http://www.mua.org.au/news/miners-and-maritime-workers-back-bougainville-wome/

Miners and maritime workers back Bougainville women at Rio AGM 26 May 2010

A delegation of miners from the Hunter Valley and maritime workers from the Victorian branch joined Bougainville women at the Rio Tinto AGM in Melbourne today, opposing the mining giants attempts to regain a foothold on the island and reopen the Panguna mine and speaking in favour of the government tax on mining.

CFMEU (Mining and Energy) union provided Bougainville women proxies so that could raise their opposition to the reopening of the mine, at the Rio Tinto AGM, today. The mine was the source of a 10 years civil war, economic devastation and 10,000 deaths.

The MUA delegation was led by branch secretary Kevin Bracken and follows a series of protests outside Rio offices in Melbourne during the ILWU miners lockout.

VIDEO - see Rio's Avatar?,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OI921vl1R8

Avatar’s secret history lesson on our doorstep ... The films 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. Until now. Many people will be familiar with the story of Avatar. The story opens one hundred and fifty 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.