SBS had an episode of Dateline this week which looked at the past and future of the Bougainville copper mine - Blood and Treasure.

This is the Panguna mine, two kilometres wide and half a kilometre deep, the war ensued here after the mine was closed down. It claimed the lives of 15,000 Bougainvilleans, around one 10th of the population. The PNG government was desperate to reopen it because it provided 20% of government revenues. The people of Bougainville got a little over 1% and a degraded environment, which is why they revolted.

In 2001 in the aftermath of the war many of the islanders launched a class action in the US against Bougainville Copper Ltd's parent company Rio Tinto. The case has been bogged down for 10 years. The landowners accused Rio Tinto of genocide, citing the company's support of the blockade of the island and the military action which took place after the revolt against the mine began. The plaintiff's lawyers claiming that Rio Tinto's manager on Bougainville at the time encouraged continuation of the blockade for the purposes of starving the bastards out.

I've noticed a few articles in recent times suggesting there are moves afoot to reopen the Panguna copper mine on Bougainville island (Bougainville is part of Papua New Guinea) - Bougainville consultations on mine re-opening set to widen (Radio Australia), Media Told To Report Facts About Bougainville (Scoop.co.nz) and Sandline mercenary crisis – Singirok reflects 14 years on (Pacific.scoop).

A PNG based blog called "Tubuans & Dukduks" has a look at the link between the native revolt on Bougainville Island a decade ago and the movie Avatar (generally viewed as more of a fable about the Iraq war, though Bougainville seems far more jungle planet than the oil covering deserts of the middle east) - Avatar and Bougainville: A Parallel History?.

When I first watched Avatar, it was mooted to me that James Cameron had quite possibly publicly demonstrated his personal opionion on war, the US, Iraq, and of course oil. And then I read Omar Hamed’s article which undeniably ascerts that James Cameron created Avatar on the basis of the Bougainville conflict – a scenario that has resulted in an interesting article, of which I have included exercpts from.

Hamed claims that the highest grossing film of all time to date has blatant allusions to the historical drama of Bougainville that happened in our backyard 13 years ago. He states that the film’s names, plot and characters are almost direct references to the 1997 Bougainville crisis yet no one seems to have drawn the dots between science fiction and South Pacific fact.

Many people will be familiar with the story of Avatar. The story opens 150 years in the future. A human mining corporation, RDA, has come five light years from Earth to the ecologically pristine jungle wilderness of the planet Pandora to mine the mineral unobtanium.

The richest deposits of unobtanium lie buried deep within the ground of Pandora and directly below the home of an alien race known as the Na’vi. Jake Sully, an ex-United States marine turned mercenary, is sent out to spy on the aliens by controlling a genetically engineered Avatar.

The security commander of the RDA, Colonel Miles Quaritch, encourages Sully to win the trust of the Na’vi and entice them to relocate away from their home in a giant tree, so the RDA can mine the unobtanium. Before Sully is able to persuade the Na’vi to leave Hometree, Colonel Quaritch attacks Hometree and destroys it.

Scientists’ Mutiny

Sully (in Avatar form) and a crew of RDA scientists mutiny and join the Na’vi in their struggle to rid Pandora of the RDA. The endgame battle revolves around the Na’vi defending the sacred tree of souls and the vital connection it provides to their races culture, memories and the Pandoran equivalent of earth goddess Gaia. By the end of the film the RDA are defeated and in one of the closing scenes Sully and armed Na’vi watch over a column of sullen RDA miners and their mercenaries as they are forcibly put aboard a space shuttle destined for earth.

The events that inspired Avatar writer and producer James Cameron can only have been the long guerrilla war that scarred the Bougainville for a decade between 1988 and 1998. The armed revolt began in 1988 when a group of indigenous rebels stole explosives and sabotaged the electricity supply to the environmentally destructive Panguna copper and gold mine, opened in 1964 and controlled by the CRA, an Australian subsidy of UK mining giant Rio Tinto.

The Panguna mine was opened on land stolen from the Nasioi tribe and tailings were dumped in a nearby river, eliminating aquatic life and forcing 800 tribespeople to lose their land. For a decade, the Pacific conflict festered between the eco-guerrilla Bougainville Revolutionary Army and the ill-disciplined Papua New Guinea Defence Force.

Tight Blockade

The conflict caused the deaths of between 10,000 and 20,000 Bougainvilleans, as Australian-supplied gunships strafed rebel camps and civilian villages and a tight blockade left the islanders often without food or medical supplies and allowed malaria and tuberculosis to spread with impunity. The end of the conflict came in 1997 when the Papua New Guinea government hired Sandline International, a British mercenary outfit led by former British Army Colonel Tim Spicer, to destroy the Bougainville Revolutionary Army.

Sandline and the PNG government signed a secret US$36 million contract for Sandline to provide a military solution to the Bougainville crisis that would see Sandline supply new helicopter gunships and troopships and using a mixed mercenary and PNGDF strike force, overwhelm the BRA. However, as Spicer’s mercenaries landed in PNG and began training the PNGDF in preparation for the assault on Bougainville to reopen Panguna, the Weekend Australian journalist Mary-Louise O’Callaghan broke the story, precipitating a diplomatic crisis between PNG and Australia and widespread disgust from PNG civil society.

In the wake of Callaghan’s expose, the commander of the PNGDF, Jerry Singirok, led an army coup to force the government to cancel the contract, step aside and call new elections. Singirok went on national radio to tell the country he could not allow the government to send foreign mercenaries armed with high-powered rocket launchers to murder in Bougainville and then disarmed the Sandline mercenaries and imprisoned Spicer. As the crisis grew and student protests in Port Moresby escalated the government reluctantly resigned and the Sandline soldiers were deported.

NZ-Brokered Ceasefire

In 1998, a New Zealand-brokered ceasefire was negotiated and eventually the Autonomous Bougainville Government established. The Panguna mine remains closed and in the hands of the indigenous landowners yet foreign corporate interest in reopening the mine continues.

Cameron’s plot is almost a direct adaptation of the Bougainville crisis with only the most minor adjustments. The full scale attack on Hometree in Avatar is a fair estimation of the havoc that Spicer’s proposed gunship assault to open Panguna would have had on the Nasioi tribe.

In the climactic battle, Jake Sully leads an alliance of Na’vi tribes aided by an uprising of Pandoran wildlife sent by their planets goddess of life, Eywa. Sully then lands on the back of the RDA space-shuttle turned carpet-bomber and uses a grenade to spin it off its flight path, thus preventing it from destroying the sacred tree of souls.

The scenario nicely symbolises how Jerry Singirok’s coup blew apart the PNG governments plan to rain death and destruction over Bougainville, in tandem with student and union protests escalating into anti-government riots and a parliamentary siege. This uprising eventually forced Sandline to divert the flight-plan of the world’s largest cargo plane, filled with grenade launchers, mortars and ammunition.

Singirok’s Coup

Cameron has infused his film Avatar with so many allusions to the Bougainville conflict that it beggars belief that only a few have picked up on it. For example, a quick reshuffle and a little transposing of the letters in “Miles Quaritch” and we get something very similar to “I am Tim Spicer”.

Coincidentally Cameron was developing the script a good 13 years ago – the same time as CNN and BBC were broadcasting to the world Singirok’s coup against the Sandline contract. The story of Bougainville’s bloody eco-revolution, the Sandline crisis and the overthrow of unscrupulous and corrupted PNG politicians by army revolt was always going to make an excellent film.

Cameron has done justice to a little-known chapter of history that happened right here in the South Pacific. Yet just last October Rio Tinto’s Bougainville company was exploring with the new Bougainville government the possibility of reopening the Panguna mine. Of course, the indigenous landowners still vehemently oppose the reopening of the mine. The sequel to Avatar may be coming sooner than many predicted.

NOTE:

This article was written by Omar Hamed and can be found here.

The New Statesman has a slightly harsh review of James Cameron's "Avatar" (though not as harsh as John Pilger's) and a similar story evolving in India (minus the cool floating mountains) - Return of the natives.

James Cameron's Avatar tells the story of a disabled ex-marine, sent from earth to infiltrate a race of blue-skinned aboriginal people on a distant planet and persuade them to let his employer mine their homeland for natural resources. Through a complex biological manipulation, the hero's mind gains control of his "avatar", in the body of a young aborigine.

These aborigines are deeply spiritual and live in harmony with nature (they can plug a cable that sticks out of their body into horses and trees to communicate with them). Predictably, the marine falls in love with a beautiful aboriginal princess and joins the aborigines in battle, helping them to throw out the human invaders and saving their planet. At the film's end, the hero transposes his soul from his damaged human body to his aboriginal avatar, thus becoming one of them.

Given the 3-D hyperreality of the film, with its combination of real actors and animated digital corrections, Avatar should be compared to films such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) or The Matrix (1999). In each, the hero is caught between our ordinary reality and an imagined universe - of cartoons in Roger Rabbit, of digital reality in The Matrix, or of the digitally enhanced everyday reality of the planet in Avatar. What one should thus bear in mind is that, although Avatar's narrative is supposed to take place in one and the same "real" reality, we are dealing - at the level of the underlying symbolic economy - with two realities: the ordinary world of imperialist colonialism on the one hand, and a fantasy world, populated by aborigines who live in an incestuous link with nature, on the other. (The latter should not be confused with the miserable reality of actual exploited peoples.) The end of the film should be read as the hero fully migrating from reality into the fantasy world - as if, in The Matrix, Neo were to decide to immerse himself again fully in the matrix.

...Avatar's fidelity to the old formula of creating a couple, its full trust in fantasy, and its story of a white man marrying the aboriginal princess and becoming king, make it ideologically a rather conservative, old-fashioned film. Its technical brilliance serves to cover up this basic conservatism. It is easy to discover, beneath the politically correct themes (an honest white guy siding with ecologically sound aborigines against the "military-industrial complex" of the imperialist invaders), an array of brutal racist motifs: a paraplegic outcast from earth is good enough to get the hand of abeautiful local princess, and to help the natives win the decisive battle. The film teaches us that the only choice the aborigines have is to be saved by the human beings or to be destroyed by them. In other words, they can choose either to be the victim of imperialist reality, or to play their allotted role in the white man's fantasy.

At the same time as Avatar is making money all around the world (it generated $1bn after less than three weeks of release), something that strangely resembles its plot is taking place. The southern hills of the Indian state of Orissa, inhabited by the Dongria Kondh people, were sold to mining companies that plan to exploit their immense reserves of bauxite (the deposits are considered to be worth at least $4trn). In reaction to this project, a Maoist (Naxalite) armed rebellion exploded...

Stuart at Early Warning has a rather unorthodox review of James Cameron's "Avatar" - Avatar and the Unabomber.

Let's start with the political viewpoint of the movie. When I watched it the first time, I was amazed that I was watching a major Hollywood movie with such a radical message, expressed so overtly. The movie doesn't go in for a lot of moral ambiguity: it's really clear that Sully, Trudy, Grace and the Na'vi are the good guys, who we are expected to view as moral and heroic. Meanwhile, Quaritch and Parker Selfridge are the bad guys, who we are expected to see as in the wrong. Let's break down a bit what the moral rules are behind the behavior of the characters. I took away the following points:

* It's wrong to desecrate natural beauty in order to get natural resources (the bulldozers destroying the Tree of Voices are clearly in the wrong in the movie's moral universe).
* It's wrong to displace native people in order to get natural resources (even Parker is shown shaken and uncertain of himself at what is required to get the Na'vi away from their Home Tree).
* Native people are more spiritually advanced and morally better than civilized people (the main arc of Jake's spiritual growth in the movie is to become one of them).
* If civilized people do, nonetheless, come to desecrate the natural environment and take the resources, native people are justified in violently resisting that effort (this is what the Na'vi do, and we are encouraged to root for them).
* If you, as a member of the civilized society, find yourself in the position of being part of such a resource extraction effort, the morally correct thing to do is turn traitor to your own society and help the native people in their violent resistance (the moment when Trudy says "I didn't sign up for this shit" and turns her guns on her own side).
* Civilization is destroying all other life on the Earth (the movie reports that Earth is no longer a green planet by 2154).

(I should stress before I go on that I'm not saying Cameron believes these things in everyday life, but those are the moral rules he sets up in the universe of Pandora for storytelling purposes).

If you want to place this viewpoint on the contemporary political spectrum, I think you have to go out past liberal democratic environmentalists, past the Green Party, past Earth First, and out to the Earth Liberation Front. ...

That's from the Unabomber's manifesto. We put him in jail because he started killing technologists, stating as his reason that he hated industrial society and wanted to return to a more natural and free state of humanity. He was less successful in the execution than Jake/Trudy/Grace and the Na'vi - who actually succeed in ejecting Parker and Co. from Pandora - but it seems to me that the moral logic is exactly the same. Nature good, technology bad, violent opposition justified.

So, you might want to stop a minute and ask yourself: how exactly does Cameron get mainstream American audiences to root for the Unabomber side in this conflict?
That's quite a trick, isn't it?

No, STOP before you skim over this point. I really want you think about it: do you approve of the Unabomber's actions? If not, but you liked the movie, do you know how Cameron got you to root for that side?

Stated quite so baldly, and stripped of the dressing of stunning CGI and exciting action sequences, I think it's clear that the movie's moral position is a rather extreme and absolutist position. Extracting resources from the natural environment and turning them into tangible wealth or capital - houses and their furnishings, wagons/cars, workshops/factories/offices is what civilizations do. It's not an accidental or optional feature of civilization that could easily be dispensed with if we were only a little more reasonable. Instead, it's absolutely basic to the nature of the beast. Ever since the Natufians started building houses and farming wild grasses, through the Sumerians irrigating the Mesopotamian plains, and the Romans deforesting the Italian countryside and mining Britain, to our modern extraction of all manner of metals and fossil fuels from the earth, cutting of forests for timber, and farming of most of the best soils on the planet, civilizations have extracted resources and done so in ever increasing quantities.

I guess this is one way of looking at it (though maybe a mature civilisation gets over this behaviour and adopts cradle-to-cradle manufacturing systems and quits the extraction business for good).

You could view the basic moral of these tales through a libertarian lens too - the Na'vi "own" their natural world and the interloping Americans have no right to steal their private property at gunpoint - they aren't necessarily paid up members of the ELF...