By David Robie
With Fijians facing their first post-coup general election — five years after the first successful military seizure of power in the region — and Papua New Guineans preparing for their election next month amid fresh rumours of a potential coup, it is timely to reflect on how conflicts or struggles in one part of the Pacific are hardly known about, or barely understood, in another.
Featured on the cover of the February 1991 edition of Pacific Islands Monthly, for example, was a stark photograph of a gas mask. The picture pointed to the magazine's coverage of the Gulf War and its impact on the Pacific — or at least on the wives at home in Fiji whose soldier-husbands were "in the firing line" with peacekeeping units in the Lebanon and Sinai, and on about 500 American Samoans serving in Operation Desert Storm. Yet there was no mention in this article, or virtually any other published in the Pacific and New Zealand, about the parallels between the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, and the attack 15 years earlier by Indonesian troops on East Timor, which turned the small Portuguese colony in the Western Pacific into Jakarta's 27th "province".
Since 1975, says Timorese resistance leader Xanana Gusmao, the East Timorese people have "lived under an injustice" based on a betrayal of universal principles. Yet it took the killing of New Zealand-born student Kamal Bamadhaj during the massacre of between 50 and 200 Timorese people by Indonesian troops at Dili's Santa Cruz cemetery last November to reawaken Australians and New Zealanders to the East Timor tragedy.
Iraq was in Kuwait because of oil and Indonesia is in East Timor because of oil. On December 11, 1989, Australia and Indonesia signed an agreement for a joint zone of cooperation for the exploration of oil in the disputed area known as the Timor Gap, north-west of Darwin. The agreement satisfies compelling economic imperatives for both Australia and Indonesia, and boosts their uneasy bilateral relationship.
But these considerations cannot be pursued in isolation from equally compelling international legal and ethical obligations. The United Nations regards East Timor as a non-self-governing territory under the administering authority of Portugal. In February 1991, the Portuguese filed a case before the World Court challenging the legality of the treaty and accusing Australia of inflicting "serious legal and moral damage" on the Timorese. The key argument in Portugal's case is that the treaty disregards "the rights of the people of East Timor to
self-determination, to territorial integrity and unity and to permanent sovereignty over its wealth and natural resources".
Australia's decision, and thus New Zealand's, to recognise the annexation of East Timor is said to have been strongly influenced by "a desire to resolve the Timor Gap issue". Barely 10 months after the Fretilin declaration of independence for East Timor and the subsequent Indonesian annexation, Australian and Indonesian officials began informal negotiations to establish a seabed boundary between Australia and East Timor, in defiance of Timorese protests.
East Timor is a major test of international political integrity. The principle of self-determination espoused in the UN Charter and many relevant declarations and resolutions are an established part of international law. Yet it is clear the East Timorese have been tragically denied that right by the Indonesian invasion.
Just as the world and much of the Pacific, particularly Australia and New Zealand, have turned a blind eye to the invasion and annexation of East Timor — at least until the Santa Cruz massacre — on the eastern side of Papua New Guinea the island of Bougainville has also become a tragedy, a victim of another colonial aberration. It has cast a shadow over both PNG and neighbouring Solomon Islands.
In November 1988, a group of Nasioi traditional landowners launched a campaign of sabotage against the largely Australian-owned Panguna copper mine in PNG's North Solomons Province, demanding a massive 10 billion kina in compensation for loss of land and environmental devastation. By early 1989 this confrontation developed into a major conflict between PNG's armed forces and an alliance of landowner and Bougainville nationalists. Demanding secession, the self-styled Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) waged a guerilla war and eventually forced the mine to close in May 1989.
Th consequences have been devastating for PNG, which in recent years has counted on Bougainville Copper Ltd (BCL), a subsidiary of Conzinc Riotinto of Australia Ltd (CRA), for 40% of its national exports and about 19% of total government revenue. In May 1990, the BRA unilaterally declared an independent republic of Bougainville. PNG retaliated by imposing an economic and communications blockade around the island. Even medicines and humanitarian groups such as the International Red Cross have been barred in a policy frequently described as virtual genocide.
Although more than 150 BRA militants, government soldiers and civilians were killed during the guerilla war, more than 3000 ordinary people are estimated by some aid agencies to have died
from lack of medical treatment during the blockade. In spite of PNG Prime Minister Rabbie Namaliu making assurances to New Zealand aid agencies last November that the blockade on medical supplies would be lifted, the military have fired on canoes carrying medicines and equipment from the Solomon Islands. In one recent incident, two men were killed and a craft carrying medical supplies sunk under fire from an Australian-supplied PNG gunboat.
Less bloody, but no less disturbing, has been the social dislocation, increasing militarisation, growing poverty and erosion of human rights in Fiji since the double coup in 1987. Since former military strongman Major-General Sitiveni Rabuka originally seized power under the guise of "indigenous rights", the predominantly Fijian military force has projected itself as the guardian of a romantic notion of a hierarchical and disciplined model of chiefly ruled indigenous Fijian society that it imagined had existed during colonial days. At times this belief has been translated into the notion that the commoner officers should, for at least 15 years, be given the opportunity to run the system as guardians of the "public interest" as they view it.
Among the strongest champions of the chiefs are senior civil servants and military bureaucrats, who are not chiefs at all. But they saw their privileged positions threatened as the result of the 1987 general election that brought the late Dr Timoci Bavadra and his government to power. They have had a major influence in the drafting of the 1990 constitution, a transparent facade for authoritarian and racist rule — creating a new form of apartheid just as its namesake in South Africa is crumbling after more than four decades.
This section of the Fijian bureaucratic elite has an economic interest in commercial involvement with local non-Fijian business and multinational enterprises. Since the late 1970s, they have exploited the resources of the Fijian central administration and the provinces to launch commercial enterprises — most of which collapsed because of mismanagement, misappropriations and unwise investment decisions. The most spectacular example of this was the failure of the "Fijian" business development company, the Native Land Development Corporation, in 1985.
Since 1986, "Fijian investment" has been channelled by the government-run Fijian Affairs Board into Fijian Holdings Ltd, a company effectively controlled by Fiji's Great Council of Chiefs, with investment of public funds of about A$18 million in the purchase of shares in major foreign companies such as Carlton Breweries Ltd and local enterprises such as the Fiji Sugar Corporation, cement manufactures Fiji Industries Ltd and others.
Bavadra's deposed Labour-National Federation Party Coalition
government had promised to "democratise" the Fijian administration, share out among ordinary Fijians the wealth its institutions generated, and open the books. The post-colonial Fijian political and bureaucratic elite that had developed under 17 years of Alliance Party rule took fright at such far-reaching change. It was politically effective to mobilise the chiefs and commoner Fijians to support the coups by portraying this as an Indo-Fijian threat to take over indigenous Fijian interests.
However, the patent shallowness of the philosophy behind the coups has already spectacularly come apart, with indigenous Fijian opinion bitterly divided, the chiefly system under strong pressure, and a deeper and broader identification with unions and the other people's movements across the barrier of race. The remnants of the Alliance Party oligarchy no longer give united support to its successor, the chiefly backed Soqasoqa ni Vakavulewa ni Taukei (SVT), indigenous Fijian support being split in the election between the SVT, Apisai Tora's unfortunately named ANC (All National Congress), Sakeasi Butadroka's Christian Nationalists and others.
Even the pro-democracy parties are in chaos. The Coalition has broken up, with the Indian-dominated National Federation Party deciding to contest the election and the multiracial Fiji Labour Party clinging to boycott in protest against the racist constitution. Bitter wrangling over the boycott led to public blood-letting and the formation of the breakaway New Labour Movement by Jone Dakuvula, a former Wellington human rights researcher, and leading trade unionist Micky Columbus. With the rebels contesting the election, the FLP finally relented and decided to run as well — only a week before candidate nominations closed.
The very constitution drafted in 1990 by the elite to keep it in power may not even achieve that objective in these elections.
The disinformation and repression against pro-democracy groups that have marked the post-coup Fijian regime have become increasingly common elsewhere in the Pacific. Just as the United States has been able to use the "Fourth World" ideology to separate the indigenous struggle from the liberation movement in Latin America and other countries, so the divide-and-rule dynamic has eroded people's movements in the Pacific.
Apart from its notable success in the Philippines, where it has virtually crippled cooperative and sustainable development projects, low intensity conflict has also been widely employed by Indonesia in East Timor and West Papua. Now such strategies are having a modest impact in some island states. Although limited doses failed on Bougainville and have so far faltered in Tonga, destabilisation methods have proved effective elsewhere in PNG, Fiji, Vanuatu and in Kanaky/New Caledonia, where the
independence movement has been split in the wake of Matignon Accords. Two Kanak leaders were assassinated in May 1989 as a consequence of bitter divisions within the movement fuelled by French manipulation, both overt and covert. French influence was also alleged to have had a hand in the constitutional crisis in Vanuatu in 1988-89. But destabilisation has had the most devastating impact on Belau — a tiny nation of just 15,000 people, far from the scrutiny of the international community.
For a relatively small country like Fiji, such methods are very apparent with the high degree of infiltration of the military at most levels of civilian, political and development life, and the use of terror tactics against outspoken critics of the regime. A prominent academic civil rights activist, Dr Anirudh Singh, for example, was abducted by a military torture squad in October 1990 in a crude attempt to silence him and intimidate others. While his five abductors were given a slap on the hand with a minor fine, Singh still faces a sedition trial for his alleged role during demonstration when a copy of the constitution was symbolically burned.
In Polynesia, moves towards democracy have gained momentum. Western Samoa in April 1991 held its first general election under universal suffrage since gaining independence from New Zealand in 1962. This step in a tradition-bound society was judged a success and has probably opened the door to candidates other than the chiefly matai eventually becoming elected to the Fono, or parliament.
In the neighbouring conservative kingdom of Tonga, the struggle for greater accountability and open government achieved a remarkable moral victory in February 1991. A two-year legal fight by people's representative 'Akilisi Pohiva, who challenged the sale of naturalisation and passports to foreigners, led to a hasty constitutional change — itself rather questionable. But the retrospective law legalising passports sold to 426 foreigners, including Imelda Marcos, widow of the Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos (he had also gained a passport), led to unprecedented protests and a march on the royal palace.
The region's chaotic political changes are having a traumatic influence on cultural, economic, environmental and social development options. Now, more than ever, the Pacific faces a crisis of leadership. It is up to people's movements to produce an alternative leadership with a style that will be pro-Pacific, more responsive to the needs of the region's underprivileged — from the "ghettos" of Raiwaga to Ebeye and Faa'a.
[©Tu Galala: Social Change in the Pacific. Edited by David Robie. Sydney: Pluto Press, May 1992. A$24.95.]