Up Front

with the editor

That great haze of phosphate dust which has obscured events on the small island of Nauru during these last few months of the hectic rush to independence will take many more months to settle. Not until it has settled do I think I have much hope of knowing just how the citizens of the world’s smallest republic will manage their new independence.

rm certainly not prepared to make any predictions. This may appear odd if you know that for some years I have been actively sympathetic to the Nauruan request for control of the phosphate and for political free dom. I have given my support often, both in print and on the radio, and I’ll have some satisfaction in being able to wave a Nauruan flag this January 31.

But being entitled to the right to independence, and having the re sources and the capacity to make it work, are not the same thing as making it work, and I have never been confused about the difference.

Having decided that the Nauruans were sincere about their requests, as I did some time ago, the first thing to do was to give them support.

The resources for an independent economy were always there. And with their ownership of the phosphate deposits achieved half way through 1967, they were thus in a position to set off on their own in a far sounder economic state than most territories that have achieved inde pendence before them.

I think that the Nauruans have the personal capacity for indepen dence, even accounting for the fact that the island is not exactly over burdened with men of the calibre of Hammer Deßoburt. I believe they have the capacity despite the views of some knowledgeable and undoubted good friends of the Nauruans who shake their heads over the recent swift turn of events and say moodily “The Nauruans just haven’t got it. They’re spoiled. They’ll never make it work”.

The Nauruans have got it. But will they decide to use it? Will they get stuck into the job and make it work?

Well, as I said, I’ll be waiting until the haze lifts.

I’d be surprised if there were any trouble from the dissenting voices to independence, represented by Councillor V. Eoaeo, who has gone on record lately asking that inde pendence be deferred for another year or so, as there has been “no need for this acceleration”.

Over the many months of the negotiations the trusteeship powers hopefully looked for signs of real dissent and discontent in the com munity, but found none. The Nauruans had closed ranks.

No doubt this was easier to do in Nauru than elsewhere because, of the population of 3,000 Nauruans, about 2,000 are under the age of 20, and about half of these are under the age of 10. But whether for the right reasons or the wrong ones, most of the people who*-have the respon sibility of making the decisions on Nauru have supported Hammer Deßoburt in his demands for inde

pendencc, and this is what matters.

If trouble comes in the first few years it will be because not enough Nauruans want to put their shoulders to the wheel, preferring the role of absentee landlord, and allowing others to earn their money for them.

It will be because the youngsters have not been taught that application is needed in a competitive world; that high failure rates at school, truancy, lack of discipline—all of which have been a marked feature of the educational scene on Nauru in recent years—are no way to develop a nation.

And if trouble comes it will come because of the Nauruan dislike of self-examination, of Nauruan sensi tivity to criticism.

Independent Nauru and the people in it can expect now to be more in the public eye, and not everything that will be written will be con structive, and some of it will be downright damaging. How will the new Nauru react? Ban its critics, like Cambodia and South Africa? I confess I don’t know, but I am not apprehensive.

Nauruans have their deadly sins, but they have their graces, too. “This may be a small people in terms of numbers,” the New Zealand repre sentative, Mr. Craw, told the Trustee ship Council in November when moving for the termination of the Trusteeship Agreement, “but it is a unified, proud and able people, a people imbued with a powerful sense of being, in themselves a quite unique human group.”

I hope when the haze lifts, Mr.

Craw will be seen to be right enough.

By the way, Mr. Craw was one of a handful of UN representatives who congratulated both the Nauruans and the Australians on the satisfactory completion of Nauru’s trusteeship.

The one exception was Soviet repre sentative Shakkov, who saw Nauruan independence entirely as a “great and invincible national movement waging a decisive attack against the forces of imperialism and colonialism, oppression and enslavement.”

Which reminded me of the pleasant lunch I had in Sydney a few months ago with a visiting Soviet professor, whose sound knowledge of South Pacific political problems won my admiration.

“If there are people like you in Moscow,” I said, “why does the Soviet spout so much South Pacific nonsense in the UN?”

“That’s nothing to do with me,” said the professor. “That’s politics.

There are those of us in Moscow who know what is really going on.”

Stuart Inder