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Date Posted: 14:45:54 01/11/00 Tue
Author: Anonymous
Subject: To D Burdette: Comments re: outsiders assisting PNG development and justice

Date Posted: 22:34:40 01/10/00 Mon
Author: Anonymous
Subject: TO DOUG BURDETTE re your opinions of PNG development

Dear Mr Burdette,
I have read your web site pages regarding Utula Samana, and what you think of PNG and its development. I think you are good intentioned, but suffer from the normal cultural bias that "my way is the best way". May I throw a few red herrings across your trail and see your response? I will use quotations from your web page.

Mr. Samana has a passion for agriculture and even wrote a book about it entitled, "PAPUA NEW GUINEA, WHICH WAY?" Mr Samana as time went on, showed fewer obvious ties both to those beliefs (which are borrowed straight from Julius Nyerere and other African writers) and to his days as a student rebel. In PNG far more so than in america, you only have to look at the size of a man's stomach and get a very good feel for how committed they are to others, versus their own self interest. Each passing year has witnessed an increasingly obese Utula Samana. Compare that with most of our few politicians for whom there is not one single allegation of corruption or unethical behaviour.

Other leaders of our country on rare occasion, have spoken out about wrongdoing. If Samana was wrongly accused, he could sue the newspapers and win. If Samana was the fall guy, he could come out to the press and explain the true story in full detail. He did not. This silence from a former student rebel. It doesn't wash. Some people also willingly lose their jobs rather than fall party to wrong doers. Samana did not resign rather than be tainted. Finally, this is not the first time Samana has been tainted. Do you know anything of his days as Morobe Province Premier?

All that is beside the point of my main difficulty with your perspective. What are these statements about?

"without outside help from foreign missions and individuals you would not have made the progress you have to this point since independence." Here is the progress we have made, sir. Our educational level has collapsed and our infant mortality has increased, all at a time when foreign aid increased, we had more and more logging companies, fishing companies, and mining companies all eager to "help us." I think we would be totally destroyed if we had been so privileged to have more help from outsiders like the help we've already had. We've been raped of our resources, drowned in Coca-Cola and other imports, swamped with missionaries which has eliminated most of the pride our countrymen might have retained over the PNG Way and We Can Do It,PNG. Instead, we have been docile and subservient on outsiders, more with each passing year, because we no longer have that much pride in being able to do things for ourselves, without outside help.

"But for the 80% of the population who are now destitute, to be held down forever by those selfish people who seek power and self wealth is a sin." Sir, where do you get this idea that the 80% not in the formal employment sector are destitute? Where, sir? They have more land per family than the average American family. Many of them are still rich in resources. They are happy. They get most of what they need from the environment around them. In contrast, I look at your country, where people do not have the freedom to work a cash job or not work it. I see a country where so many are trapped in commuting several hours each day which detracts from the quality of their family life. I see a country where your old people are shipped away from family in nursing homes very often, and where you do not even know your neighbour's names in many instances, much less talk to them. The destitute people you talk of, suffer none of these things.

Now let me tell you something about the so-called non destitute 20% of the population who are in the cash economy and make money. The logging and mining companies brought this cash into some rural areas. Go to some of them and see what increase in quality of life that cash brought. That money mostly has gone back again to YOUR country and other developed countries because of all the imported foods people have bought. It has made them lazy to make gardens. Coca cola cans everywhere. Beer bottles everywhere, which is only the surface indication of increased violence and wife beating. That is your cash economy economic development that you want to spread further in our country. Go to the towns and you'll see the same thing, often even worse.

There was one a fish project in PNG supposed, I believe by United Nations or FAO which dumped alien fish into the Sepik so that people would have more protein. The villagers responded to the greater availablity of protein by having more babies, because now they had easy protein. The result has been more pressure on the limited land in this swampy area and definitely not any long term increase in quality of life. Another piece of outside help.

My last commment has to do with your quotation next to the Amet posting by Topaz. The quoatation reads:
"In a true democracy a person must be considered innocent until a proper court of law with a jury of his peers finds him otherwise. It must be remebered that if some one is allowed to falsly accuse another and cause harm to that individual, someday they could do that to you as well"

Well, all that is well an fine in a country such as yours with an established judicial system. However, as you may well know,DNA analysis of a sample of prisoners on death row in your country showed that more than 15% of them were actually innocent. Yet they were convicted anyway. We have a totally opposite situation in PNG now where absolutely no corrupt politician goes to jail, and hardly anyone is even cited by the ombudsman. Our justice system -the one you tell us to rely upon - has totally collapsed insofar as giving any justice and punishing wrongdoing by the leaders. We might be where you were 100 years ago when your vigilantes were going out and hanging people. Please don't put your standards on us. Please don't assume that we can so easily skip the 100 years of experience your society had in dealing with these problems. You did not have a colonial master watching over you 100 years ago telling you how primitive you and your society was. Unfortunately we do.

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