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Restoring Peace to a War-Torn Island
20,000 dead and 70,000 displaced. A decade-long, bloody civil war had left the inhabitants of the Pacific island of Bougainville sorely in need of peace and restoration. Read how peace was restored and why the peacemakers received PFI's 2007 Prize for Restorative Justice.
After a decade-long, bloody civil war that left nearly 20,000 dead and 70,000 displaced, the inhabitants of the Pacific island of Bougainville were greatly in need of peace and restoration. The war officially ended in 1997, but for genuine peace to truly take hold, healing and reconciliation had to take place among the Bougainvilleans themselves.
To aid this process of reconciliation, a grassroots organisation called the PEACE Foundation Melanesia came to Bougainville to provide conflict resolution training. To date, the Foundation has trained thousands of people in basic restorative justice in Bougainville. Five hundred have been trained as facilitators and another 50-70 as trainers.
The restorative justice practices taught by the PEACE Foundation were an extraordinary success, so much so that now many of the village communities use the practices for general conflict resolution, even for serious matters such as murder. Because of their effective peacemaking efforts, PFI has chosen the PEACE Foundation Melanesia to be the 2007 recipient of the International Prize for Restorative Justice. The $5,000(US) Restorative Justice Prize is awarded every two years in recognition of those whose work has led to significant advances in the implementation of restorative justice. The prize was presented to Brother Patrick Howley, Executive Director of the PEACE Foundation Melanesia, at the PFI Convocation in Canada by PFI’s Centre for Justice and Reconciliation and Prison Fellowship Canada.
The PEACE Foundation Melanesia’s work in Bougainville is distinctive because it works at a grassroots level that provides a skill, rather than a service or product. It succeeded in teaching Bougainvilleans to help their communities resolve disputes, which allowed the people to build peace among themselves.
Choosing the Restorative Justice Award winner “was a very difficult decision to make,” said Dan Van Ness, Executive Director of the Centre. “But the PEACE Foundation stood out because of its unique work revitalizing customary processes of peacemaking in Bougainville. This allowed Bougainvilleans to use those to begin binding wounds of a prolonged conflict that had set villages and families against each other across the island.”
