Thomas Biunu goes to war in retaliation

Leonard Fong Roka

‘Bougainville Copper Limited (BCL) destroyed our land and people to built the Papua New Guinea’s Highlands Highway, buy planes for Air Niugini, built the city of Port Moresby and Lae, and so on without building us good roads, schools, funding our school fees, providing us electricity or even better, training and employing us and keeping out the Papuans and New Guineans that uprooted us’ is all Thomas Biunu said when I met him panning for gold in January this year.

Like many other Panguna men of his youthful days along BCL’s honeymoon era, he was a popular break-and-enter jack in the mine site. That’s how he made his living in his Onove village where laboring for a new plot of cocoa was no use in fear and doubt of their fate from the fast approaching gigantic gravel walls created 24/7 by the mining waste dumps and the silt built-up.

His Onove village, located high on the Oune ridge, then had around two-three thousand people but had only two villagers employed with the mine. But when BCL was new to them, nearly every able-man had jobs with the mine’s construction phase and when the mine got established all of them were kicked out. As resource-owners, the BCL was not willing to train them and keep them for its own good.

Biunu saw all these with his own eyes as a kid.

‘In the beginning,’ Biunu recalls, ‘what a nice relationship the BCL had with our people. The villagers provided BCL with food; they came and purchase garden food in the villages. I carried plastic bags of tomato with my mother and sold them to the company food buyers. I used that money to pay for my school but when the company lost its love for us in favor of Papuans and New Guineans, I left school.

‘We had nothing to do as young men of Panguna because there was no point trying to advance in education and so on when everyday you watch as the size of your cocoa or garden plot is shrinking to the silt-built up our valley was facing.

‘Thus, when the late Francis Ona took off into the bush, we stood up to save ourselves and our island’.

But for Biunu, he was afraid to join the village men in the pre-Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) militant group, Rambo, as they were known then. He feared to kill a human being as the Rambo was doing. Just beneath his Onove village, he witnessed the local Rambo men attacked a hated New Guinean settlement by an extended family.

One of them married into the Onove community and later invited a whole extended family to come and settle there. The New Guinean settlers then had for ages harassed indigenous people.

The Rambo then raided the settlement at dawn and got the iron-man of the settlement that had also attempted rape a local girl and killed him. Then they had torched the whole New Guinean settlement and ordered them depart for Arawa and out of Bougainville.

 The PNGDF and the police whilst torching other villages and hamlets of the Tumpusiong Valley had avoided for long the Onove village that was too far from the Panguna-Nagovis highway. This incident, to the perception of Biunu and the local populace, however was the catalyst for the PNGDF mortar attacks on the Onove village soon after.

Fear crept into the village but the elders, with all the evidence from the Radio North Solomons jingles of peace by the PNG government, advised them not to panic or flee. For Biunu, who had an infant first born son and a two week old house he had just built, the mortar attacks had him shrink with envisages of a sacrifice and loss that was imminent.

So on Onove’s fateful morning, the villagers woke up to see across the Oio River valley, a big packed convoy of BCL transport on the junction of the Oune feeder-road on the Panguna-Nagovis highway. Around the vicinity were dozens of PNG soldiers.

Minutes trickled as they watched what or which village actually these infiltrators were after. And as least expected of, the troops began to follow the newly opened Oune feeder road towards Onove; the valley was all silent, as evacuation orders were given for mothers and children to flee.

The Oune road took off from the Panguna-Nagovis highway and heads towards Onove for Oune, a community school on the borders of the Tumpusiong Valley and the Avaipa area further west. It was to cut through the Onove village but to avoid the steep Onove’s rugged eastern slope, it was built to run south then crawl onto the Onove lawns from the west.

Thus some of the men with Biunu headed east of their village to have a closer look of thee advancing killers armed with some knives and bows and arrows. And as foreseen, the soldiers crossed the Oio River and now there was nothing more to think about; they were coming for Onove.

The march came just beneath the locals cover; they saw that they were armed to the teeth and bothered not to test them with their bows and arrows here, in fear that some of the villagers maybe were still packing.

As the foe was heading south along the road, Biunu and the men rushed backed into the village and revealed that the killers are here for us. Everybody did not waste time but fled. Biunu and the men watched from the bushes as the PNG soldiers came and without wasting time began torching the houses. Some forty to fifty houses were there for them to calm their rage on.

Seeing fresh footprints of people’s escape routes, they just fired heavy gun shots into those directions. Biunu and the men just kept quite with emotions and regret for not having the type of weapons, the enemy had.

After satisfying themselves, the PNGDF left for their transport with the angered Biunu stealth behind them now joined by some of the armed Rambo men.

Knowing of some militant activities further south, in Orami and Mananau (a BCL farm project), Biunu’s party headed south with high hope that the convoy would head south to set up an ambush and retaliate.

As expected of, a convoy of BCL vehicles loaded with PNG soldiers appeared as they laid in wait. With a borrowed shotgun, Biunu breathe heavily for a kill for the loss of 40-plus houses of his village few hours ago which looking up at Onove, he still saw the smoke in the air, at the hands of these foreigners.

They waited with confidence as the three vehicles approached unprepared. In the weapon, Biunu had not a normal shotgun cartridge but rather, for impact reasons, had a WW2 .50 calivre anti-aircraft machinegun cartridge. They let the two front runners to pass and the last vehicle received its share of arrows and three shotgun rounds.

For Biunu, he knew his cartridge made contact; the foe he aimed at was lifted by the bullet impact but was grabbed by screaming soldiers before he landed on the gravel.

The soldiers escaped some corners away then began shooting back at the direction of the attack with their bullets cutting the tree canopy as the militants sat chewing buai and laughing.