2 - Place-Based Justice in Bougainville and Solomon Islands

Summary

The peoples of the southwestern Pacific possess sophisticated ways to resolve disputes, and as might be expected in a region whose peoples are open to new ideas and strangers, the parties involved are capable of adapting to new circumstances (Dinnen, 2003, p 28; Jolly, 2003, p 270; McDougall and Kere, 2011; Allen et al, 2013; McDougall, 2015). Such pragmatism revolves around three pillars of the justice system (kastom, churches and the state) although in practice the pillars are difficult to separate as people identify overlapping roles for each pillar (Allen et al, 2013; Larcom, 2013). Each pillar can also traverse multiple scales. Kastom, for example, is hardly limited to relations between kin and family but is a resource when disputes occur across communities and islands (McDougall and Kere, 2011, p 144).

Although dispute resolution requires a reconciliation process that deals with the details of what happened and who did it, other kinds of knowledge about violent pasts can and do circulate in Bougainville and Solomon Islands. For example, central Bougainvilleans commemorate Francis Ona's Unilateral Declaration of Independence for Bougainville every year on 17 May. I witnessed the event in 2016 and spent the next two weeks talking to people about it. I found that most people were willing to let the former Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) commanders that organised the commemoration tell their version of events. Several participants had misgivings about the omissions in the former commanders’ historical narrative. However, those participants either did not attend the event or kept their disquiet to themselves because they understood that the combatants were making progress towards reconciliation. In this way, while public memorialisation practices might have seemed at first to be venues to articulate conflict knowledge, because people made sense of those commemorations with reference to reconciliation processes it is essential to understand these processes in more detail.

The specifics can vary widely across Bougainville and Solomon Islands (Dinnen, 2003), but in the most general terms reconciliations proceed in the following way. After a conflict, representatives of the people involved negotiate with the aim of restoring balance to the relationships between the broader clan groups to which the victims and perpetrators belong. The mediators are community leaders, individuals who share social ties to both parties or, increasingly, trained mediators. They are usually men. In some cases these men might convene a formal meeting to resolve the issue (White and Watson-Gegeo, 1990, pp 30–2). The specific approach can depend on the harm caused (Reddy, 2012, p 138). Chiefs can often deal with minor damage to relationships by organising banal social events that re-establish friendly relations among the parties. By contrast, negotiations over serious cases are deliberately slow to enable the individuals involved to reflect and prepare themselves (Sirivi, 2004, p 176).