Asserting that a collapse of governmental authority in the Solomon Islands, some 1,000 miles northeast of Australia, could be exploited by “drug dealers, money launderers and international terrorism,” Howard stated that Australia would “assist” the Solomon Islands government to re-establish “law and order” and rebuild government services.

Backing the intervention, New Zealand foreign minister Phil Goff echoed Howard’s claims, saying that the Solomon Islands were fast becoming “ungovernable.” The “overwhelming majority of Solomon Islanders want something done to restore the rule of law,” he asserted.

The force heading to the Solomon Islands is expected to comprise 1,200 Australian army personnel, including 200 combat troops, some 300 Australian police, and up to 240 soldiers and cops from New Zealand. Smaller numbers of troops and police from South Pacific countries such as Fiji and Papua New Guinea will also be involved. Dubbed “co-operative intervention” by Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer, the plan was approved at a specially convened meeting of the South Pacific Forum in Sydney June 30. Earlier, after a June 5 meeting with Howard in Canberra, Solomon Islands prime minister Allan Kemakeza issued a public invitation for the intervention. The Forum, which includes 14 South Pacific governments, is dominated by the imperialist governments of Australia and New Zealand.

“It’ll be nothing short of recolonizing this country,” declared former Solomon Islands prime minister Manasseh Sogavare, during a July 9 debate on the intervention in parliament in Honiara, the island nation’s capital. “We have a reason to be extra careful…so that we strike a proper balance between achieving the objectives of such an intervention,” Sogavare said, “without subjecting ourselves to becoming long-term puppets of foreign parliaments.”

According to a report in the New Zealand Herald, Sogavare, who was in office in 2000 and 2001, complained that “previous pleas for help had been ignored by major aid donors Australia and New Zealand.” With 42 of the 50 members of the Solomon Islands’ parliament present, a unanimous vote for a resolution in favor of the intervention was recorded July 10.

A central goal of the Howard government—and its counterpart in New Zealand, the Labour Party government of Prime Minister Helen Clarke—is to install a new administration in the Solomon Islands tightly controlled by the two imperialist powers. “Under the plan,” the Australian reported June 26, “experts drawn from Australia, New Zealand, and the South Pacific region will be embedded throughout the Solomon Islands government system, especially in its financial institutions and the judicial system.”

According to a July 15 report on Radio Australia, the troops and police in the intervention force would be authorized to use “reasonable force” and would have immunity from local law while on duty, under a Solomon Islands law being drafted on instructions from the Australian government. The “international assistance program” would be reviewed every two years.

The Australian and New Zealand governments intervened in the Solomon Islands in 2000 to broker a peace deal between rival militias after civil war broke out in 1998. These powers have now decided that a more forceful, long-term intervention is required to shore up their domination of the Solomon Islands and other countries in the South Pacific.

Taking its cue from Howard, the Sydney Morning Herald stated June 26 that “the Solomons has descended into lawlessness and corruption, and is effectively bankrupt. The police force is racked by divisions, extortion attempts on senior public officials are common, and killings are a weekly occurrence.”

“It is estimated 90 percent of the Solomons’ consolidated revenue does not reach the country’s Treasury but is handed out in bribes, bogus allowances, and ‘compensation’ payments to whoever possesses a gun and demands money,” intoned the Australian the same day

Militia leader Harold Keke, who refused to be part of the peace talks in 2000, has been a major target of demonization in the build-up to intervention. Australian Financial Review editor Rowan Callick, writing in the July 9 Wall Street Journal, declared, “The Weathercoast on the south of Guadalcanal island—the capital, Honiara, is on the north coast—is today the country’s heart of darkness, an anarchic zone ruled through fear by tribal warlord Harold Keke, who has killed scores of people including a government minister and clergy.”

New Zealand foreign minister Goff has stated that the military intervention will target 300 “armed thugs” in Honiara, as well as Keke’s force of about 60. With the intervention pending, Keke has declared a cease-fire.

The Solomon Islands is a former British colony that won independence only in 1978. The country faces imperialist oppression and exploitation, especially through foreign domination of gold mining and logging.

Family, clan, and tribal social relations still predominate among the 465,000 people throughout the seven large and numerous smaller islands and outlying atolls. While English and Pijin are widely used, more than 60 local languages are still spoken.

Some 80 percent of the population live in the countryside as subsistence gardeners and small-scale farmers on clan lands.

There are scarcely any jobs, with 80 percent unemployment in Honiara. Mass layoffs in the public service, central to imperialist-imposed austerity measures, have deepened this crisis. The per capita gross domestic product has halved in the last few years from $1,000 to less than $500.

The country is saddled with a debt of $152 million, equaling some 55 percent of gross national product. Foreign trade, dominated by Australian business, has slumped by 80 percent since 1997. A gold mine, once proclaimed by capitalist pundits as the country’s “economic salvation,” has been closed since 2000.

Senior officials from Australia and New Zealand arrived in Honiara July 1 to finalize details of the intervention with the Solomon Islands government.

This intervention, with New Zealand imperialism joining in as junior partner to defend its own interests in the South Pacific, marks a sharp extension of the Australian rulers’ militarization drive. “The Pacific Islands are about to reap their Iraq dividend,” the Australian Financial Review stated June 26. Some 2,000 Australian military personnel participated in the assault on Iraq. The Australian government has also declared its backing for Washington’s aggressive plans to intercept north Korean ships and planes, while maintaining its more than decade-long warship presence in the Persian Gulf. In addition, a battalion of Australian troops remains garrisoned in East Timor as a central component of the UN-mandated military force there.

There are indications that Australian imperialist military intervention in the Pacific may extend elsewhere. The Australian government has described Papua New Guinea as a “failing state” too. A proposed $6-7 billion pipeline to Australia from oil and gas fields in Papua New Guinea’s Southern Highlands province to Australia, is a central focus of imperialist concerns over “security” there.  
 
 
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