The World in 2007 / The Pacific
Handle with care
by David Robie
The Pacific forecast for the year is not promising.
Fiji’s fourth coup in two decades came barely three weeks after pro-democracy protest spilled into riots in Tonga. The spotlight has fallen once more on the fragility of Pacific democracy and the forecast for 2007 isn’t terribly promising.
Growing poverty, unemployment, lacklustre political leaders, failure of Western democratic institutional models and flawed Australian, New Zealand and European aid policies all signal the need for fundamental changes.
Even New Zealand’s “smart” sanctions in protest against Fiji’s military regime are seen as not so smart by many non-government organisations and church leaders. Catholic Archbishop Petero Mataca says they will unfairly punish ordinary Fiji Islanders, especially the poor.
Australian-led “interventionist” policies in the region have been especially dismal, fuelling problems rather than solving them from East Timor to Fiji.
In the West Pacific Melanesian sub-region over the past 25 years, we have seen not only Fiji’s four coups but also ethnic conflict in the Solomon Islands; pro-independence ructions in New Caledonia; paramilitary revolts in Vanuatu; secessionist rebellion and civil war in Papua New Guinea’s Bougainville province; and tribal warfare in the Papua New Guinea Highlands.
And although Tonga is in Polynesia, the issues of political reform and poverty have a resonance with problems in Melanesia. In French Polynesia, pro-independence Tahitian President Oscar Temaru has just been ousted from office by a narrow parliamentary no-confidence vote and the territory’s future is uncertain.
Last year, a University of Canterbury survey of violent conflict in Melanesia by Associate Professor John Henderson chronicled 10 political assassinations since 1981. The political murders included New Caledonian independence leader Pierre Declercq in 1981; Kanak independence leaders Jean-Marie Tjibaou and Yéiwene Yéiwene (1989); Bougainville Premier Theodore Miriung (1996); Samoan cabinet minister and anti-corruption campaigner Luagalau Leva’ula Kamu (1999); and West Papuan pro-independence leader chief Theys Eluay (2001).
Fiji’s current military strongman Commodore Frank Bainimarama narrowly escaped becoming assassination victim No 11. He made a dramatic dash through a cassava patch in a gully behind Suva’s Queen Elizabeth Barracks when elite Counter Revolutionary Warfare Unit rebels mutinied in November 2000.
A major factor in last month’s coup, making it very different from the previous three, was Bainimarama’s anger over deposed Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase’s insistence on treating the George Speight coup ringleaders with kid gloves – welcoming some of the convicted coup henchmen into Cabinet and Parliament.
The “father” of Fiji’s coups, Sitiveni Rabuka, who as lieutenant-colonel staged two in 1987, was striving to reassert indigenous supremacy. The first coup was in retaliation for the election victory of Dr Timoci Bavadra, an indigenous Fijian Prime Minister and his largely Indo-Fijian-supported Fiji Labour Party.
Bainimarama’s coup, however – carried out by the military, which is 98 percent indigenous Fijian – is claimed to be on behalf of a multiracial Fiji.
Fiji’s Indo-Fijian population, mostly descendants of indentured labourers imported by British colonial authorities in the 19th century to work sugar plantations, has shrunk dramatically over the past two decades. A majority at the time of Rabuka’s coups, Indo-Fijians now comprise 38 percent of the 840,000 population; indigenous Fijians are 54 percent.
Though there has been no external intervention in Fiji, the Australian-led deployment of troops in the Solomon Islands in July 2003 and again this year in the wake of rioting in the capital Honiara set new precedents for intervention in Pacific Island nations.
Although New Zealand often argues from a “Pacific” perspective that sees the region as less threatening, Australia views it as a “potentially dangerous neighbourhood”. Critics see Australian Prime Minister John Howard as having been too eager to become President George Bush’s “deputy sheriff” in the South Pacific and have tended to regard Australian talk of the sub-region as an “arc of instability” as war-on-terror hype. Now they wonder whether it’s becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Civil society advocates regard free-market globalisation under the domination of New Zealand and Australia as a problem for the region. Some believe free trade will devastate Pacific economies already suffering from unequal trading relations with Australia, New Zealand and Europe. China, Taiwan and other Asian nations are exploiting this vulnerability.
Father Kevin Barr of the Suva-based Ecumenical Centre for Research and Advocacy (ECREA) is critical of the “good governance” catchcry, arguing that it is selectively applied in support of neo-liberal economic policies. Interventionist “reforms” in the region often undermine multi-ethnic developments in Fiji, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.
The 35 percent of Fiji people living below the poverty line, for example, are disadvantaged. The Qarase government had planned to increase an unpopular VAT tax from 10 to 15 percent in a country with no minimum wage and no real system of social welfare.
“Rather than listening to the people of Pacific countries and assisting them to find models that would suit their own needs, international financial institutions and bilateral donors such as Australia seek to impose their own structures and policies for development,” Barr says. “It is in effect arrogant domination.”
For academics such as the University of the South Pacific’s Dr Steven Ratuva, a senior fellow in governance at the Pacific Institute of Advanced Studies in Development and Governance and a keen observer of the Fiji military for many years, critical security realignment is needed.
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