Charles Bangki weeps on for his Wife and Daughter after 23 years

Leonard Fong Roka

‘Operation Tampara’ as the PNG government effort that included the riot police and the Papua New Guinea Defence Force (PNGDF) to quell the Bougainville uprising was known since May 1989 to early 1990, it was so damning for the old Charles Bangki of Mosinau village in Panguna who was a runaway refugee in  the Kongara (1) area of Kieta District.

Mr. Charles Bangki

 

Tampara is a Nasioi word that means ‘Good’ so the PNG government military code name of their actions on Bougainville was to mean, ‘Operation Goodness’ or ‘Operation Bringing Goodness to Bougainville’. But the government affair with the people of Kieta then was a contradiction; it harden people’s minds and hearts against the PNG government and people (the New Guineans and Papuans), so that they fully supported the militancy cause led by the deceased Francis Ona in  the late 1980s.

The government brutality on the Solomon island people of Bougainville who were fighting against the inhuman Papua New Guinean and Rio Tinto actions through the Bougainville Copper Limited (BCL) exploitation of their island was fierce. The government and the BCL supported each other to starve the militants out once and for all with every measure available.

The government security forces, as they were known then, torched villages and looted gardens; used airborne machine guns and mortar rounds on innocent civilians and killed innocent people, and two of the many victims, were Mrs. Maria Bangki and her 2 year old daughter, Joyce Bangki.

The PNGDF, upon arrival in May of 1989, concentrated their energies in the areas surrounding the BCL’s Panguna Mine in the hope of arresting the rebel leader, Francis Ona. They began their unlawful acts of torching villages from the west of the mine site, in the Tumpusiong Valley where they burned the villages that existed under the broader name of Onove.

Slowly, with the arrival of the four Australia donated Huey helicopters for support, they took the inaccessible villages of Widoi, Poaru and Mosinau in the Toio River valley, east and south-east of the Panguna Mine.

PNGDF attack on the Toio Valley was overwhelming for the war-primitive militants who had no high-powered guns or the indirect-fire power weapons like the mortar tubes and shells.

With mortar platoons attached on the Guava-Kokore ridge shelling the valley below and choppers hovering with heavy machine gun fire on the jungles, the government troops torched villages in their raid of the Toio Valley.

Thus Charles Bangki and his wife, Maria, decided to flee for safety with their children to the Bougainvillean highlands of Kongara to Dopari village in Kongara 1.

In the Kongara area, the family was a refugee but safe from the warring air of their Panguna area.

But in the month of October, the PNGDF choppers began a routine of daily visits into the highlands of Bougainville. Government troops began visiting Sipuru and Kakusira villages in Kongara 2 by road keeping the inaccessible by trucks Kongara 1 area away for the choppers.

Then on a late October morning, the government forces raided the village of Tairima that was a few minutes’ walk from the Bangki family at Dopari. With fleeing people from Tairima, the stunt people watched from the distance as the soldiers burned down homes that had taken them ages to save money and built with the government or BCL support.

By midday, mortar platoons were engaged on the Dopari village. The Bangki family and the people fled into the inhospitable jungles. Here they erected make-shift shelters for comfort and to hide from the killers and looters.

But from the safety of the jungles, they watched as Dopari village went up in flames. People wept for their valued assets to no avail as helicopters open fire on the jungles keeping the people on the run.

On the morning of 28 October 1989, false silence and peace crept through the hideouts below the impenetrable jungle canopy. The people thought the enemy might have withdrew so a band of people decided to visit their still-burning homes to fetch whatever property the inferno might have being shy of.

Seeing this, Maria Bangki had her little daughter Joyce, slung on her back and followed the other villagers to fetch some belongings they had hidden in a bush in the vicinity of the Dopari village whilst escaping from helicopter gunfire the day before.

Her husband, Charles Bangki, in fear resisted the move but she, as a mother, was not willing to see her 10 children go hungry and without clothes in the jungles whilst their clothing and cooking utensils were there somewhere concealed on their escape track beyond.

 In the prevalent peaceful afternoon air of the jungles, next to the Dopari village, returning women and grown up children and two elderly men came upon the mother and the daughter, and together they noisily began making their way deeper into the safety of the jungles following an old trial.

On the way the noisy party came upon a freshly felled tree and began slowly cutting their way through the protruding branches when a heavy round of gunfire rained on them.

Without any sense of the surrounding, the people were dispatched by the bullets from the PNGDF ambush.

In their running, the lucky escapers began to bump into each other till the whole party was about to become whole that they realized that Maria Bangki and her daughter, Joyce Bangki were not in their midst. The mother, who had her daughter playing on her back minutes ago, was nowhere to be seen.

Warm tears trickled freely under the canopies as people wept for the mother and her child.

For days and nights, nobody wandered away from their camp but remained there in mourning. In the distant surroundings, the government troops ran from village to village torching homes and looting gardens and killing domesticated animals to top up their Australian patrol rations.

No one even bothered to hunt the bushes for the bodies in the presence of the enemy till news reached Mr. Bangki’s ears  that his dear wife’s and daughter’s bodies were airlifted by their killers to the Arawa General Hospital to the north.

Charles Bangki then took a two day journey with piercing sorrow through the impenetrable jungles and rugged terrains of Kieta till he and his party reached the Pomaa Mountains in the hinterland south of Arawa town. The sight of the distant Arawa town made his knees weaker and he broke into crying on the damp forest floor alongside his sympathizers.

On the third day of his journey for Arawa, he reached the Arawa General Hospital morgue, in the company of his relatives and family members.

There in a refrigerated shipping container turned into a morgue, was his wife and daughter, so whiten by ice and distorted by bullet wounds and blood stains. Old Charles Bangki fainted in sorrow and was help and comforted by weeping relatives and family.

Since his family home of Mosinau in the Panguna area was out of bound from reach because of the undisciplined PNGDF activities, Charles Bangki took the bodies of his wife and daughter to the much safer village of Parai’ano near the Aropa airport and buried them there.

‘We paid a highest price in our fight for our rights,’ Bangki says, ‘and it is about time the combatants and politicians to be responsible in their actions and do the right thing so the Bougainville becomes independent and free from the irresponsible Papua New Guineans. Without the use of weapons in 1988, Bougainville is not ours; it would have being the Papua New Guineans’ land occupied by their illegal squatter settlements’.

Today Charles Bangki lives in Arawa with his eldest son and regularly visits his wife’s and daughter’s graves to pay respect.

‘Having left me some 22 years ago,’ he cried, ‘my wife and daughter are still around me’.