Fiji and the Forum

Fiji and the Forum;

who needs who more?

August 23, 2008

Michael Field

It is easy to lose sight of simple truths amidst all the self promotion and back slapping going on among South Pacific leaders who bravely faced Voreqe Bainimarama’s empty chair and told him things they would not have had he been there.

Not that the commodore is particularly fiercesome in the flesh. He is known to run away from his men and down very steep banks at the first sign of trouble. His reaction to the Forum’s rebuke has a school girlish quality about rowing our own canoe now. The other great success story in that School of Statehood is North Korea.

The real problem with what happened in Niue at the 39th Forum – gosh I thought it was much older the way it creaks along – is that in throwing down the gauntlet to Bainimarama, its played its last effective hand.

In short the Forum cannot survive without Fiji. A Forum without Fiji has no value. And Fiji can survive without the Forum. Sure, the F$36 million Forum Secretariat will shuffle off to Apia but the buildings remain. One can be sure some other organization with less scruples and more sense will move in.

What it will prove, in the failure, is the desperate need for a new form of regional government organization in the South Pacific.

For in the 39 years of the Pacific Forum’s watch, the quality of the lives of the majority of the region’s people has deteriorated. The economies of most of the states are worse now than they were a decade ago. None of that is opinion; its fact.

Even the Forum’s model state, Samoa, has achieved its gains mostly because its major (and almost sole) export, people, have been living in the strong economies of Australia and New Zealand. And god has been kind to Samoa; no big hurricanes for a while.

What went mostly unnoticed is the way in which Samoa has niftily exploited the situation and got their candidate into the secretary general’s chair. With virtually no regional experience, it is now headed by Tuiloma Neroni Slade, a rather pompous fellow with limited political skills.

How bizarre is that? The Forum is fighting for its life and has a massive role on its hands in Fiji and finds its new leader living in semi-retirement in Auckland.

Out of the Forum came the bluster on Fiji, hailed as some kind of milestone. For the people of Fiji they are the offerings of a sad and mostly irrelevant Greek chorus.

The Forum’s communiqué is their major production number. It’s a grand wish list controlled by officials, written up long before the politicians get there. At one Forum I attended at Madeng years back, the communiqué came out with a ringing endorsement of the Polisario Front and its struggles to liberate Western Sahara from Spain. The prime minister tasked to speak to the media about the communiqué openly confessed he didn’t have a clue what that was about. Officials had put it there.

After the French stopped nuclear testing at Mururoa the Forum struggled to find relevance and its communiqués got smaller. Now they are returning to epic tomes.

Some of the old favourites are back; Pacific countries have been begging to be included in rugby’s Super 14 – an empty vessel sound made since 2001. They want rugby in the Olympics too; its funny how politics gets into sport when it is the politicians wanting it there.

The diplomats got busy once it was clear Bainimarama was a no show. Its always interesting to look at the words they use. Bainimarama’s absence is described as “unacceptable”. Kind of soft in the Forum’s lexicon which once described nuclear testing as an “extreme outrage”.

They say the commodore should have come given that he had promised elections at the Tonga Forum a year earlier and that he should account for his failure to honour this. I guess they felt they had to be surprised, but the truth was Bainimarama recanted on his promise the day after he made it, while in Tonga. And lets not be coy here; he has already accounted for his broken promise (at the UN no less). He’s said publicly, countlessly, that Fiji is not ready to hold elections until he – the commodore himself – has cleaned up the Augean stables that is Fiji’s electoral law.

The Forum “condemned” statements from Fiji that were inconsistent with the now broken promise.

A bit like holding-your-breath until you get what you want. Except you will not.

It goes on a bit about reaffirming this and pushing Fiji here and there.

They throw the dog a bone too: “ reaffirmed the readiness of Forum members to continue to assist Fiji prepare for that election.” It pads out things saying that yes, Fiji does have long-term issues (which nation hasn’t?) and manages to use management speak by saying all the “key stakeholders” should be involved.

Out in the burus of Fiji all this is kind of distant noise, not enough to keep them awake or get them excited.

The Forum’s Ministerial Contact Group is to keep monitoring Fiji, apparently. One of that group’s key members is New Zealand’s Winston Peters. Even in the self-absorbed world of Suva, they know he is Dog Tucker with elections just months away. The Group, which will now, no doubt, be run by Australia, will write another report (the Forum loves reports and its army of mainly Australian consultants charge like wounded bulls for writing them).

Depending on what it says, the leaders might decide to have another special meeting, this time in Papua New Guinea. Short of a polling mircle, Helen Clark will not be there; John Key might have to get up to speed quickly on Fiji, a place he only knows in flying over it very high enroute to his Hawaii holiday home.

If, after all this, the leaders meet again, they will then consider suspending Fiji from the Forum. So what? But they will not.

Bainimarama waited 24 hours before responding to the communiqué. One wonders who wrote it; Justice Shemeem? Colonel Aziz or his newly exposed secret adviser, John Samy of Auckland.

Whatever, the message to the Forum is clear: get lost.

“Each one of the us as the citizens of this country, must now ask: are we going to be bullied and pressured into doing things that are clearly not in our national interest? If we succumb to such pressures, what next? What will that do to our self-worth as an independent nation?”

Of course this a dopey statement; national interests are paramount only to the extent that they stop other interests developing. No man is an island.

Bainimarama complains about the “emerging and threatening dominance of the Forum by the two developed metropolitan powers, Australia and New Zealand.”

Emerging? Its been that way since 1971 when New Zealand called the first meeting.

The Forum was becoming a “a foreign policy tool of these two countries”. He is probably right and it was certainly used by Australia to justify its occupation of the Solomon Islands.

“They now seem to have usurped the moral leadership of the region.”

But its not Canberra or Wellington’s problem though; it’s a consequence of the appallingly self-centred and weak leadership of the Pacific member states themselves. Most have governed over decline, not growth.

“Against this background, and the situation which Fiji is in now, Fiji’s people need to realise that in going forward as a nation, we may have to paddle our canoes on our own,” he heroically said.

Knowing Bainimarama’s battlefield ability and poor seamanship, the thought that he will paddle off out into the ocean, taking Fiji with him, is a sad prospect.

The sad side of all this is the misreading of Bainimarama.

For a long time I thought he was mad. Some of those who have cashed in on him are.

But no, the commodore’s problem is that he is a dim-witted utopian. He wants all the ice cream, and now, with lashings of cream; he's a political infant. He believes in an unattainable vision and because he expresses the dream so badly, and is so blunt in executing it, he fails to carry others along with him. As Sir Thomas More found with Henry VIII, you can have a vision but it is not of much use when all the others around the king are corrupt and exploiting him.

The Forum would have done better to have said a whole lot less, and acted a whole lot more.

But it matters little now; Fiji is going its own way and in the game of rugby diplomacy, its not only got the ball, it owns the ground too – that heroic Secretariat compound that in 2000, as George Speight seized Parliament and thugs wrecked Suva, they erected a mighty gate to keep Fiji out… They did nothing then, and really are having little effect now.

Bainimarama can ignore them.

Read the Pacific Forum communique

Read Bainimarama’s full statement