After globalization protest
Three students killed by cops in Papua New Guinea
By Heather
Cottin
Carlo Giuliani was not the first person to be killed by
police in the anti-globalism struggle. On June 26, Papua New
Guinea government police shot three students dead and wounded
17 others who had been protesting against the World Bank and
the International Monetary Fund.
These two institutions imposed a crippling "structural
adjustment" program on the people of Papua New Guinea in
1995. PNG is a land of abundant natural resources and 5
million people in the Pacific that was colonized from 1885
until 1975 by Britain, Germany and then Australia.
Now the big imperialist banks call the shots. They have
forced the privatization of the national airline Air Niugini,
privatized the water supply, and made the government sell the
national electricity system to pay off debts accumulated in
the growing economic crisis of capitalism.
The June protests in Papua New Guinea followed an earlier
demonstration. Students had marched to the army barracks to
support troops who had seized weapons, also in opposition to
World Bank policy. More than 3,000 students, unemployed and
workers in Waigani had been part of a five-day peaceful
sit-in in front of the offices of Prime Minister Mekere
Morauta.
The protesters had presented a petition to the government
demanding the elimination of the IMF and the World Bank from
PNG. They also called for rejection of a plan to sell the PNG
Banking Corporation, the only bank owned by the
government.
The murders and tear-gassing of the protesters took place
after the demonstration had dwindled to just a few hundred
people.
While the Australian government affirmed its total support
for repression by the soldiers and murder of the students,
and reiterated its backing for the PNG's privatization
program, protests have spread across Australia in support of
the murdered PNG students. Solidarity among the
anti-globalists in the region has grown.
Resistance, the anti-globalism movement in Australia,
coordinating widespread opposition to the repression, has
called for an end to privatization, abolition of the World
Trade Organization, IMF and World Bank, and a condemnation of
the violence against the PNG protesters.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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