When Reporters Without Borders chief Christophe Deloire introduced the Paris-based global media watchdog’s Asia-Pacific press freedom defenders – including from Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea – to his overview last week, it was grim listening.
Pacific environmental and political journalist David Robie has recalled the bombing of the original Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior 33 years ago in an interview with host Sarah Macdonald on the ABC’s Nightlife “This Week in History” programme.
Former Brigadier-General Jerry Singirok, a former commander of the PNG Defence Force has described Prime Minister Peter O’Neill’s government response to last week’s Mendi riots as a “premature state of emergency” and a “cheap, reckless and knee-jerk option”.
It was the also the most horrendous day for global media too since the Ampatuan massacre on the southern Philippines island of Mindanao on 23 November 2009. A shocking 32 journalists were murdered that day … To date nobody has been successfully brought to justice.
The original version of this photo, of West Papuan nambas (traditional penis gourds), which was published in the weekend edition of the family newspaper Vanuatu Daily Post and then by Asia Pacific Report, was deemed to have breached Facebook’s “community standards”. The photo was by award-winning photojournalist Ben Bohane, who lives in Vanuatu and whose work was published recently in the PMC book Conflict, Culture and Conscience.
Hele Ikimotu and Blessen Tom bear a close connection to the impact climate change is wreaking on the Pacific region and wider world for their new Bearing Witness challenge. Ikimotu is from Kiribati and his passion for the Bearing Witness project is drawn from his close connection to the Pacific.
“After the shooting was over, the soldiers went and were eating their lunch, really literally next to the ditch, next to the bodies. And that’s how disconnected you get,” Seymour Hersh, the investigative reporter who uncovered the story, said on Democracy Now.
It has been described by the BBC as the “invisible quake” – at least to the outside world. However, more than 100 people have died with landslides engulfing entire villages in the Papua New Guinean Highlands earthquake … PNG journalists have been doing an admirable job reporting the disaster to international media as well as their own people in difficult and risky circumstances.
Another critical takeaway message was the vital need for “more Pacific research, by the Pacific and for the Pacific”, as expressed by 2007 Nobel Peace Prize co-recipient Professor Elisabeth Holland, director of the University of the South Pacific’s Pacific Centre for Environment and Sustainable Development (PaCE-SD).
Since former Fiji military leader Voreqe Bainimarama carried out his “coup to end all coups” in 2006 and ushered in his authoritarian regime, he has reset electoral rules, abolished communalism in order to pull the rug from under the old chiefly elite, and provided the first non-communal foundation for voting in Fiji. A new book assesses his political role as he faces another election this year.