‘Students breached by-laws’

PAPUA NEW GUINEA – The Chief Secretary to the PNG government, Isaac Lupari, said that according to reports received from the UPNG management, students had breached university by-laws and the Student Representative Council Act by staging their boycott of classes over the past month.

Lupari said the students’ conduct had led to the confrontation with police on Wednesday, despite students’ claims that they were simply planning to march to parliament.

A senior government minister, Ben Micah, said while it was regrettable that they were shot, students didn’t adhere to rules around public demonstrations and that police responded as an operational issue.

“It is regrettable that certain elements in the student leadership, and certain elements at the political level supported the students to do these things that they did,” he said.

“As a leader of the country, I very much regret what has happened. There will be a commission of inquiry and if the police are proven to have acted beyond reasonable force, then those policemen will be dealt with also by the same laws.”

Stopping short of condemning the shootings, Prime Minister Peter O’Neill has admitted that Wednesday’s confrontation “could have been handled better”. In a statement the prime minister said the facts relayed to him about Wednesday’s shootings indicated a small group of students were violent, threw rocks at police and provoked a response.

However, one of O’Neill’s leading supporters in parliament, the Governor of the National Capital Powes Parkop, said that this was not how he understood it.

Parkop felt the use of live ammunition on unarmed students was unacceptable.

The prime minister has suggested the students’ actions were at least partially engineered by the parliamentary opposition.

“The blood of the injured students is on the hands of those members and their supporters,” said O’Neill.

“The criminal elements involved in this incident will further feel the full force of the law for their involvement in what has transpired.”

Civilian unrest appears to be emerging in many parts of Papua New Guinea in the wake of the shooting incident. A section of the vital Highlands Highway in the Eastern Highlands has been shut with protesters converging on the township of Kainantu.

“The crowd has outnumbered law enforcement, backup police arriving from Goroka. The situation is tense and the main highway has been blocked,” aneyewitness said.

Business houses have shut due to the increased threats of looting as more towns in the Highlands are targeted by anti-government protesters.

Kainantu is the latest town in the Highlands region to fall victim to the growing anti-government movement after protesters ran riot yesterday in Mt Hagen in the Western Highlands, destroying private and public property.

Protests, led by high school students and their parents, also surfaced in Wabag in the Enga Province. - PNC sources