Everything everyone gets wrong about Papua New Guinea, Hollywood turns against diamonds, volcano science...

Papuan pap

"No part of Indonesia generates as much distorted reporting as Papua, the western half of New Guinea," International Crisis Group (ICG) said this week.

Papua, which became part of Indonesia in 1969, is one of those elusive lands that fires the Western imagination. It is a place of mystery, acting out a story aflame with indigenous culture, mountainous havens barely touched by outsiders, a distant government that subdues by means of a notorious army - and a rich endowment of minerals, coveted and plundered by voracious international players.

But how much of this story is true - or, more precisely, how extreme the situation actually is - is a tricky question to answer. Does Papua house a desperately abused indigenous people who suffer unspeakable atrocities at the hands of the Indonesian army? Or is there a Western conspiracy to engineer an East Timor-style revolt in Papua to weaken the integrity of the Indonesian nation? Has there been genocide in Papua? Do hardline Muslim militia work with the Indonesian army there, to undermine the local, Christian community?

The answer to most of these questions, in the eyes of the ICG, seems to be "kind of a bit but you're exaggerating somewhat". The common portrayals of Papua are not accurate, it says, but are "extraordinarily difficult to dislodge - particularly because both contain kernels of truth that fuel false assumptions".

Thus: There have been dozens of cases of torture and killing, and there is a human rights problem in Papua - but it's not genocide. There has been a massive influx of non-Papuan Indonesian migrants into Papua, diluting the ethnic population - but much of this today is spontaneous and not part of some deliberate government programme. And there is unjustified and disproportionate violence against local people - but there have also been incidents where locals have been spontaneously vicious towards an inoffensive police or army presence.

Getting the story right matters because "failure to understand the complexities of the Papuan problem not only produces bad policies in Jakarta but can also have severe international consequences, as witnessed by the plummeting of Indonesian-Australian relations in early 2006 over Australia's decision to grant temporary asylum to a group of Papuan political activists," the ICG says.

This report, "Papua: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions", is essential reading if you are trying to understand Papua.

Aisling Irwin
AlertNet Journalist

Diamonds are good for you, whatever Leo says ...

Did you know that an estimated five million people have access to appropriate healthcare in southern Africa thanks to revenue from diamonds?

The World Diamond Council is keen that you know this, posting it as Fact Number 1 on a newly launched website. Among other helpful pieces of information... diamond revenues enable every child in Botswana to receive free education up to the age of 13.

These heart-warming statistics appear on the Diamond Facts website, part of a global multi-million dollar campaign launched by the trade organisation to counteract possible negative publicity from a new Hollywood movie about conflict diamonds.

The upcoming film, The Blood Diamond, stars Leonardo Dicaprio as a South African mercenary (daft accent included by all accounts), chasing around Sierra Leone in search of a priceless rock. Jennifer Connelly pitches in as an idealistic (and predictably gorgeous) American journalist.

The diamond trade is apparently concerned that the ultra-violent flick will divert public attention from industry efforts in recent years to regulate the illegal trade in conflict diamonds, which have been widely used to fund wars, particularly in central and western Africa.

"We were concerned that the movie be told in the historical perspective," Eli Izhakoff, president of the New York-based World Diamond Council, told Reuters. He said the campaign was aimed at showing "that these things are something that happened in the past and since then, the industry, governments and NGOs (non-governmental organisations) have taken care to take care of this problem."

Izhakoff said the situation had changed since a system of certification, the Kimberley Process, was instituted in 2000 and these diamonds - linked to years of horrific human rights abuses - now make up less than one percent of global diamond sales.

NGOs that monitor the trade in blood diamonds, however, are unimpressed, despite the launch in 2003 of an international certification scheme in support of the Kimberley Process designed to keep diamonds from conflict zones out of legitimate trade

"The diamond industry is paying little more than lip-service to the system of self-regulation," said Corinna Gilfillan of Global Witness in a statement in June.

According to Global Witness, which been campaigning on the issue since 1998, elements of the diamond industry continue to trade in illicit stones, funding outfits ranging from African rebel groups to al Qaeda, while the rest of the industry turns a blind eye.

"The industry claims the problem of conflict diamonds has been solved but they've only just launched a full educational programme," said Gilfillan.

Diamonds have come in for further bad publicity in a Grammy-winning song by rapper Kanye West, Diamonds from Sierra Leone, with a video clip featuring a girl's bloodied hand as she slips on a diamond ring.

As for the Blood Diamond film, early internet reviews of test-screenings have welcomed Hollywood's increasing appetite for serious political themes, but critical assessments have been mixed.

"Of course, any movie that has Leonardo DiCaprio killing a baboon with a pocket knife gets a wacky bonus," says one.

She's gonna blow, or is she?

As recent activity on Indonesia's Mount Merapi has again proved, predicting volcanic eruptions is a shaky business.

Volcanology - and its evil twin brother seismology - have both proved remarkably impervious to some surprisingly basic understandings. Accurate predictions of either eruptions or earthquakes remain as rare as hen's teeth.

There are certainly ways to tell that an eruption may be on the way. Different types of measurable tremor can indicate that molten rock, or magma, is rising towards the mouth of the crater. Earthquakes around a volcano - as we saw in Java - are also a sure sign of increased activity.

Yet what made reporting on the Merapi emergency so frustrating was that when all was said and done, scientists simply could not tell which way the volcano was going to go. Locals repeatedly abandoned their homes, fearing a full-scale eruption that persistently failed to materialise, despite dire warnings.

But according to Britain's Guardian newspaper, scientists have concluded that there might be a way of predicting earthquakes by measuring the amount of water in magma.

Having stuck consistently to the bottom of all my school science classes, I would have assumed any water would instantly boil and evaporate away. Not a bit of it, say British researchers.

"What we've done is study little droplets of volcanic liquid that are trapped inside the magma as it rises to the surface," Madeleine Humphreys of Cambridge University was quoted by the Guardian as saying.

By measuring the water and chemical content of these droplets, called melt inclusions, the researchers were reportedly able to tell how the magma was moving underneath the volcano and what condition it was in. Based on studies of Mount St Helens in the U.S. and Shiveluch in Kamchatka, Russia, they found that the more water there was in the magma, the more bubbles were formed, ergo the higher the pressure and the more imminent an eruption.

We'll take their word for it.

Mark Snelling
AlertNet journalist

Any opinions expressed in this newsblog are those of the writer and not of Reuters.