‘Saving the Solomons’: a New Geopolitics in the ‘Arc of Instability’?

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Geographical Research

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doi: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2006.00372.x

Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Original Acticle

J. Connell: ‘Saving the Solomons’

‘Saving the Solomons’: a New Geopolitics in the ‘Arc of Instability’?

JOHN CONNELL

School of Geosciences, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. Email: [email protected]

Received 30 August 2005; Revised 28 February 2006; Accepted 1 March 2006

Abstract

The recent crisis in the Solomon Islands is reviewed in the context of historicaland regional antecedents. In the past two decades political and ethnic disputeshave flared in several parts of Melanesia and nearby parts of the ‘arc of instability’.Tensions and violence in the Solomon Islands, based on social, economic andpolitical issues, exemplify regional development concerns. The collapse of theeconomy and civil order resulted in the Solomon Islands being characterised asa ‘failed State’. Localised warfare brought external military intervention, with aregional assistance mission led by Australia, which paralleled other involvementin the region. Involvement has emphasised renewed Australian interest in theregion, in the light of global geopolitical shifts, and a more controversial approachto regional security and development.

KEY WORDS

Solomon Islands; geopolitics; States; intervention; neo-colonialism

The end of the Cold War and the collapse ofthe Soviet Union have led to ‘internationalindifference’ with respect to the world’s ‘greyareas’, the control of which is no longer ofeconomic or strategic concern, and to thosewars that have limited destabilizing potentialat the international level. A new division ofthe globe is taking form, between a ‘uselessworld’, the stability of which does not justifythe death of a single Western soldier, and a‘useful world’, on which the interests of thepowerful nations are focused (Conesa, 2001, 1).

‘This is our patch, we have a special respon-sibility in this part of the world, I believe thatvery strongly and this is our region’ (JohnHoward, Prime Minister of Australia, 2004).

Introduction

In the past two decades a belt of nations andislands, across the whole of Melanesia, extend-ing westwards into the Indonesian archipelago,has been characterised by some as an ‘arc ofinstability’. The term ‘arc’ was first used by the

journalist Rowan Callick (2000) with allusionsto arcs of instability in the Balkans and MiddleEast – awkward and troubling precedents. It alsomatches a parallel volcanic arc of instability.Across that arc there has been an independencestruggle in Aceh, religious violence in theMoluccas, a bitter struggle for independence inEast Timor, and repression of secessionist senti-ments in West Papua (Irian Jaya). A violentsecessionist struggle in Bougainville eventuallyculminated in ‘high level autonomy’ within PapuaNew Guinea (PNG) (Connell, 2006a). Civil warand political disarray have occurred in the SolomonIslands, political problems in Vanuatu and PNG,coups in Fiji in 1987 and 2000 and, north-eastof the arc, the Micronesian State of Nauru effec-tively collapsed. Other than in Indonesia (apartfrom East Timor), such political crises havebrought some form of external intervention, in aregion that had hitherto been largely ignored byglobal and regional powers. Only New Caledoniais presently characterised by political stabilityand effective territorial organisation, despitehaving come close to civil war in the 1980s in

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© 2006 Institute of Australian Geographers

the struggle for an independent Kanaky (NewCaledonia). This paper examines the recentcrisis in the Solomon Islands and the rationalefor the subsequent intervention by the RegionalAssistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI)in the context of other forms of regional crisisand intervention, and their historical antecedents.

Recent years have seen increasingly frequentdiscussions of ‘failed States’ in the Pacific region.Failed States are considered to be those wherethe government cannot effectively discharge con-ventional bureaucratic functions, such as provid-ing security and delivering services, paying thewages of government employees and having afunctioning police and judicial system. Usually‘failed States’ are identified as also having amassive breakdown in order, with high levels ofinternal violence and the government unable tocontrol the territory or the national borders, asin the cases of Somalia, Sierra Leone and Haiti(e.g. Helman and Ratner, 1992; Rotberg, 2004).By the end of the last century the Solomon Islandshad come very close to failed State status, andwas later argued to be ‘the Pacific’s first failedState’ (Anon, 2003), but external interventionprevented the transition from failing to failed(Fraenkel, 2003; McDougall, 2004). Ironically,at much the same time Nauru did become thefirst Pacific failed State (Connell, 2006b), whilststrong warnings were being issued about Statefailure in PNG (ASPI, 2004; cf. Regan, 2005). Themost pessimistic analyses of trends in the archave drawn attention to a series of problemsthat have suggested the onset of ‘Africanisation’,implying many negative elements (Reilly, 2000),though such comparisons have been rejected(Fraenkel, 2004a; Chappell, 2005).

The arc itself is a complex shatter belt betweena densely populated, rapidly changing and eco-nomically unstable Asia, where religious differ-ences have resurfaced in political terms, and ahighly developed, urbanised and thinly populatedAustralian continent. Tensions in the arc havefollowed colonial legacies, where political insta-bility has evolved from (and contributed to)poorly performing national economies anduneven development, corruption, resource colo-nialism, and the rise of ethnicity within – or inopposition to – nationalist movements. In somecontexts this has been complicated by increasedflows of asylum seekers, money laundering, armstrafficking and concerns over possible linksbetween these and terrorism. Explanations forthe disappointments of development includethe inappropriateness of established systems of

government (and hence some resurgence of‘chiefly’ rule), the destabilising effects of large-scale resource projects, land and compensationclaims, high levels of, increasingly urban, unem-ployment and structural readjustment programs(especially the downsizing of public services),reduced delivery of services, and concern overmoves to formalise, privatise and rigidify landtenure). The colonial legacy, external resourceexploitation and intrinsic geographical and cul-tural fragmentation of multi-island States havemeant that development has been difficult toachieve and manage (Bonnemaison and Wad-dell, 1997). The 1999 referendum in East Timor,which eventually led to its independence, provedto be one turning point of vital geopolitical sig-nificance in highlighting processes of destabili-sation in the arc; 9/11 in New York in 2001 andthe Bali bombings in 2002 were further shocksand turning points.

With the exception of France, the old imperialpowers have retained little interest in the region,despite economic interests there, and both theUnited States and the United Kingdom haveincreasingly withdrawn. By contrast Asian States,such as China (Henderson and Reilly, 2003),have become more involved. New Zealand hasreduced its military forces, and has little capac-ity for a strategic intervention beyond its borders(other than in an international peace-keepingrole). Australia has therefore both been calledupon and has chosen to exercise greater authorityin the region, and new forms of intervention in thesecurity arena have expanded its earlier notionsof ‘constructive commitment’ that had moreevident economic overtones (Fry, 1997; 2000;Rosewarne, 1997).

Life and Laughter ‘midst the Cannibals (Collinson, 1926)

The Solomon Islands, like its Melanesian neigh-bours, is characterised by extreme fragmentation– both geographically and ethnically – withmore than 60 inhabited islands and almost 90languages. Most Solomon Islanders are Melane-sian (though there are distinct ethnicities withinSolomon Islands) but Polynesians inhabit severaloutlying islands, such as Tikopia and Rennell.The national borders, especially to the west, areboth artificial and recent, and local and regionalties are more important than national identity.

Colonial history is recent and limited. Britain,as in much of the Pacific, was a largely reluctantcolonial power, and became involved mainly toprotect its interests in Australia. It was not until

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1900 that the Solomon Islands took its presentshape, with the transfer of several western islandsfrom Germany to Britain, and there was violenceon the colonial frontier until the late 1920s (e.g.Keesing and Corris, 1980). Otherwise during thecolonial era the impact of colonialism in smalland remote islands was largely that of benignneglect. Especially in parts of Malaita, SolomonIslanders have retained a firm hold on variousaspects of ‘tradition’ with limited commitmentto capitalism or to the contemporary Nation-State– the latter being a concept of doubtful localvalue.

In the post-war years there was some opposi-tion to colonial authority, notably in the contextof ‘Maasina Rure’ (Connell, 1993, 246–247), butthe Solomon Islands was one of the last territoriesto be decolonised by Britain. It gained inde-pendence in considerable haste, in the wake ofBritain’s active drive for disengagement from itscolonial possessions, in a context where ‘to manySolomons communities, whose security andsurvival traditionally derived from a small-scaleautonomy and self-sufficiency, central govern-ment represented a threat’ (Herlihy, 1982, 571)or at least an unknown. There was therefore littleenthusiasm for independence as, for example,in Anuta (Feinberg, 1986). However, despite a

secessionist movement in the west (Premdas

et al.

, 2003), there was no violent opposition, aswas the case in Vanuatu (Beasant, 1984) or massmobilisation, as in Bougainville (Connell, 1993,246). Minimal rhetoric was directed towardsSolomon Islands nationalism. The Solomon Islandswas not only remote from its colonial power butdistant from other decolonised States and withlimited access to tertiary education. More thanin most newly independent States there was –and is – a limited sense of national unity andproblems exist in the incorporation of disparatelinguistic and cultural groups into a single polit-ical and economic entity. As elsewhere in Mela-nesia, any real sense of national identity hasbeen difficult to develop and maintain, and evenappeals to island-wide unity have often foundered,undermined by rural economic development andnew inequalities, religious sectarianism and rural-urban migration, hence creating problems inurban informal settlements.

The capital, Honiara, was only created after theSecond World War, and plantations dominatedthe economy until the first signs of diversifica-tion appeared in the 1960s, though the countryremains dependent on commodity production.Like other island micro-States, the Solomon Islandsexperiences development problems centred around

Figure 1 The Solomon Islands (Source: Fraenkel, 2004b, 25).

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various concomitants of small size, includingthe lack of local markets and skilled workers,dependence on external institutions (such as fortertiary education), and the high costs of con-structing and maintaining infrastructure. It alsoexperiences cyclones (especially in the easternislands) and droughts and food shortages (as,respectively, in Tikopia in 2003 and Temotu in2005).

In the post-war years a limited and fragmentedcommercial economy emerged, based on fishingand forestry, both of which benefited commercialcompanies rather than local people and land-owners. The history of forestry has been a scan-dalous one of mismanagement, exploitation,corruption, economic loss and environmentaldegradation, as the principal national resource hasbeen depleted without real gain (Kabutaulaka,1998; Bennett, 2000; Hviding and Bayliss-Smith,2000). A substantial proportion of the populationremains largely involved in subsistence agricul-ture with limited links to the commercial econ-omy, while population growth rates have beenexceptionally high, even for Melanesia. In 1976its population ( just prior to independence in1978) was 196 800 but, by the 1999 census, thishad doubled to 409 000 of whom 122 600 wereon Malaita.

Dreams of material wealth have often foundered,in the wake of failed attempts, mainly at cashcropping, resulting in divided communities anda widespread perception that ‘money makes youcrazy’ (McDonald, 2003). A report for AusAIDin 1995 emphasised that the Solomon Islands:

is among the poorest of the Pacific islandcountries ... [and] faces a complex set ofdevelopment challenges ... The relativelypoor social indicators and low income levelare indicative of slow social development andeconomic growth that has failed to significantlyoutpace population growth ... An effectiveresponse to these challenges will require a firmcommitment to implementing a detailed andcomprehensive reform programme (EconomicInsights Pty. Ltd., 1995, 1, 7).

Reform never came and the economy declinedfurther. Some degree of poverty has now beenrecognised (Solomon Islands, 2002). SolomonIslands was named one of the four Pacific IslandStates (including Vanuatu) where living standardsfell between 1990 and 2001 (Kabutaulaka, 2004a,393). Development problems are more acute inthe smallest islands, but also in parts of Malaitathat were increasingly characterised by land

shortages and disputes (Frazer, 1987). Long themost densely populated island, Malaita had fewdevelopment opportunities and even, by the timeof independence, had already become character-ised by out-migration, mainly to northern Guad-alcanal, either to the fringes of Honiara, whereMalaitans came to dominate bureaucratic employ-ment, or on the plains to the east, where rice andoil palm cultivation was being developed bySolomons Islands Plantations (SIPL). After twodecades of independence the Solomon Islandsconfronted complex and worsening problems ofuneven development.

The Crisis: Custom and Confrontation (Keesing, 1992)

As elsewhere in Melanesia, by the late 1990s,incompetent and corrupt governments hadcontributed significantly to a ‘legitimacy crisisof the post-colonial State’ (Dinnen, 2002, 286).That crisis of governance was evident in grow-ing popular disenchantment with formal politi-cal processes and outcomes and a desire forautonomy in some regions, and could be meas-ured in increased unemployment, limited eco-nomic opportunities, in a broader context of lowcommodity prices and a growing trade deficit.Fraud, theft and dissent over land sales reflectedtensions around the deteriorating economy.

Economic downturn, especially around Hon-iara, where squatter settlements had grown, andin the nearby Guadalcanal plains, contributedto resentment in Guadalcanal against Malaitan‘migrants’ – often second or third generationresidents – though, ironically, opposition wasoften greatest in the more remote parts of Guad-alcanal, such as the Weather Coast. The crisis,discussed in detail elsewhere (Fraenkel, 2004b),began with organised disturbances late in 1998and spread rapidly through Guadalcanal, withmilitant groups, notably the Isatabu FreedomMovement (IFM) harassing Malaitans, many ofwhom sought refuge in Honiara or returned toMalaita. In June 1999 a state of emergency wasdeclared in Guadalcanal.

At the 1997 elections, after more than half themembers were voted out, a new governmentheaded by a Malaitan politician, Bart Ulufa’alu,came to power with a reform agenda that met withconsiderable resistance from the former politicalelite, who had benefited from lax regulations.The government sought to play down the crisisas a ‘law and order’ problem, which aggravatedthe crisis, as Guadalcanal militants became thetarget of punitive operations by the dominantly

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Malaitan police force (Dinnen, 2002). Remark-ably Honiara became something of a Malaitanenclave on the island of Guadalcanal.

Another armed group – the Malaita EagleForce (MEF) – emerged early in 2000 andsought to represent the interests of displacedMalaitans, attacking the IFM and its supporters,with casualties on both sides. Perhaps as manyas 200 people were killed, most during thisperiod (Carter, 2004). As the security situationdeteriorated the government appealed to Australiaand New Zealand for assistance but neither werewilling to intervene. Soon afterwards the MEFseized control of key installations in Honiara,arguing that this was necessary because of thegovernment’s failure to resolve the crisis, loss ofpolice control over national security and theneed for a different Prime Minister. A new PrimeMinister, Manasseh Sogavare, was elected underpressure from the MEF, and, though not recognisedby the IFM, he was recognised by Australia andNew Zealand.

Following this ‘de facto coup’ (Dinnen, 2002,288) violence increased, with the new govern-ment incapable of challenging the MEF whichhad brought it to power. Honiara was cut offfrom the rest of the country, and violence spilledover into other areas, with reprisals againstMalaitans, and growing demands for fission andlocal autonomy. The economy collapsed whenthe Gold Ridge mine closed, as had SIPL some-what earlier, and several parts of the country,including rural Guadalcanal, reverted towards asubsistence economy.

Sogavare’s government sought to engage inpeace making, in large part through the distribu-tion of compensation, but this effectively con-tributed to a ‘chequebook approach’ to negotiationsand the ‘instrumentalisation of disorder’ asdemands for compensation multiplied (Dinnen,2002; Fraenkel, 2004b). Both New Zealand andAustralia then entered into international peace-making by sending delegations to Honiara, host-ing talks and producing the Townsville PeaceAgreement in August 2000.

Violence continued, however, with looting ofhouses, burning of vehicles and intermittent hos-tility and battles between the IFM and the MEF,mainly around the fringes of Honiara, whilethe economy deteriorated further. Compensationbecame increasingly corrupt, draining an alreadycollapsing economy, with the loss of services inseveral areas, and battles for control of governmentresources and institutions. Disarmament waslimited, criminality increased in the absence of

a working police force, and ex-militants retainedpower. The IFM became factionalised withlocalised feuds, notably on the Weather Coast,where a local ‘warlord’, Harold Keke, engagedin unprecedented violence. Factionalisation em-phasised that, though the two main militantgroups were identified with different islands,ethnicity was not necessarily central to the crisisand, as it continued, attachments became morelocalised.

National elections in December 2001 broughta new government to power, headed by Sir AllanKemakeza, and including a number of promi-nent MEF ex-militants. Kemakeza himself hadbeen involved in nepotistic compensation pay-ments, and had limited ability, will and authorityto arrest the downward spiral. Government financeswere in exceptional disarray in 2002, the yearwhich marked the nadir of the crisis (Fraenkel,2004b, 152). Because of the government’s ina-bility to pay its workforce, 2003 was marked bystrikes and closures in the public sector, thoughpolice officers were being paid salaries andallowances. Pyramid schemes brought povertyto many. Harold Keke continued his murderous‘rule’ on the Weather Coast (Kabutaulaka, 2004a).By then the government had become effectivelyparalysed and a ‘shadow State has emerged in theSolomon Islands – a patronage system centredon the ruling cabal’s control over resources. TheState has been gutted from the inside, and theparliament largely serves as an avenue for accessto dwindling resources by political players’(Wainwright, 2003, 24). There were frequentmanipulations of custom, and particularly ofcompensation practices. These were intended toredress grievances and strengthen social ties, butdid little more than enrich a powerful elite: ‘whatwas done in the name of Melanesian customduring 1998–2003 was a politically paralysingtale of posturing, patronage and power’ effectively‘ransacking the State’ (Fraenkel, 2004b, 107,187). In mid-2003 Australia intervened moredirectly by launching the combined military andpolice intervention force involved in RAMSI.

By mid-2005, peace had been restored andthe economy revitalised but, though RAMSIoperations had been scaled down, political andeconomic problems remained. The Prime Minis-ter had been asked to resign by a group callingitself the Malaita Separatist Movement, indicat-ing that the potential for secessionism andrenewed militancy remained, while demands forcompensation continued to be raised. Thoughboth SIPL and the mine had reopened, localised

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food shortages occurred, land ownership issuesremained problematic and little new employ-ment had been created. Nonetheless there was asubstantial degree of consensus that outsideintervention had been a success.

While there were obvious ethnic elements inthe crisis, with the formation of militia repre-senting Guadalcanal and Malaita, the emergenceof ethnicity was rather a response to an economiccollapse that was a partial outcome of failures ofnational governance and a flawed politicalsystem, all of which had led to rising and morevisible levels of unemployment, especially onthe urban fringes, inequitable distribution of thebenefits of resource developments and ‘a strugglefor scarce and poorly managed resources, whoseownership was previously vested in the clan, tribeor line [

sic

]’ (Ponzio, 2005, 175). Guadalcanalmilitants themselves expressed their militancy interms of their perceptions of uneven developmentrather than of ethnicity (Gray, 2002), despitesome recourse to ‘traditional’ dress. Ethnicitybecame the arena through which conflict wasmanifested and frustrations expressed and whichhelped to define and coalesce two main islandgroups, which had hitherto been fragmented(Kabutaulaka, 2001), a familiar process in con-texts of chaos.

Blazing the Trail in the Solomons (McHardy, 1935)

After independence the Solomon Islands, likemost other Melanesian countries, had been largelyignored by colonial and regional powers. How-ever, by the time of the Solomon Islands crisis,a wind of change had already brought greaterregional concerns, evident in interventions inEast Timor and Bougainville.

Australia and New Zealand were initially cau-tious in responding to the growing crisis in theSolomon Islands, although both the AustralianForeign Minister and a United Nations missionhad visited (Fraenkel, 2004b, 68). Initial externalinvolvement came through the arrival of SitiveniRabuka, former Fijian Prime Minister (andarchitect of the 1987 Fijian coup), as a specialCommonwealth envoy in mid-1999. Rabukabrokered the Honiara Peace Accord that provideda starting point for subsequent conflict resolu-tion (Kabutaulaka, 2001). Australia eventuallyresponded in mid-2000, hosting peace talks inTownsville that led to a peace agreement andcontributed to the end of fighting, but it was lessable to develop a structure through which theSolomon Islands government itself could imple-

ment peace provisions and restore the economy.A small International Peace Monitoring Team(IPMT), mainly composed of civilians fromAustralia and New Zealand, went to monitorand observe the intended disarmament process.

At the start of 2003, after conditions had againworsened, the Australian Foreign Minister,Alexander Downer, argued that Australia hadlimited ability to be involved in the SolomonIslands, and that fundamental problems shouldbe resolved by Solomon Islanders:

Sending in Australian troops to occupy Solo-mon Islands would be folly in the extreme. Itwould be widely resented in the Pacificregion. It would be very difficult to justify toAustralian taxpayers. And for how many yearswould such an occupation have to continue?And what would be the exit strategy? (quotedin McDougall, 2004, 217)

By the middle of the year, when Australia inter-vened, it was evident, first, that the situation wascontinuing to deteriorate; second, that there wasno great regional opposition to Australianintervention; and third, that the presence of a‘failed State’ in the region might provide aregional threat, in terms of criminal or eventerrorist activity.

At the same time as the appearance of a reportby the government funded Australian StrategicPolicy Institute (ASPI) on

Our Failing Neigh-bour

(Wainwright, 2003), Downer noted thatAustralian involvement might need to be moreproactive and extend to security assistance, butthat intervention should be based on ‘fullownership’ by Pacific Island countries’ (quotedin McDougall, 2004, 218). The Prime Minister,John Howard, stated ‘The Solomons is ourpatch ... If the Solomons becomes a failed State,it’s a haven for terrorists, drug runners andmoney launderers ... we don’t want that on ourdoorstep’ (quoted in Kabutaulaka, 2004b, 4).The Solomon Islands parliament unanimously(and perhaps uniquely) voted for an interventionforce to enter the country. The Pacific IslandsForum (the regional group of 16 Pacific IslandStates, including Australia and New Zealand)supported ‘cooperative intervention’ in line withthe principles of the Biketawa declaration (setout in 2000 in the shadows of the SolomonIslands crisis), which provided for a regionalresponse when problems within a member Statehad consequences for the region as a whole.Both forms of support were sought by Australiato minimise the taints of neo-colonialism. In the

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Solomon Islands, opposition to intervention camefrom those who had gained most from lawless-ness (Kabutaulaka 2004a, 397–398).

In July 2003 Operation Helpem Fren (Helping aFriend) was launched with the arrival in Honiaraof the first components of RAMSI: an acronymthat drew regular parallels with Rambo. Acombined force of 2225 personnel was sent, twothirds of whom were military with many of theremainder being police. Australia contributedthe majority. New Zealand contributed more thana hundred; Fiji, Tonga and Papua New Guineasent military, and six relatively small PacificIsland States (including Vanuatu and Nauru)provided police (McDougall, 2004, 218–219;Henderson and Watson, 2005). It was the largestmilitary and police deployment in the regionsince the Second World War. The initial RAMSIemphasis was on restoring law and order anddisarming militias, but it evolved towards estab-lishing judicial processes, achieving a structureof effective governance (especially of the finan-cial system), restoring elements of the economyand developing planning programs and mecha-nisms. It was quickly successful in disarmingand arresting criminals and militants, and inrestructuring the police force, and was then ableto move on to more subtle and complex economicand governance reforms. A report was produced(DFAT, 2004) to set the scene for subsequentmore detailed plans for economic development,though the Australian focus on ethnicity as thecritical issue partly ‘diverted attention from thecore issues of land tenure, economic developmentand more decentralised and accountable govern-ance that underpinned the protests’ (Ponzio, 2005,181). Establishing peace was easier than enablingdevelopment.

RAMSI was the first time that the PacificIslands Forum had played an assertive role in theaffairs of a member State, though several islandStates (including Vanuatu and Fiji) had contributedto peacekeeping in Bougainville. Island leaders,after some years of criticism either of Australia’s‘big brother’ attitudes in the region or of itsdisinterest, had accepted that the Pacific wasAustralia’s ‘patch’ in the global security arena.

Lightning Meets the West Wind (Keesing and Corris, 1980)

Beyond the Solomon Islands external interven-tion within the arc has taken various forms inthe past decade and involved several countriesand organisations, from the participation of theUnited Nations in East Timor and Bougainville,

with a substantial Australian input, to the moresubtle and small scale transfer of a few highlevel public servants in Vanuatu and Fiji, andsupport for regional security programs (suchas quarantine, immigration and police training).Forms of intervention have been a function oftime and perceptions of severity, but have every-where gone beyond conventional forms of aid oreven military training.

Late in the 1980s mounting grievances overmining evolved into a violent secessionist strugglein PNG’s easternmost province, Bougainville,with hundreds of deaths in civil warfare withinthe island and between the Bougainville Revolu-tionary Army and PNG forces. In 1994 a cease-fire was declared and a transitional governmentestablished in the following year but violencecontinued, despite talks held in Australia, until asecond 1997 truce. In that year Australia effec-tively modified its unconditional support forPNG by adopting a peacekeeping role that mightyet lead to Bougainvillean autonomy. Late in 1997an unarmed Truce Monitoring Group traveled toBougainville. It was commanded by the NewZealand Defence Force, with personnel andlogistical support from Australia, Fiji and Vanuatu.Six months later it was replaced by a PeaceMonitoring Group, endorsed by the UN, andcommand shifted from New Zealand to Australia.Operation Bel Isi brought over 300 peacemonitors to Bougainville, mostly Australian publicservants and military personnel, alongside asmall UN Observer Mission (Regan, 2001), whichremained until 2005.

Australian involvement in East Timor wascharacterised by ambiguity and inconsistency fromthe 1970s onwards as sympathies were regularlyexpressed towards the East Timorese, but fullsupport was given to the notion of Indonesianterritorial integrity despite the problematic legalstatus of East Timor. Policy was based whollyon the practice of power politics, and the desirefor a favourable Timor Gap oil treaty, and thisstance only shifted following the 1999 referendum,East Timor’s bitter struggle for independenceand the establishment of the UN TransitionalAdministration (Ishizuka, 2004). Australia thencommitted troops to defend the integrity of EastTimor and disarm pro-Indonesian militia.

Australian attitudes to West Papua paralleled,and still parallel, those towards East Timor inthe years before the referendum – sympathywithout challenging notions of national territo-rial integrity, despite the contentious legal statusof Indonesia’s acquisition of West Papua after

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Dutch decolonisation and well-founded human-itarian concerns. That orientation has neverchanged (King, 2004). In all three cases therewere loose parallels in territorially based strug-gles in ethnically distinct, outlying regions oflarger States, but there were differences in theirvarious legal and political statuses.

By the early 1990s the small island State ofNauru was experiencing a financial crisis follow-ing depletion of its phosphate incomes andAustralia provided the Nauruan governmentwith financial assistance, partly through funding(Australian) refugee camps there. Alongside theredefinition of Australia’s borders to excluderefugees, this ‘Pacific solution’ marked a strikingchange in Australia’s engagement in the region(Fry, 2002). Australia also filled the positions ofNauruan financial secretary and commissionerof police, in order to improve governance andreduce corruption. By 2004, the situation hadworsened, and the Pacific Islands Forum announceda Regional Assistance Mission to Nauru, follow-ing the RAMSI precedent, but primarily chargedwith restructuring the economy (Connell, 2006b).Nauru by then had become a failed State in termsof its being ‘utterly incapable of sustaining itselfas a member of the international community’(Helman and Ratner, 1992, 12).

Deteriorating law and order conditions inPNG resulted in Australia announcing in 2003that a condition of its (substantial) aid deliverywould be the dispatch of police support to PNG.Late in 2004 it reached an Enhanced Coopera-tion Agreement (ECP) with PNG that over 200police officers and 70 public servants would bebased in PNG in a ‘whole of government’approach. Like RAMSI, the ECP was substan-tially supported in PNG, though there were laterarguments about its legal and constitutionalstatus. But, unlike RAMSI, this was not part ofa regional consensus (Patience 2005). Neverthe-less the ECP experienced no regional objectionand only belated local opposition.

Neither in Vanuatu nor Fiji was interventionon a similar scale, though coups in Fiji and con-stitutional crises in Vanuatu sparked concerns inAustralia. In Vanuatu, fears of a coup werecommon in the 1990s, based on economic stagna-tion, fractious and divisive national politics andregional parallels; such fears were allayed in2002 after the imprisonment of the former PrimeMinister, Barak Sope, for corruption (Morgan,2003). This brought some dissent through per-ceptions that Australia was interfering in localpolitics and in the appointment of a new police

commissioner. Sope’s release and return to powerin 2004, in the government of Serge Vohor, whohad previously strongly criticised Australianinvolvement, led to demands that two Australianpolice officers and two AusAID advisers beremoved from Vanuatu. Australia threatened towithdraw aid on different occasions, until theVohor government fell late in 2004 (Jowitt,2005). Fiji presented a different case in havinga larger, more stable, though declining economyand an ethnic structure that had long been asource of tension and coups (Davies, 2005; Field

et al.

, 2005). In Fiji, Australia has similarlysought to position public servants in key posi-tions where they might strengthen governanceand support police and military training.

Intervention in the Solomon Islands ‘brokenew ground in lowering the threshold for inter-vention in the indisputably internal affairs of asovereign State’, albeit after a formal requestfrom the State, so that ‘to a degree not witnessedin international peacekeeping’, high levels ofcrime, violence, corruption and poor governancewere the primary impetus for external interven-tion rather than a significant humanitarian crisis(Ponzio, 2005, 178–179). Elsewhere in theregion, intervention, though never as formal or‘regional’ as RAMSI, had broadly similar goals– the establishment of a stable political and alsoeconomic order – but this varied from interven-tion in long-term and extremely violent circum-stances as in Bougainville and east Timor, to lowlevel involvement without international legalstatus as in Fiji, PNG, Vanuatu and Nauru(though in the last case Forum support camelater). Within a decade Australia had becomecomprehensively engaged in diverse post-colo-nial issues across much of the arc.

New colonialism or new geopolitics?

In the eighteenth century both Australia andNew Zealand had repeatedly urged a reluctantBritain to annex various Pacific islands, espe-cially Fiji, the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) and NewGuinea (Thompson, 1980). Britain remainedlargely unenthusiastic about its distant coloniesand, in the nineteenth century, the British ColonialOffice hoped that Australia would eventuallygovern the Solomon Islands (Bennett, 1987, 105;Goldsworthy, 2002). During the 1950s therewere discussions on whether Australia shouldassume Britain’s colonial authority in both theSolomon Islands and the New Hebrides. IronicallyAustralia has effectively taken on that responsi-bility in the post-colonial period.

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More than a century ago, missionaries firstarrived in the Solomon Islands with the intentionof winning new places and people for Christianity:‘Saving the Solomons’ enabled ‘many a savageman-eater [to be] transformed into a faithfulfollower of Christ’ (Decker, 1947, 1). Melanesia,and especially the Solomon Islands and NewGuinea, were long seen as populated with blacksavages, backward, primitive and necessitatingexternal intervention to secure development,quite different from the indigenous people ofPolynesia (Lutz and Collins, 1993, 26; Connell,2004; Chappell 2005). In some respects the leg-acy of these perceptions has survived in externalperceptions of ethnic divisions and tribalism,feuding and violence, and they have been describedin more extreme form as ‘Africanisation’ – orwhat Fry (1997: 305–306) has described as ‘a newdoomsdayism’ that necessitated bringing salva-tion. ‘Salvation’ involved the modernity andprogress earlier implicit in the colonial conjunc-tion of capitalism and Christianity (Allen, 1968).For more than a century Australian agendas inthe region involved continuity in the drawingof geographical boundaries, the organisation ofthe lives of those people thus bounded and thedesign of outcomes not of these peoples’ ownmaking (Fry, 1997, 306–307). This was nothingless than a discourse of orientalism (Chappell,2005, 290) that implied subordination and requireddomination, restructuring and new authority. Itwas a process in which imaginative geographiesessentialised cultural and geographical differ-ence. The recent intervention in the SolomonIslands was thus part of a long tradition, butboth in its form and in its conceptualisation itwas on a grander scale.

Paradoxically, new intervention took place ina region characterised a quarter of a century ear-lier by hasty decolonisation – an unusual situa-tion in which the colonisers were more anxiousto withdraw than were the colonised to take con-trol. Not surprisingly, not only were ‘the ghostsof the colonial powers still present, looming overthe shaky futures of the tiny islands’ (Jourdan,1995, 127) but the intertwined histories, econo-mies and geographies of Australia and the islandStates – even those where Britain was the colonialpower – meant that independence was in a senseonly a ‘trial separation’ and any real project ofindependence never occurred (Denoon, 2005).Intervention represented a form of continuityrather than change.

Despite attempts at ‘constructive commitment’Australia displayed marked disinterest and no

enthusiasm for intervention until towards theend of the last century. By then, the arc was toostrategically important to ignore. Though ‘greyareas’ (and failed States) emerged in sub-SaharanAfrica (Conesa, 2001) new forms of globali-sation meant that regional powers intervened inMelanesia, as once ‘grey areas’ acquired newimportance, in a ‘A Pacific Engaged’ by theirlarge and, now, interested neighbour (Common-wealth of Australia, 2003). Intervention wasprimarily for strategic reasons – to reduce insta-bility and to prevent the failure of States that aretoo close for comfort – rather than for humani-tarian or economic goals, though both of theseplayed some part. Insecurity may now involveanything from the ‘hosting’ of drug runners, or theprovision of passports to ‘terrorists’, to economiccollapse and the possibility of new flows of‘economic refugees’, as in the case of Nauru(Connell, 2006b). In this new geopolitical disorder,threats may come not from nations but from a‘placeless’ terrorism, thriving in places withouteither an adequate rule of law or simply usingfragile States as transit points. Consequently thefocus on regional political stability also involvesdeveloping viable economies.

The new Australian geopolitics has combinednew national borders, expanded State power,territorial surveillance and military incursionswith economic (re)construction. An emphasis on‘doorsteps’, ‘back yards’ and ‘patches’ has broughtgeopolitics firmly into the regional arena, whilstreferences to ‘failure’, ‘arcs of instability’ and‘warlords’ justified recourse to intervention. Placesand people were thus rendered both marginaland critical to Australia.

Involvement in Bougainville presaged themore interventionist Australian approach in theSolomon Islands (McDougall, 2004, 221), onewhere Australia was, more evidently, in control.Foreign Minister Downer argued, in mid-2003,that, given missed UN opportunities in suchplaces as Rwanda and Kosovo, for the Solomons,‘it would just be too difficult to get the UN tosolve this problem. We’ll have to do it ourselveswith a coalition of other countries’ (quoted inPonzio, 2005, 178). After criticism from otherpotential partners in RAMSI, including NewZealand, Downer subsequently refrained fromcriticism of the UN. However, the perceptionremained that Australia was seeking its ownregional mandate and was ignoring the UN whichhad played (and was still playing) a key rolein neighbouring Bougainville. The BiketawaDeclaration, unprecedented in endorsing the

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intervention of Forum members in the internalaffairs of another State, was repeatedly endorsedby Australia, which thus saw no need for UNinvolvement or a Security Council mandate.

Australian-led intervention in the SolomonIslands therefore exhibits parallels with the UN-sanctioned invasion of Afghanistan and the US-led invasion of Iraq, since each was aimed atending internal instability (Kabutaulaka, 2004b).It partly took the form of ‘fifth generationpeacekeeping’ where, in the sequel to disastrousUN ventures in Rwanda, Bosnia and Somalia, asingle power or

ad hoc

multilateral coalitions(such as the US in Haiti, and Russia in Georgia)pursued military intervention when and wherethe national interests of major powers wereengaged (Schnabel and Thakur, 2001, 13). Inter-vention in the Solomon Islands was even moreevidently a form of ‘sixth generation peacekeep-ing’ (Ponzio, 2005) that involves State-makingfor a transitional period (as in Kosovo, EastTimor and also Bougainville) but, in this context,with a ‘coalition of the willing’, as in Iraq,where the UN and its agencies play a limited ornon-existent role.

Australia has thus spearheaded a new, costlyand risky form of peacekeeping that, despiteregional support, undermines some core principlesof multilateralism. It is ‘shortsighted to margin-alise the UN on sensitive issues of post-conflictstabilisation and reconstruction, particularly thoseUN agencies mandated and equipped to assistsuch situations ... And questions of legitimacyabout the intervention may arise’ (Ponzio, 2005,183). While this is manifestly so in Iraq, despiteobjections and doubts, such a situation is not soevident in the Solomon Islands. Indeed the UNSecretary General, Kofi Annan, expressed hissupport for the regional solution to the crisis(Kabutaulaka, 2004a). Nonetheless the interven-tion highlights the UN’s difficulties in influenc-ing the actions of a regional power committed toleading a ‘coalition of the willing’ on a relativelysmall scale (Ponzio, 2005) even though the UNplayed a significant role in Bougainville.

Across the arc, real difficulties attend the long-term project of nation building in conditions ofeconomic and political insecurity, where culturaldifferences are real and not simply to be dismissedas awkward vestiges of historic practices and a‘scandal to be overcome’ (Scott 2005, 191).And, where there is constant concern over lackof real ‘progress’, threats to sovereignty in acontext of apparent ‘neo-colonialism’ reflect theeternal paradox involved in providing external

assistance in order to develop self-reliance. Yet,even if colonialism was relatively benign inSolomon Islands (mainly by being superficial) itprovided no foundations for the nation’s effectiveparticipation in an increasingly global world.Vulnerability emanates from elsewhere: therapacious quest for raw material (notably timber)that has transferred economic surpluses overseas;the focus on resource exports to the exclusion ofmanufacturing and food production; disinterestin fostering a middle class that might somehowdevelop a national consciousness within theirrelevant borders of colonial mapping pens, whereweakness is a function of competing authorityrather than of its absence (Bennett, 2002; cf.Sidaway, 2003; Moore 2005; Chappell 2005, 292).

Critical development issues remain in theSolomon Islands, as they do elsewhere in Mela-nesia, and RAMSI can never resolve these – sus-tainable development requires complex policiesand practices in terms of population change,health care, agriculture, fisheries etc. and humanresources are limited (Wade, 2005). The coun-try’s small size and (physical and cultural) frag-mentation pose inherent problems and thereare limits to donor-funded technical assistance(Regan, 2005). Much of what is valued in Mela-nesian life remains: a sense of community inassociation with a particular tract of land; sharedbeliefs and values; a rough equality of materialconditions; reciprocity and some degree of com-munity control over the means of production.Such values and virtues that have enabled local-ised autonomy and self-reliance are not readilytransferable into a more globalised world(McDougall, 2005), just as many western valuesand institutions are fragile and ‘foreign flowers’(Larmour, 2005) in Melanesia.

It is no longer possible to address regionalissues only according to such relatively ‘benign’and local parameters as governance, povertyelimination, environmental management and sus-tainable development – important though theseare. The accelerating rate and scale of change,broader forces of regional integration (and dis-integration) together with widespread weaken-ing of the apparatus of the State and the shift ofeconomic initiatives to an unfettered private sec-tor, weak locally but powerful at an internationalscale, constitute major destabilising forces.Challenges within the region include a concernfor the stability of the nation-States, respect forhuman rights and the promotion of harmoniouslonger-term development policies. Decentraliseddevelopment is implicit; people need neither

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central planning nor significant guidance fromabove but they do need roads and routes. Indeed,one of the most critical questions that remains tobe answered is what may be the most effectiveform of the Melanesian State in what remaineconomically weak, artificial and highly fragmentedcountries and how can these be constructed in anew, intrusive geopolitical order which, itself, isunstable and unpredictable.

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‘Saving the Solomons’: a New Geopolitics in the ‘Arc of Instability’?

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