Biden heading to South Pacific… perhaps
Bainimarama into oblivion
Wednesday 15 February 2023
Want a quiet time - then avoid Rarotonga this coming September.
Not only will the talkfest Pacific Forum be there, filling the better hotels and Air B&Bs, but now word is that United States President Joe Biden and his entire office and US media are going to visit. Probably for less than a day.
Air Force One landing at Rarotonga will surely be a sight, although plane spotters are likely to reckon the big 747 will land at Faaa, in French Polynesia, and the Americans will use smaller planes to ferry into the white runway. Of course no one will confirm or deny, but expect a US aircraft carrier battle group to be patrolling in the Atiu-Mangaia-Rarotonga triangle.
The notion that Biden will attend the forum has come out of the just finished Micronesian Presidents Summit in Pohnpei. Buried in the communique that followed, Micronesian President David Panuelo said they discussed the value of Biden visiting the Pacific sometime in the near future.
“The first U.S.-Pacific Islands Summit in September 2022 was an unambiguous success,” Panuelo said, referring to the gathering in Washington DC.
“It will be of instrumental importance for the Pacific to ensure the United States continues to re-engage, as thoroughly as possible, with our Blue Pacific Continent.’
Panuelo said there was soon to be a leaders retreat in Nadi, Fiji, and he would raise the matter there: “I believe it will be in the Pacific’s interest for us to invite President Biden to visit us, in the same manner where we visited him in Washington, DC, last September.”
That puts it all on Rarotonga….
No serving United States president has ever visited the independent Pacific.
Rarotonga came close in 2012 with a day visit by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton - attending the Pacific Forum.
In 1989 Vice President Dan Quayle stopped over at Tafuna in American Samoa. The visit is remembered for his brief remarks to around 2000 mainly children who greeted him: “You all look like happy campers. Happy campers you are, happy campers you have been and happy campers you will always be.”
The region will be hoping for a bit more than that from Biden.
Meanwhile…
Reported yesterday on Fiji Opposition Leader Voreqe Bainimarama’s outrageous speech in Parliament.
There were consequences two days later. The new Speaker, Naiqama Lalabalavu, who should have acted to stop the speech as it was given, has not referred Bainimarama to parliament’s Privileges Committee. They have been given until Friday to decide what to do with former prime minister Bainimarama. My bet is that he will be kicked out of parliament as a member, effectively ending the Fiji First Party.
Should Bainimarama find himself unemployed, it will create an odd regional pairing. Samoa’s recently defeated prime minister, Tuila’epa Salele, was also tossed out of his assembly. The two old irritable men could not stand each other.
Later in the day, former minister of most things and leader of the SK Clan, Aiyez Sayed-Khaiyum, was back before police explaining his various abuses of office. Yesterday Bainimarama was with him.
Bainimarama appeals to Fiji soldiers
Background to Bainimarama’s 2006 coup
Another coup - this without ammunition
I came out of the hotel early one morning to walk down the road to pick up newspapers and as I did truck loads of soldiers pulled up by the old Government Buildings. Other soldiers took over Treasury and the Police headquarters. Outside of Suva at another police base a bigger contingent went in to get the arms they believed the police had.
In other substack postings…
The meeting amounted to the Mau’s first recognition of New Zealand rule in two years, the reporter wrote; ‘The neat village amid the coconut palms was crowded by men wearing the blue lavalava with its band of white braid, and it was difficult to imagine that they had so recently been fugitives…. The large fale, a thatched, open-sided house, was filled with grave chiefs, mainly on the sunny side of life, to the number of 100. Faumuina, of giant proportions, who is the leader of the Mau, and the Aged Tuima-alii-Fano, sat cross-legged in the front. Young Tamasese, the high chief nominal head of the Mau, had no special prominence. This handsome youth, who wants his job at the bread counter back again after the trouble is over, sat there, not as a personality, but as a title.’
At The Pacific Newsroom among the stories we linked too…
Air Vanuatu making hefty losses
Pacific Games stadium in Solomon Islands looking good
West Papuan national liberation rebel group says kidnapped New Zealand pilot is safe
Crew's lucky escape as 50 year old fishing boat sinks off Majuro
Aotearoa New Zealand academic Jon Fraenkel has published his preliminary Fiji’s 2022 Election: The Defeat of the Politics of Fear.