Presented by Emily Moli
Presenter Emily Moli, then a student journalist of the University of the South Pacific and now a Fiji Television reporter, narrates an overview of the award-winning student journalist newspaper Wansolwara, 1996-2006.
Not good quality technically as this is the only version still available and it was dubbed from an old VHS copy.
Programme made in 2006.
East Timor’s history is repeating itself as Jakarta colludes with the West to crush another resource-rich land — West Papua. The world is watching as Australia decides the fate of 43 West Papuans seeking asylum.
By John Pilger
In 1993, I and four others travelled clandestinely across East Timor to gather evidence of the genocide committed by the Indonesian dictatorship. Such was the depth of silence about this tiny country that the only map I could find before I set out was one with blank spaces stamped “Relief Data Incomplete”.
Yet few places had been as defiled and abused by murderous forces. Not even Pol Pot had succeeded in despatching, proportionally, as many people as the Indonesian tyrant Suharto had done in collusion with the “international community”.
In East Timor, I found a country littered with graves, their black crosses crowding the eye: crosses on peaks, crosses in tiers on the hillsides, crosses beside the road. They announced the murder of entire communities, from babies to the elderly.
In 2000, when the East Timorese, displaying a collective act of courage with few historical parallels, finally won their freedom, the United Nations set up a truth commission; on 24 January, its 2500 pages were published. I have never read anything like it.
Using mostly official documents, it recounts in painful detail the entire disgrace of East Timor’s blood sacrifice. It says that 180,000 East Timorese were killed by Indonesian troops or died from enforced starvation. It describes the “primary roles” in this carnage of the governments of the United States, Britain and Australia.
America’s “political and military support were fundamental” in crimes that ranged from “mass executions to forced resettlements, sexual and other horrific forms of torture as well as abuse against children”. Britain, a co-conspirator in the invasion, was the main arms supplier.
If you want to see through the smokescreen currently around Iraq, and understand true terrorism, read this document.
As I read it, my mind went back to the letters Foreign Office officials wrote to concerned members of the public and MPs following the showing of my film Death of a Nation. Knowing the truth, they denied that British-supplied Hawk jets were blowing straw-roofed villages to bits and that British-supplied Heckler & Koch machine-guns! were finishing off the occupants. They even lied about the scale of suffering.
And it is all happening again, wrapped in the same silence and with the “international community” playing the same part as backer and beneficiary of the crushing of a defenceless people.
Indonesia’s brutal occupation of West Papua, a vast, resource-rich province — stolen from its people, like East Timor — is one of the great secrets of our time. Recently, the Australian Minister of “Communications”, Senator Helen Coonan, failed to place it on the map of her own region, as if it did not exist.
An estimated 100,000 Papuans, or 10 percent of the population, have been killed by the Indonesian military. This is a fraction of the true figure, according to refugees. In January, 43 West Papuans reached Australia’s north coast after a hazardous six-week journey in a dugout. They had no food, and had dribbled their last fresh water into their children’s mouths.
“We knew,” said Herman Wainggai, the leader, “that if the Indonesian military had caught us, most of us would have died. They treat West Papuans like animals. They kill us like animals. They have created militias and jihadis to do just that. It is the same as East Timor.”
For more than a year, an estimated 6000 people have been hiding in dense jungle after their villages and crops were destroyed by Indonesian special forces. Raising the West Papuan flag is “treason”. Two men are serving 15- and ten-year sentences for merely trying. Following an attack on one village, a man was presented as an “example” and petrol poured over him and his hair set alight.
When the Netherlands gave Indonesia its independence in 1949, it argued that West Papua was a separate geographic and ethnic entity with a distinctive national character. A report published last November by the Institute of Netherlands History in The Hague revealed that the Dutch had secretly recognised the “unmistakable beginning of the formation of a Papuan state”, but were bullied by the administration of John F Kennedy to accept “temporary” Indonesian control over what a White House adviser called “a few thousand miles of cannibal land”.
The West Papuans were stitched up. The Dutch, Americans, British and Australians backed an “Act of Free Choice” ostensibly run by the UN. The movements of a UN monitoring team of 25 were restricted by the Indonesian military and they were denied interpreters.
In 1969, out of a population of 800,000, some 1000 West Papuans “voted”. All were selected by the Indonesians. At gunpoint, they “agreed” to remain under the rule of General Suharto — who had seized power in 1965 in what the CIA later described as “one of the worst mass murders of the late 20th century”. In 1981, the Tribunal on Human Rights in West Papua, held in exile, heard from Eliezer Bonay, Indonesia’s first governor of the province, that approximately 30,000 West Papuans had been murdered during 1963-69. Little of this was reported in the west.
The silence of the “international community” is explained by the fabulous wealth of West Papua. In November 1967, soon after Suharto had consolidated his seizure of power, the Time-Life Corporation sponsored an extraordinary conference in Geneva. The participants included the most powerful capitalists in the world, led by the banker David Rockefeller.
Sitting opposite them were Suharto’s men, known as the “Berkeley mafia”, as several had enjoyed US government scholarships to the University of California at Berkeley. Over three days, the Indonesian economy was carved up, sector by sector. An American and European consortium was handed West Papua’s nickel; American, Japanese and French companies got its forests.
However, the prize — the world’s largest gold reserve and third-largest copper deposit, literally a mountain of copper and gold — went to the US mining giant Freeport-McMoran. On the board is Henry Kissinger, who, as US secretary of state, gave the “green light” to Suharto to invade East Timor, says the Dutch report.
Freeport is today probably the biggest single source of revenue for the Indonesian regime: the company is said to have handed Jakarta $33 billion between 1992 and 2004. Little of this has reached the people of West Papua. Last December, 55 people reportedly starved to death in the district of Yahukimo. The Jakarta Post noted the “horrible irony” of hunger in such an “immensely rich” province. According to the World Bank, “38 per cent of Papua’s population is living in poverty, more than double the national average”.
The Freeport mines are guarded by Indonesia’s special forces, who are among the world’s most seasoned terrorists, as their documented crimes in East Timor demonstrate. Known as Kopassus, they have been armed by the British and trained by the Australians. Last December, the Howard government in Canberra announced that it would resume “co-operation” with Kopassus at the Australian SAS base near Perth. In an inversion of the truth, the then Australian defence minister, Senator Robert Hill, described Kopassus as having “the most effective capability to respond to a counter-hijack or hostage recovery threat”.
The files of human-rights organisations overflow with evidence of Kopassus’s terrorism. On 6 July 1998, on the West Papuan island of Biak, just north of Australia, special forces massacred more than 100 people, most of them women.
However, the Indonesian military has not been able to crush the popular Free Papua Movement (OPM). Since 1965, almost alone, the OPM has reminded the Indonesians, often audaciously, that they are invaders. In the past two months, the resistance has caused the Indonesians to rush more troops to West Papua.
Two British-supplied Tactica armoured personnel carriers fitted with water cannon have arrived from Jakarta. These were first delivered during the late Robin Cook’s “ethical dimension” in foreign policy. Hawk fighter-bombers, made by BAE Systems, have been used against West Papuan villages.
The fate of the 43 asylum-seekers in Australia is precarious. In contravention of international law, the Howard government has moved them from the mainland to Christmas Island, which is part of an Australian “exclusion zone” for refugees.
We should watch carefully what happens to these people. If the history of human rights is not the history of great power’s impunity, the UN must return to West Papua, as it did finally to East Timor. Or do we always have to wait for the crosses to multiply?
Democracy Now!
Twenty years ago on 10 July 1985, the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior was bombed by French government agents and sunk in Auckland harbour, New Zealand. The French newspaper Le Monde recently revealed that the late French President François Mitterrand personally approved the sinking of the ship. We speak with David Robie, an independent journalist who was on board the ship and wrote the book Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior.
Le Monde obtained a handwritten account of the operation written by the former head of France’s spy agency, Steve Lacoste. Lacoste describes his meeting with Mitterrand two months before the attack. At that meeting, he asked Mitterrand for permission to conduct the bombing. Lacoste wrote that Mitterrand “gave me his consent while emphasising the importance he placed on the nuclear tests.”
Two members of the 13-person French secret service team that carried out the bombing were arrested two days after the bombing. Dominique Prieur and Alain Marfart were sentenced to 10 years in prison but were extradited to French Polynesia, where they served less than three. Others who carried out the bombing have apparently escaped punishment.
The man who coordinated the operation, Louis-Pierre Dillais — a former lieutenant-colonel in the French Secret Service, is now living in Washington, DC, and working for the giant Belgian Arms Maker FH Herstal. The company sells weapons to the US Special Forces and to New Zealand’s defence forces.
Transcript:
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined on the phone now from New Zealand by David Robie, an independent journalist who was on board the ship on its last journey and wrote Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior. A new updated edition of the book is being released this week. He’s also associate professor at Auckland University of Technology’s School of Communication Studies. We welcome you to Democracy Now!, David Robie.
DAVID ROBIE: Hello, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Can you respond to this latest news, the handwritten memo that describes the approval of the French President, François Mitterrand, for the blowing up of the ship?
DAVID ROBIE: Well, it’s been largely received in New Zealand with a certain amount of a “ho-hum, well, we thought so all along.” Most of the reaction, certainly in New Zealand, is that, well, you know, it was no surprise. You know, people have more or less accepted for the best part of 20 years that although it was not, you know, absolutely certain before that Mitterrand had actually sort of authorised the attack, it’s been more or less accepted in New Zealand that that was probably the case.
It’s just interesting that Sir Geoffrey Palmer, who was the Deputy Prime Minister in New Zealand at the time of the bombing said — his reaction when confronted with this news from Le Monde, he said it’s very disappointing, because one would not expect the president of a friendly nation to authorise an illegal act against the nation with whom you enjoy friendly relations and with whom you fought in two world wars.
That seems to me to be rather extraordinary. So that was Sir Geoffrey Palmer’s reaction.
AMY GOODMAN: This past weekend, there was this memorial at the Rainbow Warrior. Can you talk about what happened, who was there, and also about the Greenpeace photographer who was killed?
DAVID ROBIE: Well, Fernando Pereira, he, in fact, had a cabin just very close — I was on board for something like 10 weeks up until the time of the bombing, but I had actually left a couple of nights before, because after the Rainbow Warrior arrived in New Zealand — my home is actually in Auckland — so I had actually gone ashore. And it was good to get ashore for a while.
And with — now, at the 20th anniversary, Marelle, Fernando’s daughter who was eight at the time that he died, she came out for the voyage of the new Rainbow Warrior, going up to Mātauri Bay where the original ship was sunk to make a living reef.
Well, Fernando’s daughter, Marelle, came up on this voyage. And it was a very moving — a very emotional time for her. It was be a opportunity to talk to crew members, and also she addressed the local Māori iwi, the tribe, and to the Greenpeace people and many other peace supporters, and so on, that came up for the ceremony.
AMY GOODMAN: The mission of the Rainbow Warrior, can you talk about that and how it applies to what is happening today, David Robie?
DAVID ROBIE: Well, I mean, the irony today, I think, is that, you know, 20 years ago this was an act of state terrorism, yet the major powers of the era, the US, Britain, and so on, and even Australia, gave no reaction whatsoever to this extraordinary attack, you know, on a sovereign nation, a friendly, sovereign nation with 13 secret agents operating in the country as part of the attack.
In this context of war on terror today, it seems extraordinary that, you know, that — you know, so little attention was given to it. And the legacy of the period of nuclear testing, although France subsequently stopped nuclear testing in 1996 when it signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, there’s still the unresolved problem of the Tahitians that were subjected to radioactive fallout during the period of atmospheric testing in French Polynesia.
And another aspect, of course, with the Rainbow Warrior was that immediately prior to being bombed, it was actually on a voyage to the Marshall Islands, where it resettled a number of Rongelap islanders. In fact, the whole community on Rongelap Atoll were moved to another island. And the reason they did this was because they were subjected to nuclear radiation during the 1950s when the United States was doing atmospheric testing in the Marshall Islands.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to David Robie, who was on the last journey of the Rainbow Warrior before it was blown up by the French government by French intelligence agents. Do you think President Francois Mitterrand should be charged for the explosion and for the death of the photographer?
DAVID ROBIE: Well, the fact is that, you know, there’s a lot of bitter, you know, sort of feeling left in New Zealand as a result of the fact that only two of those agents were arrested and, of course, they were sentenced to 10 years for manslaughter for the death of Fernando Pereira, and also for willful damage to the Greenpeace ship.
And, of course, what really happened was through a brokered trade deal and mediation from the United Nations at the time, France did apologise (of sorts) and it did pay over $13 million in compensation to the New Zealand government, but in return, New Zealand handed over these two agents to the French authorities, and they were whisked off to Hao Atoll in French Polynesia, which was the military base supporting the nuclear testing at Moruroa.
Well, of course, Hao Atoll was something rather like a military Club Med, and both Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur only served there in exile for probably less than two years.
AMY GOODMAN: David Robie, we have to wrap up.
DAVID ROBIE: And then they were taken back to France as heroes.
AMY GOODMAN: But, we have to wrap up. And, of course, with Mitterrand dead, I mean, members of his administration but also the head of French intelligence, Louis-Pierre Dillais, the former lieutenant colonel and French secret service, now living in Washington and working for the giant Belgian arms maker, FH Herstal, it’s interesting he’s selling weapons to, well, your own Defence Department, the New Zealand Defence Department, as well.
DAVID ROBIE: Absolutely, and many New Zealanders are aghast at that.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there. I want to thank you very much, David Robie, author of Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior.
The original content of this programme is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
By Greenpeace
The Boat and the Bomb is a 2005 documentary marking the 20th anniversary of the bombing of the Greenpeace flagship the Rainbow Warrior by secret agents of the French military in Auckland Harbour, New Zealand.
On the night of 10 July 1985 the Rainbow Warrior had been docked in harbour for three days while preparations for the protest voyage to the nuclear test site at Moruroa Atoll were being finalised.
Just before midnight two bombs exploded sinking the ship and killing cameraman Fernando Pereira.
The Greenpeace environmental ship had been earlier on a voyage to Rongelap Atoll in the Marshall islands where the crew helped evacuate the islanders to evacuate to a other islet, Mejato, on the US military base atoll Kwajalein.
The documentary includes images of David McTaggart, Steve Sawyer, Marion Hobbs, Martini Gotje, Pete Willcox, Hanne Sorrensen, Paul Brown (UK journalist), Marelle Pereira, Fernando Pereira, Henk Haazen, Edwy Plenel (French journalist), Allan Galbraith, Rien Achterberg, Bunny McDiarmid, David Lange, Margaren Crozier, David Robie (NZ journalist) and Stephanie Mills.
By Anastasia Siniori
“K” Magazine, published by Kathimerini Publishing SA of Greece, ran a six-page article and interviews with Grace O’Sullivan and David Robie (including some of David’s images) marking publication of the memorial edition of Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior.
Citizens of the politically turbulent states that are New Zealand’s neighbours deserve better news media. David McLoughlin talks to an old Pacific hand, David Robie.
By David McLoughlin
Trainee New Zealand journalists learn how to cover council meetings and not get sued for defamation. Their colleagues in the South Pacific learn how to cope with coups and having guns pointed at them.
Now the one-time Wellingtonian who devoted a decade to training South Pacific journalists in Fiji and Papua New Guinea thinks it’s time this country did something to foster the Fourth Estate in its backyard.
David Robie’s journalism career spans 40 years, beginning on The Dominion in Wellington in 1965, but despite stints in attractive places like Melbourne and Paris and hotspots like Kenya and apartheid-era South Africa, the South Pacific became his specialty.
From 1986 to 1993, he ran a South Pacific regional news service based in Auckland before shifting to Port Moresby to become a journalism lecturer at the University of Papua New Guinea. In 1998, he moved to Suva in Fiji as journalism coordinator at the University of the South Pacific.
Four years later, he took a position as senior lecturer in journalism at Auckland University of Technology, where he has continued as an ardent advocate of Pacific journalism, writing a book on its pedagogy, politics and perils. Mekim Nius (Making News), launched late last month.
“Journalists in the South Pacific face a lot more risks than in New Zealand or Australia,” he says. “Here we are concerned with defamation, but in the Pacific, you face the risk of personal threats and assaults.
“One of my first students in Papua New Guinea was held up at gunpoint by a soldier because she exposed corruption in the military. At USP, we taught about dealing with sedition and treason.”
Unfriendly environments
Dr Robie says that what happens in the South Pacific is important and often affects New Zealand, but this country does little or nothing to help train the journalists who have to work in often unfriendly environments.
“We should be more involved, because the South Pacific has been a volatile area for a long time. The media is vital in strengthening democracy in the region.”
He cites the 10-year war in Bougainville, the three coups in Fiji, the long unrest in the Solomon Islands.
“At this moment, there are rumours of another coup in Fiji and about what will happen when Labour wins the next election there, as I’m sure it will.”
The picture he paints is of opportunities lost by New Zealand to Australia, which contributes extensively to journalism training in the region, but not of the kind that would produce the most benefit.
Ausaid, the Australian government aid agency, has allocated millions of dollars since 1996 for media training in the region.
“And so it dominates the region. Ausaid pays quite a lot for short-course journalism training, but it’s a band-aid approach with minimal training. Australia’s aid is designed to be influential for Australia. New Zealand aid programmes don’t try to seek direct influence and favours the same way.”
Support quickly waned
That was not always the case. In 1975, New Zealand helped found the University of PNG journalism school, where Dr Robie worked, but though New Zealand interest in economic development aid to the region has grown, its support for training journalists quickly waned.
Dr Robie notes the irony that few New Zealand journalists had any university training in 1975. Most learned on the job after starting fresh from school.
A second PNG journalism school was established at the Catholic Divine Word University in 1982 and, in 1987, a journalism school was founded at the USP in Suva. But funding has always been problematic and most journalists across the region never get to them, continuing the “learn on the job” tradition.
“In the South Pacific, the school system in most countries does not educate young people to question authority, so it is very important for journalists to get training in that. Outside PNG, journalists mostly go straight into the job with little knowledge of how things work. So you get some quite slapdash standards, and journalists who are wary of taking on authority.”
The lack of training and a tradition of not questioning authority resulted in mixed messages from the Fiji media during the attempted coup fronted by George Speight in May 2000.
Dr Robie says some Fiji journalists (including those in his journalism classes at the time) turned out sterling work, but others simply assumed that the elected government had been overthrown and accepted the coup as a fait accompli.
Some journalists even camped with Speight at the commandeered Parliament.
Poorly paid
As well as lack of training, South Pacific journalists are poorly paid. In Fiji, which has one of the strongest economies and highest pay in the region, a newly trained graduate nurse begins at F$14,000 (NZ$11,700) but a journalist begins on F$6500.
“What I found teaching there was that you get bright young people who will work as journalists for a year or so but leave for jobs with much better pay using the double major degrees they got to get into journalism. It means there is a revolving door with a continual loss of staff and makes it very difficult to get stable editorial standards and policies.”
Though there are many capable, talented and courageous journalists in the region, the poor pay undermines the independence and integrity of the Fourth Estate.
“It means that journalists are potentially more readily tempted by ‘envelope’ journalism — bribery and other inducements by unscrupulous politicians and other powerful figures.
“There have been cases of this reported in Papua New Guinea and elsewhere in the region. And it may well be worse than is generally believed. Financial hardships and lack of training are an unhealthy mix for media in a democracy.”
Media owners say the pay is poor because they cannot afford anything else. Dr Robie says this might be so in smaller countries, but not in Fiji and PNG, which have some big media companies, including subsidiaries of foreign multinationals. For example, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp owns Port Moresby daily Post-Courier and The Fiji Times in Suva.
‘Journalist in residence’
He would like to see New Zealand offer scholarships for Pacific journalists to come here to work as interns with our media, and establish a programme like having a New Zealand “journalist in residence’ at the University of the South Pacific.
It isn’t something he has raised formally, but he has discussed it informally with Foreign Affairs officials. His book floats the idea, and he hopes something comes of it.
Dr Robie also believes New Zealand media could offer much better coverage of South Pacific news and issues. Despite our links with many Pacific countries and our geographical nearness, he describes news coverage as sparse.
“Some things going on in the Pacific right now will have an enormous impact on the region, such as the current upheaval in French Polynesia with [veteran President] Gaston Flosse being ousted after two decades by anti-nuclear campaigner Oscar Temaru. But it’s got barely any coverage here.”
By David Robie
The news media is the watchdog of democracy. But in the South Pacific today the Fourth Estate role is under threat from governments seeking statutory regulation, diminished media credibility, dilemmas over ethics and uncertainty over professionalism and training.
Traditionally-with the exception of Papua New Guinea where university education has been the norm — the region’s journalists have mostly learned on the job in the newsroom or through vocational short courses funded by foreign donors.
However, today’s Pacific journalists now more than ever need an education to contend with the complex cultural, development, environmental historical, legal, political and sociological challenges faced in an era of globalisation.
From the establishment of the region’s first journalism school at the University of Papua New Guinea in 1975 with New Zealand aid, Mekim Nius traces three decades of South Pacific media education history.
Dr David Robie profiles journalism at UPNG, Divine Word University and the University of the South Pacific in Fiji with Australian, Commonwealth, French, NZ and UNESCO aid. He also examines the impact of the region’s politics on the media in the two major economies, Fiji and Papua NewGuinea — from the Bougainville conflict and Sandline mercenary crisis to Fiji’s coups.
The book draws on interviews, research, two news industry surveys, and the author’s personal experience as a Pacific media educator for almost a decade. Mekim Nius argues journalists need to be provided with critical studies, ethical and contextual knowledge matching technical skills to be effective communicators and political mediators with the Pacific’s “new regionalism”. — From the Back Cover
By Angeline Lal in Suva
It was an occasion to remember for three University of the South Pacific students and their former lecturer when they graduated together during Friday’s ceremony in Suva.
Professor Robie received a doctorate in history/politics while three of his former students — Akka Rimon, Lauren Robinson and Kaveeta Chand — all received a bachelor’s degree majoring in journalism.
Dr Robie, 59, now a senior academic with Auckland University of Technology’s School of Communication Studies, said it was a relief to have completed his doctorate since he faced many hardships trying to balance full-on journalism academic work and study, especially in the middle of a coup.
He dedicated his achievement to his wife, Del Abcede, who was at the graduation.
“This achievement is for my wife who has always supported me and encouraged me at difficult times to work on completing my thesis,” he said. He also thanked his parents, Jim and Jean Robie, and sisters Pauline and Claire for their support.
The USP’s journalism coordinator for six years, Dr Robie said that it was a great honour for him to complete his PhD at USP since his thesis was on Pacific media.
Based as a journalist in the South Pacific for 20 years, he taught at the University of Papua New Guinea prior to joining USP.
George Speight coup
“It’s been hard trying to do a thesis and working at the same time, especially in 2000 during the George Speight coup,” said Dr Robie.
Of the 10 prizes and highly commended citations won by the USP journalism programme at the Journalism Education Association (of Australasia) — Ossie Awards — during Dr Robie’s time, one was the coveted Dr Charles Stuart award for their 2000 coup coverage.
One of the students, Robinson, now working for Fiji Television, graduated with a BA in journalism and community psychology.
“No more assignment and exams. I’m just looking forward to pursuing a career in journalism and the things I am interested in like production work.”
Robinson won the journalism programme’s best editor/news director award in 2003.
She dedicated her achievement to her parents for the “late night pick-ups and for providing everything that I needed for school.”
Her parents, who were present at the graduation, were visibly moved.
Her father was proud that Lauren’s achievements had surpassed his own. “I attribute Lauren’s success to God,” he said.
Rimon flew in from Kiribati for the graduation. “It was hard coping with he assignments and meeting deadlines, but it was worth the demands.”
Rimon dedicated her success to her late father. She works for the Kiribati government. She won the programme’s best graduating student award in 2023.
Republished from USP’s Wansolwara Online website.
By David Robie
University education for South Pacific journalists is a relatively recent development. It has existed in Papua New Guinea for merely a generation; it is less than a decade old at degree level in Fiji, and in the former colonies in Polynesia. At the same time, mean age, experience and educational qualifications have been rising among journalists in the major Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) member countries, Australia and New Zealand, as the news media has become more professionalised.
While the Papua New Guinea media has largely depended on journalism education to provide the foundation for its professionalism, Fiji has focused on a system of ad hoc short course training funded by international donors. This thesis examines the history of South Pacific university media education and its impact on the region’s journalism. Its first objective is to test the hypothesis that tertiary education has a critical influence on how Pacific journalists practise their profession and perceive their political and social role in a developing society faced with the challenges of globalisation.
Secondly, the thesis aims to analyse the political, economic and legal frameworks in which the media have operated in Papua New Guinea and Fiji since independence. Third, the thesis aims to explain and assess in detail the development of journalism education in the South Pacific since independence.
The theoretical framework is from a critical political economy perspective. It also assesses whether the concept of development journalism, which had its roots in the 1980s debate calling for a ‘New International Information and Communication Order’ (NWICO), has had an influence on a Pacific style of journalism.
The thesis argues within a context where journalists can be considered to be professionals with some degree of autonomy within the confines set by a capitalist and often transnational-owned media, and within those established by governments and media companies.
Journalists are not solely ‘governed’ by these confines; they still have some freedom to act, and journalism education can deliver some of the resources to make the most of that freedom.
The thesis includes historical case studies of the region’s three main journalism schools, Divine Word University (PNG), University of Papua New Guinea and the University of the South Pacific. It demonstrates some of the dilemmas faced by the three schools, student journalists and graduates while exercising media freedom.
Research was conducted using the triangulation method, incorporating in-depth interviews with 57 editors, media managers, journalists and policy makers; two newsroom staff surveys of 15 news organisations in Fiji and Papua New Guinea in 1998/9 (124 journalists) and 2001 (106); and library and archives study. It also draws on the author’s personal experience as coordinator of the UPNG (1993-1997) and USP (1998-2002) journalism programmes for more than nine years.
The thesis concludes that journalists in Papua New Guinea (where university education has played a vital role for a generation) are more highly educated, have a higher mean experience and age, and a more critically sophisticated perception of themselves and their media role in Pacific societies than in Fiji (where almost half the journalists have no formal tertiary education or training).
Journalists in Fiji are also more influenced by race, cultural and religious factors. Conversely, PNG journalists are poorly paid even when compared with their Fiji colleagues. There are serious questions about the impact that this may have on the autonomy of journalists and the Fourth Estate role of news media in a South Pacific democracy.
Thesis sequel, Robie, D. (2004). Mekim Nius: South Pacific Media, Politics and Education. Published by The University of the South Pacific Book Centre, Suva, Fiji. Open access available here.
Retrieved from USP (only Vol 1 available digitally, Vol 2 in Pacific Collection): http://pimrisregional.library.usp.ac.fj/gsdl/collect/usplibr1/index/assoc/HASH0179.dir/doc.pdf
Retrieved from Auckland Public Library (Pacific Collection, 2 vols).
Retrieved from AUT University (2 vols): http://hdl.handle.net/10292/4557
Retrieved from CORE – Aggregating the world’s open access research: core.ac.uk
Many Pacific Islands neophyte journalists face a baptism of fire. It often takes raw courage to be a journalist in the Pacific. DAVID ROBIE writes about media issues after recently ending a decade of journalism education in the region.
Barely two years ago masked Fijian gunmen seized a consignment of books from the United States bound for the University of the South Pacific journalism programme in Suva. The small cardboard box was stashed in a courier mail van hijacked by coup front man George Speight’s supporters hoping to find hard cash.
Two months later the carton was recovered by police from the ransacked Parliament and handed over to me; torn open but contents intact. Ironically, inside were six copies of Betty Medsger’s Winds of Change: Challenges Confronting Journalism Education.
This was a poignant reminder of the realities facing Pacific media. Politics in the region are increasingly being determined by terrorism, particularly in Melanesia; such as in Fiji, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.
And with this development comes a greater demand on the region’s media and journalists for more training and professionalism. Most journalists are young, relatively inexperienced and lowly paid.
Since Speight’s illegal seizure of Parliament on 19 May 2000, politics in Fiji has remained under the spectre of terrorism. While the Speight upheaval cost a relatively modest 15 lives–all Fijian–the fear of it happening again, and next time being even bloodier, is still a concern.
Fiji’s politics is driven by fear and a continuing threat to reinvoke terrorism if governments do not pursue a narrow particular direction, defined as ensuring “indigenous paramountcy”.
Fiji is already a country prone to having coups (three so far) and risks becoming consigned to a fate of economic, political, and legal instability; a “banana republic”. Respect for the law is rapidly diminishing.
Few people believe Speight will serve more than a token symbolic period of his life sentence for treason in “prison”; he is detained on the tropical isle of Nukulau off Suva, a former haven for local picnickers.
Ten of his co-conspirators who pleaded guilty to lesser charges were given minor jail sentences (none will serve more than three years), while two–leading journalist Jo Nata and chiefly politician Ratu Timoci Silatolu–have denied the treason charges and at the time of writing await trial.
The role of Nata — “I was just a public relations consultant”– is at the centre of crucial issues in Fiji over journalism ethics, integrity, and independence.
One of Fiji’s first journalism graduates (at an Australian university), Nata was formerly coordinator of the Fiji Journalism Institute, a training centre established by media industry people that eventually closed under a cloud in 1999 about accountability over donor agency funding.
Another Fijian journalist, Margaret Wise, sacked as chief-of-staff of The Fiji Times, has also recently been at the centre of debate over ethics and her paternity action against former coup leader and prime minister Sitiveni Rabuka.
Editorial headlines such as “Don’t shoot the messenger” highlight the hypocrisy in the Fiji media when defending perceived threats to media freedom. There is little debate about the quality of the media itself and whether the Pacific gets the critical journalism that it deserves.
Other countries such as Australia and New Zealand have “mediawatch” style programmes on television and radio, and columns in newspapers, that vigorously question the media. News programmes also regularly invite journalism school commentators for views as they are independent from commercial interests.
Such lively debate is healthy for improvements in the media. After all, the watchdog also watching to ensure it doesn’t become a lapdog.
Award-winning documentary maker Senator ‘Atu Emberson-Bain was incensed after Fiji Television refused to show her excellent documentary, In the Name of Growth, exposing the appalling exploitation of indigenous women workers by an indigenous owned Pafco (Pacific Fishing Company) tuna canning plant on Ovalau Island:
“So much for the free (television) media in this country — the debate always focuses on freedom from government interference.,” Dr Emberson-Bain said.
“What about freedom from the big (private sector) boys on the block with their vested interests?”
While Fiji TV turned down her programme on spurious grounds, SBS TV broadcast it in Australia and bought exclusive broadcast rights for four years. It was also nominated in the best documentary category at the 21st Annual Hawai’i International Film Festival.
After more than two and a half decades reporting and teaching journalism in the region, at times involving controversy, my most nerve wracking time was perhaps being twice arrested in New Caledonia during 1987 by French military forces, once at gunpoint near the east coast village of Canala. At the time I was covering the militarisation of indigenous Kanak villages in an attempt to suppress the struggle for independence.
One of the problems was my book on the 1985 Rainbow Warrior bombing, Eyes of Fire, which was not popular with French colonial authorities.
The Fiji crisis highlighted many dilemmas about culture and conflict. Customary obligations can be a burden on journalists.
“Under pressure they can succumb to the demands of traditional loyalties,” argues former Fiji Daily Post editor Jale Moala. Writing about the Speight putsch in my book The Pacific Journalist, he said:
“The problem that arose here was not so much one of reporters taking sides, as it may have seemed at the time, but the inability of many reporters to function objectively under the pressures of the crisis. A lack of leadership in newsrooms was one reason.”
According to Agence France-Presse correspondent Michael Field — who has had the biggest share of bannings of any journalist in the Pacific, having being shut out of Kiribati, Nauru, Tonga, and even Fiji at one stage — the region has been going through something of an unprecedented crackdown against journalists.
Student journalists have also faced victimisation over their reporting. Many incidents involving threats and attempted gaggings have impacted on USP student journalists working on their newspaper Wansolwara.
But the “shooting the messenger” syndrome always had more serious consequences in Papua New Guinea. Two University of PNG reporters on Uni Tavur gave testimony last year before a commission of inquiry examining the causes of the shooting to death of four young Papua New Guineans during the protests against structural adjustment.
While I was at UPNG, two senior Uni Tavur reporters were beaten up one night because of their front page report on a political dispute between two national student politics leaders, both from the province of Enga.
On another occasion, drunken off-duty officers attacked a group of Uni Tavur students and me inside a police barracks. One student journalist was forced to go into hiding after he reported a funding scandal involving the then Miss UPNG.
Rarely do Australian or New Zealand journalism schools encounter this degree of “direct action” over stories. For many Pacific Islands neophyte journalists, it is a baptism of fire.
Not only does truth hurt, it can sometimes lead to a brutal act of retribution. It often takes raw courage to be a journalist in the Pacific.
Originally published in Pacific Weekly Review, September 30-October 6 edition.
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