Transcript
MARTIN WARD: Our commission was to examine the socio-economic, cultural and environmental impact of the mining operation and to guide the government on how to mitigate those effects that were in place at the time and to look forward a bit to see whether there was any activity that the local people could undertake that would give them some benefit associated with the mining activity.
DON WISEMAN: Were you able to suggest things that would have mitigated what was going on?
MW: It wasn't easy, the environmental damage was so extensive and so widespread and, to the frustration of the people and really as a constraint to us, it was all lawful. It was provided for in the various mining arrangements and mining leases.
DW: And no environmental laws?
MW: [laughs] No, no environmental laws. There was in the original plan. For instance, a pipeline proposed to take the tailings out into the bay which would be unheard of now but to bypass the valley then would have been a huge benefit to the people, whereas what resulted was this low gradient expanse of silty sand that overtook the whole floor of the valley and set aside, wiped out the gardens and dammed up some of the tributaries so that there was swampy land, whereas formerly there were free running rivers.
DW: Now this all came at a very pivotal time, just before all hell broke loose, in fact, on Bougainville.
MW: When I came back from the job, some of the Radio New Zealand and some of the press reporters constructed the argument that I, or our/my team, had triggered the uprising but ours was really the last throw of the dice by the government to prevent it. It was well under way and we undertook our work in a really open way. We included the landowners in all our visits to the mine and our interviews with the company and so forth - to some discomfort of the company people that we had the landowners with us - but we wanted to ensure that at least the process was as good as we can even though we had no control over what the outcome would be, because the outcome was tied to our terms of reference. We met modest foment everywhere we went including an extraordinary visit to Francis Ona's village where we sat under a single lightbulb in the huge communal house surrounded by tiers of faces sort of retreating into the gloom and some quite extraordinary young women who spoke good English, although most of the conversation was in Tok Pisin, but their English had come from the fact that they'd gone to Brisbane, they'd trained as teachers. It was an illustration of what the company had lost sight of, was that in the 15 or 20 years that they'd been running, there'd been a whole group of young people who'd got education, got knowledge, got understanding and who were dispersed through the company, through the government, through the society and who knew that they were being ripped off really.
DW: Francis Ona had at the beginning of this process had made this threat against you 'MiPela Kilim Yu Dai'. What did he say after you presented the report?
MW: We didn't see him again, Francis never turned up again. We had one of his agents, I guess you'd call him, with us all the time and this young man and two or three of the older men came to a final debrief that we gave and they did storm out of it. They were angry at the caution with which we presented our interim findings. We were at the stage where we were still waiting for some analytical results on fish that had been dying and various other things, so we weren't ready to be as condemnatory as they wanted us to be. In fact, in the end we had to have our conclusions and recommendations couched in quite modest terms because we were writing our report to a set of terms of reference that the government had given us. But there was no doubt that there was widespread environmental damage and we said that but the fact that we also said it was lawful was not something that the landowners were impressed with.
DW: Would you have imagined at that stage what eventually developed in Bougainville, did you have any concept at all of what was coming?
MW: No, although we learnt quite quickly. Hints were given to us, particularly on our last day when we, the young man who had accompanied us as a village representative around all the village meetings.
DW: This is Lawrence Daveona?
MW: Yes. He said to us with respect and pleasantness, we'd struck up a bit of a relationship with him. He said 'Look, thank you for what you've been doing. We think you've worked well and we've enjoyed the openness of what you've done but actually it's not working, it's not going to fix anything and there's going to be some trouble. We're going to start some trouble.' And it was within a few days of that they started. I think their first attacks were on the buses going up to the work site and explosions around the power pylon sites.