Forum
Pacific Posse To Corral Bush
Island Leaders Take Climate Change Action Despite Australian Lobbying.
In September a posse of some indignant Pacific Island Prime Ministers and Presidents will perhaps confront the Beast in his Washington D.C. den. The Beast is one George W. Bush. His blunt assertion that the preservation 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.
The region’s people fear that their low, small atolls will be swamped in as little as 50 years if some scientists are right in claiming that the warming of the atmosphere caused by polluting industry will cause the level of the sea to rise as ice caps and glaciers melt.
- ADVERTISEMENT -
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 group’s spokesman, was asked by reporters if the final session had spent quite some heated time debating the issue, with hostility emanating from the Small Island States (SIS) group.
 |
|
|
“No,” he said. That’s wasn’t how some Forum officials recalled it. There was an hour of rather brusque exchanges, one said.
Appearing with Harris at a 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 Island attitude.
At the separate meeting SIS countries have before the main Forum meeting it was agreed that the SIS communiqué should make specific reference to indignation felt by the group about the U.S. sabotage of the Kyoto agreement. Harris, after the meeting, told reporters that climate change threatened the Pacific Islands with a “modern holocaust” and said those who went to the UN 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, which hosted last year’s meeting, had urged all leaders to attend the UN meeting to win recognition of the 12 Forum island members as a distinct bloc instead of being swamped by Asians by being classified as “Asia Pacific” 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.”
Photo: Giff Johnson
