Demystifying Law Enforcement in Melanesia

By Sam Koim, Chair of Task Force Sweep Team
March 20, 2013

My role has brought me to confront the mysteries of law enforcement in contemporary Melanesia. I have come to appreciate that we have adopted western laws that are individualist oriented, to be applied and enforced in our communal setting. Our communal existence imposes certain obligations that more often clashes with the demands of the law. For instance, you try to hold one person responsible for his/her own wrongdoings but more often you find yourself dragging the whole tribe/group.

The society is conditioned to protect even the worst criminal. In Western cultures, when someone commits a crime, everybody, including their immediate kinship, treat that person as undesirable for the society and readily have him handed over to be dealt with according to law. Whilst in our culture, we are prepared to protect the perpetrators, even to the extent of putting up a fight. Say in a case of a rape, we put compensation money and hide the perpetrator. If the victim’s people insist to go after the perpetrator, we are prepared to fight. In so doing, we pervert the course of justice. Yet we complain of lawlessness.

In electing leaders too, we vote according to our tribal/kinship lines even if we know that the person is not the right person. Even Christians pray hard for a right leader and blindly vote the wrong person in. Remember what Jesus said "Watch and Pray, lest you fall into temptation". Yet we complain of corruption. Shame on us.

And to a certain extent, when law is about to catch up with them, there is a general expectation for a level of tolerance by law enforcement agencies. That is because traditionally, we are supposed to respect, protect and be loyal to, our leaders even if they do something wrong.

Of course there are many other factors that contribute towards the breakdown of law and order, such as incidents of bribery and external influences that may temper with objective law enforcement. Those incidents have led our people also to be sceptical about law enforcement, which in turn diminishes the respect and legitimacy of the people it should otherwise deserve. People are inclined to build nexus to tribalism and rivalries as the first point of reason whenever law is enforced.

Notwithstanding all of that, our customary values and expectations also have some influence in law enforcement in Melanesia. Whilst the process of occidentalization had helped to develop our country in many respects, there is also an obvious disconnection, in that our people had not been fully acculturated to the Western Cultural values. Unless we take a paradigm shift, we will still have law and order problems.