KEY POINTS:
Golden sands were stained with blood in East Timor this year and though none was spilled in Fiji, that country suffered yet another coup.
The French Polynesian government fell in a no confidence motion, riots in Tonga and Solomon Islands killed people and hurt fragile economies, while tribal
warfare with high-tech weapons broke out in Papua New Guinea.
For all that the region is no basket case, as each country has unique problems that can be solved, Pacific Cooperation Foundation head Vince McBride said.
"I think while we cannot deny there are problems and there is a lot of work to be done...making blanket comments about the region as a whole is not helpful."
Waikato University anthropology programme director Mike Goldsmith was also optimistic.
"While the Pacific has enormous problems they're not on the scale on the problems we see in Africa."
He said there was a tendency to see the Pacific as falling into chaos as countries struggled with independence. But their economies have risen and fallen.
"Samoa and Tonga were seen as basket cases a while ago, and then they came back into favour because they showed some growth and development and were relatively peaceful and prosperous."
And Pacific politics follow developments within society, as they did anywhere in the world.
"I certainly don't have a pessimistic view of democracy in the Pacific. It always needs to take into account local culture and local culture inevitably shapes how democracy turns out," he said.
"I think there are enough people who want democracy for us not to take the view that democracy is doomed in the Pacific. It's difficult to implement almost anywhere, and it's difficult to implement in situations where people are facing real economic difficulties."
In Fiji democracy would continue to struggle while such a strong military continued to exist, but Dr Goldsmith said another coup was not the end of the world.
"Fiji has suffered economically from the events of 1987 and 2000 and so on, but always seems to be able to pick itself back up," he said.
"It is a dramatic event... there is also an ability to recover. Certainly they've managed it in the past."
Tonga was struggling with an internal move towards democracy while countries like East Timor and French Polynesia suffered from factionalism.
While each of those countries had specific problems, a commonality they shared with Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands was a large population of young unemployed men with nothing to do.
"(They have a) growing population of youth without too many prospects, unemployed, able to be drawn into events easily motivated by existing prejudices in society," Dr Goldsmith said.
Another problem was governance, as Foreign Minister Winston Peters pointed out in a recent speech.
"Weaknesses in governance, development and security manifest themselves in many ways -- the incidence of drugs, small arms proliferation, organised crime, people and goods smuggling, illegal fishing and compromised sovereignty."
He said an example of this was the number of modern weapons that had made their way into the hands of those who should not have them.
In Papua New Guinea tribes were fighting with high tech guns instead of traditional spears, and in East Timor whole stores of military weapons disappeared only to be later used against security forces.
New Zealand put aid dollars into trying to support peace and the future of Pacific countries, and Mr Peters said military support had helped in many of the trouble spots.
"Across our region development assistance is an increasingly important part of the diplomatic toolbox. In 2006-07 New Zealand via NZAID has committed $166.6 million to address key Pacific development challenges."
Australia spent considerable sums in the Pacific and other players such as the European Union, China, Japan and the United States were paying greater interest.
The World Bank believed countries such as Australia and New Zealand need to do more.
Senior World Bank economist this year Dr Manjula Luthria visited New Zealand to discuss her report, which advocated labour mobility as a solution to Pacific problems of isolation and limited opportunities.
She said Pacific countries should be able to treat their people as exports and remittances as income.
New Zealand has agreed to a scheme to allow in seasonal workers, but Australia was not moving on the issue.
The region has on occasions come together to solve problems. The Pacific Islands Forum recently damped down a threat by the Solomon Islands government to get rid of the Regional Assistance Mission which is keeping the peace there.
Whether such institutions, and neighbours like New Zealand, can make a difference in the years to come is yet to be seen.
- NZPA
