The Reluctant Nation

Since the 19th century, when the first European colonists reached New Guinea, the island has had a small but fervent population of cargo cultists. They build mock airstrips on mountaintops and wharves along the seashore in hopes that they will bring the material prosperity enjoyed by the plane-and ship-borne white man. Last week the white man brought to the eastern half of the island* some cargo that a good many cultists might find to be of doubtful value: independence. As Australia's Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and Britain's Prince Charles stood at attention with a crowd of 10,000 in a Port Moresby football stadium, the Australian flag was hauled down for the last time and replaced by the black, red and gold standard of the world's newest nation, Papua New Guinea. Said solemn Michael Somare, 39, a policeman's burly son who is the new Prime Minister: "This is just the beginning. Now we must stand on our own two feet and work harder than ever before."

Bush Pilots. That is an understatement. The football-field ceremony ended more than 90 years of mostly benevolent foreign rule by, in turn, Germany, Britain and Australia. Except for a few years during World War II, when Japanese troops overran much of the island, Australia had governed Papua--the island's southeastern quadrant--since 1906, and adjoining northeastern New Guinea since World War I under League of Nations and U.N. mandates. Prodded initially by the U.N. and by its own dislike of the colonial image, the Whitlam government fairly rushed the reluctant colony into self-rule (in 1973) and now full independence.

In size (181,000 sq. mi.) and population (almost 3 million), Papua New Guinea is roughly equivalent to New Zealand, but there the resemblance ends. The population is scattered among more than 700 tribes, each of which has its own dialect. Most of the people hack out meager livings as subsistence-level farmers in remote rural areas. The country has no railroads and few paved roads, relying for transportation on bush pilots and 476 air strips.

On a social level, the ex-colony's semi-Westernization has left it with some anomalies: tribesmen clad only in "ass grass" (leaves fore and aft hanging from a bark belt) push shopping carts in supermarkets, and spear-carrying warriors in the hills go into their occasional battles with blaring transistor radios strapped to their bodies. On a political level, the latest fad is independence--and not just from Australia. Prime Minister Somare's new government is already plagued by two separatist movements.

One of them, led by forceful Josephine Abaijah, 32, who is the only woman in the 100-member Papua New Guinea Parliament, trumpets independence for the southern region of Papua. A more serious threat to the new nation comes from separatists on the outlying island of Bougainville. Coal-black farmers and miners who disparagingly refer to lighter-skinned mainlanders as "redskins," the Bougainville secessionists argue that their island has stronger ethnic and geographic ties to the nearby Solomons, a British protectorate, than to New Guinea. A break with Bougainville would cripple the new country; the island is the site of Papua New Guinea's one large industrial enterprise, an immense opencut copper mine that last year generated upwards of $120 million in taxes and royalties--fully half the country's internal revenue.

Bear Hug. So far, the separatists have waged only a war of words, and Prime Minister Somare does not seem to be worried by them. A bearded former journalist and teacher who orchestrated his Pangu (Papua and New Guinea Union) Party into leadership of the ruling coalition in the Port Moresby Parliament, Somare often journeys back to his tribal area on the north coast of New Guinea, where he likes to "suck a couple of stubbies [short beers]" with betel-chewing friends on the white beach. A powerful man, he once broke up a brawl in the legislature by bear-hugging one of the combatants into submission.

Somare will need all of his strength to shepherd his country through what promises to be a period of post-independence austerity. Though Australia will continue to aid the new nation with an infusion of some $650 million between 1974 and 1977, its own economic problems have slowed aid this year from an expected $234 million to $182 million.

In the longer run, the country's economic prospects are brighter. International arms of Texaco oil and Kennecott mining, among others, have shown interest in developing the country's rich but largely unexploited natural resources (oil, gas, zinc, gold, silver). Somare hopes to tap other sources in Australia, Japan, Britain, West Germany and the U.S. for additional development capital. Although they now have their independence, the people of Papua New Guinea are not likely to be liberated of their liking for that Western cargo.

* The western half of the island--second largest in the world, after Greenland--is known as Irian Jaya and is now part of Indonesia.

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