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Date Published: 22/02/2001
Author: Nicola Baird Future rising sea levels have brought The plight of the Solomon Islands to the attention of the world. yet as Nicola Baird reports, global warming is only part of the islanders’ troubles. |
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The solomon islands used to be known as the ‘Happy Isles’. But that was before Prime Minister Bartholomew Ulufa’alu was ousted by the Melaitan Eagle Force in a coup in June last year, before the nightmares of inter-island strife that followed – headless bodies have even been dumped in the marketplaces – and before the sea levels have even begun to rise.
Thousands of families have had to flee their homes to avoid the increasingly bitter clashes between men from Guadalcanal, the island province where the capital, Honiara, is sited, and Malaitans who came to work on oil palm plantations near the airport, made homes in Honiara and seemed to take over the country’s top jobs.
At the same time, the country’s fragile economy, based on unsustainable exploitation of natural resources, has imploded. Logging has, for some time, been the source of around 40 per cent of the government’s earnings. As the country’s debts mounted – by the end of 1997 it owed over a billion dollars – log exports grew and grew. Apart from a handful of powerful men – all too often in government jobs – this trashing of the forest didn’t make the majority of Solomon Islanders any richer. The currency devaluation of August 1997 made life much harder for a people reliant on foreign imports (such as rice, tinned fish, cooking oil and kerosene) – especially the Malaitans and the Guadalcanal youths. It also made foresters wonder just how long this pace of logging could be maintained – some believed there were only a couple of years’ of harvestable trees left, and that the damage done to the country’s forests would take decades to recover.
The irony is that the Solomon Islands is a nation of villages. Most families prefer to live in self-sufficient language groups – around 80 languages are spoken – growing food and fishing using methods that their ancestors would recognise. However, the exponential population growth, lack of appropriate education – even primary schools charge – and too few places for
secondary school students, combined with increasing exposure to Western lifestyles, has created a very restless youth culture.
Since the coup, there have been increasingly ugly clashes between the MEF (named after a local football team) and the Guadalcanal-based People’s Isatabu Freedom Movement (IFM). More than 100 people have been killed in ambushes and random attacks, calling up memories of the violent battles of 50 years ago between Japanese and American soldiers and commemorated by place names such as Bloody Ridge.
Most of the fighting has been on Guadalcanal, around Honiara, but the consequences have been far-reaching: paid jobs nationwide have all but disappeared as a result. Besides foreign aid, all sources of hard currency have dried up as first oil palm plantations, then a gold mine and finally the country’s own tuna cannery fell victim to the activities of rival armed militia. And despite a tentative peace agreement signed in Australia last October, business is not back to normal. The government is constitutionally illegal, the police demoralised, schools shut and the 40 foreign peacekeepers from Australia and New Zealand are powerless to stem the chaos.
Meanwhile, the damage being done to this tiny island nation’s environment is out of control. With 20,000 Honiara residents moving back to crowded Malaita province and another 10,000 Guadalcanal people forced to flee the capital to more remote parts of their home province, uncontrolled clearing of the forest for food crops is rife. ‘People say, “We know the bush is our future, we know how important trees are, but we have to eat, so the ground has to be cleared,”’ says Heinz Schurmann Zeggel from Amnesty International.
There are also reports of private logging deals, which the government collects no income on and cannot monitor, as well as dynamite being used for fishing in Malaita’s beautiful Langa Langa lagoon and in Marovo lagoon (a World Heritage Site) over in Western Province.
What was once an extraordinary melting pot of Melanesian peoples has become yet another casualty in the rush for Western-style nationhood. And the premiers from the country’s other seven provinces, mindful of the turmoil in the capital, are increasingly talking of going it alone. ‘How much their village people are aware of this choice and if aware, how much they understand of the new system remains a mystery. None of the nine premiers mentioned anything about having consulted their people… a lack of village level participation in affairs partly responsible for the past months of social unrest,’ according to John Roughan, adviser to the country’s largest NGO, Solomon Islands Development Trust.
The future looks bleak. Pundits predict further armed power struggles in the other provinces, which will lead to even greater trials for the villagers; while those who can cream off the cash as they fight for positions of power.
And just when it seems that things could barely get worse, the Solomon Islands faces the threat of rising sea levels due to global warming. The islands are truly a country under threat.
Nicola Baird is an environmental journalist. She worked in the Solomon Islands from 1990-92.
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