Bougainville Lessons for Rio Tinto

Abstract

Former Papua New Guinea (PNG) Prime Minister Somare said that Rio Tinto had been complicit in the conduct of the war, a charge the company denied. In 1988 Francis Ona resigned his job at the mine and formed the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA), and Sam Kauona, Ona’s right-hand man, broke into the mine’s magazine, stole dynamite and blew up electricity pylons, and shot at and wounded Australians, leading to a closure of the mine in 1990. In dismissing allegations that mine owner Rio Tinto was responsible, Cochrane says that the way the Australian colonial administration acquired land for the mine and disposed of its wealth plus the fact that Bougainville considered itself to be part of the Solomon Islands rather than PNG were contributing factors.

The chapter on Bougainville draws on my time in what was then Western District in the British Solomon Islands Protectorate (BSIP) where as an Administrative Officer I met with my Australian counterparts from PNG from time to time; experiences as a World Bank Advisor resident in Port Moresby in the 1980s; contact and conversations with Douglas Oliver, whom I got to know in the 1960s when he sent his graduate student Roger Keesing to do research on Malaita where I was working in the Solomon Islands; Hugh Laracy in Auckland who is especially knowledgeable about the Catholic Marist missionaries; and Gene Ogan whom I met in Bougainville and in Honolulu.