Australia, explained.
A Solomon Islands boy sits in front of guns surrendered by rebels as part of the RAMSI initiative, 15 August 2003 (ADF via AFP and Getty Images)
More than two decades on, what are the lasting effects of a mission to save a failing state?
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Postcard from Solomon Islands: The legacy of RAMSIPostcard from Solomon Islands: The legacy of RAMSI
Final touch-ups were being made to the RAMSI gallery at Honiara’s National Museum on the languid mid-November afternoon I visited. Opened in 2017, the gallery commemorated the end of the fourteen-year Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI), but the building had been poorly maintained since. With a caved-in floor and busted air conditioning, it had become too ramshackle to welcome the few visitors that stopped by.
Australia is paying to restore the gallery to its original state. When it will be opened to the public is unknown. But it was the ideal starting point to gauge RAMSI’s legacy in today’s Solomon Islands. The exhibit includes photos, memorabilia, and a poignant record of notes written by Solomon Islanders praising RAMSI’s role in restoring order. The potted history contained in the gallery records that the mission arrived in 2003 to a Honiara gripped by thuggish anarchy, split between groups connected with the islands of Malaita and Guadalcanal, on which the capital is located. The police had fragmented into rival factions and an armed gang had sacked the armoury.
When the mission ended in 2017, there was a sense that, if not fully accomplished, RAMSI had done all it could.
Australian defence forces and police, working with police from 15 Pacific nations, restored stability quickly. Then came the ambitious part: bolstering public service functionality, tackling corruption, and stimulating economic growth. When the mission ended in 2017, there was a sense that, if not fully accomplished, RAMSI had done all it could.
Canberra was ready to move on by then. The policy of supporting “failed states” – the driving impetus of RAMSI – was going out of vogue. Solomon Islands’ switch to recognising China, and a subsequent security agreement, were unforeseen events.
I spoke to a cross-section of people who had encountered RAMSI in various guises to understand how they remembered the mission, if at all, and what imprints it had left. The everyday return of security provided by RAMSI “gave us another chance,” said Patricia George, a curator at the museum taking a break with colleagues under a leaf hut on the museum grounds. The mission also brought jobs, employing a throng of Solomon Islands cooks, cleaners, and drivers with “very good packages”, much better than the work crews currently repairing Honiara’s roads for a Chinese contractor.
The Royal Solomon Islands Police Force was part of the RAMSI initiative aimed at returning front-line policing to local forces (RAMSI Images/Flickr)
Other legacies were less great, George averred. RAMSI introduced the concept of “sitting fees” to the bureaucratic culture, meaning public servants needed financial incentives before doing anything. The influx of expatriate advisers jacked up the price of rents, which hadn’t fallen since. Although it’s hard to get a definitive sense of the numbers, the advisory imprint remains pronounced. New housing complexes in Honiara are springing up, many fringed around the Australian High Commission on the evocatively named and rutted “Mud Alley”.
Just up the road is a RAMSI-era redoubt. The Lime Lounge was once the go-to watering hole for advisers and cited as a byword for waste in a coruscating 2014 Interpreter commentary on the costs of RAMSI.
The advisory crowd has since moved elsewhere. Now called Café Bliss, the coffee joint was empty the day I visited, except for myself and Stobart Nunuvia. A former fighter in one of Guadalcanal’s militant groups, the Istabu Freedom Movement, Nunuvia was engaged in a different struggle these days, as an officer implementing projects for the MP for North Guadalcanal. He had a puckish humour – he said RAMSI’s visible legacy was mixed-race children, some abandoned by their fathers – but his reasoning was consistent with others: gratitude that RAMSI had staunched the bleeding and recognition that its broader aims went unfulfilled because they lay beyond its control and depended upon the interest levels of the Solomon Islands’ elite. “I’d give it 7/10,” said Peter Kenilorea Jr, a leading figure in the opposition whom I met at the Breakwater Café, the new see-and-be-seen spot.
In a 2021 poll, 97% of the Solomon Islands public surveyed perceived corruption as a big problem.
“What improvements there were through RAMSI were incremental,” observed Terence Wood from the Australian National University, who conducted his doctoral research on electoral politics in Solomon Islands during RAMSI when I reached him via telephone. “There was this sense that you could put advisers in and get policies on paper et voila you could have a well-functioning government,” an approach Wood characterised as “naïve”. The “political economy of clientelism and horse trading is as vibrant as ever,” he observed.
In an office both palisaded with posters decrying corruption and stacked with yellowing newspapers headlining allegations about it, Ruth Liloqula was in a ruminative mood. A former senior public servant known for butting heads with various iterations of RAMSI leadership, Liloqula is the Chief Executive of Transparency International Solomon Islands.
Her country ranks 43/100 in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, with zero being the most corrupt and 100 denoting squeaky clean. In a 2021 poll, 97% of the Solomon Islands public surveyed perceived corruption as a big problem.
Liloqula is plainspoken with a distinct lion-in-winter quality. She wasn’t short of critiques of RAMSI, including that the mission itself did not reach sufficiently beyond Honiara. Yet she recognised the fundamental dilemma of diplomacy at RAMSI’s heart.
The mission needed the willingness of successive governments to maintain a presence, yet those governments included at least a sprinkling of rogues to whom meaningful anti-corruption activities would be anathema. “Corruption comes in, but they couldn't do anything to them [the politicians] because RAMSI was worrying more about its relationship with government than solving the problem,” she sighed. Similar quandaries must prevail for diplomats posted to Honiara today, I thought, as I tramped home to my hotel past giant billboards extolling the work of Solomon Islands’ various international partners.
About the author
Gordon Peake
Gordon Peake is a writer, podcaster and consultant, and a campus visitor at the Development Policy Centre.
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