The PNGDF roasted me on the tar

By Leonard Fong Roka

In 1989 when the government troops began raiding the Tumpusiong Valley; torching and looting homes, Noel Monoung who then a teenager, fled with his family to Siae village to be with their relatives inland from the provincial capital of North Solomons, Arawa.

Noel Monoung in 2012

Fear was now away in their home Panguna. They lived here as ordinary villagers concealing the fact that they were refugees from Panguna and now unsettled by violence on their own island.

For the young man, Siae village was freedom. He was everywhere doing whatever the locals did, of course, regularly missing his home in Panguna which was the subject of the PNG military frisking and destruction. Always he was eager for news from home if any.

He saw the PNGDF troops regularly but did not fear them; these were, he believed, a different lot from the men who woke his family and relatives in the Tumpusiong Valley with the scything of their guns and rumbling mortar one morning thus making him a refugee running for the safety of his life.

But his carefree life and scope of fear-freeness ended one fateful day that he, soon after walking out alive, went to join the militancy in late 1989.

On the week leading to his nightmare, a relative did ask Monoung to help him harvest and ferment cocoa and, after that, they would go selling the dry beans at Kieta. The sale was to earn some money for the Christmas season celebrations and some for Monoung for his labour.

Since he and his family were in a disadvantage position in earning cash, this was an opportunity for Monoung to get something into his pocket and wander off to Arawa whenever time permitted so he readily accepted the job and he worked hard.

Monoung was so excited after they had packed five bags of dry bean cocoa for, has his leader had promised, they would together go to Kieta to sell the produce and later on come to Arawa and Monoung would do some shopping for himself.

The next morning, Monoung was up early in anticipation, for directives from his senior relative. When the requested PMV arrived, Monoung was the first to be in the fermentary fighting with the mass of the cocoa bags with the help of the PMV crews.

Without any second thought Monoung and his relative were on the truck and they drove into town in joy. They left the serenity of Arawa and drove through the Kerei plains and coves and innocently arrived at the Kobuan PNGDF checkpoint just before climbing the Kieta hill.

They were stopped here by aggressive military men who were some hours were shot at by the militants.

Monoung who had already seated himself on the edge of the trailer that would allow him to watch the sea at Siae was there occupied by the bliss of the sleepy sea he watched when a angry soldier not in uniform barked at the travellers to get off the trunk.

Monoung was lost for words and in fear fighting hard to keep back his tears.

As they were disembarking, one of the PNGDF soldiers angrily shouted at them: ‘Did you see the trouble makers?’ Not an answer came as the people saw their local driver being pummeled by a handful of soldiers resulting in him urinating as he was kicked in the abdomen.

‘I nearly peed,’ Monoung recalled, ‘because I thought we were going to be killed. One soldier came forward and grabbed my little bag with a K10 note in it and walked away’.

As Monoung watched, one of the soldiers knifed the cocoa bags, shouting defiance at the locals. Then he moved at the travellers and began searching one of them. Seeing that he was the lone person doing the frisking, he ordered all to remove their shirts.

‘After all of us had removed our shirts,’ Monoung recalls, ‘the bastard ordered us to prone on the hot coal tar. I felt it burning my palm and hesitated but seeing one of the soldiers stepping onto the naked back of one of us I forced myself onto the frying heat of the midday sun’.

In the center of the road Monoung and his mates remained prone as other people and cars were being searched and left to go. They remain there in the mercy of the sun and the burning tar for not a crime.

‘There was not a bullet or any offensive item discovered,’Monoung told me, ‘but we were there obeying their orders because they had guns’.

Monoung had his belly burning with stinging pain but still he remained. There were no soldiers minding them for all were busy with other vehicles and people but the sun was there burning them bodies from the spine down whilst the shimmering coal tar was abrading from the belly up.

Then later, around 2 o’clock, a BCL vehicle arrived with some soldiers and one of them looked at them thoroughly and asked loudly: ‘Na ol displa lain ya wokim wanem? (what are these people doing?) and to that, and answer from a rouge soldier that seemingly had coastal features of New Guinea laughed and said: ‘Ol laik silip and silip stap, mipla salim ol lo take off pinis’ (They want to sleep so they are sleeping. We already ordered them to leave long ago’.

Then one of the soldiers and moved towards them and ordered them to disappear from his sight immediately so they slowly stood up and went for the vehicle.

When Monoung stood up, his belly had blisters and was stinging. He searched around to see if the soldier who took his bilum was there, but sadly he was not there nor was his bilum.

So they—all topless—climb onto the car and drove off towards Kieta when one of the soldiers aimed his gun on them and ordered them to turn back to Arawa.

On the trailer, the punished travellers were now sitting on the dry cocoa beans that were not littering the floor. All five backs of cocoa were knifed and not a bag was saleable.

So Monoung had made great losses of his dreams to the PNGDF that day in late 1989.

Later in the night back in the village he packed up his few belongings and left by foot for Panguna to join the militants.

‘I left because to me, at least, just borrowing a gun and firing at those BCL vehicles that carry the army everywhere was a release of the pain these armed men had given at Kobuan,’ Monoung said to me, ‘For I was roasted by the hot coal tar for no wrong done under that state of emergency laws’.

From then on, he served the BRA till 1997.