The Economist February 13th 2021 Asia 41bours, for instance by blasting bass-heavy
music towards the ceiling or by banging
rubber mallets against the wall to create
noises that can “shake the skull”.
Not everyone takes this advice quite as
literally as the man sent to prison in Sep-
tember for assaulting his neighbour with a
rubber mallet after a noise dispute. But
many resort to desperate measures. Kwon
Seo-woon, who suspects her upstairs
neighbours practise basketball and golf in
their apartment, says bashing the hoover
against the ceiling has worked on occa-
sion. Lee Sun, who feels tormented by the
noise of her neighbours’ children, says sheis considering putting up a notice in the lift
to shame them publicly. Mr Yoo says he has
tried playing Buddhist chants and the na-
tional anthem through the ceiling at full
volume. Though effective at shutting up
the neighbours, the approach has its draw-
backs: “It’s basically unbearable to listen to
for any length of time.”
The number of noise complaints will
probably fall along with the covid-19 case-
load. But pandemic or not, it seems certain
that there will always be a healthy market
in South Korea for thick carpets, fluffy slip-
pers and noise-cancelling headphones—if
not rubber mallets. Geopolitics in the PacificPalm-fringed fury
I
t was yetanother Zoom meeting gone
horribly wrong. The annual shindig of
the Pacific Islands Forum (pif), the main
regional organisation for the far-flung
countries of the Pacific, could not take
place in person this year, owing to co-
vid-19. Instead, its members chose a new
secretary-general in a video conference.
When a former prime minister of the Cook
Islands, Henry Puna, squeaked into the job
by a single vote, five of the forum’s 18 mem-
bers threatened to withdraw from the body
in protest.
The five dissenters are the PIF’s Micro-
nesian members: Kiribati, the Marshall Is-
lands, the Federated States of Micronesia
(fsm), Palau and Nauru. They insist that a
gentlemen’s agreement requires rotation
of the top job among the three main re-
gions of the Pacific: Melanesia, Polynesia
and Micronesia (see map). Since the outgo-
ing secretary-general was Melanesian, and
her predecessor was from Polynesia, the
Micronesian candidate, Gerald Zackios,
had widely been considered next in line.
Yet on February 4th, with Australia’s en-
couragement, the forum’s members disre-
garded the convention to award Mr Puna
the job by nine votes to eight.
The Micronesians are furious. Palau an-
nounced it was shutting its embassy in Fiji,
where the pif’s secretariat is. Then on Feb-
ruary 9th the five Micronesian countries
declared that they would “initiate the proc-
ess to formally withdraw from the Forum”,
although the final decision will be up to
national governments.
Micronesians have long feared margin-
alisation in Pacific diplomacy. The pifbe-
gan life in 1971 as the South Pacific Forum,
an organisation of Pacific countries mostlysouth of the equator. At the time most of
Micronesia, to the north, was still, in ef-
fect, an American colony (technically,
America administered the area on behalf
of the un). All five Micronesian countries
had joined the forum by 1995, but only in
1999 did it drop the word “south” from its
name.
Moreover, even by Pacific standards the
countries of Micronesia are small. All five
put together muster a population of barely
300,000, not only vastly less than pif’s gi-
ants, Australia (25m), Papua New Guinea
(8.6m) and New Zealand (4.9m), but also
considerably less than Fiji (900,000) or the
Solomon Islands (670,000).
The pifhas never been a closely inte-grated bloc. There is little trade or tourism
among its members. Their most important
ties are to the various countries of the Pa-
cific rim rather than to one another. Al-
though Jules Dumont d’Urville, a French
explorer, divided the Pacific into three re-
gions in the 1830s, contemporary econom-
ic realities have in effect reduced it to two.
The northern Pacific relies chiefly on
America as a source of aid and a place to
migrate to, whereas the south has closer
ties to Australia and New Zealand. In the
northern Pacific most flights go to Guam,
an American territory, or Hawaii, as well as
to China, Japan and Taiwan in search of
tourists. In the south they tend to connect
to Auckland, Brisbane or Sydney. Australia
and New Zealand are the biggest contrib-
utors to the pif’s budget.
Micronesia straddles this divide: the
two southernmost Micronesian countries,
Kiribati and Nauru, have strong ties to Aus-
tralia. Nauru has earned most of its foreign
exchange over the past decade by hosting a
detention centre for Australia’s unwanted
asylum-seekers. Kiribati, a country of
some 120,000 people spread across an area
of ocean bigger than India, uses the Austra-
lian dollar as its currency.
That may undermine the Micronesians’
united stance. So may geopolitics. Austra-
lia and America are both anxious about
China’s expanding influence in the Pacific.
One of the ways they hope to curb it is by
promoting Pacific unity. Guam, the North-
ern Marianas and American Samoa, Amer-
ica’s three remaining territories in the Pa-
cific (as opposed to Hawaii, a state), be-
came associate members of the Forum in- Already David Kabua, president of the
Marshall Islands, has said he would prefer
to “review” membership rather than pull
out of the Forum. A few more Zoom calls
may yet patch things up.
WELLINGTON
Micronesian countries threaten to withdraw from the Pacific Islands ForumAmerican
Samoa§ (US)KIRIBATI†Cook
Is.*
FIJI* (NZ)
Niue*
(NZ)French Polynesia*
(France)To ke l a u ‡ (NZ)TONGA*TUVALU*
Wallis &
Futuna§
(France)SAMOA*New
Caledonia*
(France)PAPUA
NEW
GUINEA*AUSTRALIA*NEW ZEALAND*VANUATU*SOLOMON
IS.*PALAU†MARSHALL IS.†FEDERATED STATES
OF MICRONESIA†Guam§ (US)Northern Hawaii (US)
Mariana Is.§
(US)NAURU† EquatorPACI F I C
OCEANPACI F I C
OCEANP o
l y
n e
s i
aM e
l a
n e
s i aM i c r o n
e s
i aAucklandSydneyBrisbanePacific Islands Forum
*Members
† Withdrawing members
‡ Associate member
§ Observers