cl i mat e ch a n g e
Strengthening Our Ancestral Community Across the Seas “We are crying for our land. We are crying for our land that has been destroyed. They dug out our land and the waste has been washed out to the sea. We cry for our land.”
“We Are Crying For Our Land: Stories From the Panguna Listening Project”
Ursula Rakova and Salote Soqo
T Ursula Rakova. Photo courtesy of Ursula Rakova.
he Carterets in Papua New Guinea is a coral atoll that is home to 3,000 people in 6 island communities living on land less than 3 meters above sea level. In the early 1990s, after several years of experiencing environmental changes, community Elders made a collective decision to relocate the Carteret Islanders to mainland Bougainville to save its people from rising seas and coastal erosion that was flooding their homes, destroying their food crops, and polluting their waters. Many people still live on the Carteret Islands today, while a few families have relocated to Tinputz, Bougainville. Ursula Rakova, from Hans Island in the Carterets, says that the circumstances are fragile for families back on the islands. “Presently, 430 family households remain in the Carterets, which has seen a significant increase in population from the last electoral commission count,” she says. “These islanders are struggling to meet the daily needs of their families, with the hardest hit families having an average number of seven children per family. I hold fear in me about the Islanders remaining on the Carterets, because if a sudden and severe king tide happens, the whole island will disappear and there is going to be a catastrophic genocide of Islanders being washed away without any trace. A whole generation of people will be lost.” Although separated by sea from Bougainville, the Carteret Islands are part of the political jurisdiction of the Autonomous Bougainville Government of Papua New Guinea (ABG). The ABG became autonomous in 2005 after a brutal decade-long civil war that began in 1988 when Indigenous landowners led an uprising over the mass environmental destruction caused by the Panguna copper and gold mine and inequitable distribution of the
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mine’s profits. Since Panguna’s inception in the 1970s, the mine generated more than $2 billion in revenue and released billions of metric tons of mining waste that seeped into the land, killing wildlife, polluting water supplies, and disrupting the lives of local communities. The government of Papua New Guinea sent police and military troops to stop the uprising and secure the mine. Neighboring villages were burnt, and villagers were forced into military-run detention camps where torture, rape, and extra-judicial killings were recorded. Almost 15,000 lives were lost during the war. Panguna was owned by the British-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto, which abandoned the mine in 1999 and has since dodged responsibility for addressing the damages. More than 20 years later, living conditions are worsening. Mining waste continues to contaminate freshwater, cause destructive flooding and landslides, pollute water and food supplies, destroy sacred sites, and affect human health. This ongoing sociocultural and ecological devastation adds to the entrenched trauma faced by the people of Bougainville, who are still healing from the aftermath of the brutal conflict. In 2001, the Bougainville Peace Agreement officially marked the end of the conflict. The agreement outlined three key requirements: autonomy from Papua New Guinea, a referendum amongst Bougainvilleans, and the disposal of weapons. In 2019, Bougainvilleans overwhelmingly voted for independence. For the Carteret Islanders who have relocated to Bougainville, their journey to resettle in a new community devastated by war and ecological disaster has been filled with mixed emotions. “The issues that Carteret Islanders faced when we first came to Bougainville to secure land for relocation were very mixed, with many Islanders unwilling to come to the mainland,” Rakova says. “Land and the host community were seen as the enemies, and the Islanders were very much keeping to themselves for a while and not mixing with mainland people.” Tulele Peisa, a community-based organization managing relocation efforts for the residents of the Cateret Islands, together with another local non-government organization, facilitated post-
Rapidly eroding shoreline in Tinputz, Bougainville. Photo by Salote Soqo/UUSC.
