Tag Archive for: Solomon Islands

Suppressing the truth and spreading lies

How the CCP is influencing Solomon Islands’ information environment

What’s the problem?

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is attempting to influence public discourse in Solomon Islands through coordinated information operations that seek to spread false narratives and suppress information on a range of topics. Following the November 2021 Honiara riots and the March 2022 leaking of the China – Solomon Islands security agreement, the CCP has used its propaganda and disinformation capabilities to push false narratives in an effort to shape the Solomon Islands public’s perception of security issues and foreign partners. In alignment with the CCP’s regional security objectives, those messages have a strong focus on undermining Solomon Islands’ existing partnerships with Australia and the US.

Although some of the CCP’s messaging occurs through routine diplomatic engagement, there’s a coordinated effort to influence the population across a broad spectrum of information channels. That spectrum includes Chinese party-state media, CCP official-led statements and publications in local and social media, and the amplification of particular individual and pro-CCP content via targeted Facebook groups.

There’s now growing evidence to suggest that CCP officials are also seeking to suppress information that doesn’t align with the party-state’s narratives across the Pacific islands through the coercion of local journalists and media institutions.

What’s the solution?

The Australian Government should coordinate with other foreign partners of Solomon Islands, including the US, New Zealand, Japan and the EU, to further assist local Pacific media outlets in hiring, training and retaining high-quality professional journalists. A stronger, more resilient media industry in Solomon Islands will be less vulnerable to disinformation and the pressures exerted by local CCP officials.

Social media companies need to provide, in national Pacific languages, contextual information on misinformation and label state affiliations on messages from state-controlled entities. Social media companies could encourage civil society to report state affiliations and provide evidence to help companies enforce their policies.

Further government funding should be used to support public research into actors and activities affecting the Pacific islands’ information environment, including foreign influence, the proliferation of disinformation on topics such as climate change, and election misinformation. That research should be used to assist in building media resiliency in Pacific island countries by providing information and targeted training to media professionals to assist in identifying disinformation and aspects of coordinated information operations. Sharing that information with civil-society groups and institutions across the region, such as the Pacific Fusion Centre, can also help to improve regional media literacy and understanding of information operations as a cybersecurity issue.

Pacific island countries will need support as great-power competition intensifies in the region. The US, for example, can do more to demonstrate that the CCP’s narratives are false, such as proving Washington’s genuine interest in supporting the region by answering the call of the local Solomon Islands population to do more to clean up remaining unexploded World War II ordnance on Guadalcanal. ASPI has also previously proposed that an Indo-Pacific hybrid threats centre would help regional governments, business and civil society to understand the threat landscape, develop resilience against online harms and counter malign activity.1 It would contribute to regional stability by promoting confidence-building measures, including information-sharing and capacity-building mechanisms.

Introduction

This report explores how the CCP is using a range of influence channels to shape, promote and suppress messages in the Solomon Islands information environment. Through an examination of CCP online influence in the aftermath of the Honiara riots in late 2021 and in response to the leaked security agreement in March 2022, this report demonstrates a previously undocumented level of coordination across a range of state activities. As part of a wider shift in ASPI’s research on foreign interference and disinformation, this report also seeks to measure the impact of those efforts in shaping public sentiment and opinion, and we welcome feedback on those methods. The data collected in this project doesn’t provide an exhaustive record of all CCP influence tactics and channels in Solomon Islands but provides a snapshot of activity in relation to the two key case studies.

In this paper, we use the term ‘China’ to refer to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as an international actor, ‘Chinese Government’ or ‘Chinese state’ to refer to the bureaucracy of the government of the PRC, and ‘Chinese Communist Party’ or ‘party-state’ to refer to the regime that monopolises state power in the PRC.

Methodology

Data collection for this case study covered two discrete periods. The first collection period was for 12 weeks from the beginning of the riots on 24 November (referred to in tables and charts as the Honiara riots case study), and the second period was for six weeks from the leaking of the China – Solomon Islands security agreement on 24 March (referred to as the security agreement case study).2 The analytical methods used included quantitative analysis of publicly available data from a range of sources, including articles from Solomon Islands media outlets, articles from party-state media and Facebook posts in public groups and local media pages based in Solomon Islands. For the purpose of the analysis, any article with more than 80% of its content derived from local or foreign government official sources (direct quotes or statements from diplomatic officials, ministers or embassies, for example) was categorised as an ‘official-led’ article. Examples of such content included editorials, media releases and articles that prominently relied on direct quotes. This data was collected systematically for quantitative and qualitative analysis and was strengthened by deeper investigation into some public Facebook groups and activity. This approach drew upon a previously published framework, titled ‘information influence and interference’, used to understand strategy-driven, state-sponsored information activities.33

We conducted a simple categorical sentiment analysis of social media posts as a measure of the effectiveness of CCP influence efforts. We analysed comments from Facebook posts published by three leading media outlets in Solomon Islands (The Solomon Star, The Island Sun and the Solomon Times) for the two events investigated for this research report. We also analysed comments from posts by the Chinese Embassy in Solomon Islands’ Facebook page, as well as posts in public Pacific island Facebook pages and groups that shared links to party-state media. Relevant comments were categorised as being positive (pro) or negative (anti) towards a particular country or group, such as ‘the West’, which had to be explicitly stated in the comment. Comments that referred to more than one grouping (China, the West, or the Solomon Islands Government) were categorised for analytical purposes based on the dominant subject of the comment. Our initial data collection also sought to analyse information relating to New Zealand, the UK and Japan, but that was prevented by the lack of reporting and online discussion focused on those countries (in this data-collection period, only one article each from New Zealand and Japan were identified).

  1. Lesley Seebeck, Emily Williams, Jacob Wallis, Countering the Hydra: a proposal for an Indo-Pacific hybrid threat centre, ASPI, Canberra, 7 June 2022. ↩︎
  2. Anna Powles, ‘Photos of draft security agreement between Solomon Islands and China’, Twitter, 24 March 2022. ↩︎
  3. Miah Hammond-Errey, ‘Understanding and assessing information influence and foreign interference’, Journal of
    Information Warfare, Winter 2019, 18:1–22. ↩︎

Tag Archive for: Solomon Islands

The politics of South Pacific riots

A riot in a South Pacific city is a political act as well as a spree of violence and looting.

The urban riot is an extreme expression of political and economic failure in the islands. Riots are unusual but happen often enough that they’re not unprecedented. A riot is a dark and recurring element of regional life.

A South Pacific riot mixes excitement, grievances and unemployed young people. Stir in the lure of loot and fuel it with alcohol.

A riot can sadden even as it shocks.

Sadness was the emotion that framed the shock in 2006 when I stood amid the burnt-out aftermath of Chinatown in Honiara: Solomon Islands had done this to itself.

Sadness mixed with shock was what I felt in 2000 when stepping through the smashed glass and trashed equipment of the Fiji One television station. A mob of 200 Fijians had just attacked the station because earlier that night it had broadcast a program criticising the coup leaders occupying Fiji’s parliament. In that violent Suva night, a policeman was shot and murdered. This was riot as politics written in blood.

In understanding the South Pacific, urban riots are on the outer edges of policy maps for economics, politics, community, security and policing. In the way of topics that are dramatic and difficult, riots find the gaps between the policies.

Kudos to the Australia Pacific Security College for an important mapping effort with its first discussion paper, Riots in the Pacific: control and change. The author, Anouk Ride, observes: ‘Riots are not just events to “control” but conflicts that need “change” in order to prevent its patterns being painted on the streets of Pacific urban areas again and again.’

Ride catalogues 13 riots from January 2006 to December 2021, in Papua New Guinea (8), Solomon Islands (3), Vanuatu (1) and Tonga (1).

Rioters express ‘deprivations and economic exclusion,’ Ride notes, by attacking their own government or foreign-owned businesses. ‘Despite the intersection between grievances over governance and foreign influence,’ she finds, ‘government buildings are targeted far less than foreign owned businesses.’

The ‘perceived wealth of foreign migrants versus Indigenous peoples,’ she says, ‘has been a feature of mass violence in Tonga, Papua New Guinea, and Solomon Islands.’

In listing ‘grievances’ that caused riots, one of Ride’s main categories is defined as ‘foreigners and economic benefits’. And when the riot comes, she notes, key targets are ‘Asian shops’ and ‘Asian businesses’. The ‘foreigner’ grievance and the ‘Asian shops’ targeting are applied to five of the PNG riots, all three of the Solomon Islands riots (2006, 2019 and 2021) and the one in Tonga in 2006.

In the islands, the ‘foreigners’ are usually Chinese and the Asian shops are Chinese.

To express the reality in blunter language than Ride uses, a South Pacific riot is often racist. The Chinese are targeted because they’re rich. But riches or race, it’s still an anti-Chinese riot.

Ride says the November 2021 Honiara riot ‘dramatised the security ramifications of geopolitics’, with protests directed at the ‘national government’s increasingly close ties with China and a perception of government favouritism towards Chinese businesses’.

Raiding and robbing Chinese shops ‘is a common feature among riots across the Pacific’, she writes, ‘with Asian businesses being targeted in 69 per cent of all riot events. In Tonga, Solomon Islands, and PNG rioters targeted Asian businesses, burning and looting them, often following protests over corruption and unpopular government decisions.’

The anti-Chinese message of the rioters is well understood by the rest of island communities, even as the racism and violence are abhorred.

For recent academic work dealing with this topic, see Denghua Zhang’s survey of ‘China’s influence and local perceptions’ in PNG, Fiji and Tonga. China’s ‘influence on Pacific civil society is weak’, Zhang writes, because of ‘concerns about Chinese small businesses’ and ‘lack of job opportunities for locals and dumping of Chinese goods’. The Australian National University last year published The China alternative: changing regional order in the Pacific islands, including chapters titled ‘On-the-ground tensions with Chinese traders in PNG’ and ‘The shifting fate of China’s Pacific diaspora’.

As Richard Herr argues in his 2019 ASPI report, Chinese influence in the Pacific islands: the yin and yang of soft power, China’s soft-power reach ‘lacks breadth and depth’.

China can demand much of island governments, while on the streets Chinese citizens have much to fear.

In the Beijing–Canberra contest, China makes ambitious offers to South Pacific states. Australia’s great counteroffer can be to South Pacific people. The people dimension must define Australia’s effort for the islands.

A South Pacific riot, however, is a clash between the people and their own state.

Ride describes the dilemma confronting Australia if it steps up to help restore order:

Grievances behind riots generally have widespread support amongst populations where they occur. For those who lose out in riots, notably foreign businesses, and government offices, and for those who felt under personal threat, notably political leaders, foreign forces will be welcomed. But for those who want governments to respond to grievances, such as pro-democracy and anti-corruption campaigners as well as the politically and economically marginalised, foreign forces can be seen as supporting the current political regime.

The recipe she offers Canberra is the need for clear communication about the purpose, duration and conduct of any Australian operation. What I’d call Ride’s ‘tough love’ option is for Australia to ponder ‘whether interventions are needed at all’. And will intervention actually help ‘the underlying conflict conditions’?

Applying tough love would require a hard heart to go with the diplomatic toughness. When Honiara was burning in November last year, Australia acted rapidly and had forces on the ground within days. The immediate response was right.

Canberra ran two lines of argument: it was acting to ‘provide stability and security’ in Honiara, but it wasn’t trying ‘to intervene in the internal affairs of the Solomon Islands’.

Personal security is now an issue for the capital city elites of the South Pacific; it’s no longer just a Port Moresby syndrome. That’s a fact of life for those who run government, the professionals and those who do business. They must worry about the safety of their homes and stores 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.

History says the riots will come again. The South Pacific knows the shock of the destruction and the deaths.

Ride concludes that the security or ‘control’ response is only part of the answer. Act before the riot, she says, to deal with the grievances and resolve the conflicts.

Sogavare is playing Australia for a sucker

There’s a moment to realise that you’re being played for a sucker. That moment has come for the Australian government in the case of the current Solomons Islands prime minister, Manasseh Sogavare.

Since the new Australian government came to power after the 21 May elections, it has engaged rapidly and deeply with Pacific island leaders and with Sogavare himself and acted in ways that address their deeply held concerns, notably on the existential challenge of climate change. Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s trip to the Pacific straight off the plane from the Tokyo Quad meeting, followed by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s participation in the Pacific Islands Forum meeting and the visit to Honiara by the minister for international relations and the Pacific, Pat Conroy, were welcome evidence of priority and attention to the region and its leaders.

They have also sought assurances from Sogavare that Australia will remain the Solomons’ ‘security partner of choice’, despite the Sogavare–Beijing security pact signed in April. Wong, then the opposition foreign affairs spokesperson, said this pact was ‘the worst foreign policy blunder in the Pacific that Australia has seen since the end of World War II’.

Sogavare has been quick to oblige Australia’s new government, issuing many statements of reassurance that there will be ‘no Chinese military base’ in the Solomons and that Australia will indeed remain the Solomons’ security partner of choice. He seems to enjoy meeting leaders like Albanese, Wong and Conroy, receiving their support and commitments to aid and other cooperation and having smiling photos taken, even hugging, after providing his assurances.

But perhaps he enjoys even more the feeling of then doing something quite different as he opens the Solomons to deepening engagement with Beijing.

Sogavare has held on to office by buying parliamentarians’ support with money paid out by the Chinese embassy. He has a wealthy, authoritarian backer in Beijing who is comfortable with the path he is taking the Solomons on, mainly because it suits the Chinese government’s interests.

Cash splashes to buy political support are not completely new, of course. The decades of competition for diplomatic recognition between Beijing and Taipei included Taiwanese ‘constituency development’ funding. But Beijing’s agenda this time is broader and nastier than just diplomatic recognition.

Sogavare is probably delighted that we’ve developed sufficient amnesia to forget that he’s been a virulent opponent of Australia before. In 2007, he accused Australia of trying to undercut the Solomons’ sovereignty by being part of RAMSI (Operation Helpim Fren), the regional assistance mission that helped the Solomon Islands people control endemic violence and instability over more than a decade. It’s not news that he’s no friend of Australia.

In contrast, Beijing is the major supporter of Sogavare’s plan to hold the 2023 Pacific Games in Honiara. He is using this two-week event as the reason to suspend the country’s constitution and not hold the election required in 2023.

Beijing is capitalising on Sogavare’s time in power to rapidly expand its political and economic presence and leverage. The cash splash to members of parliament is one example, but more disturbing are the growing commercial deals and opaque loans Chinese-state-backed firms are providing, like the recent Huawei deal to build some 161 mobile phone towers using a $96 million concessional loan from Chinese government banks.

Sogavare has been prime minister four times—in 2000–01, in 2006–07, from 2014 to 2017, and since 2019—each from an opportunity created by turmoil and instability. He clearly wants to be leader and seems unlikely to step down willingly. Xi Jinping knows that feeling well.

There seems to be a strong alignment between what Beijing wants in the South Pacific, what it’s willing to do to get it, and what we see of Sogavare’s ambitions and directions.

But there’s no such strong alignment between these interests and the interests of the Solomon Islands people or those of the broader Pacific. Instead, Sogavare’s embrace of Beijing and increasingly authoritarian tendencies at home are against his people’s interests and against the security interests of the rest of the Pacific Islands Forum countries.

That’s probably why he has been so keen to issue his loud reassurances that there’s nothing for anyone to see or worry about in the relationship he’s building with China’s ruling communist party.

Sogavare is taking the Solomons down a path that is undemocratic and centred on his continuing to hold the office of prime minister, regardless of the effects on the health of the Solomon Islands constitutional democracy.

His government is making alarming statements about press freedom in response to criticism of his actions. An ABC Four Corners report documenting some of his most serious connections to the Chinese government is one example. Sogavare resorted to accusations of racism and racial stereotyping to attack the media outfit that reported his connections and avoid dealing with the substance of the issues. He apparently is comfortable preventing further visits by independent foreign journalists.

And reacting to an editorial in a local paper expressing alarm at moves to censor the Solomons’ national broadcaster, his government said it’s the journalists themselves ‘who are a threat to freedom of press in our country, and not the government’.

This is what authoritarian regimes say and do, not what healthy democracies and their elected leaders say and do.

Maybe that’s why China’s state-owned mouthpiece, the Global Times, has endorsed Sogavare’s attack on press freedom, saying: ‘Even if the Solomon Islands’ government bans ABC reporters from entering the country, it is justified and understandable.’

That support for Sogavare’s moves to limit press freedom contrasts starkly with the stance of professional journalists. The international Public Media Alliance has called on Sogavare to respect his national broadcaster’s independence and expressed concern at the ‘government’s order for it to self-censor and only cover stories that show the country in a positive light’. The PMA used an eloquent quote from the premier of Makira-Ulawa province, Julian Maka, who said, ‘It’s very sad that media has been curtailed, this means we are moving away from democratic principles.’

The creeping tide from Sogavare’s turn to Beijing is also the best explanation for the UK and US having difficulty with naval and coastguard vessel visits to Honiara. This month, both Britain’s HMS Spey and the US Coastguard cutter Oliver Henry were unable to dock in the Solomons because its government failed to provide permission, even though both vessels were helping the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency protect local fish stocks. The Solomons has now suspended naval visits pending ‘new procedures’ being put in place. We can expect that under these new procedures, no Chinese government vessel is likely to have this kind of difficulty during Sogavare’s tenure.

Controlling the local press to limit freedom of speech and reporting, threatening to block foreign journalists from visiting if they report negatively on his government, suspending the constitution, signing a security pact with an intrusive authoritarian power, preventing friendly partners’ vessels from docking in his country and buying the support of MPs with money from that authoritarian power all add up to one simple fact: Sogavare should not have the support of the Australian government or any other democratic government while he takes the Solomon Islands people on this dangerous path.

Instead of helping Sogavare fund the Pacific Games he’s using as a pretext for suspending the constitution, the Australian government should provide no funding for this event and direct the $17 million it earmarked for it towards funding events by Solomons civil-society groups, visits to the Solomons by Australian parliamentarians and reciprocal visits to Australia by Solomons parliamentarians and provincial leaders who are not part of Sogavare’s set of MPs and leaders. Some of this funding could be added to the new money that Albanese has announced as going to increase the ABC’s Pacific reporting.

Instead of inviting Sogavare to Australia as a guest, which would give him yet another platform to provide empty assurances in return for having his profile as an elected leader endorsed by Albanese, there should be no Australian visit by Sogavare until he ends his security deal with Beijing and holds free and fair elections. That may well mean he only visits Australia again as a private citizen after he’s been voted out of office.

It’s time for the friends of Solomon Islands to engage with its people, its opposition figures in parliament and the provinces, its institutions and its leaders who believe in its constitution and its people’s freedoms. This list doesn’t include Sogavare and his set of purchased MPs.

Instead of saying that Sogavare’s bill to suspend the constitution has to work through the democratic processes of the Solomon Islands parliament, the Australian government should simply oppose this manoeuvre to suspend the Solomons’ democracy and call on Sogavare to let his people vote on who leads them.

Not doing this and waiting for Sogavare to again use Chinese cash to buy the parliamentary votes he needs is to be wilfully blind to a budding dictator. Sogavare needs to be condemned and isolated, not hugged and supported.

Policy, Guns and Money: Australian rocket launches, 2022 Lowy poll and policing in the Pacific

Last week, Equatorial Launch Australia sent the third and final NASA rocket into space from Australia’s Arnhem Space Centre in the Northern Territory. The mission marked the first successful suborbital rocket launch from an Australian commercial centre, and the first commercial launch ever by NASA outside of the United States. ASPI’s resident space wonks, Bec Shrimpton and Malcolm Davis, discuss the significance of this milestone, what it means for the Australian space industry, and how the Australian government can support the industry’s development into an international and national asset.

The Lowy Institute recently released its annual poll, which captures Australian views of the world and current global issues, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China and climate change. ASPI’s Fergus Ryan speaks to the author of the report on the 2022 poll, Natasha Kassam, about the notable shifts in this year’s poll and what surprised her in the polling results.

China’s recent security agreement with Solomon Islands enables Beijing to send police and military forces to the Pacific nation. ASPI’s John Coyne speaks to senior fellow Vern White about the risks associated with China playing a bigger role in the region’s policing, and the important role Australia and its partners play in policing in the Pacific.

How the Chinese foreign minister shut down Pacific media

Media coverage of Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s recent visit to the South Pacific was effectively silenced, highlighting the fragility of a free media in the region.

Most journalists, especially those working for international outlets, were restricted, some physically, from attending Wang’s news conferences. The restrictions varied from country to country during the trip, but the overall effect prevented coverage of the trip despite the protests of local media.

Details of meetings and bilateral agreements signed by Pacific nations with China remain a secret. Despite some speculation in individual countries, it’s not known if any of these deals were security treaties like the China–Solomon Islands pact.

Not a single question from a Pacific journalist was allowed to be asked of the visiting minister midway through the tour.

While the Chinese delegation effectively shut down the Pacific media, it didn’t always act alone. Some Pacific governments were accused of acting to support the restrictions.

The Chinese delegation planned a marathon trip to eight Pacific countries to convince them to sign a multilateral security treaty. The agreement was rejected by Pacific leaders, but it’s thought Beijing will try again.

When the media contacted their governments and local Chinese diplomats in May for details of the trip and plans for meetings, they were met with silence.

China is one of the worst countries in the world for media freedom. It ranks 175th out of 180 countries on the 2022 World Press Freedom Index. Now it’s trying to influence media around the world, especially in countries where it has diplomatic allegiances. In the Pacific, this includes eight of 10 countries included in Wang’s high-level trip.

The Chinese delegation justified the decision to ban questions from journalists or to exclude the media by citing a ‘lack of time’ and the ‘Covid-19 pandemic’.

While Beijing courts the media with money, junkets and propaganda, it shuts down the free media, showing contempt for critical speech and dissent. That’s what happened on this trip.

A free press has traditionally been viewed as an essential part of democracy. Often described as a public watchdog, an independent media holds leaders to account and offers a reliable diversity of opinion.

This traditional role has changed with the spread of new, digital media, which has increased communication between people all over the world, especially in the Pacific where internet penetration has grown rapidly to reach more than 60% in most countries except Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands.

Pacific islanders now use mobile phones to communicate and share information and hold leaders to account through social media. Recent statistics show that of approximately 930,000 people using mobile phones in PNG, more than 97% are Facebook users.

It’s where much of the Pacific gets its news and where news of the Chinese FM’s snub of Pacific journalists spread rapidly. Journalists used social media as a tool to raise support and awareness internationally of the restrictions they faced covering Wang’s visit.

The Pacific media is already struggling to survive because of digitisation, Covid-19 and the worldwide downturn in advertising.

A prominent supporter of media freedom, Shailendra Singh, associate professor of journalism at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, said the lack of access for Pacific journalists during the Wang visit raised many questions.

He said the state of the media in the Pacific wasn’t just a national issue but a regional one.

‘We have two different systems here. China has a different political system—a totalitarian system—and in the Pacific, we have a democratic system,’ he said.

The news that New Zealand and Australia now agree that the region is a contested space means there’s also a contest for a free media and, with it, democracy.

Solomon Islands journalist Dorothy Wickham said her local colleagues who boycotted the visit are being excluded from all government information as a form of retribution. She says she wrote to the Chinese ambassador in Canberra complaining about their treatment and received a conciliatory response. She and fellow journalist Georgina Kekea were invited to an online interview with the foreign minister but she’s waiting for confirmation of a date.

The Chinese are not the only ones who have avoided talking to the Pacific media. It is a practice followed by many high-level delegations, including those from democratic nations like Australia and the United States.

The new Australian government has been working to reset its relationship with the Pacific since the May election. Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s three trips to the region have demonstrated a new tone and attitude towards the region and the media. She has welcomed questions from Pacific journalists and even invited some to lunch in Honiara to discuss the threats to a free media.

But China has made inroads into influencing the Pacific media and many outlets are vulnerable to offers of financial help. China is offering a way for them to survive. The fact that they stood up and challenged the restrictions is encouraging, but they need support from neighbours like Australia and New Zealand or there won’t be a free media in the Pacific.

Solomon Islands after RAMSI

On 30 June this year the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) will come to an end. Established in July 2003, RAMSI has been a feature of life in Solomon Islands for more than a third of its history as an independent country.

While much of what follows is anecdotal, recent visits to Honiara have provided some insight into the mood among Solomon Islanders as the end of RAMSI approaches. The operation has been in a gradual wind-down since 2013 and is now much less visible that it was in earlier years. Even so, RAMSI still looms large in the minds of Solomon Islanders.

RAMSI will be leaving Solomon Islands in an atmosphere of general goodwill. The Solomon Islands government is planning a series of events to mark the end of RAMSI in late June. These will be the occasion for sincere and heartfelt expressions of gratitude for RAMSI’s role in restoring the rule of law and the functioning of government in Solomon Islands. Much stress will—rightly—be placed on the regional nature of RAMSI’s composition.

Although RAMSI couldn’t have been mounted or sustained without Australian funding and personnel, it was the participation of all of Solomon Islands’ Pacific neighbours in RAMSI that gave it its particular character, and lent it genuine legitimacy in the eyes of Solomon Islanders. RAMSI’s positive reputation has, among other things, been underpinned by a record of good behaviour and conduct on the part of its personnel.

Alongside those warm feelings, though, it isn’t hard to detect a level of anxiety among ordinary Solomon Islanders as to what might come next. The Royal Solomon Islands Police Force (RSIPF) was disarmed at the very outset of RAMSI and it was only on 8 May this year that elements of the force were rearmed, in anticipation of RAMSI’s departure and following extensive training and preparation. Solomon Islands police were seen to play an aggressively partisan role during the euphemistically-described ‘Tensions’ that preceded RAMSI’s deployment. Despite extensive leadership and generational turnover since then, the RSIPF has struggled to regain the trust of the general population. For many Solomon Islanders the jury remains out on the competence and impartiality of their own police.

Some Solomon Islanders say they fear that once RAMSI is off the scene, weapons that were hidden throughout the RAMSI period will once again play into local politics. Recent crimes, in particular the horrific double-murder of a Solomon Islands couple of Chinese ethnicity at Easter, have done nothing to settle nerves about a post-RAMSI future. Earlier this month, clashes between long-term squatters and local land developers on Honiara’s crowded and only semi-regulated periphery were well-handled by the local police, but they’ve nevertheless served as a reminder of unresolved and intractable issues that continue to generate social stresses in Solomon Islands.

Popular faith in Solomon Islands’ state institutions more broadly is yet to recover from the Tensions period. Complaints about corruption remain commonplace. Cynicism about politicians and the political process appears alarmingly widespread. This is despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that Solomon Islanders are increasingly dependent on the goodwill of their individual MPs through the distribution of ‘Constituency Development Funds’ which have risen to record levels (only matched, on a global scale, by Solomon Islands’ neighbour Papua New Guinea).

New life has also been breathed into a longstanding constitutional debate with calls for a radical redistribution of resources via a shift to a federal system of government, which would see most revenues going to proposed new ‘states’. Given the interest of national politicians in retaining control over national resources (and their control over any changes to the Constitution), that’s unlikely to happen but it illustrates a sense in which Solomon Islands itself remains a work in progress, 39 years after independence and 14 years after the arrival of RAMSI.

That isn’t to suggest that RAMSI is leaving Solomon Islands in a national funk. After all, some level of nervousness is only natural after such a long intervention. There’s no doubt that RAMSI is leaving Solomon Islands better equipped to manage the many challenges it continues to face. The arrest in April this year of a government minister on corruption charges must go at least some way to countering perceptions of impunity among Solomon Islands political class. At the same time, it isn’t hard to meet impressive young and emerging leaders in many walks of life. Beyond government, we shouldn’t forget the critical role played by local institutions, and in particular the churches, in providing structure to people’s lives and indeed in delivering services that the state can’t provide.

After RAMSI departs, Australia will still provide extensive advisory and training assistance to the RSIPF, although Australian police advisers will no longer enjoy direct policing power. In a significant move, Australia is negotiating a treaty with Solomon Islands which would allow Australia to provide assistance ‘in the case of a major security crisis in the future’.

As RAMSI draws to a close, Solomon Islanders will hope that such assistance is never again required. But they can be assured that it will be available.

Saving Solomon Islands from crocodiles: 14 years of RAMSI

In 2003, Solomon Islands stared into a national abyss—confronting ethnic conflict and state failure. The Melanesian nation appealed for help, prompting the largest, longest and most ambitious security effort ever mounted by the Pacific Islands Forum: RAMSI, the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands.

Led and largely financed by Australia, RAMSI forces started to arrive in Honiara on July 24, 2003. After 14 years, RAMSI will conclude on June 30, 2017.  The price tag for the operation is close to $3 billion, most of it paid by Australia.

What did the Solomons, the Pacific and Australia get for $3 billion and 14 years? The official answer can come simultaneously from Australia and RAMSI, because RAMSI’s Special Coordinator has always been an Australian.

The final RAMSI Coordinator is Quinton Devlin and this column is based on his thoughts about the mission and its meaning (here’s the ASPI video interview). He argues that RAMSI must be judged a ‘genuine success’ because of the size of the political and community disaster that Solomon Islands has avoided.

RAMSI, he says, ‘put an end to a dire humanitarian situation on Australia’s doorstep and reversed the decline of a disintegrating nation that threatened security and stability in the broader Pacific region. RAMSI halted Solomon Islands’ descent into lawlessness and towards economic collapse and state failure’.

But the criticisms of RAMSI are as big as its claimed achievements. The Mission was attacked as an ‘emerging parallel state’, for encroaching on Solomon Islands’ sovereignty, for heavy-handedness and ‘mission creep’.

Devlin’s response is that frequently ‘criticisms came from the political class in Solomon Islands, which in some quarters resisted RAMSI’s suggested good governance and financial reforms, and in others, weren’t happy that RAMSI was involved in the investigation and arrests of MPs’.

The Special Coordinator says the long foreign intervention enjoyed remarkable support from Solomon Islanders. Surveys conducted from 2006 to 2013 showed that popular support for RAMSI never dropped below 85%.

The big bill and the long stay reflect the ambition and scope of the original mandate agreed by Solomon Islands and the Forum, calling for state building, not just stabilisation:

  • restore civil order [in Honiara and throughout the rest of the country, including confiscating illegal weapons, investigating and prosecuting criminal offences, strengthening the courts and prison system and protecting key government ministries]
  • stabilise government finances [including securing revenue collection and controlling expenditure, strengthening financial administrative safeguards and obtaining donor and international financial institutions’ support]
  • promote longer-term economic recovery and revive business confidence [including implementing economic reform, dealing with corruption and improving debt management]
  • rebuild the machinery of government [including the functioning of the National Parliament, the Cabinet, the public service and the electoral process].

Devlin says Australia’s RAMSI role has ‘invigorated and reinforced Australia’s relationships’ across the South Pacific’. He calls the rebuilding of Solomon Islands one of Australia’s finest foreign policy achievements in recent decades: ‘It has made Australia and the region a safer place. It has also helped cement Australia’s leadership in the Pacific and as a security partner of choice’.

Yet RAMSI’s 14 year trek shows that ‘even with all the resources and good will in the world, there are limitations on what states can do to help other states address the causes of their insecurity, even while restoring that security’. Devlin says that RAMSI shows security and state-building interventions must be:

  • welcomed by the host government and public
  • viewed as providing the nation the time and breathing space to recover the lost ground and address the underlying causes of the conflict, rather than a panacea for all ills
  • drawn from and endorsed by the region
  • deployed and operated under a clear legal framework
  • commenced with large numbers and superior firepower if restoring law and order
  • not persuaded to drawdown quickly or look for an early exit strategy
  • conscious that it could be an extended commitment of up to 15 years

Devlin says that ‘resetting and strengthening Westminster systems of government that jar with Melanesian concepts of power and patronage will necessarily be slow, incremental, often challenging and rarely linear’.

RAMSI will end in June, proud that it saved Solomon Islands from crocodiles. That’s more than a figurative boast. The destruction of all guns and disarmament of local police meant only RAMSI was legally allowed to possess or use guns. A crocodile cull was part of what RAMSI did to make Solomon Islands safer.

ASPI at 15: the Solomon Islands paper and the role of think tanks

Image courtesy of Flickr user Luigi Guarino

I vividly remember learning in mid-2003 that the Howard Government was going to intervene in Solomon Islands along the lines of ASPI’s Solomon Islands report. It was exciting that ASPI was contributing to government policy. But I was also apprehensive: while think tank analysts are used to putting forth ideas, they’re far less used to seeing their ideas implemented, particularly with such a policy shift.

I had worked with ASPI Director Hugh White to prepare the paper, along with contributors Quinton Clements, Mary-Louise O’Callaghan, and Greg Urwin, and with Solomon Islands’ perspectives from Sir Fr John Ini Lapli and Sir Peter Kenilorea. Hugh White and I believed Canberra’s longstanding Southwest Pacific policy of providing aid but expecting states to solve their own problems was not addressing Solomon Islands’ political and security crisis. Australia’s interests were engaged by this crisis, the Solomons government wanted Australia’s help, and we believed the policy should change.

ASPI was able to do three things with the Solomons report. First, it provided an input to the government’s decision to intervene. According to the recently-released official history of Australian peacekeeping, Prime Minister John Howard overruled his officials and decided to intervene in response to Solomons Prime Minister Sir Allan Kemakeza’s written request for assistance.

Second, once that decision was made, it needed implementation. The ASPI report provided a ready-made, high-level blueprint. We proposed the operation should be police, rather than military, led: the security challenges facing Solomon Islands were of a kind best tackled by police, and the optics of a police-led operation would be more benign.

Such an intervention would require Solomon Islands’ consent and should be multinational, with regional endorsement and participation. It should have two phases: the first would address the law and order crisis, and the second would be a comprehensive, long-term capacity building program to tackle governance and economic challenges which were fuelling the crisis.

And third, ASPI contributed to public discussion on why Australia was embarking on such an operation and how Australia’s strategic interests were engaged. It helped explain how the crisis could destabilize the broader region, particularly PNG, and how Australia might not be able to insulate itself from any fallout. We also described how Australia, as the largest regional power, had a responsibility—and interest in being seen—to be a good neighbour and assist.

While the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) broadly accorded with the ASPI report, it departed from our recommendations in a few key ways. In particular, we had recommended setting up an ad hoc agency, acting on behalf of Solomon Islanders, to temporarily control police and financing functions. RAMSI, however, left those functions under Solomon Islands government’s control. RAMSI’s minimal model was certainly easier to implement, but it left some of those implicated in the crisis in positions of power and RAMSI exposed to changing political alignments.

RAMSI quickly brought an end to the violence in Solomon Islands. The capacity building phase was always going to be imperfect, difficult and costly. Today Solomon Islands still has real challenges, not least the challenge of an island economy. But RAMSI could never have solved all Solomons’ challenges, as it couldn’t overcome Solomons’ geographical constraints. And nation building has proven enormously hard in every instance globally.

When I moved to a New York think tank in 2008, it became clear that the United Nations policy community and the US State Department stabilisation operations section regarded RAMSI and Australia’s deployable policing capability as real policy innovations, from which lessons could be learned.

Along with other early ASPI papers on East Timor, Papua New Guinea, and the merits of a deployable civilian policing capability, the Solomons report recommended an increased regional focus for Australia and an increased role for Australia’s police in protecting Australia’s interests abroad. It exemplifies how policy contributions can come from outside conventional bureaucratic channels.

An external contribution seemed to work especially well at a moment of policy inflection; perhaps it was easier for a significant change in policy direction to come from outside. ASPI could propose a policy alternative so far from the orthodoxy that it would have been hard to formulate within government. It also would have been easier for the government to disavow if it received strong criticism or didn’t work. With its perspectives from and communication with eminent Solomon Islanders, ASPI could also serve as an indirect intermediary between Australia and the Solomon Islands.

Such policy contributions should be one of the key roles of think tanks. There should be more interaction between government, think tanks and academia and the private sector, with more policy contestability and cross-fertilization of ideas, and less territoriality about their provenance. Canberra still trails Washington in this regard.

It was a privilege to be ‘present at the creation’ of ASPI and the expanding foreign and defence policy think tank space in Australia. Under the masterful guidance of Hugh White and ASPI Chair Robert O’Neill, and with tremendous colleagues in Mark Thomson, Peter Jennings and Aldo Borgu, ASPI was an intellectually stimulating and collaborative place to work. Hugh, Bob and the board encouraged policy entrepreneurship, and supported us when there was pushback. It was a pleasure to come to work each day.

I’m proud of what ASPI achieved in its early years and pleased it remains such an important voice on Australian strategic policy.

Solomon Islands: the freest and fairest election money could buy?

To lead is to serve

Last week, as Australians focused on visits by the leaders of two large countries that will help shape our long-term strategic environment, a small country that forms part of that environment faced a more immediate test with its first national election since the departure of the military component of RAMSI.

I was fortunate to spend a fortnight with the Solomons election-monitoring mission run by the ANU’s State Society and Governance in Melanesia Program (SSGM) and Centre for Democratic Institutions (CDI). Detailed findings of its close study of a dozen electorates will be out soon (see the conclusions of similar studies of PNG’s 2012 election here) but in the meantime let me offer some personal impressions.

Although the 50 elected MPs are still negotiating who’ll be prime minister and in cabinet, and previous such manoeuvrings have sometimes triggered public disorder, most signs suggest these horse-trading and formation-of-Government processes will remain largely peaceful. And while 90 additional Australian, NZ, and Pacific police were brought in to bolster the RAMSI Participating Police Force, they’ve been deliberately held in the background—with the Commonwealth Observer Group commending the security arrangements planned and executed by Solomons Police.

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Our gold-plated intervention in Solomon Islands: expensive but essential and unfinished

Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) military personnel destroy weapons at a ceremony at Marua, south east of Honiara on the last day of the Solomon Island gun amnesty on the 21 August 2003. The weapons at Marau were destroyed in front of hundreds of locals as well as representatives from RAMSI.

A week after its publication, Jenny Hayward-Jones’ forensic and provocative Lowy paper Australia’s costly investment in Solomon Islands: the lessons of RAMSI has been widely reported but hardly stirred a peep from commentators I expected to leap to the mission’s defence. That’s a pity since Solomon Islands is approaching a critical period and RAMSI holds important lessons as the Australian government works through precisely what ‘better aligning our trade, aid and diplomacy to promote regional peace and prosperity’ means in practice.

Jenny’s analysis of Australia’s $2.643 billion spent on RAMSI from 2003-13 (two servicemen also died) leads her to conclude the price of success has been excessive. Notwithstanding its achievements, she assesses RAMSI’s lack of an exit strategy led to ‘mission drift’. She argues that our interests in the Solomons were insufficient to justify RAMSI’s cost and length; that the mission transformed Solomon Islands into one of the world’s most aid-dependent countries; that we must avoid building parallel bureaucracies while working with regional partners in future missions; and that we should’ve tried harder from the outset to promote genuine political change. As a result, our investment in regional stability and development—initially good—became ‘much more questionable’. Read more