Developmental Faith, Sacrifice and the Betrayal of Transitional Justice: A Bougainvillean Case Study

Mark Evenhuis

doi:10.13169/statecrime.6.1.0102

Abstract

This article, drawing on the case study of resource development and conflict in Bougainville (Papua New Guinea), explores how global faith in development hollows out the possibilities of justice for peoples transitioning from the violence of colonization, corporate-state crime and armed civil conflict. While developmental faith promises a future horizon of prosperity with the Global North, Bougainville's recent history illuminates how development's economy of sacrifice authors social fragmentation, conflict and gross environmental harms while serving the interests of powerful transnational corporation, states and local elites. The harmonization of such interests, when coupled with development's reluctance to confront substantive colonial and post-colonial injustices, risks setting the parameters for a new era of instability and state-corporate crime.

Highlights

Decolonization and the coming of independence are laden with the possibilities of justice for the structural harms of empire
This later criticism flowed from the seemingly common and understandable belief that after Bougainvilleans fought alongside Australian forces against the Japanese in the Pacific War, they would no longer be treated as subordinates but as equals
The colonial government backflipped on this position when, in 1966 a Bougainvillean politician, Paul Lapun convinced the House of Assembly to give 5 per cent of the government’s future royalties to “landowners” of the Panguna Special Mining Lease on the basis that they owned the minerals under local custom (Filer 2005: 908; Cooper 1991: 58)

Summary

Introduction

Decolonization and the coming of independence are laden with the possibilities of justice for the structural harms of empire. In 1967, a welfare officer, deployed from Rabaul to conduct a public meeting intended to mollify indigenous resistance to prospecting in Bougainville, reported that the local spokesman “produced his usual story of natives being used as slaves while white men made vast quantities of money” and that “[i]f Australia had kept her war-time promises of equality for all, things would be different ” (Denoon 2000: 26) This later criticism flowed from the seemingly common and understandable belief that after Bougainvilleans fought alongside Australian forces against the Japanese in the Pacific War, they would no longer be treated as subordinates but as equals. In Bougainville, indigenous peoples were asked, and often forced, to place on the sacrificial altar of the global market their relationship with land, kin, and autonomy, as the price of PNG’s inclusion in the international order as a nation state (Orford 2005b: 182) This logic of sacrifice both justified and enabled the environmental and structural harms and state-corporate crimes which were to follow. As the future of the Panguna Mine hangs in the balance, the ABG’s success in garnering support for its vision of resourceled independence will depend on its ability to convince Bougainvilleans to renew their faith in the promises of development once more

Findings

Conclusion

Discussion