Author     Robert Ayson

​A week ago New Zealand’s Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta and her Australian counterpart Marise Payne issued a joint statement citing “clear evidence of severe human rights abuses” in Xinjiang. The two Foreign Ministers also lent their support to the efforts of leading western partners: “New Zealand and Australia welcome the measures announced overnight by Canada, the European Union, the United Kingdom and the United States”, their statement continued.
 
But it did not take long for the penny to drop that there were limits to this solidarity. Wellington and Canberra were not joining in on travel bans and asset freezes on specified officials and on the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps Public Security Bureau. “Australia and New Zealand welcome sanctions over Uighur abuses,” one headline read, “but impose none of their own.”

Author    Nurreddin Abdurahman

On March 25 hundreds of Tigray people and their supporters marched through Wellington to demonstrate at Parliament. They called on New Zealand to condemn the atrocities being carried out in the name of the Ethiopian government in the northern province of Tigray.

Ethiopia, an East African country of over 100 million people, a federal state peopled by multiple religions and ethnicities, stands on the brink of catastrophe. Credible reports have reached human rights NGOs and the international media of a massacre of churchgoers at Dengelat in Tigray that took place last November, and further killings in the city of Axum, in the west of the province, at about the same time. These terrible events came in the midst of an undeclared war between the central government and regional Tigray forces. Despite international disquiet, the Ethiopian government and its leader Abiy Ahmed has until now sheltered behind the tired rubric of non-interference in a sovereign country’s affairs.
​
What lies behind these events and how can further tragedies be averted?

Author    Marion Crawshaw

As the COVID numbers in PNG grow exponentially, Australia is scrambling to provide support. The support includes vaccines for frontline health workers, a large Medical Assistance Team (MAT), PPE, tents for isolation wards and a long list of other supplies.  From what we know so far, Australia will be working on the ground with the PNG response system, WHO and UNICEF.  New Zealand appears to be unaccountably absent from this picture of urgent support required for a Pacific neighbour in trouble.  
​
The alarming growth of COVID in PNG is relatively new although it might have been predicted given the very low testing numbers.  The fact that recent cases are spread right across PNG’s provinces also raises suspicions that there has been unidentified spread in case numbers for a while.  The picture looks increasingly like that of Italy a year ago, when initially small numbers of cases grew exponentially and eventually overwhelmed the health system in much of northern Italy.

Author     Marion Crawshaw

The departure of the Micronesian states from the Pacific Forum will be a tragedy for the Pacific region. The Pacific’s visibility and effectiveness on the global stage will be reduced. While individual members will continue to have agency in their own right, the Forum draws members together and amplifies their common concerns. It has done this effectively with oceans issues, climate change and fisheries.  The Micronesian countries have been at the forefront of all these issues.  The Blue Pacific concept developed by the Forum explains the connections between Pacific Island nations and tells the story of the importance of the Pacific to the outside world.  The Biketawa Declaration provided the basis for cross regional mutual support in troubled times and the Boe Declaration has built on it, presenting broad concepts of security that have resonated well beyond the Pacific.  
​
Like all multilateral organisations, the Forum is imperfect. If you go digging deep in the weeds of its work, you can lose the sense of the importance of the whole.  Yes, the meetings can be tedious but even in a zoom environment they provide opportunities to connect, maintain community and forge common understandings.  Expanding attendance, in both numbers and level, of Dialogue partners at the annual Pacific Forum meetings in the last ten years shows the increasing profile of the Pacific and the Forum, even if discussion is constant on how to make the meetings more meaningful.