Dialogue: Underlying divisions in Solomons seem set to remain

HUGH LARACY* says there is no obvious solution to the historical inter-island divisions which underlie the conflict in the Solomon Islands.

A year ago, the Solomon Islands, which became independent in 1978, entered the news when inter-island tensions culminated in large-scale violence.

Possibly 30,000 immigrant settlers from Malaita were compelled by a local militia force to flee from Guadalcanal, where many of them had lived for 50 years, and to return to their ancestral island.

The immediate reasons for this attack are identifiable in recent history. But that does not make the issues that it raises any less intractable, or susceptible to simple solutions.

Apart from the fact that the Solomons is an impoverished nation, and the Government does not have the financial resources to buy off disgruntled elements of its population, the problem it faces is deeply rooted in traditional customs and values.

In the Solomons, as in many other countries that have emerged from late 19th-century imperialism, the nation state is a highly contrived entity.

The habit of acknowledging a collective citizenship is not ingrained. Identity is still intensely local for most of the population of 400,000, of whom 100,000 live on Malaita.

The present troubles, involving the coup by the Malaita Eagle Force, is a stepping up of the violence of last year and, similarly, centres on the north coast of Guadalcanal. That region has the most extensive area of flat land in the Solomons.

Accordingly, it was there that in 1942 the Japanese built an airfield which quickly became the focus for one of the bloodiest battles of the Second World War.

With the eventual American victory in the campaign, a major military base was built there to sustain the Allied advance to the north, and after the war that became the seed of the national capital, Honiara.

Malaitans, from a populous but mountainous and resource-poor island, were closely involved with these developments.

From the turn of the century, they had provided most of the plantation labourers throughout the group, and before that thousands of them had worked in Queensland and Fiji. Subsequently, they were a majority in the civilian Labour Corps recruited to service the American war effort. Then, as Honiara developed, they settled there in increasing numbers, filling the role of the enterprising, aggressive - and often successful - immigrant group.

When, in the early 1970s, large-scale agricultural investment, especially in oil palm plantations, occurred on the plains stretching eastwards from Honiara, Malaitans again dominated the labour force.

Whole villages of them sprang up, to the chagrin of the local people. They came to resent the Malaitans not just as pushy outsiders, but also as pests who trespassed on their land and who often did not treat Guadalcanal women fairly (Malaita being patrilinial and Guadalcanal matrilinial in social organisation).

Also annoying was the suspicion that Malaitans benefited excessively from public resources, and the fact that Honiara is run not by the Guadalcanal provincial government but by a separate town council.

In such circumstances, the frustrations of underemployed young men have flourished. Moreover, many of the militants of the Isatabu Freedom Movement draw on the ideas of the anti-modernising Moro cult, founded on the harsh southern Weather Coast in the 1950s, to sustain their call for Guadalcanal autonomy and a return to, to use the pidjin expression, the time before.

The past is also felt in other ways. Traditionally Solomon Islanders lived in small, self-reliant communities. Their loyalties did not extend beyond people of the same language group (of which there are 70) or from the same island. There were no overarching structures of unity.

Eventually, the spread of Christianity and the mixing of people on plantations extended the limits of familiarity, especially after Britain annexed the group in 1893. The colonial regime forcibly suppressed the customary fighting. Rivalries, however, were often suspended rather than erased, and people never became docile subjects.

This was especially so on Malaita. In 1927, the Kwaio people of the north massacred a government tax collecting party, the reprisals for which continue to rankle with them.

And in the aftermath of the Second World War, Malaita spawned the powerful Maasina Rule movement which aimed at ridding the Solomons of British rule. A founder of it was a former Labour Corps member from Are Are named Nori, whose son Andrew has emerged as the leader of the Malaitan Eagles now fighting on Guadalcanal.

In contrast, the problem facing the embattled Prime Minister, Bartholomew Ulufa'ulu, himself a Malaitan and a contemporary of Nori at the University of Papua New Guinea, is that while his office compels him to consult national interests, many Malaitans think he has betrayed them by not providing compensation for their losses.

There is no obvious way out of the present impasse. Negotiations and resignations may lessen tensions temporarily, but the underlying divisions will remain.

The conflict reflects not only much of the history of the past 100 years, but the resurgence of endemic political fragmentation and an insistence on retribution that the Pax Britannica could not expunge.

* Dr Hugh Laracy is a specialist in Pacific Islands history at the University of Auckland.