In response to the rightist coup, military takeover, and hostage crisis in Fiji, Canberra and Wellington have threatened that country with trade sanctions and political isolation. By proclaiming their goal to be "restoration of democracy" in Fiji, the capitalist rulers in Australia and New Zealand don't mean returning the ousted Labour-led government and its limited reforms that benefited working people. They mean a stable regime that will protect their profiteering interests, including by suppressing democratic and union rights.

This imperial gunboat diplomacy follows the Australian-led military intervention in East Timor in late 1999 and the use of Australian and New Zealand "peacekeeping" troops since 1998 to try to defuse a movement on the island of Bougainville for independence from Papua New Guinea. Canberra and Wellington view with increasing alarm what they term "the arc of instability" in the region. This extends through the Indonesian archipelago from Aceh in the west through East Timor to West Papua, and on through Papua New Guinea, Bougainville, and the Solomons to Fiji in the east.

This social and political instability is not caused by "ethnic tensions," although the legacy of divisions from the colonial era often do play a part. Rather this is the logic of the world capitalist system's disorder unfolding in one of the least developed parts of the semicolonial world. Two decades of economic crisis have shattered the stability of the most fragile capitalist regimes and destabilized imperialist domination and exploitation there.

Australian and New Zealand capitalism have profited mightily from these countries. For them, much is at stake. But for us--working people from Australia to Fiji, from New Zealand to the Solomons--our common interests lie in rejecting all imperialist interference in the region.

Working people should oppose the campaign for trade bans on Fiji by the union officialdom in Australia and New Zealand. As Australian Council of Trade Unions officials have made clear, their bans are tied to calls for more intervention by the Australian government. They echo the employers in repeating the chauvinist "white man's burden" argument that was used to justify colonialism. But the last thing the working people of Fiji need is intervention from governments that represent those who have plundered them.

The obligation of the labor movement in Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere is to give unstinting solidarity to our fellow toilers in these countries in their struggles for national sovereignty, labor, land, and national rights--without giving an inch to the imperial chauvinism of our exploiters at home. This also means joining in union and social struggles against our employers and their government--the common enemy of working people and the oppressed throughout the Pacific.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home