In six weeks, a measles outbreak has infected 3,000 people out of a population of 200,000, killing 42, mostly children
Fa’aoso Tuivale sleeps on her children’s grave during the day, when she misses them most.
She and her husband, Tuivale Luamanuvae Puelua, are sitting on the newly-dried concrete that mark the graves of their three-year-old Itila and 13-month-old twins, Tamara and Sale, talking about the week that has passed since they buried them.
Continue reading...A look back at the archipelago’s history, from German colony to civil war, and from reconciliation to independence referendum
Continue reading...People are ‘in the mood for celebration’ as they choose whether to split from Papua New Guinea
After 20 years, the big day has finally arrived for the people of Bougainville. Large crowds gathered on Saturday at the aptly named Bel Isi (Peace) park in Buka for the first day of a two-week referendum to decide whether the archipelago should become independent from Papua New Guinea.
Amid a significant security presence, hundreds of Bougainvilleans marched through the streets as they followed the autonomous region’s president, John Momis, as he arrived at a polling booth to cast his vote.
Continue reading...Archipelago’s flags replace Papua New Guinean ones on government buildings ahead of voting in referendum
Bougainville will head to the polls tomorrow to decide whether the region will seek independence from Papua New Guinea and become the world’s newest country, in a referendum that has been 20 years in the making.
The small archipelago of islands about 700km east of mainland Papua New Guinea, will hold a referendum that its people have been looking forward to since the ceasefire that ended a brutal civil war in 1998 and the signing of the Bougainville Peace Agreement in 2001.
Continue reading...Bougainvilleans will vote in an independence referendum this weekend, the result of a unique Melanesian process of reconciliation
Thirty years ago Bougainville lost 20,000 people in a brutal civil war that lasted almost a decade.
This week Bougainvilleans will go to the polls to vote on independence from Papua New Guinea, but in a very different mood – one of joy and celebration. Underlying this historic occasion is a resolve by all sides to honour the fallen, but never again return to conflict.
Continue reading...It is a vote that has been 20 years in the making. On Saturday, residents of the remote archipelago in the Solomon Sea will start to decide their future
On Saturday, the people of Bougainville – a small archipelago of islands flung 700km off the coast of Papua New Guinea in the Solomon Sea – will begin voting in a referendum that will determine if their beloved homeland will become the world’s newest nation.
It is a vote that has been nearly 20 years in the making. In 2001, as part of a peace agreement to end a devastating decade-long civil war, the government of Papua New Guinea promised the population of Bougainville, then about 200,000 people, that they would one day be able to cast a vote to decide their future.
Continue reading...Dan McGarry of the Daily Post told at Brisbane airport the Vanuatu immigration service had barred him from flying back to the island country
The media director of a Vanuatu newspaper whose visa renewal was refused this month has been barred from flying home to Vanuatu from Brisbane with his partner.
Dan McGarry, who has lived in Vanuatu for 16 years, applied to have his work permit renewed earlier this year but it was rejected. McGarry believes his visa was refused due to articles he had published about China’s influence in Vanuatu.
Continue reading...At least six deaths have been linked to the outbreak, in a nation where vaccination rates are alarmingly low
Samoa has closed all schools and cracked down on public gatherings as it enters a state of emergency over the deadly measles outbreak spreading across the Pacific islands.
The island state of just 200,000, halfway between Hawaii and New Zealand, announced the state of emergency on Saturday after declaring a measles epidemic late in October, when the first deaths were reported.
Continue reading...Kurdish Iranian refugee and journalist – a multiple award-winner for documenting life in Australia’s offshore detention system – has left Papua New Guinea
•The story behind Behrouz Boochani’s flight to freedom
Behrouz Boochani, the Kurdish Iranian refugee and journalist who became the voice of those incarcerated on Manus Island, has landed in New Zealand and says he will never return to Papua New Guinea or Australia’s immigration regime.
“I will never go back to that place,” he told the Guardian, shortly after leaving PNG. “I just want to be free of the system, of the process. I just want to be somewhere where I am a person, not just a number, not just a label ‘refugee’.”
Continue reading...Vanuatu’s Daily Post has always held the government to account and will continue to do so, with or without me as editor
On Thursday, the Vanuatu government issued instructions that after 16 years living here and, despite having a Ni Vanuatu spouse and children, I will have to leave the country.
As the media director and publisher of Vanuatu’s only daily newspaper, a newspaper that has repeatedly held the government uncomfortably to account, I believe the government refused my application to renew my work visa to silence me and warn other journalists in the country not to speak out.
Continue reading...Dan McGarry believes visa was rejected because of his paper’s critical coverage of government
The Vanuatu government has refused to renew the work permit of its largest newspaper’s long-serving director, Dan McGarry, in what he said was a “straight up attack on the media”.
After 16 years in Vanuatu, McGarry’s application to renew his work permit was refused on Thursday, meaning that McGarry, whose spouse and children are from the country, will have to leave Vanuatu.
Continue reading...Tribal fighting has long been present in the Papua New Guinea highlands but the influx of modern automatic weaponry in the 1990s turned local disputes into lethal exchanges that threatened to permanently reshape highlands culture. Bootleg copies of the US film Rambo circulated in remote communities, becoming a crude tutorial on the use of such weaponry. The film's influence was so pronounced that the term Rambo is used in Papuan dialects to describe hired mercenaries who are paid to support local combatants in violent tribal disputes. Here we meet the fighters and peacekeepers trying to navigate a path between tradition and modernity
Continue reading...All 111 members of parliament will get vehicles from the Apec fleet, but the fate of 40 Maseratis is not yet known
Papua New Guinea’s prime minister will receive one of the Bentley cars controversially purchased by the government at taxpayers’ expense for the 2018 Apec summit, officials have confirmed.
James Marape became PM in May with promises to crack down on corruption. The finance secretary, Ken Ngangan, has told the Post Courier newspaper that all 111 members of parliament will get vehicles from the Apec fleet for their electoral duties, though no one apart from the PM will receive a Maserati or Bentleys.
Continue reading...Agreement for Tulagi, a former Japanese naval base with a deep-water harbour, ‘unlawful’
A Chinese company’s attempt to lease an entire island in the Solomon Islands was unlawful and will not be allowed to go ahead, the Pacific archipelago’s government has announced.
The deal between the Solomons’ Central Province and the state-owned China Sam Group was “unlawful, unenforceable and must be terminated with immediate effect”, prime minister Manasseh Sogavare’s office said in a statement.
Continue reading...Enele Sopoaga says he was also ‘insulted and deeply angry’ at comments made by Australian deputy prime minister Michael McCormack
The former prime minister of Tuvalu has said he was “stunned” by Scott Morrison’s behaviour at the recent Pacific Islands Forum, which he though communicated the view that Pacific leaders should “take the money … then shut up about climate change”.
Enele Sopoaga, speaking at the national conference of the Australian Council for International Development (Acfid) in Sydney on Wednesday, said Morrison’s behaviour at the forum, which Tuvalu hosted in August, was “dismissive” of the concerns of the Pacific regarding the climate crisis.
Continue reading...