Bougainville
(Big
Trouble In Little ChinaTown)
It
is ironic how some stories can develop a momentum all of their own.
Many
years ago I visited the Papua New Guinea Province of Bougainville.
During
World War II it was the scene of mass slaughter by the Japanese
Imperial Forces
and
about one quarter of the islands population were killed.
The
phrase ' A Bob A Nob' originated here.
What
it meant was that Allied Forces would pay each PNG headhunter a
shilling (a 'Bob') for every Japanese head they brought back to
barracks.
The
Bougainville islanders had a method of 'shrinking' decapitated
Japanese heads so that, after payment, they could wear them with
pride around their necks – like a prized necklace so to speak.
As
with many PNG tribes they have beliefs in the spirit world and the
powers of the gods of the forests and the rivers.
If
a foreigner entered (enters-today) a village and someone takes ill,
they attribute this to the 'evil eye', will kill the foreigner(s) and,
in the past at least (I cannot speak for 2019) eat that person to
'ingest' or 'consume' the powers which brought about the sickness or illness to
the local tribesman or woman or child.
In the past men could have as many wives as they could afford to maintain. Their power was derived from the number of adversary tribe members they had killed, beheaded and eaten. Just like women in Western culture are attracted to financial and politically powerful individuals, women in Papuan society were 'attracted' to men who had 'triumphed over' and 'consumed (eaten) the souls' of a multitude of tribal adversaries.
Well
that was the past.
Recently
Bougainville voted to secede from Papua New Guinea.
You
will probably not recall that East Timor was 'encouraged' by
Australia to secede from Indonesia. Australian geologists had
estimated that the shores around East Timor were not just fish but
mineral rich (oil and natural gas.)
Something
similar has gone on here no doubt.
The
Bougainville islanders neither have the education not the expertise
to negotiate international contracts where the stakes are, lets just
say,as an understatement, enormous.
1.
Papua
New Guinea has agreed to honour the recent referendum for
independence and to move towards autonomy.
The
international press are presenting this as a 'power grab' by China
for military bases
in
the South Pacific.
This
may well be the case. What is curious is how the papers are ignoring
the exploration rights and research carried out by U.S. and
Australian companies over the past 2 decades which have, as I
understand it, in confidential briefings, speculated as to the
mineral wealth of this province – including it's offshore wealth.
As
soon as the East Timorese realised that the royalties agreements
signed with Australian offshore exploration companies placed them at
a huge financial disadvantage, there was an international outcry,
and, under international pressure, these were renegotiated by the new
nation which had lacked the local expertise to negotiate with
global multinational mining and exploration conglomerates.
Reproduced with kind
permission (Reuters)
There
is no doubt about the sincerity of the PNG government in wanting a
lasting peace in all of it's tribally diverse provinces.
Will
this matter be resolved peacefully?
Given
the bloody tribal history of the country and its chronic lack of
skilled and educated professionals, I am not optimistic for the
future.
It
is sad. Papua New Guinea has come such a long way in such a very
short time.
In
many respects, some tribes were living in the Stone Age until 2004
(if my memory serves me correct, it was after my visit to Irian Jaya
or West Papua in 2002, that yet another Stone Age Tribe was contacted
by our modern world – for the first time.)
This
is a very dangerous part of the world and it is advisable to get
permission from the government since there are not only dangers from
local tribesmen but also the wildlife.
Alligators
and crocodiles (pretty big ones) and snakes (pretty big ones) are
literally everywhere - in their many dozens (I didn't stop to count)
– near rivers and streams.
It
is an open zoo. The mosquitoes can kill a foreigner but the locals
are immune.
So
there you have a mirror picture of Papua New Guinea.
Thanks
to Indonesia, West Papua has been developed through investment and
migration projects. This however, is not always to the advantage of
local tribes people who resent
'Anschluss'
of West Papua into Indonesia in what was, it is said by local West
Papuans, a 'rigged' referendum in the early 1960s.
Neither
has it been easy to integrate Muslims and local West Papuans who are
either Animist or Christian in faith.
Papua
New Guinea (PNG) today is independent of Indonesia. It was never a part of
Indonesia and has had a completely different colonial history. The
Province of Bougainville was part of the German Colonial Empire and
called German New Guinea before World War II and itself, has had a separate but similar
colonial historical development from the German ruled PNG mainland
(which you can read about in the references below.)
I
have briefly linked both East and West Papua because yet another
referendum is more likely to divide than unite an already fragile
nation.
Let
us hope that I am wrong and that the future of Bougainville, as a
nation, proves to be a lesson in coexistence rather than, as in the
case of Zaire in Africa, as just one example, a dark omen of
resources conflicts by global powers for decades to come.
©Patrick
Emek 2019*