Combatant: We need to steer ABG the Bougainville Way

Leonard Fong Roka

On the shimmering streets of Arawa, jubilating were a bunch of former BRA fighters last Saturday (12 October), reading Wednesday (9 October 2013) Post Courier article entitled, Asians warned to leave (pg 23) in the Bougainville Today section.

So joyous was Francis Duaung (pictured) who is known as the only wounded fighter in the early 1990 dawn raid on the former Kuviria Detention Center 30 kilometers north of Arawa that saw the killing of six non-Bougainvillean warders and their family members in January 1990. Duaung was shot in the head in action and survived in Honiara, Solomon Islands, after a medical operation to remove shotgun pellets stuck in his skul.

In the Post Courier story, the Bougainville Veterans Association, that is an umbrella body made up of ex-combatants from North, Central and South Bougainville who have fought in the Bougainville ten-year civil war, called on the Asians operating business singly or in partnership with locals to pack up and leave from Bougainville.

The story said, ‘The foreigners, especially Chinese nationals, were involved in retail, wholesale, and fast food, which local businessmen were in. The association said this posed a threat to the peace process because locals tended to take sides—some with foreigners while others opposed foreigners. This has brought instability to some parts of the region, especially in Central Bougainville.’

The veterans like Duaung are now joining hands with local businessmen of Bougainville claiming that the Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG) since taking office had let Asians and other foreign business to rob Bougainvilleans and give back nothing just like what the Bougainville Copper Limited (BCL) did.

In the paper the association is said to pressure the ABG, in its October 15 deliberation, that it must look at and pass the following as reserved business activities for Bougainvilleans. As listed, businesses that the ABG must protect for Bougainvilleans are:

·         Retail trading, including trade stores, canteens and takeaway food bars or eateries;

·         Supermarkets, liquor supply and import including brewery and distillation of liquor;

·         Guest houses and hotels up to three star status;

·         Wholesaling and merchandizing in any white goods, consumables and building hardware materials;

·         Fuel supplies and fuel stations, including import of oil products

·         Alluvial mining and gold trading,

·         Commodity exports of cocoa and copra primary and secondary products;

·         Cocoa and coconut plantations and other cash crop development;

·         Dealings in handicrafts and artifacts including the export of such items;

·         Timber production and exports;

·         PMV and freight transport including trucking and earth moving

·         Marine products extraction and exports;

·         Fisheries and fish exports;

·         Tourism and tour operators;

·         Any manufacturing, including cottage industries with cash capital value of K100 million or less is also prohibited and exclusively reserved for Bougainvilleans; and

·         Partnership and joint ventures in any of the above activities is prohibited.

The fighters have called on the ABG not to issue any trading license to Asians and other foreigners in any of the said activities and also said that all Asian and foreign businesses must shutdown and moved out of Bougainville.

According to Duaung, the main concern is that the ABG is really not protective of Bougainville. ‘The ABG knows we fought and died,’ He told me, ‘but it is not interested into upholding the reason our 15 000 people died for. We died for independence and that means we must be self-reliant and not be like PNG that these Asians now control; and this drive aims to protect Bougainvilleans to teach themselves how to do business and be self-reliant to built our country.’

To the many people like Duaung, the ABG is selling Bougainville away to the dogs by fearing the few foolish people on Bougainville as threats and not recognizing the strength it has with the majority of us it has behind it. Political creativity is a lack in the ABG that could make the government maneuver through loopholes using the threats as opportunities for Bougainville.

Now that the warring combatants of Bougainville, Ishmael Toroama, Chris Uma, and so on had reconciled recently, veterans say the ABG is now safe.

And according to the Panguna man Francis Duaung, the veterans have more plans to save Bougainville: ‘We have presented these demands to our government. Once done, we will then remove the Asian and other foreign parasites from Bougainville; the next lot to pack and leave are the redskins that are coming searching for jobs shamelessly as if they had compensated us for killing us on our island and blockading us for ten years as if we were destroying some parts of their country.’

Francis Duaung lost his blood brother and three other cousins to PNGDF bullets and says he is not satisfied with how Bougainville has being driven by the ABG and PNG.