WOMEN STOPPED THE BOUGAINVILLE CONFLICT

The nation has come to the 15th anniversary of the signing of the Peace Treaty to end the Bougainville conflict. Over the time 26,000 villagers died. It was not a war of aggression but an uprising of landholders.

It was one of those terrible wars in the world where clans and families fought and killed one another. It was a war of the men and boys.

Senior journalist Barney Orere writes a series of articles in the Post Courier 1 September 2016 and gives deep praise for the women of Bougainville who saw their sons going out and killing other sons. Church members killed church members. The people were bleeding son by son.

Mothers could see the terrible waste in young lives. Mothers cried out for the conflict to cease and called for their sons to come out of the jungle and lay down their arms.

The issue came to a head with the Government economic blockade that caused serious harm to families. Then there was the arrival of the mercenary killers Sandline who were eventually removed by Maj-Gen Singirok.

There are those who question the apparent change of heart of Singirok. In the early stages, it may have been that Singirok thought that the Sandline boss Tim Spicer would be under his command and control. 

Then he found out that this was not the case and that Sandline would move across the island like a pack of wild dogs killing whoever stood in their way. Singirok decided that enough was enough.

This would have been a terrible war at the hands of paid mercenaries. If confronted by the mothers of Bougainville, would these foreigners have opened fire and killed unarmed women with children in arms? They were being paid to win.

The women of Bougainville have always had the cultural support of holding the land by matrilineal descent. There was a time when these women complained that the men were beginning to ignore the authority of women. But that surely changed with the Bougainville conflict.

The women of Bougainville have been role models for the families of Papua New Guinea and the world in stopping a conflict and promoting a prolonged peace and ongoing reconciliation.

By comparison, the women in Papua New Guinea are weak and disunited. We have long been told that PNG women are not in parliament because women do not vote for women. The proposed 24 seats in parliament would have been a monstrous mistake.

Let the women fight for a place in parliament. Let women like Francesca Semoso be role models for the nation. Let PNG learn from the families of Bougainville and the mothers who cried for them and stepped forward to stop the bloodshed.

Australians often say that the problem of PNG is that the people did not have to fight for independence. It was given to them by their Australian friends and led by Michael Thomas Somare. They have not suffered as did the people of Bougainville.