Peace Corps leave,

Region

Peace Corps leave, ambassadors arrive

By David North

The American Peace Corps will leave the Marshalls shortly, and Fiji and Tuvalu early in 1998, but, in the meantime, the US has replenished its supply of ambassadors to the Pacific islands.

Beset by budget cutbacks, the Peace Corps has decided to close down its popu lar operations in the three island nations, while keeping other projects going in nine other Pacific locations.

As widely reported, the Republican Congress and the Clinton administration disagree on the importance of anything smacking of social work, domestic as well as international; the congress abhors it, and the administration does little to defend it. So, congress decided to cut back the

already hard-pressed Peace Corps by five

percent which, when accounting for infla tion, means a real reduction of about 8 per cent.

The Peace Corps, then, through an internal process whose outlines are fuzzy, decided to drop a number of countries around the world, including the three in the Pacific.

The new Peace Corps director, Mark Gearan (formerly a White House commu nications executive), would like to keep as many Peace Corps Volunteers in the field as possible, and to keep them in as many countries as possible, a Peace Corps spokesperson told us. Then he added, "but if there is a choice between reducing the number of volunteers in the field, and the number of countries served, we have to reduce the number of places served.”

This is a strange posture for the US to take. It’s as if the ultimate goal of the Peace Corps is to provide an uplifting, useful overseas experience for as many Americans as possible (which it does), rather than seeking to create as many

friends for the US as possible among the nations of the world.

But if the Peace Corps want to max imise the number of volunteers overseas, it

clearly is more costly to run a large num ber of small operations, rather than fewer,

larger ones.

With that in mind, the decisions on

Joan Plaisted: US ambassador to the Marshall Islands

to understand than the one in Fiji. Both are very small operations, among the smallest in the world, and thus among the most expensive per volunteer.

Further, Tuvalu, with its population of about 10,000, is the least-populated nation in the world with a Peace Corps delega tion. But on the other hand, the Peace Corps was the only US presence in that country, there being no resident ambas sador and no US military involvement since World War 11.

Ironically, just as word seeped out that the Peace Corps volunteers (PCVs) were leaving Tuvalu, the Washington Pacific Report noted the Japanese announcement of a $5 million dollar assistance project, the reconstruction of the harbor of Vaitupu. The Japanese did not quite reach Tuvalu in World War 11, but they will be arriving there soon in a big way.

As for the Marshall Islands, while the 15 to 20 PCVs, all school teachers, were highly-regarded, theirs is a relatively minor US presence in that nation; the US, after all, pumps more than $40,000,000 a year into the Treasury of the Marshall Islands as the result of the Compact of Free Association (which guarantees the US that no other power will be granted military bases there.) These funds are in addition to other millions of dollars com ing to the islands of Bikini and Rongelap to repair the expensive damage done decades ago by US atomic and nuclear bombs.

But why Fiji, the second most populous nation in the islands? The place where the regional US Agency for International Development (USAID) mission was closed a couple of years ago? The nation that is so helpful to the US with overseas troop deployments and so patient when the United Nations pays the costs of the troops so slowly? (A slowness created, in part, by the slow US payments of its dues to the UN.) One possibility here is the concept of "graduation;” the notion would be that, relatively speaking, things are going well enough in Fiji so that resources could be moved to other, more needy places, like Haiti or sub-Saharan African.

But while people in the islands, in the island embassies in Washington, and in the working offices of the Peace Corps all

know about the cutbacks, the director’s office refused to confirm them to PIM in early January, on the grounds that a “poli cy review had not been completed”; so the front office would offer no rationale for the decision to get out of Fiji.

But this much is clear: with a five or an eight percent budget cut, 25 percent of the Peace Corps projects in the islands were

wiped out suggesting that Washington’s

priorities are located in other, more trou bled parts of the globe. (To underline this probability, and in a bit of totally uncon scious symbolism, the Peace Corps spokesman in Washington stumbled over the pronounciation of both Kiribati and Vanuatu in our discussion.)

It clearly is more costly to run a large number of small

operations, rather

than fewer, larger ones.

With this in mind, the decisions on Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands are easier to under stand than the one in Fiji.

There are no current plans, we gather, to reduce Peace Corps operations else where in the insular Pacific. These are the long-established projects in the Cooks, Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, Palau, Papua and New Guinea, the Solomons, Tonga, Vanuatu and Western Samoa. The Peace Corps, by law, can not operate in American flag jurisdictions like American Samoa, Guam or the Marianas, and, by policy, does not venture into other nation’s colonies, such as the French pos sessions in the Pacific.

A typical on-going Peace Corps opera tion is the one working in the Solomons.

Late last year, a new group of 26 PCVs arrived there; many of them recent college

graduates; the group included 10 married couples, two single women and four single men. About half went to work as school teachers, and the rest as community organ isers each assigned to a different village or area council. These 26 joined 70 others who had been posted there earlier; two year terms are the norm.

The 60 or so volunteers in FSM are largely working in the encouragement of fisheries and agricultural production, with some teachers and health workers as well.

In the Marshalls, according to Holly Barker, an ex-PCV now working for the RMI Embassy in Washington, the volun teer teachers play an ihteresting role in the educational system. The Americans take teaching assignments in the outer island while the incumbent teachers come to Majuro for further training. The timing is such that when the training is over, and the Marshallese teachers return to the outer islands, the volunteers are ready for either a return to the States, or for another assignment.

Barker was saddened by the impending departure of the PC Vs from the Marshalls, and compared the major benefits and the minor costs of such an operation with the much larger amounts of money spent by the American military.

Even as the US government was cut ting back on its young, sandal-clad PCVs, it was restoring the strength of its more formally-clad set of ambassadors to the islands.

For a complex of reasons, relating in one instance to surgery, in another to a thwarted Clinton administration desire to send an openly gay ambassador to Suva, and in a third to an non-Pacific congres sional quarrel, the US collection of full time, on-the-job ambassadors in the islands dwindled to just one in the middle of 1995. At that time only Richard Teare was actually on the job (in PNG). He also covers the Solomons and Vanuatu. The non-Pacific related squabble was between the Clintons and Senator Jesse Helms (R - North Carolina) who is both chair of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee and the least-liked member of the upper cham ber. Helms refused to allow any ambas sadors to be confirmed by the Senate because the Administration did not share his enthusiasm for a particular State

Department reorganization plan.

Eventually, a compromise was worked out, and that cleared the way for California millionaire and political activist, Don Gevirtz, and his wife, Marilyn, to come to Suva.

Gevirtz’s nomination was freed by Helms, as was that of career diplomat Joan M. Plaisted. Gevirtz also covers Nauru, Tonga, and Tuvalu while Plaisted does both the Marshalls and Kiribati.

Plaisted leaves a highly-charged job in Washington, as Director of the Office of Thailand and Burmese Affairs, to replace

the long-departed, and retiring David Hobbs in Majuro. (The State Department faces a quandary in Burma should it deal with the

military dictatorship so

that it can curb the drug trade in the Golden Triangle? Or should it give a cold shoulder to

one of the worst dictatorships in the world?) Speaking of cold, the new ambassador to the Marshalls grew up in frosty Minnesota. Her career has taken her to Hong Kong, to Taiwan, and to Morocco, where she was Charge d’Affaires. She has also held a series of senior posts in inter national trade; the latter work will be valu able in the Marshalls which is seeking valiantly to increase its exports. She speaks five languages in addition to English (but not Marshallese, not yet.) Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Pacific, smbassador March Fong Eu, a ranking California politician, was back at work in FSM following her eye surgery. And the third of the Associated States, Palau, was about to receive its first U.S. ambassador.

John Negroponte, who is expected to serve in Koror, will spend most of his time in Manilla, where he has been the U.S. ambassador for some time. He is a highly regarded career ambassador who once held the coveted embassy in Mexico City - a task almost always saved for political appointees. The announcement of his appointment to Palau was expected to be made shortly after the first of the year.

Negroponte speaks Spanish, vital in

Mexico City, useful in Manilla, but of aca

demic interest only in Palau, although, it, too, is a former Spanish colony. While most Americans can not name the US ambassador to Manila, much less the one assigned to Palau, Negroponte gained a measure of fame in late 1995.

More than 20 years earlier he had been recognized by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as a comer in the Department, and was taken to the Paris Peace Talks that ended the Vietnam War.

Negroponte’s role in those negotiations was brought to the viewing public’s atten tion last year in a made-for-television

Should it give a cold shoulder to one of the worst

dictatorships in

the world?

movie called “Nixon and Kissinger.” At one point in the widely-seen film the

actor playing

Kissinger turned to another actor and said, “And what do you think about that,

Negroponte?”

Among the posts

held by the real-life Negroponte between the Paris peace talks and the ambassador ship to the Phillipines was that of Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs useful background for those vis its to Koror.

Meanwhile, in a maneuver in the best Jesse Helms tradition, Palau is denying itself the services of an ambassador to the US. President Kuniwo Nakamura has appointed Masamaru Tmodrang, an educa tor, to the post. The foreign affairs com mittee of the upper house of Palau’s legis lature, the OEK, has both voted against the nomination, and refused the President’s request that the nomination be taken up on the floor of the upper house.

This standoff has existed for months.

Tmodrang, best known for his work on a dictionary of the Palauan language, has had no prior involvement in Palauan poli tics. Some of the legislators apparently feel that the new nation should send a more prominent person to Washington, and there the matter rests.

And to complete the set of US ambas sadors in the Pacific, we need to mention another circuit-rider, Josiah Beeman. assigned to New Zealand and to Western Samoa as well. ■