Ethnic conflict in Papua New Guinea

Ethnic conflict in Papua New Guinea

Benjamin ReillyCentre for Democratic Institutions, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia.

Email: [email protected]

Abstract: On many measures of ethno-linguistic diversity, Papua New Guinea is the most frag-mented society in the world. I argue that the macro-level political effect of this diversity has been toreduce, rather than increase, the impact of ethnic conflict on the state. Outside the Bougainvilleconflict, and (to a lesser extent) the recent upsurge of violence in the Southern Highlands, ethnicconflicts in Papua New Guinea have not presented a threat to national government. In contrast tomost other ethnically diverse societies, the most consequential impacts of ethnic conflict in PapuaNew Guinea are at the local level. This paper therefore examines the disparate impacts of local- andnational-level forms of ethnic conflict in Papua New Guinea.

Keywords: diversity, elections, ethnic conflict, Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea combines two unusual fea-tures which should make it a case of specialinterest to scholars of ethnicity and ethnic con-flict. First, it boasts one of the developingworld’s most impressive records of democraticlongevity, with more than 40 years of continu-ous democratic elections, all of them chara-cterised by high levels of participation andcandidature, and numerous peaceful changes ofgovernment. Even more striking, however, isthat Papua New Guinea has combined thisextended record of electoral democracy withhigh levels of ethno-linguistic fragmentationand inter-ethnic violence. The conventionalwisdom is that such a level of diversity andconflict poses significant challenges to success-ful nation building and governance. Someobservers of Papua New Guinea politics, forexample, have argued that its ethnic fragmenta-tion represents a ‘formidable and intractable’impediment to nation building (Premdas, 1989:246). However, while having experienced anumber of secessionist movements, most nota-bly on the eastern island of Bougainville, PapuaNew Guinea has so far been able to maintainboth its territorial unity and an impressiverecord of formal democracy.

This paper argues that the overall effect ofethno-linguistic diversity in Papua New Guineahas been to reduce, rather than increase, the

impact of ethnic conflict on the state. The reasonfor this is relatively straightforward: outside theBougainville conflict and (to a lesser extent) therecent upsurge of violence in the Southern High-lands, ethnic conflicts in Papua New Guineahave not presented a threat to national govern-ment. Most conflict in Papua New Guinea takesplace at the local level. While this does not makesuch conflicts inherently less important, it doeslimit their impact on national issues. Of course,local conflicts can, if left unchecked, eventuallyrise to challenge the state itself – as occurred inPapua New Guinea’s neighbour, the SolomonIslands, in 2001–2003 where tensions betweenpopulations of the two of the main island groups,Malaita and Guadalcanal, resulted in the captureand overthrow of the elected government.However, in large part because of the uniquenature of its ethno-linguistic structure, this kindof conflict for control of the state itself has neverbeen a serious threat in Papua New Guinea. Thispaper therefore examines the disparate impactsof local and national-level forms of ethnic con-flict in that country.

Ethnic structure and ethnic conflict inPapua New Guinea

The state of Papua New Guinea is a colonialconstruct. Unlike parts of neighbouring Indone-

Asia Pacific Viewpoint, Vol. 49, No. 1, April 2008ISSN 1360-7456, pp12–22

© 2008 The AuthorJournal compilation © 2008 Victoria University of Wellington

doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8373.2008.00357.x

mailto:[email protected]

sia, there was no history of state-like organisa-tion in the country before European contact.Instead, society was made up of thousands ofsmall, acephalous and largely independenttribal units. Such political entities as existed‘were both relatively unstable and small. Notmany effective political units contained morethan a few hundred people, although on occa-sions thousands might cooperate for a specificbattle, or in trade and ceremonial exchange.Membership of even the smallest primarygroups was unstable – as people married in andout, disputes arose between rival leaders, andinter-group warfare forced some members ofeach group to choose between the claims totheir loyalties of, say, their residential or theirkin group’ (Parker and Wolfers, 1971: 16).

Papua New Guinea is thus in many ways astate in search of a nation. In geographic terms,it comprises roughly half of the world’s secondlargest island, New Guinea, and about 600smaller islands, including the far eastern islandprovince of North Solomons, better known asBougainville, which has a history of separatismfrom the rest of the country. Papua New Guineahas a complex colonial history. Until 1942, thecountry comprised two separate jurisdictions –Papua and New Guinea – which had originallyfallen under British and German rule, respec-tively. Before the 1930s, the populous High-lands interior of the country was essentiallyunknown to outsiders. After assuming responsi-bility for the different territories, Papua NewGuinea was administered by Australia from theearly years of the twentieth century until 1975,when it became independent.

On most measures of ethno-linguistic diver-sity, Papua New Guinea is probably the mostheterogeneous country in the world. At thelatest count, some 852 different languages arespoken by a population of 5.3 million people(see May, 2003a). This extreme degree of lin-guistic diversity translates into exceptional cul-tural fragmentation. As in most of Melanesia,Papua New Guinea’s basic cultural unit com-prises ascriptive extended family networks or‘clans’ which form the primary unit of politicaland social loyalty (Hogbin, 1973: 23). StephenLevine writes that ‘if ethnic communities areunderstood to be groups possessing a distinctivelanguage, custom and memories – traits thatgive its members a sense of unity and cause

them to distinguish themselves (and be distin-guished by others) – then PNG may have morethan one thousand such ethnic groups within itsborders’ (Levine, 1997: 479).

While distinct from the larger cultural group-ings around which ethnicity is often defined inother contexts, for the purposes of this paper, an‘ethnic group’ constitutes any of these largeror smaller cultural-linguistic groupings whosemembers tend to act collectively for politicalpurposes. Even using Levine’s relatively con-strained definition of ethnicity, it is clear that thelevel of societal heterogeneity within PapuaNew Guinea is exceptionally high by compara-tive standards. It is also clear that there is sig-nificant internal variation within Papua NewGuinea, with some regions being relativelyhomogenous and others, especially in the High-lands areas, being exceptionally fragmented.

Considering the lack of overt racial distinc-tion between them, the depth of cleavagesbetween ethnic groups in Papua New Guinea isoften striking, and can be partly explained bygeographic factors. Papua New Guinea hassome of the world’s most dramatic terrain, witha vast range of mountains and valleys runningthrough the middle of the mainland (’the High-lands’) and an extensive arc of populated vol-canic islands off the coast – all of which createsevere difficulties in terms of isolation, accessand transport. Accordingly, ‘most groups devel-oped their own physical and cultural identity inisolation . . . communities living on differentsides of the same highland valley sometimesspeak languages as distinct from one another asSpanish is from Italian’ (Souter, 1963: 49).Although few groups were entirely isolated, andmany had ally groups with which they con-ducted trade and marriage, relations betweenmany were characterised as much by hostility asby cooperation. Traditional contact in the High-lands, for example, often took the form of inter-mittent tribal warfare between clan groups(Reay, 1982). Moreover, within the main lan-guage groups themselves, there are also oftendeep and bitter internal divisions.

Part of the difficulty of defining what consti-tutes an ethnic group in Papua New Guinea isthe sheer variation of its ethnic structure, whichlimits the ability to make generalisations. Forexample, in lowland areas the population ofethno-linguistic units normally ranges from a



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few hundred to several thousand, whereas inthe Highlands these groups are much larger(de Lepervanche, 1973: 1065). There has beenlittle detailed assessment of the total numberof ethno-linguistic groups in Papua NewGuinea, but estimates of the number of sepa-rate ‘political units’ (i.e. clans) range from2000 to 18 000.1 If a larger unit of base mea-surement is used, such as ‘tribes’ (i.e. alignedor related clan groupings), then we are stilldealing with an extremely fragmented society:a rough average of 2500 members per tribeagainst Papua New Guinea’s total populationof approximately five million people gives afigure of around 2000 separate tribes. Evenusing conservative figures, then, we are deal-ing with a level of fragmentation that makesdiverse societies elsewhere look relativelyhomogeneous by comparison.

This extreme ethno-linguistic fragmentationmeans that Papua New Guinea also has anextremely high number of politicised ethnicidentities. Both traditional social relations andmodern political entrepreneurship in PapuaNew Guinea involve the mobilisation andmanipulation of such ethnic identities – aprocess which, as Karl Claxton notes, is itselfconflict-creating in the absence of structuresable to regulate competition for power, wealthand status (Claxton, 2000: 267). For example, inthe Highlands, where almost half the PapuaNew Guinea population lives, modernisation,land pressure and competition for resourceshave encouraged a ‘retribalisation’ of society inrecent decades as group affiliation is increas-ingly used to determine the distribution ofpublic goods (Strathern, 1993). As such, tribalgroups are increasingly being mobilised, refash-ioned, or at times invented from scratch, inresponse to the demands of state building (seeFerguson and Whitehead, 1992). For instance,Colin Filer (2000: 167–168) reports that land-holding disputes in areas as varied as CentralProvince and the Lihir Islands have seen someclaimants invent clan identities from scratchin order to facilitate collective demands forcompensation.

In contemporary Papua New Guinea, clansthus increasingly play the role of interestgroups. Clans compete with each other foraccess to resources – not only the jobs and otherbenefits provided by major resource projects,

but also other goods and services and, perhapsmost importantly, public offices which providean entry-point to the resources of the state itself.However, the process of these many micro-ethnic collectives competing to secure desiredoutcomes for their own group members inevi-tably and inexorably create a massive collectiveaction dilemma for the country as a whole.2 Thecombined effect of many small ethnic groupsacting to secure their own interests underminesthe broader interests of society. Because timehorizons are short, possible productive invest-ments are curtailed. Energies are focusedon short-term wealth distribution rather thanlong-term wealth creation. Rent-seeking –‘the socially costly pursuit of wealth transfers’(Tollison, 1997: 506) – flourishes, as each tribalgroup attempts to monopolise any potentialpublic good for their own ends.

The result is that public goods are increas-ingly diverted towards the private enrichmentof political entrepreneurs and the small ethnicinterest groups they represent. Productive out-comes for society at large are overwhelmed bya collective action problem created by severalthousand small ethnic collectives competingwith each other for resources, prestige andpublic goods.3 As a consequence, local poli-tics in much of Papua New Guinea is increas-ingly characterised by intense zero-sumcompetition for a small and dwindling rewardbase, and life in some parts of the country hasreverted to a Hobbesian struggle for meagreresources. The fragmentation of Papua NewGuinea society exacerbates this problem bycreating a situation of many small clans oper-ating effectively as interest groups, attemptingto exploit any available public good for theirmembership.

Forms of ethnic conflict

Studying the independent impact of ethnic con-flict upon state performance is no easy task. Forone thing, ‘ethnicity’ is itself a notoriously slip-pery concept, widely considered to be mani-fested as a mixture of both primordial andconstructed factors.4 In other words, it is bothan ascriptive phenomena, based on socio-biological traits such as race, tribe and language– a position often characterised in the scholarlyliterature as ‘primordialism’ – as well as an

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adaptive one of more malleable or constructedidentities formed as a reaction to external pres-sures and incentives – or, to use the academicshorthand, ‘constructivism’.5 In addition, ethnicpolitics impacts on public policy in a range ofmore subtle ways beyond violent conflict. Forinstance, in competing with each other forresources, rival communities in socially hetero-geneous countries can have similar impacts tointerest groups or industry lobbies in the eco-nomic realm, diverting potential public goodstowards the private enrichment of their mem-bership alone.

Despite its extraordinary social structure,ethnic identity in Papua New Guinea, as else-where, tends to be manifested as a mixture ofprimordial and constructed factors, exhibitinga combination of both basic ascriptive tiesand opportunistic adaptations to contemporaryevents. Many analyses of ethnicity in PapuaNew Guinea, for example, emphasise the extentto which ethnic identities were both a salientfeature of traditional society and a reaction tocolonialism, modernisation and independence(Premdas, 1989: 246). Today, primordial factorsremain strong at all levels of Papua New Guineasociety. Political loyalties, for example, arefocused primarily at the level of family, clan andregional allegiances, rather than along party orideological lines. Block voting along ethniclines remains a common practice, particularlyin the Highlands. Ethnic identity as a politicalfactor in Papua New Guinea tends to be playedout at different levels, and may manifest itself asa salient factor, in varying strengths, at the levelsof extended family, clan, tribe, region, and evenalong the colonial divisions of the state betweenPapua and New Guinea.

Despite this degree of variation, it is possibleto make some limited generalised observationsabout ethnicity and politics in Papua NewGuinea. The most important distinction isbetween conflicts at the national level, whichpotentially threaten the territorial integrity of thestate (such as the decade-long Bougainvilleconflict); those which take place at the regionallevel (such as the current conflict in the South-ern Highlands, or ‘micronationalist’ combina-tion of cargo cults, local protest groups andregional separatists campaigns that were afeature of the pre-independence period); andthose that take place exclusively at the local

level (which make up the vast majority of thecountry’s ethnic conflicts).

Each of these has different impacts. While thefirst category of large-scale separatist conflictsthat can threaten the state are rare, their impacthas been devastating. The decade-long civil waron Bougainville described below, in which avariety of rebel forces attempted to secede fromthe rest of the country, has been the most impor-tant of these to date. The second conflict type,major regional conflicts, also presents seriousproblems for the sate. Thus, the debilitating andongoing conflict in the Southern Highlands,which forced the abandonment of the 2002elections in much of the province, contains anumber of elements in common with the Bou-gainville case, but without the strong separatistelement. These include a variety of armedgroups in conflict, the presence of largenumbers of high-powered firearms, an inter-weaving of traditional tribal enmities withmodern identities and the presence of majornatural resource endowments (see Goldman,2003). The Papua New Guinea government hasdeclared that the Southern Highlands conflictcould become ‘another Bougainville’, withsecurity implications for the country as awhole.6

The third category of conflicts in Papua NewGuinea are manifested not at the national orregional ethno-nationalist level, but at themicro-level, typically in the form of violencebetween Papua New Guinea’s myriad small,competitive ethnic groups. The nature of ethnicconflict between these groups is traditionallyplayed out locally, often via intertribal fighting,rather than as part of an ethno-nationalist questor a competition for regional or national hege-mony. However, they are no less deadly for that.Hundreds of people are killed every year intribal fights in Papua New Guinea (Dorney,1990: 310). Reports have estimated that around20% of the population is affected by ostensibly‘tribal’ violence, with a marked concentrationin highland regions (Clifford et al., 1984:94–95). Guns have now supplanted more tradi-tional weapons in such conflicts, thus raisingtheir stakes and increasing their deadliness(Dorney, 1990: 310–311). The upsurge in‘tribal’ violence across much of the Highlandsover the past two decades is perhaps the bestexample of this kind of conflict.



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Conflict and democracy

The imposition of representative democracy hasalso played a role in formenting such conflicts.Since independence, highly competitive elec-tions have become an increasingly importantavenue for access to the resources of the state.Electoral politics is thus a high-stakes game inwhich candidates and their clan supporters viefor an entry to the state which allows them toaccess, control and distribute public goods. Inthe Highlands province of Simbu, for example,‘people have come to regard government asthe major, or only, source of opportunity andfinance. Having a friend in national governmentis seen as necessary for economic success, andelection to office in the provincial assembly andparliament is keenly contested’ (Brown, 1989:245). Aspiring candidates make (often optimis-tic) calculations of their electoral prospectsbased on the number of voters in their own clanand tribal support groups. Once elected, theexpectation is that successful candidates willuse their position to extract resources from thegovernment and deliver them back to their ownclan, but not necessarily to the electorate as awhole. Reviewing the situation in the early1990s, Strathern (1993: 48) found that ‘it wasunderstood that politicians are in power tobenefit themselves and their factions, and theyconcentrate on consolidating their existingpower bases. As a result of armed conflictbetween groups, these bases had become more,rather than less, rigidly defined and a process ofneotribalization was well under way’.

As the stakes for victory are so high, electionstypically have the effect of sharpening ethniccleavages, because the salience of ethnicityin Papua New Guinea ‘tends to come to thefore . . . during national election campaigns’(Howard, 1989: 45). It is thus perhaps not sur-prising that studies have found a markedincrease in ethnic violence at election time.Elections have today become one of the primaryways in which traditional enmities are mobil-ised in contemporary Papua New Guinea, eventhough in most cases contestation is very muchfor election to office itself, rather than largerconcerns such as policy implementation, gov-ernment formation or national ideology(Dinnen, 1996; Standish, 1996). The 2002elections, widely criticised as the worst ever

held in Papua New Guinea, featured numerousinstances of bribery, intimidation and otherelectoral offences, including multiple voting,hijacking of ballot boxes and, in the SouthernHighlands particularly, large-scale electoralviolence (May, 2003b).

While a cause of great concern, this type of‘gunpoint democracy’ is not, however, a domi-nant pattern across Papua New Guinea as awhole – at least, not yet. Indeed, there are clearregional and structural trends to election vio-lence in Papua New Guinea: it is precisely thoseHighlands regions such as Enga, Simbu and theSouthern and Eastern Highlands provinceswhere traditional clan rivalries were fiercest,and where ethnic fragmentation is most pro-nounced, that electoral violence today is also amajor factor. Ominously, however, urban areassuch as Papua New Guinea’s main city, PortMoresby, are increasingly replicating theseforms of negative social capital in an urbanenvironment, via raskol criminal gangs andother collectivities formed along ethnic and cul-tural lines.

The Papua New Guinea experience alsoshows how the design of political institutionssuch as electoral systems can have an impact onthe incidence and expression of ethnic conflict.Papua New Guinea has utilised two differentelectoral systems – the alternative vote (AV) anda simple plurality system. The AV requires votersto rank-order candidates in order to arrive at amajority winner, rather than just voting for asingle choice. Because of the nature of PapuaNew Guinea society, elections held under thissystem enabled voters to give their first prefer-ence to their own clan or ‘home’ candidate.But, in many seats, this was not enough for anysingle candidate to gain a majority of votes; theyneeded the second preferences of other groupsas well. In order to do this, candidates had tosell themselves as a good ‘second-best’ choiceto other clan groups – which meant, in general,someone who would be attentive to the interestsof all groups, not just their own. It also meantthat those candidates who formed alliances andcooperated with each other would often bemore successful than candidates who attemptedto win the seat from their own voter base alone.This gave many candidates an incentive to act inan accommodative manner to other clans. Themechanics of the system also ensured that the

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winning candidate would have the support ofan absolute majority of voters. In a substantialnumber of cases, the winning candidate was notthe one who had the biggest ‘bloc’ of support-ers, but rather the one who could successfullybuild support across several groups (Reilly,2002).

After using AV for its three pre-independenceelections, Papua New Guinea changed to aplurality system at independence in 1975.However, the different incentives provided bythis new ‘first-past-the-post’ contest led to quitedifferent outcomes than those expected.Because candidates no longer needed an abso-lute majority of votes cast in order to be suc-cessful, but just more than any other group, thecandidate from the largest clan would often winthe seat outright. There was no incentive tocooperate with anyone else. Electoral violenceincreased, because it was in some candidates’interests to stop opponents’ supporters fromvoting, rather than to campaign for their secondpreferences as had been the case in the past.Also, because so many clans were vying to havetheir own candidates win a seat, candidateslearned that they could be successful with verylimited support. In an electoral cycle increas-ingly dominated by concerns about corruption,power and money politics, a range of negativetactics, such as encouraging rival candidates tostand in order to ‘split’ a dominant clan’s voterbase, became the norm. At the 2002 elections,over half the Papua New Guinea parliamentwas elected with less than 20% of the votes –several winning candidates gained only 5%.This led to growing pressure for the reintroduc-tion of AV both internally and from externalcommentators.

In 2003, the Papua New Guinea parliamentre-adopted a form of AV, with preferenceslimited to three – known as ‘limited preferen-tial voting’ – for future elections. As well asensuring that winning candidates would haveto gain a greater share of votes to get elected,it was hoped that this new electoral systemwould reduce electoral violence and encour-age candidates to cooperate with each otherduring election campaigns, features distinctlyabsent under plurality elections. At the first useof the system in 2004, these hopes were sub-stantially fulfilled. By-elections held under thenew system featured higher support levels for

winning candidates, more cooperative cam-paign tactics and lower levels of electoral vio-lence than those held in the same regions justtwo years earlier under plurality rule.7 Thesepatterns were repeated at the 2007 elections,which were much more peaceful than previ-ous contests (Haley, 2008).

I have argued elsewhere that the kind of elec-toral engineering applied in Papua New Guineahas much wider potential application as a formof conflict management (Reilly, 2001). Onereason for this is the capacity of such systems topromote a mode of politics typified as ‘centrip-etalism’ – so called ‘because the explicit aim isto engineer a centripetal spin to the politicalsystem – to pull the parties towards moderate,compromising policies and to discover andreinforce the centre of a deeply divided poli-tical spectrum’ (Sisk, 1995: 19). Centripetalismemphasises the need for political institutionsthat encourage cooperation, accommodationand integration across ethnic divides, and thuswork to break down the salience of ethnicityrather than fostering its representation in parlia-ment. Centripetal arguments maintain that thebest way to mitigate the destructive effects ofethnicity in divided societies is not to simplyreplicate existing ethnic divisions in the legisla-ture and other major organs of the state, butrather to de-politicise ethnic divisions by puttingin place institutional incentives for poli-ticians and their supporters to act in a coopera-tive, accommodatory manner towards rivalgroups.

In my book Democracy in Divided Societies,I defined centripetalism as a political system orstrategy designed to focus competition at themoderate centre rather than the extremes bymaking politicians seek electoral support fromgroups other than their own ethnic communityvia three related phenomena:1 the presentation of electoral incentives for

campaigning politicians to reach out to andattract votes from a range of ethnic groupsother than their own;

2 the presence of multi-ethnic arenas of bar-gaining, such as parliaments and executives,under which political actors from differentgroups come together to discuss policyissues; and

3 the development of centrist, aggregative andmultiethnic political parties or coalitions of



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parties which are capable of making cross-ethnic appeals and presenting a complex anddiverse range of policy options to the elector-ate (Reilly, 2001: 11).Like the scholarly orthodoxy of consocia-

tionalism, centripetal proposals for conflictmanagement focus on institutional structuressuch as political parties, electoral systems,executive governments and territorial innova-tions as having the most potential for politicalengineering. However, the specific institutionalrecommendations made by centripetalists inmany cases run sharply counter to those ofconsociationalism. For example, rather thanfocusing on the proportional representationof ethnically defined parties, centripetalismplaces a premium on systems which de-emphasise ethnicity and encourage cross-ethnic activity. This means that, in contrast tothe consociational focus on the proportionalityof representation for each communal segment,centripetal approaches favour a kind of aggre-gative majoritarianism, with more focus on theprocess by which different groups can beencouraged to work together than strict fair-ness of outcomes.

Thus, in relation to the electoral system, whileconsociationalists focus on the desirability of astrong congruence between votes cast and seatswon in electoral results (proportionality), cen-tripetalists advocate institutional designs thatencourage opportunities for dialogue and nego-tiation between opposing political forces in thecontext of political competition. They argue thatif the rules of the game are structured so asto reward cooperative political strategies withincreased prospects of electoral success, candi-dates representing competing or even violentlyopposed interests can be presented with incen-tives to negotiate across ethnic lines for recip-rocal support, and to bargain for cross-ethnicpolitical deals and policy concessions. This isan argument consistently made by DonaldHorowitz in his writings on strategies for ethnicmoderation (see Horowitz, 1985: 597–600).The Papua New Guinea case provides a veryclear illustration of just this kind of deal-makingand conflict-management in practice, andthus represents an important (and under-recognised) case for those interested in institu-tional arrangements for the management ofethnic conflict.

The Bougainville conflict

While the vast majority of conflicts on the is-land of New Guinea are local-level contestsfor resources and power which have limitednational or international impact, Papua NewGuinea has also experienced the most violentand sustained secessionist war to have occurredanywhere in the Pacific region, on its easternisland province of North Solomons, more com-monly known as Bougainville, which claimedseveral thousand lives (estimates vary – somesources claim that there have been 20 000 casu-alties) and left many civilians injured, displacedand impoverished.

The conflict, which began as a dispute overthe island’s incorporation into the state of PapuaNew Guinea, has been called the most seriousarmed conflict in the Pacific Islands since theend of the Second World War. It centred ondemands for the island’s independence – ademand opposed not only by Papua NewGuinea but also by many Bougainvilleans.While claims for autonomy or independencehave been a feature of local politics for manydecades, they gathered momentum with PapuaNew Guinea’s independence in 1975. At thattime, Bougainville’s substantial contribution tothe national economy was disproportionate toits small size and population, mainly because ofthe enormous open cut mine at Panguna in thecentral mountains of the main island whichextracted copper, gold and silver from 1972until the conflict caused its closure in 1989. Themine was a source of discontent not only forlocal landowners who felt their property rightshad been infringed, but also for various Bouga-invillean elites who resented the massive rev-enues flowing from the island to the rest of thecountry.

In 1988, increasing confrontation betweenlandowners and government saw the PapuaNew Guinea Defence Force brought in to assistthe police. Within two years, the ‘Bougainvillecrisis’ had escalated into a full-scale separatistrebellion led by a number of different rebelgroups, most prominently (but not exclusively)the Bougainville Revolutionary Army. A series ofincreasingly violent clashes between govern-ment forces and the various pro- and anti-independence militias came to a head in 1997,when the Papua New Guinea government

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commissioned an international mercenaryservice, Sandline International, to attack therebels. However, in a surprise move, the PapuaNew Guinean army’s chief commander refusedto let the Papua New Guinea Defence Forcework with the mercenaries, who were ejectedfrom the country. Prime Minister Julius Chanand two key ministers involved in engaging themercenaries were forced to stand down. Theseevents helped create the conditions conduciveto the remarkable progress towards conflictresolution which occurred in the latter part ofthe 1990s. Taking advantage of that changedposition at the national level, rebel forces beganto make direct contact with the central govern-ment. Further developments resulted in theNew Zealand government facilitating talksbetween the Bougainvillean leaders. These talksresulted in a cease-fire agreement, followed bythe deployment of an unarmed ‘Peace Monitor-ing Group’, led by Australia, on the island,accompanied by a UN observer team.

Since then, successive agreements – notablythe so-called ‘Loloata Understanding’ of March2000, and the Bougainville Peace Agreementsigned at Arawa in August 2001 – have success-fully delivered a high degree of peace to theisland. Unarmed civilian and military personnelfrom Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Vanuatuwere deployed as a ‘Peace Monitoring Group’,new autonomy arrangements have been imple-mented, and a range of reconciliation andreconstruction activities are also underway. InJune 2005, the first elections for the Autono-mous Bougainville Government were success-fully held. The peace deal has also paved theway for a self-determination referendum onBougainville’s political status to be held at someunspecified time in the future, after an extendedperiod of autonomy, although whether a refer-endum can actually be conducted in practice,and whether the various disputants will acceptthe result, remains to be seen. However, thecommitment to hold and recognise the results ofthe referendum has been affirmed by Australia,which previously opposed any such step thatcould lead to independence.

Conclusion

Despite their prominence, outright campaignsfor self-determination remain unusual in Papua

New Guinea. While cases such as Bougainvillereceive the greatest amount of attention, inmany ways they are not typical of ethnic con-flict in the country as a whole. While the issueof separatism is indeed important in Papua NewGuinea, a greater potential problem is notsecession at the periphery, but political frag-mentation at the centre – an issue that receivesmuch less attention. Such fragmentation createsdistinctive problems of interest aggregation, ofpolicy coordination, and of effective gover-nance – problems which hamper political sta-bility and undermine economic development.Ineffective government and economic declinecan themselves generate ethnic mobilisationand group conflict and, when combined with adysfunctional political structure, contribute to avicious cycle of economic decay, ethnic mobili-sation and conflict.

This paper has argued that in Papua NewGuinea, these clear downward trends can none-theless coexist with the maintenance of com-petitive democracy. This conclusion representssomething of a challenge to facile presumptionsabout the relationship between democracy anddevelopment, which tend to assume that allgood things go together, and that a functioningdemocracy will eventually lead to increasingeconomic development (or, in some versions,will eventually be overthrown and replaced byanother form of regime). As the Papua NewGuinea case suggests, neither of these outcomesis likely where the electoral process facilitatesthe victory of ethnic representatives whoseprimary means of servicing their electorate isto divert public goods to their own group of(usually) clan supporters. Put simply, competi-tive democracy will not generate public goods ifthe electoral process encourages social groupsto use the electoral process to secure their owninterests at the expense of society at large.Formal democracy can survive in the face ofboth ethnic fragmentation and underdevelop-ment, but without necessarily overcoming orgenerating immediate solutions to either ofthese afflictions. In fact, the three can coexist aslong as the logic of collective action leads todivergent outcomes at the local and nationallevels.

The other main message of this paper is theimportance of understanding the impact ofethnic demography on the incidence of ethnic



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conflict. A striking difference between PapuaNew Guinea and many other multiethnic statesis the extent to which ethnic cleavages findpolitical expression at the local level rather thanas a contest for political hegemony at thenational level. Ethnic conflict is thus typicallyexpressed in the form of local disputes andtribal fighting rather than as a contest for controlof government itself, in contrast to ethnic con-flicts elsewhere. A number of observers haveseen this as a potential attribute for the manage-ment of ethnic group competition when com-pared with post-colonial states in other regionssuch as Africa. For example, Kenyan scholar AliMazrui argued in 1970 that ‘The worst troubleswe have had in Africa have been in countrieswith very big tribes competing with each other. . . . To this extent, one of Papua New Guinea’sgreatest assets may well be its acute ethnicfragmentation. Small ethnic groups may fighteach other, but because there are so many theirconflicts may remain localized. They need notshake the nation to its very foundation, as didthe tensions between big ethnic giants inNigeria, the Congo, Kenya and Uganda’(Mazrui, 1970: 54–55).

The reality of Papua New Guinea’s extraordi-nary ethnic structure is that no group is everlikely to have sufficient support to attempt tocontrol power at the national level, and the oneethno-regional numeric majority that couldconceivably make such a claim – the Highland-ers, who collectively make up close to half ofPapua New Guinea’s population – are probablythe most fragmented and divided of all regionalgroups in Papua New Guinea. Similarly,attempts to mobilise ethno-regional forces inlowland Papua, where there is a relatively highdegree of regional consciousness, have contrib-uted to changes of government, but never at alevel sufficient for Papuans to act as a hege-monic ethnic power. This represents a majoradvantage so far as the continuation of existingform of national regime is concerned, becauseno group ‘is either subject to strong pressure totake exclusive control of the state or capable ofdoing so if it wishes to’ (Regan, 1995: 9).

Although ‘ethnic entrepreneurs’ from thelarger and more conspicuous ethno-regionalgroups make periodic attempts at mobilisingsupport through appeals to pan-ethnic con-sciousness (e.g. Josephine Abaijah’s Papua

Besena separatist movement in the 1970s orIambakey Okuk’s similar attempts to harness aHighlander identity in the early 1980s), nogroup to date has been able, or has seriouslyattempted, to stake a claim for national domi-nation. And, although there has been a notice-able ethno-regional quality to some governingcoalitions in recent parliaments, this alsoappears to rotate, with governments headed bya coastal New Guinean under Michael Somareand islanders under Prime Ministers Julius Chanand Rabbie Namaliu giving way to the supre-macy of Highlanders under Paias Wingti andPapuans under prime ministers Bill Skate andMekere Morauta respectively. Somare returnedto the prime ministership following the 2002elections.

In sum, ethnic violence in Papua NewGuinea remains predominantly a local-levelphenomenon. At the national level, the coun-try’s multiplicity of ethno-linguistic groupsmeans that some degree of inter-ethnic coop-eration and accommodation is usually unavoid-able. Thus, one reason that Papua New Guineahas been able to maintain a system of continu-ous democracy despite a precipitous decline instate capacity is the reality that no group hasanything like the size or potential to overthrowthe incumbent regime. As a result, national-level democracy persists in part through its owninertia, and contemporary politics is, by neces-sity, characterised by the products of this soci-etal diversity – shifting alliances, cross-ethnicbargains and diverse multi-ethnic coalitions –all of which have facilitated the continuity offormal democracy at the national level.8

However, because political leaders mustservice the needs of their tribal constituencyrather than their electorate or the nation as awhole, the collective action dilemma thatafflicts actors at the local level affects govern-ment policy as well. Thus, while helping tosafeguard the continuity of formal democracyat the national level, Papua New Guinea’sextraordinary level of ethnic diversity has alsoundermined the development of a national con-sciousness, and created serious problems ofongoing inter-ethnic competition and conflictthat have undermined prospects for develop-ment and which appear to be increasing as theeconomy declines, the population grows andthe struggle for resources, prestige and power

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become ever more intense. In terms of the‘resources conflict’ theme of this volume, itmust be emphasised that the biggest ‘resource’in Papua New Guinea is the state itself. As such,the most sustained ethnic violence occurs inrelation to access to the state, and to the benefitsin terms of money, jobs, prestige and power thatstate resources can provide.

Notes

1 Personal communication with John Burton, AustralianNational University, 24 December 1996.

2 I discuss this dilemma in more detail in Reilly (2004).3 As Claxton (2000: 268) notes, the cohesion and the

utility of clan and tribal groups tend to increase as theydecrease in size.

4 The term primordialism is usually associated withGeertz (1967). For a discussion of this typology in thescholarly literature, see Esman (1994: 9–16).

5 There is a considerable literature on ethnicity and ethnicidentity. See Young (1976), Brass (1985), Horowitz(1985), Smith (1986), Esman (1994).

6 See ‘PNG: Risk of another Bougainville’, Pacific Maga-zine, August 2004.

7 For more on this, see Reilly (2006).8 For more on this, see Reilly (2000).

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Ethnic conflict in Papua New Guinea

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