Are too many security-influenced policy pronouncements turning some Pacific heads to look north?

Dev Nadkarni

Oceania's 9/11-the Bali carnage that left scores of Australians dead-ushered in a justifiably heightened security climate in the region, mainly in Australia and to a lesser extent in New Zealand. In the following months, leaders and academics expressed fears that Pacific Islands nations were fertile havens for international terrorist outfits to plan and launch attacks on the metropolitan neighbourhood a hop, skip and jump away to the south.

Several reasons were cited: weak regimes, corrupt administrations, growing international crime syndicates using the countries as their bases for human trafficking, drug running and money laundering. Steps were also taken to sanitise ports of entry and transit in many of the islands nations. Security personnel were trained and specialised equipment installed at crucial points. In this heightened security atmosphere came the RAMSI intervention and soon afterwards, there were increasing reports quoting Australian leaders in the regional media and in books published on the subject of regional security that armed interventions would be the way to go in future conflict situations, and even elsewhere in the islands nations, should the need arise.

Frequent media coverage of the festering internal political turmoil in many of the islands states has resulted in increased usage in the media of terms like “the Melanesian arc of instability” and the more contentious tag of the “failed state”, among others.

While there is no broad agreement on what really makes for a “failed state”, especially in the Pacific islands context, the rather loose and frequent use of the term has sought to exaggerate the notion of regional instability and therefore gone a step further in subtly justifying actions like possible armed interventions in the minds of the people.

To say this is not to imply that the islands nations have been perfect real-life portrayals of their paradise-on-earth touristy image. Ongoing political events in Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Kiribati-and more recently in Fiji and to a certain extent Tonga-not to mention the Solomons, have all sought to reinforce the “arc of instability” image in Australian and New Zealand circles. And thanks to the global instant media, these images and opinions filter back into the islands, often resulting in sharp reactions in editorial and readers' views columns in the local media.

Diplomatic imbroglios like the on-going VIP security drill involving the prime minister and the tangle over the issue of aid that dominated the news pages in Papua New Guinea for over a month and the manner in which it has been handled have brought in a sense of an expanding chasm between Port Moresby and Canberra, and by extension, in the minds of the people of neighbouring states.

More recently, academics and politicians have also suggested hard-line policies in the media-a panacea to set the islands right in one fell swoop, as it were-that range from completely suspending aid to linking future aid to demonstrable good governance. Good governance as measured by the yardstick of western democracies-particularly the Westminster system which was imposed on many of the islands peoples when their colonial masters left: not much more than a generation-old system that does not take into account the entrenched ancient socio-political structures that these islanders have lived in for over a thousand years. The southern developed nations need to urgently evaluate if “wielding the stick” policies like openly bandying ideas in the media about armed interventions and conditional, strings-attached aid is an approach that would go anywhere, especially at a time when the Pacific Islands nations seem to have an option to look elsewhere other than the south-a possibility that did not exist even a few years ago.

What policymakers in these nations will have to contend with in the short-to-medium-term is the fact that the Pacific Islands nations' attention is being increasingly distracted by the fiercely growing economic giants immediately north of the Pacific Ocean. There is little doubt that the temptation to look north is getting stronger by the month for many Pacific islands states.
China's so-called “machinations” are now quite the staple of political commentators of the South Pacific scene. China and Taiwan have long expanded their battleground into the South Pacific in quest of their own geo-political ambitions while yet having an eye firmly focused on the region's abundant marine and littoral natural resources.

They have abundantly shown their capacity to quickly and almost imperceptibly muscle into the tiny nations with infrastructure projects like buildings, roads and sports facilities-and a growing body of their own people. The number of Chinese-owned businesses in Tonga, Fiji and Samoa bear testimony to this.

And despite the increased security measures put in place after Bali and 9/11, the law and order climate in many of the islands countries seems to be worsening by imported crime-internecine gang warfare and other questionable activities often traced to illegal and overstaying oriental nationals: something that was a rarity in the islands in earlier times.

Coming from a socio-political culture that is completely different from that of the western world, with global business strategies that are more pre-modern and informal, their street-smart style of doing business is likely to have a greater appeal to societies that share similar values and world-views. And what's more, their more-than-buoyant economy and blitzing growth rates have wetted their appetite for both geopolitical and economic supremacy in the region.

Aid from these nations will certainly be more forthcoming. Of course, there will be strings-there never are free lunches. But one thing is certain: these strings will not be of the “only-if-you-are-a-good-boy” and good-governance variety.

The southern metropolitans will need more than ingenuity-let alone school masterly attitudes-to draft future policies if they are to stop some of the South Pacific islands nations now barely perceptible drift towards the north before they attain cruising velocity.