Bougainville, Guns gave us light and hope

Leonard Fong Roka

We have today, in our post crisis society, a bunch of people that by sight or hearing of a gun would quickly condemn this lethal weapon. But, to us few, despite the fact that we had suffered because of the gun still should claim that through the barrel of the gun Bougainville has or did earned respect as people that ought to be respected.

Bougainvillean Fighter (depananikints22.blogspot.com)

That is, we go by the Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Tse Tung’s words that, ‘FREEDOM COMES from the BARREL of the GUN’.

Going down Bougainville’s history lane, North Bougainvilleans showed the very first resistance against infiltrators of our beloved homeland in 1768. In the book, Bougainville, A Personal History, Douglass Oliver (1973: 19) records Louis de Bougainville’s account of 4 July 1768:

‘They made signs that they were to fetch us cocoa-nuts. We applauded their resolution; but they were hardly gone twenty yards, when one of these perfidious fellows let fly an arrow, which happily hurt no body. After that, they fled as fast as they could…’

We had that imprint of repelling strangers, but to the ever established imperial influence of Europe, we failed thus colonialism had mistreated us with far reaching negative consequences that our bows and arrows could not resist.

Getting our island off its sister islands of the Solomon archipelago, like a mere piece of object without our consent, colonialism did tin fished us into New Guinea where we had to watch our fate without awareness in the calm painted across our faces by the laws and corrupt politicians.

Our island being considered ‘an integral part of Papua New Guinea’ by myopic people is our fate as a unique people of the Solomon chain of islands. I am not getting this off my abdomen as a spider does to erect its cobweb, but the United Nations greatly pushes through its various Rights articles, for example, the Indigenous Rights. Under these rights Bougainvilleans have every right to pursue self determination from the ignorant PNG politics.

From this slow death, resistance rescued us. Rebellion made us to re-think our political and economic gait in a hard way. The conflict gave us the right to design our destiny and all, now depends on you and I.

As Bougainvilleans, we need to look towards the betterment of our lives along with our land that was handed over to us by our ancestors. And to survive and function as a successful state, the past is where we look to in order to built our society within the context of twenty first century globalisation. For to me, merging our values with external adopted ideas of politics and economics provides a concrete foundation as we can learn from the Chinese approach to development.

In this light, our positioning in the polarity of global politics where, we see a world of Sino-Euro tug-of-war evolving, we can design a hybrid mechanism of approach and deal with our governmental affairs that should bring tangible results.

This line of thinking today across Bougainville as sprouted not because of the provincial government system they gave us in 1976 to shut the fuck out of us, but simply because of the guns that were fired beginning around mid-1988.

We had a long line of resistance in our history. One example is the one noted by Jinks. B, Biskup. P and Nelson. A (eds) (1973), in the book, Readings in New Guinea History where in 1889, Sohano villagers destroyed a trading station established by Hernsheim and Co. and ate the trader (pg 161). These readings pinpoints that this was done because a trader mistreated and disrespected a local village kid as New Guineans had being doing to us since 1975.

In this air of mistreatment and disrespect of Bougainvilleans and their island, we know of, was the ignorant injection of Red skins (New Guineans) into our island by the colonial powers to work the many Bougainvillean cocoa and coconut plantations. This process suppressed and derived us from any space to breathe the air of innovative change for the betterment of self.

However, what gave a positive benefit to the planters and settlers energized the New Guinean to do whatever they wanted to on our island.

In what is now noted by history as the Rorongo Uprising of 1960, we read and watch in film documentaries our mothers from the village of Rorovana and others protesting violently against the CRA establishments and land grab at Rorongo (white man called it Loloho). We painfully watch and read our mothers of the land being baton by colonial police composed of mostly New Guineans (oral history documents this well).

 And one final incident that is worth mentioning as noted by Mamak, B. and Bedford, R. (1979: 12) in their book Bougainvillean Nationalism, for it created resentment in the Panguna area was the Christmas Eve 1972, was the murder of Dr. Luke Robin 32 and from Panguna and his mate Peter Moini 30 and from Siwai in South Bougainville who were trainee medical persons in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea.

Thus, with this long unseen cry of Bougainvilleans we took up the gun to write our way out. In the words of PNG’s famous blogger and activist, Martyn Namorong, he said of us in his 2012 essay, Development & anti-development: what's in a word? That:

‘There is a limit to the patience of human beings. It took 20 years of patience until the Bougainvilleans became totally fed up with a system that was basically screwing their lives and giving them peanuts. How long will the patience of the rest of Papua New Guinea be tested? Now here's a development we all don't want to see!’ (http://asopa.typepad.com/asopa_people/2012/06/development-anti-development-whats-in-a-word-1.html ).

In late 1988, when the Aropa Plantation workers from New Guinea raped and then killed a mother of Bougainville from the Kongara who was a nurse by profession, as she was returning home after work, guns came out to free our island from the claws of exploitative suppression.

Thus, the gun was our wind of change and hope.