Tongans face the trials of modern age

By HUGH LARACY*

In the past few years the Kingdom of Tonga has featured prominently in news reports as a rather sad joke.

There, where political authority is dependent on inherited rank rather than on talent and achievement, criticism of the Government has been officially deemed to smack of disloyalty to the nation and to its traditions.

There, in a reversal of noblesse oblige, the favoured few blatantly enjoy privileges on behalf of the unblessed many.

This is an arrangement ready-made to support an administrative system that seems to be reconciled to charges of corruption, cronyism and inefficiency, yet which is putatively sanctioned by "faka Tonga" (indigenous custom).

Hence, the indignant opposition of the oligarchy to the pro-democracy movement and the fiasco over the banning of the newspaper Taimio Tonga.

The reasons for this quaint state of affairs are deep-seated but readily discernible.

The main one is that the fullness of power resides with Taufa'ahau IV (the king since 1965) and that he exercises it in association with a small class of hereditary nobles and their vexillaries.

None of these people is accountable to the 130,000 commoners who tenant their lands and who supply food for feasts - and who constitute the bulk of the population. Thus it is that wild notions (like storing nuclear waste) and misguided policies (like selling passports and appointing a court jester) can be countenanced without embarrassment.

Sadly, there was a time when things were much different, when Tonga could be looked to for setting worthy examples rather than for offering cautionary tales. Thus, Taufa'ahau I, commonly known as King George I, unified Tonga under his rule in 1852.

Well before Italy (in 1870) and Germany (in 1871) were fashioned from collections of principalities into nation states, Tonga had shown the way.

Then, in his law code of 1862, King George not only freed commoners from serfdom and curbed the power of the chiefs, but made education compulsory for all children.

That was eight years ahead of England, and 15 years before it became so in New Zealand.

In 1875 he enacted a written constitution which entrenched "freedom of speech and newspaper for ever" (section 7). By such means and by international diplomacy the king (who lived until 1893) worked successfully to ensure that Tonga, alone among the Pacific Islands, maintained its political independence.

It also prospered. In 1909 one commentator calculated that with an annual disposable income of £36 a head, "the Tongans are the richest people in the world".

Another high point was the reign of Queen Salote, from 1918 to 1965. She was George's great-great-granddaughter and the mother of the present king. She charmed the world with her graciousness and presided over a renaissance of Tongan culture.

The problems that have beset Tonga since Salote's time, and especially during the past 20 years, derive in large measure from the ubiquitously pervasive and impersonal tide of modernisation.

That is not a phenomenon unique to Tonga. But the attendant difficulties there have been exacerbated by the unwillingness of the ruling group to adapt, to curb its unearned advantages for the sake of the larger common good.

Instead, it seeks to repress criticism and probably owes its survival, together with Tonga's present social stability, less to its merits than to the fact that about 50 per cent of all Tongans have chosen to live overseas to better themselves.

Yet Tonga's own history offers plentiful precedent for challenge and change rather than for a passive attachment to an ossified and inequitable status quo that shelters under the mantle of the 'faka Tonga'. The Tongan experience has not been static.

For instance, traditions record the assassinations of several Tui Tonga, or sacred high chiefs, while even the revered King George spilled blood on his way to power. More benignly, and more reassuringly, the reforms he instituted amounted to a thorough and enduring social revolution.

Despite a resurgence of factionalism in the 1880s and again in the 1920s, these measures preserved the integrity of the Tongan nation.

That precious legacy of responding flexibly to shifting circumstances now appears to be challenged less by the pro-democracy advocates than by their critics. The latter seem to assume that the citizenry cannot be trusted to act responsibly or patriotically.

Besides the possible advantages of reflecting on history, there is another salutary lesson to be drawn from the Tongan case.

It is that democracy, despite the often-parroted objection that it is a foreign or colonial invention and is inappropriate for a given culture or regime, remains an invaluable and generally applicable principle of government.

For democracy enjoins the acceptance of public accountability on those in power. It does not sit easily with conveniently rationalised exemptions from normal standards of best practice.

Accordingly, the critics of democracy tend, not surprisingly, to be found among those with sectional interests to preserve, and who also benefit from its absence. Sadly, this unhealthy correlation occurs, and severely so, not only in Tonga but in various other parts of the Pacific, and beyond.

What, then, is the prognosis? My guess is this: since Tongans are a relatively well-educated people with a strong sense of national identity, mounting internal demands and external pressures will lead to the introduction of a more inclusive system of government within five years, and that respect for the monarchy will survive any reduction of the oligarchy's entitlements.

Or is that being unduly optimistic? After all, it is difficult to understand how anyone with a magnanimous appreciation of the "faka Tonga" could support legislation that might increase public frustration.

Yet that is what the proposed amendment to the constitution abolishing judicial review is likely to do.

Meanwhile, what is one to say to those who claim to resent any criticism from New Zealand on such matters as an unwarranted intrusion?

The answer is clear, as is the evidence. Given the close links of friendship and kinship between the two countries and the generosity of New Zealand assistance to Tonga, and the importance of not compromising our overall credibility on matters of human rights, any criticism is meant to be helpful, not hostile.

It should be considered carefully, for the consequences of rejecting it may not be any kind of joke.

* Hugh Laracy is an associate professor of history at Auckland University.