According to a recent article in Australia’s Age Newspaper, the small island nations of the South
Pacific are home to a growing drug production problem.
According to Chris Ellison, a politician from Australia, the islands of the South Pacific are an ideal place for criminal syndicates to take advantage of the weak governments in the region.
“Because it is such a vast area, with many small nations and thousands of small islands, it is just an ideal place for transnational criminal syndicates to operate and base their drugs operations,” said Ellison.
While Ellison’s remarks that amphetemine use was Australia’s single largest challenge were obviously a little exagerated, the revelations of the use of south Pacific island nations as a hub for the production of drugs is quite interesting.
Besides the possible uses of the money garnered from the drug trade, the news of crime syndicates using the south Pacific as a base of drug operations for entering larger markets such as Australia fits in with other wider developments in international crime and politics.
The growing presence of Chinese crime syndicates accross the Pacific from PNG through to Fiji has been widely noticed by local authorities, governments and even military strategists who claim China is destabilising the region by encouraging orgainsed crime to enter the area and even attempting to gain a strategic foothold in the Great Game for Taiwan.
It is widely accepted that China is able to exercise a significant amount of control over both its criminal and non-criminal diaspora. By encouraging Chinese crime syndicates to move into the Pacific, China effectively creates political leverage for itself in that region as local governments are forced to turn to the Chinese government for help in controlling their own local crime situation.
Of course those local governments will get more Chinese help if they agree to political concessions. Many believe that the concessions asked for will be in the form of military concessions, which could bolster China’s defences against a US reprisal, should anything happen with the Taiwan situation.
“That pattern is now spreading throughout the Pacific Islands. Once the numbers increase, so does China’s leverage, for China will defend them. It is in China’s interests that they are here,” says Ron Corcombe, an Emeritus Professor with the University of the South Pacific.
With the interests of the syndicates now turning to drug smuggling, a new dimension is added to the geo strategic machinations of the Pacific islands and their larger neighbours.
With governments, it seems they don’t really want drugs in their own backyards, but if there are political considerations, they are happy for them to proliferate in other’s backyards.
