Happy Isles in Crisis: The Historical Causes for a Failing State in Solomon Islands.

• Author: Alley, Roderic
• Position: Book Review

HAPPY ISLES IN CRISIS The historical causes for a failing state in Solomon Islands

Author: Clive Moore Published by: Asia Pacific Press ANU, Canberra, 2004, 265pp, A$35.

By mid-2000 when Andrew Nori ousted incumbent leader Bert Ulufa'alu in what was effectively a civilian coup, the Solomons Islands had truly fallen upon desperate times. Although most in the country's outer islands continued their subsistence life-style much as before, all national political, economic and administrative structures stood in deep disarray. Subsequent leaderships under Sogavare and Kemakeza tried but failed to stabilise conditions, eventually resulting in the July 2003 arrival of the Australian-led Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI), invited in to restore order, get weapons surrendered, and halt egregious corruption and criminality. For local nongovernmental representative John Roughan, often cited in this account by Clive Moore, the shambles that preceded RAMSI's arrival probably taught overdue recognition of a 'painful lesson'. This was that 'peoples' lives are more in their own hands than in the hands of an "educated elite" who willingly sacrificed the whole nation for their own deep, greedy pockets'.

How did the Solomon Islands come to this sorry state of affairs? And what are its prospects for extrication? This study offers detailed answers to the first question, but is understandably more tentative regarding the second. Moore is a historian with a long record of professional and personal involvement in the Solomon Islands, and his account of the country's downward spiral can be read both as a descriptive mosaic and as a structural analysis. The mosaic offered reveals a detailed labyrinth of personal ambition, venality, worsening mistrust between Guadalcanal and Malaitan communities, and unstable politics. Those with the patience to make sense of what evolved during this ever-shifting montage of temporary alignment and expediency among the country's political elites are rewarded with absorbing reading. Overall, a detailed and insightful description of the nation's failed micropolitics is provided.

From a structural perspective the country was poorly served by the decolonising British, leaving on departure in 1978 an inadequately trained public service, a poorly educated population, and a constitution never designed to accommodate the country's dispersed regional identities. As significant was failure to develop Malaita, the country's...