REVIEW BY MAX WATTS
It is a simple, well-filmed story by Liz Thompson. During a war a man kills his near neighbour. After the war is over, the man is haunted by his deed. He feels deep regret and shame for what he has done. He seeks out the widow, to tell her how sorry he is.
He gives himself a task: to dig out the bones of his victim, wash them carefully, put them into a coffin he has bought and take them to the widow so she can bury her husband properly in his home village. Killer and widow, and their peoples, are reconciled and feel great relief. The killer says: "If they ever want to have another war here, count me out. I won't be coming."
The film is Breaking Bows and Arrows: Reconciliation After the War. It is about Bougainville.
Eighteen months ago, I saw an earlier film by Liz Thompson about Bougainville on SBS Dateline. The theme and some of the material were similar to Breaking Bows and Arrows. At the time, I criticised it severely and sent my comments to Thompson. She disagreed with them, but her reply failed to convince me.
Watching her new, longer and far more developed documentary, I thought: "Am I flattering myself or has Thompson taken on board some of the points I made back then?"
I found the new film much better. It is clearer about who is who. The killer was a "resistance" fighter, on the side of the Papua New Guinea Defence Force (PNGDF) trying to reconquer Bougainville. The dead man, and his widow's people, were from the Bougainville Revolutionary Army. Marcelline Tunim, a BRA supporter, explains well why "we had to fight" against the atrocities committed by the PNGDF.
But this is not the central theme of the film.
When Thompson wrote to me, she said: "My major priority in this film was to demonstrate the emotional repercussions of war and violence and the great inspiration Bougainvilleans offer in their willingness to forgive and the tremendous efforts being made to heal the community.
"It was deliberately not a film about the politics of this particular war apart from basic background material which included a very clear reference to Australian involvement in supplying guns, training and finance. The focus was on the heart not the head."
Thompson does succeeds on this very important human level. But there is something which remains unsaid that results in (perhaps unconscious) falsification.
In a "confidential" 1990 plan for the "disaggregation of the BRA" and the reconquest of Bougainville, the creation of an anti-BRA militia (later ironically called the Resistance) was described in great detail. Some of the authors of that plan were in Port Moresby, but their chiefs came from Canberra. Their ultimate "bosses" were in the Melbourne and London offices of Rio Tinto. These capitalists (excuse the dirty word) counted on the execution of this plan to destroy the BRA and recover "their" mine at Panguna within "some months".
The killing around which Thompson's film centres was one of the direct results of the plan. Thompson does not explain why this plan was not successful.
Despite enormous losses — perhaps 15,000 out of 150,000 Bougainvilleans died during that war — the BRA eventually won. The Panguna mine remains closed and is in the hands of the Bougainvilleans, not Rio Tinto.
What kind of reconciliation could there have been if the PNGDF, backed by Australia and Rio Tinto, had, as they expected to, defeated the BRA and recovered Panguna? The BRA's dead would today remain buried where they'd fallen. Defeated revolutionaries are rarely honoured.
The essential fact remains unmentioned: a small population of black people defeated one of the world's largest mining multinationals. It is a pity that this "detail" couldn't get into this otherwise very good film.