Upfront
Armed But Insecure
Taking Back The Security Agenda
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Scott
Whitney, Editor
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American and Australia are obsessed by security, and they have highjacked the agendas of regional organizations like the Pacific Island Forum, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation and, most recently, the Pacific Island Leaders Conference in Honolulu. As Tarcisius Kabutaulaka points out on the next page, Island leaders may be allowing powerful outsiders to set the regional, and the local agenda. The Forum is now chaired by New Zealand and its secretariat headed by an Australian. Observers at a recent seminar in Honolulu talked about the apparent loss of confidence of Island leaders in the face of the bigger powers.
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The War on Terrorism is based on a lie, or, to put it more diplomatically, a faulty premise. The American public, safe in gated communities, has been lulled by the rhetoric of war and the sales pitches of insurance companies into thinking that security will result from buying more helicopters and flak jackets, from taking out travel insurance and installing home alarm systems. It is all very naïve.
The image on page nine of this issue is a blunt depiction of the real security threats in the Pacific. An armed Solomons “freedom fighter” stands with his gun before an idyllic waterfall. The story that goes with the photo is about the danger of small arms in the region. Most were once legal weapons, purchased from or donated by Australia, the U.S. or Singapore. They were brought to places like Fiji, PNG and even Tonga in the name of security. And they have delivered bloodshed and intimidation.
A small item in our new Air & Sea page is telling. American Samoa has just received US$5.3 million to beef up “homeland” security. I need not mention how high the territory is on Bin Laden’s hit list. I hope those millions will buy them safety. There’s big money around if you go along with the security agenda.
One very key Pacific agenda that is being neglected shows up in both Dawn Matus’ page 14 feature on Japan in the region and in the article on tuna which precedes it on page 12. The Pacific tuna stock is in danger of being over fished and few people in the region, including the scientists, are willing to talk about it. I asked about this at the press conference following the Pacific Leaders Conference in Honolulu and was told that it might be a concern, but that yearly catches run in cycles and there were signs catches were improving around Fiji—while news stories around the same time hinted at quite the contrary.
Japan wants tuna. The U.S. wants tuna. Europe wants tuna. Is this Pacific resource secure?
Other haunting images in this issue come from Jocelyn Carlin’s moving photo essay on the Solomon Islands funeral of six Melanesian Brotherhood members killed by the bloodthirsty Harold Keke. When the negatives arrived from Auckland, I looked at them through a loupe over the light box and I literally heard the images wail. The brothers are members of an Anglican religious order dedicated to peacemaking and social justice. Though it is a Christian organization, the brotherhood is deeply Melanesian in character. And more young men apply than can be accepted into its ranks.
What did these young men give their lives for? I’ll tell you one simple way of saying it: They were working for the security, the real security, of their people. Security is a population that has food and medicine and access to education. Security comes from conflict resolution at the village level. That is the mission they had undertaken.
The security plans of the big powers are bogus. Island leaders need to summon the confidence to set their own agendas—agendas where security comes from what Moisés Naím, writing in the latest Foreign Policy magazine, called “empowering the poor, the different, and the local.”
