Cover Story
Pacific Islands Forum
Has it become a creature of regional bureaucrats?
Ten years ago, a Japanese businessman presented the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat's Suva headquarters with an elegant meeting chamber, set in its own quite splendid wing.
For the next 10 years nearly everyone met in it except the Pacific Islands Forum, which on August 17, at last, met in it for the 33rd Forum meeting. Since the Pacific Islands Forum rotates its annual summit through its 16 member countries (last year Nauru, next year New Zealand), it took time to get to Fiji, the host of two previous meetings.
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Fiji had hoped to host the 2001 meeting. But that would have had to be over the dead body of Helen Clark, the New Zealand Prime Minister, who, because a coup had again ended democracy in Fiji, ignored the interim Fiji leader, Laisenia Qarase, at Tarawa.
Since a September 2001 general election restored respectability to Fiji, Clark not only fronted up at Suva on August 16-17, but also, like Australia's Prime Minister, John Howard, went out of her way to display friendly feelings the way of the Fijians.
Pacific Islands Forum 2002 was not, as Clark put it, an event of "stand out issues", but one in which a number of mostly old issues "roll round every year".
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One issue was the issue of propping up and hopefully one day fixing the region's mostly warped, sagging, mismanaged, corrupted Pacific Islands economies and systems of government.
"Good governance" is now the insistent catchword and in Suva, Australia's Howard said countries that did not achieve a reasonable level of it could not expect to receive generous aid from his country.
There was the climate change issue, sea level rise and law and order, nuclear waste trans-shipments issues, New Caledonia (everything okay there), attacks on Pacific Islands tax haven countries by hypocritical, immensely bigger, richer countries, all with dirt under their own carpets. There was the Solomon Islands crisis, which everyone agreed that everyone, but really only Australia and New Zealand, should help address.
The Forum admitted East Timor, newly free of Indonesian oppression, to its meeting as a special observer. But it again swept under the table the economic and physical mayhem inflicted by Indonesians on several million Papuans in West Papua, just over the border from Papua New Guinea and just across the sea from Australia.
Condemning Indonesian rule in West Papua doesn't suit Papua New Guinea or Australia, for 204-million (Indonesia's population) obvious reasons, although what's going on in West Papua is becoming as obvious as what the Indonesians did in East Timor.
India also got a green light to become a "dialogue" partner with the Chinese, Americans, Europeans, Japanese, Malaysians and various other big powers, who had trade, political and aid talks with Forum representatives after the main meeting.
And at last, years after it should have done, the Forum acknowledged with "deep concern" the menace to Pacific Islanders of HIV-AIDS. It directed the Forum Secretariat to work up a regional plan to fight it.
As far as Forums go, the Suva Forum was all pretty bland. Tight security inflicted by the Fijians with 15 years experience of keeping coup conspirators free of any possible physical reproach from their victims, kept about 80 journalists as far away from the Forum leaders as often as possible, apart from a handful of press conferences.
Yet the 2002 Forum was quite significant. It was the first for many years attended by all 16 heads of government. A strike by unpaid aviation department staff temporarily closed Henderson Airport in Honiara so that Solomon Islands prime minister, Sir Alan Kemakeza nearly didn't make it. The Australians took pity and sent a plane to pick him up.
New Zealand's Helen Clark arrived almost late since she had been busy forming a new cabinet after getting elected.
Tuvalu's new Prime Minister, Saufatu Sopoanga arrived having won office by one vote, just a few days earlier.
And Papua New Guinea's Sir Michael Somare, back in power a week before after 17 years out of office as Prime Minister, returned to the Forum as the oldest participant, up to 1985, in Forum meetings.
Did prevailing events of fateful significance to the region inspire the presence of all 16 heads of government, even John Howard, who has tended to avoid most Forums in favour of more prestigious engagements?
No. It was just, probably that Suva was much easier to get to than most other places in the Pacific Islands.
Even Mike Field, the French News Agency, AFP, correspondent banned from Tonga and banned from the 2000 and 2001 Forums by host governments, was able to make it.
The greatest concern, said New Zealand's Clark, was definitely the dire circumstances of the Solomon Islands, a country driven by a nasty but limited civil war, corruption and greed to a condition of economic collapse. A partial absence and hence departure from the previous norm was the banning from most Forum occasions of the Greenpeace attack force in pursuit of its campaign against nuclear waste trans-shipments through the region and in support of its climate change and sea level campaigns.
Two members of the assault team had their photographs stuck on the wall of the Forum Secretariat's security checkpost as being victims for exclusion.
The Fiji Government, which claims to be a democratic defender of free opinion voicing, also saw to the exclusion of local civil rights organisations it feared would be a Forum embarrassment to it.
Australia's Howard, who had asked for a locally non-available bullet-proof car and whose security men were visibly nervous about the risks in some locations of his exposure, came, saw, had what he said was his first sip of kava and thought it was "not too bad".
Kava got a mention in the communiqué, with the Forum complaining about a ban put on it by countries claiming it to be a health threat; it wants regional counter-action to be restored.
Did Howard conquer? He probably got wind that his hope of an Australian replacement for the post of Forum Secretary-General was not one kindly received by the bulk of the islands states.
But Howard did score one victory. The Forum's final communiqué conceded that while 15 Forum states were all for the Kyoto climate change treaty, Australia had to be accepted for understandable reasons as being dead against it, while at least doing something to reduce its greenhouse gas levels.
On August 15, as a prelude to the main meeting, the Forum's small islands states (SIS) met for their now traditional exchange of special worries.
With Cook Islands prime minister, Robert Woonton later briefing journalists about the meeting, Tuvalu's Sopoanga said that a destructive tidal surge that hit his 27 square kilometres, three to four-metre high country two days earlier proved the reality that climate change was raising the level of the Pacific Ocean.
The surge struck Funafuti, the centre of government. "It caused dislocation and some damage to coastal houses and people were moved inland. Our people in Tuvalu are witnessing the actual rise of the sea."
Tuvalu, 600 miles north of Fiji, is one of the Central Pacific atoll countries feeling most threatened by the prospect of sea level rise. Sopoanga said the eating away of land by sea level rise and erosion was accelerating the problem of countries with small land areas and rapidly growing populations but few, if any, resources.
The small islands states — Cook Islands, Kiribati, Nauru, Niue, Marshall Islands and Tuvalu — are the Forum's smallest, poorest and most isolated members with small populations and land areas. In a written statement, they expressed "profound disappointment" at the refusal of the United States to accept the Kyoto climate convention, and praised Japan and the European Union countries for accepting the convention.
Sopoanga said he was "sad" that Australia, which with New Zealand is a member of the Forum, had also rejected the Kyoto convention.
He and Woonton also attacked trans-shipment of nuclear waste through the Pacific Ocean by Britain, France and Japan. They said the small islands states hoped to persuade the full Forum meeting to agree to press for a complete ban on the shipments.
Woonton said the small islands states would ask the Forum to endorse the idea of a regional ocean policy so that the "health" of the ocean was preserved. "We feel that our ocean is our biggest resource and we want to see its health kept to an optimum."
Woonton then condemned countries involved in the trans-shipment of nuclear waste between Europe and Japan through the region's 200-mile exclusive economic zones. These were being made without the countries that could be affected by an accident like a collision, being consulted.
Woonton said the issue was who was liable, the countries or the shipper if the Pacific got contaminated?
"Who will clear it up? Who is liable? So far there has been no indication of who is liable and the people of the Pacific are the losers in the end." The Forum's communiqué said the trans-shipment states had agreed to meet with small islands states before the end of the year.
At the gathering's formal opening in Suva on August 15, the host, Laisenia Qarase, as chairman of the meeting, raised an old complaint from one of the Forum's founders, Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, whose lament at some of the meetings he attended in later years, was that the summit had become a creature of regional bureaucrats, with little of real substance inputted and decided by the leaders.
It was time the leaders took the Forum back from the region's bureaucrats, Qarase proclaimed.Next day, at an informal retreat session at a resort 50 kilometres out of town, the leaders chewed and digested 20 items and then polished off 16 more. It had been a good, relaxed and friendly day's work, Qarase told reporters at the end of it.
But the reality was, of course, that by then most of the communiqué put out by the Forum the following Saturday had already been framed by the bureaucrats during their own two days of committee sessions on the Tuesday and Wednesday preceding the Thursday opening. On Saturday, did the leaders really have much to do other than wield their collective rubber stamp?
