Category Archives: South Pacific

‘Poisoning the Pacific’: New book details US military contamination of islands and ocean

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More than 12,000 pages of US government documents show military operations contaminating the Pacific with radioactive waste, nerve agents, and chemical weapons like Agent Orange

In 1968, Leroy Foster was a master sergeant in the US Air Force, assigned to the Anderson Air Force Base in Guam, a United States island territory in the Pacific. The day after he arrived on the island, he recalled being ordered to mix “diesel fuel with Agent Orange”, then spraying “it by truck all over the base to kill the jungle overgrowth”.

Soon after, Foster suffered serious skin complaints and eventually fell sick with Parkinson’s and ischemic heart disease. Later, his daughter had cancer as a teenager, and his grandchild was born with 12 fingers, 12 toes, and a heart murmur. Foster died in 2018.

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Investigations into police and prison violence blocked by Fiji authorities, whistleblowers say

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Exclusive: Allegations of brutality in Fiji’s prisons have been effectively ignored by the government’s human rights commission, insiders claim

Complaints against police and prison officers – including of a violent assault against a young inmate – have been blocked from being investigated by authorities, whistleblowers inside Fiji’s human rights watchdog have claimed, expressing concern the body is not independent of government influence.

Current and former employees of the Fiji Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Commission have alleged investigators are regularly refused access to victims of alleged assaults by Fijian authorities, and that some rights violations by police or corrections officers are disregarded or not investigated properly.

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Pacific’s fight against Covid-19 hamstrung by lack of clean water

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Access to clean, safe drinking water across the Pacific is the lowest of any region in the world, raising fears for the rapid spread of coronavirus

Papua New Guinea’s battle against a climbing rate of Covid-19 infections is being hampered by the most basic of shortages – access to clean water –public health experts have warned.

Case numbers have jumped from just 11 cases two months ago to 424 on Friday, with four deaths. And efforts to contain escalating case numbers throughout the archipelago, and to prevent outbreaks across the Pacific region, are being hamstrung because thousands cannot access clean water for hand-washing and cleaning, the region’s key development agency says.

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‘Cultural rights are human rights too’: Kiribati gesture of welcome must be understood from the island’s perspective | Katerina Teaiwa and Marita Davies

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i-Kiribati writers say the media frenzy over the image of Tang Songgen walking on men’s backs diminishes local customs and culture

The image flew around the world, far ahead of any understanding of what it represented.

In the grainy picture, the Chinese ambassador to Kiribati was being welcomed onto the atoll island of Marakei. A row of young men lay face-down on the ground, their backs forming a path for the ambassador and his colleagues to walk across as they disembarked from a plane.

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Surge in passport sales delivers Vanuatu a record budget surplus

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Economy devastated by Covid shutdowns and a destructive cyclone, but citizenships-for-sale are keeping the country afloat

Surging demand for Vanuatu passports has driven an unexpected record surplus, funding Covid-19 bailout packages and cyclone recovery.

With nearly every other sector of its fragile economy reeling from the twin crises of pandemic lockdowns and April’s category five Cyclone Harold, Vanuatu nonetheless managed to turn a 3.8bn Vanuatu Vatu (US$33.3m) surplus in the first half of 2020.

Its controversial citizenship-for-sale programmes account for nearly all of that.

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The plastic we use unthinkingly every day is killing our planet – and slowly but surely killing us | Andrew Paris

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As researchers, we have been shocked to find the most remote depths of the Pacific Ocean polluted by our plastic. And it will outlive us all.

Another bottle. Yet another one. We are 200km from land, in the middle of the South Pacific, and this is the third bottle we’ve found already this morning.

Everywhere is plastic.

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Pacific states face instability, hunger and slow road to Covid recovery: Dame Meg Taylor

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While the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic has so far spared the Pacific, its economies are in free-fall, the region’s chief diplomat warns

Beyond the health and economic crises of Covid-19, the global pandemic has the potential to cause political instability and undermine state security across the Pacific, the region’s chief diplomat has warned.

Dame Meg Taylor, secretary general of the Pacific Islands Forum, said the region’s economies were struggling with the virus-induced shocks, and a prolonged crisis could worsen existing problems of hunger, poor healthcare, and state fragility.

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Without seasonal workers, Australia may face a hungry summer | Michael Rose

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With not enough workers to pick the upcoming harvest, Australia faces potential food shortages, and its farmers face economic devastation

As Victoria’s Covid-19 outbreak threatens to spiral out of control and beyond its borders, Australia faces another pandemic-related crisis.

We are sailing into a food shortage and few are talking about it. This needs to change.

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‘We were the luckiest people in the world’: our month on the last lockdown cruise

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On 1 March, photographer Jon Tonks left New Zealand on a Pacific cruise. Twenty eight days later, the boat docked in San Diego, amid a pandemic. What happened in between?

The cruise ship MS Maasdam left New Zealand on the evening of 1 March, steaming out of Auckland’s Waitemata harbour into the Hauraki Gulf, where it headed north. The route was to San Diego via Fiji, the Cook Islands, French Polynesia and Hawaii. On board the Holland America Line ship were around 1,200 passengers, including Americans, Britons, Canadians, Australians and French holidaymakers. The 542 crew included Dutch, Americans, Germans, Venezuelans and Filipinos. There were also a handful of entertainers and guest lecturers along for the ride, including Jon Tonks, a portrait photographer from Bath, who ended up with a portrait of a cruise that didn’t go to plan.

Covid-19 was certainly a thing at the beginning of March, but it was still considered mainly a China thing. The Maasdam wouldn’t be going anywhere near China. Questionnaires were handed to passengers, about symptoms and where they’d been before, but then they were good to go. Still, Tonks says that friends had joked before he left: “Good luck on your corona cruise.”

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Coronavirus in the Pacific: weekly briefing

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Covid-19-related developments throughout the Pacific Islands

The total number of Covid-19 cases across the Pacific stands at 314, with new cases reported this week in New Caledonia, Northern Mariana Islands and Guam.

New Zealand is under increasing pressure, both internally and from across the region, to consider Pacific countries as part of its proposed travel ‘bubble’, alongside, or even in place of, Australia. The foreign minister, Winston Peters, initially rejected including Pacific island nations, but later backtracked.

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Pacific countries plead for inclusion in ‘trans-Tasman bubble’ as travel restrictions ease

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Many Pacific nations are Covid-free but have been devastated by the economic impacts of the virus

Pacific Island nations are urging Australia and New Zealand to include them in a planned travel “bubble”, as flights across the region resume.

Pacific governments face a delicate balancing act, weighing the devastating economic impact of border closures and travel restrictions on their tourism-dependent economies, with the risk of widespread and uncontrollable Covid-19 infections if the virus is introduced.

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The Vanuatu island in the eye of the storm

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Pentecost Island, devastated by Cyclone Harold in April, has been left a silent shadow of its former self. But its people endure

Touching down on the island of Pentecost in Vanuatu, it takes hours to notice the silence. After a while it hits you: there’s no birdsong, no insects buzzing and chittering. There is no wind in the trees.

You don’t register the silence at first because your eyes are overwhelmed with the magnitude of the destruction. The eye of category 5 Cyclone Harold passed directly over the central and southern half of this remote and mountainous island on April 5.

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‘It’s all gone’: Cyclone Harold cuts a deadly path through Vanuatu

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The northern islands of the Pacific nation were hit by a category-5 cyclone on Monday, flattening buildings, cutting power and stripping trees

The once-lush forest cover of the island of Malo has been completely denuded. Nearly every tree lost major limbs. Many were snapped at the trunk. Even cyclone-adapted coconut trees were strewn about like matchsticks. Schools and homes were destroyed.

On Monday, the tiny Pacific island country of Vanuatu was rocked by Cyclone Harold, the second category-5 storm to hit the nation in five years. The cyclone, which formed off Solomon Islands and led to the deaths of 27 people who were swept off a ferry in rough seas, went on to flatten buildings and cause severe flooding in Fiji and Tonga. But it passed through the north of Vanuatu when it was at its strongest.

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‘If it comes, it will be a disaster’: life in one of the only countries without coronavirus

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The Pacific nation of Vanuatu is one of the few places that is coronavirus-free, but efforts to stop its arrival have been hampered by a category five cyclone

On Sunday morning, 62 guests prepared to check out of an idyllic resort, surrounded by palm trees and overlooking a lagoon, in Vanuatu’s capital of Port Vila.

But instead of taxis waiting to take them to the airport, familiar faces were anxiously waiting to take their loved ones back home.

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Coronavirus fears and controversial passport sales: Vanuatu’s election explained

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A country with fractured and shifting political alliances, Vanuatu heads to the polls at a crucial moment in its history

In the coffee shops and kava bars of Vanuatu’s capital of Port Vila, there are two subjects that dominate conversation: Covid-19 and this week’s general elections, which will be held on Thursday.

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Advice from a country with regular shortages: stop hoarding toilet paper, get ready for boredom | Dan McGarry

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In Vanuatu, where cyclones regularly interrupt trade, we are watching the west’s collective panic with bemusement

I’ve lived in the south Pacific island nation of Vanuatu for 16 years. Tropical weather regularly interrupts trade. Even when they’re hundreds of kilometres away, cyclones wreak havoc on shipping. Isolation and deprivation define our lives. We know better than most how to cope.

So imagine our bemusement when we see ranks of empty shelves in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and the USA, denuded by people who pretty clearly have never dealt with a shortage before.

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Climate refugees can’t be returned home, says landmark UN human rights ruling

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Experts say judgment is ‘tipping point’ that opens the door to climate crisis claims for protection

It is unlawful for governments to return people to countries where their lives might be threatened by the climate crisis, a landmark ruling by the United Nations human rights committee has found.

The judgment – which is the first of its kind – represents a legal “tipping point” and a moment that “opens the doorway” to future protection claims for people whose lives and wellbeing have been threatened due to global heating, experts say.

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Australia, Fiji’s prayers are with you but we know they aren’t enough to fight the climate crisis | Frank Bainimarama

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The summer has seen another cyclone in Fiji and terrible fires in Australia. We don’t need to be scientists to know that something is very wrong here

As the world rang in a new year, for Oceania, the images that marked the beginning of the decade weren’t ones of champagne and fireworks. Instead we were left with photos and headlines that merit not celebration, but mourning.

The skies of Sydney were stained an eerie blood-red by apocalyptic bushfires, as desperate Australians gathered by the ocean, waiting to be rescued by boat – conditions that threaten to worsen still. Glaciers in New Zealand were covered by a brown dusting of ash that had travelled thousands of kilometres across the Pacific. And in Fiji, we were left reeling by rushing floodwaters and howling, gale-force winds.

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Cyclone Sarai: one dead, thousands evacuated in Fiji

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Storm and flood warnings issued as category two cyclone moves east towards Tonga

One person was killed in Fiji and one was missing as tropical cyclone Sarai battered the country with strong wind and heavy rain, authorities said.

The Fiji National Disaster Management Office said one person was in intensive care and more than 2,500 people had been moved to 70 evacuation centres.

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Samoa ends measles state of emergency as infection rate slows

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Six-week state of emergency is lifted after disease killed 81 people and sickened more than 5,600 others

Samoa has lifted a six-week state of emergency after the infection rate from a measles outbreak that has swept the country started to come under control.

The South Pacific nation has been gripped by the highly infectious disease, which has killed 81 people, most of them babies and young children, and sickened more than 5,600 others.

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