Tag Archive for: RAMSI

No short-term solution to Solomon Islands strife

Echoes and omens abound as Australia steps in to stop riot, arson and looting in a South Pacific capital.

Honiara offers a reprise of previous tragedy that’s a grim foretaste of the future facing Melanesia.

A capital city riot has become an extreme expression of political and economic failure in the South Pacific—unusual but not unprecedented.

Political ‘big men’ clash. One side pushes too hard or just rolls the dice. Politics boils as an elite struggle for power becomes a free-for-all in the streets. Thousands of idle young men and women are ready to rumble, to smash windows and do some ‘free shopping’.

Consider a roll call of South Pacific capital city riots: the Sandline affair in Port Moresby in 1997 when the military revolted and dispatched Julius Chan’s government; the parliament siege in Suva in 2000 that ended the government of Mahendra Chaudhry; the 2006 Dili crisis that saw an attempted coup and resignation of the prime minister, Mari Alkatiri; and the 2006 riot in Nuku’alofa that destroyed much of the central business district.

Honiara has a special place in this blackened list. In the Solomon’s capital, controversial prime ministers face riots. Five years of unrest and conflict led to the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI), the $3 billion intervention that ran from 2003 to 2017.

After the 2006 election, Honiara suffered dreadful destruction and looting—to stand amid the ruins of Honiara’s Chinatown in 2006 was to feel a great shock at what the Solomons had just done to itself. Although not on the same scale, more riots erupted in 2019 when Manasseh Sogavare won his fourth term as prime minister.

As Anouk Ride commented after the 2019 unrest in Honiara, ‘[R]iots in Solomon Islands are not “irrational” or “chaotic” behaviour. They arise at moments of key political transitions, they have specific targets, they enjoy a degree of social support and they serve a symbolic purpose.’

Last week’s deadly strife in Honiara was about politics, but it was also a chance for free shopping. The initial Malaitan protestors soon had company. Everyone could join in. Among the conventions of Pacific city riots: the taxis keep running so the loot can be carried away.

Mihai Sora’s paints the picture:

The protests rapidly morphed from a provincial–national feud to a violent release of pent-up angst over daily hardships exacerbated by the global health and economic impacts of Covid. These hardships are felt acutely in vulnerable developing countries such as Solomon Islands, with the repeated imposition of states of emergency, perennial resentment at perceived corruption and brazen chicanery among MPs, and a predominantly young population frustrated with a lack of education and job opportunities.

Personal security is now an issue for the capital city elites of the South Pacific; it’s no longer just a Port Moresby syndrome. The people who run government, the professionals and those who do business have to worry about the safety of their homes and the security of their families.

The Pacific still has strong societies and weak states, but the small middle class can no longer be as confident in the social and religious conservatism that has underpinned island stability. Mostly, this is a discussion about Melanesia, but the barbed-wire-and-bars security consciousness is on show in the capitals of Polynesia.

Capital city riots are a violent moment when the Pacific youth bulge flexes its muscle.

Half the region’s population is aged under 23. The bulge is ‘particularly acute in Melanesian states,’ Catherine Wilson writes, and the demographic dividend can deliver disillusioned young people living on the margins of the cities.

Youth bulges with lots of unemployed males mean revolution, from the Protestant Reformation to the young recruits for 20th-century facism. The bulge tips over societies, Samuel Huntington reckons, when those aged between 15 and 24 exceed 20% of the population: ‘Young people are the protagonists of protest, instability, reform and revolution.’

Amid all the complexities and difficulties of Solomon Islands, credit Australia for an instant, unhesitating response: troops and police on the way within 24 hours of Sogavare’s request.

Australia’s action this time is carefully expressed in limited language, marking important differences with the RAMSI model.

RASMI was a regional effort, endorsed by the Pacific Islands Forum; it became a 14-year intervention because of a highly ambitious agenda of change and reform. Australia did most of the cash and carrying of RAMSI, but it always embraced the regional label that burnished the mission’s legitimacy.

This time, Australia is acting bilaterally under the terms of the 2017 security treaty negotiated with Solomon Islands when RAMSI finished—although as soon as Prime Minister Scott Morrison got the call he was on the phone to fellow leaders in New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Fiji.

Morrison stresses that Australia’s sole aim is to ‘provide stability and security’ for Honiara: ‘It is not the Australian government’s intention in any way to intervene in the internal affairs of the Solomon Islands; that is for them to resolve. I’ve made that very clear. Our presence there does not indicate any position on the internal issues of the Solomon Islands.’

Such language expresses a great irony: Australia is intervening to steady the government of Manasseh Sogavare. Once he damned RAMSI as an Australian parallel government usurping sovereignty. Now he turns to Canberra to save his government.

The stoush with Canberra was at its most intense during Sogavare’s second period as prime minister (2006–2007), when he expelled the Australian high commissioner from Honiara and threatened to eliminate Australia from RAMSI.

In February 2007, Australia’s foreign minister, Alexander Downer, published a ‘letter to the people of Solomon Islands’ that amounted to a denunciation of Sogavare.

Downer attacked ‘a deliberate push to undermine RAMSI, to tarnish its reputation’, the ‘outrageous’ and ‘insulting’ attempts to smear the mission, and Australia’s concern at attempts to undermine Solomon Islands institutions designed to ensure the government was accountable.

And that was the public version of the argument.

By the time Sogavare was farewelling RAMSI in 2017, during his third term as PM, much history was forgotten amid the gentle thanks.

In saving Honiara today, Australia will do as little as possible to help the political fortunes of the Solomons’ prime minister.

Acting as the responsible power in the Melanesian arc is always going to be tough. Whatever credit Canberra receives will be accompanied by kicks; it’s the inevitable mix for the nation determined to be the South Pacific’s central power.

Being the region’s key economic and security partner is a pricey responsibility. Few bouquets. Plenty of bruising jobs. Australia’s interest in the political stability of the region means we must help to hold it up by holding it close.

Helping out Sogavare, however, is proof of that cynical observation about no good deed going unpunished.

Australia’s agenda for integrating the South Pacific

In offering security and economic integration to the South Pacific, Australia is starting gently with small steps.

The soft-and-slow approach to integration has the best chance of success, because South Pacific states will embrace the offer incrementally. In last week’s post, I discussed the factors driving the new foreign policy white paper’s ambition ‘to integrate Pacific countries into the Australian and New Zealand economies and our security institutions’.

The paper says integration is ‘vital to the economic prospects of the Pacific. Growth is constrained for most countries because of a combination of remoteness from markets, limited land and resource bases, the dispersal of people over many islands and environmental fragility’.

To show it’s serious about integration, Australia has to keep chipping at the old no-go issue—Pacific workers getting access to Australian jobs. For many years, the no-go routine was that Pacific leaders would always go to labour mobility as a key issue, while Canberra would quickly go, ‘No!’

In the Pacific Plan for ‘regional cooperation and integration’ adopted by the Pacific Islands Forum in 2005, the islands finally got ‘labour mobility’ onto the official regional agenda, despite Oz screams. Over the last decade, the introduction of islanders to Australia as seasonal/guest workers on farms has seen this Oz taboo start to crumble. The Australian pilot scheme for Pacific workers announced in 2008 (following New Zealand’s lead) was made permanent in 2012. The white paper shows Australia widening its thinking about Pacific workers to serve integration:

  • The Seasonal Worker Program is to be streamlined to give more Australian employers access to workers from the Pacific and Timor-Leste for jobs such as fruit picking.
  • The new Pacific Labour Scheme will allow workers to do non-seasonal low- and semi-skilled work in rural and regional Australia in health care, social assistance and hospitality.
  • Australia will establish a Pacific Labour Facility to connect workers, employers and training institutions; to provide financial education for workers; and to monitor the impact of labour mobility programs in Australia and in Pacific economies. Financial institutions will be pushed to reduce the cost of remittances to the Pacific.

The old Pacific Plan fell into the huge split that opened between Fiji’s military regime and the forum, but the plan’s thinking about sharing institutions and systems across the region has been dusted off. The ‘sharing’ idea is a polite way of saying Australia can do stuff on behalf of island governments. The first small step is that Nauru, Tonga and Tuvalu will use Australian testing services to improve the quality and reliability of pharmaceuticals.

In selling integration, Australia needs to take lessons from its wins, draws and disasters in the South Pacific.

A win with continuing relevance is the 14-year Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) to save the Solomons from ethnic conflict and state failure. Australia agonised for years before it committed to RAMSI, but then stayed for a long haul that cost nearly $3 billion. Integration is actually a cost-effective response to dire island needs—permanent engagement beats ad hoc emergency scrambles as the way to do good policy. And it makes budget sense.

A significant part of the RAMSI win was that it was done by the Pacific Islands Forum. The forum imprimatur—plus the support of Solomon Islanders—kept RAMSI going when politicians in Honiara tried to kick out Australia and sink the mission. RAMSI is the biggest security effort ever mounted by the forum—and it succeeded. Oz muscle is central (and we pay the bills), but regional control is more than symbolism. Integration must be owned by Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste and the South Pacific as much as it’s offered by Oz.

A draw with many lessons is the tortuous negotiations from 2009 to 2017 of PACER Plus—the Pacific Agreement on Closer Economic Relations. The white paper talks up PACER Plus—due to come into force in 2019—as ‘laying the ground for stronger trade and investment, increasing business confidence through transparent and enforceable rules’. Trouble is, the two biggies—PNG and Fiji—have refused to sign. Calling this result a draw might be overly kind. A simple lesson from a long, complicated process: in pursuing integration, Australia can’t take a one-size-fits-all approach to the South Pacific.

Finally, the disaster—the Pacific solution. John McCarthy’s thought about how we talk and act in Asia has even more weight in the South Pacific: ‘We must practise what we preach. Reputation counts. It is, for example, hard to claim leadership on human rights while defending our policies on the camps on Manus and Nauru.’

Ditto when Australia claims leadership in the South Pacific. The Pacific solution (sending boat people to the Pacific) is reputational acid.

Island leaders and officials ruefully accept that PNG decided to do a deal on Australia’s use of Manus. PNG is big enough to deal and knows how to wrestle Australia. But the view about Nauru is that the region’s great power exploited a bankrupt microstate with a ‘deal’ it couldn’t refuse. That Nauru acid has been part of the South Pacific view of Oz for 17 years. Pacific elites are equally caustic on climate change, where Canberra is seen as nodding but not actually hearing or heeding island concerns.

The acid eats at Australia’s blithe assumption that its good intentions are automatically accepted. The hegemon isn’t always benign—we have form as a selfish bully. That perception means integration is a good idea that’ll gain ground slowly. Integration asks the South Pacific to compromise, even cede, sovereignty—to trust Australia’s economic and security leadership.

What’s the significance of Australia’s new security treaty with Solomon Islands?

The Australian government has tabled the text of the security agreement it signed with (former) Solomon Islands prime minister Manasseh Sogavare during his visit to Australia in August this year. The agreement has been billed as an important confidence-building measure following the conclusion of the 14-year Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) in June 2017 and the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force’s resumption of responsibility for national security.

The Treaties Committee of the Australian Parliament invited comment on the agreement in October, although it doesn’t appear to have attracted any public submissions, and ratification should be a formality. On the Solomon Islands side, the agreement will need to be ratified by the National Parliament. Sogavare lost office in early November in a vote of no confidence, but his replacement, Rick Hou, is considered sympathetic towards Australia, and the Australian government can be confident that Hou will support ratification.

Throughout RAMSI’s time in Solomon Islands, an international agreement—the ‘RAMSI treaty’—and associated Solomon Islands legislation—the Facilitation of International Assistance Act—governed the mission’s presence. While the act remains in force, the treaty lapsed with RAMSI’s final withdrawal on 30 June 2017.

The preamble of the new treaty notes the two countries’ ‘desire to establish a future basis upon which Australia may provide assistance to Solomon Islands in case of a major security challenge, humanitarian disaster or similar circumstances’. That deliberate open-endedness about the circumstances under which the treaty might come into effect is echoed in Article 2, which outlines the scope of any Australian response. Australia may provide:

  • assistance in ‘the provision of safety and security of persons and property’
  • humanitarian assistance and disaster response
  • ‘such other assistance as may be mutually determined’.

And Article 2.2 states that ‘The parties shall consult on the nature and duration of each deployment, taking into account its particular purpose.’

A key feature of the agreement is that it precludes unilateral action on Australia’s part: Article 2.1 notes that any Australian deployment can take place only ‘[a]t the written request of Solomon Islands’. Nor does the agreement guarantee any response by Australia: Article 2.1 goes on to state that any deployment is ‘subject to Australia’s acceptance of that request based on its assessment of the circumstances’. The agreement doesn’t, therefore, provide a blank cheque to future Solomon Islands governments.

Much of the agreement echoes the language used in the earlier RAMSI treaty, including on carrying and using weapons, and the privileges and immunities of any ‘visiting contingent’. Indeed, the agreement provides for the possibility of an intervention force structured very much along the lines of the RAMSI model, including:

  • a head of the visiting contingent with ‘overall responsibility for management of the Visiting Contingent, and for liaising with Solomon Islands’. This is a conscious echo of the role of the RAMSI special coordinator, who wasn’t formally in command of RAMSI’s police and military components but was nonetheless responsible for providing overall coherence to the mission’s strategy and operations. (As an aside, while it’s important not to over-analyse the text, the new agreement differs from the RAMSI treaty in providing for the appointment of the head of the visiting contingent to be notified to the Solomon Islands government. The earlier treaty provided for the appointment to be made in consultation with the Solomon Islands government.)
  • an ‘assisting police force’, the commander of which—as in RAMSI—would be appointed as a deputy commissioner of the Solomon Islands Police Force
  • an ‘assisting defence force’.

Another important feature of the new agreement is that it explicitly provides for Australia to involve third parties in its response. Again, this reflects one of the key lessons of the RAMSI deployment (and indeed of earlier operations in support of the Bougainville peace process)—that is, the legitimacy bestowed on the intervention by including other Pacific Island countries, as well as New Zealand.

How significant is the new agreement? It isn’t a blank cheque for Australian intervention into Solomon Islands’ affairs, nor does it commit Australia to intervene even if requested to do so. At one level, then, it’s essentially a status of forces agreement (SOFA).

Even so, by the standards of most SOFAs, the new agreement is unusually broad in its scope. In a way, its very open-endedness underlines its significance, particularly bearing in mind Solomon Islands’ troubled history. The agreement isn’t in response to a specific problem; rather, it’s against the possibility of future serious threats to Solomon Islands’ national security and stability. As such, it’s a very clear and practical demonstration of Australia’s intention, as expressed in the 2016 defence white paper, to ‘continue to seek to be the principal security partner for Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste and Pacific Island countries’.

Australia, Solomon Islands and RAMSI

Australia spent years saying no to a central role in the mounting crisis in Solomon Islands. Then, in 2003, Canberra did a huge U-turn and led the intervention that ran for 14 years and ended in June this year.

Here are two interpretations of Australia’s 2003 decision:

Oz academic orthodoxy—Australia was driven by the US alliance and the ‘war on terror’. Australia’s ‘new interventionism’ was a mix of neo-liberal dreaming about fixing weak states and security fears about the South Pacific ‘arc of instability’.

Canberra official story—The Solomons was a failing/failed state pleading for help. As regional leader, Australia responded. The Pacific Islands Forum embraced ‘cooperative intervention’.

The interpretations cover the same ground, but clash. In seeing how Australia thinks about the South Pacific, the regional assistance mission RAMSI is a rich study.

The official story tells some truth while glossing over much. The academic orthodoxy is a bleak understanding, seeing Australia’s South Pacific policy as not actually derived from the South Pacific.

The academic logic is that if 9/11 hadn’t happened to the US, Canberra would have stood back, watching the Solomons slide into hell; no push from Washington, no Pacific action from Oz. Two examples from academic journals:

  • Dan Halvorson argues that the central driver for Canberra was Australia’s international reputation: ‘A primary concern for the Howard government was to bolster Australia’s reputation in the “War on Terror” vis-à-vis the USA and the international community more broadly by being seen to maintain order in its regional sphere of responsibility’.
  • Matthew Allen and Sinclair Dinnen: ‘We see RAMSI as having been conceived in the global “state-building moment”, as accentuated by the events of 9-11, 2001, when there were palpable concerns about the security threats posed by “weak” and “failing” states … The intervention had all the hallmarks of a classic liberal peace intervention…’

A superb account of RAMSI (with less orthodoxy) is the review done for Honiara and the Pacific Islands Forum by academics from New Zealand, Fiji and Papua New Guinea. It offers tough judgements about Australia’s performance, but the analysis is grounded in the realities of Solomon Islands that drove Australia and the region. One of the authors, Jon Fraenkel, offers this short account, dryly noting that RAMSI’s 14 years of ups, downs, evolutions and episodes meant that ‘only a few could recall precisely what the mission was initially intended to accomplish, or assess how it might be judged’.

Canberra’s official story glibly skips Australia’s hesitations in the five years before intervention, and the trial and error of RAMSI’s long life. The gloss obscures the truth of policy creation: ad hoc responses to cascading events, and indecision masquerading as flexibility while panic rises.

Glibness glides over Australia’s failed policy until 2003: namely, to ‘intelligently manage trouble’ by not getting close to the trouble (a description I got from DFAT secretary Ashton Calvert). As John Howard recalls: ‘From the late 1990s onwards, my government received numerous requests for assistance of various kinds from the Solomon Islands government. Each time we firmly but politely declined. The response was always that Australia did not wish to become embroiled in Solomon Islands’ internal affairs.’

Each refusal forced Canberra to stare again at the Solomons, which was stumbling fast from failing to failed. Solomon Islands is a classic weak state atop a strong(ish) society—the five years of unrest to 2003 tore society and shook the state.

Life in the villages went on, while in Honiara the prime minister was taken hostage at gunpoint in a coup; cabinet couldn’t convene for fear of armed men barging in demanding money; the new (British) police commissioner couldn’t arrest one of his senior officers who walked into the Treasury demanding money; Honiara had a police force by day that turned into a militia force at night.

Events, not ideology or the international vibe, forced the Howard government to act.

One reason Australia acted: it could. This circular statement points to the regional dimension.

After winning office in 1996, the Howard government learned about Australia’s power in the arc: extended police and military deployments in Bougainville and Timor; Canberra applying maximum pressure on the Chan government that fell in Papua New Guinea’s 1997 Sandline crisis, acting decisively that year to get food to half a million Papua New Guineans hit by drought; imposing the boat-people camps—the ‘Pacific solution’—on the broke nation of Nauru; helping to rebuild Fiji’s police after the coup crisis of Suva’s parliamentary siege in 2000.

Despite those experiences, Canberra agonised over intervention in the Solomons. Australia couldn’t recolonise the South Pacific, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer argued in January, 2003: ‘Sending in Australian troops to occupy Solomon Islands would be folly in the extreme. It would be widely resented in the Pacific region. It would be very difficult to justify to Australian taxpayers. And for how many years would such an occupation have to continue? And what would be the exit strategy?’

My response to the ‘exit’ question was one of the more useful lines I’ve injected into the Canberra milieu: You can’t have an exit strategy from your own region. I hammered the exit mentality in a paper to the Menzies Research Centre in February 2003 with this concluding line: ‘There is no exit strategy for us in the South Pacific. After all, this is where we live.’

RAMSI began on 24 July 2003, after Australia had exhausted its alternatives. The dramatic language John Howard used was cover for ditching failed policy. If you have to U-turn, deploy noise and smoke, then zoom on the new course with fresh flags flying.

RAMSI tenth anniversary: thinking about intervention and amphibs

Lambi village children gather on the beach to see the rare sight of HMAS Manoora anchored in Lambi Bay. Some of the villagers took to small craft to take closer look at the warship in their sheltered bay.

Shortly after dawn on 24 July 2003, the first Hercules touched down in Honiara with lead elements of the 1,400 troops, 300 police, and officials from the nine Pacific Forum countries initially comprising the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI). Four years of ethnic, social and criminal disorder had cost 200 lives, caused a near collapse of the national government and economy and 20,000 people to flee their homes—prompting ASPI’s call for action. At the same time as the Hercules landed, the amphibious ship HMAS Manoora loomed off the coast. Manoora’s heavy presence and the rapid build-up of overwhelming force signalled change was coming. Within the year, warring militias had been disarmed, and economic stability, more effective governance and personal security were returning.

A major milestone passed quietly with the conclusion of Operation ANODE—the military component of RAMSI—on 1 July, just three weeks ahead of the mission’s tenth anniversary. And although transition toward Solomon Islands’ full normalisation is continuing, RAMSI is a success story, despite the April 2006 riots, 2006–07 tensions with the host Government, and only incremental state-building progress. It’s also come at a cost to the Australian government of over $2 billion (including $350 million military expenses) and two Australian operational fatalities so far. Read more

A way forward for peace-building in the Solomon Islands

Locals welcomed RAMSI to church service, July 2003The Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) and its legacy have been the subject of debate among critical Solomon Islanders and foreign analysts. Many ordinary Solomon Islanders believe that if RAMSI leaves, crises will arise again. The question is how long RAMSI will maintain law and order in the Solomon Islands while the issues that ignited the conflict are left unaddressed. As University of Hawaii academic Tarcisius Tara Kabutaulaka has argued:

… foreign intervention, while useful in the short term, does not offer an easy solution to internal problems. It might create a quasi-functioning state that is able to restore order … but without addressing the underlying causes of unrest … the risk is it will create a culture of dependency.

The underlying causes of the conflict in the Solomon Islands are deep-seated traditional issues of land and compensation, and they remain important during post-conflict reconstruction and peace-building. But the process of peace-building as a pre-requisite to post-conflict reconstruction can’t advance if these issues are ignored. The danger is that the longer they remain unresolved, the more likely it is that resentment will build up. In addition, uneven development and grievances relating to powerful local perceptions of relative deprivation due to these underlying causes will remain an obstacle to sustainable peace. Read more

Taking stock of RAMSI

Soldiers from 7 Section conduct regular patrols throughout the local areas of Honiara. Greeting the local Solomon Islanders and working closely with the Participation Police Force (PPF- Solomon Island Police Force) to help maintain security to the community.

The Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI)—an extensive (and expensive) Australian-led state-building intervention under the auspices of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF)—has been operating in Solomon Islands since July 2003. It’s about to undergo a significant transition in its structure. As such, it’s an appropriate time to take stock of the mission’s achievements and failings to date, and perhaps more importantly, evaluate Solomon Islands’ prospects in a post-RAMSI future.

In October, RAMSI’s Special Coordinator Nicholas Coppel revealed plans for the transition—the most significant since the mission’s inception. Coppel announced that from 1 July 2013 RAMSI would become a compact police capacity-building operation. Its military contingent will be sent home and its governance programs will be integrated into the bilateral development assistance programs of participating countries, mainly Australia and New Zealand.

Crucially, Coppel claimed that these changes were warranted because of the progress made by Solomon Islands since RAMSI’s deployment. This is consistent with RAMSI’s ‘exit strategy’, as defined in the 2009 partnership framework (PDF) signed between the Solomon Islands government, RAMSI and the PIF. In the agreement, RAMSI’s exit is not focused on a date, but is conditioned upon the attainment of particular performance benchmarks, set out in the document.

RAMSI is often viewed by international and domestic observers as one of the most successful state-building interventions. For example, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s influential Development Assistance Committee described its security system reform approach as ‘good practice’ (PDF). Read more