Australia sends troops to restore order in Solomon Islands

Scores of Australian troops were today flying to the Solomon Islands in the Pacific to restore peace after rioters and looters laid waste to much of the capital Honiara’s Chinatown neighbourhood in protests sparked by the election of a new prime minister.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard said 110 soldiers on four air force C130 transport planes would arrive in the Solomons by nightfall.

An extra 70 Australian Federal Police officers also will be sent, he said in the east coast city of Brisbane.

Howard said the fresh deployment would “represent an immediate and needed injection of additional security forces to the Solomon Islands.”

The response came after at least 17 Australian and two New Zealand police were injured in violent clashes yesterday with protesters opposing the election of a new prime minister, Snyder Rini, in the aftermath of April 5 parliamentary elections.

The riots began outside Parliament House in the capital, Honiara, but swiftly moved to Chinatown, home to a number of businesses thought to be supportive of Rini’s government.

More than 50 Chinese shop owners were evacuated by Australian officers as rioters set fire to their businesses late yesterday, federal police said.

Some Chinese families jumped from their homes to avoid the looters, the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation quoted an unidentified hospital official as saying. Some minor injuries were reported, the official told SIBC.

The Solomons’ police chief Shane Castles said the protesters’ initial complaints about Rini’s election quickly deteriorated into mob violence.

“We’re talking about opportunistic robbery and looting at the moment,” he said.

“Chinatown was an area of specific targeting by the mobs,” he added. “That’s not unusual to the extent that the Asian or the Chinese population here do own most of the retail and commercial businesses.”

Government spokesman Johnson Honimae said about 90 per cent of Chinatown had been destroyed and authorities had largely abandoned the area.

“Mobs and looters have been hurling rocks and bricks at passing patrol police vehicles,” Honimae said.

Castles said police were struggling this morning to disperse the crowds, “only to find that the mobs have reformed themselves somewhere else and targeted other premises.”

Central Honiara was largely deserted – a burning building the only sign of the morning’s riots. A lone man with a bullhorn rode on the bonnet of a passing police car appealing for locals to return home.

It was not immediately clear whether the violence had eased or if the rioters had moved to another part of the city.

The Solomons’ new prime minister is perceived as having close links with the corruption-tainted administration of his predecessor Sir Allan Kemakeza. Rini was Kemakeza’s deputy prime minister.

Protesters also fear his election was engineered by Chinese businessmen in Honiara seeking to increase their influence in the Solomons’ Parliament.

Alfred Maesulia, the head of the government information unit, said told SIBC that Rini was being kept in a secret location and that it was “highly unlikely” he would be formally sworn in today, as previously planned.

More than 280 police officers from Australia and New Zealand have been in the Solomon Islands since 2003 helping the local force restore law and order in the chain of islands 2,385 miles north-east of New Zealand’s capital, Wellington.

The foreign force had largely ended violence between rival islanders that had simmered for years, peaking with a coup in 2000.

Before yesterday’s upheaval, law and order had been slowly returning to the impoverished archipelago following an ethnic conflict sparked by rivalry between migrants from the island of Malaita and indigenous landowners on the main island of Guadalcanal.