War drums in the Pacific
Coming hard on the heels of George Speight's terrorist coup in Fiji, the Australian capitalist media's battalion of “analysts” were quick to pronounce the Malaita Eagle Force's (MEF) June 5 seizure of Solomon Islands Prime Minister Bart Ulufa'alu a “copycat coup”.The conflict that has engulfed Honiara could have been averted, the chorus sang, had Canberra deployed Australian police officers earlier this year when Ulufa'alu asked Australia to intervene to defend his government from Guadalcanalan insurgents.
The federal government refused, PM John Howard told parliament on June 6, because “the government of Australia did not believe it was appropriate for us to respond to that request”. Instead, Canberra agreed to pay for 50 Fiji police to help boost the Solomon Islands police, but they never arrived because of the coup in Suva.
Simply put, Howard was not prepared to suffer the political unpopularity that would inevitably follow if, after taking sides in a brewing civil war, Australian cops or troops began arriving home in body bags. A unilateral Australian intervention would risk uniting the entire Solomons people against the invader, Howard correctly reasoned. Canberra was not prepared to join a “peacekeeping” force until the rival militias — the MEF and Isatabu Freedom Movement — signed a peace agreement.
Australian Democrat leader Meg Lees is reported to have said that a “few” police could have stopped the “trouble” in the Solomons. The ALP's Laurie Brereton criticised the Coalition's “minimalist” stance as an “opportunity tragically missed” and demanded to know why the government did not pay another country to send police after the Fiji cops fell through: “A timely commitment by Australia to help strengthen policing would have had a positive effect of the peace process”.
The coups in Fiji and the Solomons, most ruling class commentators agreed, are the inevitable consequence of the Australian government's “indifference”, “bungling” and “policy myopia” towards the South Pacific region and its unwillingness to take “firm” action to impose Australian “leadership” so as to ensure “stability”.
Columnist after columnist suddenly discovered that Australia now confronts “an arc” of instability (or, what is quickly becoming the op-ed writers' favourite, a “ring of fire”) that stretches from Aceh, East Timor and West Papua in the west, through PNG, Bougainville, the Solomons and Kanaky, to Vanuatu, Fiji and Tahiti in the east.
A typical — though not the most lurid — example of this was presented by the Age's Tony Parkinson on June 7: “... the armed uprisings in the arc of islands to our north and east have forced a hurried revision of any starry-eyed illusions about regional security. Fiji and the Solomon Islands are aflame; Papua New Guinea is enfeebled by lawlessness, corruption and provincialism; West Papua is chafing under Indonesian rule ... Australia has a southern hemisphere variant of the Balkans tragedy unfolding on its doorstep.”
Such superficial and alarmist analyses are meant to convince Australians that we need to boost defence spending and be prepared to use force to protect Australia from supposedly dangerous, unpredictable and undemocratic aliens.
But they also reflect an emerging debate within the Australian capitalist class over whether the Australia government is doing enough to properly carry out its “duties” as the South Pacific's main imperialist military and economic enforcer.
Some in the ruling class are nervous that Canberra may not have the “political will” to militarily defend Australian imperialism's interests in the region should a popular uprising threaten to topple the elites that Australian governments have so carefully fostered over the decades.
A half of all the profits generated from Australian companies overseas in 1994 — $1.2 billion — came from Oceania. Australia exports five times more to the region than it imports. In 1994, approximately $500 million in profits came from Fiji and PNG alone.
As Parkinson notes: “Melanesia ... includes those nations with whom Australia has the closest trade, economic and historical links. And it constitutes a sub-region in which, rightly or wrongly, the rest of the world expects Australia to serve as a role model and leader. Geopolitically, Melanesia is regarded by other Western powers ... as very much Australia's sphere of influence. Our baby. Market power through Australia's dominant trade, aid and investment profile — and a military capability that dwarfs that of the Pacific micro-states — is seen as giving us the wherewithal (if not the moral duty) to superimpose order from on high.”
Ruling class nervousness was boosted when the Howard government was forced by mass popular opinion to intervene in East Timor against Australian imperialism's economic and political interests, and those of its ally, the Indonesian elite, by preventing the massacre of the Timorese liberation movement and forcing the withdrawal of Indonesian troops.
Should the Australian government ever need to move against the people of a Pacific country similarly seeking liberation, the ruling class wants to be assured that Canberra will make the “hard decisions” to put Australia's imperialist interests first in the face of popular opposition. (See pages 16, 17 and 21 for more coverage.)
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