Bougainville, the European Love Bites

Leonard Fong Roka

One biggest law that is promoted by all for all is: ‘love one another, as you love yourself’. Love, is simply, according to Oxford English Dictionary is ‘a strong feeling of affection’. So, we could say it is a feeling of fondness that every human person, being a social animal, possesses despite our nature of being so different to each other.

In society, every man thinks and behaves differently to each other; man is a selfish being, as a single object. This nature is the root of all conflict of interest and violence in our societies today. With available resources, man pursues his interest irrespective of its neighbour.

Thus, disregarding this fundamental and undebatable nature of humanity, religion and government—the two worst culprits in our world’s problems today—aggressively enforce the notion of love in societies that culturally and socially despise each other.

In these shocking realities thus, the state of Papua New Guinea was created. To the narrow minded politicians so indoctrinated by their fanatical missionaries, they called to Papua New Guineans: ‘You are a nation of Papua New Guinea’ and the addition of a curse phrase, ‘God bless Papua New Guinea’.

Religion, of course, as seen through the history of European imperialism, was a tool of colonialism. It shaped the mindset of the Melanesian to consider his world as being barbaric and bad. It narrowed the long established creativity of the Pacifican as worthless of praise compared to the European thinking.

Christianity saw our arts of harmonious existence with the kind of environment we are familiar with in the Pacific as anti-developmental and will bring us no positive progress.

After killing our Pacific ways of thinking, religion calls us to love each other in the violent social, political and economic chaos it had brought us to die a slow death in.

The great state of Papua New Guinea, since 1975, operated under a national constitution that is nothing, but ‘LOVE’. Through the various parliamentary creations of law, the constitution through a iron fist rule, orders us to live harmoniously.

So far, as PNG existed peacefully? As there, being any positive economic progress for us to see and create hope that tomorrow is fine for our children?

Bougainvilleans kicked out New Guineans with the help of the barrel of the gun, as of mid-1988. Where was that concept of ‘one people, one nation; one country, God bless Papua New Guinea’? Did Bougainvilleans know its existence? Did Bougainvillean felt its impacts? I wonder.

Bougainvilleans started fighting without any regard to the SUPREMACY of the PNG Constitution or any repercussions. They fought on a land they had divine connection to; whilst, the poor settlers of the squatter settlements around Kieta gave a fruitless struggle in a land that had no LOVE for them.

In this context, religion and government gives nations no TRUE LOVE.

So, when we create a country, that state must be centred on the natural social ecology of the people to their land.

Pacific, which is also known as a sea of islands, to be politically and economically stable, ought to be constructed on the basis of the pre-colonial bonding between the man and his land.

European LOVE that is so powered by the Pacific relegation agent, Christianity, has belittled Pacific islanders by removing them from the reality of their roots and turned us into drifters with no source of strength; the very powers of creative and adaptive thinking that enabled our ancestors to conquer and colonised the vast ocean of islands before the imperialist westerners.

Thus, for us as Bougainvilleans, to create our island nation, the constitution should be guided by the bonding of the man to his land; in there, there is a source of strength to function as a state where citizens enjoy the common good.

With that, know that the western concept of love is disaster to any developing state and the Bougainvillean ways of love is our prosperity.