A garden under scrutiny in Arawa

Leonard Fong Roka

To many across Bougainville memory still lingers of who actually was the cause of the violence on Bougainville that actually triggered the conflict that killed the islanders from Buin to Buka and, a fenced garden in the heart of Arawa is unsettling the neighborhoods.

Non-Bougainvillean settlers, commonly referred to as redskins across Bougainville, who were pulled onto Bougainville but ended with no employment in the lucrative Panguna mine were the ones who illegally occupied customary land around all urban centers of Bougainville causing trouble for Bougainville people.

On the bank of the Tupukas River in Section 18 of Arawa town, a wandering redskin from the Highlands of PNG, who after several months of selling self sawn clothes in the main Arawa market, began making a garden that is now a subject of heated debate in the many urban households and the surrounding villages.

Many fear that the old roots of the Bougainville crisis is now back with the leaders ignoring it and our own people being irresponsible.

‘People still do not know that it was because of these nomadic New Guineans and Papuans that we perished,’ irate and drunk Martin Kobu, from Pariro in Buin told me as he uprooted some of the post of the fencing on the garden. ‘The redskins are coming back as good businessman, churchman, and lovers and so on and it is not long squatter settlements will decorate Arawa.’

To Kobu, a self employed businessman, the garden is an eye-sore and it is the government in Buka that is sleeping and allowing trouble back onto Bougainville.

Bougainville is again being exploited and it is all because the Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG) had forgotten that facts about the Bougainville Crisis.

‘We fought and died because the non-Bougainvilleans were taking over our land and other resources while we stood and watched as insane persons,’ he told me. ‘But I do not know why the leaders in the ABG and those in the PNG parliament cannot create laws that keep away useless people entry into our land that we paid and saved with our blood?’

To Martin Kobu the day he catches the New Guinean in the garden will be the end of his gardening career in Arawa.

‘He will be packing up and returning back to the highlands of PNG for I will not see him here since Bougainvilleans had shed blood to save this island,’ he said uprooting and destroying parts of the fence and littering beer cans in the garden of sweet potatoes, banana and cassava.