A FORMER senior Pacific regional official has urged leaders to stop avoiding tough questions on self-determination and sovereignty, warning that security agendas overshadow issues that really matter most to islanders.
Dame Meg Taylor, former Secretary General of the Pacific Islands Forum, recalled how the region once grappled openly with the question of West Papua.
While the territory was initially on the Forum’s agenda, it later disappeared amid political pressure, including from France regarding French Polynesia’s membership.
“We shouldn’t give up,” Taylor said.
“Here we are with people who live in the Pacific, part of the great ocean space that we call the blue continent, but they cannot define their own future.”
She was speaking at a panel discussion “Decolonization and a Nuclear Free Pacific” organized by The Pacific Network on Globalization (PANG) at The University of the South Pacific in Suva.
A review of Pacific regionalism which was done in 2014, produced two key findings: bring politics and leadership decision-making back into the region, and ensure inclusivity by giving civil society a seat at the table.
Institutions must be responsive to what Pacific people want, she said.
She also critiqued the current state of leadership, saying many are “caught up in the agenda of powers that want us to be caught up in what they want for us.”
Citing her own country, Papua New Guinea, she noted contradictions where governments speak of sovereignty while granting port access to superpowers and facing travel restrictions, including a K52,000 bond for Papua New Guineans wishing to enter the United States.
“We’re not brave enough,” Taylor said.
“We don’t want to be counted.”
Panel moderator Nic Maclellan shared an anecdote of Taylor who herself once crossed a street to silently acknowledge a West Papua demonstration — an act he called “worth a thousand words.”
The question is whether today’s leaders have that same courage.
