pn821. Lifting the Curtain on the Riots in Honiara, Solomon Islands

Several articles have once again drawn our attention to the unrest in the Solomon Islands capital of Honiara, particularly the rioting, looting and fires in Chinatown.

VUW Professor Jon Fraenkel has criticized radio/TV journalist Barbara Dreaver for her supposedly dated and limited explanation as a conflict between Honiara on the island of Guadalcanal and the nearby populous island of Malaita (see my footnote at the end), positing instead that ...

...the current conflict is mainly due to social and economic inequalities, large scale youth unemployment, and corruption exacerbated by slush funds from mainland China paid to MPs who voted for the switch in recognition from Taiwan to Beijing.

Meanwhile, mainland China hovers in the background, a major player in the events. 

 Canterbury University's Professor Anne-Marie Brady  comments on the role of Australian, Fijian, New Zealand and Papua New Guinean peacekeepers who were deployed to the Solomon Islands to stabilise the situation for a pro-China leader, alleged to have used a Chinese government slush fund to bribe militants to withdraw support from the violent protests in Honiara. 

My instinct is to back Fraenkel — inequalities and corruption is the root cause, not Dreaver's Malaita-Honiara conflict — while paying a little more attention to China's indirect and direct influences. Brady notes that:

 on December 6, despite a mountain of damning evidence of his unfitness for office going back many years, Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare easily survived a non-confidence vote in the Solomons Parliament. All those who voted in support of Sogavare had allegedly been promised money from the Chinese-backed fund.The situation is invidious, but New Zealand and Australia’s longstanding timidity on publicly confronting China’s allegedelly malign activities in the Pacific meant that it was inevitable they would find themselves using their militaries to protect Chinese interests in the Pacific. Witness our 2021 Defence Assessment that asserts that if a state that did not share New Zealand’s values and security interests – read China – set up a military base or dual-use facility in the Pacific, it would be among the most serious security threats facing New Zealand.

Jacinda has endeavoured to find a way to manage the risks in the relationship with China, while urgently trying to diversify trade. Click here for David Scott's account of our attempts to form other partnerships. 

China: pretext, reality or somewhere in between

The need to protect the Overseas Chinese community and its business interests could conceivably be used as the pretext for extending China’s military presence into the Pacific. 

But this time, as in 2006, China has been content to allow Australia and New Zealand to be its proxies in protecting Chinese interests. 

Yet as the New Zealand Defence Assessment states, both New Zealand and Australian governments believe it is a matter of time before China puts military assets into the South Pacific. The assessment records, “In 2019, China publicly announced its intention to increase its military cooperation in the Pacific, as part of its plan for an enhanced global military footprint.” 

China wants to break the US island chain containment strategy, set up at the beginning of the Cold War. 

Gordon Campbell invites us to take a deep breath:

Let's take a deep breath and consider the double standard involved in treating such a theoretical military or civilian/military base (if one ever did get built by China in partnership with say, Vanuatu or Papua New Guinea) as an intolerable game-changer. 

After all, we treat the existing huge US military bases in the Pacific (Guam, Okinawa and elsewhere) as being merely business as usual. For the record, Okinawa is closer to Shanghai than Auckland is to Queenstown, the US military bases in South Korea are closer to Beijing than Auckland is to Christchurch, and Guam is only slightly further away from Shanghai than Suva is to Wellington. So… If adjacent military bases are the measure of threat, it is pretty clear who has more right to be feeling a bit threatened.

So there we have it. 

• China has some legitimate reasons to be interested in Honiara.
• US and Australian interests are not entirely altruistic. 
• To protect our trade as much as for principle's sake, we are trying to sit somewhere between the US-Australia and China. 
• And in Honiara —where part of the wider Pacific picture is being played out— politicians become rich from China's bribes and unemployed urban youth revolt.

 Footnote on Maliata and Honiara 

In 1990, I published Popiulesin Blog Honiara (ISSN0114-8834), an analysis of the 1986 Census. 

 At that time Maliata comprised over 30% of the Solomon Islands population and 35% of Honiara's population. People born in Malaita comprised a significant minority — and in some cases— a significant majority of most of the town's districts. 

There were signs that colonial migration patterns, where young unmarried males dominated and much of the migration was short-term and impermanent, was being replaced by more equal sex ratios, more married couples, more part-time and full-time employment, more permanence and more involvement by provinces in addition to Malaita. 

If we add Honiara-born to Malaitan parents to the mix, Honiara in 1986 was very much a town inhabited by Malaitans, although not a town where Malaitans were equally represented in business and employment status.

The dichotomy between Malaita and Honiara is increasingly unreal; the "real" dichotomy is between the wealthy and the poor. 

 And the "real" causes are many-stranded loops woven between and within the local communities and foreign interventions. 

-- ACW