Death on the altar - savage rule of a fallen hero

By MARY-LOUISE O'CALLAGHAN

Once a Catholic altar boy, Harold Keke these days forces others - at gunpoint - to build altars for him.

It's all part of a bizarre cult-like existence that the 30-something Solomon Islands rebel leader appears to have created through a mixture of charisma and fear on the remote Weathercoast, which snakes along the long southern edge of the island of Guadalcanal.

It is here, within a short section of the sandy coast that rises sharply into mountains on the opposite side of the island from Solomons capital Honiara that Harold Keke appears to have built an increasingly terrifying reign over the village folk.



Executions, armed clashes with fellow villagers, torture and the taking of hostages are now almost daily occurrences according to reports and accounts by those who have managed to escape.

It wasn't always so.

One of the first men to take up arms, in 1998, Keke was once considered a local hero.

He was a founding leader of the movement on Guadalcanal which sparked the ethnic tension with fellow Solomon Islanders from the island of Malaita that led to a coup in June 2000.

Before that Keke, a mechanic in the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force, was blooded with fellow officers on the border of Bougainville in the early 1990s, when the police field force frequently came under attack from the better-armed PNG Defence Force.

He has retained contact with elements on Bougainville.

When a truce was being negotiated a few months after the coup, Keke refused to participate, claiming Guadalcanal grievances had not been adequately addressed, although he did respect the spirit of the ceasefire for many months.

It was the failure of the Solomon Islands and, to a lesser extent, Australian authorities to resolve these grievances and bring Keke into the peace process that marks the turning point in his activities.



News of Keke's alleged activities are often vague, confused and difficult to verify, but persistent reports over the past year tell of a man possessed and unchecked in the power he is exercising at the point of a gun.



Keke often decided to "try" and kill a loyal supporter if he decided he could no longer be trusted.

"He puts them on the altar and then he tells us to pray and then he asks us, should he kill them and we are too scared to speak, too scared to tell him, please don't do this again," one witness said last year.

A similar scene apparently took place on one of Keke's altars in August last year when he assassinated his local MP, the priest-politician and Government minister Father Augustine Geve.

He then radioed in the news, including a confession of his own involvement, to the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation.

But the Solomon Islands' new Police Commissioner, William Morrell, says it would be wrong to single Keke out as the country's main problem.

Morrell revealed that Keke wrote to him soon after his arrival from the United Kingdom this year, welcoming him to the country and giving him "quite a lot of background".

Says Morrell, who wrote back to the rebel leader: "My aim is to stabilise the Weathercoast as peacefully as possible by trying to engage Keke in a dialogue."

He has now received a response which he hopes will be the beginning of a peaceful resolution of the Weathercoast crisis.

Local wisdom has it that Keke would rather die than surrender.

But with the arrival of the international intervention force imminent, this may amount in the end to the same thing.