A9.TheNotSoPeacefulPacific-International-Relations.com.docVIP

Australia and the Asia-Pacific Rosita Dellios ? 2005 WEEK 9: THE NOT SO PEACEFUL PACIFIC As noted last week, the Pacific Ocean acquired its name from the Portuguese-born explorer Magellan when he crossed it in 1521. He called it Pacific because of the calm weather conditions he encountered. In contemporary times, the islands of the Pacific Ocean are often troubled. There have been coups in Fiji (May Sept 1987, May 2000); a secessionist movement in Bougainville which, additionally, caused a mutiny in Port Moresby when the government hired mercenaries to solve the Bougainville problem; the post-1998 internal tensions in the Solomon Islands that resulted in a June 2003 Australian-led multinational police and military intervention to restore law and order; law order problems also in Papua New Guinea which is deemed in 2004 to be on the brink of ‘failed state’ status and which also has the Pacific region’s highest number of HIV/AIDS carriers (up to 50,000 sufferers in a population of 5.3m); anti-French and pro-independence sentiments in French Polynesia and New Caledonia, political violence in Palau, to name but the most turbulent of the USA’s Micronesian ‘quasi-empire’. Problems may be traced not only to relations among contending cultures (both intra-Pacific as well as indigenous and outsider), but also to geography and colonial history. Consider, for example, the following questions: Culture The 1200 languages of the Pacific Islands may be regarded as anchors into traditional cultures but also politically divisive for individual states and regional cohesion. Is this a Culture versus State dilemma? And if so, how would you deal with it if you were a local policy-maker? How and where have cultural/ethnic differences threatened state cohesion? Notable Quote: Many of the island states have fragile economies and lack the economic resources to become viable independent states. And social and political developments have demonstrated the fundamental difference