Harold Keke
Harold Keke fought a war over land on one island and surrendered to an Australian officer in a clearing. He was a Guadalcanal man who led the Isatabu Freedom Movement, formed from the grievance that settlers from the neighbouring island of Malaita had taken land, jobs and the capital's business over half a century. The militants drove some twenty thousand Malaitans off Guadalcanal from 1998, a rival Malaita Eagle Force formed in response, and in June 2000 it seized the armoury and the prime minister and forced his resignation. He refused the peace agreement the other factions signed in 2000 and withdrew to the Weather Coast, the roadless southern side of the island, where he ran what amounted to a small state for three years. What happened there is why he is remembered rather than the politics: villages burned, several hundred people displaced, and the killing of seven Melanesian Brothers - members of an Anglican religious order - who had gone in unarmed to negotiate and were held and murdered. An Australian-led regional mission arrived in July 2003 at the invitation of a government that could no longer pay its police. He surrendered in August, one of the first acts of that mission, and 3,700 weapons were handed in under an amnesty he did not receive. He was convicted in 2005 of the murder of the Melanesian Brothers and of a Catholic priest, and is serving life. The mission stayed fourteen years, which is far longer than intervention was meant to take, and is generally judged the most successful operation of its kind in the region - partly because it was invited, partly because it rebuilt the treasury and the courts rather than only collecting guns. The land grievance behind the war has not been settled, and rioting returned to Honiara in 2021.
- Lived: 1970 CE – ?
- Nationality: Solomon Islander
- Roles: militant
