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.