New Light on Bougainville

Black Islanders:  A Personal Perspective of Bougainville 1937-1991
by Douglas Oliver,
Hyland House Publishing

&

Bougainville:  the Mine and the People
Paul Quodling,
Centre for Independent Studies

AUSTRALIANS are well informed, if they want to be, about the internal affairs of remote Georgia and Azerbaijan, the fighting in Mogadishu and the disorders in Haiti or Algiers.  We hear very little, on the other hand, about what is happening on Bougainville to our near north.

There are understandable reasons for this.  It is not easy to enter Bougainville, although an SBS television team has done it.  And for the matter of that, Port Moresby is not a particularly attractive place for Australian journalists to work.  Even so, it is deplorable that the situation on Bougainville receives such fragmentary and sporadic coverage in our media.  For the eventual outcome of the continuing crisis on the island is of vital importance to Papua New Guinea (PNG), our closest neighbour, and therefore of more than passing interest to ourselves.

In March 1990, after Bougainville Copper (BCL) had closed its mine and evacuated all its employees, PNG security forces were withdrawn from the province of the North Solomons.  The Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) immediately took over control and later declared an independent republic, which no government to this date has recognised.  The Port Moresby authorities then applied a blockade.  Meetings between PNG Government delegations and secessionist representatives -- the first aboard a New Zealand frigate in August 1990, the second at Honiara in January 1991 -- failed to reach any kind of lasting agreement.  Repeated attempts to set up a third round of talks have all broken down.  PNG troops have reoccupied Buka and an area in the north of Bougainville island, apparently at the invitation of local chiefs opposed to the BRA.  An accommodation has also been reached between Port Moresby and tribal leaders in Southern Bougainville.  Some medical supplies have been delivered to the BRA -- which rejected a consignment of food the first time round and set fire to a second ship carrying emergency supplies -- but there are disquieting reports of pitifully inadequate medical services and a threat of spreading disease.

This is a bald outline of developments over the last two years.  But some much-needed light has now been thrown on the background to this tragic affair by two recent books:  Black Islanders -- A Personal Perspective of Bougainville, 1987-1991 by Professor Douglas Oliver, an American anthropologist;  and Bougainville, The Mine and the People, by Paul Quodling, who retired as Managing Director of BCL in 1987.  Both are required reading for an informed understanding of the situation on Bougainville today.

Among the facts which emerge from these studies are the following:

• the people of Bougainville and Buka take pride in their very dark pigmentation and share a sense of distinctive identity from the "redskins" of mainland PNG;
• but they do not form anything like a homogeneous society -- there are nine different languages, and the social structure is highly fragmented, with family and clan group loyalties predominating;
• the Nasioi clan, from which the principal BRA leaders come, is only one of four language groups within the old area of BCL operations and with only a small share of the total island population;
• the Nasioi and other village societies affected by mining operations have been deeply influenced by cargo cult attitudes and expectations;
• aspirations towards independence go back at least as far as 1968 and are not confined to the BRA:
• but the extent of support for the BRA leaders is difficult to gauge -- they have a record of violence and intimidation, having murdered the provisional Minister for Commerce in 1989 and taken over from the elected provincial government at gunpoint -- and there have been no elections since then;
• annual population growth is estimated at 3.5 per cent, one of the highest rates in the world;
• the agricultural potential has been pushed almost to its limit (yet the mine is out of action and many plantations are devastated);
• if the current political deadlock is resolved and the mine reactivated, the operation will generate fewer profits for distribution than it did pre-1989.

Given the BRA leaders' insistence on full independence and PNG's refusal to grant it, there seems little present prospect of a negotiated settlement.  A military solution, involving sustained reoccupation of the whole island by the PNG Defence Force seems just as remote.In the longer term, if the effects of the blockade on an increasingly impoverished society begin to weaken BRA resolution and/or control, a settlement could conceivably emerge which would recognise the distinctive personality of the Bougainville people, and grant them a special autonomous status within PNG with the right to a substantial share in future profits from a reactivated mine.  But that is looking a long way ahead, and in the meantime the sufferings of the Bougainville people seem bound to increase.