HONIARA, Solomon Islands (AP):
SCORES OF Australian troops flew into the Solomon Islands late yesterday to restore peace after rioters and looters attacked police and laid waste to the capital Honiara's Chinatown neighbourhood in violence sparked by the election of an unpopular new prime minister.
As the first troops, armed and dressed in combat fatigues, touched down in a military transport plane in the capital, Honiara, a curfew was called across the city and police given the power to arrest people on suspicion of inciting violence and hold them without charge for up to a week.
PILES OF RUBBLE
A reporter who drove through the city last night said it was quiet with smouldering piles of rubble the only sign of the rampage by about 1,000 rioters that started the night before and continued well into the daylight hours.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard ordered 110 soldiers and an extra 70 Australian Federal Police officers flown to the strife-torn South Pacific nation after its government requested help quelling the violence, which erupted Tuesday after Snyder Rini was elected prime minister by 50 lawmakers chosen at an April 5 parliamentary election.
New Zealand also was sending an extra 30 soldiers and 20 police and Fiji was sending about 20 police.
Australian Foreign Ministry spokesman Scott Bolitho said Canberra was offering seats on military planes returning to Australia to any of its citizens _ or those of Britain, New Zealand, the United States or Canada _ wishing to flee the violence.
Meanwhile, Taiwan rejected a comment by Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer that the rioters were in part protesting possible involvement of Taipei in the election of new Prime Minister Snyder Rini.
The Solomon Islands are one of Taiwan's 25 diplomatic allies, mostly small or impoverished nations in the Pacific, Latin America, and Africa.
Taiwan split from China amid civil war in 1949. For the past 35 years the democratic island has been fighting a rearguard action _ often involving significant infusions of developmental aid _ to prevent Beijing from reducing the number of its allies further.
"We are happy to see our allies hold elections, but we do not intervene," Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Michel Lu said, adding that Taiwanese involvement on the islands focuses on developmental assistance.
Australia's troop deployment _ its second major military operation in the Solomons in three years _ came after at least 17 Australian and two New Zealand police were injured Tuesday in clashes with protesters.
Rioters who torched much of Chinatown Tuesday continued Wednesday, destroying an estimated 90 percent of the neighbourhood before torching a new hotel in Honiara and several cars parked nearby.
Outnumbered foreign and local police largely left the rioters unchallenged in Chinatown, where some families reportedly leapt from apartments above their businesses to escape flames Tuesday.
Government spokesman Johnson Honimae said about 90 percent of Chinatown had been destroyed.
From the air, the extent of devastation was clear, with entire blocks in the neighbourhood, which is flanked on one side by a tree-lined river, collapsed or destroyed and only a handful of buildings left untouched.
"Mobs and looters have been hurling rocks and bricks at passing patrol police vehicles," Honimae said.
By Wednesday afternoon, central Honiara was largely deserted. A lone man with a bullhorn rode on the hood of a passing police car appealing for locals to return home.
Rini, who was held in a secure, undisclosed location Wednesday, is seen as having close links with the corruption-tainted administration of his predecessor Sir Allan Kemakeza. Rini was Kemakeza's deputy prime minister.
More than 280 police officers from Australia and New Zealand have been in the Solomon Islands since 2003 helping the local force restore law and order in the chain of islands 3,840 kilometres (2,385 miles) northeast of New Zealand's capital, Wellington.
The foreign police _ who initially was backed by some 1,800 troops _ had largely ended violence between rival islanders that had simmered for years, peaking with a coup in 2000.
