Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea

Introduction

What would you think if I told you that there is a huge island in this world where the two most common means of transport are airplanes and concave tree trunks? What would you think if I continued to tell you that this country, notwithstanding a surface and a population just as big as Sweden, has inhabitants who speak over 1000 languages with differences as huge as between Chinese and English? No, I'm not joking, such a country exists in reality and its name is Papua New Guinea.

Papua New Guinea is one of the strangest countries in the world. Even though the location is in the tropics the terrain contains everything from bare snow-capped mountains 5000 meters above the sea to deep valleys and huge rainforests. Everywhere in this totally rugged incredible nature (with thousands of unexplored species), tribes with different cultures, traditions and languages live in different ways.

In the highlands you can find crowds of Stone Age farmers spread here and there. In the lowlands and rainforests you can find hunter collectors living from the saga-palm. After nearly 50 000 years in a rather calm existence (with exception for some tribal wars and one or two cannibals here and there) some not so clever Europeans tried to colonize the Island. I will now tell you how this went and the bad consequences of this dreadful stupidity.

The failing colonizers

Some centuries ago the Portuguese Jorge de Menses travelled to a huge island located just north of Australia. When he went ashore he saw strange people with woolly hair. He called the place the "Woolly-men-island", in Malaysian "Papua".  

20 years later the Spaniard De Retes visited the island. He had been in Africa, in Guinea, where he has seen woolly-haired men. Consequently, he called the island New Guinea. The name Papua New Guinea can be looked on as quite racist because it means "a new place where strange woolly-haired men live like in Guinea".

However, when the Europeans had found the new island they of course tried to colonize the whole country. The project went very bad because of malaria, the rugged terrain, the impossibility to build up an infrastructure etc. The European crops and animals were not adapted to the extreme climate so there were no good conditions for building up a society of a Western model in the country.

The Europeans even failed in their usual habit to shoot the head off the indigenous people. The reason was the following: Western technology and medical care did not develop enough for the Europeans to stay on the island until the 20th century. By that time the Europeans were no longer willing to kill a whole people because their moral traditions had changed a little.

A new country

After some initial divisions of the country and some fights between England, Portugal, Germany, France, Holland and Indonesia, the island ended up in one Indonesian colony and one independent country, Papua New Guinea (hereafter PNG) in 1975. The main part of PNG was earlier principally controlled by Australia and England so the PNG ratified the constitution of Australia when the country was founded. This implicated a Commonwealth membership and English as the official language.

But the ordinary people don't care at all about the political game above their heads. Most of them hardly know that English is the official language and that PNG is a member of the commonwealth. In fact four out of five still live a traditional stone-age farmer life in the jungle without contributing to the GDP statistics at all. Most people exchange their products or pay their goods with seashells. The use of money is not very established. In fact only ten percent of the adult population work in the public sector.

The unsuccessful project to export a society

PNG is a land full of gold, oil, copper, fish, rainforest, minerals, gas and many other natural resources. Of course, many western companies are and were interested in this, but they have not managed to start a ruthless exploitation like in many other countries.

The only existing copper mine is situated on an island near the coast. The mine produces 40 % of the total export earnings of the country. When the local people protested against the pollution and went on strike, the country's economy collapsed. It caused a civil war, which consumed all the government's money and caused a huge state debt.

There are many reasons why it is impossible to build up a Western society in PNG. To do that, you need business companies. They require such things as money, ownership and infrastructure, which do not really exist in PNG. It is very difficult to succeed in exporting a totally different society and economical system to another country with a different cultural environment.

First of all, the rough terrain precludes a good infrastructure. Between the main capital and the other cities there are no roads at all. Instead of roads, the traveller has to use small airstrips. Only 19 of the 578 air strips are paved, the others consist of grass, so you have to use small airplanes. The missionaries have been very active to use all airstrips and visit all the inaccessible parts of PNG. In some strange way they have succeeded to show the light for 95 % of all the heathens! However, most of them continue with their old animist traditions, too.

Secondly, the indigenous people don't need an infrastructure or formal documents of land tenure. 97 % of the land is some kind of "common land" "owned" by different tribes and clans. This land is not for sale and companies don't like to build illegal factories that the government has the right to demolish.

Thirdly, social conditions are very instable as a result of the attempt to "civilize" the country. All old conflicts betweens clans and tribes have increased as a result of the import of modern weapons. Lawlessness and corruption has spread throughout the country. The new social order has made people lose their old cultural identity and feel rootless. This causes many social problems. The youth wants to see the other world and leave their Stone Age life in order to move into the cities. The consequences are large slum areas and a new category of unemployed people.

The failure of exporting the democratic system

The PNG is not suited for Western democracy at all. In the traditional ways of life there is no need for any government or public services. The various tribes take care of their relations to other tribes by themselves. They have a system they call "wantok" which means that people with similar languages and traditions help each other. The wantok system gives people rights and duties in relation to each other. This is a very good system, which entails reciprocity and generosity between neighbouring peoples. This system, however, causes huge problems for the political system.

When it is time for elections in PNG, the government has to travel around in helicopters over the whole country to tell the small isolated villages that it is time for a new election. In accordance with the wantok system the various tribes vote on the basis of local political issues, vote for friends, good neighbouring leaders, etc. The result is a parliament with almost freestanding members. There are no solid political parties, which makes it very difficult to build a government.

The wantok system also causes corruption and nepotism. Most of the government's money comes from the export of minerals and goes to corrupt politicians. This leads to constant votes of no confidence, which makes it impossible to rule the country. To solve the problem the parliament voted in 1991 for a new law that forbade votes of no confidence during the first 18 months of a government. After that they just change government every 18 months.

Things like freedom of speech are not meaningful to speak about at all. In PNG there only exists one television channel, showing programmes from Australia. The institutions and structures needed to build a democracy are non-existent.

In the 2002 election there were 5.4 million participants. Considering the fact that hardly 3 million inhabitants were entitled to vote (the middle age is 20.8 years and half the population is under 18) the election cannot be seen as particularly democratic. In the 2006 election, 1.4 million of the ghost-votes were cleaned away but the participation in the election was still 130 %.

Conclusion

To export a totally different society to another country is a very risky project, which is often doomed to failure. We cannot expect that our type of society should be applicable in a foreign culture with a totally different natural and social environment.

The police in PNG estimated that 50 % of all the killings in PNG were associated with magic rituals and superstition. Modern societies and judicial systems cannot handle this kind of killings. A state governed by law is not compatible with thousands of small cultures with differing traditions and separate law systems and definitions of a crime.

If the export of one society to another culture should be successful, the colonizers have to subdue the whole population, shoot most of them and homogenize the rest and make them think in a new way, like the Europeans did in America and Australia. Otherwise the whole project will lead to huge conflicts and problems, as in Africa and other parts of the world where the climate and the viruses stopped the Europeans from a total takeover.

Sources:

• The book "Guns Germs and steel" by Jared Diamond
• http://www.landguiden.se/nya_guinea
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_guinea

Wordlist:

explicit                                                                           klar, tydlig, rättfram

sovereign                                                                        regent, monark

prevalent                                                                        rådande, gängse

ensue                                                                              följa, bli följden

appropriate                                                                     anslå, bevilja

negotiate                                                                        förhandla, göra upp

adversarial                                                                      fientlig, hetsk

implement                                                                      realisera, fullfölja

enact                                                                               stadga, uppföra

realm                                                                              kungarike

retain                                                                              bibehålla

indigenous                     &...