BY DOUG LORIMER
On July 21, the first contingent of some 155 Australian Federal Police (AFP) and 1500 Australian Defence Force (ADF) personnel, including 200 combat troops, began departing for the Solomon Islands' capital of Honiara. They will be supplemented by smaller contingents of troops and police from New Zealand, Fiji, Samoa, Tonga and Papua New Guinea.
The dispatch of the ADF-AFP force followed a unanimous vote on July 17 by the Solomon Islands' parliament — all of whose members are indirectly on Canberra's payroll, since Australia provides most of the funding for the bankrupt Solomons government — to approve the intervention of the "multinational peacekeeping force".
Since June 25, when Prime Minister John Howard announced Canberra's intention to carry out the intervention, the Australian government and the big business media have portrayed the Solomons as being wracked by "ethnic militia fighting", "lawlessness", "chaos" and "violence".
Newsreels showing hundreds of armed militia members massing in the streets of Honiara have been broadcast repeatedly on network TV news programs — without any acknowledgment that scenes were from the civil war that ended three years ago.
Except for the jungles on the south coast of Guadalcanal (the "Weather Coast"), where villagers are being terrorised by a few hundred armed men led by former police officer Harold Keke, the Solomons are relatively peaceful.
'Peace and quiet'
In an article published in the July 18 Australian Financial Review, Terry Brown — the Canadian-born Anglican bishop of the Solomons' island of Malaita — argued that, while there "is the occasional killing or act of violence", the vast majority of Solomon Islands' 465,000 people "generally live in peace and quiet".
"I am sure", wrote Brown, "that the Solomons remain safer, both in Honiara, and in rural areas, than many global popular tourist destinations, including some of the 'developed' world... The Solomon Islands I hear described in the Australian, New Zealand, Canadian, British and American media is not the Solomon Islands I experience... Journalists ... confuse the past and the present."
Nevertheless, Brown observed that most "Solomon Islanders support the coming international intervention — because of the very violent situation on the Weather Coast of Guadalcanal, which the Solomon Islands police cannot handle; the weakness and unreliability of many of the local police; and because ex-militants still hold guns and intimidate the government and the general population."
Because there is no publicly funded social security system, many former militia members in Honiara have been forced to turn to petty crime in order to live. Most of the police force, into which several hundred former militia members were incorporated, colludes in robberies and racketeering because — like most of the lower ranks of the civil service — it is irregularly paid.
While the Australian media have given huge amounts of publicity to the ADF-AFP deployment to "restore law and order", there has been little mentioned of the deployment to the Solomons of around 100 Australian civil administrators, headed by Nick Warner, a former ambassador to Papua New Guinea. These bureaucrats will take up key positions in the Solomons' civil service and central bank, in effect putting them in control of the country.
Their mission was spelt out in the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's (APSI) June 10 report, Our Failing Neighbour — the blueprint for Canberra's colonial-style takeover of the Solomons. It declared the Solomons to be a "failed state" which was "depriving Australia of business and investment opportunities that, though not huge, are potentially valuable".
The ASPI report recommended that Canberra bureaucrats take over the running of the Solomons' government departments in order to give them a "strong focus on stimulating private enterprise" — a continuation of the policy focus that has led to the Solomons' present "failed" condition.
While the Australian media has often mentioned the dire condition of the Solomons' economy, and particularly the fact that the country's government is bankrupt, this is invariably attributed to the outbreak of the violent conflict between rival ethnically based armed militias on Guadalcanal in late 1998.
In fact, the Solomons' economy collapsed in 1997-98 when, as a result of the east Asian "financial crisis", exports of hardwood logs — which provided 60% of the government's revenue — came to a standstill.
The collapse of the logging industry on Guadalcanal caused a steep rise in unemployment, particularly among settlers and descendants of settlers from Malaita, sharply exacerbating tensions over access to farming land between them and the indigenous tribal subsistence farmers.
In his AFR article, Terry Brown pointed out that more than 90% of land in the Solomons is held through "customary land tenure" — collectively owned by local tribes. "There is no system for legally registering this land with clear boundaries, genealogies and land trusts. The result is an endless string of land disputes... Cases are appealed to the High Court which treats the land virtually as if held by individuals, giving ownership to a single person 'on behalf of the tribe'. That person is then free to register or sell the land as alienated land, bringing him into conflict with relatives who suddenly discover they have lost their land."
He noted that one reason "Vanuatu does not have the troubles of the Solomons is that at the time of independence all land was registered to its customary owners and leases were renegotiated for the alienated land".
Australian blackmail
Since December 1997, under blackmail from Canberra and the US-dominated International Monetary Fund, the Solomons government has implemented a neoliberal "structural reform program" involving privatisation of government services (post, shipping), substantial cuts in public sector jobs and the introduction of high fees for education and health care.
"With the existing system of high tuition fees for all secondary students (and now, increasingly, for primary students) more and more parents cannot afford to send their children to school", Brown explained, warning that if free schooling is not reintroduced, "the pool of illiterate, dissatisfied, disappointed youth will simply grow".
He noted that the Solomon Islands College of Higher Education has been closed for three years, except for highly expensive "summer schools", due to a lack of government funding. This "has produced another pool of disaffected young adults, who turn to crime, alcohol and drug abuse".
Brown observed that the Australian and Solomons government "still believe that the Solomons' economic future lies in the reopening of the [Australian-owned] Gold Ridge mine and in the vast oil palm and cocoa plantations on Guadalcanal. Yet it is largely the land and labour arrangements of these economic activities that brought on the 'ethnic tension' problem...
"Guadalcanal people are now subsistence harvesting the cocoa plantations — the price of cocoa is high — and have nothing to gain from the plantation system being reimposed."
Land privatisation
Brown noted that the World Bank sees the solution to the land question in the Solomons as privatising more and more customary land, including its sale to foreign owners. With their "strong focus on stimulating private enterprise", Canberra's bureaucrats can be expected to implement just such a land privatisation policy, as well as a continuation and deepening of the entire neoliberal privatisation-user pays agenda that the Australian government has forced the Solomons to implement since late 1997.
The results of this neoliberal "structural reform program" were described by Australian National University professor Helen Hughes, an advocate of its continuation, in an article published in the July 9 New Zealand Herald: "While teachers, medical workers and police have gone without pay, expatriate [predominantly Australian] carpetbagger advisers have helped to siphon off huge private fortunes abroad."
Canberra hopes that replacing the "expatriate carpetbagger advisers" with Australian government bureaucrats will enable it to stop the "unravelling of the apparatus of colonial rule" (as the ASPI report puts it). However, Canberra's colonial-style takeover of the Solomons will not bring security to the lives of the ordinary people of the Solomon Islands — any more than its implementation of neoliberal "economic rationalist" policies in Australia has brought greater security to the lives of Australian working people.
In both the Solomons and Australia, the Australian government's objective is to enhance the "business and investment opportunities" for Australian capitalists by attacking the democratic and social rights of working people, making their lives less secure.
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, July 30, 2003.
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