Linus Dino
In its effort to customized itself, the CRA and other sub-contractors took up participatory-action approach with the landowners. Employment, according to Dino was localized. The foreigners had a cordial and mutual relationship.
Every BCL camp mess or caterring service providers had local garden produce from the now Panguna District, the rest of Kieta and parts of South Bougainville. According to Dino, and many other old folks, every week the BCL had pick-up trucks that travelled the villages to buy food to feed the company employees and also, to stock up the supermarkets.
The locals had a steady income from the BCL's approached that empowered and built a business-climate for the locals. In fact, the last North Solomons Province premier and first Autonomous Government president, the late Joseph Kabui, had his education funded under this cordial BCL-People relationship.
My great grand mother, his mother, earned sufficient and steady income to pay for his education by selling her garden produce to the BCL which seeing her son's political career often lamentated that BCL did us good earlier, but later killed us.
This fine co-existence, slowly however, ebbed in the late 1970s for the ordinary people, but not the few educated elite of Bougainville.
The Journal of Pacific History, Vol.33 cites that ' a 1964 patrol report described the people of the area [Panguna] as "among the least sophisticated in Bougainville". So, the BCL's good relationship from the beginning to the locals was a time-buying period of stripping the conscience of the locals before imposing western conceptions off business administration on the Bougainvilleans.
Carefully, according to Dino, the BCL Administration got few educated Bougainvilleans into the some of its established offices and began making lives of the locals harder or chaotic.
The company began importing food from Australia and Papua New Guinea or some more established food growers around Arawa and other urban areas. Food farmers around Arawa, of course, were the aliens from PNG who infiltrated the land with their squatter settlements.
With this, local labourers in the mining operations were replace day-by-day with Papua New Guineans. Instead of saving the company by localizing through educating the locals to improve and take ownership of the mining operation on their own land, the BCL made Dino and others jobless and no bodies in their land.
Dino says there was no hope for our dreams of being developed like the European, was shattered once and for all. Many locals, were out of school, especially in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The number of locals involved in the 'art of crime' introduced to Bougainville by the ever-striving Papua New Guineans in the slums, sky rocketed.
The conflict was now a 'blame game' (sometime true and sometimes not true) between the marginalized like Dino and the elite locals who had permanent jobs with the company.
Again, the Journal of Pacific History, Vol.33 says, that there ' [was] localized dispute amongst the landowner groups suffering from the distructive impact of the massive Panguna copper mine operated by BCL and precipitated violent attacks by some group members on the mine property'.
BRA man, Aasia and the Secondary Crusher Mill
The BCL was so cunning on the people of Bougainville. It gave them sweets earlier to built a mine on their land to fund the development of an absolutely geographically and culturally alien state of Papua New Guinea and its citizens known in Bougainville languages as 'ivitu' in Buin, 'urung'kasii' in Bana and 'ere'reng' in Kieta (using languages I know of to mean, Redskins).
People like Dino, though were recipients of the then K250 per month royalty money, had nothing to do with the BCL. They were often earning to survive on part-time jobs on contracts won by strangers for constructing such things as the 'rock walls' for inlets and outlets of culvert systems.
The far reaching impacts the mine offered them:
- loss of land
- limited and unfairly distributed compensation
- diversion of social inconvenience compensation into a 'business arm' which delivered little [but benefited the elite]
- environmental degradation, and
- poor standards of living for the relocated
were what the ordinary had to face. Before their eyes they were being raped to their fate.
...Bougainville is an island, an island of sorrow...Bougainville is an island, an island I love. There are people crying. There are people dying...Who is responsible?... (words of a Bougainville crisis song).
Linus Dino and Leonard Fong Roka
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