The quality of our leaders

Dr Roman Grynberg





After twenty years of watching leaders close up, I have found that the best test of their quality is found by dipping them in very hot water—if they melt like candy, then it simply wasn’t very good leadership. I have seen this time and again.
Last year, we saw one of the most humiliating tests of Pacific islands leaders. The Premier of Niue, Toke Talagi, got up after the  meeting of the Pacific ACP leaders which includes only the islands and said the Pacific was not ready to negotiate with Australia and New Zealand over the free trade agreement called PACER Plus.
The next day when then Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd walked into the Forum meeting, the Pacific islands leaders did the exact opposite and said they were ready to negotiate. Yes ‘masta’, how high do we jump?
In the real world of politics, you can forgive Talagi’s  humiliation over so minor an issue as trade—after all, Niue exports almost nothing.
But how do our leaders behave over matters of life and death. Few in the islands doubt the reality of global warming—only those comfortable people in their four-wheel drives would prefer to deny the existence of man-made climate change.
When John Howard was Australian Prime Minister, there was a very famous Pacific Islands Forum summit in the Cook Islands. Australia has long ago gotten off the sheep’s back and is now riding a dirty coal train to Newcatsle. 
Howard always represented the very comfortable Australians and like them preferred to deny global warming and certainly wanted nothing to do with any international action to prevent it.
The great armada of global warming—the scores of coal ships leaving Newcastle harbour every day bound for China and India created a sound economic reason for getting all the neighbours to agree on a benign, empty statement about combatting climate change.
So how did Pacific islands leaders respond when confronted with an issue such as global warming which is a matter of life and death to the peoples and cultures of many low-lying atolls? There was certainly strong discussions but why confront Australia even over a matter of life and death? Regrettably, they melted away and showed the leadership one expects from ambulatory invertebrates.
In the final analysis, there was never anything substantive said on the matter unless Australia shifted its position.
Two years ago when Premier Talagi was chair of the Forum, I saw him stand up over a matter of principle that really did matter.
Every few years the African, Caribbean and Pacific leaders meet in an exotic location much like the Forum, and at the end of the meeting issue a normally empty and meaningless communiqué that no-one has the slightest intention of implementing if it does not suit them.
This time, it was the 8th ACP summit held in Accra, Ghana, in late 2008. Then President John Kufuor of Ghana presided over the meeting with President Al Bashir, the so-called ‘Butcher of Darfur’, as the outgoing ACP chair by his side.
The day before the meeting, the government of Ghana treated all the participants to a visit to the many slave forts along the west African coast where African slaves had for centuries been brought by slave traders from the north to be sold to the Europeans and then transport them to the Americas.
These slave forts are truly horrific monuments of the suffering and deaths of millions of Africans.
The day following the little excursion the summit began and President Kufuor with his neighbour from Sudan presented a draft statement prepared by the ACP Secretariat essentially endorsing the African Union position that the pending indictment for war crimes in Darfur at the International Criminal Court against President Bashir should be lifted.
Forum officials  explained to Premier Talagi that the African Union had already endorsed this decision and that Sudan was trying to extend this support to the Caribbean and the Pacific islands.
To his credit Premier Talagi realised that if the Forum members did nothing, their name would be linked to this thinly disguised attempt to lift a pending International Criminal Court war crime indictment from Bashir.
Of course it mattered only in principle, but nothing about this really mattered in practice. It was only an ACP summit after all, and it was only the Security Council of the UN which had the legal authority to lift war crimes indictment.
Prime Minister Sir Michael Somare of Papua New Guinea and Premier Talagi along with the support of the Pacific islands foreign ministers opposed this part of the draft.
There was something that dripped with irony after the visits of the previous day where the Pacific islands were the only ones that stood opposed to lifting an indictment of war crimes against a northern Arab leader for crimes against black Africans.
Sudan has oil, money and power and that a sub-Saharan African leader of some repute such as Kufuor would back this, is all the more repugnant.
But all of Africa and with the exception of one Caribbean country had backed this and even some of the countries that do respect the rule of law were feeling very uncomfortable. 
Kufuor may have been an African democrat, a rare thing on the continent, but like most leaders was a man who really liked to get his way.
The ACP works on consensus and it was clear the Pacific was not supporting the consensus so after hours of arguing, he simply closed the meeting and inserted his own text—the rest of the group be damned.
The Pacific had been out-manoeuvered and the final communiqué ultimately implicated the Pacific in reaffirming the African Union's call for a suspension of the possible indictment against Bashir.
I strongly argued that the Pacific should issue a reservation which is a footnote to the communiqué. The footnote meant that we did not support that particular paragraph.
But even in largely ceremonial organisations such as the ACP group, it is unwise for leaders to rock the boat too much.
I was told the Pacific had made its point and we should not offend the Africans any further. And so it stands, the Pacific islands had reaffirmed the call to lift an indictment on the Butcher of Darfur.
One day the Pacific islands will have leaders who stand on principle but that day has not yet arrived. Instead, they fail the hot water test time and again, and put in the heat, they melt away.
Only when they stand up for principles and their people will the Pacific ever be anything other than mere objects in Australia’s lake, which is precisely how they are viewed.