Micronesia in the news, or How useful it is to be useless!

[randy_byers]

So Palau (widely called Belau in Micronesia) has agreed to take the 17 Uighurs from Gitmo in exchange for $200 million. The part of the story that is striking to me is that apparently nobody else has been willing to take the Uighurs, because the PRC wants them back and has been pressuring other countries not to take them. Why was Palau willing to buck the PRC? Because they don't recognize the PRC. Palau recognizes Taiwan instead. Why? Because Taiwan has invested money in Palau (and elsewhere in Micronesia, including Yap to some extent).

This is like the other shoe dropping to me, because my brother and I have often wondered why Taiwan paid so much attention (and so much money) to Micronesia. The answer would seem to be because Taiwan needs allies wherever it can find them, and the Micronesian nations are unimportant enough that the PRC has ignored them up till now. And so Palau is able to solve one of Obama's big Gitmo headaches. Never saw that coming!

Just as a side note, Japan invests in Micronesia too, but they have a historical colonial relationship with the islands that seems to account for it. Well, that and it's a source of high-grade tuna.

Comments

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Makes me wonder how the FSM's and Yap's laws compare to Palau's. Makes me think of Dave -- the diver I knew on Yap whose death I recently wrote about. He had his own diveshop, Beyond the Reef, but he was married to a Yapese woman and would only hire Yapese to work for him. (My nephew asked if he could work for him one summer and was told no.) He often said that he kept his mouth shut about things that could potentially affect his business (like dredging on the reef that muddied the water in prime dive areas), because the Yapese didn't want to hear his opinion. Still, he loved it out there. Then again he chose to be there, unlike the Uighurs.

Like Doug said, it would undoubtedly have been better to settle them somewhere like the US that had a community of Uighurs.