Tag Archives: indigenous people

Nature Care

Indonesian police charge indigenous men in dispute over nutmeg plantation

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  • Police in Indonesia have charged two indigenous men with vandalizing heavy equipment after a confrontation with a company accused of illegally logging their ancestral land.
  • The company, CV Sumber Berkat Makmur, has a concession to cultivate nutmeg trees in East Seram district, Maluku province, but it’s unclear whether the ancestral land of the Sabuai indigenous community falls within the concession.
  • Activists and local lawmakers have called for a halt to the company’s activities while the uncertainty about its permit is cleared up.
  • The case is just the latest in Indonesia in which local authorities have opted to pursue criminal charges against communities mired in land disputes with companies.

AMBON, Indonesia — Activists in Indonesia have called on police to drop criminal charges against two indigenous men who took part in a confrontation against a company accused of illegally logging their ancestral forest.

Police in East Seram district, in the province of Maluku, have charged Stefanus Ahwalam and Khaleb Yamarua, of the Sabuai indigenous community, with causing damage to the property of plantation company CV Sumber Berkat Makmur.

They were among 26 indigenous people arrested by the police on Feb. 17 following a confrontation over the company’s logging activities in forested area deemed sacred by the community. The 24 others were released without charge on the complaint filed by the company, while Stefanus and Khaleb face a possible prosecution that could see them jailed for more than two and a half years.

“This can’t be tolerated. This is an environmental crime that must be resolved,” Usman Bugis, director of the environmental group Nanaku Maluku, told local media. “After damaging our customary forest, [the company] is now persecuting our people.”.

A map of the Maluku Islands province, in red, in eastern Indonesia. Image by TUBS via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

The case is the latest in a long list of disputes between forest communities and the companies laying claim to the land. As with most of those other cases, the authorities appear to have prioritized the company’s grievances over those of the community, according to the Sabuai.

The community says it had previously consented to CV Sumber Berkat Makmur, which has a permit to cultivate nutmeg trees, operating in three other locations in the area, but not in the ancestral forest on Mount Ahwale, where the Sabuai bury their dead. On the morning of Feb. 17, a group of Sabuai men observed workers from the company loading up a truck with logs at the site in question. They demanded the workers stop and leave the area, but the workers refused.

A scuffle broke out, during which the indigenous men reportedly vandalized the heavy equipment on site and confiscated the keys. The company subsequently reported the incident to police, leading to the arrests. But the community says it plans to fight back, and has secured a March 12 court date for a pretrial motion to get the charges against Stefanus and Khaleb thrown out.

“How dare the company encroach into a location that’s prohibited by the community?” Niko Ahwalam, the Sabuai chief, said in a statement received by Mongabay on Feb. 22.

“Our action is solely to defend our rights on the forest and mountain that the company has grabbed. The forest is highly sacred. There lie the graves of our ancestors, and the site itself was the old village of the Sabuai people.”

Sabuai men at the disputed site amid logging equipment belonging to CV Sumber Berkat Makmur. Image courtesy of the Sabuai indigenous community.

A key question in the case, and one obscured by the opaque permitting process in Indonesia, is whether the Sabuai ancestral forest falls within the concession awarded to CV Sumber Berkat Makmur in 2018. Mongabay has been unable to access the company’s plantation maps as of the time of this writing.

Imanuel Darusman, a director at CV Sumber Berkat Makmur, told reporters that the company had all the required permits to operate in the forest, including to clear trees ahead of planting and sell the timber. He said the company had also fulfilled all its promises to the Sabuai community as agreed on by both sides, including employing 70 community members. Imanuel said this was the first dispute to arise between the two sides since CV Sumber Berkat Makmur began operating there, and suggested other parties were to blame for inciting opposition to his company’s operations.

Here, as in much of Indonesia, the driving factor behind the dispute over indigenous land is the lack of formal title. Prior to a landmark 2013 court ruling, all indigenous lands across the country were considered state land, and were parceled out accordingly by the authorities for plantations, logging concessions, mines and more. The court ruling relinquished the state’s control over the land, but notably did not order it handed back to the respective communities. Instead, the government has had to do that on a case-by-case basis, and progress has been slow.

In the case of the Sabuai, the local government must first formally recognize that the Sabuai are an indigenous community, said Leny Patty, head of the Maluku provincial chapter of the Indigenous People’s Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN). This recognition, issued in the form of a bylaw, can then be used by the Sabuai to apply to the central government for formal indigenous land rights and a title to their forest.

“If we have this indigenous rights bylaw, companies won’t be able to just come in and grab the rights of the Maluku people,” she said. “All of the forests in Maluku are customary forests.”

Police release most of the Sabuai men arrested after the Feb. 17 confrontation with workers from CV Sumber Berkat Makmur. Image courtesy of the East Seram Police.
Police release most of the Sabuai men arrested after the Feb. 17 confrontation with workers from CV Sumber Berkat Makmur. Image courtesy of the East Seram Police.

With the case shrouded in uncertainty, pressure is growing for a freeze on CV Sumber Berkat Makmur’s operations to investigate the complaints by the Sabuai.

The Sabuai Student Alliance has filed a police report against the company, alleging illegal forest clearing without the requisite permit. It says the community was left out of the process of carrying out an environmental impact analysis for the plantation, and thus any permit issued to the company on the basis of that analysis cannot be valid.

Abraham Tulalessy, an environmental law expert at Pattimura University in Ambon, the provincial capital, has backed the calls for a police probe into the permit issue.

“The company must be investigated,” he said, adding the Sabuai community was the victim in the dispute.

The provincial legislature has also called on the company to temporarily halt its forest-clearing activity on the disputed land. It says the provincial forestry department should evaluate the company’s operations.

“The conclusion is that we must visit the site to cross-check the claims by NGOs and by officials from Sumber Berkat Makmur,” Richard Rahakbauw, a provincial legislator, said on Feb. 23.

This story was first reported by Mongabay’s Indonesia team and published here on our Indonesian site on Feb. 28, 2020.

by Nurdin Tubaka on 12 March 2020 | Adapted by Basten Gokkon, Soure: MONGABAY

World

Pope says indigenous people must have final say about their land

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Francis echoes growing body of international law and standards on the right to ‘prior and informed consent’

Pope Francis in Rome last week when he said indigenous peoples have the right to ‘prior and informed consent’ regarding their lands and territories. Photograph: AP
Pope Francis in Rome last week when he said indigenous peoples have the right to ‘prior and informed consent’ regarding their lands and territories. Photograph: AP

In the 15th century papal bulls promoted and provided legal justification for the conquest and theft of indigenous peoples’ lands and resources worldwide – the consequences of which are still being felt today. The right to conquest in one such bull, the Romanus Pontifex, issued in the 1450s when Nicholas V was the Pope, was granted in perpetuity.

How times have changed. Last week, over 560 years later, Francis, the first Pope from Latin America, struck a rather different note – for indigenous peoples around the world, for land rights, for better environmental stewardship. He said publicly that indigenous peoples have the right to “prior and informed consent.” In other words, nothing should happen on – or impact – their land, territories and resources unless they agree to it.

“I believe that the central issue is how to reconcile the right to development, both social and cultural, with the protection of the particular characteristics of indigenous peoples and their territories,” said Francis, according to an English version of his speech released by the Vatican’s press office.

“This is especially clear when planning economic activities which may interfere with indigenous cultures and their ancestral relationship to the earth,” Francis went on. “In this regard, the right to prior and informed consent should always prevail, as foreseen in Article 32 of the [UN] Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Only then is it possible to guarantee peaceful cooperation between governing authorities and indigenous peoples, overcoming confrontation and conflict.”

Francis was speaking to numerous indigenous representatives in Rome at the conclusion of the third Indigenous Peoples’ Forum held by the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development.

The UN’s Declaration – non-legally-binding – was adopted 10 years ago. Article 32 says

“states shall consult and cooperate in good faith with the indigenous peoples concerned through their own representative institutions in order to obtain their free and informed consent prior to the approval of any project affecting their lands or territories and other resources, particularly in connection with the development, utilization or exploitation of mineral, water or other resources.”

Francis also told his audience “humanity is committing a grave sin in not caring for the earth”, and urged them to resist new technologies which “destroy the earth, which destroy the environment and the ecological balance, and which end up destroying the wisdom of peoples.” He called on governments to enable indigenous peoples to fully participate in developing “guidelines and projects”, both locally and nationally.

Various mainstream media including the BBC, The Independent and the Washington Post interpreted Francis’s speech as a comment, or an apparent comment, on the current Dakota Access Pipeline conflict in the US – almost as if that was the only conflict over indigenous peoples’ land they were aware of. But what about everyone and everywhere else? Such interpretations were swiftly rejected by a Vatican spokesperson, who was reported as saying “there’s no element in his words that would give us a clue to know if he was talking about any specific cases.”

So what do some of those who were with Francis that day think of his speech? How significant was it?

Myrna Cunningham, a Miskita activist from Nicaragua and former Chairperson of the UN’s Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, says the Pope was sending several main messages. These included the “need to reconcile the right to development with indigenous peoples’ spiritual and cultural specificities and territories”, and the importance of the UN Declaration and consent which was, she says, “in a way a response to indigenous demands.”

“I expected a strong message but his position exceeded my expectations,” Cunningham told the Guardian. “He is truly clear about the struggles of our people and an important voice to make our demands be heard.”

Elifuraha Laltaika, from the Association for Law and Advocacy for Pastoralists in Tanzania, says it was a “timely wake-up call to governments.”

“[His comments] come at time when, instead of scaling up, governments increasingly violate and look with suspicion at the minimum standards in the UN Declaration,” he told the Guardian. “Without heeding Pope Francis’s call, life would undoubtedly become more miserable for indigenous peoples than ever before. Greed towards extraction of hydrocarbons and minerals will open up additional fault-lines, heightening indigenous peoples’ poverty and inability to deal with impacts of climate change and a myriad of other challenges.”

For Alvaro Pop, a Maya Q’eqchi man from Guatemala, Francis’s remarks demonstrate his ongoing commitment to indigenous peoples’ rights.

“Indigenous peoples have been the guardians of their resources for centuries,” says Pop, another former Chairperson of the UN’s Permanent Forum. “Free, prior and informed consent is one of the most important issues of the 21st century. The Pope’s comments are truly significant.”

Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, a Kankanaey Igorot woman from the Philippines and now the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, says Francis’s comments illustrate his “understanding of the importance” of implementing the UN Declaration.

“His view that a bigger chance of overcoming confrontation and conflict between indigenous peoples and governing authorities can be achieved if prior and informed consent is respected echoes what many indigenous peoples have always stated,” Tauli-Corpuz told the Guardian.

Les Malezer, from Australia, describes it as “gratifying” that the Pope took such a “strong stance” on the need to respect indigenous peoples’ rights, and says he took the opportunity to raise with him the “Doctrine of Discovery” – the international legal concept grounded in the 15th century papal bulls.

“Each person in our audience had the opportunity to say a very few words to the Pope as he came around the room,” Malezer, from Queensland, told the Guardian. “I asked the Pope to continue to review the Doctrine of Discovery which was followed by many instances of genocide of indigenous peoples and the taking of their lands. Also I requested the Catholic Church seek to raise awareness worldwide of the situation and rights of indigenous peoples.”

In asserting indigenous peoples’ right to consent, Francis was echoing – and giving sustenance to – a growing body of international law and jurisprudence binding on governments, and guidelines, principles or operating procedures adopted by some financial institutions, UN agencies and private sector groups. According to a 2013 report by UN-REDD on the international legal basis for what is known as “FPIC” – free, prior and informed consent – “More than 200 States have ratified numerous international and regional treaties and covenants that expressly provide for, or are now interpreted to recognise, a State duty and obligation to obtain FPIC where the circumstances so warrant.”

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Source: The Independent

Melanesia Network

Island tourists urged to get to know the locals

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Island tourists urged to get to know the locals
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.

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Vanuatu descendants of Indigenous Australians search for long lost family

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By ABC – 

Pacific Islander labourers were forced to return to their home islands starting in 1906. (Picture: State Library of Queensland)
Pacific Islander labourers were forced to return to their home islands starting in 1906. (Picture: State Library of Queensland)

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.

David Abel (left), pictured with Emelda Davis (right), is trying to find his relatives in Australia.
David Abel (left), pictured with Emelda Davis (right), is trying to find his relatives in Australia.

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.”

South Sea Islander farm workers on a sugar plantation at Cairns in 1890. (State Library of Queensland)
South Sea Islander farm workers on a sugar plantation at Cairns in 1890. (State Library of Queensland)
David Abel, a former Vanuatu MP and a descendent of a Pacific Islander blackbirded to Australia, has long been an advocate for better recognition of that dark chapter in Australia’s history.

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.

The Vanuatu men were in Adelaide this week for a forum at the University of South Australia.
The Vanuatu men were in Adelaide this week for a forum at the University of South Australia.

 

But there is some disunity within the group who have travelled to Australia.

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.

Melanesia Network

Aboriginals in Vanuatu ‘living as second-class citizens’

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By The Australian –

Descendants of the two Aboriginal children who were taken to Vanuatu in the early 1900s.
Descendants of the two Aboriginal children who were taken to Vanuatu in the early 1900s.

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.

Melanesia Network

The chief fighting for an indigenous Vanuatu nation

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By Edward Cavanough – an Australian researcher and writer focusing on public policy and international affairs.

Chief Viraleo Boborenvanua is photographed in Port Vila where he is on bail awaiting trial. Pictures: Edward Cavanough
Chief Viraleo Boborenvanua is photographed in Port Vila where he is on bail awaiting trial. Pictures: Edward Cavanough

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.

Turaga Nation's coat of arms on display in Lavatmengamu - the pig's tusk features prominently.
Turaga Nation’s coat of arms on display in
Lavatmengamu – the pig’s tusk features
prominently.

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.

Tuvatu currency.
Tuvatu currency.

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.

A chief in northern Pentecost proudly displays his collection of pigs' tusks which are used as a means of commerce across the island.
A chief in northern Pentecost proudly displays his collection of pigs’ tusks which are used as a means of commerce across the island.

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.

A small village on the mud track to Lavatmengamu in northeast Pentecost is seen by drone.
A small village on the mud track to Lavatmengamu in northeast Pentecost is seen by drone.

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.