Kabui was the premier of Bougainville when the war erupted in 1989. A Catholic ex-seminarian, Kabui was from one of the villages in the vicinity of the giant Bougainville copper mine and he sided with the Bougainville Revolutionary Army.
He was often targeted for death and narrowly escaped once when returning to Bougainville from peace talks in Cairns. Afterward, he spoke about the incident.
“I thought it was going to be my last day. I could just feel the heat of one of the missiles just passing my face. It was in the dark, of course, at night but it was, you know, a ray of light, a trail of light as the bullets were fired at us,” Kabui said in a 1999 interview with the ABC.
Kabui eventually had a falling out with the late supreme commander of the Bougainville Revolutionary Army, Francis Ona.
He then agreed to play a major role in peace talks brokered by New Zealand after the abortive attempt by Papua New Guinea’s then-prime minister, Julius Chan, to hire mercenaries from Africa to try to kill him and other Bougainville leaders.
