Bougainville is importing dirty influences

Leonard Fong Roka

Before the 1988 Bougainville conflict, there were less Bougainvilleans living a life in the areas of New Guinea. But due to the conflict, there had being a comparative rise of Bougainvilleans flocking in and living in New Guinea’s various urban, country side and institutions; all because, as they say it, there is hell in Bougainville.

Nurtured in Bougainville

There is economic, political or social inferno on the island, I agree. But, whose problem is that; these New Guineans, or us the people of Bougainville? I see, maybe because of my stupidity that the problem in Bougainville is a Bougainvillean issue and it is, seething insanity for us running away to New Guinea.

Here are some sickening verbal attacks a few Bougainvilleans living in the New Guinea paradise are making on Bougainville: ‘upla stretim Peles and bai mipla kam’, ‘mi poret lo dai’, ‘level blong pay rates em too low’ or ‘mi kisim experience pastem and then go lo peles’ and there are more of these foolish remarks from Bougainvilleans.

Such thinking Bougainvilleans are a sick bunch of false prophets; liars and cheats; wolves inside sheep coating and they are dangerous to the Solomon island of Bougainville and it is these lot of Bougainvillean are the ones creating a fearful problem for our island.

The Samoan writer, Albert Wendt in his 1996 novel, Sons of the Return Home highlighted the problem of being strangest to our own land because we have being nurtured in a foreign setting; that foreign and harmful environs, handicaps the acceptance of one’s motherland and its ways of acting out the daily ecological interactions of life. 

In Bougainville, today many youngsters that did not exist during the peak of the conflict but live in the heaven of Papua New Guinea are becoming a bunch of social problems. Many of our fingers point to the guns, but we do not analysis who the prick is handling that gun.

In mid-2011, on the streets of Arawa, a couple of these nurtured-in-PNG Bougainvillean kids and their cronies were knifed by a band of business men for breaking into stores and stealing.

After 2005, for example in Arawa, many people who were in Papua New Guinea as we struggled during the conflict days had being increasing. That increase, did also coincided with a number of armed criminal activities because of what I call idolatry.

Bougainvilleans have one bad aspect that is worth mentioning. We are good at worshipping the good and the bad. That is, for example with the crisis we saw men who might have fought very well in a certain operation as a hero. As he and his men enter our village pigs are slaughtered to feed him. We kneel as he passes.

With this problem coming from PNG, people may collect a heresy claiming that a certain kid is a rascal in Port Moresby without the subject’s knowledge in fact, he might have being a pick-pocket criminal. Once this kid enters the village and hears gossips and answers our questions with lies, of course, we have empowered him with high esteem and status that will have Frankenstein impacts in our society where guns are readily available for our use. This too, we blindly worship.

For these circumstances, the imported subject goes into ex-combatant attire with a created perfume of Port Moresby rascal to harm Bougainville.

The man who we call a rebel or resistant, is a man with likes and dislikes we know of, but this new problem we are adopting from the crime infested Papua New Guinea into Bougainville is the one you and I ought to be carefully monitoring for the betterment of Bougainville.