Batana: Why I joined the Bougainville Militancy in 1989

Leonard Fong Roka

Now married with five daughters and a lucrative local gold buyer, cocoa buyer and PMV operator in the Tumpusiong Valley of the Panguna District, Francis Batana says that the fight he joined was a clean fight against the injustice the foreigners were doing on our land and people from Buin to Buka Island.

Francis Batana

‘We fought or took up arms,’ he told me, ‘for our rights as the very people God had placed us here on the island. Despite this, the foreigners, the Papua New Guineans and their Bougainville Copper Limited (BCL) were not at all willing to respect us as human beings and were trying to destroy us—the people and our island’.

Francis Batana was born in his Sipuko village during the construction phase of the Australia owned Panguna mine in the middle of the 1960s. He completed his primary education at a local Catholic Church operated school of Deumori. Then he went onto Buin High School but pre-maturely left because his poor parents could not afford the cost of his education despite being landowners of the mining areas.

His extended family’s diminish in terms of wealth and education was in the era of the Panguna mine’s life was inevitable because they hailed from the Bompo clan that, in terms of land ownership in the Tumpusiong Valley, was marginalized in the mountain areas but held much land on the banks of the polluted Kavarong River.

When BCL got established, the sedimentation created by its activities in Panguna covered and polluted much of the Bompo clan’s arable land on the western banks of the Kavarong on the eastern Tumpusiong under what is now the Enamira-Oune Village Assemblies (VA) of the Ioro 2 Council of Elders (Local Level Government).

In the 1980s Batana was a young man having left school and living at home with his parents. His days were spent watching heavy BCL equipment toiling the Tumpusiong Valley all the way to Marau coast where the Kavarong estuary was in South Bougainville.

Every week end, with little earnings from a few cocoa trees around his home, he was there amongst the company of Tumpusiong Valley’s young men boozing for days. Their partying only went into the Panguna Township to get cartons of beer and return back home. Drinking in the town clubs was dangerous to the unemployed Tumpusiong men whom most were not so fluent in Tok-Pisin thus were always attacked by drunkard redskins.

‘We have to visit Panguna in company,’ he told me. ‘Once you are alone in the night the redskins chased us with those BCL crushed gravel. If we are in a cinema, they are outside on the edges waiting to for us. As we start walking home, they spark a conflict and then chased us by hurling pieces of rocks at us’.

In such company, Batana and the other men had confidence, and upon seeing other primary and high school leavers getting employed, they also began visiting the BCL employment office. But none of them was accepted into the BCL workforce.

Batana’s most shocking experience of employment hunting in BCL as a landowner in Panguna happened once in the late 1980s just before the conflict erupted. He was in a queue to enter the employment office and began chatting with a New Guinean highlander from the squatter settlements of Arawa.

As they chatted, they showed each others’ qualifications in school. The New Guinean never was a primary school dropout and he was a grade 8 student in a high school.

On that painful day, a Buka man was in the employment office. John Tabinaman, Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG) vice president in 2005-10, was the officer. Batana was not accepted because he was shot for a truck driver in the mine pit whilst the redskin was taken for further interviews. He went home defeated.

After about two weeks, he saw the redskin he was with at the employment office operating a D9 Caterpillar bulldozer outside Sipuko. He was so tempted to kill the New Guinean but did not do so.

But in November 1988 night when the news that Francis Ona had ordered all people to fight and shut the mine down, he grabbed a grass knife and walked into the Nagovis area in South Bougainville where there was a man he knew who owned a licensed shotgun.

He walked all night and properly asked the owner of the shotgun and returned back the next morning.

‘I darted for a gun for a few reasons,’ he told me, ‘ BCL was not employing us but was destroying our future; and it was only bringing more and more redskins that were building slums everywhere and taking our land. They had a provincial government representative when we chased them out’.

After a few sabotage runs in Panguna one afternoon, a friend who was just employed to operate a ore carrier called Batana at home. The visitor told him that the BCL was now employing locals since non-Bougainvilleans were beginning to resign in fear. But Batana assured him it is too late I will have to kill one white and red BCL employee then think about employment.

That night Batana and a company of men went to Kusito, a section of the Panguna mine gravel spreading and dumping zone, to check out a police checkpoint that people had told them during the day. But upon arrival there were no police but decided to attack company facility security personnel on duty.

So they divided themselves into two parties: one party to torch a BCL chopper near the main ore processing concentrator area and his party to raid the security men whom their presences was visual from where the militants were planning (chopper torching story to come later).

The company broke up and Batana and his gang reached the security personnel swiftly. There manning the gravel spreader area and plants, on one section were four security men with their car parked there telling stories.

Led by Batana, the Tumpusiong men walked straight up to them from an angle they did not hope something terrible could come from.

Batana pierced the man he came upon through the chest as he screamed, ‘mama’ in pidgin and begged for mercy. Two others were shot and the forth was shot still asleep in their car.

‘That they,’ Batana said to me, ‘I felt peace in my heart. I was relieved that I had killed one of the people that were destroying our lives and land as we watched. Without the violence, Bougainvilleans were nobodies! But the war made the PNG people and their company, BCL, to see us as humans’.

On the re-opening issue of the Panguna mine, Batana told me that he will be happy with a mine in Panguna that is controlled by the ABG for the good of Bougainvilleans and not PNG.

‘Tumpusiong Valley will accept tailings from a Panguna mine that is controlled by the ABG for the betterment and independence of Bougainville,’ he said. ‘We know that BCL is owned by CRA, PNG and other shareholders. ABG must return half of the CRA share in BCL; ABG must get all of PNG shares in BCL and ABG must create laws to localize the future Panguna operations’.

He the meantime Francis Batana is occupied with his private business operations that he says, if there was no war on Bougainville, I could not have this opportunity to earn for my family out of resources available for us as Bougainvilleans.