Rio Tinto to get out of Bougainville

by Murray Horton

Rio Tinto, the world’s biggest mining company (which owns Comalco and the Bluff aluminium smelter), is finally facing reality and has announced that it is going to sell its Panguna copper and gold mine, on Bougainville. This unimaginably huge, open cast mine (boasting the world’s biggest hole) was regularly described as the jewel in the crown of this most voracious of mining transnationals. During its years of operation it constituted Papua New Guinea’s single biggest source of revenue, but it was revenue that came at a colossal cost to Bougainville, an island that had a long history of attempting to secede from PNG. Things came to a head in 1989, when a land owners’ armed uprising closed the mine (permanently, as it turned out) and sparked the war of independence that caused so much bloodshed and suffering (mostly caused by the brutal PNG blockade of the island).

Vandalized BCL properties in Panguna, Bougainville

New Zealand played an honourable part in brokering peace talks in the late 1990s and they are ongoing, being on the brink of producing Bougainville as an autonomous province of PNG. The PNG military became re-established on the island (having been completely driven off at the outset) but they, and all other outsiders, including New Zealand’s and other countries’ peacekeeping troops, have never been allowed to get anywhere near Panguna, which remains firmly under the control of Francis Ona, the leader of the original uprising. Ona is still committed to an independent Bougainville (to be renamed Mekamui) and has never been part of the peace process.

Despite having been involuntarily closed down since 1989, Bougainville Copper Ltd (54% Rio Tinto; 19% PNG government; 27% public shareholders) has remained one of PNG’s most profitable companies – it made $A10 million profit in the 2000/01 financial year – despite, or because of, undertaking no other activity. Even if it sells its Bougainville assets, it will retain $A79 million cash. The question arises as to whether it will find a buyer. Presumably it is trusting in the hope that springs eternal in the hearts of fellow mining executives (or should that be greed?). The company has set aside $A14.5 million for compensation to Bougainville land owners – who hold out the possibility that mining might be allowed to resume in several years time, under new ownership. But Rio Tinto itself faces a multi-billion dollar class action suit in the US, over its conduct in Bougainville.

The Panguna mine has been idle since 1989 and, while the millions of dollars worth of mining equipment has been rusting away in the tropical sun and rain, the badly battered surrounding environment has had a chance to partly recover (the operation is so gargantuan that it created its own micro-climate). Elsewhere in the region, other deadly relics of the Bougainville saga are also quietly rusting away. Since the aborted 1997 attempt by the PNG government to win the war using the foreign mercenaries of Sandline International, their seized helicopter gunships have been stored in an Australian Air Force base, in the Northern Territory. Sandline wants to sell them to recoup some of its losses – but assault helicopters are a prohibited export to most countries. So they sit, unmaintained and unsaleable, in a hangar.

The Panguna mine and Rio Tinto brought nothing but grief to the people of Bougainville and Papua New Guinea. The island, the country and the region are well rid of them. And we need to salute the heroic struggle by the Bougainvilleans to rid themselves of this parasite. They have paid a very high price but they are well on their way to the self-determination they have fought for all along.

Retrieved from the link: http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/97/9.htm

Insight into Foreigners’ killing of the Bougainville Psyche & Progress

Leonard Fong Roka

Deprive a people of their ethnicity, their culture, and you deprive them of their sense of direction or purpose—Francis M. Deng

The Solomon archipelago in recent times, encountered two major conflicts and both, in common, had ethnicity and internationally promoted freedom of movement of people in play.

Bougainville identity that need protection (Photo: Ishmael Palipal)

 

In 1988 erupted the Bougainville conflict that was the fruit of long influx of New Guineans since before the WW2 as a result of colonial demarcation and separating the island from its rightful place; then came the Guadalcanal islanders versus the Malaitans down south that resulted because of Malaitans occupation of Guadalcanal customary land around the Solomon Island capital, Honiara recklessly greatly denying the natives to develop as Guadalcanal people.

These are lessons of the past cruelty of not fostering a development approach that man must have harmony with his own environment and humanity and society has to correct this for by ignoring it, it is denying itself from any positive progress.

A man can be progressive in an environment that is conducive and this has something to do with the protection of peoples’ ethnicity.

According to Francis M. Deng (1997), ethnicity is more than skin color or physical characteristics, more than language, song, and dance. It is the embodiment of values, institutions, and patterns of behavior, a composite whole representing a people’s historical experience, aspirations, and world view. Deprive a people of their ethnicity, their culture and you deprive them of their sense of direction or purpose.

This was the issue Bougainvilleans were subjected to by colonialism and later by the PNG government that had then lead into the problems now they are suffering with.

One could argue that the Bougainville conflict was the result of unequal distribution of Panguna mine benefits amongst landowners but that is, a lie of submerging known historical facts that a Bougainvillean should know. The facts that are the roots of the crisis are bounded to the ill treatment of the Bougainvillean man and women by colonialism and much later, the Papua New Guineans and their government.

Psychology and other sciences claim that a man’s characteristics are the work of his environment. That is, a Bougainvillean is a real Bougainvillean in a Bougainville that is free from foreign influences. Without Papua New Guinean laborers in Bougainvillean plantations from the early colonial era and, without the influx of Papua New Guineans seeking fortune in Bougainville with the Panguna mine then creating turmoil for the native’s psyche, Bougainville would have been a ‘nation’ in the bliss of glory in the Pacific.

But that right of a ‘nation state’ was denied for the Solomon people by the Anglo-German Declaration of 1886. A Raspal S. Khosa noted in his 1992 thesis to the University of Adelaide that:

‘The Anglo-German Declaration of 1886 halved the Solomon Island archipelago. The boundary in this area underwent a significant change in subsequent decades’.

For a period of time, the Bougainville people were thrown here and there; screened and scaled as cheap commodities to the liking of colonial greed and interest. The divine psyche of the people was given a negative whipping and gradual disintegration by the master European race.

But history did see that Bougainvilleans still were prophets defending their identity. They demonstrated fearlessly to preserve their divine rights against cultural genocide and so on but, the greed and self-centered state of PNG could not allow these rights despite it being a UN member that equips itself with such things as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment on the Crime of Genocide (1948).

This convention stood against factors that Bougainvilleans were facing under the rule of PNG. The factors as listed by Divine Word University’s Dr. Jerry Semos, are: issues of [all forms of] genocide and human rights violations—cultural, social, political, economic and physical annihilation of peoples, cultures, languages and identity.

PNG was enjoying its efforts to turn Bougainvilleans into nobodies in their own land since 1975 through its legal indoctrination of the Bougainvillean conscience. PNG allowed its non-Bougainvillean citizens to built illegal squatter settlements on the Solomon land; PNG did not bother to give more BCL benefits to the land that was creating it a 40% export earnings per annum and did not bother to give the highest form of autonomy but, gave them a puppet provincial system; yet the government knew Bougainvilleans had protested against it before its very independence.

PNG politics had a myopic ambition to create a country on the Melanesian identity and calling it a ‘nation’ when in fact PNG is not a ‘nation state’ when Bougainville is included; without Bougainville, there are many reasons Papuans & New Guineans can call themselves, a ‘nation’.

 But Papua New Guinea with all its state mechanisms, especially the education system, continued to ignore Bougainvilleans as Solomon islanders. In every educational literature in high schools to the primary school, there is not an upfront declaration of Bougainvilleans as Solomon people. The outcome of this is a Bougainvillean puppet that classifies himself or herself as a person from the New Guinea Islands (NGI) region.

The PNG state should be seeing itself as bicycle rim that is supported by a dozen spokes that then strengthens the tyre to carry the weight that is the country. In order for the rim to withstand the pressures, the spokes are to be independent entities that unite to create the wheel that carries the bicycle. But leaders in PNG lacked the vision to keep PNG going.

So, one of the spokes, that is Bougainville, had not seen a conducive ground for its survival as an independent and respected stakeholder in PNG so came the Bougainville crisis to free itself from silent and slow death.

Augustine Karuvi: An Epic Journey of a Bougainville Rebel

Leonard Fong Roka

We started the civil war that killed thousands and it is us that must now lead the younger generation to attain a better life in a Bougainville that is free from all forms of suppression and exploitation-LFR

In 1988, the young men who initiated the anti-Bougainville Copper Limited and Papua New Guinea militancy in part of Central Bougainville, were mostly the men who had hardly reached the high school level in education. A good number of these men were often involved in criminal activities thus when an activity so resembling their life erupted in Panguna, they were all there.

And one such youngster was Augustine Karuvi of Koiano in the Kokoda (Koiano, Koromira and Dangtanai) constituency of Kieta. But, Karuvi’s tale is different because he was a student who decided to walk out of the classrooms to join the fight.

Br. Augustine Karuvi OP

 

The young Augustine Karuvi left school in 1989 to fight in a conflict that the end was so blurred at the age of 17. Then, his area which was referred to as Koromira, was a safe haven of some of the pre-crisis know rascals thus with them he was into the fight.

But his fighting career was halted by the 1990 cease fire between the PNG security forces and the militants.  He returned to attend school in 1991, then, operated by the weakening North Solomons provincial administration that lasted for only 1991 and ceased in early 1992 (not all schools did this but only a handful that had concerned teachers).

Within 1991 the reckless Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) arrogance of those days caught up with his extended family. In his family he had a cousin serving in the Papua New Guinea Defence Force and was not at home so to the BRA they claimed the family was still communicating with him.

Augustine was tortured alongside some of his male family members.

In that same period, his next cousin, a defected police Officer, Joseph Miarama Kasika was killed by locals in a BRA operation at Rotokas in Wakunai when he arrived in a scene where a band of BRA men before his party stirred trouble with the locals.

Augustine was a lost youngster for there was no hope; he was trapped. Then in 1992, the Papua New Guinea Defense Force landed at his home, the Toimanapu plantation. To Augustine, the PNGDF captured this location as strategic position to try and quell the BRA boats that darted into the Solomon’s Choiseul province for humanitarian help in the midst of the Australia-backed total blockade of Bougainville.

With this event and out of loyalty to the Bougainville cause, he joined the BRA group of his home, Koiano.

His first action in the BRA was at the Toimanapu PNGDF camp. This camp hosted some local families who surrendered in pursued of medical assistance. This operation saw an early dawn raid on the PNGDF and it resulted on the death of one popular BRA fighter from the Kongara area, Eperi.

After many other operations, his next major engagement was in the Papua New Guinea’s operation to clear Bougainville from all rebel areas and code named as High Speed Operation especially popular around 1996.

Augustine was at the former Aropa International airport defending his land from invaders in an engagement that took nearly a week till the PNGDF were driven back to Arawa where they came from and caused the death of two Bougainvilleans—a BRA man and an innocent fishing Kongara child.

To Augustine witnessing the lost of child that had a long future was damning. He says: ‘Truly I was fighting a genuine cause for my island and people. We were victims of ill treatment of our home by foreigners that did not respect us’.

The kid came to fish in the Aropa before the fighting began. As the exchange of gunfire began, terser bullets (bullets that explode several times after living the gun barrel) fired by the PNGDF confused him by exploding upstream so he darted downstream and was captured by the enemy.

His body was retrieved by Augustine and four other BRA men a day later buried with his hands tied behind his back. He was tortured to death and sustained broken bones and knife wounds but no familiar bullet wounds.

After this incident, Augustine calmed himself and remained fighting the PNGDF till they withdrew unable to face the determined BRA fighting power. For example, one of their hope of success, a Australia donated armored vehicle also was nearly put out of action thus they were demoralized. 

As the BRA was gearing for a massive final assault, scouts reported that the invaders were not being detected. Augustine was relieved to go home without seeing more blood.

But in the BRA rush to scavenge where the PNGDF was positioned, a booby trap exploded and killed another of his comrade, Nathan Matebai who was also another BRA legend of the late 1990s.

Exhausted by the Aropa operation he went straight for another attack on Toimanapu without visiting his family in the hideouts in the jungles of Koiano.

He was engaged to the PNGDF for a week, once more.

This fight, once again at his home area, was ignited on a Friday. ‘We engaged the PNGDF with care to let them waste their Australian ammunition and when it felt like they were done we could move in and slaughter them,’ he recalls. ‘But things really went not the way we wanted’.

As planned, their random gunfire at the Toimanapu encampment flowed smoothly into a Saturday.

On the next morning, a Sunday, it was Augustine’s group’s turn to disturb the enemy. They engaged the PNGDF and exchange fire. With a partner, some fifty meters away from the PNGDF line, Augustine and his friend were struggling to figure out a machine gunner when the reckless firing of the PNGDF man caught his friend. He died instantly and Augustine called a BRA soldier from the Buka Island and they moved the death to safety.

Early the next morning, the PNGDF wounded BRA general commander, Ishmael Toroama and the operation to flush out the invaders from his home was called off.

Augustine Karuvi feels great that he had contributed to resist his island’s subjugation and exploitation by foreigners despite the many negative aspects of the Bougainville crisis we have created and more must be done for Bougainvilleans to be free.

With this in his heart, in 1997 when his enemies, the PNGDF were withdrawing from parts of central Bougainville, he went on to attend Arawa High School and continued on to Bishop Wade Secondary school. From here he enrolled at the East New Britain Business Studies in Rabaul and in 2005 was employed by a local company in Arawa.

From 2006 he joined the Dominican Order of the Catholic Church to become a priest.  In 2007 he was posted in the Gizo Diocese Western Province of Solomon Islands and his posting was completed in 2009.

One significance of his Gizo posting was his going home to Koiano direct by neglecting PNG and international rules of sovereignty.  

‘For all those times,’ he laughs, ‘I took a boat from Gizo and went straight home instead of wasting time going to Port Moresby and to Buka. This is my home islands and it is one of the many reasons many Bougainvilleans died as we tried to regain our rights as Solomon Islanders’.

Augustine and his family were originally from the northern Choiseul Island of the Solomon Islands and were new comers into Central Bougainville just before colonialism.

Many a times the PNG High Commission at Honiara warned him but he ignored that.

From 2010 2011 he was at Bomana Catholic Theological Institute and now he is a ordained Dominican brother in the Order of Preachers (OP) and had just completed the course, English Language Arts at the Divine Word University to venture more into his learning of becoming a good Bougainvillean.

To him, Bougainville’s future depends on the new comers and their sacrifice to be educated despite the fact that they are over the required age of sitting in the classrooms and often they are laughed at by those that did not see the impact of the Bougainville civil war. But we have to cuddle our traditional values and the cruelty of history and make a new free Bougainville for our future generations.

 

Two Years in the Hell of Madang

Leonard Fong Roka

After all the years in the comfort and freedom of my Solomon Island of Bougainville, at the cool age of 31, I left Bougainville on the 03 of February 2011 by ship, MV Solomon Queen to be educated by Divine Word University.

At 7 PM on the night of 06 February 2011, strained weak by the journey through the tempestuous seas and over the land of New Guinea I did walk through the boom gates of Divine Word University proudly that now I was a university student.

From a non-school leaver self-sponsored student in 2011 I secured a place in the government backed list of students categorized as the HECAS student in 2012.

Yah, it’s cool! But to me, I just don’t like the culture in this university. To me Bougainville is freedom and life. I love it; I mean, Bougainville.

Divine Word University to me, as being hell to my social welfare and life; one could wonder why, is has this shit being going on with me. But the tale is too long!

A student boozer sleeping

 

One Papua New Guinean poet, Jack Lahui wrote a poem titled, The Dark Side of a Niuginian’s Teeth that shows what I am trying to say here. The poetry line reads: ‘I am a Niuginian and this happens to be my age of pretentiousness…’

The lawns of Divine Word University and its student populace, exactly is what this line of Jack Lahui’s poetry talks about. We are liars and cheats! In the midst of the so-called intellectuals of PNG in the making, I live with rascals, cowards, dastards and you name it. They are all here within the perimeters of this university and it is not a majority, but a minor bunch of irresponsible brains.

To this, I could say that the future of PNG is still dirty. I think, these students, without realizing it, are fighting to keep the status quo going.

In 2011, students had a strike for the lack of safety inside the university campus. In fact, the security threat and attack on students came about because of students’ recklessness when boozing in the squatter settlements that surrounds the university itself. You know, an ant does not sting unless you threaten its livelihood.

We pestered the DWU administration to do this and that without acknowledging that by far it is us the student are catalyst of the public ill feeling towards us.

To this culture of having dirt on our eyes and trying to clean up another’s problems, I had suffered. We see thieves outside and keep our wolves-under-sheep-coating to grow fat every day.

To these dogs, we feed; I lost a shirt and computer mouse in June 2011 followed on by a pick of K200.00 cash. To me this was a shock, a shock because as a Bougainvillean just coming out of civil war I see New Guineans as running ahead of my island in economic and social terms. Worst, I was robbed in a Catholic run school.

Me and my lost camera

 

But 2012 has shown me that New Guineans in general are too poor so that is why they robbed me, a Bougainvillean.

Over the course of this year, I had lost a K900.00 and two K200.00 mobile phones; with them went a K100 Digicel modem, some cash, my DWI ID Card and BSP banking card all in the midst of Divine Word University students, the great intellectuals of Papua New Guinea who every day fill the DWU chapel every Sunday and sing like saints.

It’s not my problem but I need to express my side of this hell.

Beside this, I irresponsibility is another issue. The so praised DWU intellectuals never want to respect university policies or our student leaders.

Simple latrine rules are ignored before my eyes; littering is like rain in our dorms. We have a lawn that is beautified by patches of white disposals from the rooms. But, the moment a great man like the prime minister is to be landing on our soil, I do get shocks that our lawns are so green; pure green! That is pretentiousness! The same thing our Waigani leaders do by resisting external comments when told by Australia and so on that PNG need to get rid of corruption.

One of the doors without hinges in our dorm

 

Respect of authority is absolutely lacking. Students just ignore the school’s zero tolerance to alcohol and turn our dorms into boozing night clubs. I just feign to enjoy it with a weeping heart.

Students here are also good to be classified as accessories after the fact if the law enforcement of this university is effective. Any student can break the rules like destroy property but his fellow friends will never report that to relevant school authority. This is wantok system at work!

It is a common sight where you see doors without doors. Doors are there but they are not attached to timber with a hinges.

In our midst there are also student leaders with big mouths but empty heads to navigate their course in a firm political base of justice.

One such acting-leader that is so vocal in challenging the DWU administration with student issues stoned our new dorms because—may be—he was fired in a meeting somewhere. I watched him dancing in joy when his stones penetrated the fibro walling and window louvers went off. But not a soul reported this prick yet a fellow Bougainvillean student this year was terminated for breaking a fibro wall in the senior cottages.

This new dorm was stoned by a big-mouthed student that has not being reported

 

Anywhere, this is PNG and its ways; ways so celebrated by the late Bernard Narakobi, if I report the New Guineans will eradicate me because I am a BRA rebel.

Yet to this, I had one swine that as threaten me and my learning and now my New Guinean DWU enemy. He acts tough because I am not standing here on Bougainville soil. But, I pray he must arrive in Bougainville and I will give him a taste of what his New Guinea has given us all through our history. I will just eradicate him.

But cool I am here and so thus I keep silent and wonder what this peoples’ future is.

 

Nigel Matte Lalai & the Bougainville Crisis

Leonard Fong Roka

The said Bougainville conflict affected us in different ways and at different times as we grew up in the midst of the violence and bloodshed. And here I had a short gossip with first year Business Studies Divine Word University student Nigel Matte Lalai from Buka and Kieta.

Nigel Matte Lalai was born during the peak of the first phase of the Bougainville crisis at Arawa in May 1989 whilst homes were being torched and Bougainvilleans from a few villages and New Guinean laborers from plantations and squatter settlements were being rounded by the North Solomons Provincial Government into care centers around Central Bougainville.

Nigel Matte Lalai

 

Four months after his birth, his dad was killed by the Papua New Guinea Defense Force and dumped at the beaches of Kivirai near the Aropa International Airport. Without the love of his blood father, Nigel Matte Lalai yet, made it through the crisis and this far into the Divine Word University.

According to Nigel, his father, Kevin Lalai was from the Torauan village of Vito in Kieta and was aged 24 when he was killed. His father courted his mother, Delphin Matte from Gogohe on the east coast of Buka Island and a 1988 graduate from Kaindi Teachers College in East Sepik in a short period of time and they got married.

Then, the new couple’s long life of love was cut short in late 1989.

Nigel re-collects his mother’s stories, ‘My father and his siblings of Vito were often so involved in many village conflicts over land issues and other social problems. This led to some of their family’s foes into reporting his father falsely as a Panguna militant’s informant whilst he was working with a catering company so he was picked up by the PNGDF and killed’.

The late Kevin Lalai was an employee to the Bougainville Copper Limited (BCL) contracted catering company, SHRM Limited. And by then, he had no interest what-so-ever about the militant activities in Panguna but was occupied with the welfare of his wife and the new born son, Nigel Lalai.

Whilst on duty at the BCL’s lime stone mine at Manetai, Nigel’s father was picked by a PNGDF’s BCL vehicle that drove purposefully in, from the direction of Arawa. There, they forcefully dragged him out of his work place and loaded him onto the pick-up with a few punches then drove him away as he shed a stream of tears of innocence and lost.

As his wife, Delphin and his extended family members were in shock at their Vito village, that same night of 1989, Nigel’s father was undergoing torture on the trailer of a PNGDF truck from Arawa towards Aropa in the middle of the night.

And it was at the Kivirai village, near Aropa, that Kevin Lalai’s wailing of agony was noted by the sleeping villagers sprouting off from a slowly passing convoy of PNGDF vehicles.

The curious villagers carefully watched the vehicles as they passed and went out of sight. But they were captivated when the moving headlights died indicating the convoy had come to a halt. Later the next morning, they went to investigate, and there a body of a Bougainvillean was washed up on the beach with deep knife wounds to its chest. They called the Arawa General Hospital and an ambulance took him to Arawa.

On the day of retrieving the body from the morgue, his old agonized mother scooped blood off her son’s body and rubbed it all over her face as she hysterically wailed and was beginning to sip that blood as she was held back by other sympathetic relatives (a story also shared by late Kevin Lalai’s elder sister Marceline Tunim in Liz Thompson film documentary, Breaking Bows & Arrows).

This tragedy of an innocent sibling, took the elder brother of Kevin Lalai, an auto-mechanic and naturally an aggressive character, Justin Kokiai into the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) rank & file.

Justin Kokiai married his late brother’s widow, Delphin Matte and took responsibility of Nigel Lalai up-bringing.

In the BRA profile of the Kieta area of Bougainville, Nigel Lalai’s step father and biological father to his 4 siblings, Justin Kokiai is noted as one of the only BRA leader that did maintained a cordial relationship with the pro-PNGDF Bougainville Resistant Forces (BRF) of the Torau area in Kieta.

From the BRF, Justin Kokiai took a constant supply of ammunition and a number of PNGDF issued high-powered weapons to wage war on the PNGDF until the Bougainville Peace Process came in. To the peace process, he played a significant role in the initial stages of peace negotiations as a BRA commander and also in the weapons containment efforts.

But leadership outside the family and leadership within the family are two different skills and so often do fail to come parallel or unite for Justin Kokiai.

And to Nigel Lalai his step-father was a hard-to-tame person in managing ethics in the family circle. As it is a norm to many BRA big men, he had gone reckless. He was always engaged to a wild rage of extra-marital affair life, boozing and domestic violence, thus Nigel and his siblings were there growing in an abusive environment.

But Nigel’s mother Delphin was designed by all these nightmares to be a woman that nothing can ever let her down to manage a family with pride. As a classroom teacher in many schools in Bougainville she remained steadfast and at ease, her mind. She managed her family alone when the father was out running after beer and women whom Delphin has so many times physically confronted with rage.

Nigel grew up watching all the social dirt and slowly, along with his second born brother, began to grow hatred for their father. They even planned to kill him silently for all the bad treatment he was doing to his wife—their mother—daily.

Slowly, their father also saw how his step-son was growing with his blood sons, and so began to conceal his store of guns from their reach and gradually also change is social position at home. He knew he had created a risk for his life because all his children had grew up in the gun-culture and so knew how to squeeze the trigger.

So, slowly he was moving towards the finer shores, when in 2004 he was killed near the Manetai Primary School where his wife was teaching after a drinking brawl.

Nigel Lalai was again in the midst of a traumatic shock. But a mother, so endowed with courage after a long history of nightmares, was always behind him and now he has just completed his first year of studies at Divine Word University.

His dream is to go back after graduating to help Bougainville gain peace and work towards independence that many of his loved ones had died for across the island.