The Australian Government’s decision to go to the assistance of the beleaguered government of the Solomon Islands represents an interesting case of a ‘permissive intervention’. Such an intervention may be defined as a situation in which a government requests assistance in restoring order in circumstances where normal governance and the ability to maintain law and order has broken down. Missions of this nature pose particular challenges to civil–military organisation and liaison support. In this respect, we can learn much from the recent experience in the Solomon Islands in such areas as defence aid to the civil power, military–police relations and, above all, in the realm of civil affairs.
The Background to the Solomons Crisis
The Solomon Islands is an archipelago of ten large islands and four groups of small islands in the South-West Pacific, with a total, mostly forested, land area of some 28 000 km2 and a population of some 520 000, consisting mostly of Melanesians. In 1978, the Solomon Islands became an independent nation within the British Commonwealth after almost a century as a British protectorate. It has a democratic system of government based on a unicameral parliament of fifty single-member constituencies, with some devolution to nine provincial assemblies. There is no strong system of political parties, and eighteen Members of Parliament are independents. Despite this situation and frequent changes of government, the country has until recently been politically stable.
Until the late 1990s, the Solomon Islands was a Pacific mini-state dependent on a limited range of primary exports and foreign aid for its economic existence. The great bulk of the population was concentrated in rural villages as subsistence farmers, while economic growth was hampered by the reality of a rapidly growing population. Alongside a rural subsistence economy was the problem of urbanisation. The capital of the Solomon Islands, Honiara, was increasingly plagued by urbanisation caused by a surge of partially educated and usually unemployed squatters from outlying areas of the country.
National security was vested in the Royal Solomon Islands Police, and in the absence of external enemies, there were no armed forces—at least until a spill-over from Papua New Guinea’s Bougainville conflict sparked a move to build a nascent defence force within the police force. During the 1990s, social unrest in the Solomons was fuelled by land hunger and the pressures on land availability, propelled not only by population growth and by lack of modern agricultural techniques, but also by an increase in the numbers of squatters on traditional lands around the capital. Many of the squatters came from the neighbouring large island of Malaita, regarded by other Solomon Islanders as the home of an assertive and overconfident people, who in Papua New Guinea would be called ‘big heads’. Resentment at the influx of squatters by local landowners on the home island of Guadalcanal generated attempts to expel the interlopers and led in turn to retaliatory resistance by the Malaitan squatters. This social unrest was compounded by the fact that a large proportion of the police force, including the mini-defence force, were Malaitans who tended to ally themselves with the various squatters’ militia forces, taking their relatively advanced weapons with them.
Faced by what was, in effect, a mutiny by its only security force, the elected government of the Solomon Islands lost control of events in mid-2000. The then Prime Minister, Bartholomew Ulufa’alu, appealed to Australia for help in restoring internal security. Initially, the Australian Government declined to intervene but did conduct an evacuation of Australians and other expatriates. Following the resignation of Prime Minister Ulufa’alu, the Australian Government facilitated the negotiation of a peace agreement, including a supervised surrender of weapons, between the warring militias and the police. It became clear, however, that the most significant weapons were not surrendered into the custody of peace monitors, and over the succeeding three years, the island of Guadalcanal became plagued by a low-grade insurgency. There was a collapse of law and order in Honiara, a flight of capital from the country and an effective 1500 per cent devaluation of the Solomon dollar.
The 2003 Mission to the Solomons
In July 2003, at the request of the Solomon Islands Government and endorsed unanimously by its Parliament, the Australian Government provided a combined military and police force of some 2000 personnel, and a number of administrative experts to assist in the restoration of internal security and a stable administration.
Australia’s involvement is a clear case of a permissive intervention, a phenomenon that may occur more frequently in the future as advanced states within the international system grapple with the issue of rescuing countries that fall into endemic disorder. The recent cases of Haiti and Sierra Leone spring to mind. The danger of a collapsed state in an age of non-state actors and networked operations is that such countries might be used as a base for criminal or terrorist groups. The classic case of this phenomenon was Afghanistan, where al-Qa’ida was able to hide behind the legal sovereignty of the Taliban regime and pursue a global terrorist campaign. Preventing such situations is clearly in the West’s long-term interest. While the crisis in the Solomons certainly resembles that in Sierra Leone or Haiti rather than Afghanistan, the conditions of disorder in the island-state do pose a problem to Australia’s national security. It is in our long-term interest to facilitate a stable Solomons Islands state whose system of parliamentary government succeeds. In the Solomons we are faced with the task of cooperative nation-building and re-establishing law and order.
Such a situation requires a subtle combination of enforcement, disarmament and civil–military cooperation. The smooth progress of Australia’s mission to the Solomons demonstrates the most valuable lesson in any permissive intervention: the need for popular support. Widespread popular support from the Solomons people has proven to be critical to both the success of the intervention force and to the credibility of the Solomon Islands Government.
Although media reporting in Australia has tended to focus on the restoration of internal security by Australian police supported by ADF elements, it is the task of restoring the administrative structure that is arguably the key to long-term success in the Solomons. Administrative reconstruction is, however, not an undertaking for a handful of senior experts but for a corps of Australian-led administrative personnel from all levels, working with their Solomon Islands colleagues. The challenge in reconstruction lies in demonstrating that government is community-wide and not simply a mechanism that is confined to the urban population of the capital. Permissive intervention may involve a degree of shared sovereignty and therefore nation-building tasks need to be applied with a recognition that such missions will take place in a globalised world and under media scrutiny.
Permissive interventions such as that undertaken in the Solomons require a balancing of the modernisation imperative against the realities and needs of indigenous governance. Part of the problem in failed states has been the problem of sustaining structures of administration that were bequeathed by colonialism. These structures were often strong but too complex in their workings, and required a cadre of apolitical and skilled civil servants to sustain them—a feature that was often missing in many societies where ethnicity was a major feature of politics. New states such as the Solomons and Sierra Leone faced difficulty in building strong democracies in the context of populations that were ethnically diverse and caught in the vice between subsistence agriculture and urbanisation.
As a result, governance often faltered as aspirations multiplied but were unmatched by administrative and economic growth. Aid programs that were excessively bureaucratised in the interests of the donor or were not well administered by civil servants sometimes compounded these problems. A common pattern in failed states has been the steady erosion of health, education and developmental projects followed by a general decline in internal security.
Another problem contributing to the administrative and political decay of some new states was the character of the Cold War. The latter contributed to the rise of a socialist or nationalist ideology that was aligned either to the Eastern or Western bloc rather than to indigenous requirements. Non-alignment was sometimes an option for new states but, overall, the Cold War was not a positive influence on the evolution of many Third World countries that assumed their independence in the 1960s and 1970s.
What then is to be done in restoring failed states, and how? The answer does not lie in recolonisation but in finding solutions that are attuned to the problems of permissive intervention that we face in the 21st century. The Solomon Islands should be viewed by Australian security specialists as a case study in cooperative nation-building and ought to be seen as a basic template for future regional challenges of this nature.
The most obvious requirement in a permissive intervention is to resolve the question of legitimate authority. In the case of the Solomon Islands Government, there was a request for assistance made from Honiara to Canberra and, as a result, there was no question of Australia’s acting unilaterally. Since there are two parties involved in a permissive intervention, there needs to be a clear understanding by both as to the limits of authority. If an intervention is to be effective, there needs to be substantial joint agreement on a wide range of political issues, defined by the basic objectives of the intervention.
If the objectives in a permissive intervention are simply to restore internal security and some degree of fiscal and administrative discipline, such an approach may succeed in deferring a long-term resolution of the main problems of stability. What is required in an intervention to which two or more parties agree is a clear understanding of the main objectives to be achieved, along with a timetable that lays down milestones and appropriate end states. Without such joint understanding, the likelihood for future disagreement and failure is high.
In a permissive intervention, the issue of an overarching political, legal and military authority is not one that should be ignored or lightly dismissed. For instance, a reconstruction initiative might consider principles that cover the following six issues. First, there must be a recognition that the restoration of internal security is the primary objective of the intervention mission. Second, there has to be an understanding that civilian control of the process is fundamental to success. A third factor must be a recognition that there can be only one authorised armed force in the country. This may be constituted as a combined military–police force, but the key rule is that there must be no exceptions. Robust rules of engagement may be necessary to permit forcible disarmament of rebel individuals or groups. Fourth, operations committees comprising the local police and military commanders need to be created and chaired by a senior civilian administrator. Fifth, every military operation or patrol needs to be accompanied by an indigenous police officer as an adviser. Finally, the role of the military should be strictly limited to supporting the police and the civil authorities.
In practice, the restoration of internal security in the Solomons has been a practical success largely because of the presence of popular support. If, in the longer term, the primary task of the intervention process is the restoration of effective government services, then macro-economic tasks will have to be addressed. These might encompass examining the stability of government finances, and stabilising the economic infrastructure, the currency, and the civil administration. A restoration of governance, of course, goes far beyond the provision of internal security. Good civil administration requires service delivery in such fields as policing, agricultural extension, forestry and mining, along with social services such as public health and education. Returning administration to a society such as the Solomons, which is strongly based on a rural society of villages, demands what might be called a ‘dirty boots’ approach. This type of approach would involve the employment of such personnel as administrators, policemen, teachers, health workers and agricultural extension officers, who can and will work to improve the living conditions of local villagers.
A main cause of social unrest has often lain in attempts to rationalise land rights in Third World nations. In the author’s view, the Solomon Islands’ problems are rooted in a basic clash between traditional land rights and the pressures on land acquisition imposed by a rapidly growing population. In this respect, the challenge is clear: in the future, Solomons society must modernise traditional agricultural practices while the administrative and legal systems must become capable of resolving disputes. Land issues cannot be legislated out of existence or ignored; they are real and, in the minds of traditional and aspiring owners, remain of fundamental and overriding importance.
As in parts of Africa, the overriding interest of villagers in Melanesia has been the security of their land. An administration that fails to recognise this interest or deal effectively with disputes over land simply invites at best social unrest and at worst armed rebellion. Providing a group of senior Australian administrative experts to assist in the reconstruction of the Solomons will be valuable. It will, however, not be enough unless junior and middle-ranking indigenous civil servants can be persuaded to work at the regional and village levels, thus bringing government to the people and people to the government. Another useful Australian aid program that might be developed for use in Melanesia would be to fund a special team of academics and administrators familiar with Melanesian culture in order to assist in developing an effective public administration system and associated training programs for middle-and senior-level public servants.
Conclusion
By comparison with the East Timor commitment, any permissive intervention in the future might take several forms. As with other such operations in the Caribbean or Africa, regional nations or friendly powers have come together in order to share sovereign authority and the costs of government with a local administration. In any event, considerable cultural sensitivity needs to be exercised in such circumstances since the aim should be to assist and supplement, but never to replace, indigenous sovereignty.
The Solomon Islands intervention is an interesting case in that it provides a study in collaborative nation-building at the beginning of the new century. While such a task is more civil than military in nature, the military are important as the ultimate guarantor of security. As a consequence, there is probably a good case in the future for the establishment of an inter-agency taskforce to develop a coherent policy for permissive interventions. In the case of the Australian Army, there is clearly an important future role for the nascent Civil Affairs project.
