I’ve been following a few different stories these last few weeks. Thousands of miles apart and separated by decades, they might seem at first to have little in common.

The first is the story of over 500 websites in China that have decided to mark the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre by voluntarily taking themselves offline for ‘non-technical maintenance’. The censored are boycotting the censor.

The second story is the ongoing suppression of media in Fiji. In a June 2nd statement, Fiji’s interim Permanent Secretary for Information, Lieutenant-Colonel Neumi Leweni indicated that the current state of emergency would continue into August at least. It’s not clear whether this means that state censorship of media will continue as well.

The last is a story of the Australian movie ‘Balibo’. The recently-released film recounts the story of 5 Australia-based journalists killed by Indonesia during the 1975 invasion of East Timor.

Following decades of patient, determined investigation, the facts of the Balibo case have at last come to light. In the years following the murders, nobody – not even Australia – wanted the full extent of Indonesia’s depredations in Timor to see the light of day. Through a combination of determined neglect and deliberate distortion, countries in the region and across the globe allowed Indonesia to act with impunity against the Timorese people.

All of these stories have one thing in common. Every single one of them has been shaped by our collective complacence. The passive-aggressive self-imposition of censorship by Chinese website operators is more an act of sullenness than outright protest. According to one commentator, the increase in censorship activity in the lead-up to Tiananmen’s 20th anniversary is a “minor annoyance for most, perhaps making them remember, but they don’t care that much.”

I suspect that many Fijians outside of the media establishment feel more or less the same. If media coverage and letters to the editor are any indication, it seems that many of us in Vanuatu and throughout the region concur.

Contrast this with the lavish media attention devoted to the Balibo Five, as the murdered journalists have become known. John Tebbutt, a senior lecturer in media studies at La Trobe University in Melbourne, writes that this story has inspired the creation of a feature film, 5 books, 7 reports and an investigation by East Timor’s Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation. In addition, he writes, “[t]here are thousands words in newspaper, television and radio reports.”

International coverage of the Tiananmen Massacre was intense at the time. But since then, it’s dwindled significantly. Though it’s trotted out from time to time and used to deliver a rhetorical rap on China’s knuckles (US Secretary of State Clinton did just this recently), the suppression of truth in China continues unchecked. It is, in fact, aided and abetted by numerous US-based Internet companies who, fearful of ‘missing out’ on the lucrative China market, compromise themselves in order to remain in China’s good books.

Some people I’ve spoken with on the Fiji issue have suggested that more pressure might be brought to bear on the Bainimarama regime if it was of any geopolitical importance. But, lacking influence in the outside world, average Fijians are left to cope on their own with the stifling effects of a censor that won’t allow bad news of any kind to circulate.

The flow of information creates influence. The ability to bring significant media resources to bear on an issue – or conversely, the ability to block its scrutiny – has a distorting effect on how we view history.

Hundreds, possibly thousands of people died in Beijing’s streets as the People’s Liberation Army advanced on Tiananmen Square, but all most of us remember is a single man who, for a few brief minutes, blocked a column of tanks.

Years of effort have been expended finding out the exact circumstances of the death of the Balibo Five. But nearly 200,000 Timorese people – 20% of the entire population – died as a result of the Indonesian invasion and occupation. Where is their movie?

And what will historians have to say about this period in Fiji’s history? How will daily Fijian life be recorded if nobody cares to see?

The wealth of nations is often measured in monetary terms. I say it should be measured in how that wealth is used.

Investment in media and in the mechanics of free speech and open exchange of ideas creates immeasurable wealth. Such wealth will never appear in economic reports. It will, however, define our history.

In a recent Daily Post story, Minister of Education and local UNESCO representative Charlot Salwai rightly decried poor attendance at the conference on Vanuatu’s Intangible Cultural Heritage. Unless we invest time and effort in recording these critically important aspects of Vanuatu’s culture and kastom, they will be lost.

The tragedy of such a loss may pale in comparison to the others on this page, but that distinction is a matter of degree, not of kind. The lesson in every case is the same: If we do not invest in our history, it will be utterly lost.

Update: Omitted from the print version (for space reasons) is an obvious corollary to this conclusion: If we leave it  to others to invest in our history, it will be as they see fit to record it. A recent post from a China expert on the Huffington Post illustrates this nicely. While the Chinese have invested no small resources in denying or distorting important aspects of the 1989 protests, Western journalistic and historical writing has been quite selective in its interpretation of events as well.

I came across the following exchange (translated from the original Chinese language) on a technical news site today. This series of comments come from Xiaonei, a Chinese blog site, following a post about the recent global economic meltdown. (The writers’ names have been obscured for reasons that will become obvious):

AAA: Well written!! But why can’t I share it [i.e. link it to social media sites like Facebook or LiveJournal]?

BBB: Yeah, I can’t share it either. Must be because it’s today!

000[the author]: Well, I can post it, you guys should be able to share it….

CCC: [a few comments about the actual content of the article]

DDD: I guess Xiaonei is having problems recently. Anything with numbers seems to run into problems.

AAA: Anything with certain numbers runs into problems around this time of year….

EEE: I’m sure this maintenance is perfectly normal, as it is for all other Chinese websites right now. [sarcasm]

BBB: There is no spoon~~! [this in English]

FFF: Wow, nice word choice guys.

Mystified? You wouldn’t be if you had to deal with state censorship on a day to day basis. Today – the day the comments were being posted – marked the beginning of a worldwide observance of the 20th anniversary of the disruption by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army of the pro-Democracy demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

Hundreds, possibly thousands, of students, citizens and onlookers died when soldiers, backed by tanks and other armoured vehicles, advanced on the square, shooting as they went.

While protests had erupted in larger population centres throughout the country and continued for some days after Tiananmen Square was re-taken, the focus of the 1989 protest was in Beijing. Despite the involvement of nearly 1 million people at the height of the protest, most Chinese have little or no access to factual accounts of the events.

Those who remember the events, or who wish to speak about them, are left with few options save the kind of oblique references seen in the comments above.

(The phrase ‘there is no spoon!’ is a reference to the 1999 movie The Matrix, in which a young computer hacker discovers that he is being kept captive in an oppressive computer-generated virtual reality. In this context, the comment appears to be an angry refusal to accept the reality being foisted upon the writer.)

Following a crackdown on so-called Web 2.0 sites like Facebook, MySpace and their Chinese-language counterparts that encourage sharing of comments, photos and links to information of interest between friends and peers, many sites took a novel course. As this column goes to press, over 500 websites are reported to have been brought down for ‘non-technical maintenance’.

One of them, thequietsnow.com, offers the following message on its main page (again, rendered here in English – spelling and grammar per the original translation):

Due to a reason we all know this site is presently under maintenannce.

The site will be under non-technical maintenance from 3. Juin to 6. Juin

[...]

For a harmonious environment, to make an appeal to create a harmonious sociaty, I advice all webmasters and internet users to do the following during maintenance period;

1. Go out for a walk, get some fresh air, due to the hot weather, please wear a white t-shirt

2. Since the current internet is extremely unharmonious, in order to create a healty and harmonious internet environment, please put all your websites into “maintenance state”, in oder to provide a better net environment

3. If you don’t want to put your site into “maintenance state”, please change your site into black and white colors, in oder to provide a better net environment

4. Please put your site onto the maintenance spreedsheat.

The ‘spreadsheat’ in question is a file hosted at Google Documents, listing over 500 social websites and their related ‘maintenance’ messages. Most of them make the same kind of oblique references, implying that they would rather shut themselves down voluntarily than be shut down by the State.

Perhaps the most fascinating element of this protest is its inherent cynicism. Most of the commenters limit themselves to wry observations, similar to the way we might comment that ‘It’s getting a little windy’ as a hurricane approaches. Even the angriest among them resorts to an arcane popular culture reference.

The person who translated the comments above writes of the commenters:

[T]hey’re masters at not using any words censors would find suspicious. But they’re all at least aware of it, even if its a minor annoyance.

“And it will probably remain just that: A minor annoyance for most, perhaps making them remember, but they don’t care that much. The ones that really want to protest will just use text messages or IM anyway, and even the hardcore democracy types know where the line is drawn. For the most part, it seems really unnecessary. If they really wanted to organize protests, they’d have been organized long before the 3 days before the anniversary, and then use texting or cells or IM to expand. I doubt there will be any protests to speak of anyway- the Chinese sort of have a silent agreement here, they know where to draw the line.”

They don’t care that much. They know where to draw the line.

An entire society has adapted itself to living in an environment wherein they can go about their daily lives normally, as long as they do not make themselves or their opinions known to the authorities.

One is inclined to wonder whether Fijians will become similarly inured to the censorship regime imposed by Commodore Frank Bainimarama. Recent reports indicate that the state of emergency will be extended until August at least.

Perhaps the greatest danger of State censorship is its ability to integrate itself into daily life. Provided that its exercise doesn’t affect too many of the people too much of the time, it quickly becomes an environmental factor like mosquitoes, bad weather or the common cold. Just something to be taken in stride.

Because it’s today, because elsewhere in the world people are trained from birth to avoid dissent of any kind, we would be well served to imagine how we would feel, were we in the same boat.

My greatest fear is that most of us would get used to it.

Because it’s today.

“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

This statement was first uttered in 1993 by John Gilmore, Internet pioneer and co-founder of the Electronic Freedom Foundation. Since it was first quoted in Time magazine, it’s become axiomatic, an unanswerable trump card to be played whenever the issue of Internet censorship arises.

There’s a good reason for this. Numerous efforts by governments, institutions and organizations to impede the free flow of information have achieved mixed results at best and, more often than not, failed. Only in places like Tibet and Burma, where the government owns and closely controls the information networks, has any kind of comprehensive censorship been successful.

The Internet was designed as a ‘network of networks’ – that is, a communications medium that effectively had no centre of control. While it never completely achieved that aim, it’s still a vast departure from the monolithic telecoms networks that we used to have.

The presence recently of Sulu Censors (so called for the skirt-like traditional dress many of them wear) in all television, radio and print media outlets has largely neutered Fiji’s traditional media. But the flow of information has simply found a route around this ‘damage’. In recent weeks, Fijians at home and abroad have flocked en masse to the Internet to get their fix of national and local news, uncensored by the Bainimarama regime.

Internet Pioneer Mitch Kapor’s assertion that “[Internet] architecture is politics” has never been more true.

New Zealand journalist David Brooks, writing for Agence France Presse, reports, “With Fijian journalists contributing material, these blogs are filling the gap left by the muzzled media.”

Countless blogs have sprung up like flowers across the Internet in reaction to the media crackdown. With names like Coup Four and a Half, Fiji Coup and Fiji Uncensored, they’ve made their raison d’etre clear. While a few leave no doubt that they have very particular axes to grind, the majority are replete with well-sourced, insightful news, commentary and analysis.

Their posts run the gamut from solid investigative journalism, detailed commentary and analysis to often ambivalent personal narrative and opinion.

Perhaps most surprising is the generally balanced, often quite nuanced understanding of the situation that many of these sites display. There’s relatively little knee-jerk polemic on the most popular sites.

The public seems grateful for the continued provision of useful news. The Pacific remains largely forgotten by researchers studying new media and communications, so there’s little relevant data to be had, but the few available tidbits indicate strongly surging interest in their content. According to the Alexa web analysis service, fijicoup.org has seen a 210% increase in traffic recently. It also reports that the Coup Four and a Half blog (which has been online since George Speight’s 2000 coup) now has over 430,000 incoming links to its material.

Some of the material is attributed to known and reputable commentators, while a good deal more comes anonymously. It’s therefore necessary to carefully parse the data for hidden agendas and bias. But that’s true of nearly all online content, precisely because it’s so much easier to disseminate information through the Internet than by any other means.

Separating the wheat from the chaff is not usually a difficult task. It’s pretty easy to glide past screeds lamenting “typical ignorant … coupsters in their coup coup world…” and on to more rewarding content.

The contrast to engaging and thoughtful analyses by people such as Father Kevin Barr, an economic and social justice coordinator of the Ecumenical Centre for Research, Education and Advocacy, could not be greater. Father Barr’s commentary reflects long familiarity with the events and people that led Fiji to its current impasse.

Interestingly, Fijians’ engagement with the online world seems to be limited to finding news and information.

As I write this column, I’ve seen no indications of uptake by politically concerned Fijians of social media – that is, websites designed to allow friends, relations and like-minded individuals to communicate and collaborate. I could find no coup-related groups on the immensely popular Facebook website. An online petition to voice opposition to the Bainimarama regime had garnered only 99 digital signatures when I visited.

In the short term, at least, it appears that there won’t be anything like the so-called Twitter Revolution, where thousands of Moldovan political activists apparently organised themselves using SMS and the Twitter short message service as they took to the streets in protest.

Indeed, the bulk of the content being posted to the various coup-related blogs is being copied straight from traditional media outlets located overseas. People, it seems, simply want the news they’d been accustomed to getting.

It seldom pays to speculate too much about technology and the countless ways in which people interact with it, but in the absence of anything better than a smattering of anecdotal data, I’m left with few alternatives. With that proviso, I’ll make a few observations about the way in which Fijians seem to be reacting to the sudden dearth of uncensored news via traditional media channels.

First, it seems clear that, far from becoming outraged or even particularly angry, people seem simply to have worked around the Bainimarama regime’s attempts to squelch unwelcome news and then got on with their lives. Scattered reports of discontent in certain locations or among elements of the Fijian Armed Forces notwithstanding, people seem to be willing to acquiesce to the regime, at least for the time being. They do not, however, appear to be willing to tolerate any reduction in the information they use to judge the situation.

The amount of online personal interaction seems to be quite low. I strongly suspect that’s due to the lack of personal computing devices with ready Internet access. If your only source of Internet access is the café down the road, you’ll hardly want to do more than scan a few pages for the latest news. Writing a 500 word screed against the current regime or engaging in heated discussion in an online forum would be too expensive and quite possibly more than a little risky.

Underlying everything, I suspect, is the distinctly Pacific tendency to sit and listen patiently and at immense length to others before venturing an opinion of one’s own. In the decidedly un-scientific survey I made of coup-related content on the Internet, very little of it offered any explicit opinion on events being reported.

I take great comfort and encouragement from the fact Pacific islanders have taken up the communications tools available to them, used them to work around the shortcomings of their environment and – most important of all – made them distinctly their own.

Note for online readers: For more detailed analysis and reporting of the situation in Fiji, I’d recommend the perceptive and well-sourced Coup Four and a Half blog. In its own words:

This blog has been created to allow stories and information that have been supressed or banned by the administration of Commodore Frank Bainimarama, as a result of the decision by the President Ratu Josefa Iloilo to impose Public Emergency Regulations, which has led to heavy handed censoring of the media.

Recently, numerous commentators in Vanuatu and other Pacific countries have complained loud and long that Commodore Frank Bainimarama is being treated unfairly by the media. The real bad guys, they say, were the ones who so abused the shambles of Fijian democracy that the army leader was left no choice but to intervene.

Furthermore, they argue, the problems of governance in Fiji are significant enough that holding elections before 2014 (the date recently suggested by the ruling junta) would only result in a return to the same sorry state the nation was in before. In short: Fiji can have its coup now or later, but by having it now, we can rest assured that it’s happening for the right reasons, guided by the right man.

I’m not entirely unsympathetic to this argument. It’s true that some reports, especially those appearing in Australian popular media, tend to miss the point that Fijian democracy was deplorably weak when Bainimarama took over. Furthermore, the hard rhetorical line taken by the governments of Australia and New Zealand hasn’t done much to improve the situation for anyone.

Frank Bainimarama is without a doubt a patriot who cares deeply about the welfare of his nation. But the question is whether any single patriot should rule Fiji.

To be sure, Fiji needs to clean house. But the process by which this is accomplished is more important than any other consideration. The current regime’s apologists might say that the Commodore became disgusted with the tenants’ behaviour and, like any good landlord would, he turfed them out.

A commendable act, perhaps, but here’s the thing: It’s not his house.

The arbitrary use of coercive force is antithetical to democracy. Fiji’s military is known worldwide as an effective and disciplined force, and we can all breathe a sigh of relief that (for the most part) they’ve shown discipline and restraint in spite of having no checks on their authority. But the very things that make it an effective fighting force make it perfectly unsuited to govern.

Government in a healthy, pluralistic society is a messy, disorganised, often self-contradictory contraption. Dissent, competition and the basic precept that a candidate succeeds or fails based on his standing in the eyes of his peers are all necessary to its proper functioning. Military organisations are necessarily designed to stifle all of these.

There’s a good reason why the military in every healthy democracy subordinates itself to the nation’s political leaders. It is precisely in order to ensure that discipline, unity of action and obedience for their own sake do not end up taking the country down a path the populace is not willing to follow.

Recent events in US political history have led to vigourous arguments about the nature of a unitary executive, but alas, even that kind of questing debate about the exercise of power is not currently possible within Fiji’s borders. As wise and well-meaning as Frank Bainimarama may be, he cannot be allowed to rule alone. He is, after all, one man, just as fallible and prone to human frailty as the rest of us.

And here we come to the crux of the problem: Nobody who’s given it more than passing thought would deny that the de-colonialisation of the Pacific has been fraught with problems. Vanuatu, Tonga, Fiji, the Solomon Islands and PNG have all wrestled with the application of the tools of democracy left us by our erstwhile masters, often failing in the attempt to reconcile them with traditional approaches. The fundamental issue of self-determination remains unresolved in New Caledonia and French Polynesia. Today, after a generation of mixed results, we would all do well to engage in a thorough examination of just what democracy means in the Pacific.

But that debate is prejudiced, even precluded, when its terms are applied arbitrarily and by fiat. Frankly, there is no place in a soldier’s world for dialogue. As long as Fiji remains under military rule, it cannot heal itself.

Even with the benefit of hindsight, it’s hard to imagine how things could have happened differently. Before he ousted Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase, Bainimarama had already taken unto himself the role of benevolent but implacable defender of Fijian democracy. Few people complained when he ousted George Speight’s openly racist regime in 2000, and when he elevated Qarase to the PM’s chair, the populace later validated the choice. It was hardly a surprise, then, to see him take up the reins once again when Qarase began consorting with his opponents.

By acting unilaterally to ensure that Fiji’s previous coup-plotters were not allowed to walk away unpunished, Bainimarama was saving his own life as much as anyone else’s. But he was also defending one of the fundamental tenets of a society of laws: actions must have consequences.

What he seems to have disregarded, though, is the logical extension of that precept: His own actions have consequences, too. He must be answerable to his own people. As things stand right now, he is not.

And that alone makes him dangerous. Not necessarily because he’s wrong now, but because, being fallible, he could be. And when he does act against the interests of his country, intentionally or not, the only recourse left to those who oppose him will be to apply the same tools of arbitrary force against him.

One hope remains: That Bainimarama, with the assistance of his Pacific allies, finds an orderly way to back down from this impasse, and to subordinate himself once more to the will of the people he’s spent his life defending.

With headlines like ‘Man Gets On Bus’, and ‘Breakfast As Usual’, Fiji’s beleaguered fourth estate is reporting all the news it feels is still fit – or safe – to print. Such stories are a reaction to Commodore Frank Bainimarama’s extensive power grab this week, which included the abrogation of the national Constitution, removal of judges and senior financial figures, expulsion of Australian and New Zealand-born journalists and censorship of domestic media.

One particularly riveting feature, titled ‘Paint Dry’, recounts the couch painting adventure of a man named Max. The paint, he recounts, “went on wet, but after four hours it started to dry…. That was when I realised, paint dries.”

I expect it ran with a four column headline.

In solidarity with my Fijian colleagues, I’ve decided to write about nothing as well. Happily, this is easily done. Even though Port Vila is home to the Melanesian Spearhead Group and PM Edward Nipake Natapei holds the chair this year, I am glad to say that I have nothing to report.

Despite being uniquely positioned to provide sober diplomatic counsel to the increasingly isolated Fijian dictator, despite what our PM describes as a fraternal relationship with one of our closest neighbours, one with whom we have a unique trading relationship, whose culture closely resembles our own, we and our Melanesian brethren have decided to do exactly nothing to prevent Fiji’s descent into constitutional, social and economic crisis.

So, in the space where I might otherwise have observed that, in throwing out the Constitution without so much as a ‘by your leave’, Commodore Bainimarama has left himself with little room to manoeuvre, let me instead tell you just how lovely my frangipani tree is this year. Its fragrant flowers, tinged in the softest rose and yellow hues, have a transient, fragile beauty.

Were this a column of any substance, I might remark on their similarity to Fiji’s tourism industry. Stunning beaches run for miles, uncluttered by tourists. Boutique resorts, once frequented by backpackers, lie picturesque and empty, their charm neglected, their staff sent home.

Instead, I can devote this space to the weather. The gloomy overcast, high winds and heavy rain that beset us this last week have at last cleared away. Were MSG members inclined to do more than bicker over the cost of renting an apartment in Port Vila, I might have been forced to draw an analogy to a ray of light shining across the region after a stormy political setback. Happily, no such comparison is necessary.

I have to admit that I’m glad. It’s so much easier to write about my family’s Easter celebration, which featured much laughter and too much pizza and chocolate, than to venture into the delicate and inordinately complex dynamics of a well-meaning commander who may truly believe himself the defender of his nation, but whose soldier’s philosophy prefers the rule of force to rule of law. I would much rather recount how my 3 year old niece shrieked with delight when she saw her photograph appear on my computer screen than try to explain to an uncomprehending world how this 54 year old self-styled protector of justice has allowed things to come to this pass.

Far better to dwell on the simple pleasures of a walk through Vila’s market house than to wander down memory lane, enumerating the countless failures in democracy and governance experienced by every Melanesian country. Totting up the list alone would take up half my word count. Explaining the many causes, the patchwork quilt of kastom, the tightly raveled web of filialism represented by the wantok system of patronage and support, would require volumes.

Layering on the cross-cultural tensions between ethnic Fijians and their Indo-Fijian neighbours would have been near-impossible. Explaining Bainimarama’s simplistic logic of using arbitrary measures to cast out these inequities and injustices – well, that seems to be beyond the ken of most international commentators. Thank heavens, then, that I can content myself with a pastiche on the variety of life and colour in my garden.

And Heaven help me if I had been left with no recourse but to prognosticate. How could I hope to properly characterise the patient, determined diplomatic dance that represents Fiji’s only hope of escaping economic, political and social collapse? If I had to describe the potential for outright destruction of the very things that the Commodore genuinely wants to defend, to lay out in simple terms just how far from the democratic fold he’s drawn his nation, I honestly don’t know if I’d be up to the task.

How to encapsulate a manageable framework to honestly and positively perform a stock-take on the state of democracy in Melanesia after its first generation of Independence? Engaging in the renewal of political and social engagement, shaped into a uniquely Melanesian form, is truly a place where even our brightest political angels fear to tread.

Small wonder the leadership of the Melanesian Spearhead group would rather issue non-statements, preferring a sincere tut-tutting to action.

Let’s go one better and join our silenced Fijian brethren watching paint dry.