Politics
Bishops, Bank Boss Question Where Solomons Heading
Spotlight on government as violence continues.
Former Solomon Islands prime minister Ezekiel Alebua became one of the latest casualties of the officially ended civil war in Guadalcanal on June 3. Men armed with shotguns tried to kill him.
Alebua, who is premier of Guadalcanal province, was shot in the shoulder. He survived by dashing through a crowd of schoolchildren so that the gunmen broke off their pot shots at him. After days in hospital, Alebua, an influential figure in negotiations leading last year to a ceasefire between Guadalcanal¹s anti-Malaitan Islander militants and the counter-attacking Malaitan Eagle Force, moved into hiding.
A Honiara correspondent said some of Alebua's assailants were recognised to be supporters of Harold Keke, a militant who prefers continuing violence to peace and who should be more accurately viewed as a bandit.
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However, Alebua has annoyed some Guadalcanal people by not pressing ahead with moves to declare the province to be one of nine federated states. In late May, Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare surrendered to intense international and domestic pressure by dropping his plan to push a law through parliament to extend its life by one year.
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Sogavare said an election due this year had to be delayed to give the country time to recover from the heavy mauling that 20 months of skirmishing in Guadalcanal between local people and Malaitan settlers had caused. But furious critics, including the influential Church of Melanesia¹s Council of Bishops, said that all government politicians wanted was another year of paid office.
Opposition leader Bartholomew Ulufa'alu, who in June last year was forced by the Malaita EagleEagle Force to quit the prime minister's office, rubbished Sogavare's claim that he'd dropped the bill to extend parliament¹s life after "hearing the voice of the people." The fact was that he¹d been unable to whip up the parliamentary numbers needed to get the bill through. Australia, New Zealand and the European Union are chipping in the money the impoverished government needs for the election. By mid-June no date for it had been set.
An angry statement from the bishops rubbished Sogavare's plans for turning the para-military element of the police force into an army. It said the government, after the ejection of Ulufa'alu, had become deplorably dependent on "criminal and violent elements" that were sucking national resources dry. The reason the government was still broke, the bishops said, was involvement in "such corrupt practices as shady tax remissions, bogus recruitment of staff, selling of valuable government assets, questionable property deals and corrupt tendering."
Launching the 2000 annual report of the Central Bank of Solomon Islands, the governor, Rick Hou, complained that the political crisis was being dragged out as an excuse for not facing up to the acute economic difficulties that had long hovered over the country.
Economic, governmental and social reforms were imperative, but where was the aggressive political will and commitment needed to implement them? Hou reported that last year the economy shrank by 14 percent, with a 25 percent drop in agriculture, 51 percent in mining, 42 percent in fisheries, 31 percent in construction and 30 percent in energy. The cancellation and postponement by donors of numerous development projects, mass redundancies and general decline in economic activities had intensified the recession.
The Solomon Islands, with a population of more than 400,000 mainly subsistence level villagers scattered across more than 700 islands, has a national economy based on exports of palm oil, logs, fresh and canned fish and gold, from a mine which opened only three years ago. Except for the export of some logs, all main industries were brought to a halt by the conflict in Guadalcanal.
A trickle of tourists has resumed, a cannery resumed production in May and a Japanese company has expressed interest in investment in a small fish processing plant. But the government is looking around for a partner to replace the Taiyo group, of Japan, which wants to end its 30-year association with a fishing and cannery business run as a joint venture with the government.
