ABSTRACT
The selection of Solomon Islands PrimeMinister Snyder Rini by the parliament in April 2006 was met with derision by large crowds outside, who accused him of being in the pocket of Taiwan. As Snyder Rini walked out of the parliament triumphant, his election was met with cries of “Waku,” a pidgin term typically used to describe people of Asian origins but used in this instance to accuse the new prime minister of being too tightly connected to foreign interests. Despite heavily armed police from the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI), a riot developed and most of Honiara’s Chinatown and other Chinese-owned enterprises were destroyed. With one stroke the violence in 2006 undermined the livelihoods of thousands of Solomon Islanders by disrupting local employment and depriving them of their primary source of cash for food, education, and medical expenses. In summary, that is the newspaper headline level description of the event. However, there is an intriguing disjuncture in the story that suggests other layers. This devastation needs to be set against the recent history of violence verging on civil war that enveloped the Solomons for several years, ending in 2003 with the arrival of the regional intervention force known as RAMSI. During this period most of the major commercial activities (apart from the banks) closed down. The Chinese traders, almost none of whom are from Taiwan, remained in the country and kept their businesses open throughout the violence. Many of those same businesses were destroyed in the 2006 riots under the noses of RAMSI. RAMSI, the international response to the years of violence and law-
lessness in the Solomon Islands-known locally as the “ethnic tensions” or simply the “Tensions”—had been formed three years earlier in 2003. It was another of the many “humanitarian intervention” forces of the last decade, instituted to counter an instance of what this volume calls “localized transnational conflict.” Led by Australia with modest contributions from southwest Pacific countries, RAMSI had worked from the “top down” to eliminate violence and install systems of governance with the aim of controlling illegal activities of all types including diversion of government funds. However, its success as a peace-enhancing force can be questioned. At the centre of this chapter is the argument that localized networks of
reciprocal relations remain at the core of understanding both resilience and
risk within and between communities within the Solomon Islands. Resilience is taken to mean those ways in which people are able to sustain their livelihoods in the face of sustained forms of social pressure and violence. Formed through tribal-traditional relations, this system of reciprocated relations carried by “wantoks,” has been in part reframed by modernizing practices, not least as they intersect with a local trading system largely controlled by traders of Chinese origin. The term wantok literally means “one talk.” Although it is possible to speak of a wantok system, on an individual basis a wantok is typically a person who speaks the same local language (of which there are over 100 in the country) and is bound to another through extensive kin-based relations that are connected via networks of reciprocity. The intersection between the wantok system and localized transnational
capital, we argue, provides for a kind of resilience that is rarely talked about. In other words, in the Solomon Islands, flows of modern commodities and services, as well as at times even hard currency, are mediated through an ethnic minority (local Chinese traders) and are distributed through a relatively durable system (the wantok networks) based on embodied reciprocity. It is not that violence cannot break out, including across this intersection; however, the long-term stability and durability of this system suggests that we need to look elsewhere for the fracturing sources of insecurity. The violence of 2006 demonstrates how, for instance, globalizing processes such as migration, the formation of diasporic communities and financial transfers can create political instability that lead to both local conflict and the disruption of patterns of resilience. This chapter examines these issues paying special attention to the evolving role and influence of the Chinese in the Solomon Islands and the governments of China and Taiwan.
