The Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands’ (CNMI) economic struggles are not just a local issue, but a matter of strategic importance to American operations in the Indo-Pacific, say senior US military leaders.

In a letter, dated 25 February 2026, Admiral Samuel Paparo, commander of United States Indo-Pacific Command, said he shared concerns raised by CNMI leaders about worsening economic conditions and their broader implications.

“The security and stability of the CNMI are of vital strategic importance,” Paparo wrote, warning that the islands’ civilian infrastructure and community wellbeing were “inextricably linked” to the US military’s ability to operate in the region.

• READ MORE: Other US military in the Pacific reports

He said he had directed staff to analyse proposals put forward by CNMI officials, but noted the requested federal actions fall outside his authority.

Paparo said he would elevate the issues to agencies including State, Commerce, Transportation and Homeland Security.

Paparo also backed calls for direct engagement with the White House, saying he supported “an executive-level dialogue with the Administration” and was prepared to take part.

“We are committed to the security and prosperity of the CNMI,” he said.

Expanding US presence
At the same time, military officials say an expanding US presence across the Marianas could provide longer-term economic opportunities — though not an immediate fix.

Speaking at a Saipan Chamber of Commerce forum on March 11, Rear-Admiral Brett Meitus of Joint Region Marianas said more than US$500 million in projects were underway, with additional development planned, particularly on Tinian.

“It’s going to happen over the course of several years . . .  we just don’t have the capacity to do it all at once,” he said.

Meitus said the military was trying to move beyond a short-term construction surge toward a longer cycle of “build, sustain, and operate,” aimed at creating ongoing economic activity.

“Just as important is how we sustain it . . .  making sure that what we build looks like it should a year, two years, five years, ten years from now,” he said.

He said future operations-including exercises and deployments-are expected to bring spending into the local economy as visiting personnel stay in hotels and patronise businesses.

“When forces come in . . .  they can spend money on the local economy,” he said.

Potential benefits
Meitus also pointed to potential benefits including expanded land leases, increased exercises, more port visits and service member tourism, while acknowledging that coordination across different military branches is still evolving.

“We’re working hard to get our arms around exactly how we want to do it,” he said.

He added that the goal is to move from a project-driven boost to more sustained participation by local businesses, though he acknowledged it would not fully address the CNMI’s economic challenges.

Both leaders emphasised the need for continued engagement with federal partners, framing the CNMI’s economic outlook as closely tied to US strategic interests in the Indo-Pacific.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Former US President Barack Obama has taken to social media to praise Harvard’s decision to stand up for academic freedom by rebuffing the Trump administration’s demands.

“Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions — rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking concrete steps to make sure all students at Harvard can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and mutual respect,” Obama wrote in a post on X.

He called on other universities to follow the lead.

• READ MORE: Harvard will fight Trump’s demands
• Trump pauses $2.2 billion in funding after Harvard vows to resist demands
• The Trump administration’s updated demands to Harvard
• Harvard’s April 14 letter refusing the Trump administrations’s demands

Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions – rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking concrete steps to make sure all students at Harvard can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and… https://t.co/gAu9UUqgjF

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) April 15, 2025

Harvard will not comply with the Trump administration’s demands to dismantle its diversity programming, limit student protests over Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, and submit to far-reaching federal audits in exchange for its federal funding, university president Alan M. Garber ’76 announced yesterday afternoon.

“No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” he wrote, reports the university’s Harvard Crimson news team.

The announcement comes two weeks after three federal agencies announced a review into roughly $9 billion in Harvard’s federal funding and days after the Trump administration sent its initial demands, which included dismantling diversity programming, banning masks, and committing to “full cooperation” with the Department of Homeland Security.

Within hours of the announcement to reject the White House demands, the Trump administration paused $2.2 billion in multi-year grants and $60 million in multi-year contracts to Harvard in a dramatic escalation in its crusade against the university.

More focused demands
On Friday, the Trump administration had delivered a longer and more focused set of demands than the ones they had shared two weeks earlier.

It asked Harvard to “derecognise” pro-Palestine student groups, audit its academic programmes for viewpoint diversity, and expel students involved in an altercation at a 2023 pro-Palestine protest on the Harvard Business School campus.

It also asked Harvard to reform its admissions process for international students to screen for students “supportive of terrorism and anti-Semitism” — and immediately report international students to federal authorities if they break university conduct policies.

It called for “reducing the power held by faculty (whether tenured or untenured) and administrators more committed to activism than scholarship” and installing leaders committed to carrying out the administration’s demands.

And it asked the university to submit quarterly updates, beginning in June 2025, certifying its compliance.

Garber condemned the demands, calling them a “political ploy” disguised as an effort to address antisemitism on campus.

“It makes clear that the intention is not to work with us to address antisemitism in a cooperative and constructive manner,” he wrote.

“Although some of the demands outlined by the government are aimed at combating antisemitism, the majority represent direct governmental regulation of the ‘intellectual conditions’ at Harvard.”

• The operator of a Pacific-wide network of pharmacy companies, Aiyaz Mohammed Musa Umarji, was sentenced to four years prison in New Zealand in August for illegally importing millions of dollars worth of pseudoephedrine, a precursor chemical of methamphetamine.
• Umarji, a Fijian national, had long been a target of police in his home country but had for years escaped justice thanks to what Fijian and international law enforcement say was an unwillingness by the previous authoritarian government of Voreqe Bainimarama to seriously tackle meth and cocaine trafficking.
• Fiji’s new government, which was elected last December, is now investigating donations that Umarji and his family made to the previous ruling party, as well as “potential connections” to top law enforcement officials.

Until recently, Aiyaz Mohammed Musa Umarji was — in public at least — a pillar of Fiji’s business community.

With ownership of a Pacific-wide pharmacy network, Umarji and his family were significant donors to the party that repressively ruled the country until it lost power in elections last December. He was also a major figure in sports, serving as a vice president of the Fiji Football Association and as a committee member in soccer’s global governing body, FIFA.

And he did it all as an internationally wanted drug trafficker.

• READ MORE: Fall of a Fijian trafficker – the full OCCRP report
• Other OCCRP investigations

Umarji’s fall finally came in August this year, after he ended a period of self-imposed exile in India and surrendered himself to authorities in New Zealand to face years-old charges. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four years in prison for importing at least NZ$5-$6 million (US$2.9-3.5 million) worth of pseudoephedrine — a precursor for methamphetamine – into the country.

His sentencing was hailed by Fijian police as a blow against a “mastermind” whose operations stretched across the region.

But behind the conviction of Umarji, 47, lies a far murkier story of impunity, a joint investigation by an Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), The Fiji Times, The New Zealand Herald and Radio New Zealand has found.

Umarji was able to thrive for years amid a failure by senior officials of Fiji’s previous authoritarian government to confront a rise in meth and cocaine trafficking through the Pacific Island country.

And when New Zealand authorities finally issued an international warrant for his arrest, Umarji was able to flee Fiji under suspicious circumstances.

Reporters found that Umarji and his family donated at least F$70,000 (US$31,000) to the country’s former ruling party, FijiFirst, in the years after he was first put under investigation. This included F$20,000 (US$8,700) given to the party ahead of last December’s election — roughly three years after he was first charged.

The party’s general secretary, Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, was Fiji’s long-serving attorney-general and justice minister at the time.

Reporters also found that the Umarji family’s business network has continued to expand despite his legal troubles, and currently operates in three Pacific countries. The newest of these pharmacy companies, in Vanuatu, was founded just last year.

Fiji’s Minister for Immigration and Home Affairs, Pio Tikoduadua, told OCCRP an investigation has been opened into how Umarji was able to flee the country.

He said authorities are also investigating donations Umarji and his family made to FijiFirst, and any “potential connections” he may have had to top officials in the former government, including Sayed-Khaiyum and the now-suspended Police Commissioner, Sitiveni Qiliho.

“Certainly, I am deeply concerned about the potential influence of drug traffickers in Fiji, especially over officials and law enforcement,” Tikoduadua said.

“The infiltration of these criminal elements poses a significant risk to our society and institutions.”

Umarji declined a request for an interview and did not respond to follow-up questions. His Auckland lawyer, David PH Jones, said a request from reporters contained “numerous loaded questions which contain unsubstantiated assertions, a number of which have little or nothing to do with Mr Umarji’s prosecution”.

Sayed-Khaiyum and Qiliho did not respond to written questions.

‘A hub of the Pacific’
The rise in drug trafficking through Fiji is just one part of a booming trans-Pacific trade that experts and law enforcement say has become one of the world’s most profitable.

In Australia, the most recent data shows that drug seizures have more than quadrupled over the last decade, and Australians now consume 4.7 tonnes of cocaine and 8.8 tonnes of meth a year. In much smaller New Zealand, drug users strongly prefer meth to cocaine, consuming roughly 720 kilograms a year.

Consumers in both countries pay some of the highest prices on earth for cocaine and meth, much of it exported from the Americas. Lying in the vast blue expanse between the two points are the Pacific Islands.

“Fiji is a hub of the Pacific. You’ve got the ports, you’ve got the infrastructure, and you’ve got the ability to come in and out either by [water] craft or by airplane,” said Glyn Rowland, the New Zealand Police senior liaison officer for the Pacific.

“So that really leaves Fiji quite vulnerable to be in that transit route off to New Zealand and off to Australia.”

Fiji has long been eyed by international organised crime for its strategic location close to Australia and New Zealand’s multi-billion dollar drug markets.

In the early 2000s, for example, an international police operation took apart a “super lab” in Fiji’s capital, Suva, run by Chinese gangsters with enough precursor chemicals to produce a tonne of meth.

But after early successes, Fiji in recent years went cold on the fight against hard drugs.

The previous government of Voreqe Bainimarama, who first took power in a 2006 coup, showed little interest in tackling meth and cocaine trafficking, according to current and former law enforcement officers from Fiji and the US. Despite recent signs that trafficking was increasing, the police force under Bainimarama’s hand-picked commissioner, Qiliho, seemed to overlook the problem, the officers told OCCRP.

Bainimarama did not respond to questions.

Ernie Verina, the Oceania attaché for US Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), said his agency had become worried about trafficking through Fiji.

In mid-2022, HSI assigned an agent to be based in the country. But when the agent raised the issue of meth with top officials from Bainimarama’s government, he was met with total pushback, Verina said.

“Categorically, like, ‘There is no meth’,” Verina said of the Fijian response.

“That’s what they told the agent.”

A lot of influence
Despite high-level denials, Fiji’s narcotics police were very much aware of the country’s drug trafficking crisis. In fact, they had long had Umarji in their sights. But he was a difficult target.

As far back as 2017, Umarji was identified as “one of the tier one” suspected traffickers in the country, said Serupepeli Neiko, the head of the Fiji Police’s Narcotics Bureau.

While the drug trade through Fiji is also the domain of transnational organised crime groups, Umarji was suspected of having carved out a niche for himself by using his network of pharmacies, Hyperchem, to legally import pseudoephedrine and divert it onto the black market, Neiko said.

In early 2017, Umarji and one of his colleagues were charged with weapons possession after scores of rifle bullets were found on his yacht, moored in his hometown of Lautoka. But the charges were “squashed in court,” Neiko said.

“So that gave a red flag to us that a [drug trafficking] case against Umarji would have been challenging as well.”

A former senior Fijian officer, who declined to be identified because he is not authorised to speak to the media, put it more bluntly: “Umarji had a lot of influence with the previous government.”

Reporters found no evidence that any senior Fijian officials intervened against investigations into Umarji. But the perception that he had influence was powerful, current and former police officers said.

Indeed, since the fall of Bainimarama’s government last year, multiple senior officials have faced charges that they abused their positions, but none have been convicted.

The suspended police commissioner, Qiliho, and the former prime minister, Bainimarama, were both acquitted by a court on October 12 of charges that they had illegally interfered in a separate police investigation.

Former Attorney-General Sayed-Khaiyum is also currently facing prosecution in another unrelated abuse of office case.

Despite becoming a top-level police target, Umarji continued to expand his influence in Fiji.

Company records show that, in 2015, he and his wife, Zaheera Cassim, opened Hyperchem companies in Fiji, Solomon Islands, and a now-defunct branch in Samoa.

In May 2017, Umarji opened a new company, Bio Pharma, in New Zealand.

Ahead of elections the following year, Umarji and his relatives donated a total of at least F$50,000 to the FijiFirst party, declarations from the Fiji Elections Office show.

Umarji also made a name for himself in soccer, getting elected a vice-president of the Fiji Football Association in December 2019.

Pills and cash
By 2019, it was clear that avenues for a Fijian investigation were closed. So police in New Zealand stepped in instead. Reporters were able to reconstruct what happened next via court records and interviews.

While seconded that year to Fiji’s Transnational Crime Unit, New Zealand detective Peter Reynolds heard whispers about Umarji’s alleged criminal activity from his local colleagues. On returning to New Zealand, he decided to take things into his own hands.

Digging through police files, Reynolds found a lucky break in a case from nearly two years prior.

In late 2017, an anonymous member of the public had reached out to an anti-crime hotline with a tip that a businessman, Firdos “Freddie” Dalal, had a suspicious amount of money in his home in suburban Auckland.

Acting on a warrant, police made their way inside and found NZ$726,190 in cash and 4000 boxes of Actifed, a cold and flu medicine that contains pseudoephedrine.

Known as Operation Duet, the investigation that led to Dalal’s conviction provided the information that Reynolds needed to go after Umarji. It turned out that Dalal, who owned an Auckland-based freight forwarding company, was also listed as the director of Umarji’s New Zealand company, Bio Pharma.

Reynolds soon figured out how it all worked. Using his Pacific-wide Hyperchem network, Umarji ordered Actifed pills to be delivered from abroad to his pharmacies in Fiji and Solomon Islands. The shipments were set to transit through New Zealand, where Dalal’s forwarding company was responsible for the cargo.

While the drugs sat in a restricted customs holding area, Dalal simply went inside and swapped them out for other other medicine, such as anti-fungal cream, which was then sent on to their island destinations. The purloined pseudoephedrine was sold on New Zealand’s black market.

Dalal did not respond to questions.

In just three shipments between January and October 2017, Umarji’s operation brought in an estimated 678,000 Actifed pills containing about 40.7 kilograms of pseudoephedrine, Auckland District Court would later find.

But if deciphering Umarji’s operation was straightforward, arresting him would prove anything but.

New Zealand Police filed charges against Umarji in December 2019, but Reynolds told the Auckland court that he believed they faced little chance of getting Umarji to voluntarily fly to Auckland and show up in court.

“If the summons were to be served it would likely result in Umarji fleeing [Fiji] to a country that has no extradition arrangements with New Zealand,” the detective said in an affidavit.

So New Zealand authorities decided to go through the arduous process of requesting extradition. In November 2021, a Fijian court agreed to the request, and New Zealand Police issued an Interpol red notice.

Despite all the effort, within days Fiji Police had to contact their New Zealand counterparts with an embarrassing admission: Umarji had fled the country, and was in India.

New Zealand Police’s Pacific liaison, Rowland, declined to comment on how Umarji was able to flee Fiji, but added: “The reality is, sometimes corruption isn’t about what you do. Sometimes corruption is about what you don’t do, or turn a blind eye to.”

Despite his legal troubles, Umarji remained a respectable public figure in Fiji, thanks in part to a restrictive media environment that made it difficult for reporters to look into him in detail.

In May 2021, while Umarji was still in Fiji and his extradition case was pending, he was elected to FIFA’s governance, audit and compliance committee. He kept the position even after his flight abroad later that year, and was re-elected unopposed as Fiji Football Association vice president this June. He only resigned both positions on August 7, two days before his sentencing.

FIFA and the Fiji Football Association did not respond to questions.

Umarji also made little effort to hide during his exile in India. At one stage last year, he recorded an online video testimonial for a stem cell clinic outside of Delhi where he said he was getting treatment for diabetes.

His family’s second round of donations to FijiFirst, F$20,000 ahead of last December’s elections, were similarly made while Umarji was on the run.

But the drug trafficker eventually tired of exile.

In early 2022, he first contacted his high-powered Auckland lawyer, Jones, to arrange his surrender to New Zealand Police. He pleaded guilty to the Auckland court earlier this year and was allowed to return to Fiji to sort his affairs before handing himself in for sentencing.

New focus
With Umarji now in prison, Fijian authorities say they are continuing to investigate his operations.

Umarji’s pharmaceutical business continues to run with his wife, Cassim, at its head. Cassim has for years been a significant public face for the businesses, including publicising its charitable work. She declined to respond to reporters’ questions.

OCCRP visited Umarji’s companies in Lautoka in late June, during the period in which he was allowed by the New Zealand court to briefly return to Fiji. Reporters found a bustling network of businesses, including a well-staffed warehouse and office on the edge of town for Hyperchem.

Reporters contacted Umarji by phone from the warehouse’s reception area, but he declined to come out for an interview and referred reporters to his lawyer.

Homeland Security Investigations’ Verina said the new government of Fijian Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka has since removed roadblocks to investigating these sort of trafficking operations.

“We have started to see enforcement operations and arrests and holding individuals accountable for the methamphetamine smuggling,” Verina said.

An Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) investigation. Additional reporting by Lydia Lewis (RNZ) and George Block (New Zealand Herald). This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Since the September 11 terror attacks, there has been no hiding from the increased militarisation of the United States. Everyday life is suffused with policing and surveillance.

This ranges from the inconvenient, such as removing shoes at the airport, to the dystopian, such as local police departments equipped with decommissioned tanks too big to use on regular roads.

This process of militarisation did not begin with 9/11. The American state has always relied on force combined with the de-personalisation of its victims.

• READ MORE: Why is it so difficult to fight domestic terrorism? 6 experts share their thoughts
• Calculating the costs of the Afghanistan War in lives, dollars and years
• Police with lots of military gear kill civilians more often than less-militarised officers

The army, after all, dispossessed First Nations peoples of their land as settlers pushed westward. Expanding the American empire to places such as Cuba, the Philippines, and Haiti also relied on force, based on racist justifications.

The military also ensured American supremacy in the wake of the Second World War. As historian Nikhil Pal Singh writes, about 8 million people were killed in US-led or sponsored wars from 1945–2019 — and this is a conservative estimate.

When Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican and former military general, left the presidency in 1961, he famously warned against the growing “military-industrial complex” in the US. His warning went unheeded and the protracted conflict in Vietnam was the result.

The 9/11 attacks then intensified US militarisation, both at home and abroad. George W. Bush was elected in late 2000 after campaigning to reduce US foreign interventions.

The new president discovered, however, that by adopting the persona of a tough, pro-military leader, he could sweep away lingering doubts about the legitimacy of his election.

Waging war on Afghanistan within a month of the Twin Towers falling, Bush’s popularity soared to 90 percent. War in Iraq, based on the dubious assertion of Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction”, soon followed.

The military industrial juggernaut
Investment in the military state is immense. 9/11 ushered in the federal, cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security, with an initial budget in 2001-02 of US$16 billion. Annual budgets for the agency peaked at US$74 billion in 2009-10 and is now around US$50 billion.

This super-department vacuumed up bureaucracies previously managed by a range of other agencies, including justice, transportation, energy, agriculture, and health and human services.

Centralising services under the banner of security has enabled gross miscarriages of justice. These include the separation of tens of thousands of children from parents at the nation’s southern border, done in the guise of protecting the country from so-called illegal immigrants.

More than 300 of the some 1000 children taken from parents during the Trump administration have still not been reunited with family.

The post-9/11 Patriot Act also gave spying agencies paramilitary powers. The act reduced barriers between the CIA, FBI, and the National Security Agency (NSA) to permit the acquiring and sharing of Americans’ private communications.

These ranged from telephone records to web searches. All of this was justified in an atmosphere of near-hysterical and enduring anti-Muslim fervour.

Only in 2013 did most Americans realise the extent of this surveillance network. Edward Snowden, a contractor working at the NSA, leaked documents that revealed a secret US$52 billion budget for 16 spying agencies and over 100,000 employees.

Normalisation of the security state
Despite the long objections of civil liberties groups and disquiet among many private citizens, especially after Snowden’s leaks, it has proven difficult to wind back the industrialised security state.

This is for two reasons: the extent of the investment, and because its targets, both domestically and internationally, are usually not white and not powerful.

Domestically, the 2015 Freedom Act renewed almost all of the Patriot Act’s provisions. Legislation in 2020 that might have stemmed some of these powers stalled in Congress.

And recent reports suggest President Joe Biden’s election has done little to alter the detention of children at the border.

Militarisation is now so commonplace that local police departments and sheriff’s offices have received some US$7 billion worth of military gear (including grenade launchers and armoured vehicles) since 1997, underwritten by federal government programmes.

Militarised police kill civilians at a high rate — and the targets for all aspects of policing and incarceration are disproportionately people of colour. And yet, while the sight of excessively armed police forces during last year’s Black Lives Matter protests shocked many Americans, it will take a phenomenal effort to reverse this trend.

The heavy cost of the war on terror
The juggernaut of the militarised state keeps the United States at war abroad, no matter if Republicans or Democrats are in power.

Since 9/11, the US “war on terror” has cost more than US$8 trillion and led to the loss of up to 929,000 lives.

The effects on countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Pakistan have been devastating, and with the US involvement in Somalia, Libya, the Philippines, Mali, and Kenya included, these conflicts have resulted in the displacement of some 38 million people.

These wars have become self-perpetuating, spawning new terror threats such as the Islamic State and now perhaps ISIS-K.

Those who serve in the US forces have suffered greatly. Roughly 2.9 million living veterans served in post-9/11 conflicts abroad. Of the some 2 million deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, perhaps 36 percent are experiencing PTSD.

Training can be utterly brutal. The military may still offer opportunities, but the lives of those who serve remain expendable.

Life must be precious
Towards the end of his life, Robert McNamara, the hard-nosed Ford Motor Company president and architect of the United States’ disastrous military efforts in Vietnam, came to regret deeply his part in the military-industrial juggernaut.

In his 1995 memoir, he judged his own conduct to be morally repugnant. He wrote,

We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong.

In interviews with the filmmaker Errol Morris, McNamara admitted, obliquely, to losing sight of the simple fact the victims of the militarised American state were, in fact, human beings.

As McNamara realised far too late, the solution to reversing American militarisation is straightforward. We must recognise, in the words of activist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, that “life is precious”. That simple philosophy also underlies the call to acknowledge Black Lives Matter.

The best chance to reverse the militarisation of the US state is policy guided by the radical proposal that life — regardless of race, gender, status, sexuality, nationality, location or age — is indeed precious.

As we reflect on how the United States has changed since 9/11, it is clear the country has moved further away from this basic premise, not closer to it.

Dr Clare Corbould, Associate Professor, Contemporary Histories Research Group, Deakin University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.