From about 1990, consultancy work at UPNG received much stronger support from an administration keen to bring income to the university. A new program of company-sponsored social monitoring studies began in mid 1991 at Ok Tedi, focusing on the downstream communities, including those in the Lower Ok Tedi where Yonggom and Awin villagers were taking the brunt of environmental problems after the signing of the Sixth Supplemental Agreement.
The Alice villagers lodged writs in Australia in 1994 and, after two years of legal argument costing an estimated A$20 million, secured an out-of-court settlement with the company comprising various compensation packages worth about A$100 million to the year 2010. The company is committed to a river dredging trial costing A$60 million to the end of 1998 and will adopt further clean-up schemes after this, costed at a further several hundred million dollars.
How then should the spectacular success of the plaintiffs in the law suit be seen? First, it is worth bearing in mind that the litigation could not have been launched in the absence of a law firm prepared to carry its expenses until a settlement had been reached, and to write them off if it lost. The assistance of international NGOs, for example in extending invitations to meetings in Holland, Germany and Canada, was extremely important in helping the two principal actors, Rex Dagi and Alex Maun, reshape and express their ideas in the forms that would be most efficacious in attracting and keeping hold of international attention.
Nevertheless, the key may be that much of their success was due, not to the surmounting of traditional culture—for example, to form wider, stronger neighbourhood alliances or to make use of modern legal tactics—but from its use of traditional culture to resist being suborned by partisan political power and the intense pressure brought to bear on them by their adversaries. At the height of the crisis, for example, the national government passed the Prevention of Foreign Legal Proceedings Act just to outlaw the efforts of Dagi, Maun, and their less well-known associates Moses Oti and Robin Mokin, to seek redress in the courts. Kirsch reveals that the four were members of the same kaget won, or initiation cohort, some twenty years ago, and thus were not susceptible to wavering or division. This was not true of the interest block formed by the affected Alice villages in the course of the political process; a split emerged during the crisis between the east bank Awins and the west bank Yonggoms led by Dagi and Maun. Nor was there ever a rapprochement between the downstream Alice people and the Faiwol and Wopkaimin mine-lease landowners of the Star Mountains, who watched the litigation crisis with only the concern of rentiers concerned that their source of income would be cut off were the mine to close.
How did our social monitoring reports fit in? Could it be that we were instrumental in effecting a turnabout in the handling of the downstream landowners and of compensation claims along the Alice? An internal company document Strategic Plan—Social Issues dating from late 1992 attempted to rank risks to the company’s operations mentioned our program in the following terms: ‘The impact of development on the social structure of the people in the region is currently under study by anthropologists. Ranking—problems arising from the introduction of the new cultures are viewed as presenting a relatively low long-term threat to Ok Tedi [my emphasis]’.
Unfortunately, the rather quaint thought that we were studying the ‘impact of development on the social structure of the people’ failed to reflect the content of our (or anyone else’s) reports. It is not surprising that a low risk assessment was made, given that the organisation lacked the ability to process messages carrying tell-tale warning signs that may have been received from time to time, either from our specialist reports or from the company’s own field officers. A case in point is my re-discovery in 1997 of internal documents showing that a junior staffer had visited the Yonggom village of Dome in late 1988 and had reported to his superiors in detail the petition that later became the basis of the 1994 writs. His report was ‘lost’ to management by becoming buried in internal departmental files.
The signs that we and the key decision-makers did not share the same language and were not able to communicate properly were the least of our worries. We came to realise that one section of company management had hired us to stir another section—asleep at the helm in spite of Bougainville—into action. The first of our results, showing the seriousness of damage to land, crops and bush resources—and the extremely high risk of procrastination—appeared three years before the lawsuit started. Unfortunately, all twelve of our reports were denied to the company’s Community Relations officers from 1991 to 1996 highlighting our overall ineffectiveness. Our creation of knowledge at the behest of the company was politically neutralised by forces within the company that were beyond our reach.
Misconceptions which were beyond our ability to control also sprang up. I remember a question from a senior official asking whether or not enquiries at village level provoked the political activism we were hired to assess and advise the company on. It seemed a common conviction. Logically it betrayed a raft of ill-articulated beliefs (a) that villagers possessed no independent powers of observation (b) that ethnographers are fumbling naifs easily misled by tricksters or, alternatively (c) that they have amazing superpowers enabling them to ‘plant’ misleading information on gullible villagers.
The mining industry was willing to spend money on monitoring of the physical environment but unable to understand and draw up policies for the social environment. In Ok Tedi’s case, company expenditure on environmental monitoring in the decade after the opening of the mine amounted to over K50 million, but barely K0.5 million on social monitoring. This amounts to a spending ratio of about 100:1.
Despite this, some basic answers about the workings of the river system were not forthcoming from the scientific program. Two key examples were its inability to explain the unrelenting decline of fish biomass in the river system, below levels predicted in the studies used by government to authorise riverine tailings discharge; and the faulty computer models that led to the assertion that sediment build-up in the Middle Fly would be negligible, also taken into account in the government’s decision. In the latter case, villagers were adamant in 1994 that the build-up of mine wastes was blocking their canoe passages and lagoon entrances. They were right; a re-study published in 1996 finally showed 2 metres of river bed aggradation, now modelled to rise to 3.5–4.5 metres in future years.