The election of veteran politician Manasseh Sogavare for another term as prime minister of the Solomon Islands yesterday sparked violent protests in the capital, with riot police deployed to maintain order.
Eyewitnesses reported unrest in Chinatown and at least one other area of Honiara after Sogavare won the backing of lawmakers for a record fourth term in office.
Shops and offices closed, and workers were advised to go home as police and community leaders appealed for calm.
Photo: AFP
Following an inconclusive election earlier this month, Sogavare won the backing of 34 of 50 members of parliament in a controversial runoff, with his opponents boycotting the vote.
“I wish to assure the nation that we are listening; it has not fallen on to deaf ears,” he said.
It is the first election in the Solomon Islands since thousands of Australian-led peacekeepers left in 2017.
A 2006 election prompted widespread rioting in the capital, with shops in Chinatown looted and burned down, forcing foreign peacekeepers to step in.
Within hours of the ballot yesterday, there was similar unrest.
“Each time an election of this sort happens, we have to move to my parent’s place, where it is safer,” said a food outlet owner in Chinatown, who asked not to be named. “Imagine each time, we have to pack our stuff, get the kids and move out from our place. It had been like this since the big riot in 2006. It is like the normal thing to do now.”
Sogavare’s last term in office ended abruptly in a 2017 vote of no confidence amid unconfirmed allegations that he had received donations from China’s Huawei Technologies Co (華為).
The Solomon Islands is one of Taiwan’s few remaining diplomatic allies, but is being courted by China, which has been investing heavily in the Pacific.
The Solomon Islands, where only about half of the population have access to electricity, is heavily reliant on foreign aid.
In the run-up to the election, several politicians, including Caretaker Prime Minister Rick Houenipwela, were reported to have said that they would review diplomatic relations with Taiwan if elected.
Houenipwela is a member of Sogavare’s Democratic Coalition Government for Advancement.
NO-LIMITS PARTNERSHIP: ‘The bottom line’ is that if the US were to have a conflict with China or Russia it would likely open up a second front with the other, a US senator said Beijing and Moscow could cooperate in a conflict over Taiwan, the top US intelligence chief told the US Senate this week. “We see China and Russia, for the first time, exercising together in relation to Taiwan and recognizing that this is a place where China definitely wants Russia to be working with them, and we see no reason why they wouldn’t,” US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told a US Senate Committee on Armed Services hearing on Thursday. US Senator Mike Rounds asked Haines about such a potential scenario. He also asked US Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has