Island Voices
Unfinished Business
Are Coups And Civil Disorder Becoming This Century's Version Of
My office in Suva sits at a historic vantage point. The balcony opens out to Nukulau, the island where George Speight—Fiji’s most famous prison inmate—is currently serving a life sentence for treason.
Nukulau is a mute reminder of the conflicts and violence that have wracked the Pacific Islands in the past decade.
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They started in 1987 when Fiji’s military strongman, Sitiveni Rabuka, crashed into a Parliament meeting in Suva, deposed the government and introduced the word "coup" to the Pacific region’s political vocabulary. In the years that followed we have seen an increase in overt conflicts and violence in Pacific Island countries.
In 1989, for instance, the island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea was plunged into a secessionist war that lasted for more than a decade. In Tonga the continuing challenge to the power of the monarch is likely to brew interesting developments. In Sa¯moa the crisis of governance led to the assassination of a Cabinet minister in July 1999, part of a plot that included plans to kill the prime minister.
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In May 2000, back in Fiji, Speight and his supporters attempted to stage the play scripted by Rabuka 13 years earlier. They failed and Speight was charged with treason and sentenced to death—later reduced to life imprisonment. Less than three weeks later, the Solomon Islands had its own coup, the result of an ethnic conflict that started in late 1998.
The latest regional drama is still unfolding in Vanuatu where, in early August, some police officers arrested the attorney general, the commissioner of police, the chairman of the Police Services Commission and other senior public servants in a demonstration of their disagreement with the way in which the new commissioner of police was appointed.
These incidents have shattered the image of the Pacific Islands region as peaceful political backwaters. An Australian National University academic, Ben Reilly, has described this trend as the "Africanization of the Pacific." Other observers claim that the Pacific Islands have become part of an "arc of instability" that stretches from Indonesia to Fiji (and possibly Tonga, as well).
As I gaze out at Nukulau, the questions that bother me are: Are the issues really new or have we created a new political culture to deal with old issues? And: If there is a new political culture, why and how did it develop?
Issues such as land disputes, systems of government, ethnic differences, the equitable distribution of development benefits and demands for secession, for example, existed and were discussed at the time of independence.
The problem, however, was that they were never adequately debated. Hence, in a way, what we are seeing now is a result of the Pacific Islands "unfinished business," a continuation of the debate we never completed. Now the argument has become violent.
The challenge for Pacific Island governments, therefore, is not to suppress the current debates. Rather, they should facilitate and manage them to make them vibrant without becoming violent. A classic example of such an exercise is the talanoa (talk story) project in Fiji, which is sponsored by the Hawai‘i-based Pacific Islands Development Program at the East-West Center.
Some old issues have mutated into new forms. Income disparities within states, the lack of confidence in governments, population pressures, unemployment, competition for resources, cultural and environmental disruptions, and the prevalence of bad governance are just a few examples. These are the conditions that contribute to the new political culture of coups and violence.
We must have national and regional talanoa. In fact, we have already started. The "Biketawa Declaration," which came out of the Forum Island Leaders October 2000 meeting, provides a set of guiding principles and courses of action that could be followed. These include the importance of promoting good governance, equal rights of citizens, democratic processes and generally ensuring there is constitutional rule.
As I enjoy the breeze from the Laucala Bay and look out to Nukulau, I hope to catch the scent of hope in the air. Pacific Island countries, with good leadership, can live through this era of instability, if we can honestly discuss the unfinished businesses of the past two decades.
