By IPS Correspondents
CANBERRA, Jul 11 2003 (IPS)

The most recent examples of foreign intervention in places like Afghanistan and Iraq have been uninvited ones, so the Solomon Islands’ decision to ask Australia to lead a peacekeeping force to restore law and order stands out for its sheer uniqueness.

On Thursday, the parliament of the Pacific island nation of 465,000 people unanimously voted to have Australia and other nations send to its shores a peacekeeping force of up to 2,000 members.

Australia and New Zealand are also canvassing the establishment of a Solomon Islands Rehabilitation Agency to run the country’s affairs potentially for as long as 10 years.

But beyond the uniqueness of this impending intervention looms a bigger worry – that the entry of foreign forces, even when the receiver invites them, sets a dangerous precedent that some have said is neocolonialism by any other name.

Already, aid organisations in Australia – the regional power in the South Pacific – are caught between backing the support by Solomon Islands partner organisations for the peacekeeping force and voicing concerns about its broader implications for the Pacific.

"The bigger context to the change in foreign policy is saying that ‘if you stuff up we are coming in’ à I think the analysis is wrong and therefore the solutions are wrong," said Chris Chevalier, who heads the Solomon Islands Working Group of the Australian Council For Overseas Aid.

This is even if he acknowledged that ”there is tremendous weariness in the Solomons, they just want anything”.

The current insecurity in the Solomon Islands is partly of Australia’s own making.

In May 2000, then Solomon Islands prime minister, Bartholomew Ulufa’alu, asked the Australian government to protect his government from an impending coup, led by armed gangs resentful over the failure to address long-standing grievances over land ownership.

Australia rejected the request and shortly afterwards, Ulufa’alu’s government was toppled. Ever since then – despite a disarmament agreement brokered by Australia in October 2000 – the economy has slumped and government services have all but collapsed.

"Three years ago if they had sent 50 coppers when it was requested they could have made a big difference," Chevalier said.

Chevalier worries that the Australian government – which joined the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq without U.N. support – is pondering more active intervention in many Pacific nations’ affairs.

"It has become the accepted norm that if the government is framed as a ‘failed state’, then it needs big scale intervention to make it viable again. I’m not sure that some of these states were ever viable because of the inappropriate colonial structures and the scale of their economies," Chevalier added.

Scott Burchill, a lecturer in international relations at Deakin University, believes that providing security assistance is defensible when requested by a broad cross-section of a nation’s leaders.

However, he too worries about the assumptions behind what makes a functional Pacific state, which led to Australia’s leading of a foreign intervention force.

These assumptions are found in the June report ‘Our Failing Neighbour’, which was prepared by the government-funded think thank, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), and played a major role in the intervention move.

"What concerns me is an assumption of what ‘normal’ in the South Pacific constitutes. What is the objective and how will you know when you have reached it?" Burchill asked.

The report warned of the possibility of "transnational criminal operations based in or operating out of Solomon Islands – drug smuggling, gun-running, identity fraud and people smuggling, for example. Perhaps even terrorism: the weakness of security institutions means that Solomon Islands’ capacity to monitor people movements is poor”.

Underpinning the nervousness of many in regional governments and community organisations about the intervention in the Solomon Islands is what the ASPI report refers to as the need for "muscular policing".

The ASPI report also went as far as saying that ”many of them (other Pacific nations) are, to a greater or lesser degree, failing”.

Former Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare voted in support of the preliminary motion supporting the invitation of the security forces, but had deep misgivings about it. "It’ll be nothing short of re-colonising this country. This honourable house is deliberately used as a puppet for overseas agendas," he said in parliament late Wednesday.

The opposition leader in Australia, John Garo, acknowledged that inviting Canberra to intervene in the Solomon Islands’ marks a radical shift in regional policy.

"It is a proposal that will effectively make Solomon Islands an experiment, in what is going to be the most important shift in regional foreign policy since the ‘wind of change’ swept over most of the former colonies of the South Pacific region in the 1970s," Garo told ‘The Australian’ newspaper.

The proposed intervention force has the support of majority of the foreign affairs ministers of the member nations of the Pacific Islands Forum, which met in Sydney on Jun. 30 to discuss the Solomon Islands situation.

But Chevalier says he is not convinced that the Australian government will have a real, long-term commitment to the development needs of the Solomon Islands. "It is one thing to put an end to civil strife that is endangering peoples’ lives, but that is a long way from something that is saving a failing state that requires long-term support and aid,” he said.

”I’m not sure whether the commitment to that is there, just as I don’t think it is there from the U.S., the UK and Australia in Iraq," Chevalier said.

Next week, the Solomon Island’s parliament will debate legislation introduced by Prime Minister Sir Allan Kemakeza to give legal protection to the actions of foreign police and troops while in the country. The legislation, drafted with the assistance of the Australian government, is expected to pass easily.

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