Pacific state turns back to neighbor after cosying up with China, Russia
AUCKLAND -- A New Zealand naval ship will be deployed to Fiji for six months in May to help local forces patrol the 1.3 million square kilometer exclusive economic zone that has been plagued by illegal fishing and drug trafficking.
New Zealand Defence Minister Gerry Brownlee and his Fiji counterpart Inoke Kubuabola reached a deal on April 6 to base HMNZS Hawea in the capital Suva to help struggling local forces.
Fiji's navy, already under-funded, has been reduced to a fleet of two after a patrol boat was wrecked last year. This has hampered policing in the EEZ. Earlier this month, Lieutenant-Colonel Jofiliti Talemaibau told a parliamentary committee that the armed forces lacked the equipment and capability to fully monitor the seas.
There is a lack of assets and platforms to assist us to stay longer at sea," Talemaibau said. "[The military] will rely on planned maritime surveillance patrols offered by our defense partners such as New Zealand, Australia, France and the U.S."
HMNZS Hawea, a New Zealand navy patrol boat passes its multi-role big sister Canterbury, both of whom shared diplomatic missions in Fiji.
The deployment not only provides Fiji with the presence of another ship, but could also help with the training of naval crews. The deal also marks a further warming of ties between the two countries after New Zealand sent generous aid to Fiji in the wake of Cyclone Winston. The storm in February last year killed 44 people.
In one of its largest peace-time deployments, New Zealand sent combat engineers and medics, as well as the 9,000-ton multi-role vessel HMNZS Canterbury with supplies, offering disaster relief and helping to rebuild villages after the cyclone.
By contrast, China and Russia failed to deliver much help post-disaster despite Fiji trying to build closer ties with the two superpowers. China provided mainly tents at the time, attracting political and social media criticism.
Russia did not offer any aid at all, despite closer military ties between it and Fiji. Just before the disaster hit, Russia gave Fiji around $9 million in light arms and combat kit. A second shipment of arms was expected around the time of Cyclone Winston but in fact, never arrived.
On the bridge of inshore patrol boat HMNZS Hawea The new deal with New Zealand sees Fiji returning to its close neighbor for help. Relations between Fiji and New Zealand and Australia had been frosty after the larger neighbors suspended military cooperation in 2006 following a coup that installed Voreqe Bainimarama as Prime Minister of the Pacific island state. Military cooperation only resumed in 2014.
Steven Ratuva, a Fiji-born professor at the University of Canterbury's Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, said: "It's a way of sharing scarce resources in the area of security to police the vast Fijian maritime territory; Fiji does not have the capability to do it on its own."
New Zealand-based security consultant Paul Buchanan, who works for risk-assessment consultancy 36th Parallel Assessments, says the deal is mutually beneficial. New Zealand could recruit naval crews in Fiji, positions it finds hard to fill back home. "Basing the Hawea up there gives both New Zealand and Fijian sailors the operational experience needed to conduct blue-water operations," Buchanan said.
Dangerous waters
There has been a rise in poaching, people- and drug-smuggling, crimes such as murders and slavery in the Pacific Oceans. Chinese, Taiwanese and Russian vessels have been implicated in some of these crimes but their authorities seldom acted.
One of Australia's Pacific patrol boats gifted to the Solomon Islands moored near Bougainville during the civil war.
Shipments of cocaine from South America and methamphetamine chemicals from China have increasingly been found in Fiji and neighboring Tonga from where they are usually shipped to Australia and New Zealand.
However, Fiji's capability of patrolling the area was dealt a blow last year when a patrol boat ran aground. Bainimarama, who used to command the navy, ordered the abandonment of the ship last August after failed attempts at recovery.
"The grounding also demonstrates some basic incompetence at the officer level, so establishing a training relationship with the (New Zealand Navy) might be helpful," Buchanan said.
The navy has also been starved of government funding, which had been diverted to providing equipment for the larger army as part of Bainimarama's foreign policy to maintain a U.N. peacekeeping role. Government spending on the military has been an issue of contention, with residents saying that the money would have been better spent on education and health.
Nonetheless, Bainimarama has declared stronger global ocean protection a key Fijian foreign policy, ahead of the first-ever U.N. Ocean Conference in June. Bainimarama says he wants action "to stave off disaster, to save our oceans for ourselves and all humanity and then to move from surviving to thriving."
Australia has engineered a program that most of the South Pacific's naval operations are based on and provided 22 Pacific Class patrol boats from 1987 to 1997 to the island nations. These were occasionally misused, such as when Papua New Guinea deployed them in Bougainville during a civil war. In 2000, the Solomon Islands boat was seized by militants and used to shell rival villages. Fiji and Tongan patrol boats had also briefly clashed over possession of Tonga's Minerva Reef.
But these boats that have reached the end of their service lives are now being replaced. Australia is spending 243 million Australian dollars ($182 million) to build 19 vessels for 12 Pacific island nations, targeted for delivery between 2018 and 2023.
The U.S., China and Indonesia also occasionally run naval patrols through the South Pacific over growing concerns that illegal Vietnamese boats were poaching sea cucumbers.
New Zealand, too, has upped its game. It recently signed a contract for its biggest ship with South Korea's Hyundai Heavy Industries. The 24,000 ton fleet tanker, to be named HMNZS Aotearoa (or "long white cloud," the country's indigenous name) and costing 493 million New Zealand dollars ($343 million), will operate in the Ross Sea, claimed by New Zealand.
