Helicopter attack on Kupe and capture of Louis Kepetu

By Leonard Fong Roka

Louis Kepetu remembers well the words of the first PNG soldier who approached him with anger: ‘Tete bai yu dai, yu stink kok. Kuapim Francis Ona! Acting Rambo nabaut lo kain liklik ailan hia olsem tru yupla gat kain gun olsem army gat’ (Today you will die, you stink penis. Fuck Francis Ona! Acting Rambo on a tiny island like this as if you have the type of guns the army has).

PNGDF gunners in Bougainville

He was tortured by every soldier that hand a chance to punch his anger on him till he was weak.

Weeks after the capture of the Hellman Angkanu and the killing of Karebu at Bakabori village in 4 July 1989, the Kupe mountain villages were ordered to evacuate to Piruana. But the people did not like Piruana so we all flooded the Kaino village because it was closer to Kupe.

Most of our families left whilst a few did not like being forced out of their homes and instead went into hiding in the jungles and caves of the section of the Crown Prince Range, the mountainous backbone of our island.

Louis Kepetu and his wife and other villagers of Sirona cleared a series of caves near the village where they spent the nights and during the day time, after carefully observing the village below, they would come out of the bush and pass the day in the village.

Kupe is made up of two main villages: Sirona and Nengkenaro both separated by a gorge. And Sirona, the home of Kepetu, is glued on top of a cliff that forms the western side of this gorge and another smaller ravine that runs into this gorge from the south. This is the foot of the great Kaupara brae, seen from Arawa that once hosted a repeater station on the peak, which begins from the 1930 Kupe Gold mine fields to the north of Sirona to Turampa to the south. On the other side of the Kaupara is the Panguna Valley.

But on this hurtful day, their observation was not that accurate.

During the night a patrol of the PNGDF, that did not wish to burn down villages, had reached the empty Nengkenaro, where majority of its occupants—including me and my family—were already in Kaino with others escaped further into the jungles but did not bothered to visit homes out of fear.

At the hideout, Kepetu and his wife, ordered his brother, Akora and another relative to go to the village early and collect dry coconuts whilst he and his wife fetch some cassava from the garden so that they will spent the day making tamatama (a traditional Kieta dish made of food mashed in a mortar and pestle and heated on coconut milk).

Having done everything as planned the party was at Kepetu’s home doing the tamatama. Kepetu was inside the hauskuk processing the beaten food. The young men were outside engaged to the mortar and its pestle whilst Kepetu’s wife was away into the next hamlet searching for food to take back to the hideout when the PNGDF surrounded them.

As Akora was busy with the pestle and his friend serving food into the mortar, someone whistled at them. They looked towards the source and to their shock; it was a group of redskin soldiers having their guns aimed at them ready to fire. They looked at the other angle, but there were others approaching in, so the option to avoid torture was the cliff—some 500-700 meters long—but with occasional plants like orchids, ferns and other creepers and plants attached to it.

Without Kepetu’s knowledge, they darted over the cliff like skiers down a snow slope. They were gone with their mass carrying with them plants that could not withstand the force applied on them as they PNGDF men rushed to fire at them.

Kepetu, shocked by the sound of heavy boots, popped out to bump into soldiers running for the cliff with guns and hand grenades that were unleashing after the escapees that rocked the place.

Not sure if their bullets and grenades and done their purpose they all turned on the terrified and crying Kepetu and began torturing him. One of them shot the mortar with his gun whilst a bunch of them kicked all the food he was working on.

They gun-butted, kicked and punched him at will; his eyes could not see much as his ears could not hear, and blood was all over his body. Then they tied his hands behind him and began directing him towards the end they entered from as two helicopters arrived.

Down at Kaino, the whole population gathered around where my family and others were living, upon hearing the heavy gunfire with hope that some of our homes would go up in flames.

But we watched as the army choppers separated above Sirona; one headed towards the old gold mine site whilst another went for the southern edges. From these angles of approach huge guns began rocking our Kupe. They choppers fired their guns and passed each other above Sirona; complete one round and then repeated again.

Our women were crying as we watched the chopper attacking our home.

In the airborne machineguns attack, every hideout’s culture was infiltrated into: A little 7 year old Kaumonu (pictured below, and brother in law to Kepetu) was left behind crying by his parents as they ran for their lives with his infant sister; a 11 year old Kopuru threw away her little brother, Monona as she cried after losing sight of her mother; and a man called Nukua, was calling at his family: ‘Come and see the helicopter, they have placed a generator on it’ without knowing that it was the guns till he witness a betel nut cut down and tree branches felling and his pig pinned to the ground, that he ran away.

Kaumonu in 2012

The choppers crisscrossed firing at the jungle and villages till Kepetu was brought into Nengkenaro. One of the choppers was still hovering above when one landed and Kepetu was thrown into it with some soldiers and they climbed the Kaupara slope leaving behind the rest of the soldiers.

When they arrived at the PNGDF’s camp at Panguna, a BCL’s former worker’s residence known as Camp 10 turned into an international high school, there were already a dozen soldiers on the ground and one of the soldiers with him kicked him off before the chopper actually touched the ground and he landed on the mercy of a dozen stinging fists and was unconscious.

When consciousness returned, in was in one of the Panguna police cells. Tears ran freely but his cry made no sound; he felt life around him, but his hands could not reach out; he knew fellow Bougainvillean prisoners were crying and comforting him in his mother tongue, but he could not see nor answer them for all was dark.

Louis Kepetu now lives happily in his Kupe Mountains making business through gold panning and a little canteen that he shoulders his cargo from Kaino that is 2 hour walk by foot from Kupe where hired vehicles do their drop-off.