We don't need a larger army - we need a better understanding of local circumstances

Regrettably, Greg Sheridan simplifies the issues here and suggests that it was simply "the Chinese" that were targeted. While the Chinese and Solomon Islanders have coexisted for a long time, Sheridan should know that in many respects, last week's riots have been coming for a long time. On my very first trip to the Solomon Islands I learnt of the tensions between the Chinese and Solomon Islanders, I witnessed what one correspondent referred to as 'the Missus sitting on her high chair barking orders to the Solomon Islander'. That this underlying tension should escalate to the point of violence is entirely unsurprising when one considers how this cultural difference interacts with livelihood insecurity in a transitional economy (which we've written about here)

Both Terry Brown (in Malaita) and Wei Choong (from her correspondence with people in SI) have observed that the rioters distinguished between 'old' and 'new' Chinese buildings, between the 'old' Chinese who have been there for generations and the 'new' who are perceived as having no real interest in SI, but are merely using it as a stepping stone to New Zealand or Australia. Of course, the 'old' Chinese were not immune from being targetted, but they did not suffer to the extent that the 'new' did, and in some cases their buildings were clearly spared.

Wei Choong writes, 'It's an indication that SI's distinguish the differences, and it's something that RAMSI and others need to understand. There are so many smaller details that are now quite important to highlight.' Unfortunately Sheridan fails to do that, but only furthers the construction of Solomon Islanders as primitive and in need of rescuing by RAMSI.


Neighbour trouble
It's back to nation-building for Australia in its nearby region, reports foreign editor Greg Sheridan
The Australian, April 22, 2006

WHEN Snyder Rini was unexpectedly elected Prime Minister of Solomon Islands by his parliamentary colleagues in Honiara last Wednesday, an Australian official sent a text message to a senior colleague in Canberra telling him the news. The official received a two-word response: "Oh god."

Rini's election was even less popular with the crowd outside the parliament building. It tried to storm parliament and Rini had to flee under the protection of Australian Federal Police. Rini was secretly sworn in as Prime Minister at the Governor-General's residence the next day and now faces a no-confidence motion at Monday's first parliamentary sitting.

Close observers expect a serious effort next week to resolve the immediate Solomons crisis through a political manoeuvre, either Rini's resignation, which is considered quite likely, or Rini appointing a compromise cabinet, giving his opponents key portfolios. When the Australian police took Rini out of the parliament building on Wednesday, the crowd gathered there turned from being raucous to being viciously violent.

As the world now knows, two days of rioting and looting followed. It was a catastrophic breakdown in law and order. Much of Honiara was burned to the ground.

Rini's opponents accused him of being backed by Chinese, specifically Taiwanese, money, which they said had swayed some parliamentarians' votes, and the crowd rampaged through Honiara's Chinatown. Almost every Chinese shop and business was destroyed. Then the crowd burned down the Pacific Casino Hotel, the pride of Honiara's waterfront. The hotel was owned by a local Chinese businessman.

The Howard Government responded quickly. On Thursday it sent 110 soldiers and 70 police. New Zealand and Fiji also sent smaller forces.

On Thursday night a series of telephone conversations took place involving Prime Minister John Howard, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, James Batley, the head of the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands,, and Shane Castles, the Australian who is the Solomons police commissioner.

The results were quick. On Friday, another 110 Australian soldiers were dispatched. The crowd's violence caught everyone unawares even though Rini was a central player in the previous government, which was widely accused of corruption. Allegations of corruption also swirl around Rini.

The rage against the Chinese, allegedly on the pretext that some of them may have backed Rini, is particularly surprising. For years the key fault line of Solomons politics was ethnic hostility between the natives of the main island, Guadalcanal, and those of the second island, Malaita.

But this week's violence had no discernible Guadalcanal-Malaita dynamic. There was fury over what was seen as the perpetuation of the same corrupt crowd in office. And there is underlying jealousy of the success of Chinese businessmen. But none of this could remotely justify the rampage of destruction, which miraculously - and partly because of heroic emergency interventions by Australian police - claimed no lives.

The incident shows the Australian operation, RAMSI, which entered the Solomons almost three years ago, has been unsuccessful at three levels. It has not rooted out the corruption that is endemic in Solomon Islands. It has not convinced Solomons citizens to prosecute their grievances through the political system and the institutions of government. And it has not removed the ready recourse, in substantial sections of the population, to savage violence.

But the message from Howard and Downer in response has been consistent. Australia will stay the course. The commitment to the Solomons is long-term. There is no alternative to deep Australian involvement in the Solomons or more broadly throughout the crisis-hit Melanesian world and across the South Pacific.

As Howard told talkback radio on Thursday: "No country in the world has a bigger role to play than Australia and what we have to remind ourselves again is that in our own part of the world, the rest of the world expects Australia to shoulder most of the burden."

Howard strengthened the message yesterday: "We could from time to time have a significant military presence in different parts of the Pacific. It's one of the reasons I have been saying for years this country will have to continue spending increasing amounts of money on defence because this is our patch. Nobody else can be expected to shoulder this burden.

"We can't ask the Americans or the Europeans or anybody else. They'll say, well this is the Pacific, it's next door to Australia, and Australia is a strong, wealthy, prosperous country and it's got to shoulder its burden. And I think that's a fair thing for the rest of the world to say. I don't complain about that."

But the tragedy of the Solomons is also Australia's tragedy. In 2003, Canberra changed policy fundamentally on the South Pacific and the immediate cause was the Solomons, though the wider background was the simmering crisis of governance throughout the Melanesian arc that stretches from Papua New Guinea through the Solomons and down to Vanuatu and Fiji.

For decades the orthodoxy had been that Canberra treated the South Pacific nations as small but perfectly formed independent states. It wanted to be helpful but not too deeply involved. Above all it did not want to be accused of neo-colonialism, of interference in the internal affairs of sovereign nations.

The Solomons changed all that. Even by Melanesian standards the Solomons, with a population a little less than 600,000 and growing rapidly, had always been notably corrupt. It achieved independence in 1978 and, as with many Melanesian nations, developed little sense of nationhood. Different tribes had little contact with each other and not much interaction with the institutions of government. The East Asian crisis of 1997 hit it hard, as its main foreign investors were from the crisis-hit Asian countries. Ethnic tensions developed between the people of Guadalcanal and the Malaitans, who had migrated there and taken up land.

In 2000 the Solomons' then prime minister, Bart Ulufa'alu, requested that Canberra send 50 policemen to help him keep order. He was turned down. Subsequently he was forced from office in a virtual coup as rival ethnic gangs tore apart the Solomons.

Canberra was not inactive in this period. It tried hard to broker a settlement between the different ethnic groups and achieved this, notionally, with the Townsville Peace Agreement in late 2000. But the agreement never stuck. By early 2003 the Solomons was in full-blown crisis and again on the edge of civil war.

But the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade clung doggedly to the doctrine of non-interference. Writing in The Australian in January that year, Downer gave expression to the official view. He wrote: "Sending in Australian troops to occupy Solomon Islands would be folly in the extreme. It would be widely resented in the Pacific region. It would be very difficult to justify to Australian taxpayers. And for how many years would such an occupation have to continue? And what would be the exit strategy? The real show stopper, however, is that it would not work, no matter how it was dressed up, whether as an Australian or a Commonwealth or a Pacific Forum initiative. The fundamental problem is that foreigners do not have answers for the deep-seated problems afflicting Solomon Islands."

But it is a great strength of Downer that he is willing to change his mind. The Honiara Government kept asking for help.

In the international environment of the war on terror, Howard and Downer gradually came to a much deeper appreciation of the dangers of failed and failing states. As Howard said this week: "Failed states create vacuums." And vacuums are intensely dangerous.

And so, in the middle of 2003, Australia created RAMSI, which took nearly 2500 Australian and regional soldiers and police, the vast bulk of them Australian, into the Solomons. Everyone involved in the operation believes that this huge show of force was a key to RAMSI's early success in restoring order. Not to put too fine a point on it, the ethnic militias were scared of the Australian army, and rightly so.

RAMSI quickly re-established order. The police were there to do the policing, not the soldiers. The soldiers were there to protect the police if necessary. This Australian "shock and awe" worked. In short order, the worst of the militia leaders, Harold Keke, was in custody. Several thousand guns were destroyed in a weapons amnesty. AFP Commissioner Mick Keelty points out that had this gun amnesty not worked, this week's rioters, armed with rifles instead of clubs and machetes, may have killed scores of people.

Under RAMSI, even economic growth returned to the Solomons, although its economy had shrunk by a full quarter between 1998 and 2002. Indeed, the Solomons has gone very far backwards. The International Monetary Fund estimates it would need 40 years of better than 4 per cent annual economic growth merely to reach the living standards of the mid-'90s.

This week's riots, in scaring away Chinese businessmen, destroying Honiara's infrastructure and deterring foreign investment, make that much more difficult to achieve. It is a pitiable, nearly insane situation.

Howard and Downer have foreshadowed that the Australian commitment in Solomon Islands is long term, and they have received the support of Opposition Leader Kim Beazley and the Labor Party.

A minor theme in all of this is the contest between China and Taiwan for South Pacific diplomatic support. The Solomons is one of few nations to maintain diplomatic relations with Taiwan, and this attracts Taiwanese aid and some investment. The Chinese find this infuriating. But it would be absurd to blame the Chinese, either the Chinese resident in the Solomons or any other Chinese, for this week's crisis. Melanesia is a mess all over. Polynesia is doing a bit better.

Downer this week enhanced significant Australian support for law-enforcement capabilities in Samoa and Tonga. Vanuatu is doing the best of the Melanesian states, with the economy growing a little faster than the population, a rare occurrence in Melanesia. In PNG, Australia has been prevented from its most ambitious scheme to provide Australian police for front-line duties. But Australia does have some police in PNG, improving training and fighting corruption. Fiji faces a possibly explosive election in three weeks.

There are many lessons from this week's tragedy. One is that Australia desperately needs a larger army. As Neil James of the Australian Defence Association points out, the horror scenario is a crisis in PNG which the Australian army is not big enough to deal with. One way or another, the Australian military, police and broader institutional involvement in the South Pacific is bound to increase. It won't be easy.