Security

Asia Pacific Centre for Security Studies Conference, Honolulu

“Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism: Their Place on Pacific Island Security Agendas”

Speech given by New Zealand Ambassador for Counter-Terrorism, Ms Dell Higgie, July 2005

 

Introduction

We did not need the London bombings two weeks ago to remind us all that post 9/11 the real threat from terrorism in a number of significant parts of the globe has increased enormously. For island countries scattered across the Pacific Ocean inevitably it has also increased – after all, international terrorism is a global phenomenon – but not nearly as much as for many other areas of the world.

So it is useful to clarify, as this conference aims to do, how terrorism does - or should – feature on the security agendas of this region. In my remarks, I should like to focus on that question, and to address as well how Pacific regional organisations are responding to terrorism and the international counter-terrorism agenda. Finally I’d like to pose the question whether there is more that the international community should be doing to assist.

I’m mindful that this conference is focused on Island state security. Australia and New Zealand are, of course, part of the Pacific region and members of the Pacific Islands Forum. Reflecting the conference theme, however, and except when referring to the activities of our regional organisations, my comments will focus on the Island countries alone. I do not feel entirely comfortable commenting on my neighbours in this way and I’m glad that there are a number of people from the Pacific Islands who are going to talk in the course of the conference. As far as possible my own comments, however, draw on views that I have heard Pacific Island representatives express in the many discussions that we have had.

The Threat to Pacific Island Countries

Pacific Island countries are accustomed to thinking of themselves as remote; and most of them have not been involved in any way with any of the conflicts and enmities which have engendered terrorism or fuelled it. Intuitively, terrorism does not seem a major concern for Oceania.

Pacific Island populations (apart from Papua New Guinea’s) are extremely small; and though migration continues to affect the composition of their peoples, in many islands of many Pacific states, strangers still stand out. In small communities everybody knows everybody else’s business – there is none of the anonymity that large cities confer. Pacific Island infrastructure is modest. Though trade and tourism are important to their economies, their ports and their airports are not major hubs. They have far less traffic, and they are less spectacular targets. Intelligence and information-sharing confirm our intuitive response that the threat of terrorism to this region is low.

To acknowledge that the terrorism threat is low is not, of course, to say that Oceania is exempt from it. The Bali bombings showed us all that distance and peaceful traditions do not mean that you will not be attacked. Visitors from third countries – tourists, diplomats – may themselves constitute targets. Expanding links with the broader Asia Pacific region connect Oceania more directly with countries in which international terrorist groups are established. Terrorists, under pressure elsewhere, may move their operations or activities to regions where they perceive a lack of deterrence capability. If an attack did happen in Oceania – against a tourist facility for example – it would come at a high price for Island economies. Similarly, neither their size nor their remoteness means that Pacific Island countries escape the predations of transnational crime, or are free from internal strife – and both of these factors may increase their vulnerability to the threat of terrorism. I will return to this point later.

Pacific Security Agendas

I noted at the outset that terrorism is a global phenomenon. It requires a global response. The international community has therefore adopted a wide range of new counter-terrorism obligations which require states to adopt new legal frameworks and to put in place practical measures to strengthen their security regimes. Implementation of all these requirements is very costly. For Pacific Island countries, where the threat levels are still low, and where both financial and human resources are scarce, one can understand why this might lead to a “polite scepticism” about how high counter-terrorism should sit on their security agendas.

In 2002, however, when they met at Nasonini, Forum Leaders made it clear that counter-terrorism was a regional priority. They “underlined their commitment to the importance of global efforts to combat terrorism and to implement internationally agreed anti-terrorism measures,” and they specified a number of steps that member states should take. In a meeting with President Bush which took place here in Honolulu in October 2003, Pacific Island leaders again affirmed their wish to play a role in international counter-terrorism (although they stressed as well their shortage of resources to do so). There are a number of factors which explain why regional leaders take this position.

In the first place, as I have just noted, the global obligations the international community has put in place apply irrespective of individual or regional circumstances. They are not optional and there are penalties in failing to implement them. There are, for example, very clear consequences of non-compliance with the International Ship and Port Facility Security Code (better known as the ISPS Code) or the new ICAO measures to improve aviation security. Any country which fails to act in these areas, to put it bluntly, would find that planes would not use its airports, and ships would not use its ports. And failure to comply with the international measures against terrorist financing, for instance, can result in being listed as “non-compliant” by the Financial Action Task Force, something which is also economically damaging.

To focus simply on the fact that Pacific Island countries are obliged, pursuant to international law, to meet these counter-terrorism obligations overlooks two points, however. One is that they do accept that they are – and indeed want to be – part of the international community, and they therefore share its concerns. The other factor to bear in mind is that the counter-terrorism agenda is not somehow extraneous to their real regional security interests.

The Forum Declarations which give perhaps the most authoritative expression of regional countries’ security concerns over the last decade and a half – Honiara, Aitutaki, Biketawa and Nasonini – identify two main strands. (I leave to one side the issues relating to intervention in internal conflict which are central to the Biketawa Declaration.)

The first of these strands covers the external threats that the Island countries perceive. Most of these have to do with transnational organised crime – for example, drug trafficking, money laundering, passport fraud, and people-smuggling. They also include terrorism.

Forum Island countries regard transnational organised crime as a major issue in the region; and the linkages, including of a financial nature, between transnational crime and terrorism are internationally well established. Transnational criminals create systems and arrangements which terrorists can and do use. Equally, measures put in place to counter terrorism serve as well to deter transnational crime.

Concerns about transnational crime are not new among Forum countries. They were identified in the Honiara Declaration of 1992 and they have become more pressing since. Correspondingly, at a recent Forum meeting focused on counter-terrorism in Auckland, almost every Pacific Island delegation spoke about problems common to international crime and to terrorism. They ranked border security as their highest vulnerability. They talked about threats (about traffic in small arms, people and drugs) and about responses (the need for more training of border officials, better control of passports, and better access to immigration data). Their problems included port and airport security, and the difficulties of tracking vessels and people among remote islands in huge areas of sea. Financial Action Task Force questions were also in their minds, including because of problems encountered over the years with financial scams.

The second main strand of threats to human security identified in Forum Declarations are those which are internal to each country: problems of governance, communal relations, land use, environmental degradation, slow economic growth. They are problems that face small states with fragile economies as they navigate their way between the traditions that have shaped and guided their cultures and their modern needs. These, broadly, are the domestic equivalents to what United Nations Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, has referred to as the “soft threats” to international security.

As with the external threats to Island state security, serious failures in these areas are highly destabilising. They may also enhance the threat of terrorism, not least because disaffected and disadvantaged communities are more open to infiltration and external exploitation.

At a recent Forum meeting, Secretary General Urwin summed up the way in which these various threats, “hard” and “soft,” relate to each other and to the region’s broad security agenda.

“Internal threats to human security in the Pacific, as elsewhere, foster an environment conducive to threats from external sources. So, while efforts to address border security, terrorism and transnational crime are critical, other factors such as slow economic growth, lack of good governance, social tension, land issues, poverty, environmental degradation, food insecurity, disease and lack of access to basic social services are very much at the root of it all. Regional and national security initiatives need, then, to be grounded in an appreciation of the comprehensive nature of the things which threaten us and by extension, of the need for comprehensive responses.”

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Role of Regional Institutions

I’d like to look now at the role regional institutions are playing to help formulate the counter-terrorism response of the Pacific Island countries. I believe that they have done a great deal and that they will continue to play a vital role. The Pacific Islands Forum has taken the lead at the political level and, of course, helped to define the security agenda which I have just described. Within the Pacific there is also a range of other regional bodies including the Secretariat of the Pacific Community and those that deal with customs, immigration and police matters. They participate as observers in the Forum Regional Security Committee which meets each year to coordinate law enforcement and security issues.

At the operational level their role is crucial. They have, for example, supported the recent establishment of the Pacific Transnational Crime Coordination Centre in Fiji, with the assistance of the Australian Federal Police, as well as the establishment of Transnational Crime Units and Combined Law Agency Groups (or CLAGs) in a number of Forum Island countries. These arrangements (and the Financial Intelligence Units which a number of Island countries are also setting up) should come to make a considerable contribution to the security of the region and help not just to counter transnational crime, but also to deter terrorism. Operational links and collaboration, moreover, extend beyond Forum countries, and provide Pacific Island nations with access to sources of information and intelligence from the wider region and beyond.

All this notwithstanding, our region has fallen behind in implementing the suite of counter-terrorism obligations put in place by the international community. In recognition of this, in 2004, during the period in which New Zealand was chairing the Pacific Islands Forum, the New Zealand Prime Minister, Rt Hon Helen Clark, suggested there was a need for a stand-alone process to focus on counter-terrorism. This initiative took its point of departure from the Nasonini Declaration, and from the discussions that had taken place here in Hawaii in March 2002 at the Pacific Regional Workshop on Combating Terrorism.

The Pacific Roundtable on Counter-Terrorism, as this meeting was called, brought to Wellington key officials from the Forum countries along with observers from other partners from within and beyond the region (and representatives of regional bodies and international institutions with a role in counter-terrorist activity). The Roundtable took stock of what Forum countries were already doing to fulfil their international commitments. It took into account United Nations treaties as well as Security Council resolutions, the requirements of the Financial Action Task Force, the International Maritime Organisation’s ISPS Code on port and ship security and the new ICAO counter-terrorism measures. It discussed Pacific Island countries’ resource constraints and ways in which these might be addressed; and suggested a number of initiatives through which counter-terrorism work could be carried forward.

Discussion at the Roundtable confirmed that for the Pacific Island countries the extensive and often expensive requirements of the counter-terrorism agenda represent a considerable extra burden. They can seem hard to reconcile with the competing demands of pressing domestic issues. It seemed clear that there was a need for a consistent and continuing process with which key regional officials could engage.

In this connection, the Roundtable proposed four measures (which indeed the Pacific Islands Forum subsequently endorsed):

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• It registered support for the preparation by the Forum Secretariat of a set of implementation matrices in order to record progress in meeting counter-terrorism commitments and obligations and to identify the technical assistance that the Forum Island countries need from others in order to accomplish this task.
• It proposed the establishment of a network of central contact points - senior officials with a whole of government perspective – to help to ensure that efforts to coordinate counter-terrorist work across the region were more effective.
• It picked up the New Zealand Prime Minister’s suggestion for a Forum-wide counter-terrorism contingency-planning exercise, to enhance the ability of Forum member countries to respond to an incident.
• It suggested the creation of a Counter-Terrorism Working Group which might meet annually to allow Forum members to continue to exchange information about their approaches and their experiences, and which could link in with the Forum Regional Security Committee.

This Counter-Terrorism Working Group will help drive a regional focus on this part of the global security agenda. The Working Group held its first meeting in Auckland last month immediately before the annual meeting of the Forum Regional Security Committee. It showed that as a region we had made considerable, though not comprehensive, progress. All Pacific Island countries had notified their ISPS Code port security plans, and the Secretariat of the Pacific Community had embarked on an audit regime of these IMO requirements. Good progress had also been made towards the implementation of hold-baggage screening at airports to meet the ICAO deadline. Of the three Pacific Island countries which have been on the FATF list of non-cooperative countries or territories, two have been removed and the other has been recorded as making progress. One country reported that it had just passed legislation which would allow it to sign on to all 12 anti-terrorism conventions as well as to meet its obligations under the Security Council counter-terrorism resolutions. All of us indicated that we would continue to help the Secretariat to keep the implementation matrices up to date.

Two new publications were presented at the Working Group. A compilation of all key international counter-terrorism documents was provided to ensure easy access for Pacific policy makers to the treaties, resolutions and standards adopted by the international community. As my Prime Minister noted in its Foreword, “Ease of access to [these documents] removes at least a small constraint in the way of enhanced regional cooperation [in the campaign against terrorism].” The second publication, a counter-terrorism newsletter which New Zealand has undertaken to update regularly, will help track significant international and regional developments.

The Working Group also proposed a dialogue with the Chair of the Security Council’s Counter-Terrorism Committee in order to renew discussion of the possibility of regional reporting on Security Council obligations.

The counter-terrorism agenda is demanding for us all, and clearly in the Pacific much more remains to be done.

Five countries have so far taken up the model legislation, drafted by a Forum Experts Working Group, which deals with counter-terrorism obligations and transnational crime. The opportunity remains for others to do so.
Reporting against the Security Council resolutions remains a problem. I shall return to this point in a minute.
A planning session for the region’s counter-terrorism tabletop exercise was held shortly after the Working Group met last month. The exercise itself is scheduled for November. It might well highlight practical steps which we need to take to improve our security.
We may in time, with the assistance of the Pacific Islands Law Officers Meeting (PILOM), need to return to consider the issues of mutual legal assistance and extradition on a regional basis. Both mutual legal assistance and extradition are central to the international regimes to counter terrorism and also to deter transnational organised crime. They may not be working as well as they should.
There is, then, still some distance to go; but Forum countries have embarked on a process based around the premier regional organisation, the Pacific Islands Forum, which draws in and involves other countries and regional organisations as required and which supports continuing progress.

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Pacific Island States and the International Community

The region, then, has mobilised itself in a number of ways to improve its security against terrorism, and, as a consequence, to improve the security of the international community as a whole. What is the role of the international community, in assisting the Pacific Island states to carry out what is, in the light of their resources, a quite formidable task? Is there more the international community – and I have in mind here the major international donor countries as well as the key international organisations - could be doing?

It was helpful that representatives of the international community attended the Pacific Roundtable on Counter-Terrorism, and indicated, in the course of the debate, their willingness to provide assistance. There was one suggestion canvassed at that meeting which did elicit widespread support from Pacific Island countries, however, and that was the possibility that they might be able to report to the Security Council against their international counter-terrorism obligations on a regional basis.

The Forum Secretary General has subsequently raised this issue with the Security Council’s Counter-Terrorism Committee in New York and there has been a certain amount of discussion about it there. I think that it is fair to say that so far the prospects have not been encouraging. Nevertheless, the Chair of the Committee has indicated a willingness to have a dialogue with Pacific Island countries - and the region is very much of a mind to take her up on that. Indeed, the Working Group on Counter-Terrorism decided to invite her to attend its next meeting to discuss the ways in which Pacific countries could fulfil their obligations and to hear the region’s perspectives at first hand.

Regional reporting may seem like a hard ask, but I think that this is an important opportunity. It could help to resolve some of the issues that the Pacific Island states do have with the counter-terrorism agenda, and the way in which it was arrived at. They are sometimes tempted to suspect that it was put together without much regard for their circumstances; that it does not match the scale and nature of their systems; and that it is expensive in a number of ways that they cannot afford.

There are of course responses that can be made to these points. I have heard them put most eloquently by the Forum Secretary General. At a dinner which followed the meeting of the Counter-Terrorism Working Group, Secretary General Urwin reminded us all that international terrorism is a global phenomenon that cannot be quarantined and to which Pacific Forum countries have to respond: Oceania cannot simply shelter behind a “polite scepticism that terrorism could happen here”. At a strategic level, the region needs, he said, to accept that “international obligations are part of our regional circumstances, and they cannot be set aside as being of lesser consequence”. Within that context, however, the region can legitimately ask the wider world to establish a “more two-way process” through which it could seek an understanding of its circumstances and capacities and express the full range of its priorities.

It seems to me that there might be more than one ingredient involved in such a process:

One element might be to ensure that the discussion is comprehensive and that it does acknowledge the region’s particular security needs. It would take into account, that is, the broader set of considerations – political, economic and environmental – which bear on Island security every day, and in practical ways. I referred to these as one of the two main strands in the Forum’s security agenda at the beginning of this talk.
A second question might be whether it was possible to modulate or structure the requirements that the international counter-terrorism agenda places on them – as regional reporting might do – in a way which shows Pacific Island countries that their particular circumstances really have been considered.
A third might have to do with incentives. An interesting point was made by some Pacific Island delegates at the recent Counter-Terrorism Working Group meeting to which I have referred before. The international community has provided plenty of sticks, they said, to encourage conformity with the new measures on port security, or aviation security, to take a couple of instances. It occurred to them to wonder if the international community had ever thought of providing some carrots as well.
A final issue might be to discuss whether there are steps that the wider region and the international community might take to ensure that the threat to the Pacific Island countries from terrorism does indeed remain low.
A meeting between the Forum Island countries and the Security Council’s Counter-Terrorism Committee which addressed these elements may well assist the “two-way process” suggested by Secretary General Urwin.

Conclusion

In any case, it is clear that there are a lot of things to discuss with the Chair of the Counter-Terrorism Committee. The Pacific Island states have made counter-terrorism part of their security agenda. It is entirely relevant to a number of their longstanding concerns: in particular, they recognise that the close link between transnational crime and international terrorism threatens their interests and their safety.

Equally, there is no doubt that the requirements and obligations of the counter-terrorism agenda are unusually onerous for them. To carry them out requires sustained political will and bureaucratic commitment from the Island states. It can only be done with the assistance of the region – and of the international community whose security a safe Pacific will in turn increase. This assistance will be all the more effective if it is given in a full understanding of their broader security concerns – if, to return again to the Forum Secretary General’s words, it is “grounded in an appreciation of the comprehensive nature of the things which threaten us and, by extension, of the need for comprehensive responses.”

Thank you.

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