Resistance fighters and guerillas from the Bougainville REvolutionary Army (BRA) arrive at the signing of the Bougainville Cease-fire Agreement in Arawa on Bougainville on 30 April 1998. The cease-fire officially ended a decade of brutal civil war which had claimed over 10,000 lives on the mineral-rich island. Photo: AFP
Fighting in the Bougainville-Papua New Guinea civil war officially ended in 1997, with the Peace Agreement signed in 2001, but many in the region continue to suffer severe trauma.
Three academics from the Australian National University - Sinclair Dinnen, Miranda Forsyth, and Dennis Kuiai - have been compiling a blog, 'Post-Conflict Bougainville', and say the region continues to suffer from the crisis.
Like much of Papua New Guinea, Bougainville is beset with violence and lawlessness.
However, the blog lays out that the criminality is often a symptom of the ongoing trauma.
They advise Bougainville to confront these problems with a return to peacebuilding in communities.
RNZ Pacific spoke with Professor Miranda Forsyth about their work.
(The transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.)
Don Wiseman: A blog that you, with Dennis Kuiai and Sinclair Dinnen, have been using to look back at the Bougainville conflict, post-conflict. And what you see are very serious social issues that can be sheeted straight traced back to the crisis itself, and that these are things that really need to be dealt with in a different way to how they are being dealt with right now. So how bad is it?
Miranda Forsyth: Of course, things are of different levels of severity in different places, and there are parts of Bougainville that are not afflicted with these problems of drug and alcohol abuse, sexual violence, and even murder. But it does seem that these are reasonably prevalent across Bougainville, and as you have just identified, they are often linked, in really complex ways to the earlier crisis.
We are not saying that that is solely the reason for it, but we definitely see that some of the trauma that was created then has continued, that many of the relationships that were fractured during that time have not been able to repair. The post-conflict governance and security arrangements have not really developed in a way that has been able to create a new vision and a new thriving Bougainville.
DW: You're talking about a need to effectively peace build again?
MF: Yes, exactly. Rather than seeing current-day issues, such as violence and alcohol and drug abuse as being law and order, we are saying we need to think about these in the context of an ongoing need for peacebuilding. There need to be community dialogue, but there also needs to be attention to building up that social capital, that social cohesion between communities, again.
DW: Of course, a lot of these issues that you have mentioned here are present right across the country, aren't they?
MF: Yes. In fact, one of the things that we are thinking about is that maybe some of the lessons from Bougainville, the way in which peace building was done, in those years after the conflict, need to be used in other parts of PNG today, as well, particularly up in the Highlands.
Post-conflict, there was a great deal of work done by Peace Foundation Melanesia, which was a grassroots NGO that really spent years training village leaders to be peacemakers, and these kinds of skills were then called upon and used by communities in order to resolve day-to-day disputes and conflicts.
Unfortunately, those skills have started to atrophy over time, as there has not been that same level of effort put into keeping people's skills up to date and also bringing on and training new peace builders. We think that a lot of effort could be put into doing that, particularly as a way of addressing the problems up in the Highlands with ongoing intergroup violence.
DW: Let's come back to Bougainville. You'd need a lot of people even in Bougainville, wouldn't you? Because while Bougainville is a small region relative to many other parts of the country, there is still potentially 400,000 people there.
MF: Yes, but there is a great capacity within the Bougainvillean population to step up to perform that role. We have seen just the way in which leaders step up in Bougainville, in order to voluntarily do mediation within communities, is really extraordinary - something that I have admired for a long period of time.
We see, in particular, some of the leaders from the crisis, in fact, who are recognising that they now have a role, not as war-makers, but as peace builders. For example, in the work that I have been doing in relation to sorcery accusation related violence, I found that there are some former BRA [Bougainville Revolutionary Army] leaders who have been really trying to address the problem of SARV [Sorcery Related Violence]. They have taken it upon themselves to establish safe houses to keep those who are being accused safe, while they can engage in the really long process of reconciliation and of trying to enable those who have been accused to be reintegrated back into their communities.
I think that it would require a lot of people to be involved, but we certainly see that there is a willingness within the community to do that kind of work.
DW: One of the organisations you are talking about is the Bougainville Community Peace and Security Task Unit. Now this is a new organisation, is it?
MF: That is a proposed part of the new system of governance. You should be speaking with Dennis [co-author Dennis Kuiai] about that, because he is one of the ones who has been designing it, and thinking about what kind of a role could it have. But the idea, again, is to bring governance in at that grassroots level, and to ensure that you have got local leaders who are equipped with skills to be able to deal with social order problems, and then can work together with bits of the state, as well, in order to address them quickly before they get out of hand.
DW: Within that there's a different approach needed or seen as ideal to policing.
MF: Yes, so the policing approach - we ere not saying that you need to have one or the other. We are saying that we need to have both. But if you just have a policing approach that is focused on punishing those who are actually caught committing crimes, then it is not going to be addressing the underlying drivers of these kind of problems.
Generally, they come after a crime has been committed, after there has been violence, and you want to be able to be doing a lot of proactive work to stop these things from exploding in violence in the first place, and to try to build that community cohesion so that there isn't a need for that heavy policing.
Keep the policing presence there as, if you like, a threat in the background. But if things cannot be settled down at the community level, then the police certainly can come in and can ensure that people's lives are not put at risk.
DW: What about justice?
MF: There has also been a lot thought given to how to address justice in the Bougainville context, that would bring together both state and customary understandings of justice. This approach build on trying to ensure that relationships are mended and that people are held to account within their community as well as by the state.
So, it is important to think about how can that accountability occur at the same time as allowing traditional reconciliation practices to build back those relationships within communities.
