Up Front

with the Editor

Fortunately PIM doesn’t receive the kind of anonymous letters that plague most newspapers and magazines, but we do receive a good share of communications written by people who sign their name but ask us to withhold it from publication. Usually they hold official positions, so the anonymity is understandable.

But the other day I had a letter from a member of French Polynesia’s Territorial Assembly, signed by him, and asking me not to use his name, “as the French certainly don’t like the Pacific Islands Monthly, and true articles such as you run on Tahiti would never be printed here”.

If a parliamentarian doesn’t feel free to publish a letter to the editor over his own name, the political situation in Tahiti must be worse even than the president of the Assembly, Mr. John Teariki, has been claiming recently. But I shall honour his re quest of course.

His complaint is against the French bomb tests in French Polynesia, which he says have resulted in Tahiti being virtually under French military occupation, and it is this “occupa tion”, as much as the tests themselves, that he objects to.

He suggests that members of the Pacific Area Travel Association be encouraged to blackball the workshop section of PATA which is to meet in Tahiti this year.

He continues: “Under normal cir cumstances the conference would be a good thing for the future of Tahiti, which does need tourists.

However, the fact is that France will be exploding six more atomic bombs in this area, and Tahiti is under French military occupation. If Tahiti was listed as being unfit to hold a tourist conference, this might hurt French pride and in the end may actually help tourism.

“The French are conducting atmos pheric tests in Tahiti without the permission of the Territorial Assembly or the population. We have voted against the Gaullists, who brought us the bomb and the military, on every opportunity.

“Much of the best available flat land in Tahiti is covered with military

camps and housing areas and we have rampant inflation which has made a few rich, but actually brought new poverty and slums to Tahiti.

“The devaluation, thanks to Gaullist false pride, has hurt us badly. We have to import everything and most of it does not come from France. While tourists in France might benefit from devaluation, tourists in Tahiti will finally pay more for everything, and the popu lation will suffer.

“We in the Assembly asked for an American consul, but the Gaullists kicked out the consul and closed the consulate, an insult to us and the Americans who bring us most of the tourists.

“Yet we must support these people in Tahiti who have ruined our economy, given us a bad name, crushed our roads with heavy military trucks and caused shortages of water and electricity.

“The tourists in Papeete need not expect to see Tahitians in the local bars and night clubs. They will see rows of young French military gawk ing at any strange girl who might walk in. The crime rate, accident: rate and divorce rate all point to the military. I can only urge Pacific: nations to stop the PATA conference,, which will only help French prestige and prove to the French that bomb tests don’t hurt tourism.

"Ban the Games"

“And the same situation should apply to the South Pacific Games, to: be held in Papeete in 1971, unless the tests are stopped and the military sent home. Tahiti is now a gianti rest camp for the tired French; military. Three hotels are still under military occupation as well as virtu ally all private housing.”

This politician’s views square with the anti-military attitude that is current in Tahiti. And it squares with the continual demand by the parliamentary opposition, the majority party, for internal self-government for Tahiti.

I don’t believe that any opposition to the bomb tests from either inside or outside Tahiti will stop the tests. But the time is coming when metropolitan France will have to be more flexible in its handling of its Pacific territories, and give them the measure of self-government they have been asking for.

Those territories may legally be part of France proper, but you can’t forever run them from Paris, and still keep up the fiction that they are as independent as anybody else in the French republic.

Tongan situation

Another piece of correspondence during the month is anonymous in a different sort of way. It has a name for publication, and the address of one of our smaller Pacific institutions of learning. I can’t find anybody at that institution who has heard of the writer. But I shall give him a run, because he obviously has know ledge of his subject and he makes a point.

The writer has little confidence in Tonga’s family planning objectives, referred to by Prince Tu’ipelehake at the Noumea South Pacific Conference ( PIM, Nov., p. 32).

He says Tonga won’t control her population explosion that way, and he continues; “As far as Tonga’s people being its greatest asset, one can only add that in the very near future Tonga’s people will also be its greatest liability, for one can have too much of a good thing. One can easily bear out this view by walking around the capital of Nukualofa and observing the large numbers of schoolchildren, for very few of whom jobs will be available in the future. Owing little allegiance to a system which has done precious little for them, these children are the unemployed and disaffected of the coming years. The present social system will surely founder before the pressures which they will create.

"Place in the world"

“Exactly what Prince Tu’ipelehake can mean by the Tongan people taking their place in the world is not at all clear. If he is referring to the ‘great nation aspirations’ of his brother the king, whose fancies range from UN representation to international jet ports, the abacus

and computers, then the future for the average Tongan seems con jectural, to say the least.

“However, his assertion that, ‘it is not minerals, coconuts or bananas that count’ is most frightening, and points to a naive flight from the agricultural environment which is the reality of the Tongan situation.

“One cannot help but think, as one considers Prince Tu’ipelehake’s remarks, that the longer that the Nobles ruling Tonga hold these types of beliefs, then the nearer comes the inevitable Tongan social revolution.

Regrettably, or perhaps fortunately, there are few educated Tongans who can subscribe to Dr. Joe Fanamanu’s belief that, ‘Tongan royalty will last as long as there is even one single Tongan subject still alive to be ruled’ {PIM, July, 1969).

“The majority of educated Tongans who I have been able to meet, both in and outside Tonga, are even now growing impatient of the selfish ways in which the Nobles and the royal family are using the government, its agencies and the Constitution to better their own lives, instead of improving the lot of their subjects.

“A Tongan future, a Tongan identity, needs not empty words or fancy rhetoric by princes at SPC meetings, it needs unselfish action by a government renowned for its inactivity.”

One has only to read recent corres pondence in PIM, including an article in this month’s issue, to know that the position of the Nobles in Tonga is being questioned more each month.

I think it is going too far to say that they and the royal family are selfishly using the government to better their own lives, but it won’t do them any harm to hear it said.

Stuart Inder