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NIUE: Pacific leaders have opened a summit on the tiny island nation of Niue at which they will focus on their response to the Fiji military regime's broken promise to hold elections by March next year.
The last-minute boycott of the summit by Fiji's military leader Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama was starkly illustrated by the empty chair alongside the other leaders of the 16-member Pacific Islands Forum at the colourful opening ceremony.
Bainimarama announced in Suva Monday he was pulling out of the summit, avoiding an awkward confrontation with other regional leaders, particularly his staunchest critics, Australia and New Zealand.
He had been expected to face a hostile reception over his decision last month to renege on a promise given to last year's forum summit in Tonga to hold elections to restore democracy by March 2009.
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd told reporters Tuesday the forum's leaders' retreat on Wednesday would consider its response to Fiji's "contempt for democracy" since the December 2006 military coup.
"I think this is a direct and deliberate slight and snub to the leaders of the Pacific Island countries assembled here in Niue," Rudd said of the boycott.
"The challenge for us in these meetings is to uphold and stand firmly behind that principle of democracy."
New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark said it would be up to forum leaders to decide what action to take.
But she added she was sure a report from a group of forum foreign ministers who held talks with Bainimarama's regime would be supported by leaders.
The report says political will is the only thing standing in the way of holding the elections by the March deadline.
"What I'm hearing from others who've been to Fiji is that the commodore is not just baulking at the commitment for March 2009," Clark said Tuesday.
"There is no timetable for 2009, 2010, 2012 or any other time," she said.
Bainimarama has threatened to withdraw from the forum if it continues to oppose his plans to change Fiji's electoral system before holding elections.
Leaders of the forum's 14 island nation states have been less outspoken than Clark and Rudd but outgoing chairman, Tonga's Prime Minister Feleti Sevele, said Bainimarama needed to explain his broken promise.
Sevele denied claims by Bainimarama that he had been pressured last year into giving a definite March 2009 commitment to hold elections.
"Let me place on record that the commitments that Commodore Bainimarama made at the leaders' retreat were not forced on him as some have claimed," Sevele said in a speech at the opening ceremony.
Leaders wearing matching tropical themed shirts sat on a raised stage to watch local performers wearing large green and yellow fronds perform traditional dances and songs during the opening ceremony.
On either side of the leaders' stage, wooden trellises held the vegetable root crop taro and bunches of bananas, representing some of the staple local crops of the tiny nation of fewer than 1,500 people.
Security was low-key compared with other international summits, with locals and foreign visitors walking freely around the leaders' stage as security maintained a discreet presence.
The main business of the summit will be discussed at a leaders' retreat on Wednesday. As well as Fiji, leaders are expected to discuss ways of combating soaring fuel and food prices and climate change, the central theme of this year's summit.
- AFP/yb
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