Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who is now on President Trump’s legal team, told CBS News correspondent Paula Reid Monday afternoon that special counsel Robert Mueller’s office has rejected proposals to allow Mr. Trump to answer questions from …Read more
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Island tourists urged to get to know the locals
VanuatuIndependent – THE head of the South Pacific Tourism Organisation says better including local communities and indigenous people is the key to offering unique travel experiences.
Christopher Cocker said culture was at the centre of what was on offer in the Pacific and a recent global meeting had emphasised the need for indigenous people to have more of a voice in the way tourism was planned and developed.
He said tourists to the region also needed to be encouraged to branch out when they travelled to the region to gain a more authentic experience of the diverse cultures they were visiting.
“A Fiji experience or a Cook Island experience is not just lying around in the poolside etc and enjoying cocktails and the sun, sand and sea and watching a one-off show, cultural show, but to go out to the communities, go out to the villages and learn more of what’s happening there as well as mix and mingle with the indigenous people,” Mr Cocker said.
He said Pacific countries needed to treasure the fact that indigenous people represent the majority of Pacific populations and they should take steps to nurture their culture to share with visitors.
Vanuatu descendants of Indigenous Australians search for long lost family
By ABC –
A SMALL group of men from Vanuatu with Aboriginal ancestry have travelled to Australia on a mission to reconnect with their long lost family, and to push for better recognition of their Australian ties.
Thousands of people with Indigenous Australian ancestry are believed to be living in Vanuatu. Many are the descendants of blackbirded islanders went back to Vanuatu at the turn of the 20th century, in line with the White Australia Policy.
Between 1863 and 1904, more than 62,000 Pacific Islanders were taken to Australia — often against their will, or on false pretences — to work on Queensland’s cotton and sugar plantations.
But Emelda Davis, chairwoman of the Australian South Sea Islanders Port Jackson chapter, said it wasn’t just Pacific Islanders who were kicked out of Australia.
She said there were stories of islander workers taking in orphaned Indigenous Australian children, as well as stories of workers marrying and establishing families with Indigenous Australians.
“Then when the White Australia Policy came in, the mass deportation did take a lot of those Indigenous families back to the islands,” she said.
“It’s always something that was known, but it’s quite interesting that it’s being promoted or brought to the attention of the Australian Government now.”
He and his brother, Chief Richard David Fandanumata, a member of Vanuatu’s influential National Council of Chiefs, were in Adelaide this week for a forum on the topic hosted by the University of South Australia.
Both brothers have Aboriginal ancestry through their mother, and have been tracking others down around Vanuatu.
“We started receiving stories from all around the islands, I came here with some figures that put them up to over 4000,” Mr Abel said.
Chief Richard said they are not necessarily seeking Australian citizenship, but they do want to be recognised.
“Plenty of us, when we look at our history, our bloodlines, our family tree, they call us Australians,” he said.
“They connect us. And we want to become part of the family. Those of us in Vanuatu want to be connected with our family in Australia.”
The brothers are trying to track down their Australian family, the majority of whom are believed to be from the Tweed Heads region of New South Wales.
One of the descendants claims many people with Aboriginal ancestry experience discrimination back in Vanuatu, and don’t have equal access to customary land or education
Pakoa Rudy Rolland, a police officer on Tongariki Island, told The Australian newspaper last week that hundreds of people with Indigenous Australian heritage in his community were living as second-class citizens.
But Mr Abel said while he agreed there was ‘a history’ of issues with land rights, many descendants of Indigenous Australians in Vanuatu have had successful careers.
He said he did not want the comments to overshadow their trip.
“There’s a Lord Mayor, even the person who’s giving this information is a police officer, some of them were teachers. I believe they are respected,” he said.
Aboriginals in Vanuatu ‘living as second-class citizens’
By The Australian –
HUNDREDS of South Sea Islanders living in Vanuatu complain they are being discriminated against because they have Aboriginal ancestry, and say they want official Australian recognition.
One, Vanuatu policeman Pakoa Rudy Rolland, said the problem has become so bad that more than 480 Aboriginal people on the island of Tongariki are fringe dwellers, living as second-class citizens with restricted access to land or proper education.
“My father told me since I was a boy we were Australian Aborigines living here,” Mr Rolland said.
“I have Vanuatu ID but still in my heart I know I don’t belong here. I want the recognition from our government in Canberra that we have the rights all Australian citizens have.”
According to family legend, ‘blackbirded’ New Hebrides sugar plantation workers returning from Tweed Heads soon after 1901 took home with them two Aboriginal children, a brother and a sister named Willie Tutukan and Rossie. Circumstances around the pair being snatched are murky, but by various accounts their parents had either been killed or had disappeared.
Mr Rolland, who belongs to the Tongariki Australian Aborigines Association and is Willie Tutukan’s great-great-grandson, said he had been brought up with the story of the journey by his mother’s brother, who is still alive and is the grandson of one of the children’s abductors.
Willie Tutukan and Rossie went on to marry and raise families, with the details of their Aboriginal past told and retold among their descendants.
But Mr Rolland said that whenever a small issue arises … ‘the native people of Tongariki always criticised us and always told us that we are not from Tongariki but we are black Australian Aborigines and we have no right over land in this island’.
He said he grew up ‘just accepting it’ to be true that he did not have full status in the eyes of the indigenous Ni-Vanuatu.
A forum this weekend at the University of South Australia will examine the issue and revive an apology made six years ago in Queensland by Vanuatu Chief Richard David Fandanumata for historic wrongs.
Chief Richard told Aboriginal people in Bundaberg during a 2012 visit that his ancestors had been forced by their white captors to ‘terrorise and kill’ the indigenous landowners of the area in order to open it up for agriculture.
Although the removal of the two siblings probably came several decades after this atrocity — and far to the south — their Vanuatu descendants believe the kidnappings came from some sense of responsibility for the children’s welfare because of wrongs done to Aboriginal people.
The Australian has been shown official Vanuatu government documentation establishing descendants of ‘Rossie who is a pure Aboriginal bloodline from Australia’. While some blackbirded returnees took adult partners home, the abduction of Aboriginal children was rarer.
South Sea islanders have only in recent years been officially recognised as a distinct group in Australia. However, there are no reciprocal rights or recognition for those who, like Mr Rolland and his family, claim an Australian connection from abroad.
First Negotiators Certificates for customary land issued
Minister of Lands, Ralph Regenvanu, yesterday handed over the first Negotiator’s Certificate to be issued for a lease application for rural customary land under the new land laws to the Vanuatu Football Federation (VFF) for the development of a futsal field and football field at Paunangisu village, north Efate.
This certificate was one of three certificates issued yesterday for applications to lease rural customary land, the other two being for residential leases at Matantapua (Malapoa area) and Pango.
The Government’s 100 Day Plan has been the aim of having 15 Negotiators Certificate issued within the Government’s 100 Days.
At the same time as this first Negotiator’s Certificate was issued, the Chairman of the Land Management and Planning Committee (LMPC), Professor Don Patterson, also took the opportunity to hand over to the Minister for Lands the annual report of the LMPC for 2014 and 2015.
According to the Land Reform (Amendment) Act No.31 of 2013, the Committee is required to produce and annual report to be tabled in Parliament which details all the applications and leases processed by the Committee in one year. The Minister of Lands assured the Chairman that this report would be tabled in the next sitting of Parliament.
Source: DailyPost
You won’t believe the waves in Melanesia
THIS IS NOT for those who are only after the tried and tested wave magnets — those consistent spots where you’ll find “guaranteed waves” aboard a luxury surf charter boat. Not that there’s anything wrong with booking your two weeks’ annual leave around a surf break known for waves six months of the year.
But scratch the surface a little and you can find options on the fringes, the harder-to-get-to places. The spots that, as you read this, have waves that are going unridden. Like Melanesia.
Decolonize your mind
A decolonized mind defends its cultural roots, By Isaac Giron
The term “decolonized” is popular among activists of color, yet is very loaded and hard to pin down. It has been used to free minds, but it also has divided communities.
I used to view the world in terms of opposing powers struggling for dominance. I thought I was proud of who I was, but now I see that all the Brown Power talk regurgitated the White Power history I bought into. Pride in our people shouldn’t stem from the fact that we used to be a great empire before the white man came, but from the fact that we stand as a great empire regardless of that conquest. Aware of the injustices our ancestors faced, I reciprocated that anger towards white European Americans. But the process of “decolonization” should not place colonization as the central point of our culture, nor should it romanticize our indigenous past. These trains of thought perpetuate the point of view of the dominant culture of today. Rather, “decolonization” should be a process of changing the way we view the world.
Frantz Fanon wrote, “Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land and from our minds as well.”
Separating an individual from their culture and family was the tactic used by the conquistadors to subjugate a whole continent and to enslave parts of another. Many lingering affects of colonization impact our communities today. For example, people who deny their heritage or who take on the dominant culture while they reject imperialism embody these effects. Such individuals are those who went against the interests of their own community by promoting a bill that sanctioned racial profiling even though it would affect them negatively. Another example are Chicano activists who rigidly define what it means to be a Chicano. Sometimes in our urge to break free from mental colonization, we become ensnared in the same thought processes of the people we despise. An example of this are the cultural nationalists. Huey Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party said that “cultural nationalists are concerned with returning to the old African culture and thereby regaining their identity and freedom. In other words, they feel that the African culture will automatically bring political freedom.”
Cultural symbols do not decolonize our minds. Wearing olmec jewelry and sporting native tattoos does not mean your are decolonized.
The residue of colonization allows for the continued stratification of people. Rejecting labels, selfishness, egotism, a black and white binary, discrimination and judgments are, instead, traits of the decolonized.
A decolonized mind defends culture by defending the root of who we are. The family unit is the center of our culture. That’s why the destruction of family has been the mainstay of oppression. Even today, the separation of families is still the number one way of colonizing our community, exemplified by the anti-immigration fervor favoring deportations and incarceration. The high prison rate in black and brown communities also showcases this. Division of the ethnic family unit is the tool of choice for the colonization of our people and men of color must especially strive against these forces to be the defenders of the family.
A person with a decolonized mind accepts their past, loves their present and creates their future, regardless of what stands in their way.
Source: http://web.utah.edu/
Can Fiji Save the World?
Fiji wants countries to join its climate canoe at the latest UN climate talks.
Source: https://thediplomat.com/, By Lyndal Rowlands
When Fiji’s Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama assumed the presidency of the 23rd meeting of the UN’s climate change convention on November 6, he was a long way from his Pacific home. Fiji is the first Pacific Island country to host a UN Conference of the Parties (COP), but is doing so remotely from Bonn, Germany.
With a population of less than one million people, Fiji has taken on an outsized role at the United Nations in recent years, becoming a much more prominent leader on climate change than many much larger countries.
Despite being held in a cold German city, COP 23 will have many Fijian touches. Fiji will lead a dialogue following the Pacific principles of “Talanoa” – sharing stories to build empathy and trust. Bainimarama also plans to delegate formal proceedings so that he can play “a roving role” and be on hand “to resolve any difficulties in the formal negotiations.”
Yet not all countries coming to the meeting are yet ready to climb into Fiji’s canoe.The Fiji police band will perform and a Fijian canoe, known as a drua, will sit in the main foyer of the meeting to remind delegates that “all 7.5 billion people on earth are in the same canoe.”
In particular, this year’s meeting will occur under the cloud of the Trump administration’s threatened withdrawal from the Paris Climate Change Agreement, just two years after the agreement was finally reached. It will contrast with the brief optimism around last year’s meeting in Marrakech, when countries were almost ready for the agreement to enter into force in December 2016.
That particular milestone was in no small part because Fiji had led a small group of countries eager for the agreement to be implemented as soon as possible. Fiji became the first country to officially join the agreement in April 2016, on the first day it was open for signing. These countries hoped to build momentum and avoid the delays that saw the Kyoto Protocol take more than 12 years to enter into force.
The speedy entry-into-force of the Paris Agreement also reflected its differences from the Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto Protocol legally bound developed countries to emission reduction targets. On the other hand, almost every country both developed and developing, has signed the Paris Agreement, but they are not legally bound to their commitments.
The United States’ planned withdrawal from the Paris Agreement will see it keeping company with only one other country, Syria. Every other country has signed the agreement, even North Korea.
Despite their small populations and economies, small island states like Fiji, have been among some of the biggest leaders on climate change at the United Nations. The impact of climate change on these countries with little protection from vast oceans is now well known.
Fiji is no stranger to some of the worst effects. Its coral reefs are dying, harming fishing and tourism, and salt water is rising, harming the nation’s second biggest export, sugar.
In February 2016, Cyclone Winston, the strongest storm to ever make landfall in the southern hemisphere, hit Fiji, killing 44 people and causing an estimated $1.4 billion in damage, around one-third of the country’s GDP.
The cyclone also prevented Fiji from hosting an Oceans Conference in June 2017. Damage from the cyclone saw the meeting relocated to New York.
The health of the world’s oceans, including the consequences of overfishing, has become another area where Fiji has shown leadership. Fiji’s Peter Thomson, until recently the 71st president of the UN General Assembly, is now the UN’s Special Envoy on Oceans.
All of these efforts have not come without cost to the small nation, still recovering from Cyclone Winston. The presidency of the General Assembly was in part funded by a trust fund set up after corruption plagued the office during Antigua’s recent presidency.
However Fiji’s small size means that it has also not received any of the economic benefits associated with hosting major international meetings. Last year’s COP brought around 20,000 people to Morocco, almost one quarter of the 80,000 tourists Fiji usually receives in a month.
With its white beaches and coral reefs, tourism remains Fiji’s biggest source of income, yet the COP will be held at the headquarters of the UN’s climate body the UNFCCC. Bainimarama has said that his country “simply could not have staged an event of this size and complexity in Fiji” describing it as an example of how countries of vastly different means can work together.
As a small country Fiji has to rely on building relationships with much bigger, richer countries if it plans to address climate change. Most small island states’ carbon emissions are negligible at the global level. Fiji is only responsible for 0.01 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
For its part, Fiji has also made commitments to transition fully to renewable energy by the year 2030. Its Pacific neighbor Tuvalu, aims to be the first country to use 100 percent renewable energy by the year 2020.
By contrast some of Fiji’s other neighbors, including Indonesia and Australia, have much higher emissions. Indonesia has particularly high emissions, partly due to peat fires used to clear land for palm oil plantations. Australia, meanwhile, is proceeding to build the Carmichael coal mine, a project of the Indian company Adani, which may potentially attract funding from China. It will be the biggest coal mine in the southern hemisphere, and will also potentially do further damage to the Great Barrier Reef.
China is now the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, although the United States remains the biggest emitter in history. Facing pressure over air pollution at home, the Chinese government has been taking strident steps to minimize fossil fuels within its own borders. However beyond its borders, China has been involved inan estimated 240 coal power stations in 25 countries through its Belt and Road initiative.
Alongside China, three of the other 10 biggest emitters – India, Japan, and Indonesia – are in Asia.
Ironically, there is a strong correlation between a country’s historic emissions and its ability to adapt to climate impacts due to poverty and lack of infrastructure. Alongside small island states, drought prone countries in Eastern Africa and river delta countries like Bangladesh are also vulnerable.
While small island states like Fiji have been among the countries most consistently sounding the alarm on climate change, the events of 2017 so far have shown that climate related disasters know no boundaries.
This year’s COP has been preceded by a year of unprecedented floods, hurricanes, and wildfires. A full one-quarter of all category five hurricanes to make landfall in the Atlantic Ocean since 1851 made landfall in 2017.
Bainimarama made his speech at the UN General Assembly in September just as Hurricane Maria tore through the Caribbean. “The appalling suffering in the Caribbean and the U.S. reminds us all that there is no time to waste,” he told the assembly, also recalling the impact of Cyclone Winston on Fiji. “As incoming COP president, I am deeply conscious of the need to lead a global response to the underlying causes of these events.”
This consciousness, together with an understanding that Fiji and many of its closest neighbors simply will not survive unmitigated climate change will inform Fiji’s approach at the 23rd COP, which will run until November 17.
Lyndal Rowlands is a freelance Australian journalist and United Nations correspondent. She has written for Al Jazeera, the Saturday Paper and SciDev and is the former UN bureau chief for Inter Press Service.
The chief fighting for an indigenous Vanuatu nation
By Edward Cavanough – an Australian researcher and writer focusing on public policy and international affairs.
By Al Jazeera – August 28, 2017
IN the suburbs of Vanuatu’s capital Port Vila, Chief Edward Cavanough is an Australian researcher and writer focusing on public policy and international affairs. Boborenvanua awaits trial on bail.
The middle-aged chief spends his days processing kava root, an intoxicant experiencing an international boom, tending to a small taro plantation and dreaming of a triumphant return to his village of Lavatmengamu – the de-facto capital of the Turaga Nation of which he is the leader.
“All of Vanuatu will turn out to greet me,” he laughs, prompting smiles from his supporters who have gathered in front of his temporary residence in Port Vila.
In December 2015, police arrested Chief Viraleo and nine other men in Lavatmengamu – a small and isolated settlement located on Pentecost Island – and brought them to the capital to stand trial on charges including burning property in a neighbouring village.
A few days before their arrest, fishermen from that village entered Lavatmangamu’s coastal territory to harvest sea cucumber from the reef, invoking the chief’s ire.
“I summoned them to a meeting and gave them three options: they could either pay a fine to make amends … or they could leave, and be banished from the community. If not, I’d be forced to take actions,” Viraleo says.
Eyewitnesses told Al Jazeera how villagers, including children and pregnant women, ran into the jungle while their homes burned. Violence of this kind is unusual on the island.
Viraleo doesn’t deny the allegations. He simply says his response to the territorial encroachment was legal under ‘kastom’ law – a traditional form of governance dictated by chiefs, and recognised in Vanuatu’s constitution.
He believes the charges are politically motivated and designed to halt his controversial movement – a multifaceted lifelong project that has seen him devise an alternative currency – the Tuvatu – which is pegged to traditionally valued pigs tusks, invent a script for his native Raga language, and declare his corner of Pentecost the ‘Turaga Nation’. But with the removal of Viraleo from its base in Pentecost, his movement, which emerged in 1983 as a response to generations of French and British colonial influence, is now floundering.
The kustom economy: a distant revolution
Northern Pentecost is rarely visited by outsiders. Its one outlet to the world is a grass landing strip visited by two light aircraft each week – if the weather holds.
The south receives more visitors, particularly seasonal day-trippers who come to see its famous land-diving ceremony – a traditional form of bungee jumping.
Lavatmengamu, in the northeast, is particularly remote. Hours from the airstrip, only the sturdiest of vehicles can descend the mud track to the village. Despite being a coastal settlement, accessing Lavatmengamu by boat is challenging, with the shore blocked by reefs and only a handful of entry points.
It is here that Chief Viraleo has pursued a project that aims to harness Pentecost’s traditional economy with the objective of ultimately enabling his people to prosper.
Viraleo’s Tuvatu currency – which has not yet been printed – is pegged to the value of pigs’ tusks and intends to be a paper representation of Pentecost’s traditional economy. It is designed to be exchanged with recognised currencies in Vanuatu and elsewhere in the world.
In Pentecost, and across Vanuatu, the pig’s tusk is a traditional symbol of wealth, still widely used as a means of kustom exchange throughout rural communities. Tusks can take 10 years to grow and are recognised to be worth at least VT 18,000 (about $150). While many commodities, such as food and clothing, are grown and produced within local communities, tusks are still regularly used to pay for property, school fees, debts, and celebrations, such as weddings. Viraleo’s hope is that Pentecost Islanders will one day use Tuvatu to buy necessities, such as medicine and basic building materials, from formal economies.
Much of Vanuatu retains a subsistence agricultural lifestyle that generates little recognised wealth. For the hard-working but income-poor citizens of Vanuatu, the Western economic system brought by foreign powers simply doesn’t deliver. For many, Viraleo’s idea of a currency that values a traditional means of exchange in a way that Vanuatu’s official currency, the Vatu, cannot, has found fertile ground.
Birth of a dissident
In 2001, in a United Nations indigenous peoples conference in New York, Viraleo first declared his homeland Turaga Nation, catching the attention of Vanuatu’s government.
“Ever since I went to New York … the government have been keeping tabs on me, seeing me as almost a dissident,” Viraleo says.
Viraleo’s agenda has caused some authorities in Port Vila to be nervous. The Reserve Bank of Vanuatu has gone so far as to announce possible legal action against Viraleo, should he begin trading with his currency. His movement bears the hallmarks of a genuine separatist push by promoting its own currency, education system, language and legal framework as a means to fill a perceived governance vacuum across rural Vanuatu.
“The government here in Vila only really takes care of 20 per cent of the population. It takes care of the 20 percent who are living in town and have jobs, but the 80 per cent living in rural areas … they have their local chiefs, but there [is] no central government to take care of them,” Viraleo argues.
Hilaire Bule, the spokesman for Prime Minister Charlot Salwai, says Viraleo has little support on Pentecost. If he is acquitted ‘only his village will celebrate his return’, Bule says.
While the Constitution recognises kustom law and commerce within Vanuatu, Viraleo’s Tuvatu has ‘no legitimacy as a genuine form of currency’, he says.
A Pentecost Islander whose property was destroyed in the fire, who did not want to give their name for fear of retribution, says some neighbouring villagers fear the chief’s return and are critical of the ‘slave-like’ devotion he demands of others.
Some of Viraleo’s co-accused have pleaded guilty and in their defence said they have felt influenced and threatened by the chief, reported Vanuatu’s Daily Post.
Even so, support for Viraleo is apparent.
Hilda Lini, Vanuatu’s first female MP and former health minister, is a long-time supporter of Viraleo and the Turaga Nation, and has provided accommodation and legal counsel for his legal struggle. In north Pentecost, Viraleo has inspired devotion. Norris, 18, a student from Laone, a village in Pentecost’s far northwest, walked eight hours each day to Lavatmengamu to learn from Viraleo.
Tony Wilson, editor of the Vanuatu Independent newsmagazine, believes Viraleo ‘has polarised’ the local Vanuatu community, highlighting an old fissure between those who advocate for kustom law versus those who are in favour of the Western system of governance.
Lavatmengamu falls quiet
With its leader indefinitely awaiting trial in Port Vila, Lavatmengamu’s activity has ground to a halt, and the village feels almost abandoned.
Its population, once in the hundreds, now only numbers a few dozen. My guide in Levatmangamu says most inhabitants deserted the village after Viraleo and his men were arrested.
Before the incident, scholars from all over Vanuatu came to train at the kustom school and learn from the chief.
Today, Viraleo’s classroom is empty. On the chalkboard, notes from the last lesson are fading. A kustom bank, reportedly housing billions of Vatu worth of pigs’ tusks, is closed so long as the chief’s handcrafted timber throne sits empty. And the Tuvatu remains just a dream, rather than the beating heart of a kustom economy.
The chief concedes his movement has lost all momentum as he fights to clear his name. He says since his arrest, “All the work that I have been doing in Lavatmengamu has stopped.”
Viraleo tells Al Jazeera he will defend himself in court, and is optimistic his acquittal will come soon. But his prosecution seems certain from the government’s perspective.
“You cannot take revenge … you cannot take national law or kustom law into your own hands. That is what Viraleo was doing,” Bule says.
As Viraleo’s future remains in question, so too does the future of his kustom movement, the Turaga Nation – and his dream of Vanuatu prospering off the back of its traditions.
Descendants of Solomons’ slaves looking forward to dual citizenship
The descendants of Solomon Islands’ slave labourers living in Fiji say they hope dual citizenship legislation being proposed in the Solomons will help them reconnect with long lost relatives.
In the mid-nineteenth century more than 60,000 Pacific Islanders from Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia and Niue were coerced to work on canefields in Australia and Fiji through trickery and kidnapping, a practice known as Blackbirding.
A Solomon Islands government delegation doing consultations in Melanesia this week on dual citizenship met with leaders of descendants of blackbirded Solomon Islanders living in Fiji.
The secretary of the dual citizenship task force, Chris Waiwori, described the meeting as an emotional one during which community leaders told the delegation they appreciated the move towards dual citizenship and saw it as another avenue for them to try and mend their broken links to Solomon Islands.
The taskforce is now in PNG for the final leg of its consultations having earlier also visited Vanuatu.
A final round of local consultations on the dual citizenship bill will be done when the taskforce returns to Honiara before a final draft of the bill is submitted to cabinet.
The Solomon Islands prime minister Manasseh Sogavare had previously said he aimed to have the bill tabled in parliament early next year.
Source: RNZ