Poem to PNGeans and the Sandline Mercenaries

Around 1996, the PNG government was having nightmare as the tide of agression on Bougainville was turning against the infiltrators. In Buin they were attacked by the pro-PNG Bougainville Resistance for raping women, arson and ill-behaviour; in the Koromira Catholic mission, they were made to swim to the islands after overpowered by BRA firepower and in numbers, the pro-PNG forces were running into the bush with their guns.

The PNG solution to this, was to invite some more powerful forces to get rid of the Bougainville people from the land and culture. Bougainville was to be New Guineanized!

But, because of their culture of corruption, their plot created a Frankinstein crisis and the departure of PM Sir Julius Chan.

PM Sir Chan resigning (flickr.com)

Poem to the Papua New Guineans:



Sandline Mecenaries

by Leonard Fong Roka

Island in the south seas…

Brokenville lies here,

In this lake of chaos

Longing for missionary legends

And their kind of god.

Not your lethal warheads

Of mass murder and looting.

Nor that torturing policing rod

As she no feeder of gluttons

Like your darling red sun

Of that killer west…

Oh, you money face killer

She cries for her freedom from redskin subjugation

Of this black inspiration

Dimmed to thinness of emptiness.

She’d struggled

At door ajar, oh, money maniac…

Keep my Bougainville for missionaries…

Not mercenaries’

Greed.

Note #: I wrote this in 2008 in Panguna after watching a documentary on this affair