From the Author’s Preface:
‘I have had the privilege of visiting Papua New Guinea many times beginning in 1967, always at the invitation of Papua New Guineans. They wanted help to put into practice the ideas of Moral Re-Armament. A colleague, George Wood, and I were on Bougainville with Paul Lapun, the key figure in the story, at the time of the first violence breaking out in 1969 over the oncoming copper mine. We were showing a Moral Re-Armament film, Freedom, which plays a significant part in this story.
'In this paper, I set out the background to the Rorovana land crisis, and explore the part people connected with Moral Re-Armament played in effecting a solution to it. I do not attempt to give a complete history of the mining operation, nor to evaluate other parties’ roles in the dispute–Bougainville nationalists, Australian MPs, academics, journalists, unionists, and the Catholic Church also played their parts… Having read several dozen accounts of what happened in the crisis, I realised that little is known about this aspect of the story. This is not surprising. The spiritual factor in international affairs is not easy to prove, let alone explain.’
Occasional Paper Number 1, Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
English
