WASHINGTON, May 7: US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice kicked off an unprecedented meeting of Pacific leaders here on Monday by warning against the danger of island “strongmen” undermining democracy in their vast region.

Rice lashed out in particular at the military in Fiji, which toppled an elected government in December and has recently appeared to back away from a promised timetable for a return to democratic rule.

“The United States is deeply concerned about the unlawful overthrow of the freely elected government in Fiji,” Rice told leaders and senior officials from 20 Pacific nations and territories, including a representative from Fiji.

“The Pacific cannot evolve into an area where strongmen unilaterally decide the fates of their countries and destabilize the democratic foundations of their neighbors,” Rice said.

She was addressing the opening session of the first meeting in Washington of the triennial Pacific Islands Conference, a grouping of 12 Pacific states and eight territories, including the US state of Hawaii and two French dependencies.

President Kessai Note of the Marshall Islands, current chairman of the group, said the two-day meeting was the highest level gathering of Pacific leaders ever held in the US capital.

The US government has declared 2007 “The Year of the Pacific” as part of an effort to boost US engagement in a strategic region that China has been aggressively courting with aid and diplomatic attention.

US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Glyn Davies told a recent congressional hearing that Washington had largely neglected the Pacific region for over a decade in terms of its diplomacy and development aid, but was now taking steps to engage the region.“We believe it is crucial to keep this vast, strategic region and its mostly small, sometimes struggling states firmly on our side,” he said.

“Maintaining security and stability in the Pacific region is crucial to the interests of every country and every territory represented in this room, including the United States,” Rice added in her remarks.

But a series of initiatives to be unveiled by the State Department during this week's meetings focused mostly on public relations and democracy promotion projects rather than expanded aid.

These include the creation of a new regional office in Fiji representing the State Department's “public diplomacy” bureau, created two years ago to counter growing anti-Americanism in the wake of the Iraq war.

Rice said the US also planned to explore ways to ensure that Pacific nations benefit economically from construction projects related to the relocation of 8,000 US troops from Okinawa, Japan, to Guam.

Officials from the office of the US Trade Representative were also due to meet with the Pacific leaders to expand duty-free imports into the United States of Pacific island products.

But Kote of the Marshall Islands called for additional US help in coping with the effects of climate change, which he said represented a “major security issue” for low-lying nations threatened by rising seas.

While the administration of President George W. Bush has long taken an sceptic view of the more dire global warming scenarios, Kote said his region could not afford to be complacent.

“Sea level change is no longer a matter of conjecture, but a reality,” he said.—AFP