The Bougainville Peace Agreement

Anthony Regan
Photograph by Darren Boyd, Coombs Photography

Anthony Regan says he came to academia quite by accident. While teaching law at the University of Papua New Guinea in the 1980s, he befriended a Ugandan national, who, it later transpired, had been a representative of a guerrilla movement. He told Regan that he was going home to Uganda because the guerrillas had just won government and they were going to write a new constitution. He asked Regan if he would like to come and work with them.

Regan had begun teaching law after about eight years working a a lawyer for the PNG Government and found himself in academic life 'by accident' after writing about the practical work he had been doing. He went to Uganda in 1991 and spent three years working on the Ugandan Constitutional Commission. Then, he says, he realised he had 'become a post-conflict constitutional lawyer, but with an interest in politics and anthropology and culture'.

Regan had made his way to Canberra by the time the State, Society and Governance in Melanesia (SSGM) Project was established at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies in 1997. The project needed people with an interest in the kinds of areas that Regan had been working on in PNG: trying to understand how the State was working and its interaction with the complicated, diverse societies in Melanesia, such as those in PNG, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and, to a slightly lesser degree, Fiji, New Caledonia and West Papua.

He says all are 'new States with very complex societies and numerous language groups, very wide differences in culture — a much greater range of problems involved in establishing a single State than perhaps anywhere else in the world'.

'The [SSGM] Project is trying to understand what's involved in the development of the State in these areas and the tensions between the very complex social groupings in those States and the effort to establish a single unifying ethic.

'The work I was doing on decentralisation and constitutions and resolving conflict through constitutional structures fed into the project fairly readily.'

Since joining the project full-time in 1997, Regan has been involved in developments in PNG generally, as well as in the peace process in the Solomons and the making of a constitution in East Timor. More recently, he has been working for the Bougainville administration as the constitutional and legal advisor in the implementation of the Bougainville Peace Agreement. He has spent about three and half years in Bougainville, and spent the past two and half years living there.

Bougainville suffered through a terrible civil war from 1988 to 1997. Since hostilities ended, the various parties have been involved in what Regan says has been one of the world's most successful peace processes.

It has been, he says, 'successful in terms of resolving without bloodshed a really bitter conflict, which had involved a huge amount of bloodshed. And that peace process was a very slow-moving one, but it eventually produced a political settlement — the peace agreement that was signed in August 2001.'

Regan was an adviser to the Bougainville parties in the negotiations for that agreement, which took more than two years to complete. He has since been involved in attempts to implement the agreement, which has required large and detailed amendments to the PNG Constitution to guarantee a high level of autonomy to Bougainville and to defer the main divisive question between Bougainville and the rest of PNG — that of secession. The issue of Bougainville's independence from PNG has been delayed until a constitutionally guaranteed referendum, which can be held 15 years after the Autonomous Bougainville Government is established.

All this has required a tremendous amount of work, including the development of a Bougainville Constitution, arrangements for the transfer of power and functions from PNG to Bougainville and arrangements for new funding systems between PNG and Bougainville. As well as participating in all of this, Regan has been doing broader policy work in relation to public-sector reform and developing a new administrative structure for Bougainville.

Regan says Bougainville had a sound human administration and some of the best overall infrastructure in PNG before the conflict.

'It was probably one of the wealthiest [provinces] in PNG overall, mainly as a result of mining revenue. Pretty well everything was destroyed during the conflict — most infrastructure and the human infrastructure, the provincial administration.

'So Bougainville's starting from a very weak base, which is one of the great ironies of trying to develop autonomy with very limited capacity. The desire for autonomy is very strong but the capacity to do it is limited, so they have to work really hard.'

Despite these limitations and the fact that the internal reconciliation process is still under way, one of the biggest threats to the creation of an autonomous government may come from within.

The original leader of the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA), Francis Ona, has remained outside the peace process and refuses to support it. So far, Regan says, he has been using words rather than violence to generate popular support for his position. In the past few months, however, Ona has been mounting a stronger campaign to oppose the establishment of the Autonomous Government and the situation is quite fragile.

'All other groups have disarmed and destroyed their weapons,' Regan says. '[Ona] has refused to do so. He remains with a group called the Me'ekamui Defence Force. He regards himself as the head of an independent republic of Me'ekamui, with elements of what used to be the BRA supporting him. Because they are the only armed group and they are now mounting an awareness campaign directed at encouraging people to support Ona and independence, we're a bit unsure where it's all heading.'

Young Members of the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA)
Photograph by Jan Gammage

Ona's opposition to autonomy is being encouraged by 'a rather strange man called Noah Musingku', Regan says.

'He was the head of a pyramid moneymaking scheme in PNG in the 1990s. And he's now in the mountains with Ona and has convinced him that he's established a new world economic order, which is going to make Bougainville the wealthiest place in the world. Bougainville will be financing the United States, according to his rhetoric. And Ona has always been pretty keen on getting lots of money for Bougainville and making Bougainvilleans wealthy.

'[Ona] started off as an opponent of Bougainville Copper, the mining company, not because he opposed mining, but because he was unhappy with the distribution of wealth from the mine. And he now sees the opportunity for all Bougainvilleans to be incredibly wealthy, if this man Musingku is right.'

The situation is further complicated because the people who support Ona are mainly in the mountainous and isolated areas of Bougainville and have had very little education or access to government services of any kind for 15 years.

'There's a whole generation that has grown up outside the mainstream, and [they] are very easily convinced of what most people would regard as quite bizarre theories.'

As well as his involvement in the drafting of the amendments to the PNG Constitution, which were passed in 2002, Regan has been an advisor to the Bougainville Constitutional Commission and now the Bougainville Constituent Assembly, which is finalising the new Constitution. The 100-member representative body will hold its final meeting this month [November] to finalise the Constitution and, if everything goes according to plan, the Bougainville Autonomous Government should be elected in the first half of 2005.

The possibility of Ona destabilising this process, however, is not the only potential impediment to its success.

'PNG's economy is in crisis,' Regan says, 'so the ability of PNG to support the autonomy arrangements financially is much worse than was expected when the peace agreement was negotiated and signed.

'At the same time, there are very high expectations in Bougainville of what autonomy will deliver. There's a tendency to think that things are going to change dramatically when autonomy is established: that money will flow, that jobs will be created. And if those high expectations are not met, it could be a serious problem.'

Regan believes the Bougainville leadership needs to dampen expectations and help create a more realistic outlook among Bougainvilleans. That's not an easy task as communication in Bougainville is incredibly difficult.

'The road system is very bad,' Regan says, 'the provincial radio station has almost no money, there's very little money even for running the power station in the main provincial centre. The power is often off for days at a time, the phone system doesn't work for days at a time. So there are very basic problems just getting people talking to one another.'

Despite the considerable challenges, Regan has found the whole process immensely satisfying and believes the outlook is positive.

'What we're describing on the constitutional side itself is a small part of a much broader process of re-establishing peace, of reconciling people deeply divided by conflict, of trying to provide ways ahead that enable people to deal with difference and conflict without violence.

'Far from PNG being a collapsing State, as some people suggest, my feeling is that out of this conflict in Bougainville have come many, many positive things, including a common understanding that violence is not an acceptable way of dealing with problems. That doesn't mean that violence doesn't occur — it does occur, but when it does there are all sorts of community responses to try to bring it under control as quickly as possible.

'And what we're seeing is the emergence of the beginnings of commonly accepted limits and restrictions, which are part of what a modern State is, and wha human rights and the rule of law are about.

'Human rights regimes and the rule of law developed in Europe in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries out of violence and conflict ... They were attempts to restrict what the State and other groups did to one another ... It's only when people develop their own acceptance of those kinds of rules do you find them working.'

Regan sees what's happening in Bougainville as being at the cutting edge of processes that are happening in other Melanesian States; but what we outsiders tend to see as conflict, chaos and collapse is an almost natural process of shedding the existing, colonially imposed social structures and creating new State structures that people can work with and feel comfortable in.

So it's not just a matter of other places learning from Bougainville's experience, he says. 'But ... that we can see some of these good things that have come out of the awful experience in Bougainville. Perhaps if we looked at what was happening in the rest of Melanesia in the same way, we would see a lot more of the positives in the chaos.'

Regan says that one of the great — and exciting — positives to come out of the Bougainville conflict is an openness among the people there to look at the Constitution and the structures of government in new ways and a willingness to try new things.

'The post-conflict situation offers people the chance to do things differently and to choose new options. And Bougainville's certainly busy doing that.'