura Way, is expected to be completed in September.

It is being built by the China Harbour Engineering Company at a cost of more than K80 million (NZ$35 million) funded under a BSP Group loan.

National Capital District (NCD) Governor Powes Parkop — who is a decisive early leader in the counting for his electorate in PNG’s 2017 general election — said the aim of the major road projects around Port Moresby was to ease traffic congestion and to promote a spread of businesses on the edge of the city.

Governor Parkop visited the construction site today to see that work progress has reached 60 percent complete.

He said the project was on schedule for the completion date of October 21.

The 4.5km four-lane road links Waigani Drive to the Hanuabada bypass. Initially, the road was supposed to connect Waigani Drive to the Badihagwa High School, but plans had changed.

About 250 energy saving lights will be installed to power up the road.

Other services
Parkop said the project had also provided a way for other services like water, sewerage, electricity and telecommunication services to be added to the area.

He said the project had generated about 400,000 cbm of fill materials — almost all of this being used for the Ela Beach redevelopment.

He said there were plans for another road to link Koura Way to Sir William Skate Highway to link at the Baruni Bypass.

If that materialises, them the second phase of Ela Beach would be completed.

Delly Waigeno is a senior journalist with six years of experience in the television industry. She has a Bachelor of Arts degree in literature and English communication with a minor in journalism from the University of Papua New Guinea. In 2012, she was awarded a Business Reporter of the Year commendation by the Media Council of Papua New Guinea.

• Other PNG stories

Although linked by road to Papua New Guinea’s capital of Port Moresby and Waigani, Gulf province continues to be the least developed in the country and something has to be done about it.

Gulf Regional candidate Ruben Giusu in the PNG general election starting today says Gulf province out of all the provinces in the country should be well developed by now.

But, he says, successive governors have continued to neglect the province because of the mismanagement of funds.

Running under the Pangu Pati ticket, Giusu told the people of Kikori and Baimuru where he spent eight days living among the people and hearing their stories.

“We’ve had over 40 years of independence, so why are our women still dying in these rural areas because of lack of better health services?” he asked.

“The stories I heard are heart wrenching. And this is a province that is linked to the nation’s capital and Waigani by road.”

Police officer Giusu has served as the former provincial police commander in Gulf province.

Greater benefits promised
He also said that the landowners in resource areas had been promised greater benefits over the years but still nothing had been done to make that a reality.

Giusu said that if elected he would ensure that proper land vetting was done for resource landowners, schools were built to keep its human resource in the province, local SMEs were supported, rural health clinics and airstrips were back up and running, local farmers had access to markets and women in the province were supported and given a voice.

“I want to go in and clean up the system and ensure that the people benefit, especially the landowners and the people living in the rural areas of Gulf. We can’t talk about big things when the basics are not there.

“We can’t keep making the same promises every five years, these are people’s livelihood we are talking about. The province and its people need to feel and see the change in their lives,” he said.

Voting begins in PNG’s 2017 national election today and closes on July 8 with 165 women among a total of 3332 candidates contesting the 111 seats in the National Parliament.

• PNG Electoral Commission
• ‘Anticipation, excitement’ sweep PNG

Climate change is the central focus of the European Union’s continuing relationship with the Pacific, says the international cooperation chief.

Stefano Manservisi, Director-General of International Cooperation and Development of the European Commission (DEVCOM), says his organisation is fully behind the Pacific on raising awareness of climate change.

“Having consulted already with national level authorities on how we can step-up support, notably on climate change, we are 100 percent backing determination to do more,” he told Asia Pacific Report.

Manservisi is currently in the Pacific — due in New Caledonia today — meeting with leaders to discuss the European Union’s (EU) ongoing relationship under the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP)-EU Partnership Agreement, which is more commonly referred to as the Contonou Agreement.

Signed in 2000, the treaty between 79 countries from Africa, the Caribbean and Pacific is the “most comprehensive partnership agreement between developing countries and the EU,” according to the commission.

Aimed at reducing poverty, ensuring sustainable development and promoting democracy, peace and security, the agreement is set to expire in 2020.

“The objective is to reaffirm the full commitment of the European Union in the South Pacific, now, and in the future,” Manservisi said.

Climate change challenge
Part of this commitment would continue to be climate change, identified as a key concern under “global challenges” in several EU documents.

This was due to the fact that since the agreement’s 2010 revision, climate change had been referenced as the central point on which future relations should be framed.

This was because all the treaty’s partners were adversely affected by climate change, Manservisi said.

“Well, climate change is the agenda and the main issue our partners themselves are raising with us, because, you know, they are all islands which are at risk in terms of disasters, in terms of rising oceans, in terms of difficulty of having a prosperous agriculture sector for food production.”

Potential future investments and development in areas such as energy and increased interconnectivity were hindered because they “fall under the climate change umbrella and are linked to the vulnerability of these islands”.

This was unfortunate, given Pacific nations would like to see their vulnerability turn into something more sustainable through the development of such resources, Manservisi said.

“This is what our partners are asking us to do and we are working in order to respond.”

Post-COP21 world
Such commitment reflected a global trend in which world leaders were taking climate change seriously.

“COP21 would not have produced the commitment that it has, otherwise.”

More importantly, this was further evident in the fact Fiji was co-chairing COP23, Manservisi said.

“This will, let’s say, keep promoting the importance of the climate change agenda and to make pressure, in particular, seeing it from one of the area which is most at risk.”

This all comes despite US President Donald Trump’s announcement America will be unwinding several key climate change policies implemented under Obama’s presidency.

“I would say that I’m an optimist, so therefore I believe that since climate change is evidence-based, you know, our American friend will probably reconsider a certain number of things,” Manservisi said.

“In any case, what I noticed here so far in my talks is that if anybody has some doubts and in spite of some announcement from the US, this has boosted even more our determination to tackle climate change.”

Moving forward, the EU would also like to see the addition of a “Pacific pillar” to the agreement.

Pacific pillar
Although the treaty creates a powerful framework for engagement, Manservisi admits it does need some work.

“We suggest it be a bit more regionalised, closer to realities. A Pacific pillar of this new ACP framework will be able to address more specifically the specificity of the South Pacific to have its own governess and mechanics to make decisions.”

Ideally, this new pillar would encompass other European territories such as French Polynesia, and include Australia and New Zealand, he said.

“I’m here to talk about this and see how we can do it. But in the understanding that we want to consolidate our presence here.”

Manservisi said the EU’s main motivation behind its plans to strengthen relations with the Pacific, however, was friendship.

“We are here, and we are doing work and efforts for developments for decades, so therefore you know we have an old story of friendship and partnership with the islands. Therefore, you know, it’s our first thinking and duty to say ‘now look, let’s see how we can do better’.”

Manservisi spent the beginning of his “case for the Pacific” roundtable last week engaged in several talks with leaders from Australia, but missed speaking with leaders and Pacific academics in New Zealand due to unexpected weather.

Talks on how to do better also continued in Fiji on Friday, where Manservisi planned to meet with Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama and several government ministers.

Similar talks took place in Vanuatu on Sunday, and bilateral discussion with Pacific leaders are planned to conclude in New Caledonia today.

Kendall Hutt is Pacific Media Watch freedom project contributing editor for the Pacific Media Centre.

• European Union gives Fiji $28.5 million

A timber plantation company is illegally clearing one of Indonesia’s last coastal peat swamp forests, a carbon reservoir and biodiversity hotspot home to hundreds of endangered orangutans, say observers who are appealing to President Joko Widodo’s administration to intervene.

The company, PT Mohairson Pawan Khatulistiwa (MPK), did not respond to numerous requests for comment. But locals report the firm is digging a drainage canal through the peat soil in alleged violation of a moratorium on peatland development enshrined by Jokowi, as he is known, into law last December.

Draining peat soil — a deposit of decaying organic matter that can extend deep below the ground’s surface — is a prerequisite to planting it with the fast-growing pulpwood species that feed Indonesia’s paper mills, a huge industry in the archipelago country.

But the practice dries out the soil, rendering the peat highly flammable. Its widespread usage is the main underlying cause of Indonesia’s annual fires which often reach crisis proportions. In 2015, they made half a million people sick and pumped more carbon into the atmosphere than the entire EU during the same period.

A man who lives near the area PT MPK has been licensed to develop, and within the Sungai Putri forest block in question, confirmed the canal has reached eight kilometers in length and counting.

“The canal development is even at the moment going on and I’m sure by next week it will have reached more areas,” he said by phone last week, asking to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal.

“From what I’ve witnessed myself, there are two excavators operating to build the canal and some workers in the field. These activities kicked off around late December, but it only appeared clear what they were doing in January through March.”

The Sungai Putri landscape covers some 55,000 hectares in the Ketapang district of West Kalimantan province, along the southwestern coast of Borneo island. The area consists almost completely of peat, some of it many meters deep, according to a 2008 report by Fauna and Flora International.

“I went back there in 2009 and also 2014, and yes, it’s still peat,” Gusti Anshari, the Tunjung Pura University professor who conducted the study, said in an interview.

Sungai Putri supports an estimated 900-1,250 orangutans, “one of the largest unprotected populations in the whole of Indonesia,” according to a 2016 joint report by the Borneo Nature Foundation and International Animal Rescue. The Bornean orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus) is listed as Critically Endangered by the IUCN.

Potentially at issue is how much of PT MPK’s concession is forested. The firm’s permit area overlaps largely with the Sungai Putri landscape studied by researchers.

Company documents obtained by Mongabay cite a figure of 35.1 percent forest coverage in the concession. The rest of the area is said to consist of mostly “scrub swamp” and “shrub swamp.”

The figures appear in a 2015 letter to PT MPK from the Ministry of Environment and Forestry; the letter suggests the data was produced by a consultant hired by the firm. (The permit was issued by the Ministry of Forestry in 2008, before it was combined with the Ministry of Environment.)

But researchers insist that much more of the area is forested.

“A 2016 satellite image confirms findings from a detailed 2007 vegetation study in Sungai Putri that about 58 percent of the 48,440 hectare license area remains covered in tall peat swamp forest and the remainder in medium height swamp forest, heath forest, and hill forest,” conservation biologist Erik Meijaard, who coordinates the Borneo Futures Initiative, wrote in a recent op-ed for Mongabay.

“Those estimates are still pretty accurate. When I was recently standing on a hill overlooking the area, I can say that for sure this is an extensive forest area, a bit damaged and degraded near the edges but certainly with tall forest in most of the remainder.”

He added in an interview: “If the conversion license was given out on the basis of wrong information, it needs to be retracted. It is the government’s responsibility to ensure that their processes are fair and lawful.”

The Rainforest Action Network has launched a petition demanding that President Jokowi intervene.

Gemma Tillack, the NGO’s chief agribusiness campaigner, called Sungai Putri “critical forest ecosystem” that “must be protected from palm oil and pulp development. Its intact peat forests are a source of livelihoods for local communities and important habitat” for the Bornean orangutan.

The Peatland Restoration Agency (BRG), which answers to the president, has been asked to independently verify the area’s physical characteristics in order to clear up any confusion.

Asked if the agency was aware of the canal development, BRG deputy Myrna Safitri said in an email that her side had met twice with the company and that it had agreed to change its logging plan under the supervision of the forestry ministry, after which a ground check would take place. She did not reply to a follow-up inquiry asking for specifics.

It remains unclear who owns PT MPK, although recent comments by Ketapang district head Martin Rantan suggest a link to a Chinese-owned investment firm. The Chinese Chamber of Commerce in Jakarta did not answer a request for comment.

Marcellinus Tjawan, head of the West Kalimantan Forestry Office, said he was taking the initiative to establish Sungai Putri as a protected area, but obstacles remained.

“All concerns about the environment and natural resources management certainly gets our full attention, but this is definitely not as easy as looks, particularly knowing the fact that permits from the central government are involved,” he said.

The Forestry Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

Meijaard called for the company to cease and desist while stakeholders determine what to do.

“Maybe the deforested fringes of Sungai Putri can be developed for plantations so that the land use is stabilised and some of the revenues are used to protect the forested center,” he said.

“Maybe companies around Sungai Putri can contribute to the long term management of Sungai Putri’s core forest areas. But first we need to stop the needless destruction of the area.”

Mongabay.com seeks to raise interest in and appreciation of wild lands and wildlife, while examining the impact of emerging trends in climate, technology, economics, and finance on conservation and development. This article is republished under a Creative Commons licence BY-NC-ND.

Curbing illegal drugs “holistically” is now an explicit mandate as provided by the Philippines government’s 2017-2022 Development Plan, released last week.

Chapter 18 of the Development Plan says that government targets the significant reduction of “all forms of criminality and illegal drugs” through a “holistic program that involves combating not only crimes but also the corruption that leads to the perpetuation of such acts”.

The portion on curbing illegal drugs in the PDP comes at a time that President Rodrigo Duterte revived community visits to warn drug users and pushers, called locally as Oplan Tokhang.

At the same time, the Philippine National Police Director General Roland dela Rosa has announced yesterday the launching of “Operation Double Barrel Reloaded”.

The operation is said to be a “kinder, gentler” approach for law enforcers to confront the illegal drug problem, dela Rosa told reporters.

More than 7000 suspected users and pushers have been reported killed since Duterte assumed office on 1 July  2016.

These killings are linked to the rise of extrajudicial killings (EJKs) that have been lambasted by critics — but shrugged off by Duterte supporters as not being the president’s policy —  that have criticised by international human rights groups, former heads of state, and the United Nations.

‘Suppressing the flow’
The Development Policy declares the country’s national anti-illegal drugs strategy included “suppressing the flow of illegal drugs supply through sustained law enforcement operations and reducing consumer demand for drugs and other substances”.

While the PDP mandated drug rehabilitation and massive preventive education and awareness programs, government is set to arrest and prosecute police personnel “involved in the use and trade of illegal drugs through counter-intelligence operations” prosecution.

Noting also the entry of Chinese, African and Mexican drug syndicates to the Philippines, government will also work with local and foreign law enforcement counterparts, as well as other international anti-drug organisations.

All these plans are part of a “holistic” approach to curb the drug problem, the PDP wrote. The plan also noted the data from the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency that there are around four million drug users, and that 47 percent of villages (barangays) nationwide are “drug-affected.”

“The government has therefore adopted a holistic approach in addressing criminality and illegal drugs,” the PDP says. “As these initiatives are expected to result in high incidence of apprehensions, the government must also upgrade its jail faiclities and substantially increase drug rehabilitation centers.”

The PDP also says that “respect for human rights should be upheld and observed at all times” in all of law enforcers’ activities against criminality.

Recently, the US-based Human Rights Watch published a chapter on the Philippines and observed that Duterte could be liable to a lawsuit before local courts and even the International Criminal Court, the latter for alleged “crimes against humanity”.

Narcotics board concern
The UN-aligned International Narcotics Control Board (ICNB), in a March 2 release of its annual report, indicated the board’s concern about extrajudicial killings.

The board called on the Philippines government to “issue an immediate and unequivocal condemnation and denunciation of extrajudicial actions against individuals suspected of involvement in the illicit drug trade or drug abuse; to put an immediate stop to such actions; and to ensure that the perpetrators of such acts are brought to justice in full observance of due process and the rule of law”.

Extrajudicial action “is fundamentally contrary to the provisions of… three international drug control conventions,” the ICNB report said.

The Malacañang called the HRW report “thoughtless and irresponsible” when the group’s report wrote the country had a “human rights calamity” given rising extrajudicial killings — allegedly perpetrated by police.

Such a “human rights calamity,” said Presidential Spokesperson Ernesto Abella, may have been averted due to actions by government.

Abella cited the more than 1.1 million pushers and users who voluntarily surrendered and the construction of drug rehabilitation centers.

“Is it a human rights calamity when the sheer scope and magnitude of an emerging narco-state have been exposed?” Abella said.

‘Ransom scheme’
Dela Rosa recently formed within the PNP the Drug Enforcement Group (DEG) that replaced the old Anti-Illegal Drugs Group (AIDG) given the involvement of several of the latter group’s officers in a reported “Tokhang for ransom scheme”.

The Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) indicated in its 2013 to 2016 figures that anti-illegal drug operations such as entrapments and arrests rose exponentially during the last six months of 2016 (the first six months of Duterte’s presidency).

In 2016, PDEA and partner law enforcement agencies had conducted 34,007 operations,  arrested 28,056 people, and filed 23,887 reports. These total figures are the highest over a four-year period (2013 to 2016).

Contrast the extended statements on illegal drugs 2017-2022 PDP to the 2011-2016 PDP provision on illegal drugs. The latter PDP wrote: “Modernise and upgrade facilities for law enforcers such as the PNP and the NBI (National Bureau of Investigation) crime laboratories, forensic investigation facilities and equipment.

“Improve capacities of prosecutors and law enforcers particularly NBI agents in the investigation and prosecution of special cases involving economic or white-collar crimes such as money laundering, tax evasion, smuggling, human trafficking, violations of intellectual property rights and antitrust laws, illegal drugs and even cases involving extralegal killings and other human rights violations as well as violation of environmental laws.”

Jerome Villanueva is a graduate journalism student of the University of Santo Tomas. Assistant Professor Jeremaiah Opiniano supervises the undergraduate and graduate journalism degree programmes.

More 2017-2022 Philippine Development Plan stories

The Indonesian government has approved the conversion of the contracts of gold and copper miner PT Freeport Indonesia and copper producer PT Amman Mineral Nusa Tenggara, allowing them to continue exports of their partly processed minerals.

As required by a revised government regulation that has partly lifted the ban on the export of raw and partly processed minerals, the two companies have converted their contracts of work (CoW) into special mining licences (IUPK).

The Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry stated that Amman Mineral and Freeport Indonesia had submitted proposals to convert their CoW into IUPK on January 25 and 26, respectively.

READ MORE: Indonesia stands firm as Freeport mine threatens to cut production

Amman Mineral has recently been taken over by local energy firm PT Medco Energi Internasional, owned by politically wired tycoon Arifin Panigoro, from the United States-based miner Newmont Mining Corp., while Freeport Indonesia is a subsidiary of another American giant mining company Freeport-McMoRan Inc.

“Today, the Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry has approved the conversion of Freeport and Amman’s CoW into IUPK,” the ministry’s mineral and coal director general, Bambang Gatot Ariyono, said on Friday.

“Furthermore, we expect those companies to immediately submit proposals for export permit extensions so that we can process them right away.”

Bambang also said the proposals needed to be submitted along with written integrity pacts consisting of commitments and detailed plans to build a smelter, the progress of which will be monitored every six months.
Last month, the government relaxed the ban on mineral exports in returns for miners’ commitment to convert their CoW into IUPK, divest 51 percent of their shares and build a domestic smelter.

“The two companies must also comply with the requirement to sell their shares,” said Bambang, declining to elaborate on the subject of divestment.

The requirements are stipulated in two ministerial decrees as derivatives of the fourth revision of Government Regulation No. 23/2010 on the management of mineral and coal businesses, which allows miners to continue exporting copper concentrates, certain amounts of low-grade nickel and washed bauxite.

Politicians and analysts have argued that the issuance of the regulation and the decrees contravene the 2009 Mining Law, which originally imposed a total ban on mineral ore exports in 2014 and mandated all miners to build smelters domestically to strengthen the processing industry.

However, up to now, Freeport Indonesia and Amman Mineral have shown no significant progress in their smelter developments.

Now that the companies have obtained their IUPK both of their CoW have automatically been annulled and they are obliged to comply with fiscal policies stipulated in the prevailing law in return for their export permit extensions.

The Finance Ministry’s fiscal policy head, Suahasil Nazara, said the government had finalized the revision of a 2014 finance ministerial decree on raw mineral export duties, with the new rates to be based on the smelter-construction progress.

Export duty revision
Under the revision, if smelter progress is between 0 and 30 percent, the export duty will be 7.5 percent, while if the progress is between 30 and 50 percent the duty will be 5 percent and for 50 to 75 percent progress, the duty will be 2.5 percent.The export duty will be 0 percent only when progress passes 75 percent.

The export duties for both lowgrade nickel and washed bauxite will be 10 percent. However, Suahasil did not detail whether the rate was linked to the progress in smelter construction.

“A miner needs to submit a proposal to get the recommendation from the Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry for its export permit. Within such a recommendation, the ministry will state the progress of the smelter development, which will be our basis for setting the export duty for the miner,” Suahasil said, while adding that the duty would last in accordance to the export permit period.

Data from the Finance Ministry show that Freeport Indonesia and Amman Mineral paid Rp 1.23 trillion (US$92.1 million) and Rp 1.25 trillion, respectively, in export duty alone to the government throughout 2016.

Freeport Indonesia said recently it had begun preparing to reduce production, which could be followed by job cuts, in a move that indirectly pushed the government to grant the company the export permit.

• Freeport mining boss denies assaulting lawmaker

Papua New Guinea government representatives have met with landowner leaders of Hides PLD1 and PLD7 natural gas field in Hela province this week with discussions between the two groups said to be “satisfying”.

Mineral Resources Development Company (MRDC) managing director Augustine Mano, Department of Petroleum and Energy (DPE) acting secretary David Manoh and government interface representative, Ian Maru, met with landowner leaders on Monday.

Main issues
The main issues discussed between the two groups included:

• The 4.27 percent equity share belonging to landowners should be released to them.
•  All payments under agreements and commitments by the government must be paid. As part of this an audit by the government has also been requested. This must show how much money has already been paid to each company and their specific projects, aswell as the total of outstanding payments due to landowners.
• Licensed Based Benefit Sharing Agreement (LBBSA) and Umbrella Benefit Sharing Agreement (UBSA) agreements must be reviewed. These agreements should be reviewed every five-years, but the government has failed to do this and it has now been seven-years since the the last review was made.
• Other projects in the Hela province including the Hides 4 township, water supply, market, electricity, Para Primary School that are mentioned in the LBBSA and UBSA must be delivered.
• Now that Hela is its own province, the gas benefits between Hela and the Southern Highlands should be split.
• The clan vetting process must be finalised and the royalty benefits paid before September this year.
• High impact projects such as the road sealing between Halimbu to Nogoli bridge, and from the Nogoli to Komo bridge, which was committed to by the PM, must be funded.
• Komo airport should be opened for domestic and international flights. This has been approved by the National Executive Council (NEC) but the National Aviation Authority needs to facilitate this decision.
• Hides 4 Special Purpose Authority made a submission through Komo Local Level Government (LLG) and the NEC which must now be granted without political interference.

The government representatives have said they will return later this week to deliver the responses from the the government.

Landowner leaders have responded and said that they will withdraw their protest if answers from the state are favorable.

• Officials fail to resolve issues with PNG LNG landowners, gas flow reduced
• Local PNG leader sets deadline to start LNG negotiations
• Don’t use force to resolve LNG shut down, warns PNG opposition
• Benefits sharing
• Landowners shut down LNG project

The Indonesian government’s mining ministry is said to have recommended the granting of a new short-term export permit to Freeport-McMoRan’s Grasberg mine in West Papua.

Freeport’s local subsidiary is required to apply for renewal of export permits at six-month intervals.

In February 2016, an export permit was renewed by the trade ministry through August 8, 2016.

Reuters cited Bambang Gatot, Director-General of Coal and Minerals, within the mining ministry, as saying the latest renewal would run for less than six months until January 11, but did not explain why.

The company is still in discussions with government to obtain an extension of its long-term rights under its original contract-of-work agreement as it looks to extend operations beyond 2021.

It has agreed to construct new smelter capacity in Indonesia and to divest an additional 20.64 percent interest in PT Freeport Indonesia at fair market value.

The Indonesian government continues to impose a 5 percent export duty while it reviews the company’s smelter plans.

In the six months to end-June, Grasberg produced 169,000 tonnes of copper and 336,000 ounces of gold at a copper cash cost of US$1.22 per pound after gold and silver credits.

Correspondence seen by Post-Courier from a source close to the Prime Minister states that O’Neill had not met Rio Tinto officials in Port Moresby prior to the share divestment, and there had been no decision by the National Executive Council on the shares.

This comes after Bougainville President John Momis last week slammed what he called “a shady deal between the national government and Rio Tinto”.

Rio Tinto’s decision to transfer the BCL shares would make Papua New Guinea an equal shareholder with the Autonomous Bougainville Government in the company which operated the ill-fated Panguna copper mine.

Last week, Momis said the national government was “deeply involved” in the transfer because:

“Rio officials first advised me of the Rio share decision around 9pm on the night of Wednesday, June, 29.

“But a subsidiary of the National Government, Petromin, accepted the Rio Tinto shares the very next day. I can see no way Petromin could have been ready to jump on June 30 if PNG was not fully involved in Rio’s decision on its BCL shares.

“Yet when I met the Prime Minister to discuss the share issue two days later on Saturday June 30, he said he needed to see the details of the Rio decision.”

The Prime Minister’s assurances that he had not been part of a backdoor deal are backed up by the correspondence sighted by the Post-Courier which went on to state that the NEC would be meeting to discuss their options on this matter.

The communication said the Prime Minister was not aware of any movements of the Petromin board relating to the shares and if there were any, they would be reviewed by cabinet.

Bougainville leaders have been advised to await the return of the Prime Minister next week to negotiate what is hoped will be an amicable outcome.

• Bougainville president, chiefs condemn Rio Tinto ‘conspiracy’ over mine

Timor-Leste signed a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) agreement this month with the French company Bolloré to build and operate a major new container port at Tibar, 15km west of the capital of Dili.

La’o Hamutuk has analysed the project in depth, identifying some social and environmental impacts, raising concerns about economic viability and pondering  implications for Timor-Leste’s sustainability.

This blog summarises points from our longer article, which is in both English and Tetum.

We don’t yet know how much Tibar port will cost the Public Partner, the people of Timor-Leste.

The contract promises to pay $129 million to Bolloré up front, but the 2016 State Budget only allocates $94 million over the next five years, and neither figure includes additional spending for roads, project management or unanticipated cost overruns.

PPPs all over the world underestimate costs in the planning stages, as promoters often bias their research to justify viability.

Just this week, Timor-Leste’s leaders suggested a mid-year increase to the 2016 State Budget to cover some Tibar port costs, notwithstanding that officials knew about them long before the budget was enacted.

When this project was conceived four years ago, many thought that Timor-Leste’s non-oil GDP would continue to grow at ‘double-digit’ rates, and that our oil and gas wealth was more valuable than it has turned out to be.

However, ‘non-oil’ GDP – which is largely driven by government spending of oil money – has not grown as much as expected; the latest government figures report growth of 2.8 percent and 5.9 percent in 2013 and 2014 respectively.

With rapidly falling oil revenues, the government will have to reduce spending, which is likely slow the growth of non-oil GDP even more.

The Tibar port design was based on overly optimistic economic projections, and more recent data cast doubt on its rationale. In addition, its traffic will be shared with other new ports planned for Suai, Oecusse, and Baucau.

Current evidence
La’o Hamutuk hopes that current evidence and realistic forecasts will underpin decisions about the Tibar project. We believe that longer hours and more efficient operation of Dili port may provide for Timor-Leste’s needs for decades to come.

Therefore, the port will make Timor-Leste even more dependent on overseas products, at a time when we should be increasing local production to ensure non-oil economic sustainability.

It will also take over local people’s land, destroy their livelihoods, and divert government resources away from basic services for ordinary people.

Our longer article relates the three-year process of tendering for this project, which ultimately resulted in only one company’s bid being considered. It also discusses how the port will impact fishing livelihoods, as well as endangering sensitive mangroves and coral reefs, and makes ten recommendations.

Vanuatu’s Prime Minister Charlot Salwai has instructed Infrastructure Minister Jotham Napat to negotiate the second phase of the Chinese-funded road construction on Tanna, including Malekula.

This road rehabilitation and construction phase 1 started in July 2015 and will take up to five years to complete at a cost of US$50 million.

Napat says he will be leaving for China soon to negotiate the second phase of the project.

The first phase of the project on Tanna covers a 30km road soon to be tar-sealed, starting from the Whitegrass Airport through Lenakel to Green Point.

Along this road, 69 structures will be constructed, including 64 culverts and 5 bridges. The longest steel truss bridge is 21 metres.

A total of 36 culverts have already been constructed with 23 box culverts and 13 slab culverts.

Four culverts and three bridges are under construction. The company that is constructing the road is China Civil Engineering and Construction Cooperation (CCECC).

Infrastructure update
Minister Napat, who accompanied the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Trades, Commerce, Tourism and Industry, Joe Natuman, to Lenakel recently was requested to give an update to the people on the plans of the government on education, health including infrastructure.

He said the second phase covered the road from south Tanna right up to the entrance of Yasur volcano in south-east Tanna.

According to CCECC engineers Chen Lieng and Wu Nana Isaac, the tar sealing of the road under phase I will commence soon, in September.

Once the second phase is completed, there are plans to also tar seal the road that runs from the junction at the Lenakel Stadium to Kings Cross at Whitesands.

Repairs are currently being carried out on this section of the road, thanks to Australian government funding.

Once the road is tar sealed, then the whole island would be covered, Napat told the people.

He said improving roads boosted economic development.

Indigenous landowners from the Marap people in Arso in Papua’s Keeron regency have this week invoked customary law to take back 1300 ha of oil palm land owned by PTPN II for 30 years as part of its Arso plantation.

The action took place at Yamara village PIR 3, Manem sub-district, Keerom Regency, in the province of Papua near the Papua New Guinea border on Wednesday.

Maickel Fatagur, head of the Fatagur clan which holds customary land rights, alongside other clans such as the Wabiager and Gumis clans, said that they would no longer hold any kind of meetings with the company.

That is because they have used customary law to take back the land PTPN was using, specifically the Core III, Core IV and Core V divisions.

“We used customary law to take the land back. That means now there will be no more meetings with the company. The land now belongs to us.” he said.

“We invite PTPN II Arso to take back its oil palm and we will take back our land. That’s all,” Fatagur made clear to the manager of PTPN II’s Arso plantation on Wednesday at Tami in Manem District, in Keerom.

According to Fatagur, PTPN II has operated the Arso plantation on the Fatagur clan’s land, and that of its sub-clans, for about 30 years, but the local community, who hold the customary land rights, have never felt economically secure

Action supported
“All these years attention has never been paid to the wellbeing of the community, who hold the customary land rights, ” said Fatagur.

Dominika Tafor, secretary of the Boda Student Association (Himpunan Mahasiswa Boda) in Keerom, who is also an indigenous member of the Marap ethnic group, said she was supporting the action taken by local indigenous people.

“We strongly support the action which the Marap community of Workwama village are taking today. We support it, because for so many years the company has not paid attention to the fate of the community. They only come to destroy,” she said.

When the indigenous people arrived at the plantation office in Tami, PTPN II’s Arso plantation manager, Hilarius Manurung, received them. He said he would take their wishes on board and pass them on to the Keerom local government.

“Since we’re a state-owned company, we can only listen to all aspirations and complaints and pass them on to the local government for further action. There’s not much we can do. What we can do is to follow up all these complaints from the community,” said Manurung.

Suarapapua.com observed that security forces from the Keerom police headquarters were present – 11 armed policemen in a Dalmas truck, ready to police the Marap people’s action.

The indigenous people’s main banner said: “We don’t need oil palm, we only need forest … for our grandchildren”

As a symbol, the indigenous people brought soil from the three oil palm locations and taro yams from their gardens, placing them in a noken string bag made from forest palm frond midribs, and using traditional rituals took them to PTPN II’s office located in the plantation
administration centre in Tami.

[Translation].

#savehutanpapua
#savehutankeerom

A total of $476.3 million of estimated damages in all sectors was recorded from damages caused by TC Winston, the Fiji Roads Authority has recorded the highest preliminary amount of $135 million of damages around the country.

This was announced by the Natural Disasters Management Office Director, Akapusi Tuifagalele, at a press conference today.

The damage assessment results by sector, the FRA now tops the list with 135 million. The rest remains, with the Agriculture Sector with $120 million, the Sugar Sector with $80 million and Education with $50.2 million. We now have a preliminary estimate of $476.3 million in total damages.

The director said that the Fiji Red Cross Society had assessed 10,397 households and had assisted 5243.

As of today, there are 619 operating evacuation centres around Fiji with 19,649 evacuees. We expect people to move back to their homes, move back to their places and start to rebuild also to clean up in the respective areas

Director Tuifagalele said that rehabilitation on Koro Island was continuing and that the Prime Minister with other cabinet ministers were on the island today.

The preliminary assessment results of destroyed dwellings around Fiji stands at 7042 and 11,111 of damaged dwellings. Coming to total of 18,154 dwellings destroyed or partly damaged.

Update of Statistics:

• Deaths: 43
• Evacuation Centres: 619
• People in evacuation centres: 19,649

Rakiraki town, in one of the worst cyclone Winston-ravaged areas in Fiji’s northwestern Viti Levu island, is expected to be fully operational by next week.

The Town Council has been working non-stop to clear debris in the central business district.

The town suffered major damage after its market was blown away and flood waters brought big logs and trees onto the main street.

A number of large trees in the town also fell, blocking streets.

While there is still no electricity supply in Rakiraki, shops that have generators have opened for business already.

Businesses in Rakiraki are asking government for tax incentives in order for them to survive.

George Shiu Raj, a prominent businessman in Rakiraki, said:

“They are very sad at the moment just because we are THE biggest taxpayers and my request to the government is that they give us a tax breaks and incentives for three years so that we can build up.”

Papua New Guinean Prime Minister Peter O’Neill has taken on the portfolio of Bougainville Affairs in his latest cabinet reshuffle.

O’Neill says this is because the autonomous region is a top priority for the government as Bougainville heads towards a referendum on possible independence.

The Leader of the Opposition, Don Polye, queried the motive behind O’Neill giving himself the Bougainville ministry on January 12 in light of the looming vote on a referendum.

Poyle then described the minor reshuffle as “self-serving and not in the best interests of the country”.

Then on January 21, Papua New Guinea opposition MP Sam Basil warned about O’Neill’s interest in the Panguna mine in Bougainville.

In December, O’Neill last month met with the president of the Autonomous Bougainville Region, John Momis, over a reported government proposal to purchase 53 percent of Rio Tinto’s shares in Bougainville Copper Limited.

Momis, whose administration has been in recent discussions with BCL about a possible re-opening of the mine, rejected the proposal.

Buy-up plan denied
The prime minister has since denied that the government is interested in buying in on Panguna.

But Basil says O’Neill’s latest move to appoint himself Minister for Bougainville Affairs is ominous:

“With his actions, in terms of dealing with other mines – Tolukuma and Ok Tedi – I think the people of Bougainville should be very wary of the prime minister’s actions, and they should be very careful on how they allow the prime minister to deal with their mine. So we should be very careful with Mr Peter O’Neill. He has lied to us many times.”

It is very interesting now that the Bougainville President Momis doesn’t mind that Peter O’Neill is Minister for Bougainville Affairs because “the advantage is that the buck stops with Mr O’Neill, so there can be no excuses”.

But O’Neill has already stopped the bucks.

On Decenber 29, John Momis said many millions of dollars were owed to Bougainville under the terms of the peace agreement concluded with PNG in 2001.

In a lengthy statement, Momis said his government estimated that PNG had underpaid Bougainville for the recurrent unconditional grant and owed at least US$33 million, which must be paid immediately.

Tax failures
The president said Bougainville was owed another US$207 million under the Restoration and Development Grant.

Momis said the National Tax Office was also failing to hand over taxes collected in Bougainville.

Is PNG Prime Minister Peter O’Neill and his government holding President John Momis and the people of Bougainville to ransom?

Are Rio Tinto and Bougainville Copper Limited (BCL) influencing the PNG Prime Minister?

Father Francis X. Hezel reviews a new book on climate change corruption and development in the Pacific. And the message is rather sobering.

BOOK REVIEW: Giff Johnson’s latest work – Idyllic No More: Pacific Islands Climate, Corruption and Development Dilemmas – is a call to serious planning and more. The author summons leaders to recognise that life has changed in the Marshalls and the status quo is the road to disaster.

There was a time when this might not have been true – when people who wanted to kick back and live a simple island life could quietly opt out of school and retire to the family land to provide for themselves as their ancestors had done for generations in an island society that offered the resources, physical and social, to support its population.

But times have changed, the author convincingly argues. That kind of idyllic fallback is no longer an option. Residents of the Marshalls, including those outer atolls where life was simple and cheap, are voting with their feet.

The outflow of Marshallese to the United States is steadily increasing, slowly emptying the remote atolls even as it drains the population of the two large population centers, Majuro and Ebeye. Islanders today expect meaningful employment but find none at home.

Marshallese today want more but seem to be getting less. Water supplies are contaminated in many places, the copra industry which once provided modest disposable income for those who worked the land has gone south, and the quality of education is not what it once was.

No wonder people now describe themselves as “poor”. Normal household tasks have become more challenging with the breakdown of the old extended family on which they relied. As a result, even basic care of children often leaves a lot to be desired.

In today’s world no island is simply an island. All nations have subscribed, willingly or not, to standards that are spelled out in global millennium development goals.

Stalled progress
Measured by these standards, progress in the Marshalls has stalled.

Donors may open their hearts and wallets to the Marshalls, but the money given is all too often regarded as a treat to be passed around the table and sampled by everyone rather than for its real purpose. Consultants come in and craft a report outlining reform measures that goes unread and unimplemented.

Government employees fly off to attend meetings that multiply each year and leave them little time to provide the public services their people so badly need.

How does this small island nation chart a new course for itself? One that offers it the hope of finding new resources while conserving those it now has? One that provides a pathway to the development that government and people claim to want for themselves? One that is, in that over-worked phrase, sustainable?

The answer is not nearly as elusive as it might appear, the author suggests. But making this happen will require reform: a change in habits, especially on the part of the government, and a readiness to implement practices that we know can be successful but threaten our own interests.

That’s what it will take, no matter whether we’re dealing with global warming, preserving fish stock in national waters, improving education and health services, or trying to make the heavy emigration work to the advantage of the Marshall Islands.

Father Francis X. Fran Hezel was the founder and long-time director of the Micronesian Seminar in Pohnpei. He is now based on Guam and writes a regular blog at: www.wheresfran.org.

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Welcome to the 4th World Journalism Education Congress that will be held in Auckland, from July 14 to July 16, 2016.

The conference, hosted by Auckland University of Technology’s School of Communication Studies, will provide a discussion forum on the development of journalism and journalism education worldwide. Contemporary developments signal significant shifts in the place of journalism programmes within the university and broader educational environment and in relationships with industry and wider society.

The implications of this transition will be the focus of the 4th World Journalism Education Congress (WJEC).

Journalism Education in the Asia-Pacific will also be a strong feature of the conference in partnership with the Pacific Media Centre.

Topics to be discussed at the congress will include:

• Mobile/Social/User-generated Media and Journalism
• Research Trends in Journalism
• Utilising the Professional Connection Work in Journalism Education
• 21st Century Ethical Issues in Journalism
• Journalism Education and an Informed Citizenry
• Journalism Programmes Offered by the Industry
• Journalism Education in the South Pacific
• Journalism Education in Asia

Call for abstracts

Contact: Steering Committee chair Associate Professor Verica Rupar
Asia-Pacific inquiries: Professor David Robie, New Zealand country representative of AMIC

WJEC conference website at AUT

AUT School of Communication Studies

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