New Army chief believes in aid role

Press, 28 August 1978, Page 7

New Army chief believes in aid role

By

CEDRIC MENTIPLAY

A philosophy which developed out of the close co-operation maintained between New Zealand troops and the embattled Malaysian villagers during the "confrontation” nearly 20 years ago is being extended into a new way of life for New Zealand units in South-East Asia and the Pacific.

This is confirmed by the deputy Chief of General Staff (Brigadier M. Poananga), who on November 15 will become Major-General Poananga, Chief of General Staff — the first Maori to do so.

While a company commander with the Second Battalion, New Zealand Regiment, in what was Major-General Poananga, Poananga realised that the Army had a big part to play in dveloping the community, other than fighting.

In Malaya there was a long border and a dearth of information, specifically about the movements of groups which used to be called “Communist dissidents and infiltrators.”

“We had a long stretch of the border, which it was quite impossible to cover with patrols. In mv time we had two patrolbases, each manned in company-strength, with gunner and mortar support. All of the longnouses in the border area were friendly to us — but information was slow in coming because of the distnaces involved,” he said.

So the New Zealanders picked some key areas and sent in small patrols. Each had a commander, a radio operator (to clear information quickly) and "young fellows who had been on farms and had an ability to look after pigs, and chickens, and fencing and so on. There was

always a ‘medic’ to watch over hygiene.” While in the village the patrols helped develop better systems of farming. They also helped to improve hygiene — even to advising on such matters as latrine-digging. "And we had to have a chap who could play the guitar, to help with the music-making.” So the gaining of information was accelerated and the New Zealand reaction to infiltration improved. At the same time the villagers tended to fight against attempts to move on the patrols. There was a feeling of togetherness between villagers and patrols. “It was against that background that my philosophy developed over the years,” Brigadier Poananga said. “Of course, we had to be very careful. For instance, we could not develop the area we were trying to help beyond the level of its own ability to maintain. Those ' expectations, if they cannot be maintained, only make bigger problems. We had to be careful not to leave a vacuum when we pulled out.”

Subsequently, when he became New Zealand High Commissioner to PapuaNew Guinea (1973-5), Brigadier Poananga was able to direct how New Zealand’s money should be used in aid to it. “These things remained with me. Strangely, at the end of the day, I found that it wasn’t the big projects, like cool stores in Lae or major developments in the highlands that were remembered. It was the small things. “When I came to leave, I remember, the PapuaNew Guinea Minister of Foreign Affairs used

always to talk to visitors about our aid programme — better than anyone else’s,” he said. ‘‘And why? It was because we were doing the things that mattered at the work-face, in the villages, where the i people appreciated it,” he ’ said. The villagers could not | understand the value of : the cool-store, even ‘ though it was far more important than anything I else. It could store a suri plus to be used in times of hardship. The things they remembered were the installation of a New Zea-land-made ram-pump in the village, so that the women no longer had to carry water in four-gallon tins from the river. "These are the things

that matter,” Brigadier Poananga said. “When they talked about aid, it' didn’t seem to matter that the Australians were giving PapuaNew • Guinea something like S2OOM a year in direct aid. That was Government -to-Government ment

money — but New Zealand had given their village a water-pump and had provided tanks for them to store it.”

Today, with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Army is doing what Brigadier Poananga thinks it always should have been doing.

“It seemed nonsense, when I was in Papua-New Guinea, that every time I wanted to put a ram-pump into a village, it would cost us peanuts to produce the pump, but the earth to get it put in. It seemed to me that what we should be doing was to have the Army do the simple engineering jobs.” He believes that the high cost of installation meant that New Zealand aid funds were not being spent effectively. This led him to the view, with which the Chief of General Staff (Major-General R. D. P. Hassett) concurred, that the Army should get more involved in aid-type projects in the South-West Pacific, “even perhaps using somebody else’s money.” Among other reasons for Army involvement, Brigadier Poananga says: “It would give us the opportunity for practising deployments, doing something worth while on the job, getting some area familiarisation and so on.”

The Army started on this concept early this year, on Major-General Hassett’s initiative, in Tonga. New Zealand medical personnel helped in the hospitals, did cholera surveys, put in some water pipes in the villages and looked out for future airstrips. “We then proceeded to deploy through Tonga, two field hospitals,” Brigadier Poananga said. “That gave us something like two and a half moneys’ coverage in Tonga, doing a very useful job — and developing our own training exercise.” That was the first step. “It proved itself as a most effective operation, and'we are now looking, with Foreign Affairs, at a three-year roll-forward programme, in which the countries themselves request aid — Papua-New

Guinea, Fiji, Tonga, the Solomons. Our missions in these and many other places are advising the countries what is available and are asking them to define priorities for assistance.

“From this we can find the sorts of things that we can do which will have the sort of training spinoff that is necessary to our people. So it all goes back to those pig-sties and chicken-coops on the Borneo border,” Brigadier Poananga said. He believes that by far the most important thing he learned in Papua-New Guinea was how New Zealand aid could be best applied. Brain Poananga, aged 53, was just too young to have served in World War 11. Born at Palmerston North, be attended the Royal Military College, Duntroon, and graduated in 1946. He served with 2 N.Z.E.F. in Japan in 194748, and spent a year in Korea, where he was mentioned in dispatches. He was a company commander in Malaya (195961) and late in 1965 was commander of the First Battalion, R.N.Z.I.R. During his command the battalion was on active service in Borneo. He gained a second mention in dispatches. He is a graduate of the United Kingdom Staff College (Camberiey), the Joint Services Staff College (Latimar) and the Royal College of Defence Studies.

Just before his present appointment he was seconded to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, serving as

New Zealand’s first high commissioner in PapuaNew Guinea. During his Army career he has been a noted sportsman, playing both cricket and rugby for representative teams. He was light-heavyweight boxing champion of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force in Japan and has represented the Army at golf. Brigadiar Poananga is married, with two sons and a daughter.