Bougainville landowners meet with mining giant Rio Tinto

The mining giant Rio Tinto has told a Bougainvillean group it should have made an earlier assessment of the damage their mine at Panguna had caused.

The first meeting of the Panguna Mine Legacy Impact Assessment Oversight Committee was held in the autonomous Papua New Guinea region this month.

Rio Tinto was the instigator of the giant copper and gold mine in the 1970s.

It was so big that it was PNG's most important earner of foreign exchange, but it also left an horrendous legacy of destruction.

Rio Tinto has since given away its shares in Bougainville Copper Ltd but the people at Panguna say it remains responsible for the destruction.

Last July Panguna communities, led by local MP Theonila Rota Matbob, filed a human rights complaint over the mine damage.

Ms Matbob told Don Wiseman how that first meeting with Rio Tinto went.