After the Solomons Crisis: Where Was PIF?

The return of civil unrest in the Solomon Islands has again obliged Australia to use its capabilities to maintain stability in its region. Australia sent police, military personnel, and diplomats to its northeast neighbor in late November to bring calm to the Solomon Islands after protests erupted over a complex web of ethnic tensions, competing regional interests, corruption, and the recent switch of diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China.

It has only been four years since the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) left the country. For 14 years, from 2003 to 2017, the Australian-led RAMSI reestablished stability and functionality in the Solomon Islands after a period of ethnic violence from 1998 to 2003. Although Australia provided the bulk of RAMSI’s 2,200 military personnel and police, their presence was also augmented by contributions from other Pacific countries.

While the weight of responsibility for maintaining peace and stability in the Solomon Islands has fallen to Australia, as the most capable regional state, Canberra has also sought greater regional legitimacy by including forces from other Pacific countries in its interventions. Peacekeepers and police from New Zealand, Papua New Guinea (PNG), and Fiji joined their Australian counterparts in the Solomon Islands after the recent unrest.

Despite the inclusion of other regional countries, there remains a lack of involvement from the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), the region’s primary multilateral body. Two decades ago PIF established the Biketawa Declaration, a framework that was meant to provide the basis for coordinating responses to regional crises.

While the Biketawa Declaration provided legitimacy for the RAMSI mission, it has not been called upon in the current instance of unrest in the Solomon Islands. Following the withdrawal of RAMSI in 2017, Australia signed a bilateral security agreement with the Solomon Islands that allowed for a “visiting contingent” to deploy in the country should the need arise. This is the mechanism that is being used for the present peacekeeping operation. Australia has asked for contributions from New Zealand, PNG, and Fiji to give the deployment a regional face.

This was obviously deemed the fastest mechanism to use in order to quickly quell the unrest, but it does present a pair of problems that require serious redress. First, although RAMSI was meant to have left behind an adequate state infrastructure to be able to handle the Solomon Islands’ internal tensions, this has clearly proven to not be the case. Honiara is still reliant on external powers to manage its domestic problems. This poses the questions of how long this current “visiting contingent” will be stationed in the country, and whether further enhancements to the Solomon Islands’ state are required in order to make it self-sufficient.

The broader regional issue is whether PIF has the ability to be a driver of regional responses to instability. Given the differing levels of capability within the region, it is unlikely that PIF can be a body that directs security traffic in the Pacific. The region will always be heavily reliant on Australia to be the primary responding force to any security issues, and as the Solomon Islands government has just demonstrated, going directly to Canberra instead of the PIF Secretariat is a far more efficient way of receiving assistance.

While Australia knows that it will always carry the lion’s share of responsibility in the region, Canberra also understands the importance of involving other countries in the region, creating a buy-in to a collective regional security. Fiji, especially, has a well-trained and highly-capable security force due to its long-standing commitment to United Nations peacekeeping operations. Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama also carries significant diplomatic weight in the region, making it a smart move for Australia to call upon Fiji’s services for the current mission in the Solomon Islands.

Given that the broader Melanesian region is experiencing significant instability, this current response in the Solomon Islands – for however long it lasts – may not be the only regional security issue in the near future. In PNG, the transition of Bougainville to an independent state after its 2019 referendum remains fraught, particularly because Port Moresby fears that granting the region independence may inspire secessionist movements in the provinces of New Ireland and East New Britain as well. Meanwhile, much of the country’s highlands remain mired in inter-tribal violence.

While the discrepancies of power in the Pacific region will mean that Australia is always heavily involved in any security concerns – and Canberra itself would never allow any non-aligned power to assume security responsibility in the region – Canberra also needs to be wary of maintaining legitimacy for this role within the broader Pacific region. Given that the Biketawa Declaration is now two decades old and forces of power in the wider Indo-Pacific have altered significantly in the time, it might be worth revisiting this framework within PIF to make sure it is capable of addressing the region’s current needs.