What Has Gone Wrong, What May

Go Wrong In The Solomons

Elected the first Chief Minister of the Solomon Islands in August, 32-year-old Solomon Mamaloni has forced the resignation and departure of his Senior Information Officer, Australian journalist Denis Fisk. Mr Mamaloni accused him of political bias. Below, Mr Fisk, now in Sydney with what he says is the doubtful honour of being the first public servant to be run out of the Solomons by the new government, tells the story of his clash in November with the Chief Minister. He also fills in the background to give a dramatic picture of the Solomons political scene.

It is up to the Solomon Islanders now they are very close to self governing to determine their own way of running their country. It be comes increasingly presumptuous, after they have waited so long since the declaration of the British Solo mon Islands Protectorate in 1893, to tell them how they should do it.

Solomon Islander politicians have seen their own priorities more clearly in the past year or so. How ever, it is a simple matter of human rights to find unacceptable the denial of vital information to a people so that they may judge their new government elected by them and to find the government worthy or not of their support.

It has not taken long for the elected members of what was the Governing Council, which in August became the Legislative Assembly, to set their own national economic and social aims.

A controversial new education policy intended to fit local require ments more closely, to increase pride in custom, and to bring it more equally to all children, is close to being promulgated, and only awaits a courageous plan to finance it and a time-table to fit it.

Debate is well under way about the life-style the Solomons’ people should expect and can pay for. This

By Denis Fisk

has included the philosophy and wisdom of family planning and birth control in an emerging country which, for a change, is well fed but which is experiencing a birth-rate that could double its population in the next 30 years or less.

It has also included some deep thinking, not before time, about the increasingly disputed need for expen sive imports, especially food, and the inflation that comes with them, when it is plain that the Solomons can feed her own people more than ade quately already, with beef raising, fishing on a big commercial scale, rice-growing and other commercial cropping, all expanding rapidly.

The church’s position in what has been a thoroughly Christianised country is being examined by its leaders. These have come to defend with some vehemence, in a backlash movement, the practice of “pagan” religion and once-pagan ceremonies.

MLAs are even seriously question ing the relevancy of foreign tech nical, professional and social stan dards—inherited as part of three quarters of a century of colonialism —and their influence on local custom and traditions which are being re vived as self-government and unity are promoted.

The new Chief Minister has courageously led a movement since before he assumed his position in August radically to decentralise government to give more power, money and expertise to probably seven local government councils. Out of close to two dozen ineffectual councils (but for the Western Coun cil which was an amalgamation it self of four small councils) is being formed, in theory, a group of well staffed organisations to satisfy the need of the islanders to feel close contact with government, and to be involved in its decision-making pro cesses.

The new local politicians are prob

ably getting the reaction from years of centralised, remote and untouch able administration by benevolent foreigners whom they thanked in the main for the peace and beginnings of prosperity they brought but who nevertheless made them feel less than men.

Melanesians, no less than anybody else, like to run their own lives, and it becomes more and more obvious that their humble gratitude to the Queen and her representatives has been due more to conditioning than to a desire for it to be so.

The revival since the immediate post-war years of the Ma’asina, or Marching Rule, which was put down forcibly in the early 1950 s and its leaders jailed for a few years, is enough proof of desire for a local form of politics.

Elected MLAs have roared out in the House that this movement was the first anti-colonial expression and it should have been met then with concessions to help its initially posi tive, if confused, aims to develop Malaita and other islands and to join the rest of the world.

Too late, the MLAs cried, was the first local government council im posed on Malaita as a foreign and never popular answer to the ex pressed need because of the tight control kept over the council through its district administration advisers and the very system of an LGC.

During the first half of 1974, all the chiefs of the still deeply-tradi tional Are Are area of Malaita, from which the word Ma’asina (brother hood) comes, met in a new custom house built of sticks and leaf some 20 feet high. More than 90 chiefs met in the dark gathering place, with the seven most senior chiefs squat ting in a line between them as they sat and stood along its eaves.

They all issued a statement to the then new High Commissioner, Mr Donald Luddington (now Governor),

Mamaloni's ...

expressing support, even today for the principles of the old movement.

Are Are, of all places in the Solo mons, has had little development because of jts mountains and rela tively-infertile soil.

It also has a reputation for mys tery, for harbouring ill-will towards the colonial administration, and for having in its hinterland some of the most significant pockets of naked pagans still left.

But it is people like these whom Mr Mamaloni’s Government is try

ing to give expression to in its decen tralisation programme. It has been reasoned that if Malaita Council itself controls more funds, men and machines and makes more of its own decisions, then places like Are Are will stand a better chance of finding their own way to development and some contentment in the process.

The Solomons, after 100 years of partial and then complete foreign control, is by no means a unified group of islands.

It needs increased local control to satisfy people so that it will hang together under the general policies of its emerging central government.

Mr Mamaloni’s plan, despite des perate and sometimes bitter misgiv ings in much of the public service, is to create a federation in effect out of a, theoretically, already unified country.

This back-to-front thinking will either save the Solomons from inter nal destructive dissension, or cause it by failing to equip the new coun cils well enough to give the satisfac tion the government promises and hopes for.

It has, actually, set out more quickly and irreversibly to do what Papua New Guinea intended and failed to do in the past few years, and with a similar aim. In Papua New Guinea, the only region to achieve the same status has been Bougainville, and that by political and economic blackmail.

Britain has planned for the Solo mons a parliamentary democracy based on the undoubted freedoms of Westminster. But, as I started to say earlier, those freedoms have not been bequeathed by the British ad ministration in the field of access to information through the media.

The most dangerous aspect of the threat to this human right is that the strangling of information channels has been slow, subtle and uncodified.

It has been under cover of a free parliamentary system and a stated policy of using the government media to provide news and informa tion to spur debate on national poli cies and events.

One of the hopeful aspects of the current situation is that the Solomons has a governor under its new con stitution in Mr Donald Luddington with a far freer and informal ap proach than has been usual in its past colonial administrators, the High Commissioners. The last one, before Mr Luddington, was Sir Michael Gass, an unashamedly colonial ruler who gave few signs of liking his post but who determinedly carried out his duty of ruling on behalf of the Queen. He retired in 1973.

Mr Luddington has been equally determined to shed the aura of supreme official, using social in formality and an unending round of walking tours of the islands to tell people they must look now to their elected politicians for leadership and to get the feeling of the villagers for himself.

The Solomon Islands have a better chance than most of becoming econ omically self-sufficient and having a stable and free society. But events in the past two years and some tra ditions inherited by the close-to-self

... AND HIS ACCUSA TION OF BIAS

governing local politicians threaten the continuation of this undramatic progress to a developed economy and national unity. 1 believe this to be the essence of what has gone wrong and is going wrong in the Solomons. It is not a recent judgment, but one which 1 have had confirmed increasingly in the two years I have been there and have tried where possible to demon strate to those with power.

As anywhere, there are entrenched views and ill-based motivation within government and public services, but in a small and tightly-controlled colony of long standing these two can produce potentially disastrous effects due to the lesser risk of inter ference from community reaction than in larger countries with long tradi tions of government.

I tried for two years to ensure a free flow of news and information to the population through the govern ment-dominated media. As a result, I initially, and then during 1974 the Information and Broadcasting Ser vices as a whole were tainted by charges of political bias by Mr

Mamaloni, at first when he was Chairman of the Internal Affairs Committee of Governing Council and since August as Chief Minister.

The taint had grown over more than a year, during which Mr Mama loni’s mistrust of expatriate public servants around him grew to the point where one result was his out right refusal towards the end of 1974 to use the Information and Broad casting Services to keep his people informed.

It is part of an arrogant paternal ism by a new local elite which is succeeding the entrenched, defensive and reluctantly-departing establish ment of the British colonial adminis tration.

Heading a minority government has not helped his feelings of insecurity.

He acted secretively to spread his power base with the appointment in November of the leader of the main opposition group (the USIPA party) Philip Solodia Funifaka, to the Coun cil of Ministers, as Minister of Works and Public Utilities.

It was soon known in Honiara that some of the original five ministers

did not know of the appointment until after Mr Solodia was sworn in, or at least only hours before.

Four are from his own People’s Progress Party. The fifth—Dr Gideon Zoleveke, who had been deputy leader of USIPA, was given a new post of Home Affairs to allow Mr Solodia into Works and Public Utilities.

Some were angry at this appoint ment as Mr Solodia was one of their most bitter critics during the first Legislative Assembly meeting in Oc tober. And USIPA members were left confused for some days as to whether Mr Solodia was still their party leader.

Mr Mamaloni refused to explain the appointment when asked by his own Information and Broadcasting Services.

The government media—Solomons Radio which includes a Monday to Friday daily news service from the Information Service and a fortnightly newspaper—are virtually the only means of news communication in the Solomons.

The one exception is the weakening independent journal of comment and opinion, Kakamora Reporter, now ap pearing only every two months as its principals have become too involved

harvest of corruption

in commerce or compromising senior public service work.

In October while I was on leave, the Secretary of the PPP, Martin Wickham, told a staff member of the Information Service that I would not be coming back because Mr Mama loni did not want me back.

The same month in a personal comment over morning tea, Mr Mamaloni accused the Acting Senior Information Officer and other staff of biased reporting of the Legislative Assembly.

Mr Mamaloni also made it diffi cult to have his travels within the protectorate covered by Information Service news men, and was say ing virtually nothing of his aims or policies.

All this may sound like sour grapes. But it is the direct result of cynical or misguided seeds sown by some senior public servants in recent years.

In addition to there being in creasingly narrow-minded censorship of the government media these seeds have began to result in a harvest of corruption.

It was my aim, in the absence of any government policy when I was appointed in July, 1972, to try to establish freedom of speech and in formation in the Solomons media.

Eighteen months later a policy de claring this was issued but govern ment has not stuck to it.

Opposition to this ideal came from those who did not see it as gov ernment’s role to allow debate in depth or criticism of government policy in its own media. It also came from those who simply disliked ex posure of their decisions or decision making processes to the public.

In commerce, businessmen believed the government media was either not interested in them, was only interested in reporting what was in the govern ment’s interest or was biased against commerce generally.

This was despite the efforts of an information officer who was my im mediate predecessor and who had worked vigorously against the old sycophantic approach to news gathering which had established virtual censorship Censorship is now a definite thorn in the side of the Information and Broadcasting Services, and is of course slowly poisoning the initiative and relative fearlessness which had been encouraged in a still very young and now uncertain Solomon Islander staff.

Several ways of checking political

news were introduced in 1974, from approval of a news story by all five chairmen of the old Governing Coun cil Committees to the current vetting by senior civil servants. This does not refer to the natural checking of stories by junior reporters with rele vant officials.

News of politics and political parties virtually disappeared in 1974.

The makeup of the PPP and its executive, for example, has never been broadcast or published even though it is now the governing party.

Such results came from a colonial system where education was withheld from the local people for so long that an expatriate—white, if you like— “old boy” establishment became en trenched and corrupted; where the Melanesians were regarded, only very recently, as being, perhaps, capable of working out their own destiny or. anyway, of looking capable enough so they could be left to it; and where white men of good intent and some power in government had their in fluence nullified or were subverted or sent away by the foolish, the weak, the cunning and the selfish.

The colonial misdeeds of failing to deal according to law with oc casional errant prominent Solomon Islanders, of failing to treat all ex patriate transgressors equally with local people, of failing to apply pub lic service regulations equally where there was incapacity or breaking of rules have had considerable effect on

Solomon Islanders. In a small society of 180,000 people, anything like this becomes widely known.

Already there is corruption in the new government—a scramble by politicians to get some of the best government houses, by direct inter vention of the Chief Minister, regard less of need by public servants, is one example. Some politicians tra velling overseas have grossly misused public funds on entertaining them selves. There are numerous specific cases.

Unlike in more sophisticated countries, such acts are bitterly re sented by ordinary Solomon Islanders.

For myself, I am very sad to be forced to resign over charges of poli tical bias. My only aim was to try to be as unbiased as possible, but in Honiara’s splintered society, too few believe that can be. For what that means to the Solomons I am even sadder.

If I still could have the chance to go back for two more years until the local people were better trained, I’d take it, because the job still needs doing.

To the public servants I knew who worked hard and honestly for the Solomons’ good I apologise if they feel insulted, but I don’t think they will.

And to those who still don’t see what damage they have done stick ing to outmoded ideas, to the cynics who can only see that trouble and corruption must come to a colonial country, even one as blessed with a natural way of life as the Solomons, and to those who have fostered re ligious and political divisions for their own selfish ends, I hope for enlightenment to come. Sadly, as history shows, it’s usually a vain hope so late.

Mamaloni, courageously leading a move ment, but . . .