Bougainville: ‘You die today, we will kill you’

Swimming with Sharks Chapter 8.1

Francis Ona was king of an imaginary country when he died. 

We never met him and I had to make do with chatting with him on a satellite phone while he stayed in his mountain fastness at Panguna, deep in the interior of PNG’s Bougainville Island.

The village sat on a vast copper deposit, and in 1972 Rio Tinto, through Bougainville Copper Ltd (BCL), began extracting copper and gold. It was the biggest copper mine in the world, a large pit in which the tailings slid down the mountain, polluting a wide area down to the coast. 

Ona worked for BCL as a surveyor and found himself a party to the destruction of his neighbourhood. He demanded A$10 billion in compensation. Rio did not pay and Ona created the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA). 

PNG’s Defence Force (PNGDF), poorly led and equipped, found their opponents deadly, highly motivated and armed with World War Two and homemade weapons.

In 1990, PNG quarantined Bougainville and while the guerrilla war sank into a bloody stalemate, the tragedy was hidden from the world. The Pacific, including New Zealand and Australia, saw it as an ‘internal’ PNG issue. 

Across the border

The Solomons Islands western province, within sight of Bougainville, was initially peaceful as the civil war began, but an arms and goods trade developed across the easily travelled border. PNGDF believed the Shortland Islands was a Pacific Ho Chi Minh Trail terminal, where arms and supplies originated for the rebels. 

While sympathy did exist among the Solomon Islanders for the Bougainvilleans, mostly they wanted nothing to do with the war. BRA forces kept coming across the border and raiding their facilities, among the first a Catholic centre in Choiseul.

For a time the war lapsed into a poorly kept ceasefire, but PNG Prime Minister Julius Chan decided he could win. Equipped with Australian supplied Iroquois helicopters, the PNGDF got tough on the Solomon Islanders, with PNG Defence Minister Mathias Ijape talking of ‘hot pursuit’ raids. ‘All we ask for is for Solomon Islands not to make its soil a hideout and criminal haven, because if that is so we will make hell for them.’

Shortland Islands with Solomons police patrol boat Auki moored. Photo Michael Field