A fighter’s call of responsibility

Leonard Fong Roka

He was one of the men who ambushed and killed 8 PNG soldiers in late 1992 outside Arawa; he was wounded in the former Kieta port area by the redskin enemies of Bougainville in mid-1993, and he recently acted as a Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) sniper in the Bougainville movie, Mr. Pips.

 

Kevin Paibaku and his wife and children today live a calm life at his Bomena hamlet at Pidia village of Kieta, Central Bougainville taking up opportunities that reaches him with openness and a positive mind.

‘We all have suffered in the 10 year war for independence,’ he told me, ‘but our struggle is still going on. We have yet to reach the destiny we fought and died for and that is freedom from our own selfish leaders, the cruel PNG government and its people, and the Bougainville Copper Limited (BCL) and its friends that are still running around to exploit us again with old laws.’

He joined the BRA in 1990 angered by the reckless PNG army and their patrol boats that came and regularly shot at and threatened his villagers with their huge guns.

According to Michael J. Field’s 1998 historical timeline entitled, Chronology of Bougainville Civil War (online), the PNG government, after failing in 1990 to end the BRA rebellion in Panguna and withdrew, it had its National Intelligence Organization (NIO) to create a confidential plan to re-take Bougainville with Australian input in April of 1990. The plan had two strategies: (1) a total blockade and (2) deliberate setting of Bougainvilleans against each other on geographic/ethnic terms.

All these worked out on Bougainville and Paibaku know for sure that Bougainville was and is still trapped in this PNG and Australia set-up.  

In early 1992 when the reckless PNG army began intensifying their attacks on the coastal villages, the Pidia people began slowly moving their families into the inland areas of their hinterland. As they moved to safer refugee camps their village went up in flames on the dawn raids.

So it was now the responsibility of young people like Paibaku to patrol the Pidia Peninsula with guns. They had also the role to contain the PNG army camps at Kobuan and Kieta that regularly attempted ambushes on their narrow trails of entry into the Pidia peninsula.

It was these duties that one day got him engaged in a gun battle with the foe that had him wounded in 1993. His unit of BRA patrol was trying to block a PNG army team foot access into the Kieta port at the Premier Hill when they got engaged.

After facing a brutal guerilla fire power of the BRA on the Arawa-Kieta access road without any gain, the PNG army patrol broke up and sent a unit further into the ridge overlooking the Premier Hill in the cover of night.

Early the next morning Paibaku and his old team of mates from where they rested for night in the jungles of the Pidia peninsula came to have a look at the previous confrontation spot. There they discovered a section of the divided PNG army patrol scavenging and encircling a point on the road that they were positioned the previous day.

Paibaku and his men did not waste a moment but started shooting at them from the rear. In joy of the scene of panicking Australia trained PNG soldiers, a few forgetting their weapons, darting into the roadside slope into Kobuan, Paibaku and his team exposed themselves to the PNG army unit positioned on the ridge above them.

They were about to pick a few dropped and forgotten PNG government weapons on the road when the uproar of gunshots from above them got them in shock. Four of his friends got shot but they still manage to help each other and move away from the line of fire.

Paibaku was trying to get a good shot at the ridge positions of the PNG army and a stray bullet bounced off a metal frame he was hiding beside and reaped through his buttocks. He was a experienced BRA man thus the tiny sting he felt meant a bullet and reaped through him thus he ran down hill into the former Kieta township and made it for the Karakung villages without checking his back.

As he reached Karakung, he ran out of blood and collapsed as he met friends who immediately carried him further inland.

His wounded life threatening so soon after he was shouldered by locals from Karakung to Koromira area where the BRA boats transported him to Choiseul province; this is a journey the saw him undertaking a life saving medical operation in Honiara.

Soon after his treatment he returned to keep fighting. In his return he was braver to fight the invaders of Bougainville.

But with the peace process he had not a chance to fight the shameless PNG government that came to fight to re-take Panguna mine. But he thinks peace was a positive development for Bougainvilleans to be united and get rid of PNG that had destroyed Bougainville land and people for years.

‘Peace was good since our kids are now in school as our leaders are fighting the war on the table,’ Paibaku told me at his Pidia village. ‘But peace again has sadly created irresponsible and corrupt Bougainville leaders who had forgotten our struggles since the 1960s.

‘The BRA leaders are worst. They had forgotten what we fought for and now they are running after money. They have also forgotten us the soldiers who actually suffered to earn them the reputation they have as our leaders. They are recklessly running after money with threat to the civil society after ordering us to contain our weapons.’

His recent role in the movie, Mr Pips, as a BRA rifleman was a moment of pride to his life as a fighter for Bougainville freedom struggle.

‘The New Zealanders has helped us make our story be felt in the wider cinema world,’ he said, ‘where people will know at least we had suffered in the hands of redskins from PNG who did wanted only to rob us our rights and dignity.’