THE PRESS MONDAY, APRIL 1, 1985. Eroding the Pacific’s peace

Press, 1 April 1985, Page 12

THE PRESS MONDAY, APRIL 1, 1985. Eroding the Pacific’s peace

Why should the Pacific Islands country of Kiribati not conclude a fishing agreement with the Soviet Union? New Zealand maintains agreements that allow foreign fishing boats, including Soviet vessels, to fish in New Zealand’s exclusive economic zone. Kiribati, with a huge zone relative to its size, and with few other natural resources, might be congratulated for finding a way to make money from the ocean. The President of Kiribati, Mr Tabai, said during his visit to New Zealand last week that revenue from the deal on fishing rights would displace about $2 million in aid that his country receives each year from Britain. Such self-help is especially commendable among the small countries of the South Pacific. Many of them depend on international charity to balance their books.

The New Zealand Prime Minister, Mr Lange, changed his attitude to the Kiribati deal while President Tabai was in New Zealand. Originally, Mr Lange had reservations about the proposed deal with the Soviet Union; then he changed his mind. He might have done better to have kept quiet altogether. Some New Zealand politicians have been showing undue readiness to mind other people’s business; they are much less welcoming of any action that smacks of outsiders offering advice to New Zealand about how to run its affairs.

Yet Mr Lange, and his colleagues, are right if they feel concern about what happens in Kiribati, especially when the fishing proposal there will effectively increase the presence of one of the super-Powers in a region generally free from interference by outsiders. Kiribati is a scattering of 33 islands, astride the equator, north of Fiji. Its population is only 58,000. It can claim an exclusive economic zone of more than five million square kilometres of ocean, and it has no means of its own to police the zone. Until this year the small States of the Pacific Islands could generally assume that their wider interests were being watched by New Zealand and Australia, with the power of the United States in the background through the A.N.Z.U.S. alliance. That comfortable arrangement is in tatters as the result of the New Zealand Government’s attitude to United States warships. If A.N.Z.U.S. can no longer be relied on, the United States is likely to seek ways to increase its presence in the South

Pacific, rather than leave a vacuum. Where the Americans venture, the Soviet Union is likely to venture, too. Better access to the fishing round Kiribati is a small, but useful step in enhancing the Soviet presence. Perhaps it was always too much to hope that the South Pacific could continue indefinitely to be a region of the world where great-Power rivalries were muted. Yet there has been comfort for the Pacific Islands in believing that New Zealand and Australia — familiar, friendly neighbours — were watching the region’s wider interests. Australia can be expected to continue to do so, but its attention is likely to be given, as in the past, mostly to its closest neighbours in the eastern Pacific. Kiribati, almost at the point where the equator and the date-line meet, falls in a kind of noman’s land, 3000 kilometres north and east of New Zealand.

Even if New Zealand wanted to continue to provide a discrete defence umbrella for its small Pacific neighbours, it will be hard pressed to do so in the near future. New Zealand’s first responsibility has to be to its own maritime economic zone. The Navy is losing men even faster than the other two services while uncertainty continues about New Zealand’s defence, and its relations with former allies. The Government will have to face substantial new expenditure if it is to maintain, let alone expand, this country’s capabilities in maritime surveillance. Modern equipment may turn out to be less readily available, just as reliable information about foreign ship movements in the Pacific has already been curtailed in the wake of the A.N.Z.U.S. fiasco.

The unhappy situation of the defenceless Pacific Islands is another of the unintended consequences of the Government’s foolish attempt to lay down limits to its defence cooperation with old friends. Soviet craft fishing in Kiribati’s waters in the central Pacific might have been dismissed as having no more importance than Soviet craft fishing round New Zealand if the old A.N.Z.U.S. arrangements were still in force. With those arrangements discredited, any extra intrusion by the Soviet Union in the Pacific disturbs further an already disturbed balance. A reaction can be expected from the United States and the peace of the Pacific eroded a little more.