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.