In shift, Australia offers helping hand to Solomons

The Solomon Islands is a nation coming undone. Parliament has not sat for more than five months because it can't pay its power bill. Armed militia control the police and intimidate government ministers at gunpoint.

Years of ethnic violence have emptied the archipelago's coffers to the point where some government officials have even suggested selling passports for extra cash. But that has raised the fear that terrorists could use the sandy haven as a place to get guns and change identities.

Until now, Australia has watched the turmoil from a distance, restricting its involvement to aid and monitoring activities.

"Australia has been very reluctant in the past to get involved in the internal affairs of the South Pacific countries. That would be seen to be a neocolonialist attitude," says Hugh White, head of Canberra's Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

But attitudes are changing here in the wake of terror attacks last October in Bali that killed 88 Australians. With a somber eye toward regional security, Australia is taking a newly muscular approach, offering to send in military and police forces to help restore order.

The islands' parliament is expected to debate the offer this month. Most observers believe it will be accepted.

Just three years ago, the Australian government refused a plea for intervention by former Solomon Islands Prime Minister Bartholomew Ulufa'alu. Mr. Ulufa'alu was subsequently overthrown at gunpoint by police who were aligned with a militia group, and the situation worsened.

Describing it as "a petri dish for transnational crime," White says that "rather than the country reverting to a premodern Pacific paradise, it has become a postmodern badlands, a haven for drugs, people smuggling, and mercenaries - like some of the more tragic parts of West Africa."

The Bali attacks forced Australia to pay more attention to potential terrorist havens in its neighborhood. Mr. White sees the Solomons as just such a place.

But other experts think that's an exaggeration.

"It's well out of southeast Asia ... and where does the terrorist go ? He could go from Japan to New Zealand, but that's not very likely, is it?" says Clive Williams, the head of the department of strategic and defense studies at the Australian National University.

Suspicious groups have moved through the country before, however. Just after the Bali bombings, two groups of Pakistani nationals on unknown business were tracked as they passed through Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands.

A three-hour flight from Australia, the Solomons is a country of 1,000 islands that together are the size of Maryland.

It was colonized reluctantly by the British in the late 19th century at Australia's behest, to ensure that no other imperial power gained a foothold there.

The British spent no money on development right up to the time of independence in 1978.

Page: 1 | 2