By Gwynne Dyer, ContributorIT WAS romantics like Paul Gauguin who seduced the world into believing that tropical islands are palm-fringed paradises where people are nicer and more innocent than elsewhere, but they did have help from the 'small is beautiful' crowd. Surely, they murmured, much of the ugliness and cruelty of mass societies comes from their sheer scale. So let us consider a few small islands.
Start with the Maldives: 1,190 low-lying coral atolls in the Indian Ocean, with about 300,000 people scattered around 200 inhabited islands. President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who has been in power for 25 years, wants another term, but young Maldivians have decided they've had enough. In two nights of violence on the weekend of September 20-21, mobs of youths burned the Election Commission's office, the High Court, and several police stations in Male, the capital.
Gayoom has done a good job of raising living standards in the Maldives: 10 per cent annual growth for the past 20 years. An average income now nearing $2,000 a year is not bad for a chain of barren atolls which lives exclusively off tourism, fishing and trade. The price, however, has been arbitrary arrests and long jail sentences for government critics. So the younger generation, having benefited from the education their parents could never afford, has turned against the all-powerful patriarch who has outlived his usefulness. Just like anywhere else.
FIRST OUTBURST
Gayoom will win this month's referendum and get his sixth term: this is just the first outburst of resistance in the Maldives. Things have gone much further in the Solomon Islands, 4,000 miles (6,000 km) to the east, where a five-year civil war between the Isatabu, the dominant population of the main island, Guadalcanal, and immigrants from the neighbouring island of Malaita has already devastated the country. Hundreds of people have been killed in fighting between rival militias, schools are shut, there is little water or electricity, and export earnings have fallen 80 per cent in five years.
A multinational force led by Australian troops arrived in the Solomons in late July, but it has not yet managed to disarm the militias. Two weeks ago, the shaky truce was threatened when Selwyn Sake, commander of the Isatabu militia for the capital, Honiara, was found dead and mutilated in his car. The 465,000 people of the Solomons speak 70 different languages, and the prospects for a lasting peace deal must be reckoned as slim.
Go north-east just a few hundred miles (kilometres) to the tiny, lonely island of Nauru, and the ethnic complexity diminishes: most of Nauru's 12,000 inhabitants at least speak the same language. But after European traders introduced guns and alcohol in the 19th century, there was a 10-year war among the island's 12 major clans - and the clans are still at war, in a way, though these days they play the game out through more or less democratic politics. The resulting chaos is so great that Nauru is now on its fifth president since January.
It's all a long way from paradise, but it's not surprising. Small island countries aren't nicer than other places; they're just smaller. The people are the same, too, except that there's no way to get away from them.
As another Frenchman remarked - Jean-Paul Sartre, this time - hell is other people.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
