Embracing the Pacific Islands

By AUDREY YOUNG

There will be a bit of a do in Suva tonight for the leaders of the 16 countries in the Pacific Islands Forum. If the cliches of the past are relived, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark will glide in and handle the occasion with the ease of a leader used to dealing with Pacific issues and Pacific people.

She might join the dancing briefly if it is deemed necessary not to offend her hosts, or if she is pressed by some old swinger who has had a little too much kava.

Our Australian neighbours, on the other hand, if they stick around for the party, will make a loud entrance after having loudly expressed their views during the summit. John Howard will have been given a hard time by almost everyone else over Australia's refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol to reduce global warming.

He will try to mend a few fences. He will either refuse to dance, or look so gauche if he does dance that people will wish he had refused.

According to Matt Robson, who until two days ago was associate foreign affairs minister: "We want to be perceived as the country in the Pacific which understands Pacific people and is loved and respected by them, as against the Australians who we like to be perceived as loud, brash, insensitive.

"Many, many times our own officials have that view of us and have given that view to me."

The competition for influence and affection is growing as the Pacific Island nations increasingly "look north". In terms of aid spent in the region, New Zealand ranks fifth after Japan, the European Union, Australia and France.

But Clark takes the view that personal links still count for a lot where New Zealand is concerned. "We've accepted a lot of Pacific peoples as migrants to our country. That gives you more links. You're not going to see them invited to be permanent residents in Korea, Japan or China or Taiwan."

And she is sceptical about whose interests are being served by some Asian nations' attempts to cosy up to Pacific nations.

"There are huge countries in the Asia-Pacific rim that have very, very big fishing interests for example. We just need to keep building up our friendships and links and relationships and being supportive because we have a long-term, multi-dimensional interest as compared, perhaps, with new-found friends who don't have the long-term, multi-dimensional interest."

Asked if that meant others were acting with self-interest, she says: "Precisely."

As the influence of "the north" increases, so too has the involvement of the western-dominated Commonwealth. Its Secretary-General and our former foreign minister, Don Mckinnon, is attending his second consecutive forum.

Mickinnon has organised a post-forum workshop on good governance, enlisting the help of his former Cabinet colleague, Sir Douglas Graham, among others. He has nearly 100 per cent acceptances from island states to attend.

He ran a similar session recently for African leaders, who also relished the chance to stand at arm's length from the detail of issues facing them and look more widely at governance. His workshop is due to begin tomorrow.

Tonight's forum finale was to have been held at the Queen Elizabeth Army barracks but was shifted, apparently because there is too much mud in the grounds. But it also may have represented a confrontation with the past too raw for comfort.

The barracks were the scene of an attempted mutiny of the Royal Fijian Military Forces in November 2000. Eight soldiers were killed, five rebels, three loyalists.

After George Speight's attempted coup, businessman Laisenia Qarase was appointed interim Prime Minister. Clark encountered him in that capacity at the forum in Kiribati in 2000, but avoided him because he wasn't the elected leader. The New Zealand view was that talking to him could have been seen as accepting a situation it did not approve of.

But she did almost certainly speak to Barak Sope, the Prime Minister of Vanuatu at the time, who was jailed on corruption charges last month, as the result of a satisfying type of New Zealand aid - help from New Zealand's Serious Fraud Office.

There were also strains at the Kiribati forum over the adoption of the Biketawa Declaration, a landmark document that allows the forum to take action collectively to bring wayward members into line over issues of rule of law, democracy, good governance, and corruption. It was aimed squarely at Fiji and the Solomons, whose Parliament had also been seized.

Now that Qarase is the legitimate Prime Minister of Fiji, after democratic elections last August, Foreign Minister Phil Goff and Clark have been paying him compliments. Clark says she likes his straightforward, business-like approach.

Goff is more effusive: "We were actually quite impressed with Qarase's performance at Chogm [the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in March]," he told the Weekend Herald this week, "particularly his intervention on the Zimbabwe issue where he indicated that international pressure had helped to restore Fiji to democracy - and equally could be applied to Zimbabwe.

"That was a courageous and a strong intervention on that issue."

He said New Zealand had always regarded Fiji as being a Pacific leader, "which is why the respective coups have come as a huge disappointment to us".

Goff was pilloried by interim ministers after the coup for his unrelenting criticism, and he is still an unpopular figure in Fiji.

But last week he said: "I make absolutely no apology for the strength of our response on the Fiji issue and if it happened again we would do the same."

The bridge-building has begun, however. Clark describes the progress as "re-engaging at a measured pace". Military ties have not been restored.

Goff says New Zealand will work with Fiji in the next year on police, customs and anti-terrorism and it has increased its aid to Fiji by $900,000 to $4 million.

New Zealand's aid budget is $230 million a year. Some goes into a pool of international agencies such as the United Nations. Of the $169.4 million that goes directly to countries, $80.7 million or 47.7 per cent, goes to Pacific countries.

Robson oversaw a major shake-up during his three-year watch, separating the aid operation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs into its own agency, with strong resistance from the ministry. The aim was to put more emphasis on the needs of the country receiving the aid rather than New Zealand's political interests, and to ensure that aid is part of a strategic plan, not haphazard or kept ticking over because it has always ticked over.

The immediate concern of New Zealand and the forum is the Solomon Islands - a place where "aid" by Taiwan - in its competition with China for influence - has led to greater corruption. Conventional development aid can no longer be contemplated there because the rule of law is so tenuous and, according to Goff, there are links between the Cabinet, the police and criminal elements.

Goff spelled out New Zealand's attitude in a hard-hitting speech to the Institute of International Affairs, which was largely overlooked during the election campaign.

The message was blunt: Start putting your own house in order or we're out of there.

He issued a veiled threat to pull aid if the Solomons did not bring to justice those identified by witnesses as responsible for the murder of New Zealander Kevin O'Brien earlier this year.

"Without such basic progress, the donor community is unlikely to re-engage."

Three weeks later an arrest was made and news reports suggested the alleged offender was a relative of the police minister.

Assistance to the Solomons has been reviewed. In October, New Zealand will send 10 police officers, not to keep the peace but to try to inject professionalism into the Solomons police.

Donors have been part of the problem in the Solomons. Robson doesn't mince words. "Aid is often a form of blackmail," he says.

Taiwan handed over large sums to the Solomons to compensate for land loss at the heart of the ethnic conflict and large amounts were pocketed by individuals in Government.

Goff explains how the Solomons has let tradition be subjugated by the bank balances of aid donors: "In the old days, they would use shell money for resolving grievances. There would be passing across of shell money and pigs and there would be a show of contrition. That was customary law and that would resolve the difficulty.

"We came into the scene as donors, the international community, and there was this expectation that vast sums of money would be passed across.

"That hasn't produced a resolution of grievances. It has simply led to a large degree of corruption and an even greater degree of dissatisfaction among those who weren't recipients of that benevolence.

"What we have stressed at the donor meetings is that if aid is about trying to set the country right, the donors need to work collectively together to ensure that the assistance being given is likely to produce change in the country and not maintain the status quo."

Taiwan is now said to be working more closely with other donor countries. But ending corruption in the Pacific will not happen overnight when people don't even know it is wrong.

Robson says an Asian Development Bank official recounted an incident this year involving a minister in a country to which he was arranging a loan. The minister blatantly asked him how he, the minister, was going to get his cut. Progress on the loan was delayed somewhat.

As late as last week, a business friend of Robson's told him of recent trips to several islands to explore setting up business. He had encountered demands for pay-offs, by a minister in one country and an official in the other.

But the answer is not to take a holier-than-thou attitude with Pacific states, says Robson. It is to accept that New Zealand also has problems derived from its colonial background and to understands theirs.

"We should talk about it. The Pacific should talk about it."

It has to be approached carefully.

"I believe there is often an underlying resentment to us as a sort of patronising older brother," he says.

"In the main, New Zealand isn't as loved as it believes it is."