http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/south-pacific/...ds-hold-books-to-ransom
A beautiful library inspired by the New Zealand novel Mister Pip is home to just one book after more than 5000 others went missing, held to ransom by warlords in a remote part of Bougainville.
Novelist Lloyd Jones, author of the 2006 novel Mister Pip that inspired the building, finds it all hard to fathom, blaming "either incompetence or indifference, which for all I know may be a local form of political interference. I don't just know [what happened to the books]".
Barry Bindings of Volunteer Service Abroad was the driving force behind the building of the library. He says the missing books are caught up in the lingering after-effects of a bloody, little-noticed Pacific civil war.
"All hands have been out, waiting for payment," he says, "but we have been refusing to pay bribes."
In 2009 Jones established the Bougainville Library Trust to build a library in Arawa, the island's main town that was left ruined by a decade of war.
Getting it built has been a triumph given Arawa is reputably controlled by three rival warlords who need to be paid off before anything can happen.
The scene is complicated by Western looters. All the steel works at the mine and the huge power station have been secretly shipped away in bits.
A group of New Zealanders tried taking thousands of litres of heavy fuel oil at the power station. They failed but not before the civil war was nearly reignited. Other people got away with the oil.
Then there are the fabled secret stashes of gold; rumours of ownership have destabilised governments in Papua New Guinea, the neighbouring Solomons and Fiji for a couple of years.
Bindings, from Te Horo near Wellington, went to Bougainville to teach locals the skills needed to build the library and then to help them build it. The Bougainville Library Trust also sent a container of building materials to Kieta, the nearby port.
Instead it ended up in Lae on Papua New Guinea's northern coast, and sat there for nearly six months.
When Bindings tried to get his material moved on to him, he says a government official asked for 3000 kina ($1660) just too listen to the complaint.
Then he was hit with all kinds of other fees and charges.
"Bougainville is a place that is very hard to get things done. The working day is only about four hours, people lie down and rest during the day," he said.
Late last year the library was completed and its first (and so far, only) book, a collection of tribal Motuna texts by Japanese linguist Masa Onishi, was put on a shelf.
Five thousand other books left Wellington early in January - and again, instead of arriving at Kieta, ended up in Lae. Bindings fears the container might suffer the same fate as the earlier one full of materials.
"The last I heard it was virtually cleared and ready for transhipment - but that was weeks ago and I haven't heard anything since."
Jones says they've suffered inexplicable and frustrating delays in Lae.
"For all that, we have built a wonderful facility which, among the usual things a library provides, will help the island rebuild its cultural confidence."
It was to have opened last month, but with the uncertainty over the books, it is now scheduled for May - when VSA will provide a librarian.
Bindings is keen to return for the opening, despite the tensions simmering in Arawa.
"There is a lot of hunger for books, but trying to get across the concept of a public library is hard," he says.
MISTER PIP MOVIE IN EDITING LIMBO
Lloyd Jones was one of the few outsiders to make it to Bougainville after the ceasefire and used its civil war as a striking backdrop for his novel Mister Pip, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2007.
It was about a girl caught in the war and a teacher, Mr Watts, who tries to continue teaching and introducing the students to Charles Dickens' Great Expectations - and its character Pip.
A movie based on the book, starring Hugh Laurie, of House fame, is being toned down to remove extreme violence.
The film, shot in Bougainville and Ashburton, is now in a re-edit limbo with the Film Commission saying only that it will be "released here later this year once final editing has been completed".
The film, made by Shrek director Andrew Adamson, has already screened at last year's Toronto Film Festival to mixed reviews. The Hollywood Reporter said it "mixes magical realism with hard-hitting historical drama in a way that feels both contrived and questionable, even if the filmmakers clearly have their hearts in the right place".
The Hollywood Reporter questioned a "lengthy sequence that's at once stomach-churning and eye-rolling" as PNG soldiers hit Bougainville.
"The scenes of violent cruelty are truly painful to sit through, but their impact is completely upended by Adamson's decision to cut in yet more Dickens references."
Neither Jones nor the Film Commission commented on the nature of the re-edit, but industry sources say a desire for the film to make a more profitable general release has led to much of the violence being removed.
WHERE IS BOUGANVILLE?
Bougainville, an autonomous part of Papua New Guinea physically located in the Solomon Islands, has a savage reality.
It began in 1989 when land owners objected to the environmental devastation caused by Rio Tinto's Panguna gold and copper mine.
When Francis Ona created his Bougainville Revolutionary Army in 1990 a vicious PNG-led civil war followed as the 160,000 people on the 10,660 square kilometre island were left stranded behind a tight blockade.
Only when a New Zealand diplomat, and now MP John Hayes, managed to negotiate a ceasefire in 1998 did the immediate fighting stop. As many as 20,000 people were dead.
- © Fairfax NZ News |
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