Editorial: Solomons given carrot and stick

It is hard to stand by and watch a near neighbour subside into civil war but the New Zealand and Australian Governments must be wondering what more they can do for the Solomon Islands. Their diplomats were in Honiara making strenuous efforts to avert conflict even before the Solomons' Prime Minister was seized by a Malaitan group a week ago. Late last week their Foreign Ministers, with those of Malaysia and Botswana, went to intercede personally - an act of some courage on their part. The previous day a delegation from the European Parliament had departed with its aircraft under fire.

In Honiara the Foreign Ministers made an offer and threat. The offer, from Australia and New Zealand at least, is to provide the monetary compensation that the Solomons cannot afford to give Malaitans forced from land on Guadalcanal last year. It bears comparison, in principle if not scale, with the compensation Britain has offered Zimbabwe for a peaceful resolution of land claims in that country.

New Zealand proposes to divert its annual aid to the Solomons, about $5 million, to the land compensation. It would replace aid for education and the like, but aid for those purposes would be suspended anyway. Foreign Minister Phil Goff says they told the Solomons belligerents: "If you go to war there is no way I'm going to persuade my people that we should continue to pour money into a country bent on self-destruction." It is hard to argue with that. Aid, which diplomats prefer to call development assistance, becomes pointless when the recipients are undermining their own development.

Guadalcanal brigands probably set back the Solomons' development a year or two ago when they began driving Malaitans from their land. Malaitans, migrants from a poorer and more populous island, by all accounts brought to Guadalcanal the energy and diligence that migrants usually do. Their industry came to be resented by the natives of Guadalcanal and other islands, much as Indian migrants have attracted resentment in Fiji. Is an aversion to migrants becoming contagious in the Western Pacific?

The Solomons conflict could easily widen beyond one island in the group. There are suggestions that even Bougainville to the north, whose rebels against Papua New Guinea rule used to find refuge in the Solomons, could line up against the Malaitans. It is a volatile mixture that must have been brewing long ago. If New Zealanders paid it little attention before, they can hardly ignore it now. The Solomons are not so far away, as this country realised in the Second World War. Instability there is of concern here.

If monetary compensation can pacify those driven off their land, it is well worth the price. But it is hard to see a permanent solution short of barring Malaitans from buying land on other islands, which would call into question the integrity of the Solomons as a single state. No matter how artificial its creation, it would seem premature to write off the Solomons as a single entity.

Whenever conflict breaks out within post-colonial states there is a tendency to blame those who imposed a nation state upon tribes with little common interest. But there are just 400,000 people in the Solomon Islands today. To carve them into smaller states, and consign the 100,000 Malaitans to their mountainous homeland, would be an admission of defeat.