Sydney Morning Herald
News Review
Saturday, July 8, 2000
Sea of trouble
-- The five Melanesian states and territories tie up Canberra's
diplomatic and defence resources out of all proportion to their size
and population, writes Hamish McDonald - and many critics say it's
still not enough.
If we are the deputy sheriff in this part of the Pacific, our patch
is crowded with perhaps the world's most wildly diverse and divided
peoples, intensely suspicious of outside intrusions.
Melanesia (the word comes from the ancient Greek for "black
islands") includes the independent states of Papua New Guinea, the
Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji and the self-governing French
territory of New Caledonia, over 1,000 language groups among just
5.9 million people, and a host of internecine disputes that can lay
dormant for decades and then erupt in savage violence.
Throw in Papua (formerly Irian Jaya), the western half of New Guinea
island now chafing under Indonesian rule, and you have another 2.3
million people and 254 languages, in land and seas containing
immense resources of oil, gas, gold, copper, timber and fish.
The basic political drives in this region are fear and attachment:
fear of being displaced by outsiders, as were the Aborigines and
Maori, or by aggressive neighbours; attachment to land.
This is why the Fijian psyche is still too weak to stand an ethnic
Indian prime minister, why the Isatabu warriors of Guadalcanal took
on the Malaitan settlers, why PNG has put off building a highway
from the Highlands to Port Moresby.
Melanesia's intricate problems require long and devoted negotiation
and highly creative accords, such as the Burnham meetings in New
Zealand which led to the Bougainville accord and its risky unarmed
peacekeeping mission by Australian and other regional troops, and
the 1988 Matignon accord which started reconciling New Caledonia's
Kanaks and settlers.
Canberra has 43 diplomats stationed in Melanesia, augmented by
Defence and AusAid representatives. Some 28 other officials watch
the South Pacific in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
(DFAT), plus two specialists in the Office of National Assessments
(ONA), six in the Defence Intelligence Organisation, and five in the
Defence Department.
Yet constantly, it seems, we are surprised by dramatic developments
in the region: the Fiji coups in 1987 and this year, the
Bougainville war, the arrival of Sandline mercenaries in PNG in
1997, and the Solomons coup last month by the Malaitan Eagles.
Has the Federal Government, as the Opposition charges, taken its
"eye off the ball"? Seduced by the glamour of the big power games
and economic pictures of Asia, are we shirking the burden of
regulating and developing our more humble backyard?
DFAT officials point out that the department does send its top
people to regional capitals, and its missions are strongly staffed.
Then there is receptivity at home base. Regional specialists tend to
agree that DFAT and AusAid have not kept up their "institutional
memory" on this complex region.
Staff are rotated too frequently, reports buried in files, and the
practice of regular consultation with academic and other experts,
followed in the 1980s, has lapsed.
While heads of missions tend to want to avoid being labelled
pessimists and like to send good news back to Canberra, departments
have a hard job interesting their ministers until the shooting
starts. The notorious ONA brief prepared before a South Pacific
foreign and economic ministers meeting in 1997, accidentally leaked
to the press, showed the extent to which officials felt they had to
spice their reports with scandal to get them read at all.
While diplomats do report gathering malaise, the tiny, low-tech
scale on which trouble starts in the Pacific can often defy
detection by outside intelligence systems. Two months ago, George
Speight was just a blowhard at the Suva golf club.
By contrast, Sandline was an indisputable intelligence failure for
Canberra. But it was his army's revolt and a popular backlash, much
more than the jawboning by a senior DFAT mission, which got the then
PNG Prime Minister, Sir Julius Chan, to retreat.
Short of acting like the US in Grenada and Panama, Canberra has to
let the sovereign countries in the region reach their own solutions,
unless invited to intervene, and even then it is wary of
perpetuating dependency on its aid.
This approach has worked in PNG, at times with held breath. After
coming close to complete lawlessness a year ago, the country has
pulled out of its economic nosedive through the tough policies of
its Prime Minister, Sir Mekere Morauta, and the international
support he has regained.
The Solomons is a different case again. Prime Minister Bartholomew
Ulufa'alu, whom Canberra had welcomed to clean up the corrupt legacy
of the previous Solomon Mamaloni government, pleaded for outside
police assistance. Canberra offered money and logistics, but no
peacekeepers, and then Fiji's offer fell through with the Speight
coup. Two weeks later, Nori toppled Ulufa'alu and seized control of
Honiara.