Lording Over the Pacific

Australia power...Prime Minister John Howard and Mrs Howard greet Australian rugby captain George Gregan.

North Korea's nuclear weapons ambitions may be a worry for them. But what really is currently boiling the tempers of some Pacific Islands Forum's member governments is the cold-hearted exploitation of their top rugby players by the Australian and New Zealand rugby unions.

Islands governments are at last becoming really frightened about the insidious spread of HIV-AIDS through the region.

The growing size of Pacific Islands marijuana crops is another embarrassment‹one that could become complemented by a growing island market for chemically concocted amphetamine drugs.

The 34th Pacific Islands Forum meeting, held at Auckland in August was portrayed widely internationally as a triumph for John Howard, leader of the Forum's largest member, Australia.

But rather more emerged from the meeting than Howard's triumphant trumpeting.

From Auckland, the Australian Prime Minister left for a more prestigious red carpet welcome in China crowing that in Auckland he had it just about all his way in whipping the Forum's 14 islands country members to his requirements, even to the extent of having an Australian appointed for the first time as the Forum's Secretary-General. That victory broke a convention that had kept the job as a Pacific Islanders preserve.

Victory caused by squabbles Howard's victory on this point was caused by squabbles, particularly between Tonga and Samoa, over which Pacific Islands candidate should have the job. Howard left declaring that the Auckland meeting's acceptance of his ideas would give Australia a tighter grip on influencing the region's economy and controlling security matters like terrorism, drugs and organised crime that now bogey Australian thinking. It had made the Forum a "watershed".

"The body is seen as having a new authority, new clout, new relevance, and everybody will come from this meeting feeling they are part of something that will punch even harder and more efficiently in the region than before," he said.

New Zealand's Prime Minister, Helen Clark, who took over the Forum chairmanship from Fiji's Laisenia Qarase, displayed a cautious cooler attitude.

Australia should sensibly avoid the impression that it was forcing its ideas down the Forum's 15 other throats, she intimated.

Leaders in retreat...at the Pacific Islands Forum meeting in Auckland.

"Where you have big states and little states, it is always possible for perceptions to arise that the big states are throwing their weight around," she said." It is incumbent on big states to address perceptions and it is incumbent on small states to look at the merits of the issues."

Issues beyond the Forum's region don't normally feature in its annual deliberation. But to keep the Australians happy, the islanders agreed that North Korea should be invited to accept a peaceful solution to its row with the Americans over its nuclear weapons research and preferably discontinue this.

The rugby issue popped up after Samoa's Prime Minister Tuilaepa Malielegaoi complained in an interview that the raiding of his country's players by the Australian and New Zealand rugby unions had driven Samoa's union to insolvency.

The Forum's communiqué complained that eligibility rules applied to islands players hired by the Australian and New Zealand unions were throttling the growth of the game in the islands.

The issue would be taken up by the Forum Secretariat, and the International Rugby Union queried about the absence from its board of Pacific Islands representation, the communiqué said.

The Forum accepted a book of rules intended as a guide for islands prime ministers and presidents on how to be good. It was written by Forum officials and the Auckland meeting accepted it as a "useful document" for leaders who want to try to be good instead of being leaders with a reputation for being corrupt and careless about such matters as law and order, liberty and fair and efficient rule. The rule book allows for "traditional Pacific values" while also requiring its readers to swallow all the Forum's previous pronouncements about clean government, transparency and accountability.

HIV-AIDS began creeping into the region in the mid-1980s. It now has reached catastrophe status in Papua New Guinea and "serious" status in Fiji, Kiribati, New Caledonia and French Polynesia. It wasn't until its 2001 meeting that the Forum decided to notice the disease.

This year's pronouncement on it is the strongest yet. The Forum now regards the disease, which has killed millions of Africans and Asians, as a "serious concern" that could have a "devastating impact on the economies, societies and security of the region".

Reorganising the Forum The 2004 Forum, to be held at Niue, in August, will receive a regional strategy for fighting the disease. At Auckland, Australia announced a A$12.5 million grant for the fight over five years.

Greg Urwin, the new secretary-general, will start at the beginning of next year tasked to implement a plan for reorganising the Forum and its Suva, Fiji, headquartered secretariat.

The last review was in 1995. Like that one, the next will be done by an "Eminent Persons Group", yet to be appointed. This will be told to have a draft report ready by the end of November. This will be passed around amongst Forum leaders for their approval by the end of this year.

Another Forum decision made to keep the Australians and, to a lesser extent, the far less nervous and fidgety New Zealanders happy was to agree, yet again, that small islands countries are "vulnerable to exploitation by criminal syndicates." Apparently, this is intended to mean more so than Australia and New Zealand, where the influence of mafia, triad and yakuza crime organisations is not unknown.

The Forum wants island police to counter the increasing "cultivation and usage" of certain crops, meaning marijuana, which is already a big if illicit cash crop in Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Samoa and French Polynesia. If anyone in the region is growing poppies for opium they haven't been spotted yet.

The local consumption of hard narcotics in the islands isn't yet a worry except for Hawaii, where cocaine, heroin and ice have huge markets and consequentially massive socially destructive effects.

What islands police forces must watch for, the communiqué says, is attempts to push the sale in the region of amphetamines.

The Forum asked the United States to think about slightly delaying the December-scheduled closing of an airport at Johnston Island, south of Hawaii, which twin-engined jets flying between Hawaii and the South Pacific rely on for emergency landing if one engine fails.

The planned alternative is Christmas Island, in the Line Islands of Kiribati, but some time it is needed to bring the airport there up to required international civil aviation standards. The Americans have been asked to transfer some of Johnston Island's airport gear to Christmas Island.

As expected, the Forum formally blessed the Australian-led Solomon Islands rescue mission and accepted that it's going to take years to repair the Solomons' economy and the public service from heavy damage caused by years of misrule, corruption and the impact of a small war on Guadalcanal Island between local landowners and settlers from nearby Malaita Island they grew to fear and resent.