Copycat coup waiting to happen

By GREG ANSLEY and BRONWYN SELL

Bartholomew Ulufa'alu knew to expect the worst.

Early this year, just after the Malaitan Eagle Force launched itself by seizing high-powered police weapons, the Solomon Islands Prime Minister feared for his life.

"I'm very vulnerable," he said. "They tried through a vote of no confidence, and now what they can try is to kill me."

Last week, Andrew Nori, spokesman for the Eagle Force, gave an even sharper warning of what lay ahead.

"Law and order can no longer be upheld where there is a breakdown in the police network," he told Australia's ABC television.

"The situation will give rise to criminal elements and the two militant groups taking control of their relevant sectors.

"In the end we will have a major confrontation between the two. So a civil war ... is a probability.

Yesterday, as Mr Ulufa'alu reportedly sat with an Eagle Force gun to his head, both men's prophecies were within a hair trigger of fulfilment.

Like Bougainville, Fiji and a string of embattled Indonesian provinces, the Solomons have collapsed into violence fomented from long-brewing local disputes and the hangover from colonialism.

The conflict is between the people of Guadalcanal, site of the capital, Honiara, and immigrants from the poorer island of Malaita.

Auckland University Pacific history expert Dr Hugh Laracy says tension has been rising for months. "People there have long memories. Every action gets a reaction; every hurt is reciprocated."

Solomon Islanders are all too aware of precedents, he says.

Bougainville, with its insurrection against rule from Port Moresby, is a short boat ride away, and Fiji strongman Major-General Sitiveni Rabuka was much admired when he went to the islands to broker peace.

George Speight's coup in Suva, according to former MP Joses Tuhanuku, almost certainly encouraged the Eagle Force to act.

Dr Laracy says the peace talks seem to have become a facade.

"The young men, or the hotheads, think, 'Well, we want some action'. It's the George Speight thing - he just seemed to cut through all the theatre of protocol. I rather fear that's what has happened now in the Solomons."

Amnesty International's New Zealand executive director, Ced Simpson, says the human rights group feared the Solomons would blow up while the Pacific was watching Fiji.

Professor John Henderson, head of political science at Canterbury University, wonders if the absence of the police commander, former Auckland detective Rangi Rangihika, may have sparked action.

"For a long time it's been suspected that the police are sympathetic with the Malaitans. The police force in the Solomons is made up mainly of Malaitans, and they have not been very effective in attempting to arrest the Malaitan group."

Now, with the Malaitan militia apparently controlling Honiara, and a large and reportedly well-armed opposing force of native Guadalcanal guerrilla fighters encircling it, yet another island state is on the verge of war.

There is, as 18 months of failed peace attempts have shown, little chance of an early, lasting solution.

The two sides are locked in by economic as well as tribal jealousies, and bound almost as firmly by internal political schisms that have allowed Mr Ulufa'alu, a Malaitan, to be taken captive by his own people.

There are even widespread reports that the Prime Minister had raised his own paramilitary force, called the Seagulls, to combat both the Eagle Force and the Guadalcanal Revolutionary Army (GRA).

According to other reports, Mr Ulufa'alu, disappointed at New Zealand and Australian reluctance to intervene, this year sought unspecified security assistance from Cuba. The approach, said to offer new diplomatic ties and possible mineral concessions, alarmed Australia, but it was a measure of the Prime Minister's desperation.

A reformist who has ruled since 1997 with wide support, especially in impoverished rural areas, he had become hopelessly enmeshed in the mounting violence between the people of Guadalcanal and Malaita.

Malaita has long been, in Solomons terms, rich in people but poor in arable land, home to a people who had been taken for virtual slave labour in Queensland canefields and to plantations elsewhere in the Solomons group. The main island of Guadalcanal, in contrast, has fewer people and far more agriculture.

In the later stages of the Second World War it also had the Americans, who poured their vast wealth into huge military facilities, including Henderson Field, now Honiara's international airport.

The advantages of an instant city of roads, hospital, buildings, port and the like were immediately obvious to the British after the war, and they made Honiara the new capital.

For the people of Guadalcanal, this was bad news. Thousands of newcomers, mainly from Malaita, descended on a city that became stretched beyond the limit providing housing, education and healthcare.

Malaitans came to dominate the economic and political life of Honiara, and in 1998 tensions found their expression in the creation of the GRA - initially a disorganised and ill-equipped band of unemployed youths but now a formidable and well-armed force of up to 2000 fighters.

Early last year, Guadalcanal provincial premier Ezekiel Alebua demanded that the Government pay millions of dollars in rent and compensation for the unconstitutional resumption of traditional land for Honiara, and for the victims of alleged rape and murder.

The GRA backed his demands with beatings and bloodshed. By June the violence had forced 2000 Malaitans to flee rural areas, and the GRA's policy of cleansing Guadalcanal of outsiders by terror and violence had left up to 55 people dead.

As many as 20,000 Malaitans fled to the relative safety of Honiara, or to their home island.

Young Malaitans, from an island with a warrior history which had resisted British control, refused to be cowed. After seeing their families safely back on Malaita, they returned to Guadalcanal to fight under the banner of the Eagle Force.

Last January, they overran a police station in the Malaitan capital of Auki, stole high-powered rifles and declared themselves openly in Honiara.

"The Malaitans are very resentful about being pushed off Guadalcanal," says Dr Laracy. "They lost a lot - many of those people had been born there. It was home. They didn't have much to lose in fighting back."

Repeated efforts at brokering peace have failed, including two attempts by General Rabuka, the 1987 Fiji coup leader, who was sent to the Solomons as a special Commonwealth envoy. Ceasefires have ended in killings.

Dr Laracy says the Malaitans have had no satisfaction from the peace talks, which were apparently supposed to resume this week after being stopped while the island hosted a youth conference.

"I don't know that it was in the nature of things for them to get satisfaction. A number of them have reached that boiling-over point."

The capture of the Solomons Government and the control of the capital by the Eagle Force, surrounded entirely by a hostile and well-armed Guadalcanal majority, leave little hope that much will change in the near future.