Playing Big Brother in the Pacific

By GREG ANSLEY

Two weeks ago, when Australian Prime Minister John Howard sent one of the RAAF's new VIP jets to Honiara to collect Solomons' Prime Minister Allan Kemakeza, the ground shifted in the Pacific. It is not yet tectonic but the crisis of corruption, greed and violence that is killing the Solomons has set alarms ringing.

Suddenly New Zealand and Australia are no longer talking of just sending in a handful of police officers, or even a larger force of soldiers to help to restore a temporary peace. Instead, they are considering a proposal that would in effect take management of the islands from their elected government, install a new interim administration to set things to order, and embark on a programme of rehabilitation.

And the Solomons would not necessarily be the only recipient of intervention well beyond anything that would have been considered even a few short years ago.

"If we can really get the Solomons going again that will send a strong message to other countries that there is a point where Australia just can't make the argument that these are independent countries and they're nothing to do with us," Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said last week. "There's a point where we can't sit by. There's a point where we want to engage with these countries and get the problems fixed."

But as New Zealand and Australia consider drastic responses, they also tread a dangerously fine line between assistance and neo-colonialism, intervention and ensnarement.

East Timor shows the responsibilities assumed when outsiders step in. Faced with the reality that the former Indonesian province will remain one of the poorest countries in the world for decades, Australia is now accepting that it is largely the guarantor of the infant nation's future.

Economic and civil aid to East Timor will be a constant in Australian budgets and Canberra's military commitment of about 1000 troops is likely to remain for years.

Dr Elsina Wainwright, an expert on decolonisation and author of a landmark Australian Strategic Policy Institute paper on the Solomons, warns that by moving beyond the provision of aid, Canberra - and by extension New Zealand - would step across a major threshold.

"These decisions are important because they will require Australian policymakers to consider commitments which may be costly and lengthy," she writes in Our Failing Neighbour: Australia and the Future of Solomon Islands. "What we decide to do about Solomon Islands will shape Australia's approach to the problem of maintaining stability among island states in our immediate neighbourhood."

The past two decades have demonstrated a rising tide of woes, including the series of coups in Fiji and Papua New Guinea being in a state of chronic and frequently violent malaise, and where peace monitors are only now moving out of Bougainville.

Vanuatu teeters on the verge, Nauru is being kept afloat by Australian cash for refugees held under Canberra's "Pacific Solution", and tensions are simmering in Tonga.

Apart from moral responsibility, commitments to democratic government and economic concerns, collapse in the Pacific holds deadly implications for Australia and New Zealand.

"If states fail, this impacts on the wellbeing of the people of those states and indirectly on the region," Foreign Minister Phil Goff said in an address to the Australian Defence College. "The vacuum of authority which results encourages transnational crime, including the smuggling of weapons and people."

Corruption threatens to spread organised crime and terrorism. Last year al Qaeda operatives were captured in Italy on a Tongan-registered ship, and measures to beef up cooperation against terrorism were agreed at May's Japan-Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting in Okinawa.

The Pacific is already flooded with guns - according to a study by the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey, there are 3.1 million firearms in civilian hands, outnumbering those held by police and militaries by almost 14 to one.

"Australia's security is threatened by the passage of drugs, arms and, ultimately, terror and the flight of large numbers of economic refugees," Australian National University Emeritus Professor Helen Hughes wrote in a study for the Centre for Independent Studies.

The root causes of the Pacific's malaise are deep. Populations are growing at alarming rates, resources are under pressure, environments are polluted, ethnic and communal tensions simmer endlessly, gaps between rich and poor are widening, and governments and bureaucracies are flawed to the point of failure.

The Pacific Islands are in somewhat better shape than those of Melanesia, but even with population pressures eased by emigration, problems are acute. Sadly, the states that are succeeding are those still administered by colonial powers. Per capita gross national product in French Polynesia and New Caledonia is well over US$20,000 ($34,000), five times that of Fiji, Samoa and Cook Islands.

In the past 30 years the region has received almost US$50 billion ($85 billion) in aid from France, Australia, the US, Japan, New Zealand the European Union. No other region in the world in recent years has received as much in relation to their populations. On average, the Pacific received US$220 ($377) a head between 1995 and 1999, 10 times the per capita figure for sub-Saharan Africa.

Hughes argues that all Pacific states are economically viable but have been distorted by corruption, crime, the diversion of wealth to small urban elites, poorly targeted and inappropriate aid, and a range of institutional, bureaucratic and policy legacies.

Outsiders also extract much of the Pacific's natural wealth. The region provides one-third of the global tuna catch, worth about US$2 billion ($3.43 billion) a year. Its states get only about one-tenth of that, a problem now being addressed by the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Convention, chaired by New Zealander and long-time Pacific advocate Michael Powles.

Powles was also the prime motivator of Wellington's new Pacific Cooperation Foundation, set up with an initial, modest $675,000-a-year to run media, cultural, public affairs, business and academic programmes similar to the successful Asia 2000 Foundation.

For New Zealand, the Pacific's malaise has other implications. We do not have anywhere near the resources required for the job, which by default hands leadership to Australia.

Unless New Zealand defines its policy it risks being seen as an appendage of Australia, potentially blunting its own presence and national self-interest. Foreign policy officials in Wellington are already concerned at the real possibility of declining influence in the Pacific.

The voice we have comes largely through long-standing relationships, the flow of islanders into New Zealand, similarities of culture and the availability of a sympathetic ear. But the first generation of leaders of an independent Pacific has gone, diluting the intimacy that marked the early years of what is now the Pacific Islands Forum.

Australia is obviously making itself felt. France is a major player, with its open purse, its force of patrol boats, maritime patrol aircraft, armour and airborne and infantry troops in Tahiti and New Caledonia, and political rehabilitation since the end of nuclear testing. Pacific states have also forged new ties with the European Union, Japan, China and Taiwan.

And now, in the Solomons, tough new paths are opening. The details have yet to emerge, but last week Downer gave broad backing to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's suggestion of a two-stage programme.

This would involve an initial law-and-order operation, with possible limited military support, provided by countries throughout the region, as in Bougainville. Once this was under control, an interim administration would dismantle what remains of the Solomons administration and rebuild it, from police and courts to economic and social development.

This is a quantum leap. So far it has the approval of the Solomons' Government, as well as Governor-General Sir John Ini Lapli, Parliamentary Speaker Sir Peter Kenilorea and many ordinary islanders.

Papua New Guinea has given in-principle support to the plan and, in Samoa, the Samoa Observer stated: "It has got to be accepted without reservation that the Solomon Islands problem is no longer theirs alone. It has now become the South Pacific's problem, since its influence could spread to other countries."

This support is crucial for intervention in the Solomons and for future policy and relationships in the Pacific. Australia and New Zealand cannot afford to trip any of the hypersensitive wires that criss-cross the Pacific.

Noted Elsina Wainwright: "We are right to be cautious about allowing ourselves to be drawn into their problems more deeply than our interests require. Any policy approach to the problems of the southwest Pacific must avoid the perils and mistakes of neo-colonialism."

Wellington and Canberra are placing much emphasis on the Bitekawa Declaration, an agreement signed in Kiribati in 2000 as an articulation of the "Pacific Way" of dealing with trouble in the neighbourhood.

It sets down principles of good governance, liberty and equality for individuals, sustainable development, respect and protection for indigenous rights and cultures, and the prevention and peaceful resolution of conflict.

Although treated initially with some suspicion by Fiji and some Melanesian states, the declaration won final approval with its requirement for constructive approaches.

Sanctions and other measures can be imposed only as a last resort and only after the collective agreement of Pacific Island Forum members.

While there is no prospect of Australian or New Zealand involvement in the Solomons without the full support of its Government, significant intervention will set a precedent. How that precedent is seen by the region, and exercised by its major powers in future crises, will be crucial for relations in the neighbourhood.