President: Retrieve, proper burial and recognition of heroes
President Ishmael Toroama has called for the retrieval, proper burial, and recognition of the remains of men who fought and died during the decade-long Bougainville Civil War.
It’s been over thirty years since the crisis and the loss of an estimated 20,000 people either directly or indirectly from the bloody conflict.
Many of these lives have, to date, remained missing and unaccounted for.
Many others still remain unceremoniously dumped, scattered across the region, left behind without a proper burial.
President Toroama says these remains must be unearthed, returned to their families, given proper burials and recognized.
He’s called them heroes for a cause which has led Bougainville to its current state of autonomy working towards independence.
The president made this remarks when taking part in the May 17 Remembrance Day commemorations at Tsunpetz in Suir District and Sipotavae in Tinputz District over the weekend, during retrieval of 14 remains of a platoon of the then Bougainville Revolutionary Army, which was massacred at Tsunpetz when their planned attack on PNG security forces bunkers failed.
Accounts of the massacre say the men were not only killed but their bodies mutilated and humiliated as well, constituting war crimes.
Two mass graves each containing five bodies and four separate single graves were exhumed and their remains retrieved – an emotional experience conducted by the Office of Missing Persons, officers from the Department of Independence Mission Implementation and locals in Tsunpetz.
The remains, mostly of fighters from Tinputz, were later brought to the Saint Peter Channel Tsunpetz Primary School – the grounds where they were initially killed and later transported to Sipotavae in Tinputz back to their families to be secured at the local Memorial Monument for those missing or killed during the war.
President Toroama says there are many fighters, whose remains are yet to be retrieved and given proper burial, and this is what he’s determined to do.
The Tsunpetz event is the first-ever exhumation of mass graves and bones retrieval the region has witnessed.
There are a number of similar mass graves, including that at the Bel Isi or Peace Park in Buka Town, and President Toroama told NBC Bougainville News, that he’s determined to continue exhumation, retrieval, proper burial and recognition of these men, believing that Bougainville can only move forward successfully if it observes these rituals, which is both humane as well as cultural and customary.