The Intervention Parliament Voted For
On 24 July 2003 a force that would build to about two thousand two hundred foreign police and soldiers began landing at Honiara, and the first thing that had happened was a unanimous vote in the Solomon Islands parliament. Fourteen years later the mission left on a date agreed years in advance, which almost no armed intervention anywhere has managed.
The transports came into Iron Bottom Sound on 24 July 2003, which is a stretch of water with previous. About two thousand two hundred police officers and soldiers came ashore at Honiara over the following days — Australians and New Zealanders in the largest numbers, with contingents from Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Tonga and eventually ten other Pacific Islands Forum members. The operation was called Helpem Fren, Solomon Islands Pijin for helping a friend, and the naming was doing work: the Australian government had spent the previous three years publicly refusing to do this.
What made it different from every other intervention of that decade happened three weeks earlier and about a kilometre from the wharf. On 17 July 2003 the National Parliament of Solomon Islands passed the Facilitation of International Assistance Act, unanimously, setting out what a visiting force could do, what powers its police would hold, what immunities they would have, and who could end it. The Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands arrived as the creature of a domestic statute passed by the country it was arriving in. Fourteen years later, on 30 June 2017, it went home on a date that had been agreed years in advance. Both halves of that are unusual enough to be worth taking seriously, and the second half is rarer than the first.
The Tensions
The crisis had been building since late 1998. Militants on Guadalcanal, organised first as the Guadalcanal Revolutionary Army and then the Isatabu Freedom Movement, began forcing settlers from Malaita off land around Honiara — grievances about land, about who held the jobs the capital created, and about a capital that had been planted on Guale land by an administration that never settled the question of who owned it. Something in the order of twenty thousand people were displaced. The Malaita Eagle Force formed in response and armed itself, in part by emptying the police armoury at Rove. On 5 June 2000 the MEF, with elements of the police field force alongside it, took Prime Minister Bartholomew Ulufa'alu hostage; he resigned nine days later. A peace agreement signed at Townsville in Queensland on 15 October 2000 disarmed nobody in practice. On the Weather Coast of Guadalcanal, Harold Keke's Guadalcanal Liberation Front went on killing through 2002, including Father Augustine Geve, a Catholic priest and member of parliament. By 2003 the police force was a party to the conflict rather than a check on it, and the state could not pay its own salaries.
The Act that made it lawful
Prime Minister Sir Allan Kemakeza asked Canberra for help in the middle of 2003, and Australia — which had turned down a similar request in 2000 and again in 2002 — this time said yes, in an international climate where a failing state a thousand kilometres off Queensland had acquired a different political meaning. But the request was routed through the region rather than around it. Pacific Islands Forum foreign ministers met in Sydney on 30 June 2003 and endorsed the mission under the Biketawa Declaration, the framework the Forum had adopted in Kiribati in October 2000 for exactly this kind of crisis, and which had never been invoked before. Fifteen Forum countries eventually contributed personnel. Then parliament in Honiara legislated. The distinction matters more than it sounds: the mission's police carried powers under Solomon Islands law, answered in Solomon Islands courts, and could be shown the door by a vote of the same chamber that had let them in.
An invitation is not the same as consent, and consent is not the same as agreement — but a statute that a parliament can repeal is a different object from a mandate written in another country, and the Solomons kept hold of the difference for fourteen years.
Guns, arrests and a treasury
The first phase worked fast, which is the part everyone remembers. A weapons amnesty in the opening weeks brought in some three and a half thousand firearms. Harold Keke surrendered on 13 August 2003, three weeks after the landing, and was later convicted of murder. Over the mission's life several thousand people were arrested, including a former police commissioner, serving officers and members of parliament — the prosecution of the security forces themselves being the thing a domestic police force could not have done. Advisers went into the finance ministry and the state began paying its bills again. Then came the harder work, and it went less well. In April 2006 the election of Snyder Rini as prime minister set off riots that burned much of Honiara's Chinatown; he resigned after eight days. Nobody had rebuilt the political economy that produced the violence, and a mission built around policing was not equipped to.
How long an invitation lasts
The years that followed were an argument about sovereignty conducted mostly by two governments who disliked each other. Manasseh Sogavare, prime minister again from 2006, expelled the Australian high commissioner in September 2006 and appointed Julian Moti, an Australian-Fijian lawyer wanted by Australia, as attorney-general; Moti was eventually deported in December 2007, and in December 2011 the High Court of Australia permanently stayed the prosecution as an abuse of process. Underneath the personalities was a real question, and the Solomon Islands side of it was not unreasonable: a police mission that had been in the country for years with no defined end was, whatever the statute said, a standing foreign presence. The answer was to write the exit down. The military component drew down and finished in 2013. The policing mission ran to a published date and closed on 30 June 2017, having cost Australia something in the order of two and a half billion dollars. Six weeks later, in August 2017, the two countries signed a bilateral security treaty allowing Australian police to return if Honiara asked — the invitation made permanent and, crucially, still an invitation.
Four years after it left
On 24 November 2021 protesters from Malaita marched on the parliament in Honiara and three days of rioting followed; Chinatown burned again and three bodies were recovered from a burnt-out building. The grievances were partly local and partly about the government's decision in September 2019 to switch diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing, a decision Malaita province had loudly refused to accept. Honiara invoked the 2017 treaty, Australian police flew in within a day, and Papua New Guinea, Fiji and New Zealand followed. Five months later, in April 2022, Solomon Islands signed a security agreement with China, and a good deal of commentary in Canberra and Washington treated this as a betrayal of the fourteen years and the money.
That reading misses what the country had actually been doing since 2003, which is choosing who to invite and on what terms. It also skips the part of the record the government itself was least comfortable with. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established under an act of 2008, began work in April 2009 with Desmond Tutu at its launch, and delivered its report to the prime minister in February 2012 after taking statements across the provinces; it documented in the region of two hundred killings during the Tensions. The government did not table it. In April 2013 Bishop Terry Brown, a former Anglican bishop of Malaita who had worked with the commission, published the whole thing online because it had become clear that nobody else would. The mission that ended on schedule collected the guns, restored the courts and left; the reckoning about what Solomon Islanders had done to each other was a domestic job, it was done, and it was then sat on. Both of those are what sovereignty looks like in practice, and only one of them makes a good anniversary.