Cover Story
Nauru's Forum Feat
Despite everything, this was a Forum much better than expected.
As birthdays go, a 30th birthday is not an unimportant milestone. As in August, the 30th anniversary of the Pacific Islands Forum loomed on the horizon of Nauru, the location of the milestone meeting, the outlook for this year's summit of the leaders of the Forum¹s 16 member states looked distinctly dubious.
Air Nauru's only jet, usually the sole conveyance to and from the isolated mined-out 21 square kilometres speck of limestone rock, 56 kilometres south of the Equator, lay broken down in Australia. These were reports of inability to pay a mighty repair bill. That wasn't the only breakdown. New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark, who had offered six other leaders a lift to Nauru, had to accept a 10-hour flight in the hold of an airforce cargo plane, with overnight stop in Vanuatu. This in place of a five-hour ride in the comfort of an air force VIP jet grounded by a technical hitch.
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There was doubt externally about Nauru's ability to handle the meeting in time, if at all.
It was landed with it after New Zealand objected to holding the Forum in Fiji before democracy removed by last year¹s coup was restored. Nauru was reported to be broke, even broker than usual, with foreign bills unpaid, an unpaid civil service, and with a cargo ship circling the island refusing to land supplies until payment was made.
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It was running out of fuel oil needed to generate the electricity needed for light and for pumping water from a stressed-out desalination plant. Journalists were warned officially to arrive carrying a personal bucket for the collection of water said to flow only briefly in the morning. Electricity was being shed from ordinary folks, including most Nauruans, to ensure that the sole posh hotel, the government-owned Menen, had power 24 hours a day for its expected VIP guests.
Then some VIP guests cancelled out. John Howard, an Australian Prime Minister not known for intense interest in the Pacific Islands, announced that he was too busy to get to Nauru amidst trips to Japan and Indonesia. A few days before he had assured visiting United States supervisors of Canberra¹s affairs, and then Japan, that Australia was a reliable Pacific Islands watchdog He sped off instead to Jakarta to make his kow-tow to Megawati Sukanoputri, the new leader of 200 million Indonesians Australia fears one day might thunder over the water to occupy its territory. Howard, who assured Megawati that Australia backed Indonesia's claims to the western part of New Guinea grabbed by it in 1961, compounded the Forum snub by sending his retiring defence minister, Peter Reith, to represent him instead of his Foreign Minster.
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Howard's dodging of the Forum was a "national disgrace", a Sydney Morning Herald editorial thundered. Speculation was that Howard wanted to dodge two topics bound to boil up at Nauru. One was Australia's role in backing the United States rejection of the Kyoto climate change treaty. This is a document dominant in Pacific Islands minds as the beginning of a global effort to avert the flooding of low areas of land - especially most of theirs - by a rising sea level caused perhaps by the climate warmed by atmospheric pollution by the United States, India, China and other big industrial countries.
The other was the embarrassment for Australia, and also Papua New Guinea, of belonging to an organisation at last beginning to question the oppression, pillage and murder of West Papua's Melanesian indigenous people by the Indonesian army.
Three other prime ministers also cancelled out; Papua New Guinea¹s Sir Mekere Morauta; Fiji's caretaker leader Laisenia Qarase; and Manasseh Sogavare, of the Solomon Islands. All decided that pressing domestic political pressures made it necessary for them to stay at home.
Morauta and Qarase sent deputies. Sogavare nominated his foreign minister, David Sitai, as his replacement. But Sitai didn't make it to Nauru either. He was said to have gone down with malaria. The Solomon Islands seat at the Forum table was eventually taken by a foreign affairs official who was allowed to take notes, but not speak. Others didn't make it to the Nauru Forum. Michael Field, South Pacific correspondent for the French news agency AFP, added Nauru to Kiribati and Tonga, two other Forum countries he¹s banned from for reporting on their affairs with what they judged to be insufficient delicacy. The Field ban was a show of regional solidarity, President Rene Harris explained to reporters.
Clark objected to Harris, muttering about press freedom and transparency and got a reply she complained wasn¹t good enough. Nauru is presumed to have objected to Field¹s reporting of its controversial offshore banking services.
Other victims, probably made so under pressure from Indonesia¹s appeasers, Papua New Guinea and Australia, were representatives of the West Papua Presidium, which is demanding the ending of Indonesian rule. They made a debut at the Kiribati Forum last year sponsored by Nauru and Vanuatu. But the sponsors have since had changes of government.
Nauru's new government declared that it didn¹t want the West Papuans at the Forum until their quarrelling factions could appear as a united front. But Dick Kerwey, first secretary of the Free Papua Movement (OPM), a far older agitator for independence, travelling on a Dutch passport, arrived unannounced on an Air Nauru flight from Nadi on August 13, only to be deported next day. Kerwey, who has lived in Holland, West Papua's former ruler since the Indonesian takeover in 1961, said he'd come to tell the Forum that "we do not agree with the way the Presidium is acting. It is not diplomatic." The other independence group was "too noisy". The OPM preferred cooler tactics in trying to get the Indonesians out, he said.
On the verge of causing it national embarrassment, the tide of Forum misfortune at last turned in Nauru¹s favour. Its jet, repaired, returned to the air. The supply ship delivered. An island parched by long drought greened under daily falls of heavy rain. On August 15, two days before the Forum¹s formal opening, a tanker from the Federated States of Micronesia delivered 500 tons of diesel fuel, enough to keep Nauru's electricity on for two more weeks. But it was too late to save the contents of freezers and refrigerators in hundreds of houses deprived of power so as to keep the guests happy.
Payment for the oil was reportedly personally guaranteed by the Federated States of Micronesia President, Leo Falcam. But no petrol was delivered and petrol pumps became draped with "no petrol" placards.
Nauru's civil servants grumbled to visiting journalists that they hadn¹t been paid for a month although pay delays weren't as bad as they had been. Six hundred phosphate mineworkers from Tuvalu and Kiribati, living with their families in small flats deprived of power and water, also complained that they too were owed more than a month's pay.
Where did the money for the Forum come from? Australia chipped in A$100,000 worth of help and reportedly asked an Australian telecommunications company to delay cutting telephone services because of unpaid bills. South Korea put up A$50,000. Was it correct that Taiwan, which maintains the sole foreign embassy in Nauru, had contributed US$5 million towards the cost of hotel renovations, new cars, receptions and a general spiffing up of Nauru¹s facilities? No, but nearly so, chief secretary Mathew Batsiua told journalists.
It wasn't clear who paid certain costs, like a troupe of dancers flown in from the Cook Islands and a rumoured A$30,000 fee for a singer from Australia.
A senior Nauruan official complained to Pacific Magazine that it was madness for the country to be hosting the Forum at a time when it was tottering towards the end of national insolvency. He wasn't the only embittered local.
"What does this Forum mean to Nauru? Tell me!" bellowed a fisherman with a powerless freezer full of rotten fish and a boat from which a fuel delivery got diverted to the choking power station.
But the 32nd Forum was a success. Nearly everything worked for Nauru most of the time except for the delay by a day of the Miss Nauru Forum contest due to a sudden half-gale and deluge of normally welcome rain. Thirty-Second Forum? Not the 30th? Since that historic meeting at Wellington, New Zealand, 30 years ago, there have been some half-year "mini" Forums, one being at New Delhi during a Common-wealth Leaders meeting there. The Forum next year will be in Fiji, it was agreed; that's if Fiji still has a democratic government due to be restored at the end of a general election this month.
