As lockdown lifted in the capital of the Solomon Islands on Friday after two days of violent protests and looting, residents wandered the debris-strewn streets while burned-out buildings still smoldered and smoke rose into the sky.
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“Oh my,” said one woman as she walked through Honiara’s Chinatown, recording the scene. “This is really heartbreaking.”
But even as locals assessed the damage, the chaos continued, with rioters rampaging across the city and police responding with tear gas.
Australia deploys forces to Solomon Islands as protesters burn Chinatown, Parliament
Two dozen Australian federal police officers had arrived overnight as the tip of a 120-strong force aimed at quelling the unrest in the South Pacific island nation. Rioters had torched dozens of buildings, including Chinese-owned shops and part of the national Parliament complex.
As residents took to the streets on Friday after the end of a 36-hour lockdown in Honiara, however, there was not yet any sign of the Australian peacekeepers, according to local journalist Georgina Kekea. And rioting continued in the center and east of the city.
“It still hasn’t settled,” Kekea said in an interview. “I’ve been to Chinatown. There is basically nothing left there. There are only six buildings that are still standing, but otherwise most of the shops have been looted and burned. Scavengers are now … trying to look for whatever they can to carry back home.”
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The violence had begun on Wednesday morning after hundreds of protesters gathered in front of the national Parliament building to demand Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare step down. Some demonstrators then set fire to a grass hut next to Parliament before torching a police station and several buildings in Chinatown.
The small Pacific islands at the center of a big power play
The rioting continued on Thursday, as much of Chinatown went up in flames. On Thursday afternoon, Sogavare called his Australian counterpart to ask for help, and Scott Morrison announced he was sending about 80 Australian Federal Police officers and more than 40 military personnel.
Many of the protesters came to Honiara, on the island of Guadalcanal, from Malaita, the most populous island in the archipelagic nation in the South Pacific, about 1,000 miles northeast of Australia.
Tensions have simmered between the two islands since the national government switched diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to China in 2019, a move opposed by Malaita’s premier, Daniel Suidani, who claimed he had been offered a bribe to support the switch. Sogavare denied the accusation.
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Suidani pledged Malaita would never engage with Beijing and terminated licenses of businesses owned by ethnic Chinese, drawing a rebuke from the national government.
Sogavare defended the diplomatic switch, even as he said the decision was the root cause of the current unrest.
“That’s the only issue,” he said in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation published Friday. “And unfortunately, it is influenced and encouraged by other powers.”
As protesters defied a government lockdown and set fire to buildings in the capital of the Solomon Islands, eyewitnesses captured the chaos on video on Nov. 25. (Reuters)
“These very countries that are now influencing Malaita are the countries that don‘t want ties with the People’s Republic of China and they are discouraging Solomon Islands to enter into diplomatic relations” with Beijing, Sogavare said in an apparent reference to Taiwan and the United States. “I don‘t want to name names, we’ll leave it there, we know who they are.”
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Opposition leader Matthew Wale denied Sogavare’s claim that he was one of the people behind the unrest and dismissed the idea that foreign powers were to blame.
“The people in this country feel that the democratic processes are not working for them, that their own government is the puppet of China,” he told the ABC.
Australia deploys forces to Solomon Islands as protesters burn Chinatown, Parliament
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