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There have been calls for the establishment of a separate Hela province for the best part of three decades now, and although such a province has not come to fruition the Somare-led national government evidently is sympathetic to the needs and wishes of the Hela peoples. In May 2003, for instance, The National reported that the current government had promised the people of the Southern Highlands a separate Hela province by 2007 (The National 11 May 2003). More recently it has come to light that the national government, through the Boundaries Commission, will ‘look into the possibility of a separate province for Hela in 2005’ (The National 13 August 2004). This paper will comment on the push for the establishment of a Hela province and on the supplementary election results in the Southern Highlands Province (SHP). It is argued that in recent years the support for a Hela province has waned in many parts of the province and that formation of a Hela province may well exacerbate emergent ethnic conflicts.
Newspaper articles and letters to the editor since independence reveal that the Huli have long dreamed of a separate Huli province. Initially, the calls for a separate province simply focussed on the fact that SHP is a large province with a large population, and that, as such, it warranted being split into two or three separate provinces (Post-Courier 18 April 1978). However, within a very short time the calls for a separate province became synonymous with calls for a separate Huli province.
The early proponents of this movement argued that the formation of a separate Huli province would promote stability and the preservation of Huli culture (Post-Courier 3 May 1978). On 18 May 1978, the Post-Courier reported that local government councils in Koroba, Kopiago, Tari, Komo and Magarima were demonstrating to push for the formation of a separate province ‘to be called the Hela Province’. These demonstrations were followed by formal local government council resolutions rejecting the introduction of provincial government (Post-Courier 3 August 1978),[1] and coincided with public announcements that local government councils in the west of the province were ‘not ready for provincial government in the Southern Highlands Province’ (Post-Courier 30 August 1978). Proponents of the Hela province officially opposed provincial government for the Southern Highlands, arguing that the Tari, Magarima, Koroba, Komo and Lake Kopiago districts lacked economic and educational development — which they did.[2] They sought a separate province and argued that provincial government should be postponed until such time as they had gained the ‘necessary educational qualifications and experience’ required to successfully run a provincial government (Post-Courier 30 August 1978).
Although the movement was not officially endorsed by the Southern Highlands Area Authority, the arguments employed tended to echo those which the Authority had itself employed when opposing self-government and independence several years earlier (see Haley and May, this volume). Individual members of the Authority were certainly sympathetic to the push. Andrew Andaija, the then president of the Southern Highlands Area Authority and later premier of SHP, for instance, was reported as saying that many of the movement’s complaints were genuine (Post-Courier 18 May 1978). He did not, however, wish to see the province ‘break into pieces’, pushing instead for service provision.
By the mid 1980s the push for a Hela province had gained momentum, due in part to the ongoing neglect of the west. This same neglect “served as an essential basis for the development of [a Huli/Hela] social and political identity” (Ballard J.A. 1989:142). In 1986, Andrew Wabiria, the former member for Koroba-Lake Kopiago, presented the prime minister with a petition calling for the recognition of the Hela people across provincial boundaries. The petition was from the recently formed Hela Gimbu Association. It demanded a share of oil royalties, insisted that all labour for development projects be recruited in the Hela area, and called on the national government to provide goods and services ‘or face serious trouble’. Specifically, the petition demanded a road between Tari and the Gulf Province, improved telecommunications, an upgrade of the Tari airstrip, and fully funded health and education services throughout the Hela region (National Times 12 April 1986).
In more recent times, Huli people have called on the national government to split the Southern Highlands in two, because of the continuous armed hold-ups on the Nipa road, frequent roadblocks at Poroma, Magarima and Nipa, and ongoing ethnic conflict between the peoples of the west and the east, which has meant that the peoples in the west of the province have been cut off from Mendi, their provincial headquarters (PNG Gossip Newsletter 6 September 2000). Several of the key candidates in the 2002-2003 national elections took up the call for a Hela province. James Marape, runner-up in the Tari-Pori open electorate, for instance, held a press conference in August 2002 in which he demanded a more equitable distribution of services within the province, noting that if the Hela people continued to be denied essential services then SHP would go the way of Bougainville (Independent 28 August 2002). He and others, including Damien Arabagali, the current chairman of the Hela Gimbu Association, have continued the call for a separate Hela province.