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Solomon Islanders Suffer in Silence - Nations & States - Global Policy Forum Solomon Islanders Suffer in Silence
By David Fickling
Guardian
January 6, 2003
The miraculous escape of more than 1,000 Pacific islanders from the 300kph winds of Cyclone Zoe last week did not depend on modern shelters or protection. In fact their salvation came about not even - as some had speculated - by hiding deep in caves and crevices on the island, but simply by lying on the ground near the leeward cliffs of Mount Reani and holding tight.
Officials in the Solomon Islands spent the past week stressing that the islanders of Tikopia and Anuta are well used to storms of this sort and predicting that casualties would be minimal. But, until now, images of forests flattened by the winds and whole villages swept away by the storm had led most to believe these claims were little more than desperate optimism.
In this cash-strapped archipelago, where last year the prime minister was kept from a major regional conference by a strike amongst his own unpaid airport workers, optimism is often one of the few resources left to deal with such crises.
Loti Yates, director of the national disaster management office (NDMO) in the capital, Honiara, runs his department almost entirely out of his own pocket, using media reports and internet cafes to keep up to date with world affairs. As with the airport workers, pay for his staff has often been months behind schedule.
Embarassingly, the first direct contact with the islanders was made not by the Solomons government, or even the regional aid giants of Australia and New Zealand, but by a freelance filmmaker from New Zealand who chartered a helicopter to Tikopia with money from an Australian newspaper.
Geoff Mackley spent over three hours on the island on Friday, and said that the islanders seemed matter-of-fact about their ordeal. "I was immensely impressed with them. The place looks like Hiroshima, but they seem to have just got on with things and started to put their lives back together," he said.
While the outside world has had little idea of conditions on the island, the people of Tikopia have kept up to date with the speculation about their fate. Their own radio transmitter has been broken for up to two months but, after the storm subsided, equipment was hooked up to receive short wave radio.
At its peak, the storm hovered over the island for 12 hours, and high winds continued for two days either side of the cyclone's peak. The effects of the winds have been typically capricious. More than 200 houses were destroyed, including two whole villages perched on the spit of beach separating Lake Te Roto from the sea. However, other structures have survived undamaged: one school block was blown to matchwood, while its neighbour remained standing.
Most of the trees on the island were levelled by the high winds, and it could be decades before Tikopia's coconut palms are productive again. Buried stores of root vegetables have also been damaged and scattered, forcing islanders to subsist mostly on scavenged fruit over the past week.
Water is a serious problem. The island has two main sources of fresh water: one, a spring on the mountainside carried down to the village in pipes, has been contaminated by sewage and is being used only sparingly by islanders. The other sits in an area which has been completely reshaped by the cyclone, and is under water at high tide.
The first official government aid limped towards Tikopia's shores at sunrise yesterday. The Auki, a police patrol boat which left Honiara last Thursday night, does not carry food or fresh water and is only big enough to evacuate 20 people in case of a medical emergency. But it brought the first medical supplies and water purification equipment to the island, alongside an assessment team to gauge the situation on Tikopia, and was followed by a larger supply boat this morning.
The three-day voyage of the Auki has been plagued with problems from the very start in a sequence of events that borders on the farcical. At the outset, the NDMO was hampered by the fact that Zoe struck over the new year holiday. Incredibly, one of the main difficulties the office has cited has been getting hold of food: most shops in Honiara have been closed over new year while their shopkeepers returned to their home villages.
A more serious dispute arose over the payment of special compensation to the police officers running the Auki - a demand which has been described as extortion by some members of the Solomons government.
The incident resembles a similar extortion attempt last month, in which Solomons police fired shots at the house of the prime minister, Allan Kemakeza. They claimed they had been driven to the move by the government's failure to pay them for their work in an operation to seize firearms.
Milner Tazaka, the Solomon Islands high commissioner in Canberra, admitted that pay demands by Solomons police had held up the mission.
He said that the government was already taking steps to deal with the problem within the country's police, but would not say what the moves would be. "We can't afford to have ourselves continue in this situation. We have enough problems as it is," he said.
Loti Yates said the action had managed to delay the patrol boat's departure by at least two or three days. "It's made the situation much worse. We have to work fast with this and cannot afford this sort of interference from people."
But he said that he also sympathised with the police who, like all other public servants in the bankrupt country, have often not been paid for months at a time. "If people who have not been paid leave town to go on this patrol boat for seven days, who will pay to feed their families while they are away?" he said. "We all have had these problems with [not receiving] pay."
The problems have not been confined to the Solomons government, either. An Australian surveillance flight carried out on new year's day failed to air-drop any emergency medical or food supplies. Australian government aid agency AusAid said that they were not prepared to carry out such an action unless it was specifically requested by Honiara.
On Tikopia, islanders predict they will be dependent upon outside aid for at least three months. Given the week-long wait to dispatch an emergency patrol boat to the disaster zone, even that unambitious demand could prove typically optimistic.
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