Changes In The Air In Honiara

Committee of Representatives of Governments and Administrations meeting...in Suva.

Times are changing in the Solomon Islands. In the capital, Honiara, people walk relaxed and free of the fear of open intimidation by gangsters who for 18 months had put their ruthless squeeze on a weak, acquiescent government.

In November, Daniel Fa'afunua was arrested and remanded in custody for 14 days. Fa'afunua is a cabinet minister with responsibility for telecommunications and civil aviation. Police were drawn to his house by a fracas there. A senior New Zealand woman police officer with them was punched. Later, as Fa'afunua was being driven to a police station, she reportedly got her head kicked.

The cabinet minister found himself before a magistrate on charges of allegedly being drunk and disorderly, assaulting a police officer, giving false identity to the police, resisting police arrest, malicious damage and demanding money with menaces. Would that have happened in the early part of this year? Last January, after the Solomon Star reported that Fa'afunua's thuggish" bodyguards" had beaten someone up, intimidators descended on the newspaper's office and publisher John Lamani parted with S$5000 to avert attacks on his staff.

Three weeks before the assault charge Fa'afunua got a four months jail sentence, suspended for 12 months, over another matter.

In previous months, Fa'afunua would have been unlikely to have been bothered by policemen. He was one of a number of people who had become accustomed to doing what they like.

Those free-and-easy times, with freedom to extract cash from the government's treasury at gunpoint, came to an end in July with the arrival of the Australian-led Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI), a force of more than 2000 mainly Australian and New Zealand troops, with smaller military and police contingents from Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Tonga and Vanuatu. The force was called in by a Solomon Islands government that lost its grip on power after the end of a two-year small war in which Guadalcanal landowners tried, with partial success, to drive thousands of migrants from Guadalcanal back to their own island.

After a peace treaty, militant gunmen became intimidating thugs and law to no one but themselves. They swaggered about, taking what they wanted and forcing the powerless government to pay them millions of dollars in "compensation". Some elected politicians helped themselves from the trough as well. In November, RAMSI's leader, Nick Warner, announced that thanks to a "remarkable improvement of law and order" since July, about 900 Australian soldiers were to return home by the end of December. A logistics support ship returned to Australia in October followed by four helicopters, two other naval ships and engineering and logistics personnel. Two Australian infantry companies are remaining.

New Zealand said while some of its 220 troops would be recalled, about 35 New Zealand police would remain for up to two years. Eighty Fijian troops also left for home in mid-November, with a smaller number remaining with some Fiji police.

One hundred days after the July 24 arrival of RAMSI, Warner gave a heartening account of initial efforts to restore peace, stable government and eventually resumed growth to the Solomon Islands. The country's problems stemmed from high-level corruption and civil war between Guadalcanal's people and the Malaitan settlers they became suspicious of.

Warner painted an optimistic scenario laid for the repair of the badly shattered heavily forestry and fishing-dependent economy. The police force, some of whose officers supported a coup in 2000 that removed the then government, was much more disciplined, he said. Intimidation in Honiara and some of Guadalcanal's rural districts by armed gangs had ended, government finances stabilised, public servants after years were being paid on time, the government had cash in its coffers and the delivery of disrupted government services was resuming.

Warner said Guadalcanal's Weathercoast region, a bad trouble spot and scene of numerous murders, was safe, secure and "normal" with police and military unit at various locations in it.

Since July more than 350 people have been arrested on more than 600 charges. More than 3700 guns including about 660 military weapons have been seized or surrendered.

After surrendering meekly in August to RAMSI authorities, the Weathercoast gang leader, Harold Keke, appeared before a magistrate charged with the murder of a former minister, Father August Geve, who had ventured into the Weathercoast on a lone peace mission. Keke, his brother and four of Keke's "commanders" were also charged with robbery, possessing illegal firearms and membership of an illegal society.

Other important arrests in September included that of former Malaita Eagle Force commander, Jimmy Lusibaea; and in October of an Isatabu Freedom Movement leader, Moses Su'u, charged with the 2001 abduction of an Isatabu Freedom Movement figure whose body was found later in Honiara in a burnt out car.