Fear and frustration rife in Solomon Islands

By GRAHAM REID

Richard Majchizak's small shop on the first floor of one of Honiara's few multi-storey buildings doesn't have many paying customers these days. He sells cheap, dubbed-off reggae cassettes and the local boys hanging around the door listening don't have money.

"It's very quiet here right now," sighs Majchizak with weary frustration. "No one has money for anything."

What there is in abundance in Solomon Islands, a country riven by endemic corruption and sporadic violence, is frustration and fear.

The "special constables" - undisciplined and armed former rebels who can hold the Government and officials to ransom at gunpoint - are still a threat, and on the remote southern Weathercoast of the main island of Guadalcanal the rebel leader Harold Keke continues his killing spree.

A fortnight ago his followers killed another boatload of young men taking supplies to the police, who are trying to track him in the inhospitable country he knows intimately.

Keke, more a madman than a political dissident, is an isolated problem in a country that seems unnaturally cursed with them.

The beheading of the Australian Seventh Day Adventist missionary Lance Gersbach in May was another. The assassination attempt on the Prime Minister's special adviser last year was another, the murder of a former politician and the subsequent escape from prison by his killer yet one more.

But in Honiara, where power and water supplies are erratic, life goes on much as ever. The women sit on the broken footpaths selling the foul local tobacco, betel nut, and individual cigarettes, and the boys hang around the record shop.

"Yes, it's just the same and there's not a serious law-and-order problem we are facing in Honiara," says Priestley Habru, a journalist from the Solomon Star. "But the news about the intervention of Australia and New Zealand has made our image overseas such that we are being seen as a dangerous place and that there's a law and order problem.

"But it's not that dangerous compared to the past couple of years. The feedback from the public in our letters column, however, has been that most people welcome the initiative by the Government to have Australia and New Zealand intervene. Generally people, and even the Opposition, are welcoming it."

Majchizak agrees. "That was good news that the Australians and New Zealanders would do something, and we are quite relieved. People heard it on the radio and so it's all quite positive. People talk about it daily and want them to come. They welcome the help."

The Solomons Government has reached out for help - Prime Minister Allan Kemakeza visited Canberra three weeks ago and welcomed high-level officials from Australia and New Zealand on a scoping mission a fortnight ago.

While nothing has been confirmed by way of intervention, it seems likely a force of 2000 troops or armed police will be sent, around 300 of them New Zealanders.

The killings on the Weathercoast have been characterised as an emblem of the Solomons' lawlessness but, while horrific, they have not been unexpected or uncommon.

Keke, a former policeman, has been holed up for months and while he may claim to have executed a Cabinet minister last year, he is not considered an immediate or widespread threat and has few followers.

So if Keke isn't the real problem and life in Honiara is as always - miserable - then why would Australia and New Zealand become involved now?

In a report last year, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute pointed out the Solomons could be a haven for terrorists and cited it as a pivot in an arc of instability in the region.

With special constables able to hold the Government to ransom, the Solomons are a volatile mix of gunmen, corruption and increasing poverty. Its government and financial systems are effectively impotent, the social infrastructure has collapsed and the country is considered a threat to regional security.

It is also slightly crazy. This month, as attention was focused on pressing issues such as bribery, unresolved assassinations and the failed social infrastructure, Honiara city councillor John Iromea got to grips with real issues. Using a mish-mash of Biblical sources, he proposed legislation that would ban women from wearing shorts in the streets of the capital.

When a pyramid-selling scheme hit trouble in May, banks closed under threats from investors who had lost their earnings. Among them were special constables who had been paid out and, in the expectation of immediate riches, had invested their severance money in the Family Charity Trust scheme.

When it failed to deliver they had the guns to back up their threats of reprisals. The ANZ evacuated two senior managers who feared for their lives.

An official unwilling to be named says there is no dramatic crisis in the Solomons, just the creeping problem of systemic corruption and disrespect for law.

Public security in Honiara is still good but people are sick of the problems with special constables and the dysfunctional political and justice systems.

"There is always a drama in the Solomons. A lot of it we have to attribute as being more symptoms of the same cause rather than each being a new step down the slope."

But whether the slide is gradual or steep, the Solomons is a mess and desperately needs help, which is why Parliament, which rarely sits, will be called on July 8 to discuss a motion requesting Anzac-led intervention.

Australian and New Zealand police are already on the ground mentoring and acting in institutional roles, but in a system as damaged as that in the Solomons these piecemeal measures aren't enough.

What the Australian Strategic Policy Institute has suggested is a two-step programme: first imposing and maintaining law and order through direct intervention, then dismantling and rebuilding the administrative structures.

Such intervention in an independent state - even if invited - is a controversial move and politically fraught.

But for ordinary people in the Solomons it is getting harder to survive.

"I've got a job with the EU now," says Majchizak. "I travel around the islands to take food to their projects and that helps us a bit. I try to sell our tapes there, too, but ...

"We now do reproductions of photos in the shop and one guy came in today. There were two cousins and they argued. They were drunk and to make a point this one guy went and got his gun and shot him.

"So today this guy comes in with a photo of the guy who was shot and wants it enlarged for the memory. It's sad, and crazy.

"I tell you, when the news came that Australia might intervene I thought, 'Good' because that makes me feel safer. I can't stand a second coup, my nerves couldn't take it. I would just start swearing at these [special constable] guys.

"They are just bullies. But they are bullies with guns, you know?"