Up Front
Big Money, Big Compromises
Fishy Dealings In Pacific Governments
This issue of Pacific Magazine kept remaking itself right up to press time. Even our long-planned feature section on fisheries around the region was spawning new twists and turns right up to the final proof.
It would be to no one’s surprise that money was the connecting vector in the fisheries stories, as well as some of the government news in this issue. In the region’s fisheries, there is a clear pattern of encirclement by well-heeled, first-world nations and corporations with open checkbooks and big appetites for seafood and profits. Having exhausted their own fish stocks, the EU and nations like Japan, Taiwan and China are doling out the bait of aid money and license fees in hopes of getting Pacific fishing rights. From Fiji, Robert Keith-Reid’s piece (click here) points out some fishy dealings between the fishing industry, regional organizations and Island politicians.
- ADVERTISEMENT -
Also from Fiji, journalist Mike Field examines the mysterious subplots of the 2000 Fiji coup which have been spinning out in Suva court proceeding over the last year.
Money too was implicated in the downfall (or, at least, the temporary embarrassment) of four regional government figures: the speakers of the Palau, FSM and American Samoa legislatures and a Marshall Islands high court judge are all in legal trouble for various versions of cheating on travel expenses, a venerable and long-running practice of some Island government employees.
Governance and Transparency—those two orthodox clichés of the current era—are notable for their absence as, for instance, no one seems to know who’s in charge of Nauru or where the money went. And in the Solomons, although there’s a nominal government, it seems incapable of even delivering the basics as it’s held hostage by angry, unpaid airport workers or extorted for “bonuses” by thuggish policemen who stalled rescue efforts for the storm-stricken islands of Anuta and Tikopia. In this case though, even the wealthy and sometimes overly-confident Australian government said there was no way they could get assistance to the two islands either. As the excuses multiplied, an enterprising New Zealand photojournalist beat everyone there by renting a helicopter in Vanuatu and delivering the first aid to Tikopia and the first wire service photos to the outside world.
Finally, big money for big compromises is coming to the former American trust territories that now make up the Federated States of Micronesia and the Republic of the Marshall Islands. It’s in the form of “Compact II” the final iteration of American assistance to the two countries. But this second compact has stipulations about money, transparency and governance that are so intrusive that one FSM legislator sees them as violations of sovereignty and dignity and is urging his colleagues not to approve the new compact. We’ve printed excerpts of Senator Isaac V. Figir’s speech (click here). It’s the rarest of all communications from a politician—an honest, impassioned declaration of principles that goes against the common sense of fiscal compromise. His voice may be that of a prophet crying in a wilderness of atolls and islands, but his message is both brave and revolutionary in our sea of compromised governments and cynical, big-money metropolitan nations and corporations.
Scott Whitney can be reached at: scottw@pacificbasin.net
