Solomon Islands: Soldiers from Australia and New Zealand have gone to the Solomon Islands hoping to restore order. Nick Squires reports from Honiara
John Mate carefully lifts his shirt to reveal a ragged bullet scar just above his waist.
"This is where they shot me when we were unloading the boat," he says. "I was frightened so I ran into the sea and swam as far away as I could, even though there are sometimes crocodiles and sharks. The salt made the wound very painful."
Mate (22) is one of hundreds of victims of an all-but-forgotten conflict in the Solomon Islands, a sprawling archipelago of nearly 1,000 palm-fringed islands in the South Pacific.
A coup in June 2000 sparked a civil war between rival ethnic groups which has sent the former British protectorate into a downward spiral of violence, corruption and despair.
This week saw the arrival of 2,200 armed troops and police from Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and other Pacific states. Their mission is to restore law and order to a country once known as the Happy Isles.
The operation has been dubbed Helping Friend or Helpem Fren in the pidgin English which is used throughout Melanesia. It is the biggest military undertaking in the South Pacific since 1945.
Australia, as the regional super-power, fears that without such help, the Solomons could become a haven for gun-runners, drug-traffickers and even terrorists.
In the wake of last October's terrorist attack on Bali, which killed 88 Australians, the Solomons is now regarded by Canberra as an "arc of instability" which stretches from the restive Indonesian provinces of Aceh and West Papua, through to Papua New Guinea and Fiji.
One of the force's main tasks will be to confront men like Harold Keke, a renegade warlord whose militia men were allegedly behind the attack on Mate and two others, one of whom was shot dead. The trio were delivering supplies to a detachment of Royal Solomons Islands Police on the rugged and remote Weathercoast, on the main island of Guadalcanal.
That was enough to incur the wrath of Keke, a former policeman who has carved out a jungle hideaway and is fiercely opposed to outside interference.
Like Mate and nearly 1,000 others, Susan Delam (22) was forced to flee her village when it was attacked by Keke's militia. She trekked for days along tortuous mountain tracks before reaching the relative safety of the capital, Honiara.
On the night of the attack, however, her three-year-old daughter was staying in her grandmother's thatched hut. Susan has not seen her since and fears the child has been kidnapped by Keke.
"I don't know if she is dead or alive," the young mother says, crying quietly beneath the shade of a tarpaulin. She is one of dozens of refugees who are now living in a muddy, makeshift camp in the jungle-clad hills above Honiara, close to the village of Titinge.
The nearest water pipe is a 20- minute walk away, there are shortages of food and people are living in shelters made of palm leaves, bamboo poles and plastic sheeting. The humidity is stifling, there are regular tropical downpours and many of the children run around naked or in ragged clothes. Bare-breasted women tend tiny fires, squatting in the mud.
The Australian-led intervention has been welcomed by the vast majority the Solomon Islands' 450,000 inhabitants, a friendly, open people who are sick of the years of corruption and extortion which have brought their country to its knees.
The first troops and police landed in Honiara aboard Hercules transport planes on Thursday, having been flown in from an Australian army base in Townsville, Queensland.
They were greeted by traditional warriors clad in grass skirts and smeared with charcoal, as well as a full guard of honour and hundreds of locals. Also in attendance was William Morrell, a former officer with Greater Manchester Police, who was recruited in February as the Solomons' police commissioner.
"I am very proud of them because we need peace in our country and we need their support," says Drelly Seniga (30), a plumber and father of two young children. "We are harassed by militants and it is very dangerous everywhere."
Australian and New Zealand police began joint patrols around Honiara within hours of arriving. One officer was amazed to be greeted with spontaneous clapping when he walked into a local shop.
The police are billeted alongside the troops in the grounds of a former holiday resort, close to Red Beach, where US forces landed in 1942 at the start of a long and bloody campaign to reclaim the Solomons from the Japanese.
The Australian diggers are as welcome now as the Americans were more than 60 years ago.
"We've only just arrived but already there's been a lot of positive feedback from the locals," says Cpl Dwayne Coates, a veteran of East Timor and Rwanda from the 2nd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment.
Around him young soldiers were sleeping or reading in hastily erected bivouacs and mosquito nets, while games of rugby and cricket were in full swing. One group had come up with a local version of skittles, involving coconuts and plastic bottles filled with sand. Helmets and rifles were laid on the immaculately kept lawn as the Australians challenged a newly arrived contingent of New Zealand infantry to a game of footie.
The job of the soldiers is to back up police operations as expatriate officers work with their Solomons counterparts to slowly reclaim the streets of Honiara and then fan out over the rest of the country over the coming weeks.
Complicating the situation is the fact that many officers in the Royal Solomons Islands Police are notoriously corrupt and have extorted money both from ordinary people and the government.
"Yes, there's criminality and yes, it will be dealt with," says Ben McDevitt, the Australian head of the multi-national police force. " It \ does need to be weeded out very quickly, but it's not something that can be achieved overnight."
Co-ordinating the whole operation is Nick Warner, an Australian career diplomat who has previously served as high commissioner to Papua New Guinea.
"For the Pacific this is a unique operation," he says. "It's a combination of law-enforcement, peace-making and nation building." Warner claimed an early success yesterday, when 25 illegal weapons were handed in to police in Honiara under an amnesty announced earlier this month.
Hundreds of weapons however left over from the civil war remain at large, with rumours that militants and warlords are busy burying or hiding them in scattered corners of the archipelago.
"The main problem is not the militants, it's the white-collar crooks," says Dr John Roughan (71), a New Yorker who came to the Solomons in 1958 as a missionary and who has been here ever since.
Now an adviser to a local NGO, the Solomon Islands Development Trust, he says the country's MPs have made fraudulent claims on a national compensation scheme totalling millions of dollars. "They claim A$30,000 for a house which they say was destroyed. When you ask them what sort of house it was, they admit it was made of palm fronds. It was worth maybe a tenth of that. The political elite is based on cronyism."
The Solomons, he argues, was woefully unprepared for Westminster-style democracy when it gained independence from Britain in 1978. "Too many times we have cases of someone who couldn't run a village canteen becoming a member of parliament. The ineptness is staggering. Honiara is like a dry sponge sucking up all the wealth."
The Solomons is now being given a last chance to turn its fortunes around. "You see African countries which are basket cases, with AIDS and warlordism. We are nothing like that yet," Roughan says.
The country has huge potential. Its forests and fisheries, if managed sustainably, could provide a livelihood for generations to come.
It has large reserves of gold, although mining operations have largely closed down since the coup four years ago. Its beaches, lagoons and atolls should, by rights, be attracting thousands of tourists every year.
American and Japanese ships which weretorpedoed during the war provide some of the best scuba diving sites in the world. However, tourists are few and far between on the streets of Honiara, a dusty, dilapidated town with pot-holed roads, open drains and mounds of festering rubbish.
The handful of hotels still operating are shabby and rundown and untreated sewage flows on to what could be an attractive beach. Mangey dogs roll in the dirt and locals spit vivid red betel nut juice on to the cracked pavements. It is a disappointment for anyone expecting the South Seas romance of Conrad or Somerset Maugham.
Back at the refugee camp high above the capital, the country's tourist potential is the last thing on the mind of Susan Delam.
"I want to see Harold Keke brought to justice and put behind bars," she says, in barely a whisper. "Then I want to go back to my village and find my daughter."