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.

The recent decision by the Mubarak regime in Egypt to cut off all Internet access for its citizens is a textbook example of using a silver bullet to shoot oneself in the foot.

The whys and wherefores of how they’ve gone about doing so provide a useful opportunity to understand the paradox of control over the Internet and the costs involved when governments and other actors indulge their desire to dam the torrent of information that flows across their networks.

In order to do that, we need to dispel a rather pesky myth.

Perhaps the most dangerous misconception of the Internet is its survivability. It’s true that, as one information activist put it, the Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it. But that statement is predicated on the actual presence of an Internet in the first place.

That may sound like a silly statement, but the Internet might not be as enduring as many assume it to be.

While many of the software and communications protocols that define the Internet are, by design, remarkably resistant to outside control, the physical networks through which our data passes are not nearly so robust.

James Cowie, a network analyst from Renesys Corporation, has written excellent analyses of state intervention in national communications both during the post-election strife in Iran and more recently in Egypt. Using forensic evidence gathered in real time, he constructs a vivid scenario: In contrast to Iranian authorities, who elected to use physical choke-points in the communications infrastructure to reduce the flow of information to a trickle, Egyptian authorities appear to have instructed all national Internet Service Providers simply to cut all communications with the outside world.

Starting at midnight (Egyptian time) on the 27th of January 2011, Egypt’s largest ISPs began disappearing from the Internet. Within a period of about 13 minutes, they simply stopped delivering data to and from their customers.

Cowie writes:

“[T]his sequencing looks like people getting phone calls, one at a time, telling them to take themselves off the air. Not an automated system that takes all providers down at once; instead, the incumbent leads and other providers follow meekly one by one until Egypt is silenced.”

How did this happen? Every large ISP participates in a cooperative system called the Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP. BGP allows them to discover how traffic destined to a remote network should be directed. Simply put, each ISP announces which address blocks it supports. These blocks can represent tens or even hundreds of thousands of individual machine addresses.

Designed for simpler times, BGP is a trust-based protocol. It relies implicitly of the good faith of all participants to continue working. This makes it remarkably vulnerable to the machinations of states or organisations whose interests don’t align with others’. Back in 2008, Pakistan Telecom caused a furore when, for a little over 2 hours, their bungled attempt to use BGP to block YouTube domestically resulted in the site disappearing from much of the Internet.

Just last year, a change to BGP traffic announcements resulted in about 15% of all Internet traffic being routed through networks in China for a brief period. This resulted in breathless speculation that the disruption was not accidental. Some claimed that it amounted to a reconnaissance in force, as it were, a probing of the global Internet to determine its resilience in the face of attack.

Intentional or not, these disruptions to the BGP apparatus make it abundantly clear that choke points exist on the Internet and that they are remarkably easy to subvert.

Debate continues to rage in technical circles about what can be done to mitigate BGP’s innate deficiencies. Changes will doubtless be necessary. But the liability wouldn’t be so grave if our physical communications networks weren’t so hopelessly centralised.

Egypt offers us a particularly vivid example of this. A country of over 80 million people, it has only a half a dozen or so large Internet providers. Only one of them, the Noor Group, initially resisted the demand to drop services. Some have speculated that its continued online presence was due to its extensive list of blue chip clients, including many banks and the Egyptian Stock Exchange.

Ultimately, though, it was a limited victory. Noor advertised only 83 of the roughly 3500 data routes in and out of Egypt. They were eventually forced off the air a week after their IT confrères.

In Iran, population 72 million, there are only 5 significant international links, all of which flow through a single Government-run office. Such centralisation makes it easy for the state to exert its influence.

(One European-owned company, Vodaphone, washed its hands of the decision to cut service to its Egyptian customers, claiming that the Mubarak regime had the legal right to issue the order. This rhetorical line apes the rationale provided by Nokia-Siemens when it was discovered that their equipment enabled Iranian authorities to block most traffic and eavesdrop on the rest.)

The Internet as a principle –that is, the idea of an open network allowing free communication regardless of source or sender– is not as popular as some might believe. It made its way into the commercial world more by stealth than by deliberation. Telcos didn’t really understand the Internet as a service; they just knew they had to offer it in order to compete.

One thing was clear to them: The sum of all services across a global network was clearly more valuable than those offered by a single provider. Equally attractive was the perception that these services came more or less for free with the connection.

But the seductive power of the Net hasn’t changed attitudes entirely.

Telecommunications companies, with a long legacy of market-controlling behaviour, still build and deploy their infrastructure using centralised models. Recently, some of them have begun lobbying for the right to exert control over the data that passes over their networks, potentially penalising services that compete with their own. Comcast, one of the largest ISPs in the US, recently got approval to acquire NBC Universal and its content-creation ecosystem, giving rise to fears that they might leverage their control over the information pipeline to dictate what passes through it.

Put simply, carriers would love nothing better than to go back to the telephone service model, where fees are based on where you are and who you talk to, with no conversation possible unless you’ve paid your toll.

The principle of an end-to-end network –that is, one that allows direct, unmediated connections between two parties– militates strongly in the opposite direction. Its appeal is remarkably seductive, leading most Internet users to view with displeasure the telcos’ (or governments’) desire to mediate communications.

Renesys quite rightly remarks that if cuts to Egypt’s Internet had lasted much longer, the reduction in commercial activity could have been catastrophic for the nation.

Furthermore, Cowie remarks, it wasn’t only Egypt’s pipelines that were at risk:

“[T]he majority of Internet connectivity between Europe and Asia actually passes through Egypt. The Gulf States, in particular, depend critically on the Egyptian fiber-optic corridor for their connectivity to world markets.

“Are the folks at Davos thinking about this? They should be.”

In a perfect world, consumer choice and basic business commonsense would always win. But the problem is that centralised networks not only cost a lot of money (placing their design and construction into the hands of the most powerful), they make a lot of money, too.

In monetary and political terms, the wealth of the network itself tends to pool rather than to flow.

A fundamental change has already overtaken the public’s perception about the value and nature of digital communications. Passive consumption of news through the television is considered passé, or at least diminished in relation to the sharing of photos, videos and words across the Internet.

As individual control over the flow of information rises, central control wanes. And this, obviously, is the crux of the dilemma facing businesses and governments across North Africa and throughout the world. They are belatedly coming to realise that they are fighting a many-headed hydra. As they cut off one avenue of communication, another rears its head.

But that hydra has a body, and the body is the network itself.

As this column goes to press, it appears that Egypt’s decision to cut off the Internet failed in every important regard. One protester is reported to have said, “F*** the internet! I have not seen it since Thursday and I am not missing it.… Go tell Mubarak that the people’s revolution does not need his damn internet!”

I would be amazed, however, if this fact led other governments to act differently, should they find themselves in a similar situation. Indeed, the US Congress is currently considering legislation that would provide the President with an ‘Internet Kill Switch’ for use in case of emergency.

Likewise, I see no evidence that the ultimate futility of attempting to control the flow of information will change attitudes in the board rooms and offices where our increasingly centralised networks are planned. For telcos, the challenge is merely technical.

For the Internet –as it was originally intended– to become fully realised and fully resistant to coercion, the devices and infrastructure through which our data travels will need to reflect the same principle of decentralisation as the software and protocols we use today. That implies the construction of communications devices that are very different from the locked-in, network-centric phones, tablets and computers we’re familiar with. I can think of no short-term scenario in which the development of such products will take place in any significant way.

For some time to come, we will continue to live in a world in which the powerful continue to load silver bullets and take aim squarely at their own feet.

The recent prisoner escape has –quite understandably– raised emotions among Port Vila residents. Our collective inability to end this chronic threat has led many to call for drastic action in order to resolve the problem once and for all.

If only it were that easy.

Much has been said on the topic, most of it in the heat of the moment. As difficult as it may be when we feel our loved ones are threatened, we need to step back from our emotions so we can properly evaluate the situation.

Let’s consider some of the pronouncements that have been made in the media over the last week or so:

1) Prison escapes are getting worse, not better. Correctional Services is a failure.

Unproven. The frequency of prison escapes has dropped in direct relation to the Government’s commitment of funds and resources to Correctional Services. There’s every reason to believe that escapes will decrease even further once a proper correctional centre is built.

2) Escapes diminished drastically after the VMF were tasked with rounding up prisoners.

Patently false. The largest escape in the history of Port Vila’s history was motivated in part because of the role the VMF played in prisoners’ regular and brutal mistreatment. Joshua Bong was unable to stop a mass escape even when told by the prisoners themselves when the breakout going to happen.

The escapes stopped (until now) only after a thorough-going revamp of procedures accompanied by the construction of a more secure and more humane facility.

3) None of this would have happened if we hadn’t let foreign influences dictate to us.

This is Vanuatu’s problem. Placing the blame on others’ shoulders is intellectually lazy and un-productive.

Prison reform was not foisted upon us. This path was freely chosen by the Government. Not to put too fine a point on it, if both parties were as committed to the process as New Zealand is, it might have been implemented –properly– 5 years ago.

We need to recognise that New Zealand agreed to partner with the Government in reaction to the prisons’ sieve-like security post-1980. We also need to ask ourselves why a programme that is effective in New Zealand consistently fails in Vanuatu.

If reports are correct, the direct cause of the prisoners’ escape was the fact that they were left unsupervised for at least 30 minutes because a guard wanted a cup of tea.

While kastom-based village justice programmes have proven useful in rehabilitating many offenders, a minority of our prisoners are dangerous and probably beyond rehabilitation. I challenge anyone to come up with a more measured and pragmatic plan for them than that which has been proposed.

4) Prison guards should have firearms.

This suggestion flies in the face of prison doctrine world-wide. Guards who interact directly with the prison population are deliberately not given firearms because those weapons can be captured and  turned against them, making the escapee(s) even more dangerous.

Ask yourself: How would you feel if you heard these same prisoners were loose in Port Vila and armed with pistols or assault rifles?

Reports have suggested that the guards allowed themselves to be intimidated by the mere threat of stoning. Clearly, steps need to be taken to ensure they don’t lose control of their charges so easily. But giving guards guns makes things worse, not better.

5) Escaped prisoners’ human rights should be ignored.

Let’s be honest: This is really just a polite way of saying that prisoners should be shot, or at least beaten at will.

Without going into the why’s and wherefor’s of this debate, let’s at least be clear about one thing: If the police or VMF are going to be given the power to summarily punish or even execute certain individuals, then they need some clear rules established concerning when, why and how this happens.

Nobody is going to argue that Kasimir’s rights outweigh those of our sons and daughters. But if we’re going to authorise his trackers to shoot him on sight, what’s keeping your son or daughter out of the crossfire?

When the bullets start flying, they don’t distinguish between Good Guys and Bad.

Moreover, does this death penalty (let’s call it what it is) apply to all escapees? Consider the real case of a young Tannese man straight from the island, jailed for theft. He speaks no Bislama or English and doesn’t fully understand why he’s been incarcerated. Were he to escape, unaware of the consequences, should we shoot him too?

If society is intent on putting aside people’s human rights under certain circumstances, then for its own sake it had damn well better be clear about what those circumstances are, lest the innocent suffer with the guilty.

Equally important, the responsibility for who gets to live and who dies is too great to be trusted to a few individuals, both for their sake and for ours. We as a society must own that choice.

Until the Law says otherwise, killing or beating prisoners after their apprehension is a crime.

6) Prisoners don’t deserve respect or kindness.

Anyone who’s heard the details of the crimes committed by some of these men would be hard-pressed to show even the slightest flicker of compassion. My honest reaction to the news that one of them had kidnapped a young woman from my neighbourhood, torturing and raping her for four days was… well, suffice it to say that I don’t know if he’d survive 5 minutes alone with me.

But before we indulge that desire to return an eye for an eye, we need to remember two things:

1. Some prisoners truly are psychopaths and a danger to society. But they are the minority. Treating all of them that way becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Kick the sweetest-natured dog often enough and eventually he will bite back.
2. The unbearable, inhuman conditions described by the prisoners themselves led even remand prisoners to escape. Poor prison conditions only made them more desperate, more willing to go to any lengths to escape.

Treating prisoners humanely is a pragmatic concern, not a moral one. Simply put, a prisoner who is treated with a modicum of decency has less reason to run away.

I have no silver-bullet solutions to offer here. That’s because they don’t exist. We’re deceiving ourselves if we pretend they do.

It’s not my place to prescribe the choices Vanuatu society makes about its own offenders. All I’m suggesting is that, when we consider our options, we think them all the way through.

Dealing with its transgressors is one of human society’s defining challenges. It’s a thicket of thorns that has entangled us throughout history, one from which we can never completely emerge.

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.

Marshall McLuhan’s rise to prominence as a cultural icon parallels that of television. Today, just like television, he is as widely lionised as he is misunderstood. Like credulous children, we toss around the terms he minted without a moment’s reflection. ‘The media’ has become a shibboleth for corporate commentary on the events of the day, filtered arbitrarily through a lens that sees no further than the next ratings cycle.

McLuhan saw this trend and feared it. Contrary to popular belief, his famous image of a global village was a pessimistic, almost despairing vision. A flickering television screen replaced the campfire at the centre of the human experience, but those huddled around it, seeking meaning in its seductive gaze, were as brutish and unreflective as he imagined early man to be.

It’s a shame he wasn’t around to see the how the rise of personal communications has subverted this dark vision. A new PiPP report, “Social and economic impact of introducing telecommunications throughout Vanuatu”, demonstrates unambiguously that access to personal communications has the power to change lives.

McLuhan’s dark metaphor was wrong in one critical regard: The people sitting around the village campfire are not nearly the simpletons he imagined them to be. Dozens of case studies in the PiPP report demonstrate that even in a world with only the most rudimentary technology, people show ingenuity, perspicacity and intelligence. Given access to mobile telecommunications, they grasp the initiative, improving their lives in almost every way.

The personal stories appearing in ‘Social Impacts…‘ provide striking contrasts between a world bereft of the amenities taken for granted in the developed world and the immediacy of electronic communications. Before the advent of mobile telephony, a process as simple as ordering goods for a village shop involved days of effort and weeks of waiting. Just making a phone call often required long treks over difficult terrain and prohibitively high costs.

The report offers numerous examples of the inordinate lengths that rural merchants go to just to keep stock on their shelves, putting paid (one hopes) to the stereotype of the indolent islander waiting patiently for the cargo to come. If it serves no other purpose, it is invaluable for this insight alone.

But there is a great deal more to it than that. The image it conjures up is not so much of new entrants to the Global Village as of residents of Digital Islands: While communication has improved –and social and economic well-being along with it– the distance from one island to the next has diminished only slightly.

Mobile telephony in and of itself is a boon in most regards, but without complementary infrastructure and services, it is of limited value.

It’s not even clear how our new telecoms infrastructure can be further leveraged to bootstrap access to the Internet. Digicel’s Mobile Internet fees put the service out of reach of the overwhelming majority of its customers, and TVL is simply absent from the field.

Furthermore, lack of access to electricity forces rural residents to spend as much charging their mobile phones’ battery as they do on credit. If they can’t keep even a mobile phone running cheaply, what hope have they of running a computer?

The PiPP report recounts the story of Simon, a lobster salesman based in Ipota on Erromango island. Before Digicel’s appearance on the island, he was forced to rely on the teleradio at the local airport, making delivery of his highly perishable stock extremely difficult. He now relies almost exclusively on his mobile phone to conduct his business. But limited coverage in his area means that he has to ride 9 km on horseback to get reliable service.

The image of a man riding his horse across Erromango’s rugged jungle trails to place a call on his mobile phone says it all. The telecoms market liberalisation strategy represents an historic policy win for the Government of Vanuatu, but unless it’s treated as a first step of a much more comprehensive development strategy, its value will be significantly diluted.

Dozens of stories like Simon’s are peppered throughout ‘Social Impacts…‘, each as illuminating as his. Their lesson is consistently the same: Improvements in transport, access to credit and secondary infrastructure are all necessary if we want to see further improvement in household outcomes in next year’s report.

Another concern raised by the report is the impact on kastom and culture as the immediacy of personal communication provides new channels for information, insight and guidance. While some of them are undeniably positive –women, for example, are making extensive use of mobile telephony to sustain and strengthen their social networks, improving their safety and access to information– these changes present new and largely unacknowledged sources of conflict with kastom’s inherent conservatism.

This year’s survey was nearly an order of magnitude larger than the inaugural report, which was conducted only weeks after Digicel’s initial roll-out. A total of over 900 participants were interviewed this year. The resulting dataset is a goldmine of demographic and economic intelligence whose import extends well beyond the primary focus of the report.

‘Social Impacts…’ should be read by more than just researchers and policy wonks. Anyone with even a passing interest in development, Vanuatu culture and its leap from a largely unchanged 3000-year-old agrarian culture into the Information Age will find it a fascinating document. Its 140-odd pages are replete with fascinating insights into social phenomena affecting the entire Pacific, indeed much of the developing world.

Comprehensive research reports into the dynamics of Vanuatu society are few and far between. Rarely are they presented in such a concise and approachable format. The report is available from www.pacificpolicy.org.

A friend of mine recently completed a photography project documenting the people of Dhaka, Bangladesh. These 265 mostly candid portraits capture what I like to call the miracle of the mundane. Without editorialising, they create a compelling polemic for the inherent dignity of every human being.

They’re noteworthy precisely because they’re not newsworthy.

If you were to ask me what animates me, what makes me take on the labours of love that fill my time to brimming, I would likely point to something like this. I’ve often been accused of being an idealist, but that’s only partly true. The ideals that I aspire to are simple:

We should have the right to a peaceful, respectful existence, with all the rights and responsibilities that this entails.

We should be able to choose which dramas and adventures we become involved in. Those we can’t choose should never grow so large that we lose all choice whatsoever.

One of the most alluring and endearing aspects of life in Vanuatu is our collective ability to drift along with few cares and few (sometimes too few!) responsibilities. The machinery of government grinds and chugs on by like a smoking bus with three cylinders firing, but aside from a bit of smoke and noise, leaves us largely unscathed.

Recent events, especially last Thursday’s tsunami warning, serve as a reminder just how fortunate we are. Within an hour of the alert being issued, news agencies the world over were contacting the Daily Post. Intent on the next human tragedy, they wanted to know: How much damage? How many dead?

The answer, happily, was that only one young girl was hurt when she ran in front of a moving truck.

Had a similar area in virtually anywhere else in the world been struck as we were by 3 earthquakes in quick succession, each in excess of 7.0, thousands, even millions might have suffered.

The simplicity of our existence – our lack of development – has in many ways saved us from the worst. If we didn’t have so little, we might have more to lose.

Life goes on today as it did the day before. We worry about where the next bag of rice is going to come from. We ruin our sandals in the mud. We bicker and fuss our way through petty jealousies. And we laugh at every opportunity.

In a place where the worst example of anarchy we can find is a dozen children playing on the beach, where the sum of our fears extend no more than a few miles from home, where even a hurricane is more frightening than deadly, we should really consider ourselves blessed.

But that should never make us complacent. For all its manifold blessings, Vanuatu society is still fraught with imperfection. Violence may not be institutionalised, but it is systemic. Too many women and children, safe from the predations of the state, are nonetheless victims in their own homes. Family, stronger here than in most other societies, is increasingly strained by distance and economic forces.

The difference between Vanuatu and its more turbulent Melanesian neighbours is as much one of luck as anything else. We all have corruption, venality, social and economic tensions and occasional violence. But for some reason, Vanuatu always pulls back from the brink.

How is this? What exactly is it that has allowed us to avoid the worst excesses of violence, economic and social dispossession? I honestly don’t know. If I were forced to answer, I’d likely wave my hands vaguely and mutter something about how people just don’t like things getting out of hand.

During the incipient insurrection some years ago between Police and Mobile forces, a besieged Police commander delivered an impassioned speech to the throng assembled behind the VMF picket. What began as an angry peroration culminated in a series of (ultimately tearful) apologies to everyone concerned for having caused such a ruckus. By observing the rhetorical standards of public oratory, the rebel leader defused his own obduracy.

We are a decent society, therefore, because we are used to acting like decent people.

Conclusions like this are dangerous. Too often, they lead only to self-satisfied complacency. As one chief explained it to me, it’s as if we are given the gift of a lovely garden with bountiful fruit trees. With such abundance, it becomes difficult to see the sweat and the toil that went into clearing the ground, the care and attention that allowed the tiny seed to become an adult tree.

It’s far too easy as well to assume that the tree will continue to bear fruit forever.

Thursday’s tsunami warning was a false alarm. But there is another tsunami approaching whose effects will be more widespread and, if we don’t prepare for them, more devastating than anything the ocean could do.

As development continues its inexorable spread through Vanuatu society, we must ensure that our politicians and policy makers never lose sight of individual faces of the people on whose behalf they were chosen to work.

They aren’t newsworthy, but they are noteworthy. They are us.

In times of crisis, communication and coordination enable us to survive and to recover quickly.

When an earthquake occured between Samoa and Tonga early in the morning of September 29th, it created a tsunami that struck the inhabitants on the eastern and southeastern parts of the island within minutes. Sirens sounded and church bells rang all over side of the island, sending people fleeing to higher ground.

The latest reports from Samoa indicate that in addition to at least 149 dead, 640 families comprising roughly 3200 people have lost their homes and possessions. Most have yet to to return to their villages, and are without proper access to power, water and other basic amenities.

Food, water, clothing and shelter are all critical elements of the relief effort.

Equally important is the ability to communicate.

As I write this, many Port Vila residents are still feeling shaken following another tsunami warning caused by an 8.0 magnitude earthquake Thursday morning at the far northern tip of the Vanuatu archipelago. Happily, it was a dud. Boaters in Port Vila harbour reported a minor swell, nothing more. Two more tremblors measuring above 7.0 were felt that day, further raising anxieties.

Within 15 minutes of the tremor, the first official warning was issued by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. A few minutes after that, warnings began to be issued via email, web and broadcast media. Shortly before the wave was due to arrive, downtown Port Vila was a ghost town. Shops, schools and businesses were closed in Santo as well.

It was encouraging to see the speed with which the information was disseminated, and how care was taken to ensure that the news was accurate and timely.

Following the cancellation of the alert, there was much discussion about how things could have been done better. Among the problems mentioned were traffic jams caused by parents attempting to collect their children from schools, closed although most were situated on safe high ground and never in danger.

Others suggested that TVL and Digicel should collaborate to send broadcast SMS messages to their client base. While a commendable idea, we cannot rely entirely on such media. SMS operates on a best-effort basis, but voice traffic always takes precedence. So if everyone starts phoning family and loved ones – as happened this morning – their calls will take precedence. The busier the network, the slower the rate at which SMS messages can be sent.

Also, it’s impossible to send messages to people based on their location. From the perspective of the equipment used to send these messages, you’re either on the network or you’re not. Exactly where you are is impossible to determine.

While useful, SMS can only be a part of the solution. Broadcast media and good old-fashioned warning sirens are still the most direct and effective way to get the message out.

Tellingly, none of the the warnings that I saw originated from the government unit designated to deal with these situations. While the Geohazards unit and the Meteo office were quick to disseminate details via radio, TV, web and email, the National Disaster Management Office was nowhere to be seen.

Government resources are limited, it’s true. While every effort is made to provide accurate, detailed and up-to-date information, resources are always stretched. Esline Araebiti, Geohazards Manager, described her efforts to keep tabs on recent volcanic activity on Gaua’s volcano. Dormant since 1982, it recently began to show signs of life, and has since been upgraded from level 0 (dormant) to 1 (increased activity, danger near crater only).

The first people to notice this renewed activity were the people of West Gaua. With neither mobile nor landline service available, they used a teleradio to contact provincial authorities in Sola on nearby Vanua Lava, where the message was relayed to the Geohazards Unit.

(It’s hoped that the Government’s Universal Access Policy Fund will improve communications capacity in this extremely vulnerable area.)

Luckily, portable sensing equipment was available, and members of the unit embarked immediately for Gaua. The equipment uses satellite technology to send monitoring data back to Vila and onward to the US Geological Survey’s international network.

Thursday’s earthquake was centred about 150 kilometres from Gaua. There is some concern that the disturbance might cause increased activity in the volcano. Much like a can of soda when it’s shaken, an earthquake can cause the explosive release of gases from magma chambers deep below the earth’s surface. Gaua’s lava chamber lies immediately below a lake, so there’s significant concern that if it’s breached it could cause a catastrophic explosion. Authorities are therefore watching carefully to see if the volcano’s status should be upgraded yet again.

The kind of sensing equipment deployed in Gaua is costly to purchase and maintain. NZAID and the Pacific Fund have been assisting the unit in establishing a permanent monitoring station on Ambrym to track activity on Marum and Benbow volcanoes. These stations use Digicel’s GPRS service to provide lower-cost communications. Results so far are quite positive, though there have been technical issues with Digicel’s tower located in nearby Ulei village.

Sylvain Todman, a consultant working with the Geohazards unit, stated that there is a critical need for additional equipment. Currently only two volcanoes are monitored on a full-time basis. There is an immediate need for six such stations, located on Tanna, Epi, Ambrym, Ambae and Gaua. Each station costs between $12-17,000, plus regular service and maintenance – not too expensive, considering the lives that might be saved.

The September 29 tsunami took between 5-8 minutes to reach the coast of Samoa, and only a few minutes more to strike Tonga and American Samoa. Thursday’s false alarm provides an object lesson on the importance of timely, accurate and systematic information sharing, both in acquisition and dissemination of geohazard data.

Communications is, after all what makes us human. And what keeps us safe and alive.

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” – Leo Tolstoy

On Wednesday this week at a quiet ceremony in Chantilly’s Resort, Minister Rialuth Serge Vohor presented six organisations with telecommunications operator licenses. His action marked the beginning of a new chapter in Vanuatu’s integration into the wider technological world.

The Minister’s speech touched on many aspects of the technical and social challenge ahead of us, but its illuminating principle was his lifelong conviction that Vanuatu should control its own destiny. Acknowledging and applauding the invaluable assistance provided by numerous donor and commercial partners from overseas, he nonetheless displayed great satisfaction at seeing local operations moving into the spotlight.

There was an air of quiet excitement in the room as, after patient months of waiting, representatives from the six groups, along with Digicel Vanuatu CEO Tanya Menzies, strode to the front of the room to accept the newly signed documents.

At the risk of sounding like a giddy shoolchild, I wonder if everyone realises just how fundamentally this moment is going to affect our generation and the next.

We’ve had Internet services in Vanuatu for some time now and TVL has consistently worked to improve it. When I arrived here in 2003, an unlimited dial-up account cost 25,000 vatu per month. Today, a dedicated broadband line with roughly 3 times the capacity is available at about 20% of the price.

In 2003, it was possible – in theory at least – to connect from any telephone line. But that did mean being near a telephone line, and contending with all the other voice traffic coming and going. In practice, using the Internet regularly for anything but the most basic purposes in the islands was a challenge, to say the least. Today, we have broadband service in Vila and Santo (and soon in Tanna). And even if you’re not near a phone line, you can use TVL’s WiMax or Digicel’s GPRS service.

The pattern we’re seeing in Internet closely echoes what we saw in the months before Digicel rolled out its mobile telephone service, with a few critical differences. Prices have dropped, coverage and capacity have improved. If anything, TVL’s been even more aggressive this time in improving its core infrastructure, expanding its coverage area and reducing prices. It has clearly become a much more agile organisation than it once was. Consumers nationwide can only benefit from the result.

This time around, it’s Digicel that runs the risk (albeit a slight one) of being the one caught on the hop. On the same day the six new licenses were awarded, Digicel also received an amended license – essentially giving it the right to compete in all segments of the telecoms market.

I spoke with CEO Tanya Menzies about what Digicel’s plans regarding Internet services. When asked about becoming a full-service ISP, She said they were in the process of developing their business plan and didn’t want to make any firm pronouncements at that moment. She did, however, draw my attention to a recent contract between Digicel and Huawei to provide roaming wireless broadband in 5 Caribbean nations.

It’s no accident that Digicel’s new CTO is a wireless Internet veteran with a long list of large-scale network roll-outs to his credit. “That’s why we brought him here,” said Menzies, smiling.

I suspect, though, that most people’s first contact with the Internet here will be through smaller local commercial and community-based operations. Telsat Pacific has ambitious plans to push Internet service as widely as they can using a mix of small satellite dishes and wireless technology. Yumi Konek, an NGO-driven project designed to provide access to email to Vanuatu’s remotest areas, is already providing services in Aneityum and the Banks islands. The Pentecost community of Pangi and Malekula’s Southwest Bay are next.

No matter how you slice it, Internet will remain relatively expensive for some years to come. In addition to that, taking full advantage of the Internet involves a good deal more capital – both intellectual and technical – than using a mobile phone. So, for the majority in Vanuatu, the face of technology will be the neighbourhood geek who keeps the equipment chugging along.

My guess is that the biggest winners among our current heavy hitters will be those who push the support role closer to the customer by offering wholesale services to ‘Mom and Pop’ businesses operating in neighbourhoods throughout Vanuatu.

Pent-up demand for learning, for a glimpse of the outside world, is far greater than many people realise. If people in a remote village in South Malekula will clear a mountain hillside just to speak with their families, what lengths won’t others go to in order to explore the world? More importantly, what would parents not give to allow their children to do so?

The expansion of Internet use is not likely to follow the rocket-like trajectory of mobile services, but it will hit quickly and run deep. Too deep for some, I fear. Having lived on the bleeding and the trailing edge of technology (sometimes both at once), I find the contrast between the two is enough to cause a kind of cognitive whiplash.

Heaven alone knows what will happen when it reaches the village.

Most people fear the obvious: pornography, graphic violence and other morally dubious fare. I think they’re missing the point. The really disruptive influences are the social ones.

What will happen to society when we chat more with people on other continents than the ones sitting right beside us?

What will happen to families when their members start to see what else they could belong to?

The societies where Internet runs deepest bear the least resemblance to the country we live in today.

The Vanuatu we know is about to change utterly. The only question now is: What do we want Vanuatu to become, and what are we willing to do – now, today – to achieve that?

I heard a fascinating tale the other day. A woman of my acquaintance, happily married with children, had apparently been married twice already. Each time, the husband had become abusive and, each time, had died suddenly, without explanation. Word was that she was adept at ‘posen’ – subtle potions that kill suddenly, hours or even days after their ingestion.

Whatever his motivation, her current husband was the model of good behaviour; he never ‘passed behind’ (the Bislama term for adultery) and looked after the children as if they were his own.

Doubtless polished and embellished in the telling, the story remains, at its core, perfectly credible. Spousal abuse is rampant in Vanuatu society, and the police, courts and kastom do almost nothing to protect women. It’s not at all beyond imagining that a woman might take matters into her own hands and act to stop her own suffering using whatever means necessary.

Now, this might be nothing more than folk tale. I am constantly regaled with stories of people collapsing and dieing under mysterious circumstances. On one memorable occasion, I was informed that when the family of one deceased man went to collect his body from the morgue, ‘his guts were gone! They’d simply vanished.’ Another case told of someone’s liver turning completely white. (How this was ascertained was never clear.)

The problem with this particular story is that every part of it is perfectly plausible. Indeed, in a society that views justice quite differently from mainstream European-derived notions of it, it’s not at all inconceivable that a woman would use subtle murder as a way out of an otherwise intolerable situation.

Despite the recent passage of the Family Protection Act, most women face physical abuse at some point in their adult life. Most often, their spouse is the aggressor. For a significant minority of women, beatings are brutal, frequent and delivered for no reason than to utterly break them.

In one particular case, a young woman was beaten daily into her 6th month of pregnancy, and began to be beaten again within days of delivering her child. Three weeks later, she returned to hospital with swelling in her abdomen. A week or so after that, she ran away, unable to take another day of this sickening abuse.

Object as we might against the injustice – and we do – the problem with domestic abuse is that it’s easy to get away with. The young runaway would have left months before, but her husband had already paid her bride price, which he claimed entitled him to do as he saw fit. Although kastom clearly states that the woman’s family could have taken her back, they were intimidated by the mere notion of a long, drawn-out dispute.

Furthermore, the threat of violence was always there. I asked her sister why they didn’t send the woman back to the island, where the husband would be unlikely to follow. She shot me a patient look and said, ‘Because he would just come and burn down our house instead.’

But surely the men in her family would protect them? Well, she answered, yes and no. It’s clear that men rank the safety of their women far lower than their own. Some I spoke to rolled their eyes in exasperation. They recognised that the husband was doing wrong. They swore when they spoke his name. But when it came down to actually taking action, things became suddenly more complex.

Bride price came up again, and complaints about the ineffectiveness of the police. But ultimately, it came down to this: Conflict between families is a difficult thing to control, and nobody wanted to be the one to start something. Especially over something as ‘unimportant’ as a woman. Besides, they argued, everyone gets jealous, and sometimes a quick clip upside the earhole is just what’s needed to keep her in line.

That was all I needed to know. If someone’s going to plead for understanding for a man who engages in daily brutality against their own family member, there’s little point in arguing for trust and respect between the sexes.

The man gets off scot free in virtually every domestic crisis. If he runs off on his wife and kids, people will ask, ‘What did she do to drive him away?’ If he fools around with someone else, it’s usually the wife who’s forced to find the other woman and beat her into submission. It’s the only way she can publicly demonstrate that she’s not at fault. If a man beats his wife inside his own home, nobody will do anything. Ever. Here in Vanuatu, a man’s home really is his castle. Even if it’s his wife’s money that pays for it, her labour that maintains it, and her life that suffers just so that he can feel in control.

Why should we be surprised then, if one or two desperate women feel driven to poison hubby’s evening meal? When he pauses for grace before supper, more than one husband in Vanuatu would do well to pray he doesn’t create the next Black Widow.

I’m a bit of a curmudgeon when it comes to language. It’s partly because I value clear expression, partly because it’s just my nature. One of my pet peeves is the habit shown by some to co-opt certain words and phrases in order to make themselves sound smart or virtuous.

One of the most common sins is the misuse of the phrase ‘begging the question’. Begging the question is what’s known as a logical fallacy – it’s something that sounds reasonable, but uses false logic to achieve its argument. Where begging the question is concerned, the logical flaw is in the assumption behind the question. The stock example of this tactic is of a courtroom lawyer who asks the defendant, “When did you stop beating your wife?”

Now, you can see the problem here. There’s an unspoken assumption behind the question, one that we in Vanuatu know to be false: Quite obviously the defendant has never actually stopped beating his wife. The illogic is made even clearer by the laughable assumption that an abusive husband might somehow end up in court.

There’s a whole continuum of justification for the physical abuse of women in Vanuatu. People will trot out kastom, discipline and virtue; they’ll complain that she brought it on herself; they’ll say she started it, she was fooling around, lying, what have you.

But I’ll tell you the real reason men continue to beat women in Vanuatu. It’s for the same reason dogs licks themselves: Because they can.

At the recently completed Pacific Islands Forum in Cairns, leaders stood solemnly together and released a communiqué touting their commitment “to eradicating [sexual and gender based violence] and to ensure that all individuals have equal protection and access to justice.”

There’s an entire section in the communiqué devoted to what they coyly call SGBV. It dwells on the importance of international coordination, on continuing to maintain regional efforts to raise awareness… and of course remaining sensitive at all times to local culture and ‘differing contexts’ within the various nations.

Here’s a context I wish would differ: I wish that the young woman who greeted me at one of Vila’s marquee stores didn’t have a bruise on her jaw that had ‘left hook’ written all over it. She was at least seven months pregnant. I wish that another young acquaintance who had just given birth only days before didn’t continue to suffer through daily beatings. I wish the waitress who serves my coffee didn’t keep showing up with a black eye every month or so.

I wish the scars, the bruises, the broken teeth and bones weren’t so much part of our ‘differing context’ that we just tut-tut solemnly when we see them and carry on with our day.

Vanuatu was lauded during the Forum gathering for its social stability, a factor that many claimed was central to its continued economic growth. But the reasons for this stability are not entirely obvious. When pressed to explain why Vanuatu hasn’t descended into the same morass of factional dispute as, for example, Fiji or the Solomons, even seasoned Vanuatu experts tend to shrug and trail off into silence.

My guess is that the spirit of compromise and accommodation that pervades Vanuatu society is predicated on the promise that violence, if it comes to it, will be swift, deadly and direct. The lack of large, enduring alliances puts the emphasis on individuals to come to terms with one another, and to avoid confrontation whenever possible.

Because of this, it’s been posited that the tendency amongst our political leaders toward venality, petty corruption and, er, rather too-enthusiastic enjoyment of life’s pleasures must be accepted. They are part and parcel of that same much-lauded stability. We allow them to indulge themselves and rely on competition between personalities to keep the ship of state from running into the worst reefs.

So when a minister of state is quoted in the newspaper saying that he beat up a female storekeeper in defense of consumer rights, we note it and move on.

Why does a minister use intimidation and violent aggression against helpless women? Because he can.

It’s not going to change. The cost of getting along with our neighbours and family members is to let them take advantage of those weaker than they are. Because as long as we confront these abuses individually, we will fear the same fist that worked such damage on the woman.

Why do men use violence against their wives? Because they can.

Everyone knows it’s wrong. But they can do it, so they do.

It’s a lose-lose situation: If you intervene when a man is beating a woman, you risk getting the same beating yourself. And even if you fight him and win, there’s every chance that he’ll just take his frustration and anger out on the woman the moment you leave.

Violence against women will continue in Vanuatu until we all say it’s NOT okay. Nothing is going to change until chiefs, MPs and other leaders can honestly answer the question, “When did you stop beating your wife?”