Norm Dixon
The dramatic recent events in Honiara have revealed the true role of Australian-dominated Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI). While Canberra has brand-named its commitment to RAMSI as Operation Helpem Fren, the "friends" who have been "helped" are not the poor and working people of the Solomons, but Australian and other Western big businesses and their local collaborators.
RAMSI's primary goal was not to "restore law and order" in the Solomons, as claimed by the Australian and New Zealand governments and the Greek chorus of "commentators" in the capitalist media, government- and corporate-sponsored "think tanks" and well-paid academics. Rather, the "law and order" mantra was and is a convenient fig leaf behind which the Australia and New Zealand, the South Pacific region's imperialist powers, have been able to set a precedent of directly imposing their political and economic directives by force on the region's Melanesian island-states.
The Australian-led RAMSI expeditionary force landed in the Solomons in July 2003. Some 2200 soldiers, police and "advisers", overwhelmingly from Australia but with a small contingent from New Zealand and token numbers from Fiji, Samoa, Tonga and Papua New Guinea, took control of the Solomons' capital Honiara and strategic parts of the Solomons' main islands, Guadalcanal and Malaita.
The deployment had been preceded by months of agitation by Australian capitalist media commentators, pro-imperialist think tanks and right-wing academics calling for military intervention to end "lawlessness", "chaos" and "ethnic militia fighting". The sovereignty of the Solomon Islands had to be sacrificed, they argued, because it was "a failed state".
While at the time sporadic serious violence had been occurring in the Solomons' capital, Honiara, and on the rural Weather Coast (south coast) of Guadalcanal, which was being terrorised by a gang of former cops led by Harold Keke, generally most of the Solomons was peaceful.
The exaggerated perception of crisis was whipped up by the Australian corporate media, which repeatedly broadcast scenes of armed fighters in the streets of Honiara and reported blood-curdling accounts of Keke's real and rumoured atrocities. The TV scenes that fuelled the ruling-class' opportunistic and orchestrated campaign for intervention were drawn from file footage of inter-ethnic fighting on Guadalcanal that reached its height between 1998 and 2000, but which had subsided after the rival militias signed a truce in October 2000.
The severe political and social crisis that engulfed the Solomons between 1998 and 2000 was the product of more than a century of British economic and political domination and the incapacity of the capitalist economic system to develop a poor Pacific island society in a socially just and democratic way.
Legacy of colonialism
When Britain granted the Solomon Islands independence in 1978, it was a group of largely undeveloped islands with an economy dependent almost entirely on the exploitation of natural resources for the world market by foreign corporations. Due to its extensive plains, the island of Guadalcanal was chosen by the British colonists as the location for large plantations. Thousands of Malaitans were brought to Guadalcanal to work the plantations.
Honiara grew up around the World War II Henderson Field US air base, on the Guadalcanal plains. Unlike indigenous Guadalcanalan communities, the Malaitan plantation labourers were not tied to the land and were employed by the US military on the base. As Honiara expanded after the war, more "settlers" from Malaita arrived. In the 1970s, large new foreign-owned palm-oil plantations east of Honiara recruited more Malaitans. Today there are an estimated 70,000 people of Malaitan descent on Guadalcanal — one-third of the island's population.
Guadalcanalans did not benefit much from the development of their island, while the growing city and the plantations (and later the Australian-owned Gold Ridge gold mine) reduced their access to land and water.
A small layer of mainly Malaitans came to dominate the professions, the civil service and the political elite. Settlers (including descendants of Chinese workers) also dominated local commercial businesses. The British groomed this elite to take over the Solomons at independence.
Tensions erupted following the 1997 "Asian" economic crisis. It led to the collapse of the hardwood log export industry, which had provided 60% of government revenue. Canberra and the International Monetary Fund pressured the government of Prime Minister Bartholomew Ulufa'alu to slash government spending, privatise government assets, introduce fees for education and health services, and reduce public sector jobs as part of a "structural adjustment program" to reduce the budget deficit and meet foreign debt payments. Rising unemployment and poverty caused conflict over the remaining jobs and increased tensions over land use as the unemployed returned to the countryside.
These tensions led to an outbreak of fighting in 1998 on Guadalcanal between militias based on the two communities. Following the October 2000 truce agreement, a general election was held in late 2001, from which a government led by Sir Allan Kemakeza was elected.
Screws tightened
In the two years that followed, the Australian and New Zealand governments repeatedly rejected requests from Honiara for emergency funds to maintain essential education and health services. Canberra installed an Australian "special adviser" to the Solomons government to make sure the neoliberal "economic reforms" continued. The result was the continued contraction of the economy, a reduction of public sector employment (other than the police) by 30%, the closure of more hospitals and rural clinics, and exorbitant fees being chared by those that remained. Schools were forced to close because teachers were not paid for weeks at a time. Power blackouts occurred in Honiara because the government could not afford fuel for the generators.
The increasing poverty and social dislocation deepened the desperate situation in the wake of the 1997 economic collapse and the 1998-2000 civil strife. Growing numbers of unemployed and alienated youth in Honiara sought whatever ways they could to survive. Some joined well-armed gangs, often led by former Malaitan militia leaders, which engaged in extortion and robberies, in league with corrupt cops and politicians.
It was at this point that Australian ruling class "think tanks" and the capitalist media began to loudly clamour for an Australian military intervention in the Solomons, cynically seizing on the social and political problems that in large part were caused by Canberra-imposed economic policies.
In June 2003, the government-funded Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) issued Our Failing Neighbour: Australia and the Future of the Solomon Islands , which provided the blueprint for RAMSI and future interventions in the Pacific islands region. Calling the Solomons a "failing state", the ASPI called for Australian officials to take over the running of the Solomons police force, court and prison system, and for Australian bureaucrats to take charge of key Solomons government economic departments. Such a colonial-style takeover was considered necessary to "restore law and order".
However, the ASPI's real goal was revealed when it stated that the occupying authority should have "a strong focus on stimulating private enterprise". The ASPI report complained that the breakdown of civil order in the Solomons was "depriving Australia of business and investment opportunities that, though not huge, are potentially valuable".
As preparations for the deployment of the RAMSI force were underway, Paul Kelly, the international editor of Rupert Murdoch's Australian daily, gloated in its July 3, 2003, edition that "a new phase of Australian policy has begun with the end of our 30-year hands-off approach to the Pacific region and the assumption of a role as the metropolitan power".
Most mainstream media reports of RAMSI's "success" since 2003 have focused on its police operations, such as the arrest of Harold Keke, the disarming and arrest of hundreds of gang members and the collection of thousands of guns. On that level, many Solomon Islanders were thankful. But the media has avoided reporting on the activities of the RAMSI occupiers that have steadily increased popular resentment as the realisation spreads that the Solomons' sovereignty has been taken away.
Around 120 Australian officials (and private contractors) have taken control of the police, the courts, the prisons, the central bank and the finance department. They continue to impose the "economic reforms" that plunged the country into crisis and poverty after 1997.
Protecting business interests
A key component of the "economic reforms" that Australia is seeking is the resumption of environmentally damaging foreign-owned mining and logging operations, and plantations, against the wishes of traditional landowners.
Reducing business taxes is also a goal. In 2004, the Australian NGO APACE reported that when a Malaysian company began illegally logging the land of the Voko people, RAMSI arrested villagers attempting to stop the logging!
The Australian administrators also want to "reform" the Solomons' "land tenure" system, i.e., privatise the 90% of land that is owned in common by various Solomons clans, in order for it be bought and sold by big business. Further, privatisation of state-owned businesses is also high on the RAMSI agenda.
Australian bureaucrats have regularly blocked pay increases for Solomons public servants, most of whom earn about A$30 a week. RAMSI has driven poor betel nut sellers from the Honiara waterfront to the outskirts of town at the request of wealthy, mostly naturalised Chinese, hotel owners and shopkeepers.
While the prison system has been massively expanded (the Packer family's GRM corporation was given a $48 million contract to run the prisons by RAMSI), little is being spent on roads and other infrastructure, particularly in the rural areas, where the majority of the population lives.
While hundreds of poor youth — the "former militants" and "gunmen" of the press reports — languish in terrible conditions in prison, many of the "big fish" — corrupt government leaders who were involved in and profited from the social strife — have been protected by RAMSI. As Solomons writer John Roughan noted in July 2004, "people are not shy to observe that few senior politicians have yet to feel the full sting of the law and their rightful place in a [prison] cell. Crooked politicians, unsavoury business men, coup plotters and their cronies have yet to see the inside of a court house."
Among these "big fish" is none other than former PM Kemakeza, who after his election in 2001, openly spoke of his "friendship" with prominent criminal gang leaders. A fund established to compensate victims of the 1997-2000 troubles, which is controlled by Kemakeza, is missing $5.7 million. The hapless Snyder Rini, who was Kemakeza's deputy PM and finance minister, was accused in 2001 of corruptly granting millions dollars in tax exemptions for big overseas and local import-export businesses.
From Green Left Weekly, May 3, 2006.
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