Voices
Oceania’s Insecurities
Terrorism Isn’t The Only Regional Problem
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Tarcisius Tara Kabutaulaka
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Pres. George Bush declared war on international terrorism, and backed it with a “pre-emptive action” policy that allows the U.S. to strike against suspected terrorists before they mount an attack. At the October APEC meeting in Bangkok, Bush pushed anti-terrorism to the fore, arguing that one cannot have economic development without personal and national security.
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Most countries in the Oceania region have accepted that terrorism is a major security threat. At the Pacific Islands Forum meeting in August, for example, the leaders reiterated their commitment to developing a regional framework to address terrorism and transnational organized crimes. Individual countries have also danced along with the anti-terrorist tune. The Solomon Islands, for example, despite its own domestic problems, joined the “Coalition of the Willing” and offered moral support to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
Many of us supported the war against terrorism, not necessarily because we saw ourselves as potential targets of terrorist attacks, but because we saw it as the right thing to do.
However, that sentiment should not take away our need to question what we see as the causes of our insecurities. We need to be critical of where we acquire our knowledge of the world and how it influences what we see as “real.”
We in the Pacific need to ask questions like: Who determines what are our major security concerns? How does it affect our reactions to the world and our local situations? Is terrorism really the most important security concern for us?
Pacific Islanders are informed largely by sources of knowledge that we have little control over. The government analysts and the Western media that predominantly control our sources of information are prejudiced towards Western agendas. The Western media seems to accept the oversimplified notion that the war on terrorism is a conflict between good against evil.
The U.S. and its allies, being “good,” could easily push the unwilling UN aside and summon the support of a “Coalition of the Willing” to fight the “bad guys.” In fact, U.S. military and political operatives use this very language. These bad guys have no seat in the UN and are marginalized (if not completely unrepresented) in international forums. Many of us accept these categories of “good” and “evil” without question. We often do not question why and how our images of reality are constructed, and who constructed them.
But is terrorism really the most important security threat for Oceania? Or, is it that we are simply caught in the trend? As Guam’s former Congressman, Robert A. Underwood, has said, “While we [in the Pacific] experience the trends, we are not trendsetters. We are trend followers or sometimes just trend-impacted.”
We need to put terrorism in the perspective of what is important to us, and not what is most important for those who control our sources of knowledge.
For many of our countries, threats to the environment are more important. The U.S. and Australia must also look at their environmental policies to ensure that they are not harmful to the Pacific.
Secondly, the political instabilities we face in the region are due as much to internal factors as to external ones. Hence, leadership and good governance must continue to feature as important security issues.
Thirdly, socio-economic development must also be viewed as important to our security. We want an educated, economically and socially secure population. Without this, international security becomes a secondary.
In our discussion of security, we must not let others dictate for us what the issues are. Terrorism is important, but there are other equally important issues that must not be marginalized.
