[The country of seven
million people, north of Australia and east of Indonesia, has a history of
political violence. A separatist revolt on the mineral-rich island of
Bougainville lasted more than a decade and left thousands dead in the 1990s.
And the 2002 election that began Mr. Somare’s most recent stint as prime
minister was marred with violence that killed more than a dozen people.]
By Matt Siegel
 |
Auri Eva/Agence
France-Presse — Getty Images
Police officers
prevented Peter O'Neill and his supporters from reaching
Government House in Port Moresby on Tuesday.
|
SYDNEY, Australia — Politics in Papua New Guinea has long been fractious.
Now it has turned surreal.
The latest in a series
of twists and reversals has left the country with two rival prime ministers and
cabinets, each claiming the sole right to govern, and with heavily armed police
officers deployed in the streets of the capital, Port Moresby, on Tuesday, bracing
for civil unrest.
The trouble has been
building since April, when the 75-year-old prime minister at the time, Michael
Somare, underwent heart surgery at Raffles Hospital in Singapore and did not
fare well afterward, remaining in the hospital for months. Mr. Somare was Papua
New Guinea’s first leader after independence from Australia in 1975, but
allegations of corruption and a heavy-handed political style tarnished his
reputation over his years in and out of office. When he had not returned to the
country by August, Parliament declared the prime ministership vacant and
elected a popular opposition leader, Peter O’Neill, to take his place.
Then in September, Mr.
Somare did return, and started to fight for reinstatement, while Mr. O’Neill’s
government drafted legislation to retroactively authorize his ouster.
 |
Peter O'Neill
Auri Eva/Agence France-Presse
— Getty Images
|
On Monday, hours after
the legislation was passed, the Supreme Court came down on Mr. Somare’s side,
saying that he never vacated the office and that his ouster was
unconstitutional. But Mr. O’Neill refused to step down.
Tavurvur, a prominent
local blogger who, like many people in Papua New Guinea, uses only one name,
summed up the situation in a Twitter message on
Tuesday: “PNG’s political sandwich: a popular illegitimate Government versus a
despised legitimate Government.”
The country of seven
million people, north of Australia and east of Indonesia, has a history of
political violence. A separatist revolt on the mineral-rich island of
Bougainville lasted more than a decade and left thousands dead in the 1990s.
And the 2002 election that began Mr. Somare’s most recent stint as prime
minister was marred with violence that killed more than a dozen people.
The who’s-in-charge-here
problem now lands in the lap of the country’s governor general, a vestige of
its colonial history. The country’s head of state is Queen Elizabeth II of
Britain, who appoints a governor general nominated by the Papuan Parliament to
be her representative; among the ceremonial duties are giving royal assent for
new prime ministers to take office. Usually that is a formality — but this
situation is anything but usual.
 |
Rick Rycroft/Associated Press
The Supreme Court ruled that
Michael Somare is prime minister
and invalidated Mr. O'Neill's
election
|
Mr. O’Neill tried to
visit the residence of the governor general, Michael Ogio, on Monday night, but
was blocked by the police, and the sound of automatic gunfire was heard in the
area, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported.
Both claimants tried to
secure his endorsement on Tuesday, but nothing was resolved by evening.
Jenny Hayward-Jones, a
regional expert at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney, said
Papua New Guinea was in uncharted waters. “We have two prime ministers at the
moment, one of whom is claiming his legitimacy from the Parliament and the
other one from the Constitution,” she said. The most dangerous condition, she
said, may be the weaknesses and internal divisions of the police. “They may be
able to contain a small riot, but if it went on for some days, they would
struggle,” she said.
Australia, Papua New Guinea’s
main trading partner and aid donor, urged its citizens to use caution there.
Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd said he was “deeply concerned” by developments,
including the appointment of rival police commissioners in Port Moresby. “We
are urging calm on the part of all parties,” Mr. Rudd said on his Web site.
What will happen next?
In Papua New Guinea, Mrs. Hayward-Jones said, “you can never rule anything
out.”
SURROUNDED BY POVERTY, A LIFELESS CAPITAL STANDS ALOOF
[The country, once known as Burma, has a long tradition of building new capitals, said Thant Myint-U, a Burmese historian. There is also a long history of resentment from those forced to live in them. Mandalay, the largest city in the northern reaches of the country, was built by King Mindon in the late 1850s; his ministers and courtiers fought the project “tooth and nail,” Mr. Thant Myint-U said.]
By The New York Times
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| An often lifeless Myanmarian capital Naypyidaw |
Six years
after Myanmar inaugurated Naypyidaw (pronounced nay-pee-DAW) as its new
capital, the city remains austere and often lifeless, a costly monument to military
rulers who no longer rule, since the junta handed over authority in March to the country’s first civilian
government in almost 50 years.
Attempts
have been made to make the city more people-friendly. There is a theme park
dedicated to uplifting “patriotic spirit” and a large fountain where civil
servants can watch pulsing jets of water accompanied by Western pop songs with
Burmese lyrics.
Most
evenings, though, a tomblike silence descends on Naypyidaw.
“We are so
bored here,” said U Aung Myint, 20, a government employee who visited the
fountain on a recent Saturday evening. “This is the only place to come at
night.”
On the
outskirts of town, a warren of karaoke bars and a few nightclubs have sprouted
up, but their clientele is mainly senior officers and officials.
The
country, once known as Burma, has a long tradition of building new capitals,
said Thant Myint-U, a Burmese historian. There is also a long history of
resentment from those forced to live in them. Mandalay, the largest city in the
northern reaches of the country, was built by King Mindon in the late 1850s;
his ministers and courtiers fought the project “tooth and nail,” Mr. Thant
Myint-U said.
“Myanmar
has always been a very difficult country to govern, messy and often violent,
and many kings in the past have wanted to set up the capital as the antithesis
of the natural and perhaps inevitable anarchy,” he wrote in an e-mail. Each new
capital, he said, was a “single place of order in a country where a more
general order was impossible.”
Building a
new city amid the sugar-cane fields and rice paddies was a huge expense for
Myanmar, one of Asia’s poorest countries. The military junta never revealed the
project’s price tag, but Sean Turnell, a leading expert on the Burmese economy,
estimates it at $3 billion to $4 billion. Only part of that was cash spending,
Mr. Turnell said, because soldiers were used for construction labor, and
various business conglomerates did much of the work in exchange for government
concessions, notably logging rights to large areas of virgin forest in other
parts of the country.
The
grandiose boulevards of Naypyidaw, lined with flowers and shrubbery, are a
jarring contrast to the subsistence living seen in the rest of the country.
In the
neighboring town of Pyinmana, residents are so poor they sometimes pawn their
sarongs. U Maung Maung, the owner of a pawn shop in the town, said that four or
five times a month, someone would come in wanting to give him clothing as
collateral for a loan; he offers them 2,000 kyat (about $2.50) for the sheet of
cloth that men and women here wear around the waist, known as a longyi.
“Sometimes
they bring crockery, but I don’t accept it,” Mr. Maung Maung said. “I don’t
have room for it.”
Decades of
isolation and economic mismanagement under military rule left Myanmar much
poorer than its dynamic neighbors to the east and north. The generals and their
business associates got rich, building mansions and importing fancy cars, but
the rest of the population missed the economic boom that helped create a middle
class in places like China, Thailand and Malaysia.
The new
civilian government in Myanmar, led by President Thein Sein, wants to
liberalize the economy, but change may take years to trickle down to the
destitute. And meanwhile, Mr. Maung Maung said, “people are getting poorer and
poorer.”
The
contrasts between the neighboring towns are striking. Pyinmana’s sidewalks are
broken, its narrow streets are dusty tracks, and its telephone and power lines
are a hopeless tangle. Traffic there is barely contained chaos. Young men play
guitar on street corners for passers-by.
Naypyidaw
is roomy and regimented, with evenly spaced lampposts, tidy walkways and
landscaped traffic islands. But the workers who keep them swept and watered are
almost the only pedestrians in sight.
Naypyidaw
is also prohibitively expensive by Myanmar standards. A plate of fried rice at
a restaurant costs the equivalent of $3.75, a full day’s wages for a bricklayer
in the city.
Almost all
the business that takes place in Naypyidaw is related to the government,
something officials are trying to change. A manager at a hotel here said that
businesses and nonprofit groups were being pressed to hold their meetings in
Naypyidaw rather than Yangon, the country’s principal city and former capital.
The government has even set up semiannual auctions in Naypyidaw for the jade
and rubies mined in northern Myanmar, in competition with Yangon.
The
largest embassies in Yangon have so far resisted moving to Naypyidaw, but the
city may become more attractive with time, said Mr. Thant Myint-U, the
historian. After all, he said, “it took Washington decades before it became a
place anyone would want to live in.”
