The bad old days of colonialism

Twenty-five years after declaring independence from Britain, the stricken Solomon Islands will soon again be under administration - this time from Australia, writes David Fickling

Monday July 21, 2003

Less than 30 years after Australia quit its colony of Papua New Guinea, Canberra's administrators are going back to Melanesia this week.

The first batch of more than 200 were on board the HMAS Manoora when it slipped moorings in the Queensland port of Townsville this afternoon. It was heading for the Solomon Islands, a troubled archipelago dripping off the end of Papua and torn by corruption and five years of ethnic conflict.

Eventually, around 2,000 people from Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific will form a peacekeeping force in the Solomons. You can expect dramatic reports of Anzacs disarming unruly militias, and maybe even battling rebel warlords in the dense jungles of Guadalcanal and Malaita.

Behind the scenes, a more significant change will take place: around 100 outside administrators will quietly take up crucial positions in the civil service and central bank, putting them in effective control of the country. They are likely to remain for the best part of a decade.

This has not gone unnoticed. The bill to bring in the peacekeeping force was debated the week after the Solomons celebrated the 25th anniversary of its independence from Britain, and not everyone was happy with the proposals.

Manasseh Sogavare, a former prime minister who ran a puppet government for the Malaitan Eagles militia after the country's 2000 coup, equated the intervention - which is intended to pull his cronies' snouts from the trough - to recolonisation.

More credible criticism came from Alfred Sasako, an opposition MP who complained that the civil service takeover would "give us a fish rather than teaching us how to fish". If the Solomons want to be returned to stable self-government, he pointed out, setting up a system of government by outside bureaucrats seems a strange first step to take.

From the perspective of Canberra, Wellington or London, what is happening in the Solomon Islands looks strikingly like a return to the bad old days of colonialism.

Those who point out that this is simply a stop-gap measure to get the country back on its feet can be met with a lesson from history: the favourite protest of perfidious Albion as it spread its flag around the world was that its empire was an unwilling one. British colonialists would mutter into their brandies that if only those natives could sort out their affairs properly, the imperial administration would simply wither away.

What might be more surprising to outsiders is the fact that most Solomon Islanders seem to support the intervention force. There is no official opinion polling in a nation whose telephone book runs to just over 100 pages (Sydney's has more than 6,000), but it takes a long time to meet anyone on the streets of Honiara who doesn't welcome it.

Solomon Islanders have always been amongst the most proudly independent peoples of the Pacific, but even so it's not hard to discern their reasons for welcoming the force. The country is a basket case whose government is too poor, too weak, and too corrupt to do anything about running the country. Most of the armed militias have formally disbanded, but can still use their influence to buy whatever favours they want.

There is democracy, although the country is so poor that Australia and New Zealand had to pay for the running costs of the 2001 election, and the Islanders' elected leaders tend to be more responsive to the calls of violence and kinship than those of their electorates.

Most importantly, there is no point in pumping in aid money to support the Solomons so long as anyone with a gun is able to extort it from a government that is unprotected by any effective police force or army.

Late last year, both the prime minister and treasurer paid hefty sums from the national budget to buy off armed militants close to the country's police force. Honiara's ANZ bank was less easily threatened: when its managers were issued death threats after refusing to open accounts for a well-connected local gang, the company's Australian headquarters was able to airlift the staff out of the country.

The intervention still grates, though, and it is those 100-odd civil service administrators who grate the most. The argument for them is that corruption has become so endemic in the Solomons that clean hands are needed, but against that can be set the question of sovereignty. Canberra's bureaucrats will run the show in the Solomons just as surely as Washington's will run it in Iraq.

Canberra's intentions in the issue at least seem honest. The corruption that has cripped the Solomons is a natural outgrowth of the state in which it was left when the British packed their bags 25 years ago.

The country they left behind was a dogs' dinner. Its population - then just over 150,000, now closer to 500,000 - spoke 70 different languages, and had never thought of themselves as a nation until officials in Europe drew a border around them.

The archipelago's largest island, Bougainville, had been bequeathed to Papua New Guinea during a complex round of colonial horse-trading between Britain and Germany - a situation instrumental in that island's bloody decade-long insurrection against Papuan rule.

Furthermore, the complex clan system of the islands had been thrown into disarray when America imported thousands of Malaitans to run their naval base on Guadalcanal, a settlement which later became the capital Honiara.

This conflict between clan government and state government is the plague of countries across the post-colonial world. The moralities of clan tribalism and statism cannot be easily reconciled, since both clan and state have rival claims to an individual's loyalty.

Statist bureaucrats certainly divert favours to their friends and cronies, but when they do they know it as corruption; where the ties of clan persist, the same actions can look more like an admirable loyalty to the tribe.

If the Solomons want to enjoy the welfare and economic benefits which come from state government, a way must be found to accommodate both systems, but it won't be easy.

In Scotland, it took the brutality of the Highland clearances to suppress tribalism; in Saudi Arabia it took undreamed-of oil wealth. The Solomons have nothing like the latter, and want nothing like the former, so if they are to unpick the ills of colonialism they will need outside help.

Whether the right solution is a transplanted Australian bureaucracy is more doubtful. In curing the ills of colonialism, we should be wary of reaching for colonialism as a treatment.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,1002634,00.html