Dialogue partners were disinvited from the PIF forum this week as the organization wrestles with internal divisions. But U.S. Vice President Harris got to speak virtually to the forum anyway.
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Last week a rift opened up within the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) during a virtual meeting to elect a new secretary general. Former Cook Islands prime minister, Henry Puna, was elected to lead the region’s premier multilateral body by just one vote. However, his election has soured many of PIF’s Micronesian states, which feel that the other countries have reneged on a convention that should have seen a Micronesian lead the forum for the next six years.
Micronesian states have asserted that there was an understood but not codified agreement that the leadership of the forum would rotate through the region’s three sub-groups: Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia. Australia and New Zealand would not seek the position. After six years of the PIF being led by Papua New Guinea’s Dame Meg Taylor, the convention should have seen Micronesia’s candidate, the Marshall Islands ambassador to the United States, Gerald Zackios, taking on the role.