New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. xiii, 148 pp. (Maps.) US$54.99, cloth. ISBN 978-981-10-8119-4.
Back in the 1960s, that reluctant colonial power, the Australian government, began to feel international pressure to divest itself of its possessions to the north, the Territory of Papua and New Guinea. Urged on by the United Nations and other international agencies, Australia rushed to provide education, to create some basic infrastructure and, most relevant to the volume under review, to find a source of revenue for a future independent government of its island dependency.
To the rescue came Rio Tinto Zinc (RTZ), one of the world’s largest mining companies, with a plan to dig one of the world’s largest holes for an open-pit copper-gold mine at Panguna on the island of Bougainville, as far away from the capital, Port Moresby, as it is possible to get. An overmatched Australian government negotiating team, perhaps convinced that actual independence for Papua New Guinea was many years away, and almost certainly misled by deliberately pessimistic forecasts submitted by RTZ (the forecast for the Bougainville mine that was submitted by RTZ was based on the much smaller and less profitable Palabora mine in South Africa), agreed to a long tax holiday and minimal royalty payments from the Panguna mine, while making essentially no provisions for taking into account the interests of either local landowners in the affected areas of Bougainville or the interests of the island and its people as a whole.
In the event, independence came, in 1975, far quicker than the Australian colonial administration had originally anticipated, and a team of Papua New Guinean, Bougainvillean and expatriate Young Turks (I was one of the expatriates) renegotiated the mining agreement. The renegotiation provided substantial early revenue for the new state, and in the process developed models of excess profits, or resource-rent, taxation and of revenue stabilization that were widely used by developing countries around the world in the 1970s and 1980s, but the renegotiated agreement did little to address the concerns of people on the ground in Bougainville, where local residents were feeling overwhelmed by the influx of “redskins” from elsewhere in Papua New Guinea during the construction phase of the mine, and where severe environmental effects were beginning to appear. Eventually, the tensions culminated in a decade-long civil war, the closure of the mine, and, just last year, a referendum in which more than 98 percent of Bougainvilleans opted for independence from PNG. (For a comprehensive history of the Bougainville mine, see Donald Denoon, Getting Under the Skin: the Bougainville Copper Agreement and the Creation of the Panguna Mine, Melbourne University Press, 2000.)
In the Solomon Islands, disputes over mining and conflicts between local people and workers imported from other islands spilled over into the outbreaks of violence between 1998 and 2003 commonly referred to as “the Tension,” resulting in the deployment of an Australian-led international security force (RAMSI) that stayed until 2017. In Bougainville, a peace agreement was signed in 2001, and has largely been observed, but, as the recent independence referendum demonstrates, nearly all Bougainvilleans have no love for the central PNG government, and opinion on the island regarding possible reopening of the Panguna mine remains sharply divided.
Matthew Allen, a geographer at the University of the South Pacific with 20 years’ experience in Melanesia, approaches the Bougainville conflict, and the less intense conflicts over mining and proposed mines on various of the Solomon Islands, from his discipline’s frame of reference. Perhaps the most interesting question that Allen explores is whether the “islandness” of the mine sites he studied heightened the level of conflict that resulted from the mining projects. Was, for example, the conflict on Bougainville made even more intense because of the relative isolation and self-contained nature of its location?
An interesting question, but one that really cannot be answered without a comparative look at other, “mainland” mining projects in Melanesia. Was there, or will there be, less conflict at Ok Tedi, in far western PNG; at Grasberg, in the highlands of the Indonesian colony/province of West Papua (formerly Irian Jaya); at the Porgera gold mine in PNG’s Enga Province; at the nickel mines on New Caledonia (if that be a “mainland”); or at the ecologically disastrous Ramu Nickel project on PNG’s north coast? And, if so, are there reasons other than “islandness” that explain the difference?
At Ok Tedi, the reason for a relative lack of conflict, despite severe pollution effects that are felt far downstream from the mine, might simply be the lack of people; the mine itself displaced only a few hundred local inhabitants. At Porgera and, especially, at Grasberg, there have been serious clashes between local people on the one hand and the mine operators and their government protectors on the other. On New Caledonia, despite a century or more of mining activity, violence continues to erupt, most recently in 2014, in response to a toxic chemical spill in a local river. Ramu Nickel is a much newer project, with its ill effects only beginning to be apparent, so perhaps it’s too early to say that there won’t be major conflict; remember, actual warfare didn’t break out in Bougainville until the mine had been operating for more than 15 years. So, while Allen’s “islandness” theory is intriguing, its explanatory power remains to be proven.
Still, Allen does a major service by giving us the fieldwork-driven ground-level detail that illuminates the way in which conflict over mining develops in Melanesia. His case studies, as much anthropology as they are human geography, remind us that resource development for national revenue in Melanesia, regardless of how much money is raised for the state, always carries the potential for violence unless the people on whose land the mining occurs have a say, and a stake, in the process.
Stephen A. Zorn
City University of New York Law School (retired), New York