What began as student boycotts of lectures escalated to street protests June 21. After a sit-down rally outside Parliament, 2,000 students marched on the offices of Prime Minister Mekere Morauta, the U.S. embassy, and the offices of the Australian High Commission. Targeting Australian imperialism, they chanted "Chase out the World Bank, chase out the IMF, chase out Australia!"

With Canberra's backing, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) have been demanding that the Morauta government implement austerity measures and sell off state-owned telecommunications, electricity, and ports administration enterprises, along with Air Niugini and the Papua New Guinea Banking Corporation. Both imperialist financial institutions insist that progress toward selling the airline and the bank to capitalist investors must be made before they release a further promised US$210 million in loans.  
 
Opposition to IMF demands
Former prime minister Michael Somare, among others, has opposed the privatization plan, saying that "foreign investors and only a few Papua New Guineans will benefit."

The government had also sought to implement a plan encouraging the registration of communal land, a measure that would open it up for mortgage, sale, or development. This is a volatile issue, as a large proportion of the 4 million people in Papua New Guinea live in clan-based villages in the rain forests and mountains where they rely on subsistence farming on land held in common. As finance and mining capital, especially from Australia, has exploited the resources of this underdeveloped country, there has been a growing history of conflict with traditional landowners. Morauta has for now backed away from this plan for "land mobilization," as happened when a similar proposal was met by a storm of protests in 1995.

In late June the daily rallies outside Morauta's office grew in size as many working people joined the students. On June 25 2,000 people organized a blockade of the Prime Minister's office to demand that he respond to their petition that the government stop the "reforms" and expel officials from the imperialist agencies from the country.

After many demonstrators had left the area, 60 riot police used tear gas to disperse the hundreds who stayed. The cops began firing live ammunition as they pursued students running to the university two miles away.

Early the next morning the riot cops came onto the campus and began shooting. William Doa, a third-year commerce student, said, "We thought we must surrender to the police to avoid being shot." As the students walked out with their hands up, the cops fired shotguns and M-16 automatic weapons at close range. Three students were killed and up to 20 were injured, five of them seriously.

As students spread the news of the assault, thousands of people, many young and some from impoverished squatter settlements, attacked government buildings and shops, burning police barracks and cop cars. Some looting occurred. This venting of popular anger, but not the cops' prior bloody rampage, was described as a "riot" by the local and international capitalist press.

Except for the police, central Port Moresby was deserted for days, with schools, offices, most businesses, and some roads shut. The ports and most public transport ground to a halt as workers walked off the job in support of the students.

Unionists, many of whom are in the midst of industrial disputes with employers in the banking and airline industries, are concerned about what privatization will mean for their jobs and conditions.

Trade union officials did not take part in the student demonstrations, but threatened to shut down the country's sea and air links and power supply in protest at the police shootings. They called for Morauta to step down, and have made some moves to prepare for a national strike. Morauta responded to these protests by appealing for order. In particular, he claimed that union action would "inflame the situation." Heavily armed police were used to impose a nightly curfew in the capital for two weeks.

On June 27 police attacked 500 mourners in Mount Hagen, the home town of two of the dead students, on the pretext that some had tried to loot a supermarket. In Port Moresby, crowds of working people gathered outside the main army barracks to urge soldiers to support the student protesters against the police. Officers called on the soldiers to abide by the constitution and not get involved. However, the same day, as 2,000 mourners gathered outside the hospital where the bodies lay, a group of 60 uniformed soldiers joined them with heads bowed.

Initially, officials tried to deny that it was cops who had killed the students. As calls for an investigation grew, the government was forced to give the go-ahead for two inquiries. However, student and union leaders expect a whitewash. John Paska, general-secretary of the Trade Union Congress, said the killings were "completely unprovoked. [The police] were just a bunch of thugs...shooting them like hunters."  
 
History of colonialism, political crisis
Demands for austerity measures foisted on the government by the IMF, the World Bank, and the Australian rulers continue a colonial and semicolonial relationship between Papua New Guinea and the imperialist powers that began more than a century ago.

In 1884 Germany colonized northeast New Guinea. The southeast, Papua, was annexed under the British Crown on behalf of the Australian colonies, and later formally became an Australian colony in 1906. In 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, Australian troops seized German New Guinea. After decades of colonial underdevelopment, Canberra granted the united colony, Papua New Guinea, independence in 1975.

While the peoples of this rugged, tropical country remain poor, fantastic mineral wealth is being taken out of the country by big Australian mining corporations like BHP and CRA. They have established open cut mines that have a devastating impact on the surrounding rain forest and tribal farmers, pushing many off their land. Infant mortality is 73 per 1,000 live births, and less than 20 percent of children go to school. The average life expectancy at birth for men is 54 years, among the lowest in the world.

Describing the popular unrest in PNG as "riots" that were "pretty ugly," Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer warned the Morauta government on behalf of imperialist investors not to give in to the demands of the demonstrators. "If Papua New Guinea stumbles and the reform program is abandoned it will be a disaster" for the country economically, he threatened.

Downer recently complained that the Australian government "wasted" US$500 million on budgetary support to Papua New Guinea after 1975, before its "aid" became tied to projects tailored to Australian investment and trade.

On July 7, 100 people, many of them young, demonstrated outside the World Bank offices in Sydney to voice solidarity with the protesters in Papua New Guinea. Similar protests took place there outside the country's High Commission in Canberra.

Ron Poulsen is a member of the Maritime Union of Australia.  
 
 
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