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Sean Dorney, The Sandline Affair. Sydney: ABC Books, 1998. 352 pp., $24.95
This book provides a comprehensive and informative background to the Bougainville problem. It highlights the Chan/Haiveta government's controversial engagement of the militia syndicate Sandline International to forcibly extinguish the self-styled Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA). The government thereby created a hostile climate in which it was beset by the outside world for seeking such an extreme solution to a domestic problem. It also committed 50 million kina that could have been used for funding infrastructure services.
Readers will learn a great deal about the irregularities involved in approving such a huge sum of money to fund an illegal army, and about the origins of the Bougainville conflict itself. The conflict evolved out of a vigorous desire to distribute company benefits among the landowners of the mining area in a uniform manner.
In March 1997, most people were staggered to hear that a foreign-owned private mercenary company, Sandline International, had been contracted by the national government to recapture the troubled Bougainville copper mine, and that the deal had then been aborted by the Papua New Guinea Defence Force (PNGDF). Sandline's executives and strategists were arrested, and their contracts ruled null and void. The PNGDF further demanded the resignation of the Prime Minister, Sir Julius Chan, his Deputy Prime Minister, Chris Haiveta, and the Minister responsible for the PNGDF, Mathias Ijape, for their part in securing the services of an illegal army, which was not in conformity with the national constitution. The intention of the PNGDF was not to supersede the government, but to pre-empt the massive bloodshed likely to be inflicted by Sandline.
The main government motive for hiring Sandline mercenaries was their belief that an independent and high profile military gang would utterly annihilate the BRA hierarchy by force. The government was convinced that the proposed operation was the last resort for recapturing the once wealthy province. The government charged that it...