8. Belden Namah
Belden Namah is a Papua New Guinean politician and former military officer. He was deputy Prime Minister. In the 1990s, he was an officer in the Papua New Guinea Defence Force, with the rank of captain. He was involved in the aftermath of the Sandline affair in 1997.
In July, he and three other soldiers accompanied Captain Bola Renagi to see newly appointed Prime Minister Bill Skate, following Prime Minister Julius Chan’s resignation under military pressure over the use of mercenaries in the conflict in Bougainville province.
Renagi asked Skate to disband the Special Operations Group, to which the military was hostile. Namah, Renagi and the three other men were arrested and charged with sedition for their approach to the Prime Minister; the public prosecution argued that they had been attempting to obtain a pardon from the government for the military personnel involved in the near-coup of the Sandline affair.
Before entering politics, he was also a businessman, describing himself as being “into the multi-billion-dollar business of logging”.
7. John Momis
John Momis is a politician and elected President of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville of Papua New Guinea. Momis was sworn in as President of Bougainville on June 10, 2010 for a five-year term. He defeated his predecessor, President James Tanis, and five other challengers by a landslide in the 2010 presidential election, in which he was a candidate of the New Bougainville Party.
He was reelected for a second period (2015-2020), in the general elections in May 2015. Momis served as a Catholic priest from 1970 until 1993, becoming active in politics and elected to the assembly in the 1970s.
He was a co-writer of the Constitution of Papua New Guinea and worked to establish a secessionist organization in what was then North Solomons Province. After it was confirmed as a province, he returned to national politics.
Following the end of the civil war, he was appointed as the Governor of Bougainville from 1999 until 2005. He was Papua New Guinea’s ambassador to the People’s Republic of China.
