Book Launch: Securing a Peaceful Pacific
17 November 2005, Wellington
Speech delivered by Graham Fortune, Secretary of Defence, New Zealand
When John Henderson asked me to undertake the Wellington launch of this new book, Securing a Peaceful Pacific, which he has co-edited with Greg Watson, I wondered why me, when there were so many good alternatives available.
But when I read the names of the sixty or so distinguished academics, politicians, public servants, diplomats and journalists who have contributed to making this publication possible, I realised that I may have been chosen simply because I was the last non-contributor around.
It is that sort of book. An important, wide-ranging compendium of thinking, from the equally important conference on Pacific Security, organised by the University of Canterbury in October 2004.
It is a publication which shows a great many people have become increasingly concerned that all is not well in the Pacific region. Bringing the views of these people together in one coherent publication is a worthwhile achievement in itself. It is also, hopefully, a valuable contribution to an important, ongoing debate.
Several of the contributors in this book are Pacific Islanders. As Vince McBride reminds us in chapter 64, page 504 - this really is a very big book - "issues with local complexities require approaches that incorporate a full understanding of the local context."
In other words, the emerging security debate should not be dominated by voices from outside. In this century, the Pacific region must be organised and led from within.
The consistent theme of this publication - that all is not well in the region - is well founded. In the last twenty years, the region has experienced secessionist conflict on the island of Bougainville and in West Papua; military and civilian coups in Fiji; mutinies in Vanuatu; civil war in Solomon Islands; and tribal fighting in Papua New Guinea.
These events, and their underlying causes, are covered in the book, from various viewpoints.
The region faces new, equally intractable, security threats in the future. Some of these new concerns are internal problems, others are external.
In the introduction to the book, John Henderson provides a list of 33 "new" security issues, under the major headings of political, economic, environmental, health, social, legal, military and police. John’s list is not dissimilar to the problems I identified in a speech to an NZIIA seminar in July 2002 at Victoria University. So perhaps they are not all that new.
However, the key point here is quite clear. The Pacific region’s geography and its developmental characteristics may be unique; and its many countries remote and isolated; but in the globalised, interconnected world of the 21st century, the region can no longer rely on geography, uniqueness, or even irrelevance for protection or immunity from global security challenges. The region faces the same sorts of transnational problems that beset other places. And each individual country in the Pacific has to take its own responsibility for responding, and for meeting whatever new international standards, guidelines or expectations might emerge in the years ahead.
It wasn’t always like this.
I had my first exposure to the Pacific region 40 years ago, when, fresh from University, I joined the South Pacific Division of the Department of External Affairs. I was fairly promptly thereafter dispatched to Rarotonga, prior to the Cook Islands becoming a self-governing state in free association with New Zealand. That was 1965.
In those days, what we in the New Zealand system considered to be the Pacific, did not extend beyond Polynesia. Western Samoa had gained independence in 1962, and we had a High Commission established in Apia. External Affairs was also engaged with forming an international persona for Cook Islands, but the administration of that territory, and of Niue and Tokelau Islands, remained with the Department of Island Territories (to which I was seconded while in Rarotonga). Ours was still largely a colonial mindset, even though we were desperate to disengage from our colonial role.
The rest of the Pacific, then still under British, French, Australian or American tutelage, was effectively beyond our influence or interest, and remained so until after the next wave of decolonisation beginning in 1968, which successively embraced Nauru, Fiji, Tonga and Papua New Guinea.
From a security perspective, the enduring image of the Pacific forty years ago was one of a peaceful backwater, largely unknown by most New Zealanders. Any internal differences within island countries were suppressed, migration, outside that from New Zealand’s territories, was almost non-existent and, apart from nuclear weapons testing by the Americans at Johnston Island Bikini Atoll in Micronesia, and later by the French in French Polynesia, the region was marginal to Cold War confrontation.
The 1961 New Zealand Defence White Paper, while noting that New Zealand "must have the security of the South Pacific area very much at heart", claimed that the challenges facing the region "were fortunately not yet defence ones."
Five years later, the 1966 Defence White Paper went even further. It noted that there were no threats to, or arising from, the Pacific Islands. Indeed, the South Pacific did not warrant a mention in the Review’s strategic assessment. Instead, based on the Cold War strategy of containment, it focused on instability and conflict in South East Asia, and the threat posed by what was then seen as "an uncompromising Communist China".
It was probably the involvement of the Papua New Guinea Defence Force to dispel an incipient, post-Independence internal secessionist attempt in Vanuatu in 1980, that changed this tranquil innocence and introduced discord into the Pacific security debate. The PNGDF deployment, effective though it was, was controversial at the time both within the Forum, and amongst the metropolitan powers.
The South Pacific Forum, established in 1971, had traditionally been very reluctant to comment on, or to be involved with, security matters involving the internal affairs of another member. I well remember at the Forum meeting in Tarawa in 1980, that discussion of the secessionist issue in Vanuatu was kept off the formal agenda and pushed very much to the sidelines.
This reluctance remained for much of the next decade. David Lange observed, some ten years later, that at the Forum in "no circumstances will anything be discussed, no matter how important, which involves the internal affairs of another member." To highlight this, he noted that the Forum "met in Apia in 1987 shortly after the Fiji coup, and pretended it hadn’t happened."
Well, as this book, Securing a Peaceful Pacific shows, all this has changed. The Pacific region has expanded; the South Pacific Forum has grown, increased its responsibilities and renamed itself; security issues have become more pressing, more complex and more immediate; and regionalism, once scornfully dismissed by an Australian diplomat as being "alive and well and living only in Wellington", has been widely, albeit reluctantly, embraced through the medium of the new Pacific Plan.
This book takes the willing, industrious, reader systematically through much of this change. It provides opinions, insights and points of reference from writers whose views warrant consideration and command respect.
As my former boss, Don McKinnon, notes in the Foreword, the contributors to this publication "have eloquently identified a number of the security challenges confronting the region, the lessons learned from past experience, and the answers required to achieve a truly pacific Pacific on a sustainable basis."
Those answers, like the region, are diverse. This book encourages their contemplation. It will be a valuable addition to the literature of what is also our region.