‘Enchanted Evening’ Image Is Crumbling in the South Pacific

Almost unnoticed by much of the world, a new generation of leadership is emerging in the South Pacific, and its assertive voice is changing the character of the region’s fabled islands.

Replacing the “Coral Sea Generation,” which rose to power after World War II and was symbolized by Fijian Prime Minister Kamisese Mara, 67, are heads of state who are younger, more outspoken and more regionally minded.

The problems they face, ranging from superpower rivalry to deteriorating standards of living, are more typical of Africa and the Caribbean than the South Pacific. “We’ve been living in a fool’s paradise, kidding ourselves that nothing was ever going to happen out here,” a British diplomat said the other day. “We thought James Michener had said all there was to say about the South Pacific, that we could just write the place off and never worry about it.”

Typical Sterotypes

Indeed, no other place has managed to endure for so long locked in the stereotypes of enchanted evenings and gently swaying palm fonds.

Robert Lewis Stevenson, whose home is now the residence of the president of Western Samoa, wrote that the South Sea islands touched “a virginity of sense.” Margaret Meade did much of her ground-breaking work in anthropology here; W. Somerset Maugham found the inspiration for Sadie Thompson here; Dorothy Lamour was filmed in a sarong diving for pearls here, and it was here that Michener found his model for “Bloody Mary”--Aggie Gray, who still oversees what is now a luxury hotel in Apia (Michener knew it as a run-down, 10-room boarding house).

If the world has been slow to notice the modern Pacific--it is often called the “new” Pacific--it is not surprising. The South Pacific was the last major region of the world to be occupied by human beings, the last to be surveyed by European explorers (Capt. James Cook conducted three expeditions in the late 1700s that were so detailed that his successors said there was little left to be done), the last to fall under Western domination and, starting with Western Samoa’s independence 25 years ago, the last to be decolonized.

Passed Into History

Now there are nine independent island-states spread across Melanesia, Polynesia and Micronesia, and the wartime names that seemed destined to live forever have passed into history. The New Hebrides have become Vanuatu, the Gilbert Islands have become Kiribati, the Ellice Islands have become Tuvalu. Ponape, Truk, Yap and Kosrae have joined together as the Federated States of Micronesia.

Independence came so quietly to the South Pacific that it attracted hardly a paragraph in the international news media. Except for Papua New Guinea, none of the new island-states had a land border across which foes could stare menacingly at each other. There was no military buildup; only three of the new states have armies. There were no tribal divisions. The deep commitment to Christianity and the highly personalized system of chieftain politics stood firm against instability and radicalization.

Also, the fact that the South Pacific was considered a “Western lake” helped to discourage incursions by outsiders and the troublesome influences of superpower meddling.

But today storm clouds are building over the South Pacific. The president of Palau was assassinated in 1985; the government of Fiji was overthrown in May; French atomic bombs are tested on Mururoa; American MX missiles roar out over the Kwajalein Missile Range (despite protests by the Marshall Islanders); nuclear submarines abound, and Japanese and Soviet fishermen continue to hunt the great whale. Libya and the Soviet Union are trying to establish themselves in the region; the French are resisting independence stirrings in New Caledonia, and growing numbers of islanders are asking why the Pacific should be anybody’s “lake” but theirs.

“You’ve got a generation coming up now that doesn’t remember the World War II association with the United States,” said Charles Lepani, a Papua New Guinean who directs the Pacific Islands Development Center at the East-West Center in Honolulu.

“These leaders are going to increasingly question U.S. policies,” Lepani went on. “In fact, they already are. They’re more interested in local and regional problems than with the interests of the East or West. You’re looking at younger, inexperienced leaders, some of them military men, who will spend shorter terms in office than did the elders. They may rule through the accumulation of power rather than through the traditional chieftain process. Taken together, these are the elements of instability, the ‘banana republic’ syndrome.”

Fiji’s conservative government was overthrown by a 38-year-old army colonel, Sitiveni Rabuka. Vanuatu, the first South Pacific nation to join the nonaligned movement, is led by 44-year-old Prime Minister Walter Lini. The president of the Federated States of Micronesia, John Haglelgram, is 38. Papua New Guinea’s prime minister, Paias Wingti, is 32.

Independent Actions

Collectively--through the 15-member South Pacific Forum, which was set up 16 years ago in Fiji--these states have declared their region a nuclear-free zone, negotiated a fishing agreement with the United States designed to stop poaching by American tuna boats and given strong backing to the Melanesian independence movement in the French overseas territory of New Caledonia.

Such independent-minded actions, reflecting a commonality of purpose that conflicts with some Western interests, would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

But the future stability of the strategically important islands, political analysts believe, will depend not so much on external relations as on the new leaders’ ability to meet the challenge of social problems shared by the entire Third World: increasing population and urbanization, growing gaps between rich and poor, unfulfilled aspirations.

What seems clear now is that the Pacific was never immune from these problems, as many Westerners thought. It was just that people chose to believe the myths instead of paying attention to the realities.

Blunt Warning

As more independent political entities are created in the years ahead--some will be born from French and American associations rather than from the Australian-New Zealand-British colonial heritage--the South Pacific is likely to become more diverse, fragmented and unpredictable, the analysts say. Given the fragile state of their subsistence economies, many of the new island-states may become more dependent on donor assistance, thus making their sovereignty increasingly difficult to defend.

If one needed a reminder that the South Pacific is in transition and that all was not well in the land Stevenson called part of “God’s sweetest works,” one needed only to look at the events board in the lobby of the nearly empty Suva Travelodge in Fiji a few weeks after the coup. The hotel manager, Peter Rigby, had not listed any daily functions and instead had used the white plastic letters to relay a message quite at odds with the South Pacific image: “Due to the prevailing situation in Fiji, we notify our guests that we cannot be responsible for their safety or property and that all people entering or residing on the hotel premises do so at their own risk.”