Reconciliation in Bougainville: Civil war, peacekeeping and restorative justice

Abstract

Restorative approaches to criminal behaviour can have wide application, extending even to peacekeeping operations and rebuilding post‐conflict societies. One example is reconciliation in post‐civil‐war Bougainville, a province of Papua New Guinea. The international intervention there was organised and implemented with societal reconciliation as one of its prime aims and it is shown here, through description of peacemaking ceremonies, that reconciliation in Bougainville is an exemplar of restorative justice. The design and composition of the multinational force is outlined, and the article is infused with interviews from peacekeepers and local Bougainvilleans – the people whose peace ‘was being kept’. This particular case shows that a more restoratively focused peace operation can have valuable lessons for international interventions generally.

Keywords:

• Bougainville
• civil war
• culture
• peacekeeping
• reconciliation
• restorative justice

Notes

1. As well as those already mentioned, these operations are located in the Congo, Cyprus, East Timor, Eritrea/Ethiopia, Georgia, India/Pakistan, Israel/Syria, Jerusalem, Kosovo, Lebanon, Sierra Leone and Western Sahara (UNDPKO Website).

2. These operations are located in Afghanistan, Bosnia‐Herzegovina, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Kosovo (NATO Website).

3. Bougainville had been the most effectively administered of all PNG’s provinces (Dorney, 1998, p. 46); this was widely acknowledged by Bougainvilleans and was a source of local pride. However, the devastation caused by the war has destroyed almost all the province’s infrastructure and it is now the least developed and most under‐resourced area in PNG.

4. In 1964, copper deposits of immense quantity were found in the centre of the island and one of the largest mining operations in the world ensued (Oliver, 1973, p. 4).

5. For a detailed and wide‐ranging account of the role of women in the peace process, see Sirivi and Havini (2004) book As Mothers of the Land in which a dozen firsthand accounts of the war and the peace process outline the difficulties faced by women and their families, and the determination they brought to accentuate the need for reconciliation. This work also shows the depth of religious conviction that permeated many local responses to the crisis.

6. AusAID is the Australian Agency for International Development, and DFAT is the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

7. Breen (2001, p. 44) says, with some understatement, that: ‘The adjustment to being deployed into harm’s way without weapons was a challenge for most military personnel.’

8. The usual arrangement within a UN peace operation is that the senior person is the Special Representative of the Secretary‐General, the SRSG. There is naturally a senior military officer, and this person reports to the SRSG. This is not the case with regional or other coalition intervention forces, and the rather blunt comment of one PMG commander is notable: ‘Civilians were integral to the mission and rightly subordinate to the military commander’ (Interview, 10 May 2004).

9. Cultural appropriateness, it can be safely said, is the norm in restorative practices (see Consedine, 1993).

10. Emory Bogardus (1950) propounded his ‘Theory of Social Distance’, which hypothesises that empathy exists between people dependent upon the ‘social distance’ between them. He believed that this was a component of socialisation generally and could be expressed by degree using a scale. He theorised that it exists between individuals, between individuals and the various groups to which they belonged, and between groups. There is ‘nearness’ and ‘farness’, and these aspects can change incrementally, or even be reversed, based on the variable quality of the relationship. Where social interaction was profound, nearness existed, and where it was lacking, farness prevailed.