Bougainville innocents
p. 18 · Read in the full issue
ON Papua New Guinea’s island of Bougainville more than 44,000 people are living like refugees in their own country sheltering in PNG govern ment ‘care centres’ from the effects of the five-year-old guerilla war. In many ways they are the lucky ones. Innocent civilians in rebel controlled areas (which have been locked behind a PNG military blockade for three years) are even worse off. The story of daily life for ordinary Bougainvilleans remains one of the untold tales of the war.
For the past three years the PNG government has been attempting to restore services and civilian administra tion in areas it controls on Bougainville.
Until a few months ago the govern ment’s Restoration Committee had been making steady progress. Roads were repaired, high schools re-opened and aid posts rebuilt. In some areas in
the north conditions were safe enough for care centres to be disbanded and for people to return home to start rebuilding their villages and gardens. But a spate of attacks in the past few months has shown even those living in the safest areas of the island are vulnerable. Continued lack of funding for the military and the civilian Restoration Committee has brought the situation to crisis point. A confidential report prepared for Port Moresby by government restoration officers said the restoration operation was close to chaos. All four military helicopters necessary to move food and other supplies from their coastal drop-off points to the inland ‘care centres’ are out of action. In the south, with as many as 10,000 to 15,000 people packed into a single care centre, the logistics of supplying people’s needs are a nightmare. Since the helicopters have been grounded people have gone hungry and medical evacuations have been delayed or become impossible.
“This is a most serious dilemma actually causing deaths” said the government report. More serious, according to the report, is the flood of ammunition that has poured in from the neighbouring Solomon Islands as the military has been unable to maintain its strict border surveillance. PNG officials working on Bougainville estimate there are around 500 members of the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) and up to 1000 young men in break-away gangs which are now fighting each other for supremacy, often using the civilian population as targets. According to the report the situation is now critical. It said the government must allow peace talks to go ahead and to drop its demand for the unconditional surrender of the BRA.
Gus Schweinforth, co-ordinator of the Restoration Com mittee said the flood of ammunition “really upsets people because here we are moving very well (with the restoration) and some of the young hotheads have been told ‘come back and join us we’ve got guns.’ This is very demoralising for people.” Since the war began people on Bougainville have gone without even the most basic necessities. There has been no petrol, no electricity and no health care or education.
Thousands of people have died from preventable diseases with pregnant women and children under five, who have missed all the usual inoculations, suffering most. Through the care centres the Restoration Committee is trying to make
health care available and distributing badly needed equipment such as
gardening tools and fishing nets. People
build their own traditional style houses and are able to build food gardens nearby in the smaller centres. In the other areas, such as Buin where one of the two centres with up to 15,000 residents is located, the security situ ation is more precarious and gardens more institutionalised. “What we are doing is virtually fencing off areas with the local resistance and building mass ive gardens,” said Schweinforth.
With gangs and the BRA still operating over most of the island people are very vulnerable. “It’s indiscriminate everything can be great for a week or two and then all of a sudden you have one or two people shot dead by a mob of idiots who then
run away again. Then the people get scared and frightened and go back into the care centres,” Schweinforth said. In many cases the war has seen family and village members set against one another with serious incidents such as killings, assaults or house burnings still to resolve. A top priority for the Restoration Committee has been what it calls spiritual rehabilitation using church leaders and social workers to help people work through the trauma they’ve experienced so the peace process, so necessary for the success of restoration, can get under way.
The cost of the rehabilitation of Bougainville will be enormous. This year the PNG government has allocated just five million Kina, three and a half million of which was spent in the first three months of the year. The Australian government has put in As 4 and promised another Aslo million on the condition that PNG makes its own ‘significant commitment’ to match. All the money from outside donors has gone to provide basic services like water supply, school books, communications equipment, aid posts and immunis ations. Because of the continuing poor security most programmes are still only in their early stages. The difficulties of working in a war zone are not the only problem for humanitarian organisations. In fact for most, PNG’s blockade on rebel controlled areas and its refusal to recognise the right of civilians to unconditional humanitarian assistance has been the main obstacle. PNG officials estimate there are 20,000 to 25,000 people living in BRA areas. They have had no access to assistance other than tiny amounts smuggled in through the Solomon Islands. Brother Brian Leake, from the Marist Mission, keeps in touch with those in sealed areas by radio.
He said many people inside the blockade had fled their villages and were suffering shortage of medicine and basic supplies such as clothes, cooking pots, salt and soap. “Imagine how important these things are for people living in the open,” said Brother Leake. To illustrate his point he tells of three young men who were caught in a landslide after recent heavy rain. The people “didn’t have the implements to dig them out.” PNG’s refusal to allow humanitarian access to rebel held areas and also to the 40,000 other people living outside the ‘care centres’ has so frustrated the respected Paris-based humanitarian organisation, Medecins Sans Frontiers, that it shut down its operations on Bougainville. □