My Say
Yet another regional government club?
Three Micronesian Presidents Want Austrailia and New Zealand Out
If there is one thing that the Pacific Islands do not need it is a new exclusive political club for the region’s 14 independent, or supposedly independent, Island states.
Yet this is the idea floated by the presidents of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia and the Republic of Palau when they met for one of their regular powwows at Koror recently.
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They want a club devoid of Australian and New Zealand membership and also, presumably, devoid of their former colonial ruler, the United States, which still holds them by their foreign policy, economic and military short hairs in return for funds without which at least two of them would be totally unviable political entities— rather than semiviable ones. All three were formerly part of the U.S. Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. They do not have the close links that some South Pacific Island states have with Australia and New Zealand.
Likewise, all three are members of the 16-member Pacific Forum, which met in Fiji last month and which has Australia and New Zealand as full members. Some of the Forum’s founding members are gripped sporadically by bouts of anti-Australian, and, to a much lesser extent, anti-New Zealand feeling. One founding member, Fiji’s Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, was more or less against the inclusion of Australia and New Zealand in the Forum from the beginning.
But the question is: Where would the Forum be without Australia and New Zealand around to pay most of its operating costs and provide it with the serious international muscle it has? The answer: Nowhere much.
What would the prospects be for a minis-only club? Would outsiders be prepared to pay its bills? It is somewhat ironic that in advocating a club devoid of Australia and New Zealand influence the Marshalls and FSM are begging to be kept shackled to ultimate U.S. control by renewing their so-called Compacts of Free Association, not for another 15, but for another 20 years. The Compacts were the agreements under which the U.S. granted the three semi-independence in the 1980s.
The U.S. is prepared to renew the Compacts as a means of retaining direct military control of the Central Pacific region, but it is being much meaner and more demanding about its terms for keeping the Marshalls and FSM as its supplicants. Perhaps it is displaced resentment of U.S. domination of their affairs that has inspired the three Micronesian states to declare, in effect, that they want to see Australia and New Zealand ejected from the Pacific Forum.
—Robert Keith-Reid is publisher of Islands Business. He can be reached at: Rkeith-reid@ibi.com.fj
