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SYDNEY: Solomon Islands has a flag, a national anthem and a seat at the United Nations, but the small South Pacific state fails most other tests of nationhood.
Criminal gangs run the country. Parliament is a parody of a democratic institution. Law and order is in the hands of a police force in open insurrection against its putative paymaster.
Australia is heading a “coalition of the willing” that hopes to remedy this sorry state of affairs. It will send up to 2,000 troops and police to take on the militias that are in control of the capital, Honiara.
Papua New Guinea, Fiji and New Zealand are also likely to commit personnel to a force charged not just with the restoration of law and order but with the establishment of proper government.
Solomons Prime Minister Alan Kemakeza is enamoured of a plan that some would see as frightful. He sees outside assistance as a last chance to save Solomons from total breakdown.
Other leaders are also keen, reasoning that a short sharp shock is what’s needed to halt a three-year spiral into chaos.
Sir Peter Kenilorea, speaker of parliament, said most islanders would welcome the arrival of an Australian-led peacekeeping force.
“How do you expect a drowning man to save himself?” he asked. “We are now at a point where we can only benefit from direct executive and supervisory assistance by those who sincerely wish to help.”
The situation in Solomons is so bad that sovereignty is seen by its leaders as a side issue.
Australia is sending troops, not just police, because the 1,000 islands that make up the nation of 500,000 people are awash with guns.
Said Australian Defence Minister Robert Hill: “We fear that because of the type of arms that criminals and former militia may be holding, and may be prepared to use, there may be circumstances where the capabilities of police could be tested.”
Australia is ready for a long-term commitment. Sorting out the law and order problem could take a year. Stabilizing the economy could take a decade.
Said Hill: “There will be a long ongoing process. There is a breakdown through a whole range of institutions”.
The Solomons government is broke. Civil servants haven’t been paid in months. Honiara can’t even afford to print more banknotes.
The economy is a shambles. It’s been going backwards since independence from Britain 25 years ago. Its only remaining export is timber and the country’s once fine stands of tropical hardwoods have been decimated.
Gross Domestic Product, the sum of the value of goods and services, in per capita terms is half what it was in 1978 when Kenilorea became the first prime minister.
Last year GDP fell 10 per cent. In 2000 the rate of decline was 14 per cent. Solomons is now on a par with Sudan and East Timor.
Elsina Wainwright, from Canberra’s government-funded Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), has pushed for intervention.
“The reality is that in the absence of effective government, our neighbour risks reverting, not to a pre-modern tropical paradise, but to a kind of post-modern badlands, ruled by criminals and governed by violence,” she wrote in an ASPI report.
The worst fear is that the next worrying spiral for Solomons is a descent into drug smuggling, gun running, people smuggling, identity fraud and the harbouring of international terrorists.
The great difficulty for Australia and its partners is that intervention will be seen by some in the region as neo-colonialism and be resisted as such.
To blunt this criticism, action will be sanctioned not only by Honiara but by the major powers in the Pacific Forum grouping of South Pacific states.—dpa
