Bougainville has Economic Capability with cocoa & copra

Leonard Fong Roka

Bougainville is said to be the largest and richest island of the Solomon archipelago. In the dream days, oral history claims that most traditional trade goods from as far as Malaita Island ended up in Bougainville. In fact, this is still a mutual practice today for the divided people, where there is always a presence of traders from all over the southern Solomon in the many popular post conflict Bougainvillean markets.

Divine Word University student, Shallum Tabea at my cocoa dryer in Arawa

 

This is one indicator that, in economic terms, Bougainville has the potential—without a large scale mining project—to be an economic power house to its citizens and its sister islands and people that make up the economically weaker independent state of Solomon Islands.

In Bougainville’s economic history, the year 1989, should be noted as the year that the island economy that was driving the state of Papua New Guinea came to a standstill due to the armed secessionist conflict. This crisis was the outcome of the systematic denial of Bougainville freedom to decision making for its betterment; rather, Bougainville was a slave to aliens that exploited her and gave back nothing tangible in economic terms.

To Bougainville and its people, subsistence economic activity was the mainstay through the pre-colonial days till today. Bougainvilleans live by toiling their customary land; growing food crops and domesticating animals for food are an ongoing art of survival.

However, for the sole benefit of PNG, colonialism introduced mining into the Bougainville psyche. This had many Bougainvilleans to see that a massive export oriented resource extraction industry is the only way for economic progress in most developing countries.

Thus leaders in the ABG and even external advisors want to see the reopening of the Panguna mine as an impact project to kick-start the Bougainville economy.

But what most Bougainvilleans should learn or be taught is the massive scale of resource extraction industries in PNG that has no physical evidence of positive change in the society and people. Everywhere, one travels in PNG towns there is urban decay; porthole infested public roads and streets; fearful squatter settlements and massive unemployment, crime and an Asian takeover of cottage businesses that the Papuans & New Guineans ought to be owners of.

But to the Papua New Guineans, this is positive development or a way to development despite the fact that this is a globalizing world where natural resource exploitation is at an alarming rate out-matching the economic growth rate of PNG that is again, outstripped by the population growth; and not that 17 century when Europe began painstakingly embracing industrialization through step by step growth taking off from simple agriculture.

Bougainville’s future economic success, as every developing state should be, must solely depend on a selfish development of an agricultural base. This is well documented by W.W Rostow’s 1960’s book, The 5 Stages of Economic Growth that emphasizes the significance of an agricultural base to kick-start economic growth and development for developing countries.

That is, the Bougainville government and people should invest into any cash crop that the land of Bougainville can support. And two such crops that had long economic impact on Bougainville are cocoa and copra.

In the 2008 research paper by Ian Scales and Raoul Craemer, Market Chain Development in Peace Building, it was noted that the Solomon island of Bougainville was the major producer of cocoa for the PNG economy.

‘An annual average of about 15 600 tonnes per year was produced in ten years prior to the crisis (1979-1989)’.

The paper noted that productions ceased in 1990 with the spread of the crisis. But from 1997 as peace began gaining momentum, cocoa production rose significantly at an annual average of 11 200 tonnes. This growth by 2006 had reached an average pre-crisis mark of 15 000 tonnes per year. But to Bougainville’s disadvantage this cocoa is recorded as East New Britain cocoa since all buyers of Bougainville cocoa are Rabaul based.

Among the most notable rascals of Bougainville cocoa and even copra are these non-Bougainvillean companies such as Outspan, Garamut and Agmark. They also have local Bougainvillean agents that buy cocoa or copra under their license.

In the same note, also runs Bougainville copra production industry. Before the 1988-89 crisis, copra production on Bougainville ran from 1978-89 at rates well above 20 000 tonnes per annum. In 1990 it dropped but began rising from 1992 to a height of 10 000 tonnes per year with disruptions in 2001-2003 and sadly, all these Bougainville labor and fruit goes to East New Britain province and other PNG provinces.

This is significant revenue for Bougainville if Bougainvilleans can establish local Bougainvillean companies for direct export of their resources to international markets instead of feeding PNG’s East New Britain province and others.

In the same situation also is the Bougainville’s alluvial gold small scale mining industry. Bougainville resources are not benefiting Bougainville but generating income for PNG; Bougainvilleans just labor to exploit their land as it was with the BCL.

According to Martyn Namorong’s 2011 article, Bougainville’s Weak Government Unable to Stop Looting, it is noted that Albert Kinani who is the head of the screening committee of the ABG commerce department as estimating that K300 million worth of gold is leaving Bougainville illicitly.

This figure could be supported by a 2010 story by Satish Chand, Bougainville Bouncing Back that noted a local essayist as smelting 1.5 to 2 kilograms of gold per week. At the price of US$43 per gram this converts to US$ 64 500 to US$ 86 000 valued worth of production per week.

Again this are Bougainville natural resources that are not being generating drastic socio-economic change for Bougainvilleans because Bougainvilleans are not working to take full entrepreneurial ownership of their labor and resources to boost the island’s internal revenue.

With full control of these few but currently major resources for the peoples’ cash income, Bougainville can be sure to develop other still idle agricultural resources that are struggling to develop because the Bougainville leaders don’t want a self-reliant Bougainville by protecting local farmers.

All these problems and myopic politics is the fruit of Bougainville leaders playing Bougainville politics in Papua New Guinea shoes despite the fact that the island had lost 20 000 people under the lethal PNG shoes of politics.

Thus, looking at these few agricultural crops and sustainably exploited non-renewable resources, Bougainville does not really need a massive impact project to kick-start development on the island. But all Bougainville needs is responsible management skills to the people and a visionary political leadership at the government level.

Rio Tinto to get out of Bougainville

by Murray Horton

Rio Tinto, the world’s biggest mining company (which owns Comalco and the Bluff aluminium smelter), is finally facing reality and has announced that it is going to sell its Panguna copper and gold mine, on Bougainville. This unimaginably huge, open cast mine (boasting the world’s biggest hole) was regularly described as the jewel in the crown of this most voracious of mining transnationals. During its years of operation it constituted Papua New Guinea’s single biggest source of revenue, but it was revenue that came at a colossal cost to Bougainville, an island that had a long history of attempting to secede from PNG. Things came to a head in 1989, when a land owners’ armed uprising closed the mine (permanently, as it turned out) and sparked the war of independence that caused so much bloodshed and suffering (mostly caused by the brutal PNG blockade of the island).

Vandalized BCL properties in Panguna, Bougainville

New Zealand played an honourable part in brokering peace talks in the late 1990s and they are ongoing, being on the brink of producing Bougainville as an autonomous province of PNG. The PNG military became re-established on the island (having been completely driven off at the outset) but they, and all other outsiders, including New Zealand’s and other countries’ peacekeeping troops, have never been allowed to get anywhere near Panguna, which remains firmly under the control of Francis Ona, the leader of the original uprising. Ona is still committed to an independent Bougainville (to be renamed Mekamui) and has never been part of the peace process.

Despite having been involuntarily closed down since 1989, Bougainville Copper Ltd (54% Rio Tinto; 19% PNG government; 27% public shareholders) has remained one of PNG’s most profitable companies – it made $A10 million profit in the 2000/01 financial year – despite, or because of, undertaking no other activity. Even if it sells its Bougainville assets, it will retain $A79 million cash. The question arises as to whether it will find a buyer. Presumably it is trusting in the hope that springs eternal in the hearts of fellow mining executives (or should that be greed?). The company has set aside $A14.5 million for compensation to Bougainville land owners – who hold out the possibility that mining might be allowed to resume in several years time, under new ownership. But Rio Tinto itself faces a multi-billion dollar class action suit in the US, over its conduct in Bougainville.

The Panguna mine has been idle since 1989 and, while the millions of dollars worth of mining equipment has been rusting away in the tropical sun and rain, the badly battered surrounding environment has had a chance to partly recover (the operation is so gargantuan that it created its own micro-climate). Elsewhere in the region, other deadly relics of the Bougainville saga are also quietly rusting away. Since the aborted 1997 attempt by the PNG government to win the war using the foreign mercenaries of Sandline International, their seized helicopter gunships have been stored in an Australian Air Force base, in the Northern Territory. Sandline wants to sell them to recoup some of its losses – but assault helicopters are a prohibited export to most countries. So they sit, unmaintained and unsaleable, in a hangar.

The Panguna mine and Rio Tinto brought nothing but grief to the people of Bougainville and Papua New Guinea. The island, the country and the region are well rid of them. And we need to salute the heroic struggle by the Bougainvilleans to rid themselves of this parasite. They have paid a very high price but they are well on their way to the self-determination they have fought for all along.

Retrieved from the link: http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/97/9.htm

Insight into Foreigners’ killing of the Bougainville Psyche & Progress

Leonard Fong Roka

Deprive a people of their ethnicity, their culture, and you deprive them of their sense of direction or purpose—Francis M. Deng

The Solomon archipelago in recent times, encountered two major conflicts and both, in common, had ethnicity and internationally promoted freedom of movement of people in play.

Bougainville identity that need protection (Photo: Ishmael Palipal)

 

In 1988 erupted the Bougainville conflict that was the fruit of long influx of New Guineans since before the WW2 as a result of colonial demarcation and separating the island from its rightful place; then came the Guadalcanal islanders versus the Malaitans down south that resulted because of Malaitans occupation of Guadalcanal customary land around the Solomon Island capital, Honiara recklessly greatly denying the natives to develop as Guadalcanal people.

These are lessons of the past cruelty of not fostering a development approach that man must have harmony with his own environment and humanity and society has to correct this for by ignoring it, it is denying itself from any positive progress.

A man can be progressive in an environment that is conducive and this has something to do with the protection of peoples’ ethnicity.

According to Francis M. Deng (1997), ethnicity is more than skin color or physical characteristics, more than language, song, and dance. It is the embodiment of values, institutions, and patterns of behavior, a composite whole representing a people’s historical experience, aspirations, and world view. Deprive a people of their ethnicity, their culture and you deprive them of their sense of direction or purpose.

This was the issue Bougainvilleans were subjected to by colonialism and later by the PNG government that had then lead into the problems now they are suffering with.

One could argue that the Bougainville conflict was the result of unequal distribution of Panguna mine benefits amongst landowners but that is, a lie of submerging known historical facts that a Bougainvillean should know. The facts that are the roots of the crisis are bounded to the ill treatment of the Bougainvillean man and women by colonialism and much later, the Papua New Guineans and their government.

Psychology and other sciences claim that a man’s characteristics are the work of his environment. That is, a Bougainvillean is a real Bougainvillean in a Bougainville that is free from foreign influences. Without Papua New Guinean laborers in Bougainvillean plantations from the early colonial era and, without the influx of Papua New Guineans seeking fortune in Bougainville with the Panguna mine then creating turmoil for the native’s psyche, Bougainville would have been a ‘nation’ in the bliss of glory in the Pacific.

But that right of a ‘nation state’ was denied for the Solomon people by the Anglo-German Declaration of 1886. A Raspal S. Khosa noted in his 1992 thesis to the University of Adelaide that:

‘The Anglo-German Declaration of 1886 halved the Solomon Island archipelago. The boundary in this area underwent a significant change in subsequent decades’.

For a period of time, the Bougainville people were thrown here and there; screened and scaled as cheap commodities to the liking of colonial greed and interest. The divine psyche of the people was given a negative whipping and gradual disintegration by the master European race.

But history did see that Bougainvilleans still were prophets defending their identity. They demonstrated fearlessly to preserve their divine rights against cultural genocide and so on but, the greed and self-centered state of PNG could not allow these rights despite it being a UN member that equips itself with such things as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment on the Crime of Genocide (1948).

This convention stood against factors that Bougainvilleans were facing under the rule of PNG. The factors as listed by Divine Word University’s Dr. Jerry Semos, are: issues of [all forms of] genocide and human rights violations—cultural, social, political, economic and physical annihilation of peoples, cultures, languages and identity.

PNG was enjoying its efforts to turn Bougainvilleans into nobodies in their own land since 1975 through its legal indoctrination of the Bougainvillean conscience. PNG allowed its non-Bougainvillean citizens to built illegal squatter settlements on the Solomon land; PNG did not bother to give more BCL benefits to the land that was creating it a 40% export earnings per annum and did not bother to give the highest form of autonomy but, gave them a puppet provincial system; yet the government knew Bougainvilleans had protested against it before its very independence.

PNG politics had a myopic ambition to create a country on the Melanesian identity and calling it a ‘nation’ when in fact PNG is not a ‘nation state’ when Bougainville is included; without Bougainville, there are many reasons Papuans & New Guineans can call themselves, a ‘nation’.

 But Papua New Guinea with all its state mechanisms, especially the education system, continued to ignore Bougainvilleans as Solomon islanders. In every educational literature in high schools to the primary school, there is not an upfront declaration of Bougainvilleans as Solomon people. The outcome of this is a Bougainvillean puppet that classifies himself or herself as a person from the New Guinea Islands (NGI) region.

The PNG state should be seeing itself as bicycle rim that is supported by a dozen spokes that then strengthens the tyre to carry the weight that is the country. In order for the rim to withstand the pressures, the spokes are to be independent entities that unite to create the wheel that carries the bicycle. But leaders in PNG lacked the vision to keep PNG going.

So, one of the spokes, that is Bougainville, had not seen a conducive ground for its survival as an independent and respected stakeholder in PNG so came the Bougainville crisis to free itself from silent and slow death.

Augustine Karuvi: An Epic Journey of a Bougainville Rebel

Leonard Fong Roka

We started the civil war that killed thousands and it is us that must now lead the younger generation to attain a better life in a Bougainville that is free from all forms of suppression and exploitation-LFR

In 1988, the young men who initiated the anti-Bougainville Copper Limited and Papua New Guinea militancy in part of Central Bougainville, were mostly the men who had hardly reached the high school level in education. A good number of these men were often involved in criminal activities thus when an activity so resembling their life erupted in Panguna, they were all there.

And one such youngster was Augustine Karuvi of Koiano in the Kokoda (Koiano, Koromira and Dangtanai) constituency of Kieta. But, Karuvi’s tale is different because he was a student who decided to walk out of the classrooms to join the fight.

Br. Augustine Karuvi OP

 

The young Augustine Karuvi left school in 1989 to fight in a conflict that the end was so blurred at the age of 17. Then, his area which was referred to as Koromira, was a safe haven of some of the pre-crisis know rascals thus with them he was into the fight.

But his fighting career was halted by the 1990 cease fire between the PNG security forces and the militants.  He returned to attend school in 1991, then, operated by the weakening North Solomons provincial administration that lasted for only 1991 and ceased in early 1992 (not all schools did this but only a handful that had concerned teachers).

Within 1991 the reckless Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) arrogance of those days caught up with his extended family. In his family he had a cousin serving in the Papua New Guinea Defence Force and was not at home so to the BRA they claimed the family was still communicating with him.

Augustine was tortured alongside some of his male family members.

In that same period, his next cousin, a defected police Officer, Joseph Miarama Kasika was killed by locals in a BRA operation at Rotokas in Wakunai when he arrived in a scene where a band of BRA men before his party stirred trouble with the locals.

Augustine was a lost youngster for there was no hope; he was trapped. Then in 1992, the Papua New Guinea Defense Force landed at his home, the Toimanapu plantation. To Augustine, the PNGDF captured this location as strategic position to try and quell the BRA boats that darted into the Solomon’s Choiseul province for humanitarian help in the midst of the Australia-backed total blockade of Bougainville.

With this event and out of loyalty to the Bougainville cause, he joined the BRA group of his home, Koiano.

His first action in the BRA was at the Toimanapu PNGDF camp. This camp hosted some local families who surrendered in pursued of medical assistance. This operation saw an early dawn raid on the PNGDF and it resulted on the death of one popular BRA fighter from the Kongara area, Eperi.

After many other operations, his next major engagement was in the Papua New Guinea’s operation to clear Bougainville from all rebel areas and code named as High Speed Operation especially popular around 1996.

Augustine was at the former Aropa International airport defending his land from invaders in an engagement that took nearly a week till the PNGDF were driven back to Arawa where they came from and caused the death of two Bougainvilleans—a BRA man and an innocent fishing Kongara child.

To Augustine witnessing the lost of child that had a long future was damning. He says: ‘Truly I was fighting a genuine cause for my island and people. We were victims of ill treatment of our home by foreigners that did not respect us’.

The kid came to fish in the Aropa before the fighting began. As the exchange of gunfire began, terser bullets (bullets that explode several times after living the gun barrel) fired by the PNGDF confused him by exploding upstream so he darted downstream and was captured by the enemy.

His body was retrieved by Augustine and four other BRA men a day later buried with his hands tied behind his back. He was tortured to death and sustained broken bones and knife wounds but no familiar bullet wounds.

After this incident, Augustine calmed himself and remained fighting the PNGDF till they withdrew unable to face the determined BRA fighting power. For example, one of their hope of success, a Australia donated armored vehicle also was nearly put out of action thus they were demoralized. 

As the BRA was gearing for a massive final assault, scouts reported that the invaders were not being detected. Augustine was relieved to go home without seeing more blood.

But in the BRA rush to scavenge where the PNGDF was positioned, a booby trap exploded and killed another of his comrade, Nathan Matebai who was also another BRA legend of the late 1990s.

Exhausted by the Aropa operation he went straight for another attack on Toimanapu without visiting his family in the hideouts in the jungles of Koiano.

He was engaged to the PNGDF for a week, once more.

This fight, once again at his home area, was ignited on a Friday. ‘We engaged the PNGDF with care to let them waste their Australian ammunition and when it felt like they were done we could move in and slaughter them,’ he recalls. ‘But things really went not the way we wanted’.

As planned, their random gunfire at the Toimanapu encampment flowed smoothly into a Saturday.

On the next morning, a Sunday, it was Augustine’s group’s turn to disturb the enemy. They engaged the PNGDF and exchange fire. With a partner, some fifty meters away from the PNGDF line, Augustine and his friend were struggling to figure out a machine gunner when the reckless firing of the PNGDF man caught his friend. He died instantly and Augustine called a BRA soldier from the Buka Island and they moved the death to safety.

Early the next morning, the PNGDF wounded BRA general commander, Ishmael Toroama and the operation to flush out the invaders from his home was called off.

Augustine Karuvi feels great that he had contributed to resist his island’s subjugation and exploitation by foreigners despite the many negative aspects of the Bougainville crisis we have created and more must be done for Bougainvilleans to be free.

With this in his heart, in 1997 when his enemies, the PNGDF were withdrawing from parts of central Bougainville, he went on to attend Arawa High School and continued on to Bishop Wade Secondary school. From here he enrolled at the East New Britain Business Studies in Rabaul and in 2005 was employed by a local company in Arawa.

From 2006 he joined the Dominican Order of the Catholic Church to become a priest.  In 2007 he was posted in the Gizo Diocese Western Province of Solomon Islands and his posting was completed in 2009.

One significance of his Gizo posting was his going home to Koiano direct by neglecting PNG and international rules of sovereignty.  

‘For all those times,’ he laughs, ‘I took a boat from Gizo and went straight home instead of wasting time going to Port Moresby and to Buka. This is my home islands and it is one of the many reasons many Bougainvilleans died as we tried to regain our rights as Solomon Islanders’.

Augustine and his family were originally from the northern Choiseul Island of the Solomon Islands and were new comers into Central Bougainville just before colonialism.

Many a times the PNG High Commission at Honiara warned him but he ignored that.

From 2010 2011 he was at Bomana Catholic Theological Institute and now he is a ordained Dominican brother in the Order of Preachers (OP) and had just completed the course, English Language Arts at the Divine Word University to venture more into his learning of becoming a good Bougainvillean.

To him, Bougainville’s future depends on the new comers and their sacrifice to be educated despite the fact that they are over the required age of sitting in the classrooms and often they are laughed at by those that did not see the impact of the Bougainville civil war. But we have to cuddle our traditional values and the cruelty of history and make a new free Bougainville for our future generations.

 

Two Years in the Hell of Madang

Leonard Fong Roka

After all the years in the comfort and freedom of my Solomon Island of Bougainville, at the cool age of 31, I left Bougainville on the 03 of February 2011 by ship, MV Solomon Queen to be educated by Divine Word University.

At 7 PM on the night of 06 February 2011, strained weak by the journey through the tempestuous seas and over the land of New Guinea I did walk through the boom gates of Divine Word University proudly that now I was a university student.

From a non-school leaver self-sponsored student in 2011 I secured a place in the government backed list of students categorized as the HECAS student in 2012.

Yah, it’s cool! But to me, I just don’t like the culture in this university. To me Bougainville is freedom and life. I love it; I mean, Bougainville.

Divine Word University to me, as being hell to my social welfare and life; one could wonder why, is has this shit being going on with me. But the tale is too long!

A student boozer sleeping

 

One Papua New Guinean poet, Jack Lahui wrote a poem titled, The Dark Side of a Niuginian’s Teeth that shows what I am trying to say here. The poetry line reads: ‘I am a Niuginian and this happens to be my age of pretentiousness…’

The lawns of Divine Word University and its student populace, exactly is what this line of Jack Lahui’s poetry talks about. We are liars and cheats! In the midst of the so-called intellectuals of PNG in the making, I live with rascals, cowards, dastards and you name it. They are all here within the perimeters of this university and it is not a majority, but a minor bunch of irresponsible brains.

To this, I could say that the future of PNG is still dirty. I think, these students, without realizing it, are fighting to keep the status quo going.

In 2011, students had a strike for the lack of safety inside the university campus. In fact, the security threat and attack on students came about because of students’ recklessness when boozing in the squatter settlements that surrounds the university itself. You know, an ant does not sting unless you threaten its livelihood.

We pestered the DWU administration to do this and that without acknowledging that by far it is us the student are catalyst of the public ill feeling towards us.

To this culture of having dirt on our eyes and trying to clean up another’s problems, I had suffered. We see thieves outside and keep our wolves-under-sheep-coating to grow fat every day.

To these dogs, we feed; I lost a shirt and computer mouse in June 2011 followed on by a pick of K200.00 cash. To me this was a shock, a shock because as a Bougainvillean just coming out of civil war I see New Guineans as running ahead of my island in economic and social terms. Worst, I was robbed in a Catholic run school.

Me and my lost camera

 

But 2012 has shown me that New Guineans in general are too poor so that is why they robbed me, a Bougainvillean.

Over the course of this year, I had lost a K900.00 and two K200.00 mobile phones; with them went a K100 Digicel modem, some cash, my DWI ID Card and BSP banking card all in the midst of Divine Word University students, the great intellectuals of Papua New Guinea who every day fill the DWU chapel every Sunday and sing like saints.

It’s not my problem but I need to express my side of this hell.

Beside this, I irresponsibility is another issue. The so praised DWU intellectuals never want to respect university policies or our student leaders.

Simple latrine rules are ignored before my eyes; littering is like rain in our dorms. We have a lawn that is beautified by patches of white disposals from the rooms. But, the moment a great man like the prime minister is to be landing on our soil, I do get shocks that our lawns are so green; pure green! That is pretentiousness! The same thing our Waigani leaders do by resisting external comments when told by Australia and so on that PNG need to get rid of corruption.

One of the doors without hinges in our dorm

 

Respect of authority is absolutely lacking. Students just ignore the school’s zero tolerance to alcohol and turn our dorms into boozing night clubs. I just feign to enjoy it with a weeping heart.

Students here are also good to be classified as accessories after the fact if the law enforcement of this university is effective. Any student can break the rules like destroy property but his fellow friends will never report that to relevant school authority. This is wantok system at work!

It is a common sight where you see doors without doors. Doors are there but they are not attached to timber with a hinges.

In our midst there are also student leaders with big mouths but empty heads to navigate their course in a firm political base of justice.

One such acting-leader that is so vocal in challenging the DWU administration with student issues stoned our new dorms because—may be—he was fired in a meeting somewhere. I watched him dancing in joy when his stones penetrated the fibro walling and window louvers went off. But not a soul reported this prick yet a fellow Bougainvillean student this year was terminated for breaking a fibro wall in the senior cottages.

This new dorm was stoned by a big-mouthed student that has not being reported

 

Anywhere, this is PNG and its ways; ways so celebrated by the late Bernard Narakobi, if I report the New Guineans will eradicate me because I am a BRA rebel.

Yet to this, I had one swine that as threaten me and my learning and now my New Guinean DWU enemy. He acts tough because I am not standing here on Bougainville soil. But, I pray he must arrive in Bougainville and I will give him a taste of what his New Guinea has given us all through our history. I will just eradicate him.

But cool I am here and so thus I keep silent and wonder what this peoples’ future is.

 

Nigel Matte Lalai & the Bougainville Crisis

Leonard Fong Roka

The said Bougainville conflict affected us in different ways and at different times as we grew up in the midst of the violence and bloodshed. And here I had a short gossip with first year Business Studies Divine Word University student Nigel Matte Lalai from Buka and Kieta.

Nigel Matte Lalai was born during the peak of the first phase of the Bougainville crisis at Arawa in May 1989 whilst homes were being torched and Bougainvilleans from a few villages and New Guinean laborers from plantations and squatter settlements were being rounded by the North Solomons Provincial Government into care centers around Central Bougainville.

Nigel Matte Lalai

 

Four months after his birth, his dad was killed by the Papua New Guinea Defense Force and dumped at the beaches of Kivirai near the Aropa International Airport. Without the love of his blood father, Nigel Matte Lalai yet, made it through the crisis and this far into the Divine Word University.

According to Nigel, his father, Kevin Lalai was from the Torauan village of Vito in Kieta and was aged 24 when he was killed. His father courted his mother, Delphin Matte from Gogohe on the east coast of Buka Island and a 1988 graduate from Kaindi Teachers College in East Sepik in a short period of time and they got married.

Then, the new couple’s long life of love was cut short in late 1989.

Nigel re-collects his mother’s stories, ‘My father and his siblings of Vito were often so involved in many village conflicts over land issues and other social problems. This led to some of their family’s foes into reporting his father falsely as a Panguna militant’s informant whilst he was working with a catering company so he was picked up by the PNGDF and killed’.

The late Kevin Lalai was an employee to the Bougainville Copper Limited (BCL) contracted catering company, SHRM Limited. And by then, he had no interest what-so-ever about the militant activities in Panguna but was occupied with the welfare of his wife and the new born son, Nigel Lalai.

Whilst on duty at the BCL’s lime stone mine at Manetai, Nigel’s father was picked by a PNGDF’s BCL vehicle that drove purposefully in, from the direction of Arawa. There, they forcefully dragged him out of his work place and loaded him onto the pick-up with a few punches then drove him away as he shed a stream of tears of innocence and lost.

As his wife, Delphin and his extended family members were in shock at their Vito village, that same night of 1989, Nigel’s father was undergoing torture on the trailer of a PNGDF truck from Arawa towards Aropa in the middle of the night.

And it was at the Kivirai village, near Aropa, that Kevin Lalai’s wailing of agony was noted by the sleeping villagers sprouting off from a slowly passing convoy of PNGDF vehicles.

The curious villagers carefully watched the vehicles as they passed and went out of sight. But they were captivated when the moving headlights died indicating the convoy had come to a halt. Later the next morning, they went to investigate, and there a body of a Bougainvillean was washed up on the beach with deep knife wounds to its chest. They called the Arawa General Hospital and an ambulance took him to Arawa.

On the day of retrieving the body from the morgue, his old agonized mother scooped blood off her son’s body and rubbed it all over her face as she hysterically wailed and was beginning to sip that blood as she was held back by other sympathetic relatives (a story also shared by late Kevin Lalai’s elder sister Marceline Tunim in Liz Thompson film documentary, Breaking Bows & Arrows).

This tragedy of an innocent sibling, took the elder brother of Kevin Lalai, an auto-mechanic and naturally an aggressive character, Justin Kokiai into the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) rank & file.

Justin Kokiai married his late brother’s widow, Delphin Matte and took responsibility of Nigel Lalai up-bringing.

In the BRA profile of the Kieta area of Bougainville, Nigel Lalai’s step father and biological father to his 4 siblings, Justin Kokiai is noted as one of the only BRA leader that did maintained a cordial relationship with the pro-PNGDF Bougainville Resistant Forces (BRF) of the Torau area in Kieta.

From the BRF, Justin Kokiai took a constant supply of ammunition and a number of PNGDF issued high-powered weapons to wage war on the PNGDF until the Bougainville Peace Process came in. To the peace process, he played a significant role in the initial stages of peace negotiations as a BRA commander and also in the weapons containment efforts.

But leadership outside the family and leadership within the family are two different skills and so often do fail to come parallel or unite for Justin Kokiai.

And to Nigel Lalai his step-father was a hard-to-tame person in managing ethics in the family circle. As it is a norm to many BRA big men, he had gone reckless. He was always engaged to a wild rage of extra-marital affair life, boozing and domestic violence, thus Nigel and his siblings were there growing in an abusive environment.

But Nigel’s mother Delphin was designed by all these nightmares to be a woman that nothing can ever let her down to manage a family with pride. As a classroom teacher in many schools in Bougainville she remained steadfast and at ease, her mind. She managed her family alone when the father was out running after beer and women whom Delphin has so many times physically confronted with rage.

Nigel grew up watching all the social dirt and slowly, along with his second born brother, began to grow hatred for their father. They even planned to kill him silently for all the bad treatment he was doing to his wife—their mother—daily.

Slowly, their father also saw how his step-son was growing with his blood sons, and so began to conceal his store of guns from their reach and gradually also change is social position at home. He knew he had created a risk for his life because all his children had grew up in the gun-culture and so knew how to squeeze the trigger.

So, slowly he was moving towards the finer shores, when in 2004 he was killed near the Manetai Primary School where his wife was teaching after a drinking brawl.

Nigel Lalai was again in the midst of a traumatic shock. But a mother, so endowed with courage after a long history of nightmares, was always behind him and now he has just completed his first year of studies at Divine Word University.

His dream is to go back after graduating to help Bougainville gain peace and work towards independence that many of his loved ones had died for across the island.

Ballad of the Melanesian Way

Waves hissed as the moon replenished the gaggle of the night

From the womb came the pinnacle of Melanesia; the

Dancing torch in the murkiness of westernization. As we strip…

He moans: ‘Come back my Melanesia…O,

My Melanesian Way’

 

‘O spirit of the forefathers and the bush and the islands,

Free thy sons and daughters succumb to blasphemy of Melanesia’ He inks in tears…

‘O my naked Melanesian land, sea and brothers,

 See the infiltration from your ancestor’s dream ways

And there shall be light onto the nation’s path’

 

‘Come back…come wear the lei of Melanesia, O sons and daughters

Come write in your heart a Melanesian song so pellucid to you

And walk the foreign lands with dignity of Melanesia.

For in Melanesian dreams you see light to your path

O Melanesian sons…adorn your hearts with Melanesian dreams

O Melanesia…

The Melanesian Way.

 

NOTE

Melanesia today is being swiftly sucked into the ever aggressive torrents of westernization. Society neglects his fountains of existence and run, unstable, to the sweetness of strange foreign magic systemayically driving Melanesia into a deep pit of shit that is hard to understand by the 'giver' himself and the 'recipient' too.

So, our age is an age of pretentions!

 

Eight 2012 Crocodile Prize Pictures

I have a dream and I am running after it at all cost. I am following it closely to improve the craft I am loving so much.

I attended this year (2012) PNG Society of Writers, Editors and Publishers in Port Moresby to meet and listen to PNG and Australian established authors and listen to their inspirational words so that I can improve in my writing.

This great competition is so supported by the Australian High Commission and not PNG government.

Australian High Commissioner to PNG, His Excellency Ian Kemish & Simbu novelist Francis Nii at the Crocodile Prize



Australia so supports this event that is promoting PNG writers and their works thus it is the High Commission that hosts it since 2011.

The PNG Society of Writers, Editors and Publishers new executive that we voted for through electronic whilst those of us who were at Port Moresby cast a ballot.

PNG old man of literature and author, Russell Soaba giving a discourse to young writers from his experience

So attentive young writers listen to another presenter

Australian novelist Drusillla Modjeska who launched her novel 'The Mountain' at the Crocodile Prize; PNG writer Regina Dorum (centre) and PNG Society of Writers, Editors and Publishers president, Amanda Donigi

(From right) Novelist Francis Nii, myself, author Kela Kapkora Sil Bolkin (behind me), Bernard Yegiora and David Gonol

One popular figure was the man in blue, Sir Rabbie Namaliu and seated is PNG's wheel-chair bound author Francis Nii with his copy of the Australian novel, The Mountain

A lunch with a writing family that I am missing greatly

 

 

All photo credits to fella writer Jimmy Drekore

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bougainville Revolutionary Army was the Root of Civil Conflict

Leonard Fong Roka

Starting from October 1992 I was a kid roaming around parts of Kieta and Bana District in South Bougainville with a BRA ‘A’ Company body-guard unit attached to my relative, the late ABG President Joseph Kabui then the vice president of the Bougainville Interim Government (BIG). I partook in no armed operation except escorts to my leader and one assault on an innocent Bougainvillean in Bana as I see it today.

 

But, despite the fact my New Guinean father was killed by the BRA in 1993, I still consider myself a Bougainvillean nationalist because of the awareness I have for the ill treatment of my Solomon Island of Bougainville by colonialism and later by Papua New Guinea, especially through the mine on my land.

As Panguna people, we did spark off a conflict that saved Bougainville from brutality of the Bougainville Copper Limited, the Papua New Guineans and the squatter settlements (I carry a scar caused by kids at the Arawa’s Morobe Camp in 1988 on my face). But it was not our fight; it was a struggle for self-determination started off by so-called cargo cult movements like the Hahalis Welfare Society and many others across Bougainville earlier in the 1950s.

These were groups condemned publicly but silently assisted by Catholic missionaries and a few expatriate planters of cocoa and coconut as they demonstrated against ‘rascals’ on our island without violence.

Engaging the barrel of the gun to the long cry, we did the old so proud in 1988 by having the ‘rascals’ packing out of our beloved island in fear and pain. Thus, by then did they realize the fact they were ‘rascals’ in Solomon exploiting and suppressing a people that they are not related to.

In that fight we created the Bougainville Revolutionary Army. I know this name quaked the Pacific and even our rulers the Papua New Guineans or Ivitu, as we know them in Buin.

But the question is: Why did we turn on each other? This is the question that must be answered today so that we take Bougainville in the right track.

In 1990, I was a Grade 4 student at Kaperia Community School in Arawa, when the first ceasefire was signed by Sam Kauona (BRA) and Leo Nuia (PNG) known as the ‘Butcher of Bougainville’. All the BRA men were stationed at Panguna. Law and order was observed for a month within Panguna with the late Francis Ona as the supreme head.

But as these men got out of this cage, they did harm to businesses in Arawa by looting them calling themselves as redeemers of Bougainville. I once after school, encountered two BRA men reluctantly wearing shoes without paying for it saying to the cashiers, ‘we have suffered in the bush fighting for you’ in a store known then as the Haus Bilas.

To the late Francis Ona and his followers, closing down the Panguna mine was the bliss that blinded them. Keeping order and governing Bougainville was neglected. Thus, the BRA recklessness grew and spread.

The BRA men, majority of who were illiterate, went astray grabbing private and ex-BCL property; looted shops and exploited women often with the gun. These unorganized BRA bands falsely accused innocent people of being PNG spies and tortured them. Others, were accused of sorcery and killed.

The politically incompetent late Francis Ona was nowhere to be seen or heard in this anarchy created under his name. BRA’s ill treatment of innocent Bougainvilleans was executed under the ‘standing orders’ of Francis Ona as I was hearing. But this was a lie since I heard later that Francis Ona was not aware of any so call ‘standing orders’ and he was not responsible for the suffering endured by Bougainvilleans.

But it was said that ‘who ever that cause harm to a fellow Bougainvillean was responsible to it’ for our fight, was solely aimed at our foe, the Papua New Guineans.

But, that’s it. The BRA was a name posed externally as a body with a central command fighting for Bougainville freedom when in fact, it was tag that hosted dozens of independent individuals or bands of men who operated at own will across Bougainville.

To many of these BRA men, then, Buka was a strange place with beautiful women and unarmed men. So, with their new-found privileges they frequented Buka in new ex-BCL or robbed vehicles exploiting women and terrorizing the peace in this part of Bougainville and this lead to the Buka leaders like Sam Tulo, to re-invite the PNG government into Buka in 1990 and the creation of the Buka Liberation Force (BLF) that fought on behave of the PNGDF that had mostly coward soldiers trained by Australia (BLF men claims) after an agreement signed in the New Ireland province of PNG.

The BRA response to this was: ‘The Bukas have sold off our island to foreigners’ instead of admitting that it was they who were dividing the people of Bougainville with their irresponsibility and recklessness based on their lack of political know-how (Joseph Kabui was politically capable then, but the ruler then was the barrel of the gun and Francis Ona) .

In South Bougainville, Siwai District, responded to this BRA-BIG insanity through its creative leader, the late Anthony Anugu and few others. They created the South Bougainville Interim Authority (SBIA) to the shock of the sick BRA and BIG to try and provide services to the people who now had no leader to guide them.

But, the kind and valuable leaders were betrayed by Siwai BRA lunatics and killed in early 1992 in Panguna.

Thus, today it is the BRA that ought to re-evaluate its irresponsibility of the past and lead Bougainville in the right direction instead of sitting down and waiting for miracles and creating fear in the hearts and minds of my people on Bougainville.

LOOK BACK: Bougainville rebels prepare for mercenaries

Wednesday, March 12, 1997 - 11:00

By Norm Dixon

Fighters of the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) are on "red alert" in preparation for attacks by South African mercenaries hired by the Papua New Guinea government. The pro-independence Bougainville Interim Government has reported that the mercenaries have already been involved in skirmishes at several locations.

PNG Prime Minister, Sir Julius Chan, 'Bougainvilleans had no right to their island'

 

Mercenaries were spotted on February 28 and March 1, conducting reconnaissance flights over Bougainville in two Iroquois combat helicopters donated to the PNG Defence Force by the Hawke Labor government.

BIG Australian spokesperson Moses Havini reported that on March 1, grenade launchers were fired at villages below. Radio Australia reported on March 3 that the missions involved at least four operatives of Sandline International, the British company linked to the South African-based Executive Outcomes mercenary outfit.

On March 3, PNGDF soldiers led by mercenaries fired three mortar rounds near the Bougainville capital, Arawa. Villagers report that PNGDF soldiers, led by mercenaries, have taken up positions 25 km from the abandoned RTZ-CRA copper mine at Panguna.

In response, BIG President Francis Ona warned that mercenaries would be shot on sight. According to Bishop John Zale, a BIG representative in the Solomon Islands, BRA fighters are not intimidated by the threat of mercenary intervention.

The firepower at the mercenaries' disposal does not worry the BIG, Zale told the Melbourne Age on March 2: "Back in the days when all this started, the BRA had only bows and arrows. Then they managed to capture some weapons and learned how to use them. But while the PNG forces were always better equipped and trained, our boys have always beaten them."

Opposition is mounting in PNG to Prime Minister Sir Julius Chan's escalation of the war. The Individual and Community Rights Advocacy Forum (ICRAF), one PNG's main NGO bodies, is to sponsor a constitutional challenge to the hiring of mercenaries.

ICRAF director Powes Parkop told Chan in a letter, "Any decision to hunt down and kill hardcore BRA leaders or members or, for that matter, anyone on Papua New Guinea, would be in breach of the Constitution ..."

A similar challenge is being prepared by opposition politician Rimbink Pato. The government of the Solomon Islands has threatened to take a case to the International Court of Justice.

John Momis, the member of parliament who nominally represents Bougainville, said he was "flabbergasted" by Chan's hiring of mercenaries. It could only result in all Bougainvilleans uniting against the PNG government, he warned. The Port Moresby-appointed Bougainville Transitional Government also expressed reservations.

A group of nine MPs, led by former PM Sir Michael Somare, has demanded Chan's resignation over the mercenary contract.

Chan's government is deeply divided on the Bougainville conflict. The dominant position of Chan, his deputy Chris Haiveta and defence minister Mathias Ijape favours an all-out military solution. PNGDF commander Brigadier-General Jerry Singirok has been in Singapore and Hong Kong "shopping" for Black Hawk helicopter gunships fitted with remote-control M-16 machine guns, fixed-wing aircraft from Spain, training for pilots and ground crew, weapons, ammunition and other military gadgets such as sophisticated radar and night-vision equipment — all on the advice of the "consultants" from Sandline/Executive Outcomes.

The softer line, being pushed by PNG provincial and local government affairs minister Peter Barter, is that there cannot be a military solution and that negotiations with the BIG are necessary. Barter is favourable to a lifting of the blockade and a restoration of services to rebel-held areas. The blockade has cost the lives of at least 10,000 Bougainvilleans.

Meanwhile, Canberra continues to refuse to cut the Australian military and "budgetary" aid to Port Moresby. The lobby group Aid/Watch on March 5 backed calls by the Bougainville Freedom Movement for all Australian aid to PNG to be suspended until the Bougainville war ends. Australian "aid" only allowed Port Moresby to prolong the war and to commit human rights violations, the group said.

Pressed on whether Australia would cut its $320 million annual aid to PNG, foreign minister Alexander Downer could manage only to say that "at this delicate time it is important that we keep our options open and continue to work behind the scenes". Opponents of the war are becoming increasingly frustrated at Canberra's mock outrage.

BRA Commander Sam Kauona says that Australia was "seriously implicated" in creating the nine-year conflict. BIG President Francis Ona pointed to Australia's continued funding of the PNGDF, supplying Iroquois combat helicopters and allowing Australians to pilot them.

"I don't trust Australia", Ona told the Age on February 28. "They are the ones supplying assistance and information to the PNGDF. The only way for there to be peace is for Australia to recognise independence for the people of Bougainville."

Kauona added that Australia should provide urgent assistance directly to the people of Bougainville, impose sanctions on PNG and support an international peacekeeping force to replace PNG troops on Bougainville.

The prime minister of the neighbouring Solomon Islands, Solomon Mamaloni, slammed the Australian government on March 4 over its "double-faced" attitude. He said Canberra's criticism of PNG's resort to mercenaries was not genuine. He said he suspected that Australia's lack of action was based on its desire to see the Australian-owned Panguna copper mine reopened.

He also condemned the Howard government's refusal to aid Bougainvillean refugees in the Solomons and its policy of channelling aid through Port Moresby.

The BIG has rejected the announced plan by the PNG government to buy RTZ-CRA's 54% stake in the Panguna mine. Francis Ona said the plan was a "shady and crooked deal" designed to hand over Bougainville's mineral wealth to companies linked to the mercenary forces, just as has happened in Angola and Sierra Leone, where Executive Outcomes operated in the past.

Retrieved from: Green Left (http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/15303)

Panguna People and the Re-opening of the Mine

Leonard Fong Roka

Panguna people saw the environmental carnage and the influx of aliens from New Guinea and beyond. Today, they know that the extraction of the mineral ore on their land was for the good of Papua New Guinea and not Bougainville. They know at least, a Panguna kina, was milked on the Highlands Highway construction; a Panguna kina is there in the founding of the Air Niugini; a Panguna kina is there in the building of the Waigani parliament house and the list goes on. To them, Papua New Guinea was made by the Panguna mine and the many Bougainville cocoa and copra plantations.

 

To the Panguna man, the making of Papua New Guinea, from the basic economics to politics was all are Bougainvillean designing and financing!

This is the insight the uneducated or illiterate majority of the landowners that comprises a population of youths and children are told day-in-day-out. Since the days of the crisis to the dawn of the peace process, this is the information they are being nurtured in. One hears these stories in the family homes; after church services and worst of all, in the boozing midst (stand a New Guinean (ere’rengkong) here and you hear all the Panguna-connected curses).

For the majority of the static and illiterate Bougainvilleans, the Bougainville crisis did opened their realization of the fact that they are Solomon Islanders. At the peak of the Australia-backed Papua New Guinea blockade of their island, they had a brother who gave them little ammunition and medicine. His islands were well connected in closeness from the coasts of Buin and Kieta as he saw it from the high mountains; a fact, that is not a reality towards New Guinea.

The political discourse of the conflict-days was anti-PNG. Church men preached gospels loaded with sentiments of anti-PNGism. Few music artists of Bougainville sing all the negativity created on Bougainville by the New Guineans (the illiterate so love these artists and their songs) and the BCL. In every traditional feasting night or days there is anti-PNG or BCL folksongs sang or poetic lamentation songs at funerals in any post-conflict Bougainville death for all, every bad things happening is all created by the past deeds.

For all the majority of Bougainvilleans and the Panguna people, this is the culture the people are engaged to, or are subjected to.

Thus, when one looks at the re-opening of the Panguna mine, one has to look at the people profile (including their likes and dislikes) of the Panguna district and the existing landowners’ body to get a clear picture of what our hope is in re-opening the mine.

But, the noted trend in approaching the subject today is the non-landowner dictates like the wishes of the Bougainville Peace Agreement, the ABG and so on that is not considerate of a retributive justice for all bad things that happened on Bougainville because of the mining.

To the people, the 10 billion forwarded by late Francis Ona is not in the coffin resting with Francis Ona. On this issue, there are many injustices on Bougainville that ought to be addressed before talking about mining.

Firstly, the majority of the Panguna population consists of the illiterate or half-literate (high school failures or ex-BCL laborers and other ordinaries) men and women. But in this group of people Bougainville politics is a culture alongside the wealth of guns and trade of guns.

In this group also, is where one finds the culture of entrepreneurship is growing. This unit of people hosts gold panners, gold buyers, scrap metal dealers, victims to scrap metal dealing conman, retail outlet operators and those investing further into cocoa planting by buying land in the coastal areas such as Wakunai and Tinputz Districts.

And before the Bougainville conflict, this people were no-bodies in their own land and so in 1988-1989, the late Francis Ona ran to this people for support and got what he wanted readily even without setting for himself any political manifesto to execute the secessionist struggle; thus the crisis was born against BCL and its few ‘local friends’ and Papua New Guinea.

When the Bougainville peace process came into existence, it was those surviving old BCL’s ‘local friends’ and the crisis created opportunists went ahead with Panguna mine re-opening talks whilst the majority slowly adapting to changes by engaging into business and investment with their own sweat without talking about the mine’s re-opening.

Thus on the issue of Panguna re-opening talk, one as to deal accordingly between the crisis-created opportunists (some are armed), the few old BCL’s ‘local friends’ (majority in the current Panguna Landowner Association) and the change adaptive majority (crisis-created opportunists run here for support) in their folly.

So far, the discourse on the issue of Panguna re-opening comes from the crisis-created opportunists and the few old BCL’s ‘local friends’ who feign as genuine representatives of the population. The dangerous majority, that is adaptive to changes in Panguna and so engaged to personal small-scale business activities and so on, has no voice yet. Thus, every now and then, the Panguna re-opening gossip that is often exciting the world is not representative of the Panguna’s majority.

And this is obvious. Every foreigner that enters Panguna with mine re-opening interests chats with crisis-created elite or the members of the Panguna Landowners Association (many of whom are BCL’s old ‘local friends’) and then return to spill their bias in-house chit-chat to the media as a break-through towards the re-opening of the Panguna mine.

Majority of the Panguna people (illiterate and literate) are standing on the foundation of the recent Bougainville history. To them, BCL was for Papua New Guinea’s development and not Bougainville; and re-opening of the mine goes well for the locals in an independent Bougainville that is free from Papua New Guinea (failure of the Bougainville weapons disposal program comes into play here because many people see that Papua New Guineans will be returning if Bougainville is free from weapons) where benefits will be for Bougainvilleans.

Furthermore, majority of the Panguna people and Bougainville should be assured that their crisis-created spirit of entrepreneurship will be sustained by the ABG. But so far, the signs are not good for Bougainvilleans as the ABG is trying to suppress the bases of self-reliance for Bougainville by inviting Chinese foreign direct investment to get Bougainville in a trickle of seconds away from the stone-age into the computer-age (a process that took the industrial countries centuries to develop through agriculture or a step-by-step transition from subsistence to market economies) and likely to create loopholes for the Bougainville economy in the long run (when extraction of raw materials are depleted and the investors proudly return, where will the Bougainvillean turn to where all farming land is gravel?).

Many can critic this discourse, but one has to note that the Bougainville crisis was a ‘natural university’ to many Bougainvilleans for it opened the mind’s eye to the islanders.

So, re-opening of the Panguna mine must follow the dictates of the Bougainville people with a leadership that is trusted by the people and not the kind of leaders that are dirt to the people’s eyes and yet are currently playing the game for Bougainville's Panguna re-opening.