By Frank Enright
"The war on Bougainville is the longest and bloodiest in the Pacific since World War II, and has cost thousands of lives. Little is known about the five year war because of a blockade imposed by Papua New Guinea on the island which stops media and international human rights organisations from getting to Bougainville and reporting on the war crimes and atrocities being committed there", says Rosemarie Gillespie, from the Bougainville Freedom Movement.
At least 5000 people, including 2000 children, have died due to lack of medication since the imposition of the blockade. The lives of a further 25,000 are now believed to be threatened by an outbreak of whooping cough, claims Gillespie.
The war, being fought by PNG troops but bankrolled by the Australian government, is being waged in order to retake the island and to reopen the copper mine owned by Australian mining giant CRA. The mine was closed in 1989 as a result of actions by traditional landowners and others concerned about its environmental destructiveness.
"The Australian government provides over $360 million in aid to PNG, including military aid and aid to paramilitary police known as 'blackshirts'", Gillespie notes. "It has supplied four patrol boats and five speed boats which are used to maintain the blockade, five Iroquois helicopters which have been routinely used as gunships, mortar bombs and arms and ammunition."
There are many reports of human rights abuses by the occupying PNG army. In Orwellian doublespeak, PNG detention centres, places of rape and torture, become "care centres".
Senator Robert Ray, the Australian defence minister, admits that Australian military advisers have been on Bougainville on numerous occasions over the past four years.
Australia's war against the people of Bougainville also has the support of the Liberal Party. In November, Andrew Peacock expressed support for continued military aid to PNG.
The Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA), which continues to resist PNG government forces on the island, reports that it intercepted radio commands to PNG units on January 13 ordering them to maintain defensive positions and cease active operations in the central region in preparation for an Australian parliamentary committee visit.
On January 7 the BRA reportedly captured four spies and their PNG-supplied weapons in the Karato area. On January 9 at the Tabago "care centre", three civilian youths, aged between 13 and 15, were executed by PNG soldiers in retaliation for an ambush by the BRA on the Buin-Tabago road in which 18 weapons were captured and a truck destroyed five days earlier.
Recent bans imposed by the South Coast Labour Council and grain terminal workers at Port Kembla were endorsed on January 19 by the Australian Capital Territory Trades and Labour Council. A third regional labour council, Goulburn, followed suit on January 20.