New Zealand: no quick fixes for South Pacific unrest, violence, growing poverty

from The International Herald Triubune

WELLINGTON, New Zealand: Political unrest, violence and pockets of absolute poverty are major features of the South Pacific landscape and there are "no quick fixes" for these problems, New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters warned Tuesday.

Political unrest and violence "remain significant features of the Pacific landscape," Peters said in the Netherlands as the annual summit of South Pacific leaders opened in Tonga. There was a coup in Fiji and riots in both Solomon Islands and Tonga last year.

Internal volatility, land conflicts, population pressures, and ethnic tensions are driving down living standards, he told the Netherlands Institute of International Relations in The Hague.

"In parts of the Pacific, pockets of absolute poverty are growing. The socio-economic indicators of some Melanesian countries are almost on a par with those of sub-Saharan Africa," he said.

New Zealand is deeply concerned by the behavior of the military regime in Fiji that ousted the democratic government in a coup last December, he said.

"It has created a climate of fear, repressing freedom of expression and other basic human rights," Peters said.

While coup leader and interim prime minister Commodore Frank Bainimarama "claims to be working toward a return to democracy in early 2009, we have seen no evidence thus far that would support this claim," he said.

In recent years New Zealand had been providing security to parts of the region as a number of Pacific nations teetered on the brink of civil war and anarchy.

Armed forces have been deployed to restore peace and stability in Timor Leste, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, and the island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea.

"The nature of the current political, economic and security challenges in the Pacific means that there are no quick fixes," Peters said.

Collaboration with regional partners, including the United States, United Kingdom, France, Japan, and China was central to New Zealand's Pacific diplomacy.

Peters said New Zealand also welcomes the growing involvement of the European Union in "an increasingly unstable part of the world."