Land of

Pacific

Islands

Monthly

Opinion

Land of my Father

THE demise of the colonial empires and the birth of small, dependent states in the Pacific Islands in the past two decades created new values that are now being challenged in the region. A new wind of independence is blowing sought by the indigenous races wishing to re assert their authority in the land they call their fathers’.

In Fiji, as in Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, Australia, French Polynesia, New Caledonia, Solomons and Vanuatu the very foundation of western democracy is being shaken by renewed desire to change the law to accommodate indige nous land rights, fisheries and cultural values which in the past 20 years or so were threatened by the new political system introduced by the colonial masters.

For 3000 years they’ve owned their land from the sky to the bottom of the earth including anything on it, above it, in it and below it. But political and administrative changes in the past 200 years changed that ownership. In the cases of Bougainville and Fiji, for example, indigenous landowners no longer owned what their forefathers had. Now land own ership is confined only to the first metre of top-soil. The riches that lie beneath now belong to someone else.

For the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Islands, land is God. Its sanctity is based on its ability to provide life. With out land there is no life, and no people. It is this value that has escaped the foreigner brought up in a western value system who sees no religious value in land but merely appreciates its economic worth.

The struggle for land and fisheries rights has become the biggest threat to peace in the region. It triggered a success ful military coup in Fiji and was the cause of an attempted coup in Vanuatu. Land is the centre of the rebellion in Bougainville, and the Maoris and Aborigines of New Zea land and Australia are using it as an effective ammunition in

their struggle for political recognition.

Land struggle in the region is going through a chain reaction: as one battle is won, another is started. □