New Zealand wasn’t the only target of French special ops three decades ago. Nor was the Rainbow Warrior.

The attack on the Greenpeace environmental flagship 30 years ago was part of a Pacific-wide strategy to crush pro-independence movements in both New Caledonia and French Polynesia during the 1980s.

And Operation Satanique, as the Rainbow Warrior sabotage plan was aptly named, got the green light because of the political rivalry between then socialist President Francois Mitterrand and right-wing Prime Minister Jacques Chirac that pushed them into point-scoring against each other.

Although misleading and laughable as early New Zealand press reports were about who was responsible for the bombing on 10 July 1985 in Auckland Harbour – focusing on mercenaries, or the French Foreign Legion based in New Caledonia and so on – there was certainly a connection with the neocolonial mind-set of the time.

New Caledonia then had the largest military garrison in the Pacific, about 6000 French Pacific Regiment and other troops, larger than the New Zealand armed forces with about one soldier or paramilitary officer for every 24 citizens in the territory – the nearest Pacific neighbour to Auckland.

New Caledonia … highly militarised with French troops in the mid-1980s.
PHOTO: David Robie

A small Pacific fleet included the nuclear submarine Rubis, reputed to have picked up one unit of the French secret service agents involved in Operation Satanic off the yacht Ouvea and scuttled her in the Coral Sea and then spirited them to safety in Tahiti.

A long line of human rights violations and oppressive acts were carried out against Kanak activists seeking independence starting with a political stand-off in 1984, a year before the Rainbow Warrior bombing.

Parties favouring independence came together that year under an umbrella known as the Front de Libération Nationale Kanake et Socialiste (FLNKS) and began agitating for independence from France with a series of blockades and political demonstrations over the next four years.

The bombed Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour … not the only target of the French military. PHOTO: John Miller/Eyes of Fire

Melanesian activism
The struggle echoed the current Melanesian activism in West Papua today seeking political justice and independence from Indonesian colonial rule.

The Greenpeace tragedy was one of several happening in the Pacific at the time, and this was really overshadowed by the Rongelap evacuation when the Rainbow Warrior crew ferried some 320 islanders, plagued by ill-health from the US atmospheric mega nuclear tests in the 1950s, from their home in the Marshall Islands to a new islet, Mejato, on Kwajalein Atoll.

Rainbow Warrior crew helping Rongelap islanders board the ship for one of four voyages relocating them to Mejato islet in May 1985. PHOTO: David Robie/Eyes of Fire

Over the next few years, after the start of the Kanak uprising, New Caledonia suffered a series of bloody incidents because of hardline French neocolonial policies:

• The Hiènghene massacre on 5 December 1984 when 10 unarmed Kanak political advocates were ambushed by heavily armed mixed-race French settlers on their way home to their village after a political meeting. (Charismatic Kanak independence leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou lost two brothers in that ambush when almost all the menfolk of the village of Tiendanite were gunned down in one deadly night.)
• The assassination of Kanak independence leader Eloï Machoro and his deputy, Marcel Nonaro, by French special forces snipers at dawn on 12 January 1985 during a siege of farmhouse at Dogny, near la Foa.
• The infamous cave siege of Ouvea when French forces used a “news media” helicopter as a ruse to attack 19 young militant Kanaks holding gendarmes hostage, killing most of them and allegedly torturing wounded captives to death. The 11th Shock Unit carried out this attack – the same unit (known then as the Service Action squad) to carry out Operation Satanic against the Rainbow Warrior.
• The human rights violations involved in this attack were exposed in the 2011 docudrama Rebellion (originally L’ordre et la morale) by director Mathieu Kassovitz, based on a book by a hostage negotiator who believed he could have achieved a peaceful resolution.
  [http://www.pjreview.info/sites/default/files/articles/pdfs/PJR18%282%29_Reviews_Rebellion%20pp212-216.pdf ]
• France had its problems in Vanuatu too. Founding Prime Minister Father Walter Lini’s government expelled ambassador Henri Crepin-Leblond shortly before the election on 30 November 1987, accusing Paris of funding the opposition Union of Moderate Parties – a claim denied by the French.

French CRS special police confronting Kanak activists demanding independence in New Caledonia. PHOTO: David Robie

Social scars
The social scars from these events affected France’s standing in the Pacific for many years. While relations have dramatically improved since then, it still rankles with both many New Zealanders and Greenpeace that Paris has never given a full state apology.

Interviewed on Democracy Now! recently, Rainbow Warrior skipper Pete Willcox, who is returning to New Zealand to captain the ship for a tuna fishing campaign, criticised the failure of France to apologise for being “caught red-handed” in state terrorism.

However, the American also delivered a strong warning about climate change – the main contemporary environmental issue.

Explaining his more than three decades of campaigning, Willcox said: “We know what climate change is doing. We’re the richest country in the world. We can support, if you will, a drought.

“Countries like in East Africa and other places of the world, Bangladesh, where it’s going to displace millions of people, can’t deal with it. And it’s coming.

“And it’s only coming because we’re not willing to change the way we produce energy, we make energy. We have the technology. We don’t have the will. And that’s just ridiculous.”

In January 1987, a year after my book Eyes of Fire was first published – four months before the first Fiji military coup, I was arrested at gunpoint by French troops near the New Caledonian village of Canala.

Tailed by agents
The arrest followed a week of me being tailed by secret agents in Noumea. When I was handed over by the military to local gendarmes for interrogation, accusations of my being a “spy” and questions over my book on the Rainbow Warrior bombing were made in the same breath.

But after about four hours of questioning I was released.

David Robie presenting an earlier edition of Eyes of Fire to former Vanuatu Prime Minister Ham Lini in 2006. PHOTO: Pacific Media Centre

This drama over my reporting of the militarisation of East Coast villages in an attempt by French authorities to harass and suppress supporters of Kanak independence was a reflection of the paranoia at the time.

Then it seemed highly unlikely that in less than two decades nuclear testing would be finally abandoned in the South Pacific, and Tahiti’s leading nuclear-free and pro-independence politician, Oscar Manutahi Temaru, would emerge as French Polynesia’s new president four times and usher in a refreshing “new order” with a commitment to pan-Pacific relations.

Although Tahitian independence is nominally off the agenda for the moment, far-reaching changes in the region are inevitable.

President Baldwin Lonsdale remarked about the Rainbow Warrior bombing in a welcome for the ship’s namesake, Rainbow Warrior III, in Port Vila recently on her post-cyclone humanitarian mission.

He recalled how the Vanuatu government representative, the late Charles Rara, sent by founding Prime Minister Walter Lini on board the Rainbow Warrior to New Zealand, had been ashore on the night of the bombing. Rara was at the home of President Lonsdale at St John’s Theological College in Auckland, where he was studying.

The late Charles Rara, Vanuatu’s “diplomatic” representative on board the Rainbow Warrior bound for Auckland in 1985. PHOTO: David Robie/Eyes of Fire

“When Charles got back to the ship that night, he found the Rainbow Warrior had been bombed, it had been destroyed,” President Lonsdale said.

“I think the main intention of the French [military] who carried out the bombing was because the Greenpeace movement was trying to bring about peace and justice among island nations.”

‘Living reef’
After being awarded $8 million in compensation from France by the International Arbitration Tribunal, Greenpeace finally towed the Rainbow Warrior to Matauri Bay and scuttled her off Motutapere, in the Cavalli Islands, on 12 December 1987 to create a “living reef”.

An earlier compensation deal for New Zealand mediated in 1986 by United Nations Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar awarded the Government $13 million (US$7 million) – the money was used for an anti-nuclear projects fund and the Pacific Development and Conservation Trust.

The agreement was supposed to include an apology by France and deportation of jailed secret agents Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur after they had served less than a year of their 10-year sentences for manslaughter and wilful damage of the bombed ship (downgraded from charges of murder, arson and conspiracy).

They were transferred from New Zealand to Hao Atoll in French Polynesia to serve three years in exile at a “Club Med” style nuclear and military base.

But the bombing scandal didn’t end there. The same day as the scuttling of the Rainbow Warrior in 1987, the French government told New Zealand that Major Mafart had a “serious stomach complaint”. The French authorities repatriated him back to France in defiance of the terms of the United Nations agreement and protests from the David Lange government.

It was later claimed by a Tahitian newspaper, Les Nouvelles, that Mafart was smuggled out of Tahiti on a false passport hours before New Zealand was even told of the “illness”. Mafart reportedly assumed the identity of a carpenter, Serge Quillan.

Captain Prieur was also repatriated back to France in May 1988 because she was pregnant. France ignored the protests by New Zealand and the secret agent pair were honoured, decorated and promoted in their homeland.

Supreme irony
A supreme irony that such an act of state terrorism should be rewarded in this age of a so-called “war on terrorism”.

In 2005, their lawyer, Gerard Currie, tried to block footage of their guilty pleas in court – shown on closed circuit to journalists at the time but not previously seen publicly – from being broadcast by the Television New Zealand current affairs programme Sunday.

Losing the High Court ruling in May 2005, the two former agents appealed against the footage being broadcast. They failed and the footage was finally broadcast by Television New Zealand on 7 August 2006 – almost two decades later.

French secret agent Alain Mafart pleads guilty to reduced charges of manslaughter and wilful damage in November 1985 (courtroom CCTV footage). PHOTO: TVNZ

They had lost any spurious claim to privacy over the act of terrorism by publishing their own memoirs – Agent Secrète (Prieur, 1995) and Carnets Secrets (Mafart, 1999).

Mafart recalled in his book how the international media were dumbfounded that the expected huge High Court trial had “evaporated before their eyes”, describing his courtroom experience:

I had an impression of being a mutineer from the Bounty … but in this case the gallows would not be erected in the village square. Three courteous phrases were exchanged between [the judge] and our lawyers, the charges were read to us and the court asked us whether we pleaded guilty or not guilty. Our replies were clear: ‘Guilty!’ With that one word the trial was at an end.

Ironically, Mafart much later became a wildlife photographer, under the moniker Alain Mafart-Renodier, and filed his pictures through the Paris-based agency Bios with a New York office. Greenpeace US engaged an advertising agency to produce the 2015 environmental calendar illustrated with wildlife images.

As Greenpeace chronicler and photojournalist Pierre Gleizes describes it: “Incredibly bad luck, out of millions, the agency bought one of Alain Mafart’s pictures to illustrate a Greenpeace calendar. Fortunately, someone saw that before it got distributed. So Mafart got his fee but 40,000 calendars were destroyed.”

French nuclear swansong
France finally agreed to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty after a final swansong package of eight planned nuclear tests in 1996 to provide data for simulation computer software.

But such was the strength of international hostility and protests and riots in Pape’ete that Paris ended the programme prematurely after just six tests.

France officially ratified the treaty on 10 September 1996.

When Tahitians elected Oscar Temaru as their territorial president in 2004, he had already established the first nuclear-free municipality in the Pacific Islands as mayor of the Pape’ete airport suburb of Faa’a.

Having ousted the conservative incumbent for the previous two decades, Gaston Flosse – the man who gave Mafart and Prieur a hero’s welcome to Tahiti, Temaru lost office just four months later.

He was reinstated to power in early 2005 after a byelection confirmed his overwhelming support. But since then Temaru has won and lost office twice more, most recently in 2013, and Flosse is fighting ongoing corruption charges.

Since the Temaru coalition first came to power, demands have increased for a full commission of inquiry to investigate new evidence of radiation exposure in the atmospheric nuclear tests in the Gambiers between 1966 and 1974.

‘Contempt’ for Polynesia
Altogether France detonated 193 of a total of 210 nuclear tests in the South Pacific, 46 of them dumping more than nine megatons of explosive energy in the atmosphere – 42 over Moruroa and four over Fangataufa atolls.

The Green Party leader in Tahiti, Jacky Bryant, accused the French Defence Ministry of having “contempt” for the people of Polynesia.

Replying to ministry denials in May 2005 claiming stringent safety and health precautions, he said: “It’s necessary to stop saying that the Tahitians don’t understand anything about these kinds of questions – they must stop this kind of behaviour from another epoch.”

Bryant compared the French ministry’s reaction with the secretive and arrogant approach of China and Russia.

However, Britain and the United States had reluctantly “recognised the consequences of nuclear tests on the populations” in Australia, Christmas Island, the Marshall Islands and Rongelap.

In 2009, the French National Assembly finally passed nuclear care and compensation legislation, known as the Morin law after Defence Minister Hervé Morin who initiated it. It has been consistently criticised as far too restrictive and of little real benefit to Polynesians.

In 2013, declassified French defence documents exposed that the nuclear tests were “far more toxic” than had been previously acknowledged. Le Parisien reported that the papers “lifted the lid on one of the biggest secrets of the French army”.

It said that the documents indicated that on 17 July 1974, a test had exposed the main island of Tahiti, and the nearby tourist resort isle of Bora Bora, to plutonium fallout 500 times the maximum level.

US radiation fallout
This had been echoed almost two decades earlier when The Washington Post reported that US analysts had admitted that radiation fallout from their nuclear tests of the 1950s was “limited”.

In fact, federal documents, according to The Post in the February 1994 article, had revealed that “the post-explosion cloud of radioactive materials spread hundreds of [kilometres] beyond the limited area earlier described in the vast range Pacific islands”.

Thousands of Marshall Islanders and “some US troops” had probably been exposed to radiation, the documents suggested.

“One of the biggest crimes here is that the US government seemed to clearly know the extent of the fallout coming, but made no attempt to protect people from it,” said Washington-based lawyer Jonathan Weisgall, author of Operation Crossroads, a book about the Marshall Islands nuclear tests.

The Rainbow Warrior bombing with the death of photographer Fernando Pereira was a callous tragedy. But the greater tragedy remains the horrendous legacy of the Pacific nuclear testing on the people of Rongelap and the Marshall Islands and French Polynesia.

More information about the Rainbow Warrior affair can be found here.

The harsh 2010 Media Industry Development Decree is still a spectre. Although Fiji has produced marked improvements over the past year, recognised by global freedom organisations, many challenges lie ahead.

The Multinational Observer Group’s final report on the September 17 election found the poll “credible” – as foreshadowed by its preliminary report in spite of critics’ cries of “fraud”. However, last month’s report also offers a raft of recommendations for improvement, including the news media.

Among these recommendations is a call for an independent watchdog for the Fiji Media Industry Development Authority (MIDA). The authority was spawned by the 2010 decree and played a mixed role during the general election.

Five months after the vote, Fiji was ranked 107th out of 179 countries listed in the 2014 World Press Freedom Index. The index is drawn up by the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders.

Fiji rose 10 places from the previous ranking in 2013. Major reasons for this improvement were the adoption of a new constitution on September 6 2013, widely criticised as it had been over many months, and the “free and fair” elections promised by the end of September 2014.

News media and civil society groups hoped that the election would open the door to a free media climate, which had been lacking since Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama’s military coup in December 2006.

Expanding the bounds of public debate

Public debate has improved markedly over the past few months. News media have been relatively more robust in terms of published political comment and debate, particularly in news columns and in letters to the editor.

But civilian Prime Minister Bainimarama, who retired as rear-admiral last year, retains an autocratic streak. This was on show in a recent tirade against The Fiji Times for “irresponsible journalism” over the reporting of race-based education comments by Opposition Leader Ro Teimumu Kepa.

The Fiji Times strongly defended its editorial freedom.

A major problem previously has been a “divided media” and a professional leadership void left by the now-defunct Fiji Media Council. The council had been accused of “failing to handle ethical lapses and controversies satisfactorily or fast enough”.

Ricardo Morris, editor of Repúblika and president of the revived Fijian Media Association, spoke at the recent 20th anniversary conference of Pacific Journalism Review in Auckland about problems facing the media after the election. According to Morris:

It can be argued that such division was one reason it was easy for the military government to bring into force the Media Industry Development Decree in 2010. The government justified its actions with reference to some of the unscrupulous journalist practices that should rightly be condemned.

Morris also pointed out that the Fiji Media Council’s legacy continued in the form of a code of ethics for media workers embedded in the decree.

We realised a bit too late that we were all in this together despite our personal political views or those of the companies that we worked for. United we stand, divided we fall.

Constitution leaves media exposed

In a joint submission to the United Nations Human Rights Council’s second universal periodic review, the Auckland-based Pacific Media Centre (PMC) and Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF) argued that the constitution, described by the Fiji government as “coup proof”, still restricted freedom of the press in four particular areas.

The first criticism was that too much executive power had been placed with the offices of the prime minister and the attorney-general. They controlled nearly all appointments to the judiciary and independent commissions.

Secondly, the chief justice and president of the Court of Appeal would effectively be political appointments. This created a risk of abuse of power.

Thirdly, the Bill of Rights is weakened by “severe limitations on many rights”. In what is known as the “claw-back clause”, governments would simply need to show that a limitation is “reasonable”.

Previously, the state had clamped down on independent journalists, bloggers and netizens. This so-called claw-back clause makes them vulnerable to selective government pressure in the future.

Fourthly, the constitution provides few avenues for citizens to participate and ensure “good and transparent government”.

Signs of self-censorship but also hope

While online commentaries and letters to the editor have featured more vibrant debate in recent months – both in the lead-up to the election and since – a climate of self-censorship continues.

The recent tragic killing of a leading Fiji journalist and gender issues advocate, Losana McGowan, allegedly by her partner, was greeted by surprisingly muted media responses about Pacific-wide domestic violence. Some commentators saw this as reflecting self-censorship. However, some statements on this issue surfaced this week and Bainimarama himself gave a strong speech on the topic when opening the Pacific Women Parliamentary Partnership Forum on Wednesday.

But there are hopeful signs on the horizon. These include the recent buy-out of the regional Islands Business news magazine by a group of feisty local journalists, including former Fiji Times editor-in-chief Netani Rika and current editor Samisoni Pareti.

This should strengthen what is arguably the most influential Pacific publication based in Fiji.

This article was previously published by the Pacific Media Centre on May 3, 2015.

In Vila, the United Liberation Movement for West Papua emerged as the umbrella organisation to carry forward Papuan aspirations and to negotiate with the Melanesian Spearhead Group.

The Indonesian news agency Antara sent one of its most senior journalists all the way from Jakarta to cover last week’s conference in Auckland, yet the local New Zealand media barely noticed the lively political conference.

Comprising the National Committee for West Papua (KNPB), West Papuan National Coalition for Liberation and the Federal Republic of West Papua, the group wants to reverse the MSG refusal last year to grant membership status without it becoming “more representative”.

“I’m really confident that we will be a full member next year,” said a spokesperson, Benny Wenda. “We are the ultimate because we are Melanesian. Geographically and racially, we are Melanesia.”

But the mood of optimism took a dive early last week with the news of at least five Papuan teenagers being shot dead at a protest in the Paniai regency in the latest human rights violation.

In Auckland, a series of journalists, media educators and human rights advocates spoke about the situation in Fiji since the first post-coup general election in 2006 and also the ongoing West Papua issues at the first-ever “Political journalism in the Asia-Pacific” conference in New Zealand.

The Indonesian news agency Antara sent one of its most senior journalists all the way from Jakarta to cover last week’s Pacific Journalism Review conference in Auckland, yet the local New Zealand media barely noticed the lively political conference.

Apart from a half-hour interview on Radio NZ’s Sunday with Max Stahl, the Timor-Leste film maker and investigative journalist world-famous for his live footage of the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre – images that ultimately led to the world’s first independence-by-video triumph some eight years later – and a couple of bulletins on RNZI, you would have hardly known the event was on.

But the conference was packed with compelling and newsworthy presentations by journalists and media educators. Topics ranged from asylum seekers to the emerging “secret state” in Australia; from climate change to the logging of “cloud forest’ on the island of Kolombangara; from postelections Fiji to the political ecology of mining in New Caledonia.

All tremendously hard-hitting stuff and a refreshing reminder how parochial and insignificant the New Zealand media is when it comes to regional Asia-Pacific affairs.

New Zealand editors are more interested in the ISIL beheadings of Syria and Iraq than the horrendous human rights violations happening under their noses in their own Pacific “front yard”.

Ampatuan massacre

Take the 2009 Ampatuan massacre, for example, in the southern Philippines, where 58 people were killed in cold blood in an ambush of an electoral motorcade – 32 of them journalists. A candlelight vigil took place on the AUT city campus at PJR2014 to remember the victims.

Not a word in the local media.

One of the lively exchanges at the conference involved a clash of “truths” over alleged and persistent Indonesian human rights abuses in West Papua.

This was precisely why Antara’s Rahmad Nasution made the trip – to give the government spin to deflect any accusations and statements such as those made by West Papuan Media editor Nick Chesterfield from Australia, and New Zealand-based Maire Leadbeater of the West Papuan Auckland Action group.

Nasution’s business card simply states “journalist” (although he is described as “chief executive” in other sources after a decade working with the agency) and he stayed in the back row of the auditorium for most of the conference. But he became instantly animated as soon as Indonesia came in for any criticism.

‘Pessimistic’ view

In one of the exchanges, Nasution condemned Chesterfield for his “very pessimistic” analysis of the Indonesian and West Papuan relationship in his paper “Overcoming media mythmaking, malignancies and dangerous conduct in West Papua reportage”.

Nasution pointed out that the new President, Joko Widodo, had singled out Papua to make his first visit to a “province’ during the election campaign: “There is a big hope in Indonesia that the new government will do its best to improve the situation there.”

“West Papua is 2000 miles from Jakarta – it is a long, long way,” replied Chesterfield. “When Jokowi surrounds himself in cabinet with unreformed human rights abusers, he has sent a message to the military as well that he is not going to challenge it.

“So – I had better be careful how I say this – but it is very much up to the way the Indonesian people hold Jokowi to his promises, and take action if he doesn’t fulfil his promises.

“I agree that Indonesian civil society is very much pro-peace in West Papua – not necessarily pro-independence – but it is certainly pro ‘Let’s sort this out, let’s have dialogue.’ This is a really positive sign [compared with] before.

Papuan right

“But at the end of the day, it is not up to the Indonesian people. It is up to the West Papuan people and their right to self-determination, and their right to organise their own media.”

Chesterfield shared the podium with two speakers from Fiji, Repúblika editor Ricardo Morris, who is also president of the Fijian Media Association, and senior journalism lecturer Shailendra Singh of the University of the South Pacific.

Ironically, both Morris and Shailendra – and also Television New Zealand Pacific correspondent Barbara Dreaver – came in for some flak from Fijian authorities and the propaganda press (i.e. the Fiji Sun). None of the criticism from Fiji Media Industry Authority chair Ashwin Raj was based on an actual reading of the speeches or observing the livestreaming feed.

Instead, Raj was reacting to a Pacific Media Watch headline “Fiji media still face ‘noose around neck’ challenges”. In fact, Morris was referring specifically to the “noose” around Fiji Television because of its six-monthly licence renewals. At any time, the licence could be revoked.

However, in reality the “noose” also applies to the whole of the Fiji media while the draconian Media Industry Development Decree remains in force. It needs to be repealed at the first available opportunity for real press freedom to return to Fiji.

Watch the video report on the 20th anniversary of the PJR Conference here:

Some newshounds in Papua New Guinea have pursued political careers thanks to their media training, but most have failed to make the cut in national politics.

A leading publisher in Tonga was forced to put his newspaper on the line in a dramatic attempt to overturn a constitutional gag on the media. He won—probably hastening the pro-democracy trend in the royal fiefdom’s 2010 general election.

The editor of the government-owned newspaper in Samoa runs a relentless and bitter “holier than thou” democracy campaign against the “gutless” media in Fiji that he regards as too soft on the military-backed regime. Yet the editor-in-chief of the rival independent newspaper accuses him of being a state propagandist in a nation that has been ruled by one party for three decades.

In West Papua, Indonesia still imposes a ban on foreign journalists in two Melanesian provinces where human rights violations are carried out with virtual impunity. Journalists in the Philippines are also assassinated with impunity.

Media intersects with the raw edge of politics in the Pacific, as countries are plunged into turbulent times and face the spectre of terrorism.

A decade-long civil war on Bougainville, four coups in Fiji (if the ill-fated George Speight putsch is counted), ethnic conflict in the Solomon Islands, factional feuding in Vanuatu and political assassinations in New Caledonia and Samoa have all been part of the volatile mix in recent years.

And journalists are still struggling to regain a genuinely free press in post-coup Fiji even with a general election approaching in September.

While teaching journalism in Australia, New Zealand and other Western countries involves briefing students how to report on regional and local business, development, health, politics and law courts free of the perils of defamation and contempt, in Pacific media schools one also needs to focus on a range of other challenging issues—such as reporting blasphemy, sedition, treason and how to deal with physical threats and bribery.

At times, it takes raw courage to be a neophyte journalist in the Pacific. At the University of Papua New Guinea, at a time when it still had the region’s best journalism school, two senior reporters were ambushed and beaten by a war party from a Highlands province after the local award-winning training newspaper, Uni Tavur, featured the campus warriors’ home affiliation in an unflattering front-page report on politics.

On another occasion, a student journalist slipped into hiding when ominous “wanted” posters with his name and picture were plastered around campus because of his report exposing corruption over an annual Miss UPNG beauty pageant.

Also, at the University of Papua New Guinea in the mid-1990s, trainee reporters covered five campus-related murders over two years as part of their weekly assignments, including the slaying of a lecturer by off-duty police officers.

In July 2001, four students were shot dead in protests against the Papua New Guinean government over unpopular World Bank structural adjustment policies. Two young women, Uni Tavur reporters Wanita Wakus ad Estella Cheung, wrote inspiring accounts of the shootings and gave evidence at a subsequent commission of inquiry.

At the University of the South Pacific—a unique regional institution owned by a dozen Pacific nations—a team of students covered the Speight rebellion in 2000, when Fiji’s elected government was held at gunpoint for 56 days, for their newspaper, Wansolwara, and website, Pacific Journalism Online.

Although three long-established journalism schools at university level exist in the Pacific—UPNG in Port Moresby and Divine Word University at Madang in Papua New Guinea, and USP in Fiji—along with a second tier of trade school-level programmes supported by Australian Aid, most journalists in the region still have little solid training.

During my decade teaching journalism in Fiji and Papua New Guinea, I found many bright young graduates will work for a year or so as journalists then leave for other, more highly paid, media-related jobs using the double major degrees they gained to get into journalism.

This continual loss of staff makes it very difficult to achieve stable and consistent editorial standards and policies.

Poorly paid journalists are potentially more readily tempted by “envelope” journalism—the bribery and other inducements used by unscrupulous politicians and other powerful figures.

Financial hardship and lack of training are an unhealthy mix for media in a democracy.

Media organisations themselves are too dependent on donors in the region for the limited training that does go on, and this makes them captive to the donors’ agendas.

Many view ventures as band-aid projects out of step with journalism training and education in Australia and New Zealand.

Australian Aid has contributed little to the main university-based journalism schools—the best hope for sustainable media training and education in the region.

But even the universities are under threat.

In Timor-Leste, on the cusp of Asia and the Pacific, there is severe criticism of media education and training strategies. Award-winning José Belo, arguably his country’s finest investigative journalist and president of the Timor-Leste Press Union, is highly critical of “wasted” journalism aid projects totalling more than US$5 million.

A “journalism in transition” conference in Dili last October attempted to strengthen the self-regulatory status of the news industry “in response to the so-called international aid, particularly from the United States and Australia, which has been misused in the name of journalism in this country”.

The good news was that there was a united stand on a new code of ethics.

The most disturbing trend in the digital age is electronic martial law—a new law in the Philippines that criminalises e-libel in an extreme action to protect privacy. The Supreme Court in Manila ruled in December 2012 to temporarily suspend this law and then extended it until further notice in February 2013.

However, in February this year, the Supreme Court ruled that the law was indeed constitutional, “effectively expanding the country’s 80-year-old libel law into the digital domain”.

This Cybercrime Prevention Act is like something out of the Tom Cruise futuristic movie Minority Report. An offender can be imprisoned for up to 12 years without parole and the law is clearly a violation of Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

And truth is not recognised as a defence.

Last month, the indictment of two journalists, Alan Morison and Chutima Sidasathian, for alleged criminal libel under a similar Computer Crime Act in Thailand “may spell doom” for the online news website Phuketwan.

It would be disastrous if any South Pacific country, such as Fiji, wanted to impose a copycat decree and gag cyberspace.

In the Philippines, at least 206 journalists have been murdered since 1986—34 of them in the Ampatuan massacre in Mindanao in 2009. Four years later nobody has been convicted for these atrocities.

The Philippines is a far more dangerous place for the media under democracy than it was under the Marcos dictatorship. There is a culture of impunity.

West Papua is the most critical front line for defending media freedom in the South Pacific at present. The West Papua Freedom Flotilla last September focused unprecedented global attention on human rights and freedom of expression in the Indonesian-rule region.

Vanuatu Prime Minister Moana Carcasses Kalosil challenged the United Nation Human Rights Council last month to act decisively to end the “international neglect” of the West Papuan people.

Australia’s shameful human rights violations and suppression of information about asylum seekers is another media freedom issue.

Journalism must fundamentally change in the Pacific to cope with the political and industry chaos. Just as much as it needs to reach across an increasingly globalised world, it needs to strike a renewed bond with its communities—trust, participation, engagement and empowerment are essential.

Fiji is a critical testing ground for efforts to “renew trust” in the lead up to the post-2006 military coup general election due in September.

Deliberative and critical development journalism have an essential role to play in the future of the South Pacific region. So do peace journalism, or conflict-sensitive journalism—another form of investigative and deliberative journalism—and human rights journalism.

And a new generation of educated journalists has a responsibility to provide this for the people. The environment, climate change and peace are key challenges facing island states.

Pacific political leaders finally picked up the challenge over climate change at last year’s Pacific Islands Forum in the Marshall Islands. Now Pacific journalists need to emulate this lead and target climate change as a top priority for the media and education.

Professor David Robie is director of New Zealand’s Pacific Media Centre at AUT University. His new book Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face: Media, Mayhem and Human Rights in the Pacific (Little Island Press) is being published on April 24.