Archipelagos of Peace

337 Pages·2016·4.05 MB·English

Archipelagos of Peace
Australian Peacekeepers in Bougainville,
East Timor and Solomon Islands 1997-
2006
Kimberley A Doyle
July 2015

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the Australian National
University

Declaration

I hereby declare that this thesis is entirely my own work and that to the
best of my knowledge it contains no material published or written by
another person except where due reference is made in the text. This thesis
has not been submitted in whole or in part for a degree at this or any
other university.

Kimberley Doyle Date

…………………… ……….

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Abstract

SINCE 1945 Australians have served as peacekeepers across the world in
Africa, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the Pacific. They have
contributed to one of the most startling attempts at worldwide collective
security in human history. That sweeping story has been well explored,
but the experiences of peacekeepers themselves have remained rather
elusive. And yet peacekeeping outcomes largely depend on what happens
at the ground level between people. The central aim of this thesis is to
pull these stories from obscurity and demonstrate that peacekeepers’
recollections, descriptions and perspectives are a central and necessary
part of peacekeeping histories.
That story is explored here by examining Australian peacekeepers’ oral
histories of serving in Bougainville, Solomon Islands and East Timor
between 1997 and approximately 2006. These are valuable case studies
because all three peace operations overlapped in the same decade, all
occurred under the same Prime Minister and Foreign Minister and all
were elided together in strategic and political discourse. More
significantly, each was also bound, in Australian imaginations, to a
nebulous region called ‘the Pacific’. This unique intersection of the three
operations creates opportunities to explore broader questions about
Australia’s relationship with the Pacific.
Though not exclusively used, peacekeepers’ narratives are central to
this history. Over sixty Australians from across the country shared their
stories for this work. The peacekeepers’ came from three different
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organisations – the Australian Defence Force, the Australian Public
Service and the Australian Federal Police. Exploring what peacekeeping
meant to people across these three organisations means this history tells a
more varied story than would be possible by focusing solely on one
group. That variety also makes it possible to further dissect the nuances
and connectedness of peacekeepers’ representations of national, regional
and Pacific identities.
Ultimately, this is a history of peacekeeping is centred by peacekeepers’
own experiences. All History is, of course, people centred in its own way,
but it does not inevitably follow that people are always the centre of the
narrative. They often exist in and amongst events swirling around them,
actors for sure, but not necessarily the stars. That has certainly been the
case for peacekeeping histories so far. We need those stories, but we need
the ones in this thesis too. Peacekeeping in the Pacific has very much
been about relationships, about very human attempts to understand what
it means to build peace in varied and complex contexts; and doing so
while labouring under various historical and cultural inheritances that
complicated and made specific peacekeepers’ struggles and experiences.
This is a story that meets peacekeepers in that space while also showing
that those experiences say much about being Australian, being a
peacekeeper and being in the Pacific at the turn of the century.

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The more we sweat in peace the less we bleed in war.

– Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit
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Table of Contents

Declaration .................................................................................................................................... i
Abstract ........................................................................................................................................ iii
Table of Contents ...................................................................................................................... vii
Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................. viii
Acronyms and Abbreviations ................................................................................................. xiv
List of Illustrations .................................................................................................................. xvii
Preface........................................................................................................................................ xix
Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 1
Peacekeeping Conversations ..................................................................................................... 1
1 Bougainville ............................................................................................................................. 26
2 East Timor .............................................................................................................................. 63
3 Solomon Islands ................................................................................................................... 103
4 A Peace that Binds ............................................................................................................... 139
5 The Big Peace ....................................................................................................................... 183
6 Peace at Home? .................................................................................................................... 212
Conclusion................................................................................................................................ 244
Appendix .................................................................................................................................. 256
Bibliography ............................................................................................................................. 258

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Acknowledgements

TO THE many peacekeepers who so generously told me their stories,
shared their ideas and gave me much encouragement, thank you. My
obvious debt to them is the thesis itself. The intangible and personally
larger debt I owe is for the way these men and women reminded me why
I chose to work on peacekeeping in the first place. It is easy to become
cynical and jaded when working on a topic that is so often overwhelmed
by narratives of realpolitik and that has faced so much criticism for its
mistakes and failures. The passions, pains, joys and successes of the
peacekeepers I worked with nourished my own passion for peacekeeping.
They reminded me that this topic matters because, at its heart and for all
its flaws, peacekeeping remains an astonishing attempt to create and hope
for a world moved by more than fear, selfishness and torment.
I hope the peacekeepers find some of their experiences reflected in
these pages and that perhaps there is some new meaning or insight to be
found too. I hope also that I have used their words, stories and ideas
fairly, judiciously and in ways that ring true to them. I am sure I have
fallen short in many ways. So, though they have made this work possible
its errors and dissatisfactions are wholly mine.
Many other people have had significant roles in the creation of this
project. I have been thoroughly spoiled by the expertise and generosity of
scholars at my home institution, the Australian National University.
Thanks in particular to those in State, Society and Governance in
Melanesia, and the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre. This work is far
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