Dev Nadkarni  
The day after sky high flames consumed most of Nuku’alofa’s business district, our website received a frantic email from one of the town’s major bookshops asking us to immediately suspend deliveries of our magazines until further notice because the store had been burnt to the ground. An estimated 80 percent of business establishments in the district have suffered a similar fate.

Early this year, when it was announced that the Pacific Islands Forum meeting would be held in Tonga, pro-democracy activists were quoted in the media as saying that there could be violent protests while the leaders were there. The national mood was on a short fuse, they hinted. But the intensity of last month’s violence and the wave of destruction it unleashed must have shocked even the fiercest of the Tongan regime’s critics.

Whether the mayhem was all a result of long bottled up tensions suddenly venting steam or was caused by misguided youth instigated by vested interests, we will hopefully know in the coming months. Expectedly, the government and the administration have been quick to lay the blame squarely on the lumpen element. That groups of young men from around Nuku’alofa could at all be motivated to cause such destruction underscores the fact that things have been on the boil for too long a time. It was a disaster waiting to happen.

As the blame game unfolds, the kingdom needs to pick up the pieces and move on quickly. For a country whose largest source of income is inward remittances, the destruction of Nuku’alofa’s business district will not be too much of a problem except from the infrastructure and communications point of view—which can indeed be set right fairly quickly.

Remittances will continue to flow. In fact, there is every chance they will grow in the short term—thanks to the strong familial and clan ties that Tongans living overseas have with people back home. Increased individual remittances will be as important in the rebuilding process as will financial and infrastructural aid from Australia and New Zealand which is bound to follow.

What will perhaps take longer to put back on the rails are the small businesses that were run mostly by ethnic Chinese—particularly convenience stores that stayed open for long hours. Many of them have abandoned what remained of their stores and left the country. Some have stayed back and hope to start again. But it is the healing process that will be the hardest.

Will those who are ultimately found to be culpable make good the damage?

Much of Tonga’s revenue also comes from tourism. Though most tourist resorts are away from Nuku’alofa and have gone through the crisis largely unscathed, they will certainly suffer from lower numbers of inbound tourists because of the obvious fear factor.

The country’s tourism industry must quickly come together and announce that they are open for business as usual. Discounted packages and stepping up advertising is the way to go. Missing the coming holiday season, especially because of cancellations of pre-booked slots would prove disastrous for the industry.

Meanwhile, as the New Zealand government contemplates an assistance package to aid rebuilding, the country’s private sector is cobbling up support on its own. The Auckland-based New Zealand Pacific Business Council has appealed to industries to come forth and offer the best possible credit and shipping terms to Tonga through the rebuilding stages.

It is also asking the New Zealand Export Credit Office to guarantee 85 percent of the value of New Zealand industries’ shipments to Tonga. A similar guarantee offered to Australian businesses is believed to have boosted badly needed imports into Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands in recent years.

Nuku’alofa’s main business district needs to be rebuilt almost ground up.

And that offers a huge opportunity for the construction and infrastructure sectors to contribute.

In all likelihood, competition for rebuilding assistance will also come in from China for strategic reasons and despite its citizens being targeted so fiercely. How quickly New Zealand business—and government agencies—will respond to the business council’s ideas remains to be seen.

Nuku’alofa’s burning is a wake-up call for all in Tonga. Particularly for the royalty whose hold over everything in the kingdom looks ludicrously anachronistic with each passing day. King Tupou IV’s departure seemed like a golden opportunity for the kingdom—both royalty and the government—to embark on a long overdue transition into a more contemporary political ethos. But they blew it—and how! The worst in a particularly bad and tragic year may be over for Tonga.

Hopefully, the early months of 2007 will show us that important lessons are indeed being learnt, as Nuku’alofa slowly rises from the ashes.

The happiest place just got happier!

The fear psychosis in tourists travelling to South Pacific destinations this holiday season is understandable. Fiji is on a slow simmer, Tonga just blew up and the Solomons and Papua New Guinea are rumbling ominously.

With most of these countries having cautionary travel advisories on them, they have reported falls in arrivals—some precipitously.

Vanuatu, however, is looking up the other way. Air Vanuatu’s new code-share arrangement with Air New Zealand is bringing in ever more tourists to the country that has been voted the world’s happiest place. It has successfully ducked under the menacing sweep of the famous arc of instability—at least so far!