Sir Michael Somare.



MICHAEL Somare, Papua New Guinea's version of ''Lazarus with a triple bypass'', is looking forward to getting back into parliament and actively seeking to jail those who ousted him as prime minister.
Sir Michael said he wanted to deliver a lesson to those who had shown contempt for the Supreme Court, which had ruled that Somare was the legitimate prime minister.
Gesturing to the chest opened up twice by doctors in Singapore last year for life-saving surgery, four-time prime minister Sir Michael, 76, said yesterday he had rejected his family's advice to retire.
  
Instead he wants to redress the insult of his abrupt removal after 43 years in parliament and will probably regain the seat representing his home province of East Sepik in The national elections due to finish on Friday.
Sir Michael was voted to have vacated the prime ministership last August after months away for medical treatment, and then voted out of parliament. Two rulings by the Supreme Court reinstated him, but were rejected by the replacement government of Peter O'Neill - with Deputy Prime Minister Belden Namah storming into the court in May to arrest the chief justice for alleged sedition.
His return to parliament, possibly at the head of a National Alliance group, suggests that months of constitutional turmoil may not be ended by these elections.
Sitting in the waterfront Windjammer Hotel in Wewak, Sir Michael cuts a trim figure, persisting with the trademark Melanesian kilt eschewed by his younger counterparts, and tucking into a robust lunch of hamburger and chips while condemning his usurpers.
Last week he and family members took a motorboat for the two-hour trip to vote in the small village at the mouth of the Sepik River where he spent his early years, part of them under Japanese occupation.
Sir Michael said he had been preparing to retire at these elections, but the way he was expelled was no way to treat a long-standing MP and prime minister. ''Just at a tick of the speaker's pen … I'm out of parliament.''
But he has no ambition to be prime minister again. ''My idea is to get National Alliance and its coalition partners back into government, then say goodbye to them and stay as a backbencher and stay in my province,'' he said.
Overtures had come from camps in the present government, including Mr O'Neill's party, with a view to working together after the election, but Sir Michael says he won't accept them. ''They did a dishonourable thing by me,'' he said. ''They should have waited. They removed me while I was in a hospital bed. That hurt me more than anything else. I can see them as members of parliament, but none of them will be working with me.''
He said the vote to remove him fell far short of the majority required under the constitution and laws, as the Supreme Court had twice ruled.