Press Freedom at Risk in the Pacific

In early 2009, the Vanuatu Post published a series of stories exposing mismanagement of the Port Vila jail and material that implicated several prison guards in the death of a prison escapee. The reports led to public outrage and the dismissal of Acting Director of Correctional Services Joshua Bong.

Several days later, the publisher of the Post, Marc Neil-Jones, was alone in his office when several officers from the prison pulled up in a truck outside. Drunk and violent, the men stormed into the office and began accusing Neil-Jones of causing the dismissal of their boss and demanded to know “who was going to look after the prisoners now.”

Neil-Jones tried to reason with the men, stating he was not responsible for deciding what went in the newspaper day to day, but the men didn’t listen. According to Neil-Jones, one of the men punched him directly in the face several times, breaking his nose and leaving him with a black eye. While on the ground, the officer proceeded to kick him, while another officer, holding a knife, threatened to kill him.

“One threatened me with a knife and said he would cut my neck, another threatened to shoot me with a gun,” he said.

Two years later, Vanuatu cabinet minister Harry Lauko led a group of men into the Post’s office and began abusing staff. Neil-Jones was again assaulted. While the men strangled and kicked him, staff said they could hear the minister “shouting at [Neil-Jones] at the top of his voice.”

“I can’t think of many countries where a minister of state would survive long if he marched into a national newspaper with a gang of thugs employed within the ministry and assaulted the publisher of a national daily paper because he didn’t like the valid criticism he was getting from all quarters, including the newspaper,” said Neil-Jones at the time of the attack.

The reality is that during his 22-year-long tenure at the Post, Neil-Jones, along with his staff, were often threatened and attacked by politicians, police, and thugs.

Neil-Jones retired in 2015, but the Vanuatu government’s troubling relationship with journalism has again been at the center of a debate on media freedom in the region since his successor, Dan McGarry, had his visa refused by authorities in November.

McGarry, a veteran journalist in the region has called Vanuatu home for more than 16 years, but ironically, after attending a media freedom forum in Brisbane, Australia, the government told him he was unable to return to Vanuatu. Authorities claimed that his application was rejected because it was deemed that his job as media director of the Post should be held by a local citizen.

In a statement, McGarry said, “We all know the real reason: The Daily Post reporting on the government’s activities causes such discomfort that they are willing to abuse administrative processes to silence me.”

According to Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Index, some Pacific nations scored quite well in the latest ranking for press freedom.

Papua New Guinea, for instance, rose 15 points to 38th of 180 countries ranked. This is despite one of the country’s leading journalists, Scott Waide, having been suspended by his employer under pressure from the government to have him sacked. Just a few months earlier, a reporter from the Post Courier was physically assaulted by a staff member from the governor’s office.

Fiji rose five points to 52nd place, but last year, the editor and publisher of the country’s largest newspaper, the Fiji Times, faced sedition charges for publishing a letter written by a political activist that allegedly incited violence against Muslims.

The High Court ruled that the “prosecution had failed to prove beyond reasonable doubt the letter was seditious,” and the charges were dropped. The charges were later criticized as an attempt by the government to weaken the paper ahead of an election. Former Permanent Secretary for the Department of Information and Communications Ewan Perrin told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that it was requested that he not respond to certain media outlets, prompting him to quit the position after just three months.

In the Federated State of Micronesia, following demands from traditional chiefs to expel American journalist Joyce McGlure, Mar-Vic Cagurangan, the editor-in-chief of the Pacific Islands Times, defended McGlure, writing an editorial in which she says Joyce’s reporting provided transparency which is “vital to every democratic society.”

Mar-Vic also pointed out the difficulties of journalism in small markets, where there is often a thin line between business and government and where the risk of advertising being pulled is all too real.

“In every small community, truth-telling is not an easy job, especially when the truth gives discomfort to some,” she wrote.

McGarry, following the news that he’d been barred from re-entering Vanuatu, shared similar concerns: “Reporting the news in a tiny island nation has all the challengers faced by truth-tellers the world over, with an added complication: everybody knows everybody.”

According to McGarry, the first sign of a problem occurred in July, several months before his visa was denied, when the prime minister summoned him personally to complain about the paper’s “negative coverage.”

At the time, the Post had just published a series of articles detailing how the government had detained six Chinese nationals – four of whom had Vanuatu citizenship – without trial or access to legal counsel. The detainees were ultimately stripped of citizenship and deported to China.

Press freedom in the Pacific was recently the subject of one of Australia’s largest current affairs programs, following an incident where authorities detained and deported the crew for not having a filming permit.

Kiribati’s founding father and first president, Sir Ieremia Tabai, heard of the situation and secretly met with the reporters while they were under house arrest. He rebuked the government, telling Nine that “this is a sad day for democracy.”

According to Nine, Ieremia said Kiribati’s media crackdown had worsened since its new ties to China.

In 2018, Nauru, which operates an immigration facility on behalf of the Australia government, where more than a dozen refugees have committed suicide due to the “inhumane conditions” of the camps, banned the ABC from covering the Pacific Islands Forum, accusing the broadcaster of interfering in the nation’s domestic politics and harassing its president.

Where local media lacks resources, or faces overwhelming pressure to stand down, foreign journalists have often been able to fill the gaps, but they too, are facing immense pressure not only from governments, but lack of funding, too.

Former Fairfax papers The Australian, and the Australian Associated Press have withdrawn their journalists from the region.

The ABC, which has been a beacon of independent media in the Pacific for decades has been hit hard in recent years by budget cuts from an increasingly hostile federal government.

As a consequence, the ABC has lost more than half of its Pacific reporting staff and in early 2017 closed its shortwave service, cutting off around half the Pacific and much of Australia’s indigenous population from one of the most valuable platforms in the region.

Meanwhile, China’s state-owned international broadcaster, the fastest growing in the world and second only in size to the BBC, has directed a lot of that growth toward the Pacific, primarily Vanuatu, Tonga, and Samoa.

There’s no doubt that for Australia, China’s growing influence in the region is the story of the decade, but with Australia’s media presence in the region decimated and local journalists under attack, the media’s ability to check China’s reach is in peril.

And while there’s no evidence to suggest that Chinese officials are urging Pacific leaders to stifle independent media, it is a concern that many of the attacks against journalists in the region, both verbal and physical, have been in response to stories critical of Sino-Pacific relations.

Such was the case in PNG, where Scott Waide was suspended for exposing China’s “diplomatic tantrum” at APEC, or in Kiribati, where the Channel Nine crew were intending to film a segment on Kiribati-China relations before being deported, or in Vanuatu, where the government appears willing to silence critical reporting about Chinese influence.

McGarry, now back in Vanuatu after a month-long battle in which the Supreme court ruled that the ban was unlawful, wrote in the Guardian: “The Daily Post will fight this abuse of power just as it always has done. We may have progressed since the days when a minister of state and half a dozen henchmen assaulted Marc Neil-Jones. But clearly, even if tactics have changed, it seems to me that the political elites here still prefer to silence critics rather than respond honestly and openly.”