John Roughan: Our people pretty good at making or keeping peace

Some of the neighbours are becoming quite hairy-chested about this mission to restore order and safety in the Solomon Islands.

The day after Foreign Ministers Phil Goff and Alexander Downer announced we would jointly send an armed force to police the place, an excited message came in from the Australian Defence Association in Canberra.

It's an outfit, I think, with pretensions to military and strategic analysis.

Welcoming intervention in what it called an "arc of instability", it declared: "Every potential coup plotter, ethnic warlord and plain corrupt big man in the region needs to be clearly deterred from sabotaging his country's democratic governance and national development.

"Certain fear of concerted regional intervention and retribution," it continued, "would go a long way in preventing such thugs ripping off their own people and endangering the security of the whole region."

The whole region? They must have suspected that was unconvincing so they followed up with a heavy barrage.

"For too long an intellectually old-fashioned, morally bankrupt and timorous clamour about avoiding supposed 'neo-colonialist' connotations has shackled Australian and New Zealand strategic policymaking. Such cant merchants should just grow up and stop looking at the world through a 1960s campus prism."

Goodness. The Solomons has them talking Texan again, and we're not hearing only from the fringe. When Downer and Goff announced the deployment last weekend, the Australian Foreign Minister declared his country was "prepared to join coalitions of the willing for the good of humanity" and decried multi-lateralism.

Alongside him, Goff was content to note that this intervention had been requested by the Solomons Government, such as it is. And he had no illusions about the task ahead. How glad I am of this country sometimes.

Never more so than when you see film or photographs of New Zealand soldiers in pacifying roles overseas - shirts off and mucking in with a spade or carrying a slung rifle that seems superfluous behind a cheerful face.

I am sure peacekeeping is not always like that but I am equally sure that success depends on a calm, competent demeanour and no whiff of racial or moral condescension. I bet our people are remarkably good.

They are certainly modest about it. This week marked the conclusion of a five-year mission in Bougainville, monitoring a tense ceasefire that grew out of a quiet initiative by Foreign Minister Don McKinnon back in 1997. The story has never really been told.

Numerous earlier efforts had been made by outsiders to end the conflict over an island ethnically and geographically related to the Solomons but which had been attached to Papua New Guinea since Australia inherited the area from a defeated German empire in 1918.

In January 1997 McKinnon sent John Hayes, our former High Commissioner to Port Moresby, to meet the PNG Government and independence fighters on Bougainville. In May McKinnon talked rebel leaders into coming to a meeting at Burnham Army camp near Christchurch.

To get here the 80 delegates had to run a PNG blockade of the island. New Zealand officials accompanied them out. The helicopter that Hayes was in came under fire.

They got through to the Solomons and came to Burnham where the Bougainvilleans were cocooned with no agenda, no preconceived goals, and being left alone to consider their situation.

The initial sessions were apparently taut and emotional but on July 18 they produced the "Burnham declaration", agreeing to negotiations with the PNG Government and inviting an independent peacekeeping force to Bougainville.

The delegates were delivered home by HMNZS Canterbury, which then collected five PNG soldiers who had been held by a rebel force for more than a year.

Their release was well received in Port Moresby and after more shuttle diplomacy representatives of the PNG Government and a combined Bougainville delegation were flown back to Burnham in October.

Unexpectedly, they were joined by a delegation from the Solomons which evidently proved helpful to negotiating the truce that persists to this day.

The truce monitoring group - Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Vanuatu - was led initially by New Zealand Army Brigadier Roger Mortlock.

Its friendly, neutral, accessible style proved disarming for islanders whose history had given them no reason to trust outsiders.

The Solomons archipelago was raided by European explorers from the 16th century. Bougainville, the largest island, was named after a French sailor.

In the 19th century islanders were taken by Australian slave traders to work in Queensland sugar plantations. In 1884 it became part of the German empire.

Administered by Australia under a League of Nations mandate after 1918, it was overrun by the Japanese in World War II. In its American liberation hundreds of non-combatants died.

Under resumed Australian administration the island was plundered for copper mainly for the benefit of PNG. Its resentment eventually triggered demand for independence.

It is still a long way from setting up a viable autonomous government and the fate of the rest of the archipelago is not encouraging.

The Solomons is by any definition a failed state but it contains no threat to us. This is a purely humanitarian mission. Let's hope the New Zealand style prevails.