All talk, no action saved Bougainville
Soldiers Without Guns (M, 92 mins) Directed by Will Watson Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★★
Bougainville spent a century being passed around like a gambling chip. It was at various times occupied and ruled by England (which separated the archipelago from the Solomons, with which Bougainville had previously been one nation), Germany, Japan, Australia and then Papua New Guinea.
Sometime in the 1960s, the people of Bougainville had the great misfortune to discover they were living on top of an immense amount of copper ore.
The eye of the giant Rio Tinto corporation – which has turned up as the bad guy in movies in two consecutive weeks – swivelled across the globe and engines of capitalism roared into life.
Soon, Bougainville was the nonplussed host of the world’s biggest hole (this is official – it was in The Guinness Book of Records) and an explosion of the unrest that always results when massive amounts of capital are poured unequally into an economy.
The first protests against the mining operation were met by armed police and soldiers acting on behalf of the Papua government, which was now a functionary of Rio Tinto in Bougainville.
The men of Bougainville became factionalised, the violence escalated and the mostly white Australian engineers went home.
With the mine shut, the Papua forces left and the country spiralled into a brutal civil war that, over a decade, killed 20,000. That’s onesixth of the entire population.
Before the mining company arrived, Bougainville had been a peaceful and matrilineal nation. Property rights were passed down from mother to daughter, not father to son.
And, as so often in war, it was the women who suffered disproportionately in Bougainville. Nothing empowers a cowardly man to act on his cowardice quite like a gun. Rape became epidemic.
Fourteen peace missions were launched over a decade – and all of them failed.
Soldiers Without Guns is the story of the New Zealand initiative that finally worked.
Working unarmed, the Kiwi forces embarked on a mission of communication. A peace imposed on a people is destined to fail, fast. But a peace grown within a nation might take root.
The New Zealanders – many of whom were women – reached out to the local women on all sides of the conflict. They had far more in common with each other than they did with the men doing the fighting, and this got them talking to each other. The men followed.
Soldiers Without Guns is an engrossing and fascinating film. Auckland-based film-maker Will Watson (Haka and Guitars) weaves his material together well, and Lucy Lawless’ narration tells us what we need to know to understand what we are seeing.
This is a conventional documentary, made without undue flourish, and sometimes that’s exactly what a story needs.
In a great couple of months for local documentary – Celia and
The Heart Dances are superb too – Soldiers Without Guns made me prouder to live in this country than any other film in recent memory. Go see it.