ABG President Momis's letter to Jubilee Australia

Dear Board Members,

With reference to my letters to you dated 26th October, 2nd November and 1st December 2014, on behalf of the elected Autonomous Bougainville Government, I am deeply concerned by your failure to have the courtesy of responding to the issues that I raised with you, the questions that I asked you.

You and the organisation you head are demonstrating shameful degrees of ignorance and arrogance.

You have involved the organisation in a complex, delicate, post-conflict situation, about which the organisation, and yourselves demonstrate remarkably little knowledge, with no appreciation at all of the negative impacts your actions might have. You have taken sides in arguments about issues about which you clearly have remarkably little understanding. You proudly proclaim to be a scientific research organisation. But your research on Bougainville has been unethical and deeply flawed. Quite possibly it has been carried out illegally – and your failure to answer my questions in that connection must raise serious doubts in any fair-minded person.

Your report was clearly based on false assumptions, and those same assumptions have been evident in claims made both at many points in your report, and in statements by your CEO, that there is near unanimous opposition to mining in the landowner communities in the former leases associated with the Panguna mine.

Your assumptions, and an apparent bias, were reflected in your choice of research partners with well-known records of vehement anti-BCL views. The PNG researchers chosen to do the interviews are also people well-known in Bougainville as holding similar views.

My Government is on the ground in Bougainville. Elected members and government officers have for many years constantly consulted landowner communities from the former Panguna leases, with the organisations established since 2010 to represent those communities, with leaders of the various Me’ekamui organisations in the area, with Councils of Elders and Village Assemblies in the area. While there is undoubtedly a range of views on the future of mining at Panguna, the only way of getting 63 interviewees opposed to mining would be to carefully select them. If your report stated clearly that that was what you had done, there would be little complaint. But the report does not do that. It dissembles.

Moreover, you compound your error by numerous absolutely false statements about the views expressed in the interviews being representative of all in the area.

In short, there is no doubt at all that those doing the interviews in Bougainville on which the report claims to be based carefully chose a small group of opponents to the resumption of mining.

The report was written by a person from one of your partner organisations with a clear record of a particularly unbalanced view on BCL.

Your assumptions and bias were further demonstrated by your deliberate refusal not only to consult the ABG, but also to give it any opportunity to comment on a draft of the report before rushing to publish.

You have also refused to respond to my questions about the ethical standards of the research, and your adherence to PNG law in the conduct of the report.

By your refusal to answer the issues and questions raised in my three letters (above), you simply raise more doubts about your standards, your accountability and your bona fides.

In all the circumstances, your behaviour is shameful, and your claims to be a scientific research organisation little more than a joke.

I continue to request a response to the specific issues raised in those three letters.

Sincerely,

Chief John L. Momis

President, ARoB