Bougainville’s new road is beyond Crisis Reasons

Leonard Fong Roka

It was a sunny 1988 day that I was a child listening to a bunch of old people meeting at Piruana. The old men, then youthful, were meeting on strategizing ways to pressure the provincial government to get rid of the New Guineans colonizing in ever-increasing numbers the main urban areas of Bougainville.

The most talking persons I recall were Thomas Koronaru of the Pomaa Valley, late Patrick Niangko and others.

My New Guinean papa was also amongst them. He was a committee member.

The group was known as the Matau Nerinaving or, in the Nasioi language means: ‘decision making guides’. The little group was made up of people from Siae, Pomaa, Kaino, Bakabori and Kupe. It was focused on pressuring the provincial government into formulating political framework into getting rid of New Guineans and their illegal squatter settlements.

Matau Nerinaving was created for the areas or villages around Arawa.

These were communities that every day was subjected to crimes, illegal land grabs, and other forms of suppression and exploitation by the stubborn illegal infiltrators of Bougainville.

Hardly, they had freedom on the streets of Arawa. Instead of their children attending schools in town they flocked further inland to be educated; rather then, treated for illness at the Arawa General Hospital they visited rural aid posts away from Arawa that was home to New Guineans.

A Bougainvillean was never boozing in Arawa into the night without being tortured by the New Guineans for nothing. In 1987, an old man by the name of Kenau’ee from the Panguna District was boozing at the Napik Club close to the main Arawa Police Station with the Redskins.

After the aliens, dried up their purse, they turned on him. He fed their liking and his BCL royalty packet also was depleted. The boozed Redskins turned to forcing him despite his admittance that he was now broke. They dragged him out of the club but he with his intoxication slipped and darted towards the Bovong in the dark with his attackers on his tail.

He crossed the brawling river and up the opposite bank he went. But worst, there in front were the soccer fields—a clear patch of land to trap him—so he climbed up a coconut palm and spent the night there lamenting to dawn.

The attackers searched but did not get him.

Since that 1987 day, he avoided Arawa to his death in 2001.

Matau Nerinaving had reasons to formally and peacefully pressure the then North Solomons provincial government and that is, the protection of Bougainvilleans from suppression and exploitation by the New Guineans.

But, did our old people heard by the government? Not so because the systems were designed by Australians for New Guineans and not the marginalized Solomon islanders of Bougainville.

The issues that the villagers of the Bovong’nari were trying to address were ignored by the leadership because it was democratic to suffer and be a victim on your land at the hands of aliens.

We were wanted to be patient as aliens exploited and suppressed us. We were needed to love them—New Guineans and the Bougainville Copper Limited— as they raped, stole and belittled us. That’s what Christian religion and liberal democracy were ordering us to do as Bougainvilleans. I wonder if the late Bishop Gregory Singkai knew that.

And mind you, it was a rape and murder of a woman from the South Nasioi-Kongara area that sparked the attacked of New Guineans at Aropa in late 1988! Was Matau Nerinaving day dreaming?

From Aropa, the crisis spontaneously moved into Arawa.

It was this rape-murder case at Aropa that got the Poaru villagers who were BCL employees specialized in drilling-blasting in the pit, to take off with the BCL explosives. This had the late Francis Ona, who was fighting a verbal war for a change in the Panguna Landowners Association, to join the newer wave of violence thus, turning all independent conflicts or confrontations into what the world instantly saw as a single upraising led by Francis Ona.

So, in regard to our cause under the shoes of Matau Nerinaving, is ABG considerate with its political road map for Bougainville?

Since 2009, I did not even hear a loud pro-Bougainville crisis root voice in Waigani. Why?

If one says: ‘Leonard, everything has already being formalized in the Bougainville Peace Agreement and the Bougainville Constitution’.

I should say: ‘Those are mere piece of papers! Can be ignored or changed to suit the likes of those Bougainville must now see as its problem sources. Realizing those documents to the liking of those of us who had paid the price by losing loved ones to the Bougainville conflict is an issue of debate’.

Matau Nerinaving campaigned to see a Bougainville where foreigners were not existent and that Bougainvilleans were free on a land that was theirs since time immemorial. It campaigned to see a Bougainville where the land’s resources were owned and used for the benefit of the present and future Bougainvilleans.