Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare has defended the security pact his government signed with China on Tuesday.
Sogavare told parliament the deal with Beijing was necessary to deal with the Solomon Islands’ “internal security situation”.
The Pacific island nation has long struggled with political unrest, most recently in November 2021 when protesters targeted Honiara’s Chinatown and attempted to storm Sogavare’s residence.
A contingent of Australian police helped restore stability at the government’s request. Australia had also led a multilateral mission in 2003, following violence and a coup d’état in the late 1990s.
Canberra sounded the alarm about the China Pact when the draft was leaked online in March and tried to encourage Sogavare to reconsider the plan. The United States and New Zealand have also raised concerns, fearing it could lead to China establishing a military outpost in the Pacific.
Mark Harrison, a senior lecturer in Chinese studies at the University of Tasmania, told Al Jazeera the deal was a “disaster” for Australia, whose relationship with Beijing has long been strained.
“It’s another difficult step for Australia to reassess its future in a China-dominated region,” Harrison said. “Australia completely misjudged the impact of China’s rise in the early 2010s and the reassessment has been slow and ambiguous and has a long way to go.”
What is the security situation in the Solomon Islands?
With a population of less than 700,000, the Solomon Islands are a chain of hundreds of islands lying east of Papua New Guinea in the Pacific Ocean.
Its capital, Honiara, is on the island of Guadalcanal, the scene of a fierce – and hugely momentous – battle between American and Japanese troops during World War II.
Australia has long provided security assistance to the Solomon Islands, spearheading the multilateral RAMSi force deployed to restore stability in 2003 after serious unrest [File: Torsten Blackwood/AFP]
The former British colony has struggled with unrest since the late 1990s, when ethnic tensions erupted into violence and a 2000 coup brought Sogavare to power for the first time.
With the country on the brink of political and economic collapse, Australia and New Zealand sent troops, stability was restored, and a peace agreement was signed.
The calm didn’t last.
In 2003, after the government requested assistance from the Pacific Islands Forum, the region’s main diplomatic grouping, a multinational Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI) was established, the operation of which was led by Australia.
RAMSI remained in the country for nearly 14 years, despite Sogavare’s attempts to expel the mission whenever he was in power.
Sogavare was re-elected prime minister in 2019 and, months later, moved to sever Solomon Islands’ longstanding diplomatic ties with Taiwan in favor of Beijing.
The move was not popular with everyone in the Solomon Islands, and Daniel Suidani, the prime minister of Malaita province, opposed the move, saying he would push for independence for Malaita, the country’s largest province.
The unrest in November also reflected the lingering fallout from the decision to switch diplomatic ties.
Sogavare would not budge. He is invested in China and China has invested in him. Does this bring the citizens of Sols under the yoke of the People’s Liberation Army – the armed wing of the Communist Party? While Sol’s sovereignty is respected, this has regional implications. What is China targeting next? https://t.co/fuVNNejRT9
– dr Shailendra B. Singh (@ShailendraBSing) April 20, 2022
What’s in the pact?
A text of the pact was not published.
The leaked draft suggested Chinese warships could stop in the Solomon Islands and Chinese police could be deployed at the archipelago’s request to maintain “social order”. Neither party may publicly announce the Missions without the written consent of the other.
“We intend to strengthen and strengthen our police capacity to deal with future instability by adequately equipping the police to take full responsibility for the country’s security responsibilities with the hope that we will never be forced to to invoke one of our bilateral security agreements.” Sogavare told parliament on Wednesday that the pact is in line with international and domestic law.
Sogavare had previously said that Solomon Islands “has absolutely no intention… to ask China to build a military base,” and on Wednesday he stressed the deal was “guided by our national interests.”
A team of Chinese police liaison officers is training local Solomon Islands officers in drill, unarmed combat skills and the use of weapons such as batons and rifles [File: Royal Solomon Islands Police Force]
Opposition leader Matthew Wale was skeptical.
“All the drivers of instability, insecurity and even threats to national unity in Solomon Islands are purely internal,” the Solomon Star newspaper quoted Wale as saying on Wednesday. “This means that the deal, which provides an opportunity for Chinese military posturing, has nothing to do with Solomon Islands national security. I doubt that the relevant provision in the deal is unintentional but calculated for geopolitical implications. For Prime Minister Sogavare this is a mercenary, for China it is an opportunity not to be missed.”
Asked by Wale if he would release the text of the deal, Sogavare said he would talk to China.
What concerns do other countries have?
Australia, which has had a security deal with Honiara since 2017, has been the most vocal critic of the deal, but other Pacific countries including the US and New Zealand have also raised concerns.
Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who is in the midst of an election campaign, said on Wednesday the signing of the pact showed China’s “intense pressure” on the Pacific island nations.
Foreign Secretary Marise Payne, in a joint statement with Zed Seselja, Minister for International Affairs, Development and the Pacific, said while Australia respected the “right of the Honiara to make sovereign decisions”, it was “deeply disappointed” by the China Pact.
“We are concerned about the lack of transparency with which this agreement has been developed and realize that it could undermine stability in our region,” the statement said. Canberra is seeking “further clarity” on the terms of the deal and its implications for the region.
The opposition Labor Party, hoping to overthrow Morrison’s coalition, has called it “the worst failure of Australia’s foreign policy in the Pacific since the end of the Second World War”. Shadow Foreign Minister Penny Wong noted that Australia ignored warnings from whales about the potential security pact as early as August last year.
In a statement on Wednesday, officials from Australia, the US, New Zealand and Japan expressed “common concerns about the security framework and its serious risks to a free and open Indo-Pacific”.
For the record, I’m concerned about China’s increasingly visible presence in the Pacific. But Australia needs to fundamentally rethink how we understand and work with Pacific states and peoples to address it: https://t.co/nNKO3lnM2b
— Joanne Wallis (@JoanneEWallis) April 20, 2022
The official announcement of the pact comes as Kurt Campbell, the US National Security Council’s Indo-Pacific Coordinator, and Daniel Kritenbrink, his assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, leave for an official visit to the Solomon Islands, Fiji and Papua New Guinea.
The US has already announced that it intends to reopen its embassy in Honiara, which has been closed since 1993.
What about China?
China is already the Solomon Islands’ top export destination, buying about 65 percent of Honiara’s exports in 2019, followed by Italy with 9 percent. Australia is the destination of less than 1 percent of Solomon Islands’ exports.
China is also the source of just under a quarter of the country’s imports, followed by Australia at 13 percent.
In announcing the security deal, Beijing described it as “normal exchanges and cooperation between two sovereign and independent countries.”
Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said Western powers were “deliberately exaggerating” tensions over the pact.
China’s state media has labeled Beijing a benign power in the Pacific and pointed out that it is the US that wants to build its military might in the region.
“The Solomon Islands should realize that they are under the special attention of Washington because the US wants to use them as pawns to contain China,” the tabloid Global Times wrote in an op-ed on Wednesday.