Transitional Justice in the Asia-Pacific (29 page)

‘[L]aw and order is here but peace is not in our hearts.’
¹

In late 1998 the Melanesia archipelago state of the Solomon Islands was plunged into a period of chaos and violent civil conflict precipitated by a complex web of grievances, injustices, ethnic tensions, and economic insecurities. Known colloquially as ‘the
Tensions’, the low-intensity conflict dragged on until the middle of 2003, leaving an estimated 200 people dead and more than 20,000 displaced from their homes.
²
Although in comparison to other civil conflicts in the region the events in the Solomon Islands claimed relatively few lives, they were, nonetheless, marked by the protracted, systematic, and consistent violation of human rights. In addition to the kidnapping and murder of local and international civilians, including missionaries and peace envoys, the Tensions saw rampant
torture and the entrenchment of gender-based violence, including the widespread rape of women and girls.
³

Following a request made by the then-Solomon Islands Prime Minister, Sir Allan
Kemakeza, for assistance to quell the increasing insecurity and instability in his country, on July 24, 2003, the Australian-led Regional
Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI) arrived in the capital, Honiara. Operating under a pidgin name, Operation Helpem Fren
, RAMSI's overwhelming display of force quickly brought ‘the miracle…that Solomon Islanders had been praying for’, the restoration of law and order and the cessation of overt violence.
⁴
Alongside the standard expectation of an intervening force to ‘[e]nsure the safety and security of the Solomon Islands’, RAMSI was also mandated to institute significant reforms and improvements in the ‘machinery of government’, economic governance, and law and justice, the so-called ‘three pillars’ of the mission.
⁵
In particular, what made RAMSI unusual among interventions of its type was its ‘unusually strong rule-of-law agenda’ which, in the immediate phase, demanded the restoration of the Solomon Islands’ ‘“barely functioning” criminal justice system.’
⁶
Its initial success in doing so is unquestionable: less than four months after arriving in the Solomon Islands, RAMSI had facilitated the arrests of some 1,340 individuals, many of whom were accused of committing serious offences including murder and other human rights violations.
⁷

Although RAMSI's actions brought with them the initial impression of swift justice for human rights violations, as time dragged on, defendants remained in remand, and the criminal justice system became bogged down by the large number of complex cases before it. Questions emerged over whether RAMSI had in fact contributed to a new set of tensions between the rule of law approach it had implemented and the reconciliation approach favoured by large sectors of the community. Indeed, amongst the defining features of the Solomon Islands case is the fact that no formal transitional justice processes has been planned or implemented: neither during the lengthy peace process that brought the conflict to an end nor in the immediate aftermath of hostilities was an explicit transitional justice process or set of mechanisms developed or instituted.
⁸
Rather, in what was a relatively organic process, particular interest groups devised and implemented various mechanisms designed to bring accountability for human rights violations. These fell into two broad groups. Conceiving justice through the prism of its liberal state-building mandate, RAMSI's rule of law approach was, and remains, a top-down approach that favours the strengthening of key state institutions, including those associated with law and order, and the pursuit of accountability through criminal trials. By contrast, the reconciliation approach is a bottom-up method of post-conflict justice that favours local, grass-roots, traditional, and indigenous justice processes. In the case of the Solomon Islands, these localized practices and processes were routinely implemented by community groups, women's organizations, and the churches throughout the peace process and the post-conflict recovery period.

Although these two approaches have technically operated independently in the Solomon Islands, proponents of each have accused the other of hampering their justice efforts. Thus, while supporters of
prosecutions and punishment have argued that forgiveness and reconciliation processes circumvent justice and limit or even eliminate the possibility of achieving accountability for past human rights violations, proponents of reconciliation maintain that RAMSI's law and justice approach is impeding reconciliation efforts.
⁹
In particular, supporters of reconciliation argue that the adversarial nature of the criminal justice system results in the suppression of truth rather than its recovery and stymied attempts to address and resolve the tensions that fuelled the violence
.

At the heart of disagreements over how justice ought to be administered in this case is the very notion of justice itself and, in particular, what constitutes accountability for human rights violations. Also at play is a fundamental set of relationships between peace and justice, state and society, and local and international justice processes. With this in mind, this chapter examines the interactions of the law and order and reconciliation approaches pursued in the case of the Solomon Islands and assesses the extent to which they have, individually, and in concert with one another, achieved accountability for human rights violations. It also considers the extent to which the Solomon Islands’ Truth and Reconciliation Commission has successfully bridged the justice divide.

Since the 2003 publication of the
Australian Strategic Policy Institute's (ASPI) 2003 report,
Our Failing Neighbour,
the first line of which proclaimed that ‘Solomon Islands…is a failing state’, the label of ‘failed
state’ has been routinely attached to the Solomon Islands.
¹⁰
This is not surprising, given its lack of security, crippled economy, ineffective government, and chronic underdevelopment. Despite this, however, the Solomon Islands’ descent into civil war is not a simple case of state failure or even of a ‘fragile state.’
¹¹
Rather, conflict in the Solomon Islands was precipitated by an ‘intricate knot of fragilities’ borne of its ‘history and culture’, a complex web of grievances, perceived and real injustices, and a range of underlying and proximate causes that eventually erupted into open violence.
¹²

Three main factors underlie the conflict that took place in the Solomon Islands: first, the misfit between state and society that came with the establishment of the Solomon Islands as a state; second, economic mismanagement by the Solomon Islands Government leading to a loss of state natural resource revenues and resulting in uneven development, and; third, ‘ethnic’ tensions between Guales and Malaitans over land on the main islands of Guadalcanal.

The Solomon Islands was made a British protectorate in 1893, and, although it became an independent state in 1978, its constitution as a state sits uneasily with its traditional social structure.
¹³
As Braithwaite et al. note, ‘The state today is still not central to most of the day-to-day existence of the overwhelming majority of the population who live in villages distant from towns.’
¹⁴
Rather the
wantok
, ‘the local version of what
anthropologists call a segmentary lineage or descent group’, remains the fundamental unit of association for most Solomon Islanders.
¹⁵
However, the state is not simply seen as a benign irrelevance. Although many ‘educated people may understand the benefits of being one nation, the vast majority of Solomon Islanders see it as a threat to their resources, their cultural identity and culture, their environment and the basis of their sustained community living.’
¹⁶
Thus, although the Solomon Islands formally follows the Westminster model of political representation, this structure exists in tension with ‘the patchwork of semi-autonomous micro-polities’ that comprise the state.
¹⁷

This sense that the local community and not the state can be trusted to secure Solomon Islanders’ livelihoods has only been exacerbated by the ‘failure of successive governments to implement effective or just policies and strategies to develop the country's human and natural resources.’
¹⁸
Disputes over natural resource revenues, particularly associated with the issuing of logging licences to Asian-based companies but also related to the mining industry, have only served to heighten the sense of many Solomon Islanders that they are not receiving a fair distribution of their nation's resources. In addition, the government's inability to adequately address disputes over conflicting land tenure systems gave rise to further tensions, particularly between Malaitan immigrants and the residents of Guadalcanal.

During World War II, large numbers of Malaitans moved to Guadalcanal to take up jobs with the U.S. military which had established a base there following its defeat of the Japanese in the Battle of Guadalcanal. Grievances between the Guales and the Malaitans who remained on Guadalcanal after the end of the war emerged over issues of uneven development, the inheritance of land, and respect. As Braithwaite et al. note, ‘The people of Guadalcanal came to view Malaitans as disrespectful guests on their land’ and became increasingly concerned that different land inheritance customs were resulting in the loss of lands customarily held by the people of Guadalcanal.
¹⁹
In response, Guale militants began evicting Malaitans from Guadalcanal, causing resentment from the Malaitans who ‘viewed this as uncompensated eviction from lands they had paid to share.’
²⁰
With this, the underlying elements of what has often been called ‘ethnic tension’ in the Solomon Islands were exposed, although, as Judith Bennett cautions, this description is not always accurate for ‘sometimes the “ethnicity” of those involved [was] so uncertain’ that interrogators were forced to employ language tests to ascertain which particular group combatants were from.
²¹
Further exacerbating the situation was a government that favoured Malaitan interests over those of the people of Guadalcanal and that ‘had given in to some quite large compensation demands from Malaitans who alleged insult and violence by non-Malaitans.’ For many Guales, this was simply unjust
.

The Solomon Islands conflict proceeded in two main phases. The first phase was the insurgency of
the Isatabu Freedom Movement (IFM), formerly the Guadalcanal Revolutionary Army (GRA), during which ‘young men from the impoverished Weather Coast region of Guadalcanal, with the active involvement of political leaders such as Guadalcanal Premier,
Ezekiel Alebua’ began ‘driving settlers from Malaita off
the island of Guadalcanal.’
²²
The IFM, as we will see, ‘was a loose coalition of militant groups focused on different local grievances’ and, as such, did not operate as a coherent party during the many years of peace negotiations that followed the outbreak of violence.
²³
During the second phase of the conflict, from late 1999 on,
the Malaita Eagle Force, initially established ‘to defend Malaitan interests against the Guale rebels’ became operational.
²⁴
With the police force ‘fractured along ethnic lines’, the Malaitan-dominated paramilitary wing of the Royal Solomon Islands Police joined the MEF in staging a de facto coup in June 2000.
²⁵
This resulted in the forced resignation of Prime Minister Bart Ulufa'alu on June 5, 2000. Shortly after, in an overt attempt at political compromise, Manasseh Sogavare was appointed Prime Minister on account of the fact that he was neither Guale nor Malaitan. By December 2001, however, he had been replaced by Sir Allan Kemakeza, who instigated the intervention by RAMSI in 2003.

Throughout this period, fighting continued, with ‘[s]ome dreadful atrocities’ committed between 1998 and 2003. In addition to widespread accounts of kidnappings and the beheadings of IFM members by the MEF, ‘[r]apes and murders, executions and mutilations occurred on both sides.’
²⁶
As
Clive Moore writes: ‘Men were held and made to watch their wives and daughters being pack-raped. Innocent people became involved just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
²⁷

The peace process that finally brought the Solomon Islands conflict to an end was long, arduous and marked by numerous false starts. The
Townsville Peace Agreement (TPA), finally reached on October 15, 2000, makes mention of this by listing the previous attempts made by the Solomon Islands Government to bring an end to the conflict: the Honiara Peace Accord (June 28, 1999), the Panatina Agreement (August 12, 1999), the Marau Communique (July 15, 1999), the Memorandum of Understanding between the SIG and the GPG (June 13, 1999), the Buala Peace Communique (May 5, 2000), and the Auki Communique (May 12, 2000).
²⁸
Not mentioned in the Townsville Agreement was a Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group meeting (June 11, 2000), peace negotiations held on the HMAS
Tobruk
(July 2000) which ‘fell apart when other IFM leaders said they could not sign’ because the notorious rebel
leader Harold Keke ‘would not sign the cease-fire’, and the National Peace Conference held on the New Zealand Navy ship
Te Kaha
(August 25 to 27, 2000) at which the first official calls for the establishment of a truth and reconciliation commission were made.
²⁹
Indeed, the months leading up to the Townsville negotiations were marked, not only by numerous attempts to find a resolution to the conflict but some of the ‘bloodiest engagements of the IFM-MEF conflict.’
³⁰
During this time, Keke became ‘the decisive spoiler of the peace’, launching violent attacks and even hijacking a Solomon Islands Airlines airplane.
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