My Say-South Edition
My Say-South Edition
What have 30 years of annual meetings of countries that constitute the Pacific Islands Forum achieved for the Pacific Islands? How much of that achievement can be attributed to the much vaunted Pacific Way?
The last survivor of the first Forum meeting in 1971, Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, of Fiji, offered answers to those questions in a speech read on his behalf (he is in hospital recovering from a stroke) at the opening of the Forum meeting held in Nauru in August.
He felt that the Forum had grown to be a "potent factor in advancing the name and needs of the South Pacific." It has.
Before and during the Nauru gathering there was some comment that the list of heads of government absentees (four out of 16; Australia, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Solomon Islands) was further evidence of a diminishment, in recent years, of the relevance and stature of what is touted as being the region¹s premier political institution.
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Three absentees felt that they should give priority to domestic political worries. One felt a pressing need to appear briefly in Indonesia. All four sent deputies to Nauru, but the decision of the Australian prime minister, John Howard, to be represented by his retiring defence minister, Peter Reith, rather than his foreign minister, Alexander Downer, inspired analysis, mainly from journalistic sources, that the Forum had become a foundering, inconsequential institution.
But prime ministers come and go and Mr Howard's career as Australia's prime minister is nearing the end. Few of his predecessors showed reluctance to divert time from national affairs for a spot of personal interfacing with microstate matters.
His successors will become conscious of the trend that after a couple of decades as a placid backwater, a region that Australia and New Zealand treat as a backyard domain to be kept clear of intruders from afar, the islands are being cultivated by powers they have qualms about. The Forum's value doesn't depend simply on the number of absented prime ministers and presidents, even if one absentee leads by far the richest and internationally most influential member.
Ratu Mara mentioned some of the Forum's achievements: a regional shipping line, a fisheries agency, international trade and aid deals. The complete list is far longer, the latest being the formal launching at Nauru of the beginnings of a Pacific Islands free trade area.
Important initiatives in the areas of trade, aviation, security, education, finance, energy, telecommunications and governance have come from the Forum and to one degree or another are producing benefits for Pacific Islands or will bear fruit to do so.To argue that the Forum is becoming less fruitful is to turn a blind eye to incontrovertible beneficial realities. Would all the Forum¹s achievements have happened had it not existed?
Some would have, more than some, but without the stamp of approval by 16 heads of government it is doubtful if all would have been as successful. Ratu Mara said that the membership of Australia and New Zealand was in the early days a necessary "economic component."
He might concede that he really meant that Australia and New Zealand money was needed to pay most Forum operating cost bills, and still is. Now he wonders if the Australia and New Zealand presence is more of a bind than a benefit 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." Ratu Mara began grumbling those thoughts long ago.
There is bound to be disagreement about how misunderstanding and insensitive Australia and New Zealand have been in their Forum role. Where would the Forum have got by now, really, without them?
There must also be disagreement about the real nature of the Pacific Way. The Mara interpretation is it is consensus; what Forum countries agree to agree on.
Is it not just to also attribute to the Pacific Way shoddy government, government corruption, waste, nepotism, mismanagement, cronyism and a fatal belief that Pacific Islanders are endowed to the divine right of something for nothing?
Micro-states have a might of excuses to offer about themselves. Not all are to be swallowed. Cracks are appearing in the doctrine of consensus. Australia versus the rest over climate change; the rest uneasy with Australia and Papua New Guinea over West Papua.
Whatever the Forum is, at 30 as an institution, it is not a moribund one.
