Cover Story
The Small Island States That Roared...
Bush, Aussies get message on Kyoto
In September, the Beast will perhaps be confronted in his Washington D.C. den by a posse of some indignant Pacific Islands prime ministers and presidents.
The Beast is one George W. Bush. His blunt assertion that the preservations of the profits of United States citizens and personal comfort and lifestyle are more important than the Kyoto climate change treaty isn't making him fans in the Pacific Islands.
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The region's people fear that their low, small atolls will be swamped in as little as 50 years. That is if some scientists are right in claiming that the warming of the atmosphere caused by polluting industries will cause the level of the sea to rise as ice caps and glaciers melt.
As expected the climate change issue dominated the Nauru Forum, with the Australians, in cahoots with the Americans, hoping to make as little of it as possible.
At the end of the Forum, Nauru's President Rene Harris, as the Forum¹s spokesperson, was asked by reporters if the final session had spent quite some heated time debating the issue, with hostility emanating from the Small Islands States group.
"No," he said.
That's wasn¹t how some Forum officials recalled it. There was an hour of rather brusque exchanges, one said. Through its 30 years of existence the Forum has made a show of not being bound by procedural rules, well not many, and by reaching decisions by gentlemanly consensus. That mold was broken at the Cook Islands Forum in 1997. Then the Australians - who like the Americans want to avoid what would be the heavy economic cost of complying with the Kyoto style climate preservation rules - angered islands delegations by pressuring them into a softer official Forum stance on the issue than they really wanted.
This didn't happen again at Nauru, although the Australians managed to get the final communiqué diluted by having it read that the Kyoto deal had been ratified by only "some" Forum members. Appearing with Harris at the press conference, New Zealand's leader, Helen Clark, isolated Australia by making it clear to questioning journalists that her country was fully behind the Pacific Islands attitude.
At a separate meeting of small islands states, before the main Forum meeting, it was agreed that their communiqué should make specific reference to indignation felt by the group about the United States sabotage of the Kyoto agreement.
Harris, after the meeting, told reporters that climate change threatened the Pacific Islands with a "modern holocaust". He said those who went to the United Nations meeting in September "may as well take the option of seeing President Bush".
In handing over the chairmanship to Harris at the official opening of the Forum on the evening of Thursday, August 16, President Teburoro Tito, of Kiribati, who hosted last year¹s meeting, had urged all leaders to attend the United Nations meeting. This was to win recognition of the 12 Forum islands members as a distinct bloc instead of being swamped by Asians by being classified as ³"Asia Pacific² countries.
Tito said the region wanted to use the occasion to launch a "Pacific challenge to the world to preserve the beauty and riches of the planet Earth for the livelihood and happiness of future generations and to put a stop to excessive human activities responsible for the damage already inflicted on the ozone layer and the other atmospheric layers of the planet." This would "amount to the Pacific Islands being among the first to go with the rising tide."
Next day the leaders had their "retreat" session, a private meeting in the isolation of a place outside town at which they usually manage to agree on what to agree at the formal meeting next day.
Talking to reporters at the end of the day, Harris left the impression that everything on the agenda will be discussed for the big meeting next day. The leaders had "agreed to disagree" about their climate change stance. The seven countries, including his own, offering tax haven facilities to foreign businesspeople, had agreed not to be "pushed around" by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries by bowing down to all demands for information about foreign businesses using tax havens.
Draft agreements for the creation of a Pacific Islands free trade zone had been accepted and would be signed the following day by most members, he said.
In its communiqué, the Forum hailed the two trade agreements as being a "basis for increasing regional integration and as a means to effectively prepare members" economies to respond to globalisation." It said education in the region had to be held by "urgent" action to cut the high cost of Internet services. The wording of the official Forum position on the Indonesian regime in West Papua privately offended some delegates. They recalled the years of strong words and action the Forum applied in the cause of helping to secure more autonomy, expected to lead to full independence, for the French territory of New Caledonia.
As at Kiribati, under pressure from Papua New Guinea and Australia, the Forum said it was concerned about violence and loss of life in West Papua. The Forum accepted Indonesia as the "sovereign authority" with a duty to ensure that "all parties" had a part in securing a peaceful settlement of difference.
An Indonesian delegation this year appeared for the first time at the two-day "dialogue" the Forum has with big aid donor countries, including the United States, China, the European Union, and Japan, to discuss political and aid relations with them. At Nauru it announced that it would soon open an embassy in Suva, where the Forum¹s secretariat is located, to further cosy up to the Pacific Islands.
Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, 82, as Fiji's first prime minister a founding member of the Forum and the last survivor of the 1971 inaugural meeting, was to have been at Nauru to deliver a 30th anniversary address. He was kept from it by a stroke he suffered during a visit to Vanuatu in July. He's now recovering in New Zealand.
His speech, read by his son-in-law, Ratu Epeli Nailatikau, present as deputy prime minister and leader of the Fiji delegation, irritated New Zealand¹s Clark, and the Australians. At first Australian and New Zealand membership blended well, Mara recollected, but "I have sometimes wondered since whether this may not have been a mistake."
This was because "they have not always been ready to show understanding of our problems and they have sought to impose their solutions in an insensitive way, when left to ourselves we could work things out in what we have come to call the Pacific Way."
The Forum, said Mara, had to move closer to the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), the European Union, African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP), and to fully use its presence at the United Nations.
After 30 years he felt the Forum had become a "potent factor" in advancing Pacific Islands causes."Just one more word - at the outset, if it was we, the old men who dreamt dreams. I now call on the young men to see visions. For where there is no vision the people perish."
