Bogus cyber nation helps Islanders seek Independence

Politics

By Michael Field

It was so easy - present a bogus passport and Fiji gives it a welcome stamp. Con victed fraudster David Korem, also known as Mark Pedley, was travelling on a diplomatic passport of the entirely fictitious Dominion of Melchizedek (DOM), a cyberspace scam. Fiji’s

immigration service, unerringly good at

picking out vexing foreign journalists, had just let into the country a man and organisation the US State Department has issued unambiguous warnings about.

Pacific leaders have twice signed declarations at Pacific Forums acknowledging the threat to sovereignty they pose.

Korem had flown in on Air Pacific from Los Angeles with one Taraivina Rae and after the warm welcome at Nadi they headed on to Rotuma, 400 kilometres north of the main islands of Fiji. Frustrated at what they see as a lack of development progress, Rotuma’s 3000 people have previously flirted with independence. Ten years ago a New Zealand martial arts instructor called Henry Gibson had himself declared king of Rotuma and set about breaking away from Fiji.

At the time Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka’s Government was a Com monwealth outcast and Gibson wanted his new state in the Commonwealth. He flew the Union Jack over the island, prompting district officer Victor Epeli to shoot it down with his shotgun. That was that until Korem and Rae showed up.

Korem - or “Tzemach ‘Ben’ David Netzer Korem” as he prefers to be known - calls himself the “Head of the House of Elders” of DOM. His Filipino wife Elvira Gamboa or “Pearlasia” is president of

Dom.

He said in an interview from California that he first heard of Rotuma on December 10 last year when he had some kind of mystical experience which led him to the island.

Once there he claims the islands leaders asked him to draft a constitution, so he remodelled his own DOM version. “We

are aware of the demands for independence from the people of Rotuma for independence,” he said. “I think the constitution is an excellent one that the people of Rotuma have embraced and I am aware of their demands for independence.”

Rotuma would allow DOM to move from cyberspace to dry land. “We plan to do a lot of work with them and we plan to be a state within their state.”

He agreed he had two convictions in the United States for fraud, but he said he was

innocent and had only been convicted for political reasons. Rae, son of a Rotuman mother, says he approached DOM for aid because Fiji was not helping the island.

Also included, are sponsorships for two young Rotumans for higher education in the USA, plus equipping the Rotuma hospital with state of the art equipment.”

Rae said she and not Korem drew up the constitution which was not, he added, a declaration of independence.

“I would like to see Rotuma/Fiji’s relationship to be like New Zealand/Cook Islands.” Neither Rae nor Korem would release the constitution other than saying it was modelled on the US constitution and Rotuman traditional law. All this is hardly likely to make much difference to Rotuma and Fiji in the longer run, but the ease with which Korem and DOM got into Fiji illustrates a wider danger.

Scams like DOM and its sister

organisation, “The Kingdom of EnenKio” exist because much of the rest of the world knows virtually nothing of the South Pacific. And South Pacific states ignore all the warnings and embrace carpet-baggers and conmen with an astonishing naivete.

Their only defence is that they all fall for the same tricks, and have for a long time.

Among the first was one Albert B Steinberger who showed up in Samoa in 1873, claiming to be a US “special agent”.

Before British bluejackets violently dragged him away to Fiji three years later he had drawn up a constitution and become prime minister.

Intriguingly he had no authority for anything, yet the constitution he wrote is echoed in modem Samoa’s cons-titution.

Nevada real estate millionaire Michael Oliver who was behind the foundation then formed the Phoenix Foundation and tried to finance a succession of Abaco Island in the Bahamas. That failed and in 1975 he joined with a cult movement, Nagriamel, in the Anglo-French condominium of New Hebrides. In 1980 the launched an insurrection against newly independent Vanuatu which had to be suppressed by Papua New Guinea after the French and the British refused to intercede.

Tuvalu - just north of Rotuma - was scammed by a carpetbagger who sold them Texas desert just after independence.

The US Government eventually got the new state its money back.

Two years ago Tonga’s King Taufa’ahau Tupou IV was taken in a Korean scam which saw him awarded a non-existent world peace prize and Tonga granted the honour of hosting the world’s first plant that would turn seawater into natural gas. The whole of Tonga’s Government, including Prime Minister Baron Vaea, was taken in but what, in the long run, was some kind of confused Christian scam which had links with a Korean plan to move its nuclear waste out of the country.

These and many other incidents has seen the Pacific Forum, an annual summit of 16 nations, try to educate leaders

Baron Vaca

against swallowing American dreams of instant riches for their economically struggling nations.

A communique from the 1997 forum noted sovereignty was most at threat from transnational crime and added that they recognised “the potential for undesirable financial activities to undermine economic development.” The US State Department’s latest International Narcotics Control Strategy Report warned of the threat posed by offshore financial centers (OFCs) which had sprung up in real countries like Nauru.”... (It) is now possible for an enterprising jurisdiction anywhere in the world to establish itself as an emerging OFC. The newest OFCs. eg Niue and the Marshall Islands, are sprouting in remote areas of the world, such as the Pacific.

Even more ‘remote’ are mere figments of fertile imaginations such as the Dominion of Melchizedek or The Kingdom of EnenKio Atoll, both entirely fraudulent in intent and practice”. EnenKio, which is

linked to DOM, claims Wake Island in the North Pacific. Although it only currently exists as an address on the Internet, it claims it is recognised as a state by the Central African Republic and its “Foreign Minister”

Kermit Rydel said the kingdom had just signed a deal with Kuwait under which stateless people will become citizens and passport holders of EnenKio.

DOM claims its “ecclesiastical and constitutional sovereignty” rests on an island in French Polynesia called Karitane. It does not exist. Melchizedek has been termed “the world’s best-known virtual country” In 1998 three Melchizedek “officials” were arrested in the Philippines after duping hundreds of local Filipinos, Chinese and Bangladeshis to pay up to SUS3SOO for documents they were told were “internationally-recognised passports”. The three, an Australian, a Malaysian and a Hong Kong based British lawyer were believed to be working for an Australian previously convicted in a celebrated horse racing fixing scandal. In

1983, Mark Pedley (or as Fijian immigration know him, David Korem) was convicted in San Francisco of mail and interstate fraud and sentenced to eight years in jail. His father David, who has been convicted four times of stock fraud, theft and counterfeiting, escaped trial because he was in a Mexican prison, accused of having orchestrated a scheme to convert the then-fast devalu-ating peso into dollars through a bank in Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands.

In 1987, a casket purporting to contain the remains of David Pedley was sent back to the United States.

At the funeral, two FBI agents requested permission to fingerprint the corpse. But the family refused, leading to speculation that he is still alive and living somewhere under an assumed. In 1990 Mark Pedley was paroled and he launched his Dominion.

He named his new “country” after the Old Testament “righteous king of peace”. ■