Running the Panguna gauntlet

By David Robie

APART from convoys with armed soldiers riding shotgun and yel low Bougainville Copper Ltd pickup trucks filled with security forces in flakjackets, camouflage helmets and sporting Ml6s, you’d hardly know on the coastal belt around Arawa that a guerilla war is in progress. But once you reach the sandbagged machinegun nest in Birempa village at the foot of the rug ged mountain jungles of the Crown Prince Range the tendon starts to rise.

Scanning the dense vegetation for a sign of militants of the Bougainville Re volutionary Army known as the “Rambos” the soldier manning the machinegun doesn’t notice the irony of the T-shirt he is wearing. Scrawled across his chest are the words MINE OF TEARS, a play on the title of Richard West’s book River of Tears, a devastating attack on BCL’s Australian parent com pany CRA, and the “bible” of the mili tants.

Sitting on top of one of the sandbags is a “Swords of the Samurai” comic.

Leaving Birempa, the road to Panguna mine snakes spectacularly up through the jungle past river gorges and ideal ambush sites until it reaches the 1011metre summit of Karokata Pass through Pakia Gap. With names like Shoofly Pass and Fingerpoint Corner, the prudent traveller doesn’t stick around too long on the highway and risk becoming a poten tial target.

A long straight above Fingerpoint Cor ner has been a favourite spot for mili tants to attack vehicles and mineworker buses with shotguns and bows and arrows before they melt into the trees.

The wild stretch up to Pakia is also where the vital 30km electricity supply grid to the mine has been repeatedly sabotaged with pylons being blasted off

their footings.

Troops guard the strategic Guava vil lage area high up on the southern rim of the “big hole” that scars the earth at Panguna. On the northern side of the mine, the International School has been commandeered by security forces as a helipad for three of the four Iroquois helicopters supplied by the Australian government to Papua New Guinea.

When I told mine officials I planned tc visit the Jaba River, where several ghost villages and burnt down hamlets skirt the tailings-devastated valley, they expressed astonishment. Officials regard anywhere west of the huge waste

dump where a pipeline disgorges tailings

into the Kawerong River, a tributary of the Jaba, as undefended “no man’s land”.

However, a villager from Jaba well known to both the security forces and the militants but who didn’t want to be named agreed to take me on a tour of the devastated villages and tailings area.

Just before we reached the burnt-out hamlet of Kawerong, Premier Joseph Kabui’s home village, we came across a battle scene with two-metre arrows still piercing the ground and empty Ml 6 cartridges scattered about. It was where a soldier had been wounded in an attack three days earlier.

The villager told a gruesome story of how militants had earlier attacked a PMV bus, discovered a “redskin” High lander on board, fired arrows into him and left him for dead. He was later evacuated by helicopter to Arawa Hos pital with arrows still protruding from his chest. He recovered.

About six kilometres down the road here the gutted shell of a mine power house, a fire-revaged bridge and the fib rous ashes of a big tyre dump. “The militants set fire to the tyres because

they thought the soldiers were hiding

there,” my villager guide said. “Then they poured petrol on the wooden deck of the bridge and set that alight too.

When the soldiers came they burned down that village on the other side of the Jaba River in retaliation. It’s a never ending pay back.”

Villagers like him resent the heavy

handed bullying by the security forces.

Even travelling to town to get supplies has become an ordeal. Before villagers in the Jaba River area could get supplies 30 kilometres to 60 kilometres away in Pan guna village; now they are forced to travel double the distance to Arawa, the

provincial capital.

“It’s so much hassle to go through the checkpoints. You can have three or four

checkpoints just going into town,” said

the guide.

“The military check your foodstuffs just to make sure you’re not feeding the so-called Rambos. When you buy tinned meat, rice and things like that you have to go to command headquarters with your driver’s licence, car papers and ev erything. You have to wait for hours to get the colonel to sign a clearance only he can do that. You’re not allowed through a checkpoint unless you have the colonel’s signature.

“If you try, you get bashed up and accused of helping the militants. I’ve tried to reason with the colonel,” said the villager, a former soldier. “You cannot win this war unless the villagers are with you. And right now they support their own people.” □