Posted on 14-7-2003

Solomons Empire21 Test Tube

No troops to the Solomons! People aid not military aid! Statement by Action
in Solidarity with Asia and the Pacific, 8 July 2003, Australia.

We oppose the planned Australian-led military intervention into the Solomon
Islands later this month to "restore law and order" because it is against
the interests of the Solomon Islands people and heralds an assault on the
independence of other Pacific nations. PM John Howard says that the
intervention will take place at the invitation of the Solomons Islands’
people. But press reports say that most of the 465,000 Solomon Islanders
have been kept in the dark.

Solomons PM Sir Alan Kamakeza, who invited the Australian intervention, has
stolen thousands of dollars of aid money. The Solomon Islands parliament,
which has yet to pass a motion inviting the invasion, is a notoriously
corrupt institution. The intervention will prop up a corrupt political
elite that serves the interests of foreign corporations. Many MPs and
police officers are part of the criminal gangs that the intervention is
supposed to be aimed at. It is aimed at defending Australian business
interests, as the report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute
(which called for the intervention earlier this year) verifies. Australia's
aid program to the Solomon Islands is part of the system of neo-colonial
corruption and exploitation. According to Aid/Watch most of the $37.4
million in aid goes back to Australian companies with some going to
Australian multimillionaire Kerry Packer's GRM International to strengthen
the law and justice sector.

Instead, Australia should pay reparations to the Solomon Islanders for
years of colonial and neo-colonial exploitation and support an immediate
reversal of the privatisation and other neo-liberal policies that have been
forced on the Solomons and other Pacific nations. Australia should support
the nationalisation, under community control, of the mines and plantations
and help end the destruction of its forests and fisheries by international
corporations. This will begin to address the root sources of ethnic
conflicts and corruption in the Solomon Islands.

On top of that, we support Aid/Watch's call for an aid program to the
Solomon Islands that should be "focused primarily on alleviating poverty,
thereby promoting sustainable development within the country and attacking
the problem of internal conflict directly by addressing the urgent needs of
the people of the Solomon Islands". One such measure could also include
fully funding young Solomon Islanders’ travel, board and tuition to study
in Australian schools and universities. Canberra should repudiate the Bush
doctrine of pre-emptive military intervention and instead cultivate
peaceful relations with its Pacific and Asian neighbours.

The new imperialist interventions are the armed component of corporate
globalisation when local elites can no longer be trusted, or be relied on,
to implement the intensified exploitation that neo-liberalism demands.


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Australia in the Solomons: Security in whose interests?
A Background Briefing Paper by Action in Solidarity with Asia and the
Pacific, 8 July 2003

Colonial legacy

The Solomons crisis is rooted in the debilitating colonial legacy that goes
back for more than a century. Selective and distorted economic development,
arbitrarily-drawn borders, racist colonial administration, and the
exploitation of ethnic divisions were the basic features of Britain's
control of the Solomon Islands.

The present ethnic tension stem from Britain's policy of privileging
Malaitan employment in its colonial industries and administration. This
began when thousands of Malaitans were brought to work on plantations in
Guadalcanal in the early 20th century. As the predominantly male Malaitian
workforce intermarried with Guadalcanalese women, the Malaitans benefited
from the Guadalcanalese custom of matrilineal land inheritance. Over time,
Malaitans came to dominate the professions, business, public service,
police and military. By the time of independence in 1978, the legacy of
colonial de-development left the Solomons economy reliant on a few primary
resources - the lion's share of which remained in British and Australian
corporations’ hands.

The Solomon Islands Plantation Limited (SIPL) is almost wholly owned by the
British Commonwealth Development Corporation (CDC), after Honiara sold its
30% share to the CDC in 1999. Indigenous landowners have only a 2% stake.
The dependence on primary industries is also responsible for a debilitating
trade imbalance: in 2001-02 the Solomons imported $64 million of Australian
products ­ nearly half its total imports ­ while exporting only $2 million
of goods to Australia. This huge shortfall is made up for by a program of
"boomerang aid" from the Australian government. This means aid is tied to
contracts given exclusively to Australian companies, of which 100 were
operating prior to the 2000 coup.

According to AID/WATCH, 70% of all Australian aid is directly tied to
Australian companies. One example is the $17.2 million allocated to the
Solomons for "reforming" the legal sector, directly tied to the services
provided by Kerry Packer's management firm, GRM International.

Neocolonialism

Like many former colonies, the Solomons was only de-colonised at the formal
level of government administration. Beneath this veneer, structures of deep
economic dependence and exploitation remain in place. The Australian-owned
Gold Ridge mine, which opened in 1998, doled out just 3% in royalty
payments to the Solomons, divided between three parties: 1.5% to the
central government, 0.3% to the Guadalcanal province, and 1.2% to the
landowners. Deteriorating global economic conditions and the concomitant
pressure to open national economies to global competition and neo-liberal
restructuring have opened up new avenues for exploitation and dependence by
imperial interests, chiefly Australia.

When the 1997-8 Asian financial crisis nearly halved the value of timber
exports to Asia - the largest source of Solomons’ foreign earnings ­ a
sharp economic austerity drive followed: unemployment skyrocketed and
social services were slashed. In June 2002, the Solomons government asked
the IMF/World Bank and "donor" countries for a substantial injection of
funds to stave off a crisis. The Australian government led the charge in
demanding a further slashing of jobs and government spending in return for
the aid. That same month, Honiara ceded control of its finances with the
appointment of a New Zealand "public sector and economic reform"
consultant, Lloyd Powell, as Permanent Secretary of Finance. Powell heads a
NZ company with a history of overseeing neo-liberal "reform" in more than
20 Third World countries, including the Cook Islands, Vanuatu, Tonga and
Kiribati. At Powell's recommendation, Honiara retrenched 1300 public sector
workers in November 2002.

Corruption

The root source of today's ethnic conflict is a mixture of the
divide-and-rule legacy of the colonial era and the grinding economic
austerity program. Opportunist and corrupt politicians have exploited
tensions resulting from the drastic shortage of jobs, services and land to
deflect blame from themselves and their policies. Much is being made of the
problem of corruption when explaining the failure of aid and development
funds. However, no finger is pointed at the overarching neocolonial system
- now reinforced by neo-liberal economic policies - that fundamentally
governs every sphere of Solomons society, economy and politics. A
patron-client relationship has developed between the foreign
multinationals, Western governments’ aid programs and neo-liberal financial
institutions, on the one hand, and the local (Malaitan) political elite on
the other. The latter was cultivated by the former (and the British
colonial regime before that) to do its bidding and administering which,
until now, the local elite has done adequately even while ordinary Solomon
Islanders have suffered.

In order to justify a military intervention, Canberra now feigns concern
for the Solomons people. But the Howard government's lack of concern was
amply revealed in January when it took Canberra a week - and only after
public and regional pressure ­ to send assistance to several Solomons
islands in the wake of Cyclone Zoe.

Stability for capital

The Australian intervention in the Solomons is fundamentally aimed at
restoring the stable conditions for Western - primarily Australian -
economic interests. Specifically, it wants the neoliberal restructuring
continued, the Gold Ridge mine and the SIPL's palm oil plantations
reopened, the re-entry of 100 Australian companies which have departed and
the resumption of Australian imports. The planned intervention does not
represent the beginning of Australia's neocolonial project in the Solomons,
but its extension.

The guiding policy is summed up by the Australian Strategic Policy
Institute ’s (ASPI) paper, Our failing neighbour: Australia and the future
of Solomon Islands, which states unequivocally that "our policy towards
Solomon Islands must be designed with the aim of serving our national
interests". What are these interests? It says that while business and
investment opportunities are "not huge", they are "potentially valuable".
"Prior to the ethnic conflict, bilateral merchandise trade between
Australia and Solomon Islands peaked in 1997-98 with $106 million
(comprising $101 million in exports and around $5 million in imports).
Since then it has almost halved to a low in 2000­01 of $56 million ($52
million in exports and $4 million in imports), before recovering slightly
in 2001­02 to $64 million, comprising exports of $62 million, but only $2
million in imports."

ASPI proposes the formation of a Solomon Islands Rehabilitation Authority
(SIRA), staffed predominantly by Australian officials, to take over the
Solomons police force and treasury department. SIRA would also need to have
"a strong focus on stimulating private enterprise", ASPI says. In a clear
reference to Canberra’s new role in the Bush World Order, the ASPI warns
that "state failure reflects badly on Australia" and "Australia's standing
in the wider world - including with the United States - is therefore at stake".

Preemption

The Solomons intervention is Canberra's first step in leading a pre-emptive
intervention. Foreign minister Alexander Downer told the National Press
Club on June 26: "We will not sit back and watch while a country slips
inexorably into decay and disorder. Already the region is troubled by
business scams, illegal exploitation of natural resources, crimes such as
gun running, and the selling of passports and bank licences to dubious
foreign interests. The last thing we can afford is an already susceptible
region being overwhelmed by more insidious and direct threats to Australia."

The ASPI report claims the Solomons could become a "petri dish" for the
growth of transnational crime and terrorism. ASPI director, Hugh White,
told SBS's Dateline on July 2: "You don't always have the luxury of making
strategic policy on the basis of empirical evidence of problems that have
already arisen … The question … is whether we want to stand back and see
whether that [i.e., crime and terrorism] happens in our part of the world,
or whether we want to acknowledge that as a serious risk and take sensible
steps now to prevent it occurring." In its 2002 "strategic assessment",
Beyond Bali, ASPI considered Australia's broader imperial interests in the
south-west Pacific, including the potential for transnational crime. "But
our interests go deeper than that", it goes on to say. "The arc of islands
which those countries occupy has been the traditional focus of Australia's
most acute strategic sensitivities, and remains important to us today. As
long as we are concerned about defending Australia from direct military
attack, we need to be concerned about the ability of any potentially
hostile power to operate from bases in those islands. "These countries are
also potential havens for terrorist groups … For many decades we sought to
protect Australia's interests by supporting colonial rule in one form or
another. When the tide of post-war decolonisation reached the South Pacific
in the 1970s, we recognised that the best way for Australia to continue to
manage our strategic interests was to build close bilateral relationships
with our near neighbours as independent states, supported by generous aid
programs. "But despite our efforts the continued viability of PNG, the
Solomons and Vanuatu as nation states is now uncertain. Their Governments
are weak, transient and hard to deal with. Corruption is rife and control
over territory is uncertain. Economies are stagnant and law and order is
poor. Their ability to resist penetration by outsiders ­ whether states or
non-state entities - is almost nil. "This poses an urgent problem for
Australia … In the Solomon Islands … the collapse of effective government
means that there may be no point in tryingto work with the national
authorities … "Australian policy since decolonisation has consistently
stressed the need to allow these countries to manage their own problems …
It seems that as far as our Melanesian relationships are concerned, this
approach will no longer work."

The Australian's hawkish and racist foreign editor, Greg Sheridan, is less
restrained. In a column in March 2001, he warned: "Ultimately having
sub-Saharan African conditions in a raft of nearby micro-states means the
people flee to Australia. They come from increasingly lawless gun-filled
societies where they have not had the opportunity of a decent education.
Inevitably, guns, drugs, crime and disease will make their way to Australia
… Melanesia is on fire and the flames will one day engulf
Australia." In the wake of the US-British-Australian pre-emptive strike on
Iraq, the Solomons military intervention - the largest since the second
world war ­ marks Canberra's turn to a more interventionist US-style
foreign policy doctrine in which, in the words of Downer, "sovereignty is
not absolute".

Given the explosive social conditions created by neoliberal economic
policies, Canberra is nervous about the Pacific elites’ ability to reliably
manage Australia's business interests, contain social unrest and spurn the
advances of other foreign powers (notably China and France). As Downer told
the National Press Club, "What underpins our approach … is a determination
to advance the national interest in a pragmatic and hard headed way". All
disguises of multilateralism and respect for sovereignty are thrown out in
Canberra's Brave New World. The Solomons intervention will further
exacerbate social tensions and will not resolve the underlying economic and
social problems.

AFP's Pacific correspondent, Michael Field, quotes a highly placed contact
in the Solomons in his June 26 report: "One suspects he [Solomons PM, Allan
Kamakeza] sees foreign military intervention as his only chance to stay in
power (while the opposition sees it as a chance to depose him) …’ "Many of
those actively engaged in the Solomons fear the instability will worsen
with military or para-military involvement … the fear is that military
thinking with rules of engagement and exit strategies is not a long-term
solution to an issue few in Canberra and Wellington really understand."

Assist the Solomons people

This pre-emptive flexing of Anzac muscle must be opposed by all those who
support a progressive and humanitarian outcome for the Solomons people. It
is a complex issue: many here, in the Solomons and throughout the region
agree that something needs to be done - and immediately. An immediate
expansion of employment by reversing the IMF-dictated privatisations and
cuts to social services would be a good start, and much more effective in
dealing with the law-and-order problems. This must be funded by a full
resumption - and more - of aid funds with no strings attached. This will
relieve pressure on land in Guadalcanal and remove the support base for the
armed gangs, presently feeding on the disaffection and resentment bred by
high unemployment. Such a program must be placed under the democratic
control of the Solomons people, including the many local civil
organisations and technical and administrative personnel that are currently
powerless in the face of Canberra's intervention. It is also under this
sort of control that new policing bodies can be democratically
reconstituted from the majority of ordinary Malaitans and Guadalcanalese.
Further, Australia, New Zealand and Britain must inject both funds and
personnel to undertake a long-term, comprehensive program of training
medical staff, teachers and other skilled workers, and reconstructing
infrastructure.

References

1."Ethnic conflict a legacy of imperialist exploitation", Norm Dixon, Green
Left Weekly http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2003/544/544p17.htm "John
Howard's new colonialism", Doug Lorimer, Green Left Weekly
http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2003/545/545p3.htm "Troops should not go",
Chris Latham, Green Left Weekly
http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2003/545/545p3b.htm Australian Strategic
Policy Institute: www.aspi.org.au Aid/watch briefing paper by Tim O’Connor:
http://www.aidwatch.org.au/index.php?current=1&display=aw00385&display_item=

2. "Aid has failed the Pacific", Helen Hughes, Centre for Independent
Studies: www.cis.org.au "Beyond ethnicity: Understanding the crisis in the
Solomon Islands", Tarcisius Tara Kabutaulaka, University of the South
Pacific: journalism.uts.edu.au/archive/fiji_coup/beyondethnicity.html "Free
markets add to woes of Solomon Islands", Geoff Tucker, New Zealand Herald,
3 July 2003 Security in an unstable world, speech by Alexander Downer, 26
June 2003: www.foreignminister.gov.au/speeches/ "Paradise lost in the
Pacific", Rowan Callick, Australian Financial Review, 1 July 2003