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New Bougainville president seeks unity
Australian Associated Press - February 13, 2009
Ilya Gridneff – Bougainville's newly-elected President James Tanis says the region's crucial reconciliation process has taken a step forward.
He says feuding landowner groups who shut down the massive Panguna copper mine and sparked a decade-long civil war with Papua New Guinea defence forces have shown unity to reconcile for the first time.
The news on Friday comes a day after Bougainville Copper Limited (BCL) reported to the Australian Stock Exchange more than a billion tonnes of gold and copper ore lie dormant in their Panguna site.
Tanis, sworn in last month after former president Joseph Kabui suddenly died in April last year, places the Panguna issue at the top of his agenda along with reconciliation of the aggrieved parties. Before mining can restart reconciliation and weapon disposal must come, he said.
"The whole conflict started as a dispute among the landowners," he said. "Now they have signed a resolution in which they have agreed to reconcile and reunite into establishing one Panguna landowner association.
"Elections will be conducted under an Electoral Commission, so that it is a credible process," he said. "I said to them: 'you started this conflict, I want a strategy that you want to end this conflict'."
No deadline has been set so the groups have as much time as they need to resolve the complex web of issues. "What they've seen is that I am a president that comes from Panguna area and does not have a conflict of interest," Tanis said.
In the late 1980s the Panguna Landowner Association (PLA) was one of many groups forming the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) that shut down BCL's Panguna mine in the island's Central Province, through militant action.
Landowner groups disputed mining royalties and many were angered at environmental damage caused by the mine's 18 years of operation.
The warring, in part also a secessionist movement, ended in 1997 and culminated with the Bougainville Peace Agreement in 2001 offering a referendum on independence after 2015.
"I come from the BRA background," Tanis said. "I am not a politician, I come from the battleground which I am not necessarily proud of, but let me say, it taught me enough lessons that we have to resolve those issues.
"I do not want to see another round of conflict again that will cost many lives. Yes I am a fighter but I have turned into a peace builder. We need to bridge gaps, we need to talk and we can never resolve any problem if we bury the agenda under the table and hope we will wake up one morning and say it was just a bad dream," he said
BCL secretary Paul Coleman said Tanis' reconciliation and weapon disposal plans was a "positive step forward". "It's been a very positive approach. We've always said until consensus is found on Bougainville with the people and the landowners we can't go back," he said.
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