Former military chief warns PNG soldiers could be ‘outgunned’ in Mendi strife

Deadly MAG 58 Model 60-20 machine guns mounted on a cabin-top truck in the Southern Highlands.
Image: PNGAttitude

From Asia Pacific Report
A FORMER Papua New Guinea military commander has warned that he is “concerned, if not frightened” that the PNG Defence Force may be deploying police and soldiers in the troubled Southern Highlands province facing a deadly weapon.

Ex-Brigadier-General Jerry Singirok , a former commander of the PNGDF who arrested mercenaries deployed by the Sir Julius Chan government for the Bougainville war in the so-called Sandline crisis in 1997, has made his views known in independent media.

In an item published by PNG Attitude and EMTV journalist Scott Waide’s blog, Singirok described Prime Minister Peter O’Neill’s government response to last week’s Mendi riots as a “premature state of emergency” and a “cheap, reckless and knee-jerk option”.

His comments have come at a time when the nation has been shocked by the display of high powered assault weapons by protesters since last week’s Mendi rioting.

It is clear that the government’s guns amnesty last year did little to encourage people to surrender their weapons, reports Loop PNG.

Media coverage of war atrocities opens debate on INFOCORE research

 
Media is going through a "tremendous transformation as a result of the ever-changing, global media landscape". Video: Euronews

By Elena Cavalione of Euronews

IN A world torn apart by conflicts old and new, the issue of the media’s role seems to have growing importance.

Media coverage of atrocities committed during wars is opening up debate on the power images have to influence public opinion and political decisions.

INFOCORE is an international research study funded by the 7th European Framework Programme of the European Commission. It brings together experts from the Social Sciences to investigate the media’s role in violent conflicts in three regions: the Middle East, the Balkans and Central Africa.

Romy Frohlich from Ludwig Maaximilians University in Munich explains that journalism is under a state of tremendous transformation as a result of the ever-changing, global media landscape.

“What we see so far”, she says, “is that this change in journalism does affect or had an effect on the power balance within the shaping of public discourse, for example the relation between journalism and political actors or journalism and propaganda and public relations.”

INFOCORE sets pace on global violent conflict media research project

Pacific Media Centre director David Robie at the INFOCORE stakeholders workshop in Brussels, Belgium.
Image: PMC

IT was a privilege for the Pacific Media Centre to be among the 27 global stakeholders involved in a progress feedback workshop for the European Union-funded €2.5 million violent conflict research project dubbed INFOCORE in Brussels last weekend.

Other stakeholders included the AFP Foundation, Deutsche Welle news agency, European Broadcasting Union, France 24, Global Forum for Media Development (GFMD), Institute for War and Peace Reporting, Internews Europe, Journaliste en Danger, Thomson Reuters Foundation, UNESCO Chair in Communication for Social Change and Media, War and Conflict journal. 

The two-day event was hosted by another stakeholder, Press Club Brussels Europe, at its friendly offices in Rue Froissart, Schuman, decorated with a range of political cartoons from Europe’s finest cartoonists.

INFOCORE stands for (In)forming Conflict Prevention, Response and Resolution: The role of the media in violent conflict.

The research mission is to provide a “systematically comparative assessment of various kinds of media, interacting with a wide range of relevant actors and producing diverse kinds of conflict coverage,” as the INFOCORE website describes it.

Fiji torture series wins Pacific Media Watch editor trauma journalism prize

Torture of the captured Fiji fugitive being filmed on mobile phones.
Photo: Pacific Media Watch/Freeze frame from video

A MULTIMEDIA news report series about the torture of a fugitive prisoner and his suspected accomplice by Fiji prison officers has won a Pacific Media Watch editor a coveted international prize in trauma journalism.

Daniel Drageset, a Norwegian journalist interned at the Auckland University of Technology’s Pacific Media Centre and a postgraduate student in the School of Communication Studies, won the Dart Asia-Pacific Centre for Journalism and Trauma Prize for reporting on violence, disaster or trauma in society at the 2013 Ossie Awards for student journalism in Mooloolaba, Queensland, this week.

Drageset has been contributing editor of the PMC’s Pacific Media Watch freedom project for the past year, and has also been a student intern editor on the associated independent Pacific Scoop news website.

Judge Cait McMahon, director of Melbourne's Dart Asia-Pacific Centre, said Drageset’s winning Fiji entry had showed an “impressive investigation into alleged police torture”.

“Daniel had to straddle important ethical issues and clarify potential bias of sources to produce an impressive piece of reporting,” she said.

Sneak preview on Solomon Islands documentary in progress - help needed

By Tarcisius Tara Kabutaulaka

THIS is a sneak preview of a documentary about the Solomon Islands conflict that Larry Thomas from Fiji and I have been working on for years.

We started filming in early 2003, prior to the deployment of the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI). We went back and did more filming after the RAMSI intervention.

We are now in the editing stage and looking for funds to complete the film. If you have ideas on where and how to access funds to complete this important film, please let me know.

This film will contribute a lot to the history of the Solomon Islands conflicts and the aspirations of Solomon Islanders.

In filming, we travelled to Malaita, Western Solomons and around Guadalcanal.

Australia complicit in PNG's Bougainville blight

Pacific conflict: Associate Professor Tarcisius Kabutaulaka, of the University of Hawai'i, and others speak about conflict and transition. How can conflict-affected countries break cycles of violence, low trust or weak institutions? A Praxis panel seminar series.

OPINION by Ellena Savage of Eureka Street

THE PNG Solution is in breach of international law. It doesn't serve the best interest of the asylum seekers it will affect.

And Australia's Department of Immigration and Citizenship is taking grossly insufficient responsibility for the safety and security of its detainees on Manus Island.

But the PNG Solution is just another in a long line of "border control" solutions which are in breach of legality and morality. There is nothing new about it.

Much has been made of PNG's poverty and gender-based violence, but even more disturbing is its military and police human rights record.

Evidence of abuses in the form of a military blockade, massacres, rape and torture during the Bougainville Crisis, the civil war that spanned the 1990s, are well-documented.

Libya: The African mercenary question

John Liebhardt, who a year or two ago was posting some excellent analytical blogs on post-coup political developments in Fiji – in contrast to the rabid anti-coup blogs (and some pro-blogs for that matter) that were obsessed with political point scoring and obscuring the truth – has recently turned his attention to the Middle East. This extract is from his post on the vexed “mercenary” issue on Global Voices - and the full article is well worth a browse. It strikes a chord when Café Pacific recalls the foiled Sandline mercenary adventure plot against rebels in Bougainville in 1997:

ONE OF the more distressing sub-plots in the ongoing two-week uprising against Colonel Muammar Al Gaddafi in Libya has been reports of the Libyan leader's alleged use of “African mercenaries” to prop up his falling regime.

Global Voices has covered stories of mercenaries from Serbia bombing civilians from airplanes. But the majority of speculation regarding mercenaries portrays them as “foreign” or “African” — meaning from Sub-Sahara Africa and “Black”. This storyline is echoed everywhere in international media, in Arabic media, and in online citizen media and videos.

Why put a Black face on the mercenary story when people in Libya are both light and dark skinned?

In an open letter to Al Jazeera posted on the blog Sky, Soil & Everything In Between, KonWomyn worries that the broadcaster's shorthand description simply has become “mercenaries from Africa”, instead of looking deeper into who these people actually are, and that this description is being copied in media around the world.

Fear is another reason these claims are widely perpetuated. In a comment on a blog post on Arabist.net about mercenaries in Libya, “Benedict” writes:

… in a climate of fear and scarce information, rumours that violence is being carried out by shadowy outsiders often spread widely (e.g. the rumours of ‘Arabs' beating protesters in Iran in 2009). Secondly, there are plenty of African migrants in Libya who may be seized as scapegoats by angry crowds, and there are also black Libyans, some of who may be members of the security forces.

Nonetheless, captured mercenaries in Libya have so far included people with identification papers from Tunisia, Nigeria and Guinea (Conakry) and Chad. In Ghana there are rumours that people in Accra had been offered as much as US$ 2,500 to fight for Gaddafi. And in Ethiopia local people have reportedly also been hired to fight. The video above is of an alleged mercenary captured by locals in the oil town of Al Barqa, Libya.

Destination Libya
For many in Sub-Saharan Africa, Libya has long been an employment magnet and also acted as a port of call for those wanting to migrate to Europe via the Mediterranean Sea. An estimated 1.5 million people from south of the Sahara live in Libya, working mainly in the oil and construction industry.

Gaddafi is also financially and politically involved with governments south of the Sahara. The Libyan military has trained several rebel groups in the past, and has also recruited mercenaries on previous occasions.

In the early years of his rule, Gaddafi, who was affectionately known as “the Guide,” attempted to unify and Arabize the swath of land just south of the Sahara desert by pressing young migrants everywhere from the Sahel to Pakistan to fight as a single unit in wars in Chad, Uganda, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria.

Attacks on migrants
The immediate problem is that people in Libya from Sub-Saharan Africa have been attacked simply because people assume they are mercenaries. On the Ethiopian Review blog, several people commented on a post about Ethiopian mercenaries with fears that innocent refugees would become targets of mobs.

One commenter, “Ganamo” wrote:

Some of those could be innocent refugees. During uprising in a mob mentality people most often do not differentiate well between criminals and innocent foreigners. I have to say this because I believe it from learning it through an experience. While revolution must go on we must be carefully to stand for refugees. Specially Ethiopians in Diaspora since their government cares only for their money and abandons them on their times of need, while other countries are evacuating their citizens. Where will Ethiopian Refugees in Libya go?

Some bloggers and activists from Sub-Saharan Africa see the mercenary issue as opening a window into the chauvinistic attitudes of those from North Africa.

• For the full blog – and all John Leibhardt’s links – go to Global Village. And also check out the Libya Uprising 2011 links.

Map source: National Post

Shooting of terrorist Dulmatin overshadows key media conflict seminar

WHAT an irony that the Jakarta media headlines were focusing on a “terrorism training camp” scare in Indonesia’s western-most Aceh province and shootouts in an outlying suburb that left fugitive Dulmatin and two other suspects dead just when a regional East Asia media forum opened with a focus on the “intersections of conflict, culture and religion”.

The forum, jointly hosted by the New Zealand government, the European Union and the Indonesian government, brought together some 57 senior journalists and media educators from 16 countries to reflect on how well the region’s media is coping with complex new challenges to culture and conflict reporting.

Coinciding with the three-day conference, Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was visiting Australia and Papua New Guinea and news commentators noted how the death of Dulmatin would ease Yudhoyono’s “task to convince the Australian public and Parliament that Indonesia is a key security and economic partner”.

The shooting of 40-year-old Dulmatin came as a shock as the Jemaah Islamiyah bomb-maker, strategist and financier was believed to be still in hiding with the Abu Sayyaf group in the Southern Philippines.

Some newspapers warned of a “resurgent and expanding military network” just as Indonesia seemed to be making spectacular headway against terrorist groups.

Indonesian and Filipino journalists at the media conference speculated on how many other terrorists may have slipped across the porous border triangle bounded by Indonesia, Malaysia and Mindanao in the Philippines, unknown to security authorities in all three countries.

Media also commented on the high risk public ambush that killed Dulmatin – a onetime Islamic boarding school teacher suspected of being part of the 2002 Bali bombings - in a suburban internet café but, miraculously, this did not harm any bystanders.

Criticism also focused on sensational media coverage - especially by television of the drama - such as "terrorist manhunts, complete with graphic footage of dead bodies and puddles of blood sandwiched between comments from terrorism experts".

A day after the conference ended, two further terrorism suspects were killed in Aceh.

The conference irony was that Aceh and Maluku were both featured as examples of “post-conflict achievement” in contemporary Indonesia.

Two impressive speakers from the Maluku Media Centre, Lucky Sopacua and the Antara news agency bureau chief in Ambon, Muhammad Din Kelilauw, gave moving accounts of how both Christian and Muslim media people put aside their differences and worked hard to rebuild community trust in a shattered island province torn apart by religious conflict from 1999-2002.

A classic example of “peace journalism” having a strategic impact.

New Zealand has been a key supporter of the Maluku Media Centre with assistance for training.

Speaking on Aceh, courageous Jakarta Post reporter Nani Afrida, who had been a “frontline” journalist covering both sides of the war with the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) until the peace agreement in 2005 in the wake of the devastating tsunami, gave an insightful account of Aceh’s history of struggle and hope for the future.

Afrida has now “retired” from frontline reporting and has taken up economics reporting at the Post’s head office.

The conference opening featured a keynote speech by former Vice-President Jusuf Kalla, who has been touted as something of a regional peacemaker on the strength of his spectacular success at home with resolving several Indonesian secessionist and insurgency problems.

Kalla, currently Indonesia’s Red Cross chairman, blamed “inequality” as being mainly responsible for ethnic conflicts and separatist movements in Indonesia and in other countries.

His recipe for success included efforts to reduce “wealth gaps” in the process conflict resolution.

According to the Jakarta Post’s Lilian Budianto, Kalla is “preparing to play a role in peace negotiations in southern Thailand”, but he was reluctant to confirm this:

In 2005, the then vice-president offered Aceh separatists a special autonomy deal, including receiving 70 percent of the share of its natural resources yield, implementation of its own Islamic law and the formation of local parties.

The peace deal with GAM ended three decades of guerrilla insurgency in the impoverished province.

Apart from the Aceh peace deal, Kalla also successfully brought conflicting parties in the two provinces of [Central] Sulawesi and Maluku, in 2001 and 2002 respectively, to sign peace pacts when he served as coordinating public welfare minister under president Megawati.

Kalla is regarded as a strong negotiator who can “effectively convince hardline insurgents to put down their guns”, the Post quoted Sanata Dharma University history professor Baskara T. Wardaya as saying.

The Jakarta conflict and media conference had a strong line-up among is presenters and on the opening day, Monash University politics lecturer Waleed Aly, an Egyptian-Australian and author of People Like Us: How Arrogance is Dividing Islam and the West, gave an inspiring address on “culture, conflict and coexistence”.

A panel on “media and democracy” featured India’s Mail Today deputy editor Dr Manoj Joshi; Marga Ortigas of the Manila bureau of Aljazeera; a Korea Times editor, Cho Jae-hyun; and Philippine Star executive editor Ana Marie Pamintuan.

Jakarta Post chief editor Endy Bayuni chaired a panel on “Breakdown: Reporting war, terrorism, insurrection and civil unrest” with Pakistani presenters Zahid Hussain, senior editor of Newsline magazine and Rahim Ullah Yusufzai, senior analyst for the television channel Geo who is also working for BBC Radio’s Urdu, Pashto, Hindi and English services.

The AUT University’s Pacific Media Centre director, Dr David Robie, chaired the “post-conflict” panel on Aceh and Maluku and Tempo Weekly editor-in-chief Bambang Harymurti headed a workshop featuring “local conflict” case stories in Indonesia and the Philippines.

Twenty nine of the delegates signed a strong open letter to President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo of the Philippines in the wake of the Mindanao massacre last November when 32 journalists were among 57 people killed by a local politician’s militia.

"Their murder, and the death of countless other media workers in your country in recent years, will not be forgotten by us," the letter said. "We urge you, your government and the institutions of state to take the appropriate action to ensure justice is done and to create a better, safer environment for journalists in your country."

A proposal for a regional journalism training programme was inconclusive, especially when Filipino journalists questioned the need for such an initiative when at least two such regional programmes based in the Philippines were well established.

One of the highlights of the week came at the end of the conference when Pesantren Darunnajah Islamic Boarding School wowed delegates and presenters with an spectacular display of cultural and campus activities by the delightful students.

Pictures: Top: The Indonesian police turned down a $10 million reward offer for Dulmatin's capture. National police chief General Bambang Hendarso Danuri is pictured by the Jakarta Globe holding a wanted poster for the shot suspect. Middle Top: Metro TV coverage of the police shooting of terrorist suspects. Middle Bottom: A Jakarta newspaper street hawker and Jakarta Post chief editor Endy Bayuni (left) with the New Zealand Herald's Edward Gay and Pacific Media Centre's Dr David Robie. Above: Students at Pesantren Darunnajah welcome media conference delegates.

• Terrorists 'still a strong threat' - Jakarta Globe
• Kalla looks to champion global peace efforts - Jakarta Post
• NZ sponsors regional conflict reporting media forum
• Ratings-hungry media under attack for excessive violence in terror coverage - Jakarta Globe