From Rolling Thunder to Reggae: Imagining Squatter Settlements in Papua New Guinea

Abstract

Early in the morning of 4 February 1998 police raided the old, abandoned parliament building in downtown Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. Adjacent to the central business district, where high-rise buildings had mushroomed during the decade, the dilapidated building had in recent years been the subject of calls for preservation as a national monument. Its exterior was crumbling and overgrown with weeds, its interior long since looted of anything indicative of its former dignity. It had become the habitat of squatters, whose presence had provoked complaints from the downtown business community for some time. Now, suddenly, they were evicted, in an operation the police had code-named "Enough Is Enough," though it was never made clear who gave the order. Senior staff at the National Museum, who had been prominent advocates of the building's preservation, denied rumors that they were behind the eviction (PC, 4, 5 Feb 1998). A few days previously the police had raided the Baruni dump, a ru b b i s h tip on the "back road" that connected Port Moresby's northwest suburbs to the downtown area circuitously thro u g h a relatively uninhabited stre t c h of land to the coast west of the city. The "back road" (officially known as Baruni Road; map 1) has long had a reputation for armed holdups and the perpetrators in recent times were popularly said to come from the ranks of the squatters at the dump, who scoured their habitat constantly for materials to build shelters, sell at the roadside, or turn to other subsistence purposes. The police found some stolen vehicles hidden behind the dump, and while the raid on the dump community itself disclosed no stolen property, the stolen vehicles were used as justification for the eviction of the dump squatters and the torching of their makeshift shelters in

Powers of Exclusion in Melanesia

“…In some cases, evictions have only been temporary demonstrations of state power, and settlers have been allowed to reoccupy the land from which they have been removed (Goddard 2001). In other cases, they have been 'compensated' with an allocation of land, and even the promise of formal land titles, in another part of the same town.…”

Civic Insecurity: Law, Order and HIV in Papua New Guinea

“…The raid was conducted in the style often used for raids on urban settlements, which involves a dramatic 'code-name', advance notification to the press, and other high-profile display tactics, all designed to bring to the attention of the public the job the police are doing in maintaining law and order (for a description of such raids, see Goddard 2001). In this case, that public display involved not just a lot of violence, looting and rape at the guesthouse itself, and mass arrests of almost everyone on the premises, but a public parade of those arrested through the streets of Boroko to the police station.…”

Steep Slopes : Music and change in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea

“…There is ample literature in the fields of anthropology and human geography (not to mention the research of statisticians in Papua New Guinea) which addresses the phenomenon of migration (see for example May 1977;Goddard 2001;Umezaki and Ohtsuka 2003). A full discussion of it would be beyond the scope of this research.…”