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1. Introduction

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1. Introduction 1. Introduction The Solomon Islands Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was the first truth commission in the Pacific region. It was established by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Act 20081 with a mandate to ‘promote national unity and reconciliation’ following the civil conflict that affected the country between 1998 and 2003, locally referred to as ‘the tensions’. The commission was publicly launched in April 2009 by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former Chair of the South African TRC, and officially began operations in January 2010 for two years. In February 2012, the commission presented its final report to then Prime Minister Gordon Darcy Lilo. The report has yet to be publicly released or presented to parliament, despite requirements to do so in the TRC Act. In response to the ongoing deferment and refusal to release the final report by the government, long-term Solomon Islands resident Bishop Terry Brown, editor of the final document, unofficially publicly released the report electronically in April 2013. The five-volume final report concluded more than two years of research, exhumations, investigations and truth-seeking by the TRC. It contains recommendations for the Solomon Islands government about how to address the causes and legacy of the conflict. It details the antecedents to the conflict and its events and timeline, and contains information on the militant groups involved and an analysis of human rights abuses perpetrated, specifically: killings; abduction and illegal detention; torture and ill-treatment; sexual violence; property violation; and forced displacement. The final report also lists 200 people who were killed in tensions-related violence. The report draws on thousands of statements and testimony from victims, ex-combatants, politicians and leaders, as well as public submissions and a review of media, literature and other available documents. This thesis presents an in-depth qualitative case study of the Solomon Islands TRC. It draws on interviews with former staff and stakeholders of the commission, and my own personal 1 Access to full text of the Act is available at: http://www.paclii.org/sb/legis/num_act/tarca2008371/. Referred to throughout this thesis as the TRC Act. 1 experiences of working for the commission, to explore the visions and realities of the first (and thus far only) truth commission implemented in the Pacific region. This thesis examines and challenges the complexity of translating and pursuing ‘truth’ and ‘reconciliation’ in a particular cultural context, and describes the practical challenges and everyday realities of implementing a TRC in the Solomon Islands. The Solomon Islands TRC conducted its mandated activities and submitted its final report, despite the myriad challenges and obstacles experienced, as detailed in this thesis. In light of these outcomes, the Solomon Islands TRC could be considered a ‘success’. This success, however, was arguably superficial, a performance of reconciliation in the theatre of post- conflict peacebuilding. A wider perspective of post-conflict peacebuilding and reconciliation in the Solomon Islands shows the TRC was a minor player on a crowded stage (Braithwaite et al. 2010, 77; Kabutaulaka 2005a, 420), and lacking in genuine political and public support, as evidenced by the limited public demand and ongoing refusal of the government to release its final report. This thesis describes how many Solomon Islanders were unaware of the TRC, and those familiar with its acronym or name were often unaware of its role or mandate. This thesis contends that although the Solomon Islands TRC successfully replicated the structure and operation of a truth commission, this was based on a globalised and context-free theory of best practice. The commission was not adequately contextualised nor integrated with local approaches to reconciliation and peacebuilding, and it therefore fell short of its ambitious mandate. The following chapters detail the background and experiences of the Solomon Islands TRC and demonstrate the conceptual and practical challenges and friction experienced in implementing a truth commission seven years after the conflict had abated, and in the context of a multinational stabilising force. The thesis also discusses the positive processes and outcomes from the TRC, and the concluding chapter seeks to discern the potential that truth commissions offer for promoting reconciliation and peacebuilding in post- conflict contexts in Melanesia. This chapter is divided into three sections. The first establishes the context of the research, and in so doing, provides its rationale. The second section delineates the aim and scope of the research, identifying research questions and the contribution this research offers to the discourse and practice of truth commissions, and the growing bridge between the peace 2 studies and transitional justice fields. The final section describes the structure of the thesis, and provides a brief overview of each chapter. 1.1 Establishing context and rationale for the research Solomon Islands is situated in the south-west Pacific, in a subregion widely known as Melanesia. As shown in Figure 1.1, Melanesia comprises a chain of islands including Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Fiji, as well as the Indonesian province of West Papua, the Australian Torres Strait Islands and the French state of New Caledonia (Brown 2008, 187; May 2011). With a population of between eight and nine million people, Melanesia is home to approximately 85 per cent of the Pacific Islands region’s population (Brown 2008, 187). Like neighbouring Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu, the population of Solomon Islands is predominantly Melanesian (around 95 per cent), with a smaller Polynesian population (around 4 per cent), particularly on outlier islands (Allen 2013, 37). There are also Chinese, European and Gilbert Islander (Micronesian) minorities (Braithwaite et al. 2010, 13). Figure 1.1 Map of south-west pacific region, demarcating Melanesia, Polynesia and Micronesia subregions. 3 Brown (2008, 193) warns that terms to define and describe cultural groups and communities are typically vague and problematic: phrases such as ‘the West’ or ‘the international community’ and ‘Melanesia’ are equally opaque. The term ‘Melanesia’ (the black islands) was coined by ‘nineteenth century traders, missionaries, colonists and anthropologists’ and was based on the inhabitants’ darker skin colour (Brown 2008, 187), in contrast with Polynesia (many islands) and Micronesia (small islands). The division of the Pacific into these subregions is critiqued by some scholars (see Clark 2003; Jolly 2007). Nevertheless, the terms are widely used in academic literature, and I use the term Melanesia throughout this thesis for a number of reasons. Firstly, because it is now one of positive self-identification within the region (Brown 2008, 88; see for example Narokobi 1980); during my time in the Solomon Islands, I found the term to be claimed and employed by Solomon Islander colleagues, friends and interviewees. Secondly, Solomon Islands, like other countries in Melanesia, is typified by its cultural and linguistic diversity: Melanesia is home to about one-thousandth of the world’s population, yet has one quarter of the world’s contemporary languages (Braithwaite et al. 2010, 13; Brown 2008, 188; Fraenkel 2004, 20). So while the nation-state of Solomon Islands is culturally diverse and resists national generalisations, Solomon Islanders share a number of anthropological, cultural and sociological similarities with neighbouring Melanesian populations (Vallance 2007, 1). This allows for some generalisations to be drawn regionally, as Brown (2008, 190) describes: ‘Life for most Melanesians is grounded in kinship networks, a strong sense of place, communally held land, and principles of reciprocity […] Consultation and consensus are strongly emphasised.’ In Solomon Islands, as elsewhere in the region, culture and tradition is commonly described with the term kastom, which despite being ‘a living, changing cultural mechanism that varies island-by-island, district-by-district, and has incorporated many modern influences’, has ‘enough nation and region-wide similarities […] to be a distinct indigenous cultural development’ (Moore 2004, 27). Finally, following the reasoning of Vallance (2007, 2), the term Melanesia is used in this research because a number of regional issues of concern (and of interest to researchers) ‘transcend the national boundaries of Melanesian countries’, such as: ‘land rights; the divide 4 between customary and modern ways; [and] the conflict of traditional versus so-called “Western” ways’. In the last two or three decades, the Melanesian region has been characterised by an increase in prevalence of conflict. Henderson (2005, 3) notes that while the Pacific Islands region had been one of the more peaceful regions in the world following the Second World War, from the 1980s there was a series of predominantly internal conflicts: [I]n 1987 Oceania experienced its first military coup, in Fiji. Throughout much of the 1990s a bloody civil war was waged as the island of Bougainville sought to break away from Papua New Guinea. In 2000 further coups took place in Fiji and Solomon Islands. Armed militia in Solomon Islands continued to engage in intermittent violence for another three years. Army mutinies have also taken place in Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and Fiji. Common challenges and possible reasons contributing to the increase in conflict in the Melanesian
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