Post-conflict trauma haunts Solomon Islands By Catherine Wilson

HONIARA, Solomon Islands - After 10 years of working towards peace and reconciliation in the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific, following a five-year civil conflict known as the "Tensions" (1998-2003) which left 30,000 people displaced and hundreds unaccounted for, people now go about their daily lives in improved freedom and personal security.

Below the surface, untreated post-conflict trauma continues to impact many individuals and communities. Robert (name

"There is pain in my heart when I remember men with high-powered guns coming into the community at night and grabbing a young child, dragging him away from his parents," he said. Robert still hears the child, who was never seen again, screaming for his parents.

The Solomon Islands is an ethnically and culturally diverse nation comprising more than 900 islands east of Papua New Guinea and northwest of Fiji. The economic downturn and rising unemployment in the late 1990s and crime contributed to escalating grievances by the indigenous Gwales of the main island Guadalcanal against large numbers of migrants from Malaita, a heavily populated island 100 kilometers to the east.

In 1998, the Gwale-led Isatabu Freedom Movement began evicting Malaitan settlers, alleging they were encroaching on land, resources and jobs on Guadalcanal. Armed warfare followed when the Malaita Eagle Force, formed in defense, began to retaliate. Despite a peace agreement brokered by Australia in 2000, violence continued until the arrival of the peacekeeping Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands at the request of the government in 2003.

Today state infrastructure and services that were destroyed or damaged are slowly being restored, but healing minds will take much longer.

"There are people whose lives are haunted, they roam around town, they are silent; they are traumatized. They don't want to participate in any form of development," Reuben Lilo, director of Peace and Reconciliation at the Ministry of National Unity, Peace and Reconciliation, told IPS.

There are no available statistics on the extent of post-conflict trauma in the Solomon Islands. However, a social impact assessment by the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat in 2004 revealed that 75% of female and 73% of male respondents suffered personal trauma as a result of experiencing rape, death of relatives, threats and intimidation, destruction of homes and villages and being held at gunpoint.

Jack Kaota, a clinical mental health consultant at the National Psychiatric Unit in Auki, Malaita Province, told IPS that he had seen an increase in numbers of young people, especially since 2000, afflicted with substance abuse, and there was a connection with the legacy of the conflict.

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Post-conflict trauma haunts Solomon Islands