Ive been away from my desk for a month and am just now getting back to speed on PNG current affairs. A major plaintiff in the Ramu Nico case has just crossed the floor, apparently to small surprise for some people but a shattering disillusionment to others. He’s been bought, everyone says. Which only half explains the matter. Somehow he has come to believe (?) that it is now ‘in the national interest’ not to proceed with the case that demands environmental accounting and safeguards of the project, and secures the fishing and general well being of his people on the Rai Coast and the whole of Madang’s coast. As if overnight, his loyalties have enlarged, swollen like an inflamed spleen, to embrace the entire country and its need for revenues from Ramu Nico----although the tax break precludes many of them---as part of the national interest. There is so little rationale for this new perspective that it actually points to self-interest and a pay out instead, of course.
But even more provocatively, and in light of the sincerity with which this plaintiff argued for the Rai Coast not long ago, it begs the question of whether this gentleman has been privy to the details of the government’s idea of a domino effect. For long, we in the public have wondered what other deals goPNG has made with China, and which ones hinge upon the Nickel project moving forward (at any cost). How is it that health, safety, human rights, international conventions and environmental best practice can all be so blithely ignored, especially when the benefits to date from the plant have been far from positive for the city of Madang. Forget the ‘a deal is a deal’ rhetoric, and even the diminishing returns of party politics when the NA has so thoroughly shot its reputation. What could compel a provincial Governor, elected on the grounds of transparency and legal integrity, to turn his back on a large constituency and demand that resistance be stifled and the project proceed? It isn’t enough to say money---because everyone now understands the Chinese have deep pockets for backroom deals and cry poverty when it comes to environmental safeguards. Wouldn’t a Governor be compelled to ask why one source of funding couldn’t be diverted to another?
Is the democratic ideal so flimsy in PNG that some notion of bilateral relations between
PNG and China should overrule this ethic? What I am really asking is what are the other deals contingent upon Ramu Nico? Is it, as we all suspect (including many in the Oceanic fisheries community), the PMIZ? What else? An international port and new airport for Madang? What is the vision of a Sino-PNG future that has so smitten everyone from the PM to the landowner? Where are those drawing boards? Or is it something else---something less gilded and optimistic, perhaps a threat of economic collapse, of losing the country’s credit rating and being finally stamped a ‘failed state’? Is the Chinese government being dressed up as the white knight to PNG’s global and domestic future? If so, can we learn the details?
Not unlike the rush to fish out our tuna before this last resource migrates out of our grasp, all of this dissembling and rewriting of national history must be done quickly, urgently, before the widening reach of telecommunications and satellite technologies allow for the grassroots of PNG to get hold of the data most of the Western world, and Africa, have been reading: reports of dangerous structural neglect, inhuman labour practices, short term solutions and the insistent fiction that global investment can be separated from political interference, that trail Chinese ‘cooperation’ throughout the developing world.
In this beautiful land of great bio and cultural diversity, we have spent too much time calling each other intolerant and bigoted. When bloggers and critics of the Ramu Nico project raise these points they are routinely called anti-Chinese panic merchants and fear-mongerers. But these criticisms of the State of China apply no more to the grassroots of that country than do overseas criticisms of goPNG corruption apply to the average PNG citizen. It is a fine line between accusations of racism or bigotry and the self-censorship of a police state.
In the US, conservatives have begun to call Obama a ‘racist’ and move to reclaim the civil rights movement from African Americans. Feminists have been called bigots when they move the klieg lights onto cultural practices that dehumanize women. We now accuse any critic of Islamic Fundamentalism of being a Christian or Atheist zealot.
The easier it is to stifle debate, to buy off a plaintiff, to turn someone’s head by fear-mongering and half truths, the more important it becomes to keep talking.
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