By Norm Dixon
The government's Australian International Development Assistance Bureau is training paramilitary police squads in Papua New Guinea for jungle warfare in the highlands and on Bougainville. These police squads have a penchant for using excessive force and burning villages. Australian advisers not only condone such human rights abuses but participate in and take command of operations, some that have more in common with a Rambo movie script than with commonly accepted police duties.
These are some of the revelations made by ABC Radio National's Background Briefing on October 25. Journalists Matthew Brown and Steve McDonell spent three weeks in PNG investigating the activities of the AIDAB advisers. They went on patrol in the highlands with the elite Mobile Squads, or black shirts as they are known in PNG, and their Australian advisers.
The Royal PNG Constabulary Development Project is one of AIDAB's biggest aid projects. Over $30 million has been spent over the last five years "to assist PNG to develop an effective and efficient policing operation with increased capacity to deter and prevent crime", in the words of AIDAB's Port Moresby chief, Richard Kelloway. There are currently 40 Australian police and military advisers involved in the program.
It is run on AIDAB's behalf by private contractors Price Waterhouse. The first five-year phase of the project ends in December; AIDAB is currently considering tenders for the second phase, which will cost $61 million and last until 1997.
Training provided by AIDAB seems far removed from normal police duties. In the highlands, Brown and McDonell witnessed an AIDAB adviser, Captain Tex Howarth from the Australian Army, teaching the police how to attack a village by helicopter. Howarth said, in the presence of the reporters, he was organising an "airborne assault". "They won't know what fuckin' hit 'em", he bragged. Howarth told McDonell he considered the PNG people a "fuckin' hopeless race".
Bougainville
A Mobile Squad member told Background Briefing that after the Bougainville crisis erupted, they began to be trained in jungle warfare and the use and maintenance of military issue weapons. Police trained by the AIDAB later fought on Bougainville.
The squad member was trained to use M-60 heavy machine guns by Howarth. He used this expertise in Bougainville. "Was that in a helicopter?", he was asked. "Yeah, a helicopter given to us by the Australian government", he replied.
Pressed on whether jungle warfare training was occurring, Richard Kelloway admitted that one of the aims of the program was to allow police to fight effectively on Bougainville: "[Howarth's] major function ... was the teaching of survival skills to enable the Mobile Squad to operate in a quasi-military situation in Bougainville ... the military advisers first came to this country to help improve the survivability of the police in preparation for their operation in Bougainville. If you wish to call that jungle warfare, then that is your definition, not mine."
Sergeant Jim Namora, who is Howarth's PNG "counterpart", agreed that operations on Bougainville were central to their training: "That is one of the prime factors [why] 95% of our training involves military subjects. It is best for our guys to hit a target before that target hits back."
A secret AIDAB report, written in June by a project review team and leaked to the Background Briefing reporters, found that the use of the Australian Defence Force officer to train the Mobile Squads for action on Bougainville may be in violation of PNG's constitution. "Well, I'm not a constitutional lawyer", was Kelloway's smug response when quizzed on the matter.
The review document also confirmed that an important component of the police training project was "training for operations on Bougainville" and "training for raids on remote villages".
'Smash down doors'
The presence of Australian advisers has done little to reduce the Mobile Squads' use of excessive force in their dealings with the population of the highlands.
Jim Namora bluntly stated the attitude of PNG's police to civil liberties, views apparently shared by his AIDAB mentors. "In the highlands you have to use force. It is force against force. You go in. Bang! Smash down doors. Getting in and getting the guys who are really the troublemakers and getting out again ... If we can have them arrested, fine. If we can have them shot, terrific. Those guys have to be eliminated. There is no place for them in this society ...
"The AIDAB advisers who came in here, they were saying 'Ah!
Stop, stop! You should not be doing that', but gradually they began to understand the method in which criminals here are apprehended. Sometimes burning of villages is a must."
Brown and McDonell accompanied the Rapid Response Unit, a close relative of the Mobile Squad, on a patrol into PNG's third largest town, Mt Hagan. Its heavily armed members told them that burning homes is a matter of course.
"Sometimes they don't want to give you the names of suspects ...", a Rapid Response Unit officer told the reporters. "They won't tell you where the suspects are, they won't hand over the suspects ... They keep wasting our time ... Here no-one would bother to tell you or give you the suspects until you do some destructions to them and then they will tell you or hand over the suspect."
The Australian advisers understand, the officer said, "so when we do destructions we inform them very quickly that we have done this and this because we couldn't find the suspect".
Who's in charge?
Kelloway insisted that the Australian advisers never carried weapons except for the purpose of instruction. He was emphatic that advisers were not directly in command of PNG police units in the field. Both these claims were contradicted by members of the police units who spoke to Brown and McDonell.
Jim Namora told Brown and McDonell that the advisers carry side-
arms and an AR-15 rifle when they go on night operations with the Mobile Squads.
Background Briefing obtained a copy of a police statement signed by AIDAB adviser Danny Elliot which reveals that last year he drove a PNG police officer in his private car to ambush a well-known rascal gang leader. Elliot shot the leader in the chest and killed him with an AR-15 automatic rifle.
Namora said that the Australian advisers sometimes take command of the police units. Several months ago, during a riot in Mt Hagan, the advisers "physically came out and started shouting orders and giving verbal instructions. They are good leaders." Other police said that advisers often took charge during "bigger riots".
That Australian advisers have been taking command positions was confirmed by the secret AIDAB document.
The report said the "officer-in-charge" of the PNG Criminal Intelligence Unit has been an AIDAB adviser from the
Australian Federal Police. It considered the adviser's leadership position not in the best interests of the unit and one that could lead to a direct conflict of roles.
Kerin: 'Don't know'
Interviewed by Steve McDonell, John Kerin, the minister responsible for the AIDAB project, displayed a remarkable level of ignorance. He was unaware that an Australian Defence Force adviser had been seconded to the PNG police and that this might be in breach of PNG's constitution.
He denied that Australian advisers were at times in command of PNG police operations. Kerin found it "very hard to believe" that Captain Howarth organised airborne raids on villages. He admitted that he had approved the second phase of the project without reading the review document.
Asked about Australians training police in jungle warfare, Kerin, by now clearly uncomfortable, replied: "There's a lot of jungle up there. I honestly don't know any of this that you're talking about."
Steve McDonell told Green Left Weekly that, since the broadcast of the Background Briefing revelations, Kerin and Gareth Evans' attempts at "damage control" had consisted of "deliberate misinformation".
"They say there is no evidence of Australians acting in leadership roles when they know their own report says that they have. They say that Australians are not training explicitly for action on Bougainville when they know their own report says that they are."
In response Evans' claim that Australian aid to PNG's police is needed because of their notorious lack of discipline, McDonell said: "While it is arguable whether it's improving the Royal PNG Constabulary or not, it is certainly a lot of money for something which may not be doing any good whatsoever ... All the people we spoke to said the situation hasn't gotten any better ... [Yet] we're going to spend another $61 million on this project. That builds a lot of schools in PNG, it would provide a lot of health care too."