WOMEN, PEACE AND SECURITY:
BOUGAINVILLE (PAPUA NEW GUINEA)

UNIFEM WOMEN, WAR AND PEACE WEB PORTAL: BOUGAINVILLE

"Women's groups played a major role in working for peace and reconcilliation at local and national levels. Individual women used their high status in the family to negotiate peace in their communities and manage to use their influence as go-betweens with the warring factions to maintain constructive dialogue. Mothers went into the bush to attempt to bring their sons home. In south and southwest Bougainville, women went into the jungle to negotiaite with the local BRA. Groups such as the Catholic Women's Association and the Bougainville Community Integrated Development Agency (BOCIDA) run by Ruby Miringka, were tha mainstay of humanitatian networks that provided food, clothing and medicines to those in government and BRA-controlled areas. At the time, movement restrictions meant that these clandestine networks were the only souce of emergency assistance. As restrictions eased, these groups became the backbone of development and peacebuilding activities. Women's groups and individual women leaders emerged as an important influence in the political arena. Their activites included prayer meetings, reconcilliation ceremonies, peace marches and petitions. They also played an important role in awakening the international community to the suffereing of the Bougainville people. Their contacts with women from Australia and New Zealand were influential in bringing in support and assistance from abroad."

Sister Lorraine Garasu is a member of the Congregation of the Sisters of Nazareth (CSN) and Coordinator of the Bougainville Inter-Church Womenís Forum (BICWF)

"To be a refugee on two occasions was the hardest thing for me to do, in my life history. To leave my land, my family, my country, my lifestyle, is to leave everything. It was hard for me to settle on the land, which was foreign to me. To cross the border between Bougainville and Solomon Islands as sick pregnant mother with only five of my seven children was even more frightening.
We were crossing the border when PNG Army was shooting at us from all sides accusing us of breaking the law by crossing while they themselves were breaking the most sacred law by shooting us, that was that has left a scar in my heart that I live with even now."

Marcelline Tunim, Vice-President of the Bougainville Women for Peace and Freedom (BWPF)