Politics
Disaster in the Solomons
The Solomon Islands Has No Place to Go But Up — Or Does It?
An air of tragedy and renewed disaster faces the Solomon Islands. Democracy has failed, producing a government no one felt like cheering for, and led by men — there are no women — whose record raises many questions.
Civil war and prolonged lawlessness looms in the years ahead and, fed-up, Australia and New Zealand are threatening to cut aid to the Melanesian nation. Of course they will not — how can any country ignore a tragic fire at a neighbor’s place? — but it will change from development assistance, to emergency relief. Help for a Pacific basket case; not aid to a nation to determine its own destiny.
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The Solomons is where one side of the civil war call the other “dog-sperm” and where both sides make solemn promises of peace, keeping their fingers crossed behind their backs, knowing they are men of honor, but also men of war.
The Solomons tragedy has a long history, and British colonialism and World War II can take some of the blame, but most of the responsibility rests with its politicians and the sorry procession of corruption and ineptness that has brought a potentially wealthy country to its knees.
By most measures the Solomons should be prosperous. With just 446,000 mainly Melanesian people living on six large, lush islands and dozens of smaller ones totaling 28,530 square kilometers (11,412 square miles) it is not overcrowded. While blessed with awesome scenery, fisheries, forests and agriculture and lucrative gold deposits it’s cursed with ethnicity and a deadly strain of malaria. Often fiercely hostile tribal groups have occupied the islands for around 3,000 years. Its name came from the Spanish explorer Alvaro de Mendana who reached there in 1568, looking for King Solomon’s Mines. He didn’t find gold, although we now know the rugged mountain ranges offer fairly rich pickings. He named Guadalcanal after his birthplace.
A useful starting point for today’s trouble is World War II.
Japan’s sweep down into the Pacific following the attack on Pearl Harbor came to an end on 5,302 square kilometer (2,121 square mile) Guadalcanal, then little more than a series of scattered communities occupied by tribal people ruled in an essentially matrilineal tradition.
When the Allies learned in 1942 that the Japanese had nearly finished an airfield on Guadalcanal — which would have threatened Australia — they had little choice but to attack in what turned out to be the bloodiest American conflict since the Civil War. Around 50 wrecks, including battleships, lie in deep Ironbotton Sound, off Guadalcanal.
The airfield, christened Henderson Field in honor of a Battle of Midway casualty, is now the international airport of the Solomons, which became independent in 1978. The capital of Honiara on Guadalcanal has a population now of around 50,000.
During the war Honiara did not exist; it was a copra plantation that the Japanese built a wharf at and which the Americans turned into a base camp.
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Attracted to the new capital were people from Malaita, a 3,840 square kilometer (1,536 square miles) island across Ironbottom Sound. Its people had been popular with the blackbirders, used as cheap labor by the colonial rulers and favored by the Americans as guides during the war. Malaitans, from a patralineal society, seem much more warlike to others. There was always some tension on Guadalcanal between the groups, but it took a particularly cynical form of politics in the late 1990s to bring it to an explosive head. For a long time the Solomons was ruled by the late and notoriously corrupt Prime Minister Solomon Mamaloni. Pipe-smoking economist Bartholomew Ulufa’alu who was not notably corrupt, but was inept eventually replaced him. The ambitious provincial Premier Ezekiel Alebua, now recovering from an assassination bid in June 2001, led Guadalcanal.
It is not terribly clear even now what happened, but in a bid to destabilize Ulufa’alu, Alebua launched the latent indigenous Guadalcanal movement. It quickly became violent, in part because Guadalcanal remains littered with the Japanese and American detritus of war. Locals talk of “stackers” — stacks — of American ammunition available to them.
In the mess that followed, the militants, eventually calling themselves the Isatabu Freedom Movement (IFM), drove around 20,000 Malaitans out of the Guadalcanal countryside, forcing most of them back to Malaita. Honiara though became a Malaitan stronghold.
Then early in 2000 a new movement grew up, the Malaita Eagle Force (MEF) and with cooperation from the Malaita dominated police and para-military field force, they quickly armed themselves, mostly with M16-style assault rifles.
While IFM seemed to have the upper hand, on June 5, 2000 (three weeks after the Fiji coup), MEF staged a coup and seized the government, deposing Ulufa’alu and eventually replacing him with Manasseh Sogavare.
The bizarre and unworldly nature of what came next was summed up in the weird world of compensation. The conflict had destroyed the economy — palm oil production had ceased and the gold mine on Guadalcanal was closed. But Honiara had one small card left — Taiwan.
Honiara recognizes Taipei as the government of China — and for its troubles Taiwan stumps up money for the Solomons.
Although its injuries were almost entirely self-inflicted Sogavare’s government negotiated a SI$133.5 million (US$25 million) loan from Taiwan to pay them compensation for war damage.
Supervising the distribution was Finance Minister Allan Kemakeza who had been Forestry Minister when the Malaysians showed up in the mid-1990s. In circumstances still to be explained he allowed them to clear-fell hundreds of acres of forest without even paying the nominal export tax on round logs.
With compensation Kemakeza was so blatant, voting himself $800,000, that Sogavare was forced to fire him.
Also in the government at the time was Finance Minister Snyder Rini who distinguished himself by destroying the already vulnerable Solomon Islands tax base. He issued import duty remissions on car, beer and cigarettes to favored importers — even though the Solomons had local producers of cigarettes and beer. Political friends were also told they did not need to pay the export duty on round log exports. He in effect gave away $40 million in what lobby group Civil Society said was “immoral and unfair.” He said MEF, who had helped install him, had insisted on the remissions at the point of a gun.
Kemakeza won his knighthood for helping to negotiate what is called the Townsville Peace Agreement. It won a brief truce, but over 500 high-powered arms that were to have been surrendered remain in the shattered community, ready for use.
In December general elections were held, under the eyes of around 100 international observers. There were incidents of violence and some questions over the fairness of the elections, but generally it seemed an honest vote. No particularly party won enough of a mandate to rule and finally five candidates sought the majority vote of the 50 members of Parliament to become prime minister.
Ulufa’alu was one of them, although he feared there would be another coup if he won. But most of the deal was done before the vote at the Mendana Hotel in Honiara, with sulky, dangerous looking MEF types loitering in the bar. Kemakeza got 29 votes in a deal with Rini who became his deputy. “I cannot be more grateful for the support, cooperation and understanding of our people,” Kemakeza told reporters. “The times ahead are not going to be easy, they will be times of sacrifice.”
Michael Maina, who as tourism minister was the first to ever face misconduct charges in an unresolved case, became finance minister.
Photos: Robert Keith-Reid
Little wonder it was a somber, depressed mood when Governor General Sir John Ini Lapli swore in these men. Democracy had produced the worst possible outcome for the Solomons.
New Zealand Foreign Minister Phil Goff had warned the Solomons before Kemakeza’s election that this had been a last chance. With his victory he had to make the best of a bad job, and warned that even aid will be of little use if the new government fails to act to “halt the ongoing chaos and ultimate collapse of the Solomon Islands.”
“We’ll be there to support them, but they have to have the will, and the integrity, to do the job themselves,” Goff added.
