Solomon Islands - from world war to local tensions
‘Man you were shaking, you were scared man.’
Riots, looting and burning are not uncommon in the Solomon Islands. We just tend to forget about the last lot when a new bout of unrest is occurring. Such as in November 2021. This is an extract from my Swimming with Sharks (Penguin 2010). Readers might find it relevant to the current unrest.
Pacific peoples live in other’s shadows or as Australian journalist Helen Fraser put it when writing about New Caledonia, ‘your flag is blocking our sun’. The Solomons was barely a colony or nation, but leftovers after the main Pacific feast. It's mostly Melanesian people have been there for around 5000 years and separated into distinctive language groups.
European contact came in 1568 with Spanish explorer Alvaro de Mendana looking for the source of King Solomon’s gold. He died there never knowing it was rich in gold. What the locals may have known as Isatabu became Guadalcanal after the Andalusian hometown of Mendana deputy, Pedro de Ortega.
Tokyo’s decision at the start of World War Two to build an airstrip there determined the fate of the independent state. The Battle of Guadalcanal was immortalised in statutes and movies but forgotten were the people who called it the ‘Long Death’.
One seemingly inconsequential event of the war was the American decision to build a base at what is now Honiara on Guadalcanal. They took land from the locals to do it. They then compounded the situation by getting people from the island of Malaita to work for them. In the carefully designed tribal state, the Americans had introduced an enclave of people very different from those whose land they occupied.
Wealth lost
The Solomons is the kind of place that should not be poor. There is really no population pressure and it is resource rich. Its problem is its leadership who steal the wealth to flog off to foreigners. Malaysian racketeers operating for Chinese buyers have stolen their forests. Others are taking the fish.
Malaria has crippled the Solomons. I have noticed it in mundane ways; set up an interview and find it cancelled at the last minute because the person had a bout of malaria. At some times of the year everybody and the country itself struggles to cope with malaria.
Its leadership had been its disaster, notably corrupt Solomon Mamaloni. Early in my career, I wrote about him when a security source passed on news that he had gone to Libya and the Soviet Union in a blackmail move against Australia. During a Pacific Forum in PNG, a colleague and I gate crashed the leader’s dinner. On the strength of her beauty, we were obliged to sit with the Australian Minister for Pacific Affairs, Gordon Bilney. He proclaimed New Zealand was to blame for Mamaloni and when I expressed disbelief, he went off to find Prime Minister Jim Bolger.
‘Jim, tell this journalist where Mamaloni learnt his politics.’
As a student in New Zealand, Mamaloni had lived at the home of a Social Credit party leader. He came to believe in its discredited policies.
While I had reported his machinations for years, I only got to know him personally toward the end of his life in January 2000 when his lifestyle caught up to his kidneys. He had been addicted to betel nut chewing which was particularly hard on the mouth in the Solomons. The nut came wrapped in a leaf with a pinch or two of coral lime. He had no teeth left and would cadge nuts that others had chewed. Mamaloni lost office to Bartholomew Ulufa’alu from Malaita who continued turning Honiara, population 40,000, into a nightmare.
It had five casinos. They were not the flashy kind associated with Western cities, but upstairs places or behind fences that were not seeking casual street custom. Most people in Honiara had no money for casinos. They were money-laundering operations; Chinese and Russian gangs arrived with money in briefcases and 'played’ the casino. Proceeds were then returned, less the laundering cost, to the courier in the form of a bank cheque drawn. Australian banks were entirely helpful in the process.
Cash compensation
In May 1998, two Malaitan girls at Ruavatu National Secondary School in Guadalcanal were raped.
Ulufa’alu announced that the central government would give the family of each girl S$16,000. The money would come from the government’s grant to the Guadalcanal Provincial Council.
Guadalcanal’s provincial premier, Ezekiel Alebua, responded by demanding the central government pay rent for Honiara, at S$50 per person, plus S$14 million for breaches of the constitution. A visionless self-server he sent an invoice for S$100,000 each for 25 Guadalcanal people killed for ‘no reason’ since independence in 1978. Alebua denied he was signal for armed uprising but it led to assorted cliques from the ‘Zero Zero Group’, Guadalcanal Liberation Front (GLF) and the Isatabu Freedom Fighters (IFF).
Having made regular trips to the Solomons I was startled by the sudden tension, and knew little of it. I was quickly there and soon recognised that Honiara, with its large grouping of unemployed youth, offered plenty of cannon fodder should things go bad. They did. Within weeks matters quickly degenerated, suggesting that the ‘Happy Isles’, as the Solomons was known on tourist posters, had been harbouring deeper tensions.
In the Shortlands, I had struck up a friendship with the Police Field Force (PFF) and in those times, I had no idea what island each member came from. Most were Malaitan. In the space of those weeks of disarray, the police and the PFF collapsed.
Given that the political leadership of the Solomons was appalling, it was asking too much to imagine the police leadership would be any better. I first saw Police Commissioner Frank Short at the airport as I arrived. He would have found a place in an Evelyn Waugh novel and he was the wrong person to control a collapsing police force. The dislike was mutual. A group of arrested ‘rebels’ were to appear in court but Short insisted they go before a magistrate inside the police compound at Rove.
Radio Australia’s Sean Dorney, an Agence France-Presse photographer and I would not be allowed in but the magistrate overruled him.
When the prisoners were called to the makeshift dock, no one came.
The judge sent the crier away to find them. He came back and loudly announced to the magistrate: ‘The prisoners cannot come now, they are having their photos taken by AFP.’
Honiara was a Malaitan town in the main, but inter-tribal beatings and murders occurred in its dark streets.
Police had to use teargas in a bid to stop Malaitans tearing down the Guadalcanal provincial government offices. A police vehicle was shot-up; no one was hurt.
I could not pick the difference between a Malaitan and a Guadalcanal person. Solomon Islanders could. Many of the Solomon journalists were Malaitans and found they could not go beyond Honiara limits or out past the airport.
Some, like journalist George Atkins, who I was a journalism student with, were neither Guadalcanal nor Malaitan. Life was a dangerous twilight.
It was Malaita vs. Guadalcanal; to me it seemed to be a conflict that simply exploded on the scene but in fact, it had brewed unnoticed for decades.
Ethnic cleansing
Dorney suffered severe pot-hole-fatigue. He stopped the barely moving car and backed it into a pothole, satisfied.
‘Yip, the potholes are bigger than the car.’
Loose lines existed around Honiara. They would move; sometimes Honiara and Henderson Field were all Malaitan, other times the Guadalcanal groups cut off the airport.
Out east was the Solomon Islands Plantations, a 6300 hectares estate producing an oil that made chocolate taste different and last longer.
Malaitans, who had staffed the plantations, fled into Honiara and eventually onto Malaita, an island many had never been to.
I spoke with some plantation refugees who had been attacked.
Violin Dafua watched an old man being hacked to death, while he sheltered his grandson.
A fisherman died.
‘He said ‘oh please don’t shoot’ and then they shot him in both arms and legs and when he went down they hacked him with the knives.’
Lionel Tota told of rebels coming into a village.
‘They had a gun, a point two two. I was not frightened and I told them if you shot me you will have to face the judgment of god.’
The Malaita ferry Romas, was packed with people, their bodies hiding the deep rust and doubtful seaworthiness. I feared getting aboard while it tied up to the wharf.
‘It’s not normally like this,’ a man said, ‘Mostly people don’t have to take everything they own.’
A former journalist turned MP who was in cabinet, Malaitan Alfred Sasako, attacked my stories, saying foreign correspondents were destroying Solomon's good name.
‘The so-called ethnic tension was nothing more than a storm in the tea cup and the government is confident it would be brought under control soon.’
In June 1999, New Zealand issued a travel advisory warning its citizens to defer travel. Advisories are a recent invention; before the Internet, it was reckoned that most people could figure things out for themselves.
Honiara; it is not much of a town but without ethnic tensions, it has its own charm, set between the steep hills and the extravagantly lovely Ironbottom Sound.
Dorney and I headed out west. It was devoid of people, in an area usually lively with locals and with tourists. Abandoned was a big rice plantation.
A tree house guarded the entrance to Vilu village.
In some homes, photographs littered the floors.
Who would flee and yet leave their family memories?
I looked at a couple of the photos but put them down. To look felt like invading the people’s place. I picked up a small Gideon’s New Testament.
‘If anyone found this Bible please bring it to the owner of this Bible. Thank you by Maenu Tuita.’
Written inside was this: ‘Names Hepson, Boy From Foueba Island North Malaita Pro. P O Box 532, Honiara, Solomon Islands.’
Outside a small ginger kitten meowed for food and a goat sat hungry in a pen. A lush piece of land, it was empty of people. Another house had a sign out front.
‘Please don’t Enter in this house without permission from the owner. Try to respect.’
We came upon three men preparing to cook fish on a stony beach. I approached the men and made introductions.
An electric jolt ran through the trio when, after saying who I was and getting no reaction, I introduced ‘Sean Dorney of Radio Australia’. He was the star of shortwave radio.
The trio claimed to know nothing of what had gone on.
‘I am happy the Malaitans have gone,’ Francis Silovivario said. ‘They caused problems and they were always stealing and fighting.’
Rabuka to the rescue
None of the five foreign journalists had managed to speak to anybody from the Guadalcanal rebel groups. One afternoon Dorney came into the lobby and announced he had found them, a rebel called Bakadi (as in Bacardi). He had left a note with him for rebel leader Andrew Te’e.
As Dorney had to file his report, a Melbourne Age reporter and I took the car (we carpooled, not out of media poverty, but because there was only one rental car available for out-of-Honiara work) and headed east.
I was about to drive across the single lane Mbalasuna bridge when I could see the rebels standing at the other end. They were edgy. I parked the car and we walked over the bridge. An oil palm trunk blocked the bridge. They were pointing guns at us.
Bakadi said they had a large supply of ammunition.
‘My father told of where the Americans hid them,’ he said, using the pidgin word for the quantity, ‘stakas’ or stacks.
‘Were not against Malaita but the Malaitan people don’t treat us well. They take advantage of the land. They are robbing us. We don’t want to fight but we want to tell them to go away.’
For some reason the mood changed and a man pushed me back toward the bridge and we were marched onto it.
‘I think they’re going to kill us,’ my colleague said.
I comforted myself with the untested notion that the weapons aimed at us were not capable of hitting barn doors. Still, somebody among them had to be a good shot.
We got to the car as we realised the rebels had stopped some distance behind us, satisfied that they had driven off the reporters.
We shared our hotel with Fiji’s Sitiveni Rabuka who had arrived as a Commonwealth peace envoy, accompanied by Nigeria diplomat Ade Adefuye. They also met the rebels Dorney had found.
‘We were told there was no command structure, they were disorganised, every man for himself sort of thing…. But the group we met yesterday was very well organised,’ Rabuka said.
‘There was a commander, his 2-I-C, there were 215 young men, most of them armed with shotguns and point two two weapons. Telescopic sights, binoculars, compasses. They are aware of how to use these things.’
He told them he knew what it was like to be a militant and to act illegally. He had staged two coups in 1987.
‘I know what they are feeling. They would not want to kill anybody just for the sake of killing, they have something to fight for and this man coming to them has got nothing to do with what they are fighting for.’
Rabuka believed IFF had around 20,000 men.
‘These people are committed to a cause…. Their main ideology was based on their land and custom and their concern that they are being slowly pushed back in their own homeland, their own island, by the internal migration of the other islanders … It is a very difficult one.’
Dog
George Grey wore a wig made out of bamboo curtain rings, held in place with an old scarf. His high-powered rifle suggested it was not useful to comment on the fake ray bans and imitation military gear. He was sitting under a large banyan tree with other oddly dressed insurgents, some with homemade rifles, others with spears and axes. One had a bow and arrow.
Rabuka and Adefuye had come to meet them.
One time bank clerk Grey was cousin to Harold Keke and Joseph Sangu, names to know.
They were all followers of Pelise Moro, a big man from the Weather Coast of Guadalcanal. He had claimed to have visions about Guadalcanal or Isatabu.
Moro called for a return to pre-European custom, most notably in traditional dress, a fibre skirt for women and tree bark or kabilato for men. It was little more than a loincloth. The Moro Movement was influential for two decades and then faded out. Its message, Isatabu rule of Guadalcanal, remained relevant for Keke.
The indigenous are a maternal people whose land passes through the mother’s line. Malatans can be aggressively paternal, especially in matters of land.
Rabuka opened the meeting under the tree with a prayer that included a line about reporters.
‘We thank you lord for their courage in carrying out their duty.’
Grey pulled out Australian Maritime College notepaper with his demands.
‘The Malaitans are all gone. There is no one to fight. They are all in town. They are living behind a fence. It is very easy to wipe them out.’
As he talked, armed men along the tree line wore kabilato.
Bakadi came under the banyan and stopped Grey from talking.
He wore a sagging felt hat with a large pair of binoculars around him and precious little else. He said the rest of the men were not going to come into the village, they wanted Rabuka in the jungle. Talks would halt for discussions among themselves.
‘We are fighting a holy war,’ Grey waxed. ‘The trees are fighting, the stones are fighting and women and the children are fighting.’
I asked Grey why he hated Malaitans.
‘Do you know what we call them…. Dog sperm.’
I included the quote in my dispatch to explain the intense hatred at play. It bounced straight back and onto the Malaitan dominated Honiara media. They gleefully published it and happily blamed me for the inevitable local outrage.
Johnson Honimae, head of government controlled Solomons Broadcasting, said that foreign correspondents did not care what happened to their stories.
‘If that reporter was in Honiara, he would have been killed.’
I came back into my hotel room during that controversy to find a large spent bullet sitting on my pillow.
‘Humm,’ Rabuka said, casting a professional eye over it, ‘50 cal., makes a big hole.’
Captured
We left Mbalasuna with four reporters packed into the beaten car, two in the back of the two-door car. Dorney was driving and I was sitting beside him.
Blocking our path was Bakadi and Andrew Te’e and a few hundred near naked, angry men. They carried every kind of killing thing one could devise in the transition from stone age to iron age; axes, sledge hammers, bush knives and bows and arrows. The most worrying were the homemade rifles, strung together with pipes and wire. A single bullet, held on with a rubber band or two, sat behind a make shift firing pin. If fired the bullet could go anywhere.
Gunning the accelerator of the car was not an option so we stopped.
I had the sense that almost all of the rebels were on my side of the car poking me with shotguns or rifles. Te’e came up.
He had a small string bag around his neck, hanging down the front of his bare chest. He reached into it and pulled out a ball of paper.
‘Who is this man?’
It spelt trouble for the person whose name was on the paper.
The name Dorney stood out.
As I was about to tell Te’e that I had never heard of him, Dorney leaned over, kind of waved and in his best Queensland Australian announced: ‘Ah, gidday mate, that’s me, Sean Dorney.’
I told Dorney I was about to lie and wondered why he had scuppered me
‘What you didn’t know, was that the man I gave the piece of paper to yesterday, was on my side of the car pointing a shotgun at me.’
Te’e kept trying to grab my camera and notebook. When he realised I was not being helpful he told me to get out of the car.
‘Ah Mike, I wouldn’t do that if I were you,’ Dorney said as if it was optional.
Te’e got my notebook and started to read it.
He could not.
Things were getting a little dodgy; men were hitting me on the head and some of it was hurting. I turned around as Rabuka and Adefuye walking into the scene. The men were as stunned as I was. He was cool; looking around, taking in a calculated military way the lie of the combat ground.
Rabuka looked at me, and then spoke to Te’e.
‘He isn’t with me.’
Rabuka’s appearance left Te’e bewildered.
My tape recorder was still hanging on my wrist.
‘He’s recording, he’s recording,’ a captor called out and blows started again.
Rabuka walked over to me and said he would hold the recorder and all the others in the car. I got the other three and handed them over. As I told Te’e that none of us had been recording I saw that Rabuka was fiddling with them and had turned one of them onto ‘record’. I put my hand over it and told him to stop playing around.
Rabuka broke the impasse by agreeing that if they let us go, he would meet the warriors in the jungle.
I got back in the car and Dorney started it up; surprisingly we drove away as the two journalists in the back were discussing how terrible it had all been and how they never wanted that again. Dorney looked at me and quietly we agreed, it was not too bad. As we drove off, Dorney pulled his spare tape recorder out from under his seat. Always the good radio man.
‘There is something primal and more than a little frightening, about suddenly meeting a couple of hundred near naked, armed and very angry men on what was otherwise a picturesque and empty road,’ I wrote in an AFP dispatch.
Graeme Hunt had been teaching business writing to the locals. He told the New Zealand Press Association he feared they were all going to be kidnapped and hauled off into the jungle.
‘They were very, very angry with us. It was a fearsome sight. These guys were in their traditional dress, near naked and armed to the teeth…. They had twenty twos, some with telescopic sights, several had old style shotguns, bows and arrows, hatchets, things which looked like windpipes, and home-made pistols and rifles. I doubt if they would have shot us but if Rabuka had not been there, we would have been in real trouble.’
Adefuye, formally Nigeria’s high commissioner to Jamaica, used his best Rastafarian to describe his perspective: ‘Man you were shaking, you were scared man.’
Rabuka had saved a real life that day.
When he left us, he had gone a short distance to the guerrilla camp where a Malaita man, tied up, was awaiting murder. Rabuka intervened.
‘Shooting a man with a rifle from a long way off is impersonal,’ the one time soldier said, ‘but when they pulled out a knife, that was another matter.’
Rabuka won his release and took him back to Honiara.
That night the white expatriates of the Honiara Yacht Club held ‘happy hour’. An Australian Navy commander bemoaned the fact that the media were reporting that rebels existed at all.
‘In my office the articles have become an object of ridicule and amusement.’
They should have taken it seriously.
Coup
Adefuye had decided I was a Commonwealth resource.
‘I want you to write a peace agreement.’
I would like to think it was a masterpiece of diplomacy, but it was merely the opening gambit in what turned into a drawn out discussion. Not more than a sentence or two of mine stayed in the final agreement.
While it was negotiated, Rabuka sat on one of those globally ubiquitous plastic deck chair and its legs exploded off. The peace deal had no legs either.
Police Commissioner Frank Short, outraged that Rabuka was talking about agreements with rebels, sealed Honiara off from the countryside.
‘Frank Short has got to go,’ Adefuye said more than once.
Short’s police and PFF virtually dissolved into a newly formed rebel group; the Malaita Eagle Force (MEF) founded by local lawyer Andrew Nori formed the MEF with Jimmy Rasta Lusibaea.
They helped themselves to police arms.
A headless corpse that had died in a ‘most brutal and savage murder’ was dumped in the central market with a note saying Alebua, the provincial premier, would be the next.
The IFF responded by killing a Malaitan and mounting his head on a pike.
Those of us there did report the collapse but little notice was taken of it all.
Our stories were printed and broadcast and the Australian and New Zealand foreign ministers, Alexander Downer and Phil Goff, would make the occasional visit to shore up the forces of good. Goff, on one trip, accepted a wooden carved eagle. This was the MEF symbol. He said he had no choice in the matter.
Early in May 2000 my navy officer son’s ship, HMNZS Canterbury, held a family day trip ahead of deployment to Asia. I was on the bridge out in the Hauraki Gulf talking to the captain and saying that things were looking bad in the Solomons, and if they diverted there, I hoped he would remember that a father of one of his officers was more than likely there.
Instead, I went to Suva. George Speight and a gang of terrorists had seized the Fiji parliament, taking hostages.
I was not in Honiara on 5 June 2000, when a coup there brought down Bartholomew Ulufa’alu’s government and installed Mannaseh Sogavare.
Heart of darkness
The pro-Guadalcanal movement grew into the Isatabu Freedom Movement with Andrew Te’e, who had held us up, and Harold Keke.
In October 2000 in Townsville, they reached a peace agreement with the MEF. Keke and Te’e fell out over the peace agreement; Keke was adamantly opposed to any deal and wanted to fight on.
He formed the Guadalcanal Liberation Front (GLF) and retreated into a daunting part of the Pacific, Guadalcanal’s Weather Coast. Rugged mountains and jungle block it off from Guadalcanal's more benign side. Little villages cluster around small, exposed bays. Living is basic. Access to Honiara is by boat around the coast.
Keke moved into the Weather Coast village of Talise on the Sughu Anchorage, creating the Pacific’s own heart of darkness. Keke and his brother Joe Sangu had been altar boys and school dropouts.
Guadalcanal academic Tarcisius Tara wrote of how his people grew up ‘detesting the fact others who have settled on our island are often disrespectful of our customs and of us…. Such disrespect manifests itself in actions such as murder, the settlement of our land and the plunder of our resources.’
Joses Kejoa was another who joined GLF because Keke ‘was fighting for the life of my island.’
Keke’s dangerous nature was recognised early when a group tried to negotiate peace with the GLF. At a break in the talks, Keke attacked another participant, leaving him permanently brain damaged.
HMNZS Manawanui was a peace talk venue. Captain Lance Cook reported to Wellington of ‘Keke’s armed welcoming party brandishing M16s and AK47s’.
They came into the dive deck: ‘needless to say we had sufficient brawn on the dive deck to be in control of the situation.’
Talks ended with pizza. ‘Fed and watered, Keke shook hands with members of ship’s company and departed the ship with his party.’
The MEF dominated government in Honiara announced a price on Keke’s head. Ten bounty hunters set out to get him. They were all murdered.
Murders
Weather Coast Member of Parliament Augustine Geve was the first Solomon Islander to be ordained as a Catholic priest. In August 2002, he went to the Weather Coast, hoping to bring peace.
Keke instead accused him of being a conman.
Forced to write a resignation letter, Keke took him to the beach and shot Geve between his eyes. Keke broadcast the news on shortwave radio.
During the darkness, many stories came out. Verification was impossible at the time. State radio said that Keke had banned villagers from gardening, fishing, making fires or working, and only allowed them to pray, for two days each week.
‘He demands now that the people two days over every week do not work in their gardens or fish and instead they hold ‘Harold Days’ to honour Keke,’ one source said.
The Melanesian Brotherhood, part of the Solomon’s Anglican Church, was mostly funded from the proceeds of a Melanesian Trust based in New Zealand. It owned parts of Auckland’s richest suburbs.
In 1999, the Brotherhood decided they could not watch the country divide. They walked from village to village carrying their Bibles and walking sticks. They wore black shorts and shirts and had no possessions.
Many believed they were miracle workers, in the old Melanesian kastom style, could fend off bullets with magic.
In February 2003, Brother Nathaniel Sado went to negotiate with Keke, an old friend. Sado was a simple fellow who cared for the pigs.
With a letter from Anglican Archbishop Ellison Pogo, he and two other brothers went to find Keke.
Instead, a Keke sidekick, Ronnie Cawa, seized Sado.
‘When I went to Pite, I saw Cawa beat, hit, kick and butt Brother Sado,’ said a witness, Allan Sarevo.
Sado’s hands were tied in front of his body and he was sitting down when they beat him.
‘The government sent you to come here,’ Cawa said.
Trussed up in a rope, Sado was made to kneel under a bala or fruit tree. Kicked, punched, and pounded with sticks and stones, he died.
The Brotherhood sent six more to find him, leaving Honiara on 3 April 2003; Francis Tofi, Ronin Lindsay, Tony Sirihi, Alfred Hill, Patteson Gatu and Ini Paratabatu.
Lindsay had been assistant head brother. From Papua New Guinea, he had been suffering a recurring dream.
‘I keep on dreaming I’m on a beach and I look up and there’s a cyclone approaching and this wave hits me and I’m drowned,’ Lindsay told the brothers. ‘And then the wave transports me to the top of a mountain and when I open my eyes, I can see for miles and everything is bright.’
In May 2003, Pago announced Keke was holding six Melanesian Brothers hostage.
‘The recent report from some one who managed to escape from the camp is that the six brothers are still alive but held as prisoners.’
Keke had stopped them at Mbiti. Tofi refused to lie on the ground. They killed him. Lindsay and Hill died soon after. The others were tortured.
Next morning they were taken in front of a single, shallow grave and shot.
Fourteen-year-old Kali killed Gatu.
‘Cawa wanted me to kill Brother Gatu because he wanted to teach me how to shoot a man.’
Joses Kejoa freely admitted to shooting Paratabatu.
‘(Cawa) gave me an order that I shoot him.’
‘I think they will say something to me or do anything to me… . I think they say that I am a spy or helping them. I do not know what they might do.’
He did not know how to shoot.
‘Kali told me or instructed me to hold the gun and he told me to point at a certain place and I pulled the trigger.’
Owen Isa talked.
‘We told them to surrender but they didn’t surrender… . They don’t want to follow the order. … Then we shoot.’
Two were killed, a third wounded.
‘And (the wounded man) fell down and then we beat him and then he died.’
Isa gave a different account in the witness box. He said only he heard the shooting at the beach.
‘When we arrived and I saw the three men who were lying on the ground and I feel… . I felt fear. I was in fear… . Because I saw these three already lying on the ground, blood was flowing, so that is why I was afraid.
‘Ronnie told me to go and kick another Tasiu (Brother)… . He told me that before I went and kicked the Tasiu he told that these men were not obeying orders… . I went and kicked the man… . I just kicked him once… . I punched him on the head.’
Isa feared Cawa.
‘At the time Ronnie’s appearance was frightening and also his actions – actions. Appearance and actions… . Yes, he was holding a gun… . I think if I don’t follow orders might be they will kill me.’
On 15 June 2003, Keke heard police and para-military were sending ammunition to Marasa Bay to supply special constables. They came onto the beach late afternoon and cleared the landing spot by machine-gunning the bush around it.
Cawa and his men hunkered down and waited until the police were ashore, then attacked. The police fled, leaving behind weapons and ammunition. Next day, freshly armed, Cawa and men went to Marasa villages and ordered 400 villagers from their houses.
‘My name is Ronnie Cawa, I am part Choisel and I’m the commander of this group’.
He followed Keke but knew the villagers were government followers. He stopped talking when some one told him a police boat was near.
He left with some men while others guarded the villagers. John Lovana was punched and kicked.
Villagers said the GLF kept saying they wanted to ‘kil’ or ‘kilim’ which in pidgin means to hit or beat, but not necessarily mean to end the life of a person. In pidgin, one has to say ‘kill dead’ to mean murder.
GLF’s Owen Isa noticed Adrian Smith Bilo who, he believed, had led police up the beach. They beat him. Lovana and Bilo were ordered to dance. They tried. The wrists of both men were tied behind them. Then they told to kick each other. They did. Torn up cash was stuffed down their mouths with sticks and stones used to force it down their throats.
Lovana tried to escape, but was pulled back. Christian Sopa took out a bush knife and hacked him across the back, leaving a deep gash. John Lovana was then dragged back and both he and Bilo were beaten to death.
‘The evil men who were spies for the government are now dead,’ Cawa said, ‘if any one of you villagers helps the government you will be killed.’
Anglican priest Lionel Longarata was among those sitting on the beach. ‘It's a very, very difficult thing, watching somebody killed,’ he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
‘And after they had been killed they came over to me and I was told I was going to be the next person. They tied me - both hands - and I was taken to where the bodies were, where the dead bodies were.’
He waited for death but he was released. GLF settled for burning the village down.
RAMSI
Honiara was a town under siege; home-brew hyped Malaitans ran town and Guadalcanal militants surrounded the place. Crazy schemes looked sensible. In early 2003, a Ponzi scheme or pyramid operation gripped the town.
Known as the ‘Family Charity Trust’ and the ‘Diana Trust’, it was run by Fijian/Solomon Islander Beatty Maenua. She promised that for a deposit of S$250 (at the time, about US$34 – but worth vastly more in the Solomons) the person a month on would get S$1.2 million. The old adage that if something is too good to be true it must be a swindle kicked in, but not before Maenua fled with most of the money.
By May, people twigged, showing up at the ANZ Bank and the Central Bank. People threatened they would blow up the bank to get their money.
Late one night, a specially chartered plane evacuated ANZ management. Westpac closed its doors. ANZ and Westpac were Australian owned, and the financial outrage caught the attention of Australian Prime Minister John Howard.
Australian money determined intervention in the Solomons.
With Canberra needing legal icing on its cake, New Zealand and the Pacific Forum were roped in. The Solomons Government, such as it was, invited invasion, in the form of the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI).
It was a mission with no exit plan, an invasion with the idea of bringing peace and goodwill but no idea of what would come next. They are still there, modern colonial masters.
Ahead of RAMSI, came media minders and reporters. We had to be ‘accredited’ to the intervention. An Australian Army officer came and told a room full of Australian journalists that they would deploy an unmanned drone over Guadalcanal. Before we were lured into believing we were watching an Australian version of Baghdad Shock and Awe, Dorney deflated the military: ‘I’d like the first media seat on the drone please.’
We were told to assembly at the Henderson Field ‘boom gate’ at 4.30 a.m. 24 July 2003, to witness the arrival of the first soldiers.
As we waited in the dark, there were historical echoes. Such savagery had taken place in the ‘Long Death’ and the airfield was reason for of it. Still, you had to know that other people’s history trapped modern Pacific Islanders.
I covered the country for a decade and political stories seldom made it into international media. The international airport, built on the original Japanese runway, is named Henderson Field after Lofton Henderson, the first aviator killed in the Battle of Midway. The Solomons Government proposed changing it to Honiara International Airport. It prompted fierce condemnation and petitions from Americans who had never cared a jot for Solomon Islanders.
Before dawn, a large aircraft passed over high, the daily Qantas flight from Los Angeles to Sydney.
The first of the RAAF Hercules came into the airport pattern as the highlands turned orange and red with the first light. Soldiers quickly exited the aircraft and raced to secure the perimeter of the airport. Dozens of curious Solomon Islanders emerged from the night, pressing up against the fence. Planes kept coming and go and increasing numbers of soldiers arrived including New Zealanders, Australians and Fijians.
Minders swept in and told us to move to Red Beach.
A family lived there and as they looked out to sea, HMAS Manoora loomed large. A couple of women cleaned their lawn. As the first squad of soldiers arrived on foot patrol from the airport, a photographer handed out plastic Australian flags to the women.
‘Wave them at the soldiers.’
They did, he photographed them and then took his flags back.
On Red Beach, we waited to see the troops storm ashore from landing craft.
‘We’re shooting into the light,’ a cameraman wailed.
‘Yeah.’
Everybody moved.
‘Stay there,’ a minder barked.
I had been working with an AFP stringer who had gone out a couple of days earlier to talk to Keke. He was waiting to surrender. The lack of resistance was a disappointment for many.
A rumour swept in that RAMSI had badly wounded, perhaps killed, a local.
We descended on the small Rove police station. Immediate press conferences were demanded. The local police were confused. I was never sure of what happened and how, but within the space of a few minutes, a firm story was concocted. Commercial radio reporters were racing back to the hotel to file the first casualty.
Some of us were not keen. Dorney and I headed down to the National Referral Hospital where all things physical end up in Honiara. It is a sad place and in the midst of a civil war that had long ago destroyed the health budget, it had next to nothing.
There was somebody hurt in the operating room though. We went into the operating room where the victim lay, dead drunk with self-inflicted wounds.
Keke and Cawa were picked-up.
The Police Commissioner, Yorkshire man William Morrell, learnt then what had happened to the Melanesian Brothers. He went to the order’s headquarters to tell them.
A funeral service without the bodies was attended by over 10,000 people.
Bodies were eventually exhumed. The day their headstones were installed, 14,000 people, came.
That day Keke and Cawa were convicted of murder.