BY AZIZ CHOUDRY
An Evergreen Island
A film by Fabio Cavadini and Mandy King
Frontyard Films
Order from <cavadini@tpgi.com.au>
We are swamped with information about the impact of corporate capitalism, structural adjustment and the power and influence of transnational corporations. We are bludgeoned with propaganda about the inevitability of globalisation, of there being no alternative to the global free market economy, of promises of globalisation with a human face. The US-led "war against terrorism" has rained yet more death and destruction on the people of Afghanistan. The globalisers are on a counterattack against their critics as they try to claw back ground that they had lost. Right now, we could all do with some good news.
The independently produced documentary, An Evergreen Island, about Bougainville, a South Pacific island which has survived nine years with little assistance from the outside world has left a big impression on me.
Made by Australian filmmakers Fabio Cavadini and Mandy King, it should resonate with all who struggle against the power of global capital and are concerned about genuine alternatives to the global free market economy. It should be watched by all who believe that it is impossible to exist without being beholden to products of the transnationals, and with all of us who believe that we can.
An Evergreen Island has become a permanent fixture in my luggage while I have been on the road in North America and Asia since September. The people to whom I have shown it seem to have been as inspired by it as I was when I first saw it a few months ago.
Bougainville is part of the Solomon Islands archipelago, and lies about 700 kilometres east of Papua New Guinea. Like so many other lands and peoples, it is the victim of arbitrary borders set by former colonial rulers during their scramble to control and exploit the Pacific.
Bougainvilleans neither accepted Australian colonial rule nor incorporation into an independent Papua New Guinea in September 1975. In the early 1970s, demands for a referendum to give the people of Bougainville the right to genuinely determine their own future were denied. Meanwhile, the island was being ravaged by one of the world's most rapacious transnational corporations.
Conzinc Rio Tinto of Australia (CRA, now Rio Tinto) had located a huge copper-ore deposit in the Panguna valley in 1965. Prospecting had been strongly opposed by the local landowners whose customary title to the land was denied by the Australian colonial administration in the name of "development". Women, the true custodians of the land on Bougainville, were at the forefront of early protests against the mining, and the backbone of the subsequent struggles and grassroots initiatives to rebuild their communities.
Environmental disaster
In 1972, through its subsidiary, Bougainville Copper Limited, CRA began commercial production. It was a hugely successful and profitable operation from the standpoint of the company, and later for Papua New Guinea, but it was devastating for the peoples, lands and rivers of Bougainville.
In 1987, Philip Hughes, head of environment science at the University of PNG described the Panguna mine as "an economic Godsend — and an environmental disaster".
Villagers were forced to relocate because of the mine tearing into the heart of their motherland. Over a billion tonnes of poisonous tailings were dumped in the Jaba and Kawerong rivers. River fish and animals, as well as marine life near the coast, were poisoned, died, or disappeared, along with forests and food gardens. The mine created a huge crater, half a kilometre deep and two kilometres wide. Green mountains turned to barren rock. The Jaba river valley became a moonscape. Local communities were showered in dust containing toxic heavy metals and drank from polluted water.
After 17 years of patient petitioning and lobbying for better environmental controls, a fairer deal and compensation from CRA and the PNG government, the people of Bougainville in 1989 closed the mine. The Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) blew up the power supply to the mine. From May 1989 until the present it has stayed shut.
An Evergreen Island is a bitter-sweet film. One cannot watch this documentary and forget the scale of the suffering in Bougainville, where between 15,000-20,000 people — out of a total population of around 200,000 — died during the years of war, many from preventable diseases like TB, whooping cough and malaria, or during childbirth.
When PNG sent its soldiers in to shoot to kill, and to try to reopen the mine, the pro-independence BRA fought to defend the land and the people. In April 1990, the PNG government imposed a land, sea and military blockade around Bougainville. It aimed to make life even harder for Bougainvilleans so that they would turn against the BRA and the Panguna mine could reopen.
All government and social services were suspended, schools closed and medical staff left Bougainville. For nine years, the blockade kept journalists out, along with food, medical supplies, fuel and humanitarian assistance. The film documents how the people of Bougainville survived, rebuilt and maintained their communities.
Without modern weapons, the BRA built guns from waterpipes which could fire more quickly than the automatic weapons of the PNG Defence Force. As the noose of the blockade closed in around the island, Australian-supplied Iroquois helicopter gunships strafed villages, and the Australian-supported and armed PNGDF troops attacked, tortured and killed people and torched villages.
Resourcefulness
But in the BRA-controlled areas (over 80% of the Bougainville mainland) communities showed incredible resourcefulness, determination and ingenuity in fashioning solutions to complex problems from local materials and nature itself. They built and maintained indigenous health and education services without outside assistance. While the seriously ill could take the chance of being ferried at dusk across the blockade in small boats to hospital in the Solomon Islands, bush medicine — the traditional knowledge and practice of indigenous healing underwent a revival in the absence of medical supplies and health professionals.
A system of schools and training colleges were set up. Houses, schools and clinics were built from local timber, vines and foliage. Nails were made from cutting up cyclone fencing. In the Pidgin language, local chiefs dubbed this indigenous inventiveness mekim na savvy, or learning by doing.
Without diesel fuel, Bougainvilleans discovered a new, truly revolutionary use for coconuts. Coconut oil was fermented in upturned discarded fridges, boiled and used as fuel to run generators and the specially adapted four wheel drives needed to cross the rugged terrain.
Young people driven from their studies by the crisis combined basic technical knowhow, indigenous knowledge and sheer genius to cannibalise available bits of machinery like the gearbox of a truck to create electric power from small homemade hydro installations in the fast-flowing rivers. The abandoned mine became a hardware supermarket for spare parts which were salvaged, carried across the island and put to new uses.
Solar power was harnessed to charge batteries for two-way radios and satellite phones. As one Bougainvillean woman comments at the beginning of the film, "The war was like a university, it made us creative. We thought for ourselves and we discovered alternative ways to survive".
This film is more than just a tale of survival on a troubled tropical island paradise. It is a story about community and self-determination. After many years, there is finally some light at the end of a long tunnel for the Bougainville people in their struggle. Communities across Bougainville are confronting the painful task of reconciling with communities and individuals whom they treated as enemies during the war.
In late August, after three years of an often fragile cease-fire between the BRA and the PNGDF, an agreement was signed which will deliver an amount of autonomy to Bougainville. This includes a disarmament agreement, the drawing up of a new Bougainville constitution and an eventual referendum on full independence. In December, legislation is due to go before PNG parliament to make the constitutional amendments necessary to implement the peace and autonomy agreement.
Maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel for the rest of us, too. For many years now, we have been lied to. "There is no alternative", we have been told. Let us destroy your lands and rivers for profit — or else.
Watch this film. There are alternatives. There are no blueprints, but if we can harness just some of the same courage, resourcefulness and vision as the people of Bougainville, we will be well on the way to a brighter future. We need a global dose of mekim na savvy.
[Aziz Choudry works for GATT Watchdog, PO Box 1905, Christchurch, New Zealand.]
From Green Left Weekly, December 12, 2001.
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