Allan Kemakeza
Allan Kemakeza asked Australia to send troops to a country that had stopped being able to pay its own police. Solomon Islands is a chain of nearly a thousand islands with something over seventy languages, independent from Britain since 1978, and with a state that had never reached far past Honiara. The tensions that broke it were between the people of Guadalcanal, the island the capital sits on, and settlers from Malaita who had come for work; militias formed on both sides in 1998, tens of thousands were driven from their homes, and in 2000 the Malaita Eagle Force took the prime minister hostage with police weapons and made him resign. He was elected the following year into a government that could not collect taxes, whose payroll had been captured by former militiamen collecting compensation claims, and whose treasury paid protection money to the men who had looted it. The revenue was logging. Foreign companies cut the hardwood forests far faster than they could regrow, on licences that returned very little to the state and rather more to the people who signed them. It was the largest export by a wide margin and it was being liquidated. That is the background to a government unable to pay police who had already sold their weapons. In 2003 he requested help, and the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands arrived - about two thousand police and soldiers from Australia, New Zealand and a dozen Pacific states, invited by the parliament rather than imposed. It collected several thousand weapons within months, arrested the militia leaders, and stayed for fourteen years, rebuilding the courts, the prisons and the finance ministry. It is the most-cited case in the literature on state-building by invitation, and the criticism of it is precise: it worked on security and did much less about the land and identity grievances underneath, which produced riots again in 2006 and in 2021. He was later convicted of intimidation over a lawyer's office, served time, and returned to politics as speaker of parliament.
- Lived: 1950 CE – 2023 CE
- Nationality: Solomon Islander
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
