April 2006 #3 - Stealing ANZAC for the Solomons

Play Now -->

DATE : Thu, 20 Apr 2006 11:00:00 EST
Entered in Database : 2006-04-20 16:57:38
length : 4600000
Link to the Show / Show Notes

It's that time of year again when Australia comes as close to getting religion as collectively possible. With Jesus dead, buried and resurrected, the collective Ozzie mind turns from chocolate eggs to ANZACs. Our current leadership sees itself as a military one. The problem for Howard and most of the current crop of leaders and 'wanna be' leaders, is that the wars they want to fight are either unnecessary or unjust. As we wait and see what is transpiring in the Solomon Islands, we find more men and women being sent to fight another battle in "our name". On the ABC's AM program this Wednesday morning past, Sir Peter Kenilorea made some interesting comments. When the violence broke out around the parliament building the civilian police who form the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands, other wise known as RAMSI, didn't wait to speak to the locals about how they might help in the situation. They just decided to take over. Sir Peter told the AM program that, "I specifically spoke to the RAMSI police officers not to take hasty actions as they did. They should allow time for us to keep talking to the protesters at the Parliament house, not to use tear gas on them because it would simply aggravate the situation and it would simply take the Parliament situation or scene to the street. "As a matter of fact, they were trying to organise themselves in the Parliament building and I had to tell them to get the thing out of my office. It was Parliament house it was not an army barracks, they should organise themselves outside. They eventually had to. And in my view it was just you know, misjudgement of the action by the officers concerned". So the buildings burned, people got injured and now Major General Howard has decided to send in more troops. Modelling himself as our "commander in chief", Howard wants a war to be remembered by and it seems he's happy to chase that dream until the last soldier is spent. In this colonial adventure about to get underway in the Solomon Islands just whose interests are being protected? The history of the Solomon Islands is, like so many of our Pacific neighbours, little understood and largely ignored in our school history curricula. Also, without looking too closely, we find that there is a colonial attitude within our culture that implies that if an island is smaller than our mainland, and if somewhere in its past it was grouped together with another, then that grouping of people must have been transformed into an homogenous, culturally similar and unified nation. Moreover, if there is violent conflict between the different groups then it is due to "separatists" or "militants" which is ruling class code for "savages". Of course what this attitude covers up it also reveals. That is, that these island communities are not homogenous, culturally unified populations (the Solomon Islands are home to about 60 different cultural groups) but are, in fact, ethnically diverse and see each of their individual home islands as sacred, 'national' entities. In the case of the Solomons, this is exactly how it is just like Aceh, West Papua, Ambon and a range of other occupied or oppressed states in our region. The history of the Solomon Islands is an appalling one of colonial intervention. Starting with the Spanish, moving on to the British occupation and slave trading which saw thousands of Islanders shipped to Queensland to work in the sugar and banana plantations, through to the modern day pirates, the huge Malaysian timber and agricultural businesses that control the Island's economy. With a history of displacement and, to put not a too fine an edge on it, terrorism, firstly by the imperial colonists and then by Malaysian multinationals, the ongoing conflict in the Solomons and, more interestingly, our Government's ongoing commitment to intervene without consulting, raises the question of why? Firstly, the vast wealth to be exploited from palm oil. The oil drilling industry consumes tonnes of the stuff in the "drilling mud" it uses to lubricate, cool and assist in the drilling process. Refined palm oil is also an effective diesel fuel replacement, not to mention its nutritional characteristics. Malaysia is the world's largest producer of palm oil closely followed by Indonesia and a Malaysian company has the rights to supply the world's largest distributor of palm oil used in oil drilling wells. Second, the main issue is that the logging concessions are very rapidly running out of the raw material - logs. With local labour being paid less than a dollar an hour, the returns to the Malaysian logging companies is unparalleled. Add to that the tax and excise holidays they have bribed out the Island's administrators and we begin to see why the Solomon Islands is one of the world's poorest nations. Furthermore, the civil unrest has almost stopped the flow of export logs and for the last five or so years and the companies have been losing money hand over fist as they attempt to bribe local chiefs into allowing them free reign. However, this practice has only increased tensions as the clans attempt to "stand over" each other in order to gain better handouts. In short, the break down in law in order is a direct result of the capitalist imperative. Australia's military is doing the dirty work in the Solomons and ensuring the continued rape and pillage of that land and the continued use of its people as slave labour for the benefit of large Malaysian companies. The fact that our political leaders are prepared to aid oppressive regimes, to forgo our involvement in multilateral agreements (which we did a long time ago when it comes to human rights) should be of utmost concern to us. We are too small a nation and too fragile within our geographic location to allow those who rule us to be allowed to implement their strategy of 'grand Pacific adventures'. To allow them to do so with blind regard for the colonial history of the region and our own history is to risk not one more Bali, but many. To continue to use the so called "tradition of ANZAC" to defend the use of our troops in places they are not welcomed and not really needed is to defile what, for some, is a real sacred memory. Peace can only be restored by mediating a systematic restorative, culturally sensitive return to the Solomon Island populations of what is rightfully theirs - their traditional lands, their human rights and their pride. This will mean the renegotiation of land and sea access by the multinationals with the indigenous peoples and the establishment of sustainable industries. It will also mean the establishment of social services, education and training facilities and the rewriting of the constitution to acknowledge traditional kinship structures. Only then will the conflict subside and meaningful discussion occur. If we do not force, by whatever means we have at our disposal, our government to at least attempt this process rather than continuing to send in the guns, nothing meaningful will be accomplished that we, as a nation, can be proud of. As has been said before, only fools disregard history and so far our leaders have been allowed to make fools of all of us. If we don't act now, we will remain nothing more than mute pawns whose only use is to justify, at the polling booth, support for ruling class imperialist ambitions and their misappropriation of the ANZAC legacy.

Play in your Iphone