election offer

Boulekone’s election offer

THE Tan Union party, ofVanuatu, could join with the ruling Vanuaaku Party to form a govern ment after December’s general election, Tan Union president Vincent Boulekone said. “If the results of the elections are that the Vanuaaku Party of (Prime Minister Donald) Kalpokas does not have a majority, it is taken for granted that we would be able to work with him to form a coalition government within the parliament,” he said.

On September 6, Tan Union helped Kalpokas and his supporters pass a motion of no-confidence in Prime Min ister Walter Lini, who had led Vanuatu since independence from France and Britain in 1980. Boulekone said his party would win four to six seats at the elections. But if added to the 18 to 20 seats he expected the Vanuaaku Party to win, the coalition would achieve the necessary majority of 24 in the 46-seat house.

If the two parties fail to win enough seats, he said, it would still be possible to attain the necessary number with the

help of some francophone parties quitt

ing the Union of Moderate Parties. □ Help, help UNESCO is complaining that its Re

gional Warning System for the South

West Pacific is suffering from lack of political support, and consequently of funds. It may be on the verge of abandonment.

UNESCO wants UNDP to fund the project but the latter’s resources are already stretched in other directions. A UNESCO spokesman says that if cash doesn’t come through in two years, the project will have to be dropped. □ Tuvalu trust THE Tuvalu Government is to receive A 55.88 million from the Tuvalu Trust Fund. The fund achieved a 23 per cent return last year. The Fund as at 30 September 1991 had a market value of A 541.609 million which represented an average 11.7 per cent return per annum for its four-year life, a period in which it had to weather the 1987 stock market collapse, the Gulf crisis and unpreceden ted turbulence in the financial markets.

Tuvalu is seeking further contributions to the fund from other nations. Following a promotional visit to three Asian countries, a visit to European aid donors is planned for June 1992. □ Telecom profit TELECOM Services of Kiribati Limited (TSKL), has recorded an after tax profit

of AS 106,000 in its first five months of operation. □ Great achiever ELIZABETH “Betty” Silverstein, Foun der and President of the Foundation for the People’s of the South Pacific has won the 1991 US presidential “End Hunger Award” for individual achievement. She will receive the medal at the White House on 12 December.

During World War 11, she became “Red Cross Queen” of Australia, and was “spotted” for a career as a film star.

Then she toured the South Pacific and fundraising drives before Japan entered the War and the South Pacific. Later she married Mo "Red” Silverstein and she recalled for PIM their flight was on a flying boat which made frequent, island hopping stops across the Pacific.

“I fell in love with it, and its people” she says.

In the sixties, when her children were grown up, she decided that she wanted to help the islands. Her husband, President of Metro Goldwyn Mayer, came on board to help and the FSP was set up shortly afterwards. The Marist Fathers released one of their missionary priests, Father Stan Hosie, to run the Foundation. “We wanted to promote socio-economic development, while al lowing the people to keep their own identity”

Over a quarter of a century later, Stan Hosie is still acting as director. This year FSP has USSS million worth of support for its programmes which cover a range of bottom up projects like “wokabout” saw mills in the Solomons, and Vitamin A programmes to combat child blindness in Kiribati. FSP is also working in Tonga, Vanuatu, Fiji, FSM, Cook Islands, PNG and Guam. USAID has now offered 50 per cent self-support grant to match any funds that FSP itself can raise. □ Language hope THE Australian Federal government is funding a project to produce dictionaries for 40 Aboriginal languages, including several no longer spoken. Aboriginal Affairs Minister Robert Tickner said the AS 150,000 project was in response to studies showing a desperate need for Aboriginal language materials.

“The 40 languages will include a handful from capital city areas which are no longer spoken, researched from ar chives and other historcial sources,”

Tickner said. “In some cases the pro duction of the dictionary may be the first time the language has been written down.”

Tickner said there had been a dra matic reduction in the number of Aboriginal languages since white settle ment in 1788, when between 200 and 250 languages involving 700 dialects were

spoken. All 40 dictionaries would be both

english/aboriginal and aboriginal/eng

lish, he said. The project would be completed next year. □ Quota on tuna AUSTRALIA, Japan and New Zealand have agreed not to raise their global catch of Southern Bluefin Tuna for 1991-92 above quotas for the previous year, Federal Primary Industries Minis ter Simon Crean announced said. The global limit of 11,750 tonnes was set at the annual voluntary trilateral nego tiations for management of Southern Bluefin Tuna in Wellington recently.

Crean said the latest decision meant individual allocations would remain at last year’s levels 0f6065 tonnes for Japan, 5265 for Australia and 420 tonnes for New Zealand. Scientific evidence indi cated there were unacceptable risks associated with any increase in catch levels. □ Getting stronger AOSIS, the Alliance of Small Island States, is going from strength to strength.

It now has 36 members, 29 of which are United Nations members. New members include Cape Verde and Sao Tome, island states off West Africa, Cook Islands, and Trinidad and Tobago, while recently the Cayman Islands expressed interest in joining.

Its clout is respected by other partici pants in the International Negotiating Committee on climate change. When the non-aligned “Group of 77” nations met in Nairobi last September, an OPEC spokesman ridiculed the idea that small islands representing a mere three million people could stand in the way of human progress by which he meant oil sales.

After AOSIS protests, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, two of OPEC’s most important members, dissociated them selves from his report. “The last session was really quite positive,” said Robert Van Lierop, Vanuatu’s UN ambassador, and chairman of AOSIS. When AOSIS was set up, he anticipated it being a bridge between the environmental con cerns of the industrial countries, and the devdopmental concerns of the rest of the world. Had those hopes been matched by the reality of AOSIS’s first year? “Yes, very much so. We are frontline states.”

Many observers reported that the US delegation was holding up the drawing of an effective Convention against Climate Change. Was that his impression? “The US is not so much stalling as having fundamental differences. There is a big gap between its perception of the prob lem and that of the developing world,” he says. “Economic development is as important as the environment for many developing countries, but the US recog nises the imperative of economic issues from a very different perspective”. □