Less than three weeks into the ongoing coup crisis in Fiji, the Pacific rim again erupted violently, when a strikingly similar coup was executed against the government of the Solomon Islands to Fiji's northwest. On June 4, a militia group calling itself the Malaita Eagle Force arrested the Solomon Island's Prime Minister, Bartholomew Ulufa 'alu, and Governor-General, cut telephone lines from the island, closed the airport, and then issued an ultimatum that the Prime Minister resign. Catching Australia seemingly flat-footed so soon after it was similarly exposed by the Fiji crisis, the Solomons crisis is the latest example cited by foreign policy commentators as a failure of Australia's foreign policy in the region in which it is the major power. In reality, though, the opposite is true: it is Australia's implementation of British policy in the Pacific that has created an arc of instability stretching from Indonesia to Fiji.

The Solomons coup was ostensibly triggered by tensions over competing land claims on the main island of Guadalcanal. The population of natives from the island of Malaita, brought to Guadalcanal as labor during World War II, had grown, and their increased occupation of land around Honiara—sometimes by squatting—had in recent years provoked a backlash by the native, "indigenous" Guadalcanalese. 18 months ago violence had broken out between the militias representing the two groups, the Malaita Eagle Force, and the indigenous Istabu Freedom Movement. The conflict divided the Solomons' police force, prompting Prime Minister Ulufa 'alu, himself a Malaitan, to request armed police reinforcements from Australia and New Zealand. Incredibly, this request was refused, despite an admission by former Fijian Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka, who, suspiciously (because of his own role in Fiji's current crisis), had been appointed by the Commonwealth as a mediator between the two rival groups, that Australia and New Zealand had advanced warning a coup in the Solomons was evident. "The situation in the Solomons was predicted for some time," Rebuke revealed to The Australian on June 8, "Intelligence had been received by the police and the prime minister's office that there was a coup in the making"

There are other examples of Australian treachery behind the crisis. The Istabu Freedom Movement procured a supply of guns, ammunition, explosives and vehicles from the Australian-owned Gold Ridge mine after it was hurriedly evacuated. On June 8, the Royal Australian Navy's HMAS Tobruk arrived at the capital Honiara to evacuate up to 700 Australians and others, including aid workers, many of whom disputed the necessity to leave, but were forced to by the Australian High Commission under threat of funding cuts. An Australian Federal Police agent advising the Solomons government was also forced to leave. "This is just the time when the Solomon Islands really need people like him to try and help sort out the chaos," blasted one evacuee. On June 11, the crisis spread into the Solomons Western Province, when a third "indigenous" militia, linked to the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) that waged a ten-year, bloody, indigenous insurgency against Papua New Guinea, took over the capital of Gizo; Bougainville is under the control of an Australian peace-keeping force.

Defending his Government's decision to ignore the request for police, Australian Prime Minister John Howard said such a deployment would place Australians in a position of unacceptable risk. "Australia can't be held responsible for everything that goes wrong in the region," he said. Incredibly, this is a 180 degree turnaround from Australia's justification of its role in blowing up East Timor last year. However, as revealed in the January 28, 2000 EIR report "Queen breaks up nation-states to steal raw materials", the motivation for Australia's intervention in East Timor was the fabulous wealth in the natural gas reserves in the Timor Gap.

The "arc of instability" that commentators and defense planners have recently labelled the region extending from Aceh in Indonesia's far west, to East Timor, the Moluccas, West Papua (formerly Irian Jaya), Papua New Guinea, the PNG island of Bougainville, the Solomons, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, and now down to Fiji, is collectively one of the richest minerals concentrations in the world, that includes massive oil and natural gas reserves in Aceh, Timor and PNG, the world's richest gold and copper mine in Grasberg in West Papua, and two of the world's ten richest gold mines and its fifth and eighth largest copper mines in PNG. Although smaller in scale, the Solomons one mining project, the Gold Ridge mine, was very significant to its economy, accounting for more than 30 per cent of GDP; the share price collapse of its owners, Delta Gold, has suddenly turned it into a likely takeover target.

Given the British policy enforcer role Australia has played in the regional instability, as documented in the Jan. 28 EIR report, of creating insurgencies to grab raw materials, it is not surprising on June 9, in the midst of the crises, the British Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in London, John Battle MP, who is "responsible" for the Asia-Pacific region in the former Colonial Office, suddenly arrived in the PNG capital of Port Moresby, the first visit by a British minister in five years.