Just yesterday, Minister Regenvanu was kind enough to respond to my column of last week, in which I expressed more than a little impatience at his silence over the March 4 attack on Marc Neil-Jones. He thanked me for my views and asked, “But who’s done more for good governance and transparency in Vanuatu: you or me?”

It’s a fair question –more than fair, actually– one that bears serious consideration.

My first instinct was to reply, “Your colleague beat the crap out of my friend. I said something about it; you didn’t.” That has the benefit of the truth, and it’s a fairly good summation of how I felt at the time I was composing the column.

But it’s not at all satisfying, nor does it do anything to further the goals that I know Minister Regenvanu shares with me and with an ever-increasing number of voters.

More importantly, tit-for-tat point-scoring rhetoric only contributes to the decline of political dialogue, making enemies and sowing confusion in the very places where clarity and unity should be most easily achieved.

So let’s dig a little deeper and see what more we all could be doing to make things better.

First off, let me state that any man of principle who embarks on a career in politics is a better man than I. (Any woman of principle who does so is probably a better man than any of us.) From the very first step, compromises must be made. As I said in last week’s column, the calculus of power is byzantine and counter-factual.

If you’re looking for easy answers to anything, look elsewhere. If someone promises you easy answers, don’t trust them. They’re either naive or they’re deceiving you. To his credit, Minister Regenvanu made a point of not promising anything but the sweat of his own brow during his election campaign.

In my afternoon convos over kava, I’ve often said that politics is a muddy road, so throwing out a politician for having soiled his feet is silly and wrong. It’s the ones who roll around in the middle of it like pigs in a slough – these are the ones we should be objecting to.

It’s easy for someone like me, who won’t even qualify for citizenship for another two and a half years, to sit on the sidelines and imagine that I could outplay those on the field. So it’s healthy to consider from time to time what things look like from the ground, to understand the pressures and exigencies that impose themselves from minute to minute.

The price is a heavy one. It’s impossible, in politics at least, to have friends without having adversaries. If you don’t have any rivals, that’s because you don’t have any power yet. So every choice, every compromise comes laden with the knowledge that, even if you’ve pleased some people, you’ve upset a few others. Victories are measured in inches and the goal line is often miles away.

The question then –the impossible question– is this: When do you stand and when do you sidestep? Which are the battles that must be fought, and at what cost?

Conventional wisdom has it that, following MP Iauko’s assault on Daily Post publisher Marc Neil-Jones, PM Kilman was handcuffed by the fact that removing Iauko from his portfolio would effectively topple the government. So, like it or not, this marriage of inconvenience had to continue.

To make matters worse, the prospect of a successful prosecution was vanishingly small. There was nothing to indicate that the Public Prosecutor and the Police wouldn’t be just as ineffectual in this instance as they’d been on countless occasions in the past. Not only would a powerful man be given grounds for vengeance, he’d likely have the means and opportunity to exact it, too.

Better, then, to bide one’s time and wait for an opportunity further down the line. Iauko’s rather incendiary rise has not made him a lot of lasting friendships, and anyway, his countless pre-election promises would soon be coming home to roost. Why fight an overt battle, possibly at significant cost, to achieve something that Iauko seemed to be perfectly capable of doing to himself?

Viewed through the lens of political calculus, there’s some merit to this line of reasoning. One could even be so bold as to argue that the baroque architecture of parliamentary rules and precedents that govern behaviour in other nations using the Westminster form of government are neither appropriate nor desirable here in Vanuatu.
But just for the sake of argument, let’s consider what might happen if things played out differently.

What if PM Kilman had required his Minister for Infrastructure and Public Utilities to resign his portfolio, pending a police investigation? He’s shown he’s capable of moving inconvenient Ministers out of the way. At the same time as the Iauko scandal was unfolding, he manoeuvred the Labour party out of power. This in retaliation for having signed an Opposition confidence motion.

In that case, the immediate goal was to remain in power, to live another day in order to achieve the policy goals that comprise the very reasons for governing in the first place.
Let’s apply the same logic to the Iauko debacle.

On the one hand, sharing power with people who care nothing for policy and are willing to fight every minute of every day for a bigger piece of the pie, people who, more to the point, are willing to stop at nothing… well, you have to ask yourself: Are you making things better or worse? On the other hand, you can’t get into government without them, and they know it. More to the point, perhaps it’s better to have them using these tactics against others than against you.

As the author of the Godfather famously put it, “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.”

The problem with this equation is that it allows the worst excesses to continue unchecked. In other words, there will never be a better calibre of MP in this country, because the others either drag them down or elbow them aside. You either learn how to scrap or you don’t play at all.

So how do we improve governance, then? The only way to maintain one’s integrity is to be able to exert enough power over the other players to force them to play nice. And there’s no way to gather that much power, because of the disunity and distrust that’s endemic in Vanuatu’s political landscape.

It would take a grand, unifying goal, something about which the entire population of Vanuatu could agree, to achieve –even momentarily– the kind of unity of purpose and energy that Fr. Walter Lini managed during the first days of the Republic.

What if taking a stand, even allowing a government to fall, were enough to galvanise such a movement? What if it could be made clear to voters that there are certain kinds of behaviour that simply cannot be tolerated, and that this behaviour is the cause of so many of Vanuatu’s afflictions?

That’s not an easy task. Many voters don’t think in terms of policy and long-term reward. Some are willing to choose self-gratification over nation-building every time. Given Vanuatu’s voting districts, you don’t need more than a few hundred of these to get yourself in the running. Pony up a bit of cash to run some stalking-horse candidates and you can split the vote small enough to get in with the support of a single village.

So the risk, then, is that you take a principled stand, try to galvanise the electorate into an unprecedented level of support, only to find yourself standing on the sidelines, come Election Day plus one.

Worse, you could actually succeed in garnering an unprecedented level of the vote, only to discover that you’d been equaled by, and forced to share power with, the very kind of candidate you were elected to turf out.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

I’ll say this again, in all sincerity: A principled man who’s willing to walk that muddy road is a better man than I, because I would always take that principled stand, keep my conscience clear, and fail entirely as a politician.

That may sound back-handed to some. It’s not. Life is a complex and messy thing; there are no simple answers. And sometimes staying pure and principled means staying powerless.

For my part I’m willing to abdicate that power, because once in a while things need to be said at any cost.

It’s easy for me to say this, but I don’t say it lightly. I say it because others can’t:

If a Government Minister resorts to political violence and coercion and the government takes no action to remedy this, that government deserves to fall.

My name is Dan McGarry. I’ve been using the nom de plume of Graham Crumb since 1995, but today I have decided to draw aside the literary veil. I do so in solidarity with Marc Neil-Jones, publisher of the Daily Post, in order to make it clear that violence and threats have no power to silence the media.

In past columns I’ve dealt with fairly complex topics: technology, society, politics, culture and history. Today’s, however, is a simple one. It can be summed up in a single sentence:

Violence and intimidation only work when we let them.

For reasons that remain unfathomable to me, politics and power always seem to attract those who are most willing to take advantage of others. Vanuatu is no exception. Over the years, we’ve seen a long succession of Ministers and MPs who seem to value personal indulgence over everything else. We’ve seen thievery, deception, coercion and violence used so widely and so often that it’s hard to perceive what moral compass –if any– guides our political leadership.

So when a particularly unscrupulous character such as Harry Iauko arrives on the scene, it’s hard for our political leaders to know what to do. In fairness to the MP, he’s only slightly further beyond the pale than MPs Korman or Vohor, to name only a couple. As a group, it seems our leaders really have come to believe that the rule of law, respect and kastom are nothing more than useful tools, to be picked up and cast aside as convenience dictates.

Let’s be honest with ourselves: There won’t be any criminal prosecution for what Iauko did. There may yet be retribution, but it will be that special political kind that avoids doing any actual harm to anyone.

Iauko will not be punished for doing wrong; he’ll be pushed aside because he’s given his rivals an opening. In political terms, his fault is not that he’s broken the law; his mistake will have been that he overstepped and so exposed himself.

And that is why I find politics both fascinating and repugnant at the same time.

So, unlike some, I’m not going to demand action from this government. I’m simply going to do what journalists do: I’m going to bear witness.

It may be that MPs feel they have some special exemption from the law and kastom. But it is equally true that in a free society, everyone has the right to form –and to state– their own opinion. And the best way that we can do that is to remain informed, to encourage a public dialogue, to confront people with the facts.

Let the MPs think what they want; we retain the right to think what we like about them, and to say so publicly. And these days, it’s not going to be very flattering.

Violence and unlawful conduct don’t persist merely because our politicians do nothing to stop them. They persist because we allow them to. They persist because we’ve accepted the fact that the only time we ever hear police sirens is when some dignitary is being ushered around town. They persist because we allow politicians to separate themselves from us. Because we allow them to seduce us with paltry gifts and promises.

But most of all, it’s because we all –white and black alike– love to have access to the corridors of power.

No sooner are we given a glimpse of this separate, special world than we begin to fall prey to its allure. Witness how even principled members of government like the PM and Minister Regenvanu have suddenly, inexplicably, found themselves at a loss for words.

In the face of a torrent of international condemnation, the best PM Kilman was able to muster was a statement by his spokesman he would let the courts decide Iauko’s fate. No mention of the fact that in most parliamentary democracies, any minister under investigation immediately steps down – at least until the issue is resolved.

From Ralph Regenvanu? Not a peep. This from the man whose election slogan was ‘Inaf!’ Maybe he’ll amend it next time to ‘Klosap inaf. Wet smol.’

In a canny bit of manoeuvring, however, the PM pulled his Minister out of the fire just days later by shuffling him from Lands to Justice, thus enforcing his silence. No matter that this is his third portfolio in about as many months. No matter that actually governing is near-impossible while the Cabinet is playing musical chairs. No matter that, despite all these portfolio changes and all the problems he’s caused, Iauko remains at his post.

And what of the Opposition, whose job it is to challenge and question? Even Iauko’s VP arch-rivals Natapei and Molisa have yet to say a word.

Let’s forget the politicians, then. They’re obviously powerless to act, except according to the byzantine, counter-factual logic of power.

They don’t matter, anyway. They can bluster all they like, but as we’ve seen in recent months, they can’t dominate and control us all the time. Inevitably, the people win. Throughout North Africa and across the Arabian Peninsula, people have demonstrated that strong governments which rely on coercion to enforce their will can be rendered fragile as paper in the wind.

All it takes is for people to leave their fear behind them.

It’s almost comical to see how quickly bullies like Iauko can be deflated when people cease to fear them, or conversely, how police and other state officials can be rendered worse than useless when they allow their fear to cow them.

The staff at the Daily Post –and Marc Neil-Jones in particular– learned years ago that they were free to tell the truth once they left their fear behind. It’s a small act, and a fairly simple one, too. But its effects are immense.

I remember visiting the Daily Post offices a couple of days after Police Commissioner Joshua Bong had sent his thugs around to give Marc a thumping. In spite of the bashed-in nose, cracked ribs and bloody lip, Marc managed a quirky smile and a chuckle when I voiced my concern. “I’ve been deported, jailed and beaten up before,” he said. “This isn’t the worst I’ve seen.”

“I am getting a bit old for this, though,” he added wryly.

I would have thought our ministers of state had matured beyond these schoolyard bully tactics too, but apparently they’re not too old for tantrums.

We should all learn from Marc’s example: We have only to free ourselves from fear and the power of these bullies evaporates in an instant.

My name is Dan McGarry. If you don’t like what I’ve got to say, I’m okay with that. I’m not afraid.

The freedom that we experienced on the Internet of the ’90s is waning. Governments and commercial interests take ever-increasing steps to circumscribe people’s ability to communicate digitally. The only way to change this tide from ebb to flood is to fulfill a promise that was first made in the ’90s.

We need to disintermediate the network. It’s an ugly duckling of a word, but cutting out the middle man matters more now than ever.

As long as the cables, wires and frequencies over which we communicate are susceptible to being controlled, curtailed or even disconnected when the things we say -or the way we say them- become upsetting, we will find ourselves increasingly confined.

As I said during an Internet policy session yesterday, if you ask anyone -anyone- whether there should be limits on Behaviour X on the Internet, the answer will always be a resounding Yes. That’s not a problem in and of itself, because X is usually anti-social and contrary to the public good. The problem is that anything capable of curtailing Behaviour X can be brought to bear on Behaviours A through W as well.

The only way out of this is to provide the technical means to do what we have always done in democratic societies: Keep our private discussions private and our public discussions free.

For the former we at last have all the ingredients we need:

1. Gigabit wifi – We can finally start thinking about getting decent performance out of wireless data transmission, meaning that we can worry a little less about putting a lot of people onto a single wifi network;
2. Wireless Mesh Networks – Enough with the telcos; we can now start looking at creating ad hoc, self-organising networks, relegating the role of the data carriers to one similar to power and water utilities;
3. Secure Voice Communications – Security expert Moxie Marlinspike (yeah) and a crew of like-minded individuals have floated a very useful service recently, allowing secure VOIP and SMS communications between phones. By building encryption into the bones of the app, they’ve created software that looks and acts exactly like normal calling and texting. The only difference being that, if the other person is using their RedPhone service, the entire communication remains a secret shared only by the two of you.

The idea behind these things have been floating around for some time (the protocol underlying RedPhone has been with us since 2006), but now they’re all here in usable form.

I’ve said it before: The story of freedom of Internet freedom and online privacy will be the defining social conflict of our generation. As the peoples of the Middle East are discovering, the narrative of freedom is suspenseful, dramatic and exciting in the best and worst ways.

Whoever manages to blend these three technologies together seamlessly and easily enough for anyone to use them will assuredly be one of the main protagonists in this unfolding drama. They may not garner the celebrity of a Jobs or a Gates, but they will have the impact of a Gandhi or a King.

These are the opening lines of a song made immortal by American Jazz singer Billie Holiday. Her personal story was heroic; battling poverty, marginalisation, racism and abuse, she managed to become one of the most influential singers of the 20th Century.

‘Strange Fruit’, Holiday’s signature tune, became a hallmark of a quickening social sensitivity to the plight of black people in America. Provocative, courageous and compelling, its twelve short lines could reduce even the most jaded listener to tears.

The song’s central image is the victim of a lynching, the ‘strange fruit’ hanging from a tree. Holiday, who had been raped at 11 and prostituted by 14, and who faced a lifetime of drug addiction and domestic abuse, made it a vessel into which she poured all of her pain and suffering.

Vanuatu has its own strange fruit: Planted between the roots of a nakatambol tree lie the bones of a Tannese woman murdered, burned and discarded after 14 years of neglect by her own people. An overgrown lot in Freswota is a-flower with yellow crime-scene tape marking the place where another young Tannese woman was raped and beaten to death with a timber. Her 3 year old daughter lay strangled nearby.

Just as the mightiest tree often comes from the smallest seed, Vanuatu continues to reap this bitter harvest because, in every aspect of their lives, women are subject to coercion.

Although often applied without malice, coercion is nonetheless a seed whose fruit contains sweet venom: How much easier everything is when you can end every argument with a quick clip across the mouth. Why take the time to reason or explain?

How much easier it is to spend one’s youth cruising the darkened neighbourhood lanes in search of someone to lure into the bushes. Why invest weeks and months of effort, earning the understanding and affection of someone with whom you could become so much more than you ever could be alone? What does it matter if she’s willing or not?

How much easier it is to sit down with the father and uncles of a young woman, inexperienced and ignorant of the world into which she is being sold, and to arrange her future for her. Better to pack her off while she’s still young, because domesticating her requires less effort than nurturing a human being who participates as an equal in the life of the household and the community. She’s being looked after, so even if she could, why should she complain?

Unimportance breeds disrespect. Disrespect breeds neglect. Neglect breeds resentment. Resentment breeds angry words. Angry words lead to blows. Blows breed estrangement. Estrangement leads to flight. Which leads into danger, depredation and sometimes, tragically, to death.

In virtually every case of death or abuse among women, one can place them somewhere on this path.

I could show you examples that would break your heart, but in every one of the dozens of abuse cases I’ve encountered, speaking in detail about the circumstances would only bring anger and retribution upon the woman. Perversely, public knowledge of her victimhood brings shame upon the perpetrator, and she is punished for that, too.

As a wise Roman observed 2000 years ago: It is indeed human nature to hate the one whom you have injured.

And this, really, is the most insidious venom of all. Blaming young women for tempting their rapists, or wives for driving their husbands to neglect or abuse them, is the greatest act of disrespect of them all. The idea relies on the assumption that the actions of men are forgiveable, but even inaction by women cannot be pardoned.

The idea itself is rooted in coercion.

But this is not an abstract disquisition on morality. The purpose of this column is simple: I want us to stop beating, abusing and neglecting our women and to start loving, respecting and learning from them instead. And lest you expat men think yourselves exempt from this; you’re not. I’ve seen ni-Vanuatu women treated despicably by black and white alike.

If I seem angry, that’s because I am. I have encountered instances of children solicited for sex, fathers turning their wives out and taking up with their under-age daughters, dozens of cases of rape and abuse, and some acts of violence that would make your blood curdle.

None of these appeared in the news or even in the crime statistics. Few of them were ever dealt with under law or kastom. It’s as if they don’t exist.

In almost every case where people did try to intercede, threats of violence by the man (often with the backing of his family) forced them to back away.

Coercion is a strangling vine. If we allow it to bend us even slightly, it alone will shape our growth.

We allow coercion to work because we are -all of us- weak. Our women simply aren’t as important to us as our own individual safety. How can I, a man, stand up to your abuser if he burns my house in return? If I physically confront him, what are the chances that his brothers and cousins will come for me? What are the odds that my family will face them down? Why even risk it?

I spoke with several Port Vila women about this vicious cycle. One of them replied, “Well, maybe if men didn’t treat us like animals in the first place, they might value us more.”

“The problem we face,” she said to me, “is that we don’t know each other at all. Once a girl and a boy have seen each other’s body, that’s it. It’s over.” So after a few weeks or months, when the young couple realise that they don’t see eye to eye on everything, or that their attraction wasn’t abiding love, there’s no escape. Things are sure to go badly and, here in Vanuatu, it’s always the woman who suffers most.

In the past, kastom might at least have provided some modicum of security. The tight confines of village life held at least some promise of safety, if not happiness or fulfillment.

No more.

Kastom teaches that respect is the seed from which all virtue grows. Jesus taught us to love one another -even the weakest among us- equally and without reserve. The Constitution states unequivocally that we are -all of us- equal. But none of that will matter until we purge ourselves of the poison fruit of coercion.

It’s aggravating, sometimes maddening, to have to draw out a disagreement until we achieve understanding. We struggle constantly with our animal nature to resist the mixed temptations of violence and lust.

Human, all too human, sometimes we fail. But if we don’t try at all, what kind of people are we, really? If we don’t tend our own garden and fight daily against this poison seed, what bitter harvest will our children reap?

It all starts right here: Treat your women like people.

In the discussion on Slashdot, someone asks if this isn’t just a distraction from the real story?

That’s what’s bugging me here as well. Who cares how the footage was released? The important thing is WHY we have soldiers killing unarmed civilians.

I do. I care a lot. Why does someone have to face a lifetime in prison just to allow us to discuss ‘WHY we have soldiers killing unarmed civilians’?

Greenwald posits that ‘distractions’ like Manning’s may actually be deliberately manifestations of Pentagon Policy.

Whatever the merits of that argument, the fact that someone had to break the law to show a commonplace incident in the so-called War on Terror can be viewed as a sad commentary on the state of censorship in our time, or (if you’re an optimist) an affirmation that, despite a culture of secrecy, information really does want to be free.

In either case, Greenwald’s conjecture is that Manning really was genuinely motivated by his conscience and that his ‘confessor’ Lamo rewarded his honesty with lies, venality and betrayal. I find his case as presented compelling but not conclusive.

Greenwald’s larger point about wikileaks, however, is, I think, irrefutable:

The reason this story matters so much — aside from the fact that it may be the case that a truly heroic, 22-year-old whistle-blower is facing an extremely lengthy prison term — is the unique and incomparably valuable function WikiLeaks is fulfilling. Even before the Apache helicopter leak, I wrote at length about why they are so vital, and won’t repeat all of that here. Suffice to say, there are very few entities, if there are any, which pose as much of a threat to the ability of governmental and corporate elites to shroud their corrupt conduct behind an extreme wall of secrecy.

As others will no doubt suggest, whistle blowers should understand the consequences of their actions, accepting the sometimes inevitable retribution that follows in order to serve the public good. That does not, however, excuse what Greenwald characterises as ‘despicable’ behaviour by Lamo. If this account proves true, then Lamo really is a sick, sorry individual.

I find this whole story compelling precisely because it demonstrates the stakes involved in something as simple as telling the truth. Secrecy and Transparency both are costly and dangerous when we wander too far towards either end of the continuum.

Stories like Manning’s allow us the opportunity to gauge where we are in that continuum and the price of remaining there.

But what I’d like to know -and what McAllister conveniently forgets to mention- is: What, exactly, constitutes a ‘True Data Disaster?’

Are we talking about a leak that effectively kills a company’s credibility dead? I don’t think so, because if incompetence or data mismanagement had any kind of real-world relationship with a company’s success, Yahoo!, Amazon, TJX and Heartland Payment Systems and dozens of others would at very least have suffered losses in stock value following their colossally poor management practices.

Are we talking criminal abuse of private information? If that were the case, then Microsoft, Yahoo! and all the nation’s telcos (save Qwest) should be facing imminent demise because of their complicity in the unconstitutional breach of their customers’ privacy in the US Government’s domestic spying programme.

Are we talking straight-up data loss? If so, then Microsoft (hmm, that name keeps coming up) should have taken a dive when they managed quite literally to lose all of Danger Networks’ data.

Or are we talking non-performance and generalised uselessness on a scale that beggars comprehension? If that were the case, then why do large consultancies still manage to win multi-million dollar contracts that suck up centuries of developer time and never actually deliver a thing? Think of the FBI’s famous foray into modernisation, the now-legendary death of the UK’s online medical database and any of a hundred other projects that ended up entirely written off (to the tune of 100s of millions each) without so much as a downward tick in the value of the contracting companies involved.

It seems that in the esoteric world of noughts and ones, belief matters far more than empirical truth, making a true Data Disaster literally inconceivable.

There can’t be a Data Disaster today, because we can’t imagine what one would look like. Likewise, there won’t be a Data Disaster until we become capable of realising that they’re all around us, happening every day.

A shocking story is emerging from the Northern Vanuatu island of Maewo. Last week, two brothers, fugitives from Kaiovo village, appeared at Lolowei Hospital on neighbouring Ambae island. One was treated for injuries. Witnesses said he claimed he had been stoned following a village meeting. The other walked onward to Tumsisiro, an Anglican mission, and requested sanctuary.

Before long, a caller from Maewo ascertained the brothers’ presence in Ambae, and a motor boat was dispatched. Reports estimate that up to a dozen men armed with axes and bush knives arrived at Lolowei. They proceeded to the outpatient clinic and promptly murdered the first brother. Stunned onlookers watched as they struck him dead, then dragged his corpse down to the shore, mocking and abusing it as they went. The second brother met the same fate soon afterward.

Within hours of the events, the story began to spread that accusations of sorcery and murder were the cause of this tragic episode. As with most such events, speculation is rampant and details are difficult to corroborate. One distraught Ambaean related a tale that seems to align well with others:

She told of a meeting held in Kaiovo to deal once and for all with the death of two local school employees, widely suspected to have been poisoned. At its climax, a local church elder announced that God had given him the names of the perpetrators. He had no sooner identified the two brothers and an elderly male accomplice than the local chief instructed the villagers to kill them.

Before the brothers could react, she said, one of the villagers picked up a large volcanic cooking stone and launched it at one of them. He missed, and the two began to scramble to their feet. Another stone quickly followed, striking one of the brothers and injuring him. They nonetheless managed to escape, leaving the older man to be beaten severely by the villagers.

Reports indicate that they obtained a canoe and paddled across several kilometers of open ocean to Lolowei’s tiny cove. It was there that their pursuers caught them up and murdered them.

Poison, witchcraft, religious visions and mob justice. One could easily dismiss these events as the actions of a backward, primitive people, benighted in superstition.

We should be careful not to mock too loudly, lest we mock ourselves.

The same week this story emerged, Internet pundits noted the rise of a pernicious and dangerous trend in online ‘crowd sourcing’ behaviour. People in China have taken to organising themselves to avenge various social transgressions. Using social networking tools, they identify and publicly shame people who, they claim, have committed various acts of cruelty and callousness.

In one case, a Chinese woman posted a video of herself as she tortured and killed a kitten with her stiletto heels. Indignant viewers tracked down personal details including her name, address and employer and began a harassment campaign that culminated in her flight into hiding.

Good riddance to bad rubbish, one is tempted to say. Surely someone so thoughtlessly cruel brought her fate upon herself. Some have observed that it’s hardly surprising to see such behaviour arising in China, with its inept local police and corrupt administration.

But such vigilantism is everywhere. In a case whose circumstances closely mirror that of the young Chinese woman, a teenage American boy uploaded a video of a dog being molested and was subjected to nearly identical treatment. The loosely-organised confederacy of online activists known as Anonymous has a track record of posting incriminating information about their targets.

They too claim the moral high ground, arguing, for example, that their disruption of the Church of Scientology, both online and In Real Life (their term), is a reaction to Scientology’s suppression of information about their organisation. Their tactics, claims Anonymous, include kidnapping, torture and even murder their own members.

People often complain that the Law is impersonal, an uncaring instrument whose application too often punishes the innocent and allows the guilty to walk free. In practice, it is capricious and too often selectively applied. All of this is true, from time to time.

But the alternative is summary judgment and mob justice. Far too often, they’re driven by hysteria and a deep-seated desire to find a scapegoat in order to externalise the worst aspects of human nature that exists within all of us. A recent Daily Post story on the Lolowei murders reports that villagers had long made use of the two accused poisoners to settle their own petty differences.

The very people who had commissioned these despicable acts were the brothers’ accusers and ultimately their executioners.

So where was the rule of Law? As with so many government services, policing is little more than a charade in rural areas. Newspaper reports indicate that, far from detaining the perpetrators and securing the bodies as evidence, police escorted the bodies to the attackers’ boat and allowed them to be taken away. The bodies were apparently fastened with stones and dumped into the ocean.

(It must be acknowledged that police dispatched criminal investigation staff to Ambae the very same day the reports first surfaced. As this column is being written, anonymous sources are reporting that 7 men will be summoned to face charges of unlawful assembly and murder. Whether these people are already in custody is not clear.)

Had these events happened even a few years ago, the brothers might have made good their escape. But with the advent of mobile telecommunications throughout Vanuatu, it only took a few phone calls to locate them, to coordinate transport and, yes, to propagate the sordid story across the nation.

Truly, technology can change lives, but it doesn’t change human nature.

A recent report from the Pacific Institute of Public Policy measuring the social effects of mobile telephony has solid evidence indicating that one of the primary benefits of mobile services is to reinforce social bonds and to sustain them over distance.

Such benefits are undeniably good, but development – especially social development – cannot consist only of technological advances. Improved access to information is a good thing, but it’s only as useful as our ability to process, filter and understand the information itself. No amount of technology will mitigate the worst excesses of jealousy, superstition and mob instinct.

One surprising datum emerging from the PiPP telecoms report is that people don’t recognise the role played by the Government in these recent changes. Satisfaction rose over last year’s report with regard to access to family and friends, business opportunities, travel, even education. But satisfaction levels with the government services actually dropped slightly this year, safeguarding their place at the very bottom of the index.

Social development is a complex, often amorphous and always difficult undertaking. But the government of Vanuatu has to state clearly, publicly and unambiguously what its role will be in this regard. If it doesn’t, people will continue to take matters in their own hands, sometimes with tragic results.

Faith. Belief. Trust.

These sentiments spring quickest to mind when we talk about what animates us, about what makes us strong and what keeps us on the moral path. We express these thoughts in terms of light and face constant imprecations to turn our back to the shadows.

I admire them all, but like objects of great value, sometimes they seem to be a little too fragile to handle, too easily sullied by circumstance. When it comes to coping with the world and its complexities, doubt is my tool of choice.

Doubt – the willingness to question every assumption – seems at first to cast shadows on everything. But every light does this, so we can clearly see the contours. True, this makes the picture more complex than it was. In that sense, doubt is subversive and troublesome. It makes our elders fret and leads the naive astray.

But it works.

So what to make of the ‘debate’ currently raging over humanity’s role in global climate change (Anthropogenic Global Warming, or AGW)? At first glance, it seems to pit the skeptics and doubters against the true believers. Wait a minute, say the skeptics, are we 100% sure about the data? What proof do we have? Can we trust that proof?

The believers, having already completed over a decade of deliberation and debate, impatiently try to move the conversation away from discussing whether AGW is true. That’s established fact, they say; it’s time to decide what to do about it.

Again and again the doubters drag the debate back to first principles. How can we be sure about all this? Isn’t science about proof? Where’s the proof?

Doubt, like salt, is useless alone. While it’s often useful to question ‘common knowledge’, the goal is not to come out knowing less but to learn more. Doubt must be the search for better answers. And that requires reason.

Do we know what next year’s weather will be like in Sydney? Do we know how many years we have before Tuvalu sinks below the waves? Do we know whether we’ve already gone too far, or whether we can still pull ourselves back from the brink? No, we don’t.

Do we know that man-made carbon dioxide has caused a drastic rise in the level of atmospheric CO2 in the last 50 years? Do we know that the world hasn’t seen a comparable increase in the previous 200,000 years? Do we know that atmospheric CO2 traps heat? Yes, yes, yes.

Like faith, doubt can be misapplied too easily. When it’s used to obscure rather than to illuminate, when it’s used selectively rather than systematically. When it refuses the possibility that it might ever be satisfied.

The Bislama phrase ‘askem question’ carries heavy connotations. It implies that something is not settled, that consensus has not been achieved. And without consensus, we have nothing. At least, not in Vanuatu.

But often enough, the process of asking questions, offering contradictory interpretations of events, or even just bull-headed denial, consists of nothing more than opposition for opposition’s sake.

Most of the opposition to movement on Climate Change is economically motivated. Simply stated, those who stand to lose the most protest the loudest. There’s nothing innately wrong with that; honestly, one would expect no less. What’s upsetting is the dishonesty of it all.

They pretend to want a dialogue, they appeal to science, but they don’t ever admit that a satisfactory answer is possible. They demand godlike knowledge, even certainty, from all-too-human scientists. They pester and pester and pester and, when the scientists finally snap at them, they howl that they’re being persecuted.

They are specifically, deliberately opposed to the very dialogue they claim to be denied.

This tactic is quite familiar in Vanuatu politics. On more than one occasion we’ve seen various political players pee into the well rather than let others drink from it. Speaker Korman’s antics last week are only the most recent example.

So the question then, is what can we do? If developed nations and certain industries are going to be deliberately dishonest about the extent, the nature or even the existence of global climate change, what can we, the most vulnerable nations in the world, do?

We can apply the tools of doubt. We can ask again: What is the relationship between climate change and development? Has the fundamental problem of global environmental degradation significantly changed in the last few decades, or just our understanding of it?

What, ultimately, is the difference these days between combating climate change and development? Are they not ultimately the same thing?

If that’s the case, then what we’re really seeing in Copenhagen is the refusal of the world’s economic leadership to admit that there should be limits to the damage humanity inflicts and that we must become our brother’s keeper, whether we like it or not.

The crisis of the world has not changed, except in immediacy. We must, as we always have, continue to question our faith in development as proffered. We require only that the rest of the world admit that real, honest answers are possible.

Following a recent workshop on copyright, the plight of the local reggae group Naio was used to demonstrate how copyright legislation could improve the lot of struggling Vanuatu artists.

Unauthorised copying, they claimed, had so reduced income from CD sales that the band simply couldn’t make a living on recording alone.

While the principle of respecting creative works is one I support wholeheartedly, I need to make this clear: Recent copyright reform has done little to change the plight of performers elsewhere in the world.

There are numerous interwoven ideas wrapped up inside what people call ‘Intellectual Property’. The World Intellectual Property Organization, a UN body, clumps many of them them together under the term Copyright. In essence, it says that Copyright – the right to exercise control over one’s creation – can be exerted over any creative work, its production or its broadcast.

The idea here is quite simple: Artists deserve to be rewarded for their work. Because they share their work with the world, and because we all benefit when they do so, they should be allowed a limited monopoly on the right to reproduce the work in question.

Well, that seems perfectly reasonable.

Of course, we do need to carve out a few exceptions. We need the idea of Fair Use. People need to be able to talk about the artists’ work; so common everyday uses such as humming a tune or copying out a few key sentences of a book are considered okay. How about using creative material to teach? That seems safe enough. We should also be allowed to re-sell, trade or give away books, CDs, DVDs and magazines, right? We can make copies of them to safeguard our purchase, can’t we?

But what about a sing-along at a bar? That popularises the song, so that should be fine, right? How about if we pop the CD into the bar’s sound system, so that everyone can listen and dance to it? Or how about if I keep one copy of a song at home and put another onto an MP3 player to listen to in the car? It’s already been paid for, right? So that shouldn’t be a problem. What if I copy just a little bit of it, and use it as a ringtone in my phone? Can I give that ringtone to my friends?

What if I use a well-known hook as a witty commentary in a song of my own?

What if I’m in a band and I like a song so much I want to play it myself? Do I have to ask permission to play it?

The rights enjoyed by the authors of creative works vary widely from one country to another. In some countries most of what I’ve described above is can be done without worrying.

In some other countries, you start paying as soon as you buy a blank CD to make a backup. The music you hear in restaurants and elevators and when you’re holding the phone? Paid for.

Copyright is a great idea. In practice, however, it gets messy fast.

It doesn’t have to be that way. It’s possible to boil down copyright to a few basic elements, and many of them are easily enforced, even without special legislation.

If I record a song, for example, I can license a distributor to press a number of copies and sell them in stores around the country. In order to protect our collective investment, I give the distributor the exclusive right to sell my disks for a period of time. That’s a pretty straightforward grant of copyright that I could write up in a simply-worded contract.

But that’s not where copyright is going. Increasingly, copyright favours not the original artist, but the distributor.

Fair use provisions such as the right to make a few copies or to share with my friends actually popularise the artist’s creation. Especially in the early days of an artist’s career, exposure is everything. Some people contend that the best way to become popular quickly is to give stuff away and rely on people to spread the word to their friends.

But that particular kind of free publicity reduces profits for the distributor, at least notionally. Every copy made for free seems like a lost sale to the distributor.

Most of the movement on copyright law is being driven by distributors, not artists. They feel threatened by the ease with which music and video can be copied on the Internet, and they’re doing what they can to turn back the tide.

Naio’s work – and that of countless other talented musicians and performers – needs protecting. Of that there is no doubt. We can protect those rights today: Penalise anyone who sells their CDs without permission. Two policemen on weekly patrol could reduce the black market nearly to zero.

What WIPO is proposing, however, is much broader than that.

Bands like Naio and others in Vanuatu could benefit hugely from the free exposure that the Internet provides. (One can only hope that their exclusive sponsorship agreement with TVL includes some kind of ring-tone/website/online distribution provision.) But measures currently being touted internationally would make things harder, not easier for small acts like them.

There is increasing movement internationally toward what distributors have termed a ‘graduated response’ to file copying. If you’re caught copying online once, you get a warning; two times and there’s a penalty; three times and you’re out.

That’s a bit like revoking someone driver’s license, not for dangerous driving, but for running on knock-off tires.

It may be inevitable that Vanuatu harmonises its so-called Intellectual Property laws with the rest of the world. But let’s not pretend: We’re doing it for Disney’s sake, not Naio’s. By forcing all music and video through official distribution channels, bands like Naio might find recognition harder than ever to come by.

As Internet services become more common in Vanuatu, local businesses have been using it to supplement their normal advertising and communications channels. In their enthusiasm – and, it must be said, naivete – they’ve overlooked a few fundamental rules of good online behaviour.

Businesses and individuals (there’s no need to name and shame; they know who they are and, if you have an email account, so do you) have more and more often taken to sending unsolicited promotional and editorial emails to hundreds of Vanuatu addresses.

Regardless of their good intentions, these companies and individuals are spamming. In other countries, it would be illegal. Here, it’s a nuisance for virtually all involved.

Before I go on, I need to emphasise that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the idea of promoting one’s business via email. It’s a core marketing practice for virtually all businesses with ready access to the Internet. The problem here is not what these people are doing; the problem lies in how they go about it.

The Devil, I often say, is in the details, and IT consists entirely of details. So bear with me as I walk through a few small but critical details that make all the difference in the world between a friendly email that will likely be welcomed and what we all know as spam (and a few other unprintable terms as well)….

PRIVACY

When you send an email with a lot of people listed in the TO or the CC field, anyone who can see the email can see the address of all the other recipients. Not a problem, you might think; Port Vila’s a small town, and we’re all friends here. That’s true enough, but we’re not the only ones who can see the distribution list. Virus- and bot-infected computers quite commonly ‘harvest’ addresses by trawling through people’s inboxes.

Human scammers can take advantage of this information, too. In one notable recent case, someone pretending to be a ni-Vanuatu man trapped in London without funds sent around an email asking for money. As far as I can tell, no one was fooled – this time.

NOISE

On more than one occasion in the past, I’ve seen these mass circulation emails descend into online chaos. One person clicks the Reply To All button and says, ‘please stop sending these’. Within a few minutes, a few others pipe up and say, ‘Me too!’. Before too long, what began as one unwelcome email has become a maelstrom of online ‘noise’. Between those replying to all asking to be removed from the distribution list, others lecturing them on proper online behaviour (or ‘netiquette’), and still others telling everyone else to shut up and leave them alone, everyone’s inbox becomes polluted with useless, irrelevant messages and angry, increasingly belligerent replies.

It goes without saying that none of us would ever want our name associated with this kind of situation.

UN-NEIGHBOURLY BEHAVIOUR

There’s a world of difference between a loud party at a neighbour’s house and a loud party at a neighbour’s house… that you’re attending. The difference, of course, is choice. If you choose to receive promotional emails, then you hardly have any cause to complain if they arrive. In fact, one would expect you’d be glad of them.

If you have not chosen to receive these emails, though, they can seem pretty darn intrusive if they distract you from more important correspondence.

TRUST

During an online discussion of local spam, one local vendor complained bitterly that he couldn’t use his own distribution lists, consisting entirely of clients who had voluntarily signed up for his notices, because TVL was blocking him for spamming.

The problem here was unfortunate, but understandable: TVL has no choice but to take administrative steps to shield its customers from abusive spammers, but sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish between legitimate email behaviour and illegitimate. Mass circulation spam is so common these days that it’s hardly surprising if TVL, in its zeal to provide a reasonable and enjoyable Internet service, occasionally blocks the good with the bad.

The local business houses and individuals who spam have effectively ruined things for the rest of the community who do occasionally circulate email to a large local audience.

Port Vila is a small town, and circulating email is a timely and effective way to get in touch with many in the community. But if you’re thinking about doing so, either to promote a cause or your business, you really do need to get professional assistance with this.

It might seem simpler and more efficient to simply blast out messages at everone in your address book, but you really do need to think twice before proceeding. Before you do, imagine you’re sitting in a jam-packed movie theatre, at the very best part of the very best film, and then ask yourself what it would take to make you jump up and start shouting to everyone in the theatre.

That is what spam looks like to the rest of us.

It may look like spam works, but appearances can deceive. When you send unsolicited email to large numbers of people at a time, you may think you’re gaining business, because the only people to feed back to you are those who took no offense. Those who did take offense, on the other hand, will likely never talk to you again.

They do, on the other hand, talk to me. I’m writing this column at the urging of numerous individuals and local organisations.

You may not think your spamming is hurting you. I’m here to tell you that it is.

Be a good neighbour. Stop spamming. If you want to use email to promote your business, talk to one of the several local IT services companies. They know how to do it right.