War drums in the Pacific

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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