Keeping the peace: stories of Australian peacekeepers - Bougainville
- Bougainville
- Problems
Since the late 1980s, the Papua New Guinea province of Bougainville has been in a state of civil war between the Bougainville Revolutionary Army, seeking independence, and the Papua New Guinea Defence Force. Human rights abuses committed by both sides have sown deep distrust. After lengthy negotiations towards a peace settlement, a multinational monitoring group was established, originally led by New Zealand, more recently by Australia.
The monitoring group's role is to report on both sides' compliance with the ceasefire, but also to help raise popular confidence in the peace process. To do this, monitoring group teams visit isolated villages and hold meetings, hear complaints, and spend time with the people. Within their resources, teams will provide medical or other services to villagers. Patrols travel by four-wheel-drive, by helicopter, and sometimes by exhausting foot slogs up steep jungle tracks.
Though predominantly military, the teams include civilian public servants and police. Although relations between civilian and military team members are sometimes difficult, this integration may point the way to a likely future for peacekeeping.
Lloyd Brodrick
For three months in 1998 Lloyd Brodrick, a civilian in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, went to Bougainville as a truce monitor. Travelling by landing craft, trading vessel, helicopter, Land Rover or on foot, patrols set out to visit remote villages to carry news of the peace process.
In one village they saw two groups, previously on opposite sides of the conflict, break spears and share a meal of reconciliation. Another time, they investigated a double murder, but found it had been caused by suspected witchcraft, not by politics. Walking ridges and malarial coastal plains, crossing fast-flowing rivers, addressing village meetings, it was all a long way from a desk in Canberra.