Is The Solomons A Failed State?

Nick Warner (left)...optimistic about the repair of the Solomon Islands.

Journalists can be fickle folks. Back in February, the clamour for greater antipodean intervention in the Pacific reached fever pitch. Commentators competed in identifying failed states' across the region. Not just the Solomon Islands, they argued, but also Papua New Guinea and Nauru were failing', and it was high time for Australia to do something. Now the boot is on the other foot. In the wake of Australian troops landing in the Solomons in July, Papua New Guinea Prime Minister Sir Michael Somare roundly denounced the Australian depiction of it as a failed state'. Many journalists have shifted into a more politically correct gear and are embracing a more tranquil and wholesome image of Melanesia's trouble spots.

Speaking at the Pacific Island Media Association (PIMA) conference in early October, veteran Pacific Islands journalist Mike Field attributed responsibility for Australian intervention to the popularisation of the notion that the Solomon Islands was a "failed state". In particular, an article published in the Economist in February 2003, entitled Solomon Islands: The Pacific's First Failed State?', was said to have been used to justify Australian action.

The failed state thesis had subsequently been picked up by two Australian think-tanks. In the Centre for Independent Studies newsletter, Helen Hughes warned of failed' and even rogue' states around the Pacific. A pamphlet produced by the government-financed Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) entitled Our Failing Neighbour; Australia and the Future of the Solomon Islands, and launched by Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, was clearly intended to provide a rationale and moral justification for intervention.

"The Solomons is not a failed state," countered Mike Field in Pacific Magazine (September 2003), because 85 percent of the population live outside Honiara and have pretty much the same kind of lives they always had.

But its people have never really had a functioning central government." While many may share Mr Field's suspicions about the use of the phrase failed state', the claim that everything was hunky dory outside the capital ds not stand up to scrutiny and the view that there never really was a real government is misleading.

First, the depiction of the Solomon Islands as a failed state' way predated the Economist's article, and derived from discussions within the Solomon Islands itself. Solomon Islands Development Trust activist John Roughan was calling the Solomon Islands a failed state' way back in the aftermath of the June 5, 2000 coup, when the Malaita Eagle Forces (MEF), in a joint operation with the paramilitary Police Field Force, overthrew the elected government (e.g. Pacific First: A Failed State!', Solomon Star 13th February 2003). MEF spokesperson, Andrew Nori, responded saying the state is not destroyed just by removing its elected government‹ whether induced by revolutionary or democratic means. But you remove the unity, the mutual cxistence and cohesiveness of its people and the state ceases to exist or withers away' (5th June 2000 in Perspective', PfNet, 24th December, 2001). Both accepted that the Solomons state had, in some sense, failed.

Second, when the crisis commenced in late 1998, it had a debilitating effect on rural Guadalcanal, in areas well away from the capital. Some 24,000 settlers were evicted from the countryside by the Guadalcanal Liberation Army (later called the Isatabu Freedom Movement). Most were Malaitans. Many of these displaced settlers returned to their home island putting additional pressure on land and water resources, particularly on densely populated north Malaita.

Others returned to Honiara, and joined the MEF. The MEF, in cooperation with the Police Field Force, seized control of Honiara on June 5, 2000. The coup had a negative effect throughout the Solomon Islands' nine provinces. The Gold Ridge mine on rural Guadalcanal closed down, and Solomon Taiyo, which ran a fishing fleet and cannery in the Western Solomons, suspended operations and flew out its Japanese crew. Real GDP slumped by 14.1% in 2000.

Third, the claim that the Solomon Islands was not a failed state' because only 15% of the population live in the capital holds little water.

Most of the world's most notorious so-called failed states' have similar or smaller shares of population in capital cities.

Shares of National Populations in the Capital Cities of so-called Failed States'

Kabul (Afghanistan) 8.7%

Monrovia (Liberia) 19.5%

Luanda (Angola) 17.6%

Bujumbura (Burundi) 4.4%

Mogadishu (Somalia) 10.7%

Kinshasa (DRC) 11.5%

Freetown (Sierra Leone) 21.6%

Khartoum (Sudan) 12.4%

Source: www.worldgazetter.de

The main conservative line of reasoning in Australia and New Zealand regarding the causes of the Solomon Islands crisis has not been the failed state' thesis. It has been the argument that Solomon Islanders were not ready for self-government in 1978, and that the crisis was due to premature de-colonisation (see, for example, Mary-Louise O'Callaghan, Solomons Crisis dates back to Hasty British Handover', New Zealand Herald, 7th July 2003). A similar argument was used by the ASPI to justify intervention.

Solomon Islands has always been weak...In the South Pacific, the introduced institutions of the modern nation-state have been overlaid on top of a multiplicity of indigenous political structures...The crisis in the Solomon Islands is less about the collapse of a coherent functioning state, but more about the unravelling of the apparatus of colonial rule.'

The logic here, of course, is not temporary intervention to serve as a circuit breaker in order to disarm the gunmen and clean up the state, but rather the longer-run substitution of Australian control in the face of a supposedly non-existent capacity for self-government. Few would deny that the Solomon Islands faced long-run problems. Secessionist pressures, for example, were around even at independence in 1978. But the always a basket case' line doing the rounds in Canberra is a gross over-simplification.

There was a functioning state administration in place before the 1988-89 Isatabu uprising, and, whatever the longer-run difficulties, it was the June 2000 coup that destroyed this. Many of the critics of the state-failure' thesis are in fact projecting that failure way back into the past.

What is a failed state' anyway? How closely did the Solomon Islands fit that bill? In the The New Nature of Nation-State Failure' (Washington Quarterly, Summer 2002), Robert Rotberg wrote that failed states cannot control their borders. They lose authority over chunks of territory. Often, the expression of official power is limited to a capital city and one or more ethnically specified zones'. Sounds much like Honiara, where the mainly Malaitan town-dwellers for years would not set foot beyond Henderson Airport in the east and Kakabona in the West.

After the 2000 coup, armed Bougainvillean fighters were able to cross international borders into the Solomons' Western Province undeterred and even, at the invitation of the provincial council, briefly played a policing role resisting feared encroachments by the MEF. Six of the Solomons' nine provinces threatened to secede after the June 5, 2000 coup.

Rotberg also argues that another indicator of state failure is the growth of criminal violence. As state authority weakens and fails, and as the state becomes criminal in its oppression of its citizens, so general lawlessness becomes more apparent...For protection, citizens naturally turn to warlords and other strong figures who express ethnic or clan solidarity, thus projecting strength at a time when all else, including the state itself, is crumbling'.

Again, here's a story that closely fits what happened in the Solomon Islands. In early 2000, the authority of the Bartholomew Ulufa'alu-led government was increasingly undermined by the emergence of the MEF. Opportunists engaged in criminal activities masquerading as MEF members took advantage of the turmoil.

On the Weathercoast of Guadalcanal, Harold Keke held sway, transforming that area into a no-go zone for the police force. In Honiara, MEF commanders, often now representing distinct Malaitan groups, were able to act with impugnity, and formed an alternative pole of authority to the state. The MEF and senior police officers were able to extort large sums of cash from the treasury as payments for compensation or special allowances', and in the process reduced the state to near-bankruptcy.

Perhaps the phrase failed state' is too loaded with interventionist ethos. It's unusual to talk about powerful industrialised states like those in Weimar's Germany or Gorbachev's USSR, as failed states'. Whichever way, the perception that the Solomon Islands was a failed state' had little do with the Australian intervention. If there was a state failure, it occurred back in 2000, after months of entreaties from beleaguered Prime Minister Bartholomew Ulufa'alu that fell on deaf Australian ears. Whatever the propaganda, the main trigger for Australian intervention in July 2003 (leaving aside fanciful notions of an Indonesian threat) was the post-Iraq War eagerness to engage overseas, particularly where this could rehabilitate tarnished doctrines of humanitarian intervention. And it was precisely because most Solomon Islanders saw their own state as having failed that John Howard could present the Australian action as a grand humanitarian triumph.

€ Jon Fraenkel is a senior lecturer in Economic History at the University of the South Pacific. His article is written in a personal capacity.