Solomon Islands Tribes

Solomon Islands

Clicking over to Google Maps, hitting "Malaita Province," then zooming out and leaning back, I looked at what now seemed to be the basis for a really great tale - the kind I could tell for the remainder of my hotelbar life." It is a tale about how the web said that Solomon's temple on Malaita was in the Solomon Islands, an island whose half a million inhabitants live in almost 1,000 antolls, islands, cliffs, reefs, cay and islands, of which Guadalcanal is the site of the famed WWII wars. And about how I actually saw myself there, what few of us still do, what is a disgrace, because the secrets of the earth are only personally unveiled.

How did this Solomonic temple on the Pacific Islands look like? This is a quick way to explain how I sat in the dark imitation leather of an Air Pacific Purple and read Conrad's bike on the way to the South Pacific via LAX in the early part of the year. At Vanuatu's Bauerfield International Airport, Named after the American warrior Harold Bauer, who committed eleven hostile murders, we flown deep over Guadalcanal's weather coast, over uninterrupted verdant hillsides on volcanoes and landed in Honiara, the Solomon Islands' capitol, on the grounds of the Japanese airstrip, which was a hub of Pacific Theatre domination before America bombed in 1942.

Jonathan, a small, slim island dweller sitting next to me on the last stage of Vanuatu, presented himself and asked about the purposes of my trip. When I was leaving New York, I phoned my local telephone company and my hotel to mark my itinerary. You made it very clear to me that the Solomon Islands do not existed.

It was Mendaña who said he had re-discovered the site of King Solomon's mining, the Eldorado of the Pacific. There were now right-hand driven automobiles, the Protestant Church of the South Seas and several hundred other cathedrals, the Hot Bread Kitchen, Club Paradise, a Chinatown from the Colonies, sales offices for SolBrew, dazzling administration building, ship brokers and a college, along with the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation broadcasting center and World War II memorials.

King Solomon Hotel was fully occupied, so I moved to Mother's Union Restthouse, run by Nonnen, which Jonathan had proposed as a divine replacement to the Pacific Casino Hotel with Kataoke Pub and "Penthouse Suites" or the Japanese Mendana. The tribes that inhabited the islands of Melanesia, Polynesia and Micronesia kept a balanced offensive and defence for about 4,000 years, until the armed Europeans arrived, which fundamentally excluded the potential of large nationalities.

Meanwhile, Solomon Islanders have not forgotten their tastes for tripal piercing, marking and fancy hair. "Blong is mine, blong is mine, blong iu, which in turn becomes bloody in language, so that wherever you go, you listen to each other' s say-so.

An enormous sign along Mendana Avenue reminds Solomon Islanders to Luk awam gaud halt it. However secluded they may be, the Solomon Islands are used to being the linchpin of the story. Between August 1942 and February 1943, when the Japanese completely retreated from the islands, some 31,000 emperor troops and more than 7,000 allies were slaughtered in violent ground, naval and dogfight.

However, the poor clamped down on the humans. Non-government organisations also grew as the Solomon Islands pined in the rows of the 40 least prosperous states. The Malaites reacted by joining the Malaita Eagle Force, headed by a dark-skinned man called Jimmy "Rasta" Lusibaea, who, like Solomon's temple, is something of a myth on the web.

It assembled its forces under a Solomon Islands modification of the Solomon Islands banner, which includes the Star of David - a dark warrior battling for Israel in the South Pacific. He desperately appealed to the Solomon Islands for help. Several thousand soldiers arrived under the auspices of the Australian-led Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) and began to lead the United States.

Operation Helpem Fren was also attended by 14 other Pacific countries. Only this year RAMSI hands over full power to the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force; since one year the New Zealand forces are on a goodbye trip and perform the Haka Warshow. In charge of "ensuring the Solomon Islands' security", RAMSI has led amnesty, arms gathering, plundering controls, disputed polls, anti-Chinese unrest, healthcare and aid programs, economical reforms, taxation and other civilian work.

It was in this post-conflict setting that an Israeli developer called Yoel Siegel jumped in, whose photo I had discovered on a website where he posed between a couple of round Melanesians under a flag stretched across an empty exotic avenue. When I had turned a valuable bundle of US dollar into Solomon dollar, printed with soldiers, shield, ceremonially cut poles and mythic tortoises, I purchased a mobile telephone from an Aussie Telekom suit, and when the companion gave me the equipment, I realized my first star of David - no more than the height of a canopy, it showed up between my thumbs and index finger.

This was a time before I realised that it was not a pen-doodle, but an non-professional tattoos, and that the twins above the asterisk made it look like the ensign of the Judaic state, a similarity that turned out to be totally deliberate, and an important part of my history.

During the post-1967 six-day war years, when many saw Israel transformed from a "socialist beacon" to an "imperialist aggressor" - and when Israel was fighting Yasser Arafat's PLO while at the same time reinforcing relations with Ronald Reagan's United States - the Jew state was becoming more and more defamed in sometimes coarse and simple anti-imperialist notions.

In order to fight its growing insularity, Israel was seeking amicable overseas diplomacy with some of the world's most distant countries - an advance that coincided with what Secretary of State James Baker described as the "expansionist policy" that quadrupled the West Bank settlers and in 1987 resulted in the First Intifada.

After Tuvalu (1984), the Marshall Islands (1986) and the Federated States of Micronesia (1987), Israel first entered into 1989 the South Pacific with the Solomon Islands, all three of which were consistently and often alone in the United Nations and other fora. In the 1990', Israel's diplomacy shifted to the states of the former Soviet Union, former Yugoslavia, Africa and Asia before returning to the South Pacific, where the Jews found some of their most consequent confederates in Vanuatu (1993) and Nauru and Palau (1994).

When the Lebanon conflict erupted in 2006, Israel was elected 17 to the United Nations General Assembly; the only nations to side with the state were the United States, the Marshall Islands, Palau, Micronesia, Nauru, Australia, Canada and Tuvalu. The Wellington, New Zealand Dominion Post published an article in 2007 entitled "The Last Outpost of the Diaspora" about how "remote Solomon Islanders who believe they are offspring of the Lost Tribe of Israel have turned down Australia's plans because they are too preoccupied with cultivating coir for the motherland.

" It seemed that a surge of "Israeli businessmen" had arrived with a quick and insatiable craving for coconut. In 2009, these strange subterfuge diplomacy peaked after Operation Cast Lead, which sent Israel's land forces to Gaza. As the disputed Southafrican Jew lawyer Richard Goldstone published his 574-page fact-finding-missions-report which came to the conclusion that both Israel and Hamas had perpetrated possible acts of war-crimes during the dispute, only one Pacifico was on the side of the 114-strong minority against Israel: the Solomon Islands.

Yedioth Ahronoth, three weeks later, released a statement from the Israel State Department in which the defector was told that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran had sent a delegation to Oceania who promised 200,000 dollars to finance the trials of Solomon Islands medicine undergraders in Cuba. However, it would be a mistake to see the completely practical link between the Solomon Islands and the present state of Israel as the only cause for the tattooing of the Star of David on the hands of the telephone box warden.

Proof has been provided that at least some 18th-century prisoners dumped in the South Pacific were Jews instead of being sent to prisons in England. A further group of 20 anonym seamen was destroyed on Malaita in 1829 and supposedly kept for dinner by the cannibal. Have any of these men produced one of the rival original Jews who circled on and around Malaita?

Islands provide the delusion of closed realms, beach robbers or "transculturites" - humans who, like an academician I have read, "temporarily or durably separated from a group, join the network of societal relationships that make up another company and are under the control of its customs" - can disseminate histories and traditions like pollen-forming souls.

During the 1920', about 650 Europeans and non-natives lived in the Solomon Islands, many of them occupied themselves with conversion of the Gentiles. In Melanesia, one of the most important missionary activities, alongside the English and Latin Catholics, was the Pentecostal Evangelical Church of the South Seas, which was initially known under a different name in the latter part of the nineteenth cen.

As with other Pentecostal campaigns, the SSEC maintained mystic faith in the might of an errant script and fostered a link to the long past early Christian era, which was less of a jump than one might expect for a nation without writing a story, but with practices of ancestor veneration.

Through the intriguing work of the Flemish ethno-photographer Jaap Timmer of Macquarie University, I understood the Israel's link to Malaita and quickly came to his study of the Deep Sea Canoe Movement, a fragment of South Sea Evangelicalism under the leadership of a former interior minster in the Solomon Islands called Michael Maeliau.

" For Maeliau, since this verses precede the founding section of Pentecostalism in Acts 2, which tells of the formation of the community of the faithful, sees in the Solomon Islands a particular urgent need as the geographic and thus intellectual end of the world. Maeliau described a unique Solomon Islands premonition in a report on his praying movements in 2006, released by the Australian-Singaporean impression Onestone, which came to him in 1986.

It is drifting towards Australia and turns towards Papua New Guinea to the northern hemisphere in order to make further bends in different direction. A river turns northwards to the polar regions, the other to the southwards, and the central river is raging through the United States. This was the end of the premonition that promoted a widespread island legend that the Malaitans were descendants of Bible monarchs and that perhaps the ark itself ended up here, that the lost temple is dead on Malaita and that Jewish tables in holy places are evidence that the Malaitans are Israelites of far greater cleanness than those who have been corrupt by the migration of Europe and the conquest of the Mideast.

As I urged him, he admitted that there had been a division and that his and Michael Maeliau's churches, both formerly part of the South Seas Protestant churches, were no longer the same. "So on Sunday the cathedral is full and the crowd is sitting on the ground or standing?

Malaita's slipstream or a mystical drift or underwater landscape turned the sea-like and almost sea-hard surfaces, and the vessel, storm-whipped but unbroken, struck past an occupied refuge and crept up to Auki's busy quay. It seems that the notion that King Solomon's lost temple can be found on Malaita has captured a man, Frank Daifa or Daefa, or other variations of the notation that appear in casual messages from New Zealand and Australia.

You' ll see our mates praying for Israel every single second! In general, Malaita has the same width as Israel - from Be'er Sheva to Nazareth - and is the only one of the nine Solomon Islands regions that sits on a different plane. The revelation says that Malaita was divided into its northern and southern islands by mythic shark that fought so violently that they ripped through the earth.

Auki is a former Colonian capitol, properly located in the estuary of the Langa Langa Lagoon, a group of stilts set on man-made islands of stacked rock y corals and sands. There is a southern coastal street and another northern one. For him, the keys to all of Solomon Islands' economical, societal and policy affairs were an example of "one-top business":

It seemed to him that the Israelis' under Yoel Siegel seemed as condemned to failure as the other previous ventures he had seen, such as the mass Japanese supported travel campaign to the centre of Malaita, which failed to take into account that the natives did not shortage it. Revelations said that he would set me up to see some folks who knew about this one-top Israel store, and then he shyly expected some invoices to cover his transportation back to his town.

So I asked Peter if he knew of Leliana Firisua, the Israeli volunteer consulin. Like these things weren't a gag, the proprietor then recounted a tale of a vendetta that took place in the same room a few years ago, when a former Malaita Eagle Force commandant came in and killed a customer and killed him while the proprietor watched.

" Explaining that I was not a spirit and adding that I was not in the musical industry in the hope of mitigating the more unusual pledges made by the other members of my group. Until then I did it because I had gone to the Langa Langa lagoon with the Revelation and participated in Sunday worship in a one-room chapel that was overcrowded with men and women separated from the family.

On a ragged billboard is a top-down painting without island dwellers threatened by shady, burning palms, with a cruciform quay that leads into a sea ofredemption. Parsons are continually testing their capacity to move and inspire the highest level of human beings and ressources. Most of the things I found in the Solomon Islands were organised according to examples that were very similar to the greatness and structure of the Catholic or Hispanic Church.

Acolytics of Israel's evolution in the Solomon Islands had organised themselves in a similar way. Situated in a 1960s house on the other side of the governor's house in Auki, the Malaita Chazon Authority, which has been conceived as a recreation centre for former military colonels, with its own cafeteria and the still functioning "cold rooms", made a church-like headquarters (the name, cazon, means Hebrew for vision).

Recently, the MCA was renamed MCDA, with the addition of a" D" for Development" to extend the mandat. After my meeting was over, Revelation set up a front row passenger compartment next to Anderson, the operator of one of the flat-bed transport services from the mall northwards. After his lavish histrionics Oba was a descendent of the nineteenth century Bible Noah, who inherited some remains, perhaps from the time when a commercial Jew, perhaps a Turk, came to Malaita.

It was Franklin who said that at least one Swedish, one Canadian and one South American had come to see his Shrine. "You', he said,'will see that we have given the Jews lands. "The document describes the "conditions that the O'oba tribe set out to offer the Jews a piece of lands as a gift".

It was first created by Gad, the high prior of the Jews, who was one of the great ancestors of the O'oba tribes, so the present is a sign of recognition for the reunion after more than 2,700 years of division. Like a lure containing only the tables of the commands, it was kept in the sanctuary, and that true happiness, wrapped in the cherubs' wing, was sent to Malaita, where it is somewhere in the rain.

For me and the five or six assembled dark men in the lower part of the consulting room - almost nothing but gazes in darkness - he told Queen Saba's test of Solomon's wisdom: Bringing the emperor two fine worked bunches of silks and one from the Imperial Gardens and challenging him to recognize the world.

"Well, tell me, O King, what is right and what is wrong? Frankel recounted how King Solomon had opened the window to let himself be led to the truths by the honeybees; he said it with great nonsense and joy, invented words where he had no English, and spoke with his face in the shade before the candle.

"See, Solomon was a sage man. He who hears even the smallest creatures. It took a whole weekend of airplanes, boots, lorries, contacts, negotiation, meeting, launches and stopping to get there - but always forward to this peculiar man, the champion of the Solomon ruin on the island of Malaita in the South Pacific.

I knew that the way inside had its perils - a slippery slope and it could take me a few hours to get the right health services - but I also had trouble suppressing a greater, more apparent feeling of disillusion.

He solemnly presented the folks who would go with me - he had a poor heart and would stop us too much, he said. At dawn, where the south border of the To'abaita clan encountered the Solomon Sea, we made a turn to the south and drove into the interior on a slimy path through narrow grain fields, tarot -growing villages and overcast.

" Now we were an and a half hours away from the only street in northern Malaita. Whilst Oba's kingdom was still in its blossoming state, the Jews come for commercial use. In Ofi the mineral that the Jews exchanged for with the Malaitans was quoted. So the Jews made two journeys, the latter left Gad in the kingdom of Oba.

Esther marries Fua, the priest king. There were other impermeable beliefs: something about Adam and Eve and the notion that the Garten Eden could still be a Malaita; something about an "Esenic Party", a kind of disappearing Gemini to an "Edenic Party". So on and so on, all with the love of detail of an L. Ron Hubbard Isle.

Next day I took my bag and went to Kadabina, the site of Yoel Siegel's research work. "Then he gave me and my "company" and the Jews and all the Israelites a solemn benediction. No way to infiltrate north Malaita by road.

To the north of a tank farm the street got much poorer and I began to roam through lorry-size holes. We were standing in the empty street, shook our arms and exchanged thanks before he went southwards as I drove on to the site of the Israelis.

At the centre of the floor, in front of a small raised observation post, sluggish in the damp heat: an Israel flags. "At the centre of the symbol was the symbol of the school: a shining symbol with a ring containing a manor, an owl and other icons, and the slogan "Justice raises a nation".

As I moved further and further north, this kind curiousness slowed me down, so that I soon pushed my way through the villages and said, "Kadabina! There was another Israel ensign above it. He was talking about the new building behind us, which would accommodate Israel's farming and engineering technicians on their extensive visit, and how Emmaus Village, as he had called his family's homes, was fortunately in the right place to be the Kadabina head office.

Maena worked in the government's agricultural division after the end of the Fiji conflict, which sent him across the Solomon Islands. During the inauguration ceremonies that had taken place a few month earlier, there were pictures of tens of slaughtered swine and a few hens for kochers.

He had a three-pronged platform: "Peace, prosperity, Israel. "In order for the North Malaita region to develop, justice and order must be restored," it says. "There is a chart showing the north of the archipelago with districts on "development", "tertiary education" and "agricultural sites". "When Israel tries to help us," he said, "I thank God for it.

Basakana is a small isle, no more than a kilometer through the crystal clear, tranquil water, took the threat out of the great void - the thousand of leagues to the next country. Apart from an occasionally paddling canoe that glides over the skyline near the insular village, there was nothing but fame here. When Maena's grandchild assisted me in installing bed nets in one of the three guest rooms, I realized that he had a tattoo of an Israel tattoo on the back of his apron.

"Maena did not push the rider, so there must have been a limitation on the number of persons that could sit on the platform bottom and the side rails and the canopy. What did he imagine these high-rises, this 80-year-old man whose fathers led the Second World War on Guadalcanal and who was now working with the Israeli Consulate, who in turn shook Shimon Peres' hand?

Children were riding bikes with Israel flagged. At 10 o'clock in the morning - when the first of the shipments returned to the northern part, laden with a load of goods from Honiara and Auki - we gave up and agreed to try again that evening. Turning due north I found myself along the empty street running along the shore, through holes, through villages, past submerged plane-carrier.

Waving to the wide-eyed natives who were not going anywhere without feet, I drove to Malu' u to see Suava Bay, where Israel's plan is for an airfield and a tunnel fish plant. I' m asking him about Israel. There was a thatched building around the street with a shield with the inscription "GAZA STREET" next to "JEW", the stone stars and the line of the Israel flags, and a couple of ornamental hornheads.

Next day I opened the Solomon Star to find an inner heading announcing "Free Entry Into Israel": "POLOMON Islanders does not require a visas to travel to Israel. At" about 37" - like many Solomon Islanders he had no registrations and unreliably baptism beats - he was cut and fitted into his blues denims and his well-groomed knitted shirts and belts made of wheeled mobile telephones and multi-tools.

While he worked for the United Nations Development Programme, since one fated term in 1998 at the University of the South Pacific in Honiara he had also shown a keen interest in the "Israel question", as he liked to call it. There it was, Gege told, after turning on the pathetic stationary ventilator in his paper-packed bureau, that he had been hearing from a Kanadian sea lawyer and Protestant Christian who had said: "I am hearing there are men on the Solomon Islands who are Israelites or Hebrews.

Gege's co-ins join the Malaita Eagles Force, while the literal Gege goes down. It was also specifically commissioned to find an advisor or a kind Israelis who could come to Malaita to help improve the fate of the local population. He has taught with Yoel Siegel, an internationally experienced developer and relief specialist with 12 years of working in a TAG programme in Israel working in remote areas such as Azerbaijan, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Kenya, Jordan and Indonesia.

Gege said he had asked some of his teachers if they or someone they knew was ready to go to the South Pacific. Could he consider visiting Malaita and help them realize their own personal growth plans? The long, thin, brightly coloured square on the chart showed the position of Malaita International Airport on the east side of Malu'u, a crossroads for air travel from Tel Aviv to the South Pacific, but also for the export of fresh produce and the import of environmentally sound tourism through Bangkok and Seoul.

Malaitan and Israeli aid, I have been hearing all this from the dozen Kadabina supporters. A year before leaving for Honiara to take part in King George VI High High School, as a teens, Leliana Firisua remembered me chewing pie on a giant slice of pounds of dry pie in his offices after returning from his mission to Israel - he was starving, not starving for dinner and wondered where he might find it.

In the BBC World Service he learned of Operation Moses and later of Operation Solomon, which brought ethnic Jews to Israel. Coming home, he entered the auditors general's offices, then he ran a government cooperative, got a wife, had four children and ran for re-election to the district council, where he concluded that a fellowship with Israel Malaita was the only way to develop.

Then he began corresponding with the Judaic Agency for Israel. Firisua went through an "advocacy training" at uneven times - headed by a young sales representative, Daniel Taub, who was later to become the Israel embassador in London - and was awarded a MSc. In less than 10 years, he was appointed Israel's Honorary Solomon Islands Representative, receiving a couple of brand-new Toyota Prados with Embassy license plate (CC7, for his flagship vehicle) and opening an agency in one of the stores on the third storey of Hyundai Mall, off Mendana Ave.

During his stay there, he made a scheduled trip to the Israel Museum and instead encountered an Israel sea life expert and fishing advisor he had seen in the Solomon Islands, who then worked for the NGO WorldFish. North Malaita to see the President Peres, Israel's protector.

During his visit to Israel, he submitted a proposal to visit the Golan Heights shelter. Lusibaea - whose woman in the by-election fought for his Parliament building, who was cleared for a 10-year-old indictment of bodily harm he brought before the Supreme Court - wore a military-green fisherman's cap, dark pants and a knitted dark-poly buttoned up to unveil a large starred Jew.

He had the stomach and bump of a lively 50-year-old at 42, and it seemed to me that he was clearly conscious of the severity of life and its limitations, as can be seen in those who have sat through the years. "They' re starting to drive all the Guadalcanal folk out of the area," he said. "because she abducted about 18 of us Malaita citizens.

A number of lawless viewers, corrupt and anarchist comment that this was a "failed state", but a more precise definition is that the Solomon Islands have not been formed since they became independent and have never managed to become a system of any kind. "Where did you come up with the notion of hoisting an Israelis' banner to reinforce the heart of your warriors?

" So he had "boys" everywhere: a concrete team that drove along the pavement on an unknown section of the motorway - his "boys" on behalf of the coming Festival of Pacific Arts. Her loyalty, he said, contributed to his election to the North Malaita Assembly in August 2010.

I' m trying to betray him with Solomon' fish. There were a few vessels sitting on a trailer, one with an Israelis' banner on the aerial. At last it had given up, but was sitting in graceful silence around some other Junker, a scenery that made me think of the World War II freighters that had dragged extraterrestrial intruders to the islands.

Lusibaea's Home Ministry had a pinboard with airborne map of North Malaita, his county, an original sized Israelis' banner, photographs of him and the Israel relief mission on a ship that drove to his Barefoot Lodge, and a self-portrait in jail in front of blunt grey partitions in a small atrium.

" Three of his Israelis fluttered under the backdrop in the blister. When he showed me a KORYAN AIR bag, full in Israel, with the inscription "JORDAN RIVER", now half empty, "because old and ill persons have listened to it and keep asking me for something," he said. Pacific Islander II, a Bali Hai vessel flying the flag of Panama, had entered the harbour and was discharged by swarming men and maschines.

Conrad proposed that the instant you believe the legend that the tropic isle is a paradise is exactly the instant when the madness of the isle drove you crazy. On several occasions I had meetings with Firisua, members of the South Sea Evangelical Church, Jonathan and his colleagues. Me: This notion, which I hear from the north, that humans are descendants of Jews?

Me: How do you handle this concept when you speak to the Northerners? It went into a narrower portrayal of the challenge of insularity. "He lamented that our help for developing countries has wrecked us. It ran over Gold Ridge and how the landmines were expansions of settlement, immortalized by co-producing regimes that were unjust to the islanders.

"What happened to the Malaita Eagle Force? He was an mate of the Royal Solomons Police Force, part of the underwater crew responsible for dealing with UXOs, investigating new finds (a previously un-documented World War II shipwreck was discovered off Florida the previous month) and salvaging sunken cadavers. Talking about the hundred vessels in this cove and around the Salomon Sea water - their hold is still filled with unsaved World War II fuel and loads, their unnamed deaths and the memorial rings that are ceremoniously buried there every August by recurring tribes.

" When the Solomon Islands are not heaven, I thought to myself and forgot for a minute the bloodbath in front of me, then there is no such place on Earth. My last evening on the Isle, at Mother's Union Resthuse-in the wake of malaria tablets and the solemn SolBrews I had indulged in at Kokonut Café - I dreamed I had fallen from a ship, fully clothed, depressed by all my bag stuff.

"The Israelis and the Jews will have a place," said Firisua and made his last bid. Jews should have a second home, why not on the other side of the world? "His eldest boy, 21, was to go to Sde Eliyahu, a nunnery in the north of Israel, after six month with a Jews in Australia.

During the following few month, back in New York, I was periodically receiving missions from the emptiness, memories of having lived through this other Israel instead of dreaming. "Malaita seems to know more about our country. "and so many events during the three outings.

It was an island festival. I was really there. A hand-written, italic A4 cover of the Solomon Royal Post, in a box of air mail marked in green and green, by Franklin Daefa. "I have been formally recognized as an "appropriate association for the Jews of the United States and even the country of Israel.

2: Our first embassy to our Jewish brothers is our self-confident stand-by assistant (sic) when Jews are faced. The House of Hosts sends this dispatch to reassure the Jews in Israel that the help exceeding all physical miraculous forces in comin' after the precautions have been taken. Both the United States and Israel strongly rejected the action.

Ambassador Colin Beck, UN ambassador of the Solomon Islands, sent to New York one months after the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding on the subject of bi-lateral relations, was to be elected, as were Canada, the Czech Republic, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau and Panama.

In the Solomon Star, Firisua was cited as saying: "It really is a sorry today regarding the fellowship that the Solomon Islands have with Israel. In the NYPL meeting room one afternoons, a narrow ribbon entitled The Malaita Massacre, entitled The Malaita Massacre, was presented to me by Roger M. Keesing and Peter Corris, an anthropologist, under the high vaults of his tropic canopy.

In the centre of what Keesing and Corris tell is the history of a nation in "partial isolation", which lives in a land that is both uninterrupted and uninterrupted, with deadly foes only a few valleys away, in an empire expanded by the space legend. A tribe will see itself as the centre of its own cosmos until powers beyond the skyline appear and condemn them unexpected.

Between the mid-19th and early twentieth centuries, whites from Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia, the Solomon Islands and the remainder of Melanesia "recruited", "forced" or abducted locals to work mercilessly on the sugar cane paddies of Queensland, which became part of Australia. In addition to the savagery of enforced exiles, the spreading of diseases and contractual bondage, if not enslavement, Blakbirding also created a labour deficit at home that prevented the early Solomon Islands colony plantages from thriving.

"Mostly, in Malaita, the killings began with the infraction of the inflexible sexual codes - temptation or adultery," writes Mr Kaesing. As part of his administrative tasks, a likeable regional official by the name of William R. Bell in 1927 was preparing himself for a humble test of force in the Kwaio area in the centre and northern part of Malaita.

From that year, one Tuesday, with his collector crew just south of Auki, Bell asked the assembled Kwaio, headed by the soldier Basiana, to repay what was due to Her Majesty. When the ruins on Malaita were destroyed, Maekali, one of Bell's former peasants, was captured between his English sovereigns and his own relatives.

"Some[ of the policemen and former policemen] stayed with the British and held small groups of supporters; they and their groups have since been generously rewardsed with developing programs, schooling and other advantages. Now Maekali is resting in a grave, under a shallow concrete arch, behind an orchid barrier, in the centre of Emmaus Village, next to a 20-foot flagstaff flying the colours of today's state of Israel.

The lesson I learnt from my trip was not how I had anticipated that Joseph Conrad was right about the islands and the dark life of paradise in our imaginations. Malaitans are reading their own story in the story of Israel because they too had experienced a live Holocaust in their memories, both physically and spiritually.