Heavily-armed Australian troops arrived in the Solomon Islands yesterday as the body of the first peacekeeper killed during a mission to restore law and order in the Pacific nation was flown home.
Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said Australian policeman Adam Dunning's murder by a sniper in the capital Honiara was most likely the work of disgruntled Solomon Island militia facing murder charges.
"We want to demonstrate to the people of the Solomon Islands that we're not going to buckle in the face of an evil assassination of this kind," Downer told reporters.
The 100 extra soldiers flew from the northern city of Townsville as a memorial service was held in Honiara for the 26-year-old Dunning.
Following the hastily organized service, Dunning's body was flown back to his hometown of Canberra for burial, after he became the first member of an Australian-led peacekeeping force to be killed in the Solomons.
Australian Justice Minister Chris Ellison and Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick Keelty flew in overnight to see the situation first hand.
New Zealand's 37 peacekeeping soldiers in the regional force were ordered to wear body armor on all patrols after the death of Dunning, who was not wearing a bulletproof vest when he was hit twice in the back.
Downer suggested that after profiting from five years of chaos in the Pacific nation, militia or corrupt ex-officials may be unhappy at the roughly 4,000 arrests since the force arrived last year and pending criminal trials.
"Those two groups of people, people who have been arrested and charged on counts of corruption and those who have been arrested and charged for murders, other acts of violence, supporters of them, some people who support them could be behind this," Downer told national radio.
Downer said only a small number of people would be involved and that they lacked public support from ordinary Solomon Islanders.
Keelty echoed Downer's views, saying rebels or former members of the discredited police force could have been involved.
Asked if the culprits could have been disgruntled former police officers, he replied: "Well it could be that or it could be members of one of the former rebel groups. It is too early to speculate."
Corruption and violence by police allied with criminal gangs, both dominated by the Malaitan ethnic group that forms the major part of the capital's population, was a major factor in the country's decline into violence.
Keelty added there were concrete leads and indications that the weapon was a self-loading rifle typical of those used by rebels, and said there had been another incident in October in which shots were fired at a police vehicle.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
POLITICAL PATRIARCHS: Recent clashes between Thailand and Cambodia are driven by an escalating feud between rival political families, analysts say The dispute over Thailand and Cambodia’s contested border, which dates back more than a century to disagreements over colonial-era maps, has broken into conflict before. However, the most recent clashes, which erupted on Thursday, have been fueled by another factor: a bitter feud between two powerful political patriarchs. Cambodian Senate President and former prime minister Hun Sen, 72, and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, 76, were once such close friends that they reportedly called one another brothers. Hun Sen has, over the years, supported Thaksin’s family during their long-running power struggle with Thailand’s military. Thaksin and his sister Yingluck stayed
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS