Today marks one month since a 7.3-magnitude earthquake struck Vanuatu’s capital, Port Vila, claiming 14 lives, injuring more than 200 people, and displacing thousands more.

Downtown Port Vila remains a no-go zone.

Star Wharf, the international port, is still out of action and parts of the city and some of the villages surrounding it still have not had their water supply reconnected.

The Recovery Operations Centre estimates around 6000 workers from 200 businesses that operate in the CBD have been impacted.

All the while, loud rumbling tremors continue to rock the city; a recent one measuring above magnitude 5 on the Richter scale.

Leinasei Tarisiu lives outside of Vila but came in to vote in the snap election yesterday. She said children in her household still panic when there is an earthquake, even if it is small.

“They are still afraid. Even last night when we had that one that happened, we all ran outside,” she said.

“It’s hard for us to remain in the house.”

Ongoing trauma
The only mental health specialist at Vila Central Hospital, Dr Jimmy Obed, said the ongoing seismic activity is re-traumatising many.

Obed said as things slowly returned to something resembling normalcy, more people were reaching out for mental health support.

“What we try and tell them is that it’s a normal thing for you to be having this anxiety,” he said.

“And then we give them some skills. How to calm themselves down . . . when they are panicking, or are under stress, or have difficulty sleeping.

“Simple skills that they can use — even how children can calm and regulate their emotions.”

Trenold Tari, an aviation worker who spoke to RNZ Pacific after he had cast his vote, said he hopes they are able to elect leaders with good ideas for Vanuatu’s future.

“And not just the vision to run the government and the nation but also who has leadership qualities and is transparent. People who can work with communities and who don’t just think about themselves,” he said.

Wanting quick rebuild
Many voters in the capital said they wanted leaders who would act quickly to rebuild the quake-stricken city.

Others said they were sick of political instability.

This week’s snap election was triggered by a premature dissolution of parliament last year; the second consecutive time President Nike Vurobaravu has acted on a council of ministers’ request to dissolve the house in the face of a leadership challenge.

Counting this week’s election, Vanuatu will have had five prime ministers in the last four years.

The chairperson of the Seaside Tongoa community, Paul Fred Tariliu, said they have discussed this as a group and made their feelings clear to their election candidate.

“We told our candidate to tell the presidents of all the political parties they are affiliated with — that if they end up in government and they find at some point they don’t have the number and a motion is brought against you, please be honest and set a good example — tell one group to step down and let another government come in,” Tariliu said.

Desperate need of aid
Election fever aside, thousands of people in Port Vila are still in desperate need of assistance.

The head of the Vanuatu Red Cross Society is looking to start distributing financial relief assistance to families affected by last month’s earthquake.

The society’s secretary-general, Dickinson Tevi, said some villages were still without water and a lot of people were out of work.

“We have realised that there are still a few requests coming from the communities. People who haven’t been assessed during the emergency,” Tevi said.

“So, we have made plans to do a more detailed assessment after this to make sure we don’t leave anyone out.”

Tevi said with schools due to restart soon, parents and families who had lost their main source of income were under a lot of stress.

In a release, Save the Children Vanuatu country director Polly Bank, said disasters often had the power to suddenly turn children’s lives upside down, especially if they had lost loved ones, had their education interrupted, or had been forced to flee their homes.

Critical for children’s recovery
“In the aftermath of any disaster, it is critical for children recovering that they are able to return to their normal routines as soon as possible,” she said.

“And for most kids, this would include returning to school, where they can reconnect with friends and share their experiences.”

She said at least 12,500 children in the country may be forced to start the new school year in temporary learning centres with at least 100 classrooms across the country damaged or destroyed.

It is back to business for Vanuatu today after the public holiday that was declared yesterday to allow people to go and vote.

Unofficial election results continue to trickle in with local media reporting an even distribution of seats across the country for the Leaders Party, Vanua’aku Party, Reunification Movement for Change and the Iauko Group.

But it is still early days, with official results a while away.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

French President Emmanuel Macron’s surprise dissolution of the National Assembly and call for snap general elections on June 30 and July 7 has implications for New Caledonia.

Grave civil unrest and rioting broke out on May 13 in reaction to a controversial constitutional amendment, directly affecting the voting system in local elections.

The National Assembly decisively voted for the change on May 14. A few weeks earlier, on April 2, the Senate (Upper House) had approved the same text.

However, the proposed constitutional change — which would open the list of eligible voters to an extra 25,000 citizens, mostly non-indigenous Kanaks — remains in limbo, as it needs to go through a final stage.

This final step is a vote in the French Congress, during a special sitting of both the Senate and National Assembly with a required 60 per cent majority.

Macron earlier indicated he would summon the Congress some time by the end of June.

During a quick visit to New Caledonia on May 23, he said he would agree to wait for some time to allow inclusive talks to take place between local leaders, concerning the long-term political future of New Caledonia — but the end of June deadline still remained.

There is also a technicality that would make the adopted text (still subject to the French Congress’s final approval) impossible to apply in its current form: with a now dissolved National Assembly and snap elections scheduled on June 30 (first round) and July 7 (second round), the French Congress (which includes the National Assembly) will definitely not be able to convene before mid-July.

Yet, the constitutional law, as endorsed in its present form by both Houses, is formulated in such a way that it “shall come into force on 1 July 2024” (article 2).

Since last month, there have been numerous calls from pro-independence and pro-France parties, as well as religious and civil society leaders, to scrap the text altogether, as a precondition to the return of some kind of civil peace and normalcy in the French Pacific archipelago.

Similar calls have been issued by former French prime ministers who had been directly in charge of New Caledonia’s affairs.

‘The end of life of this constitutional law’ – Mapou
New Caledonia’s President Louis Mapou, in a speech at the weekend, mentioned the controversial text before Macron’s dissolution announcement.

Mapou said the current unrest in New Caledonia, mostly by pro-independence parties, had de facto “signalled the end of life of this constitutional law”.

But he also called on Macron to clarify explicitly that he intended to withdraw the controversial text, perceived as the main cause for unrest in New Caledonia.

He said that the text, which he said had been “unilaterally decided” by France, had “reopened a wound that has taken so long to heal”.

The constitutional law, he said, was “against the current of New Caledonia’s recent history”, and was “useless because it has to be part of a global project”.

“In my humble opinion, this constitutional law, therefore, cannot continue to exist.

“By saying (last month in Nouméa) that it will not be forced through, the French President too, between the lines, has signified its death and its slow abandonment . . .

“It is difficult to imagine that the President would still want to table this constitutional bill (before the French Congress),” Mapou said.

Does the dissolution now mean the proposed voting system change is dead?
What the French Constitution says is that all pending bills left unvoted on by the Lower House are cancelled because the dissolution signifies the end of the legislature and therefore of the current ordinary session.

In the particular case of New Caledonia’s constitutional text, which has already been passed by both Houses, the general perception is that it would probably “die a beautiful death” after being given the dissolution final coup de grâce.

Obviously, now that the French National Assembly has been dissolved, the French Congress cannot sit.

“We’re now in caretaker mode and all outstanding bills are now cancelled,” outgoing National Assembly President Yaël Braun-Pivet said on French public television France 2 on Monday.

Local political reactions
On the local political scene, a few parties have been swift to react, with the pro-independence platform FLNKS (an umbrella group of pro-independence parties) saying it was now preparing to run for New Caledonia’s two constituencies in the French National Assembly.

FLNKS is holding its national congress next weekend 15 June 15.

New Caledonia’s two seats are held by two pro-France (loyalist) leaders, Nicolas Metzdorf and Philippe Dunoyer.

Daniel Goa, president of the Union Calédonienne (UC, the largest and one of the more radical components of the FLNKS), said the “mobilisation” at the heart of the current civil unrest would not stop.

But in order to allow movement during the snap general election campaign which is due to start shortly, he said there could be more flexibility in the roadblocks.

The barricades still remain in many parts of New Caledonia, and especially the capital Nouméa and its suburbs.

“We will reinforce our representation at (French) national level,” Goa said, anticipating the results of the forthcoming snap general election.

But there are also concerns regarding the way New Caledonia’s current crisis will be handled during the “caretaker” period, and who will be in charge of the sensitive issue in the next French government.

A “dialogue mission” consisting of three high-level public servants stayed in New Caledonia from May 23 to last week.

It was tasked to restore some kind of talks with all local parties and economic, civil society stakeholders.

Last week, it returned to Paris to provide a report on the situation and the advancement of talks aimed at finding a consensus on New Caledonia’s political future.

When they left last week, they said they would return to New Caledonia.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Forty nine regional and international observers have arrived in Vanuatu to monitor the running of the country’s snap election tomorrow.

The election was triggered after the dissolution of the country’s Parliament on August 19 by President Nikenike Vurobaravu, and on the eve of a motion of no-confidence against the now caretaker prime minister Bob Loughman.

More than 300,000 people are expected to cast their vote in the snap election.

The Chairman of the Electoral Commission, Edward Kaltamat, has confirmed observers from Australia, China, Fiji, France, Kiribati, Melanesian Spearhead Group Secretariat, New Zealand, Pacific Islands Forum, United Kingdom and the United Nations are in the country.

Kaltamat said their presence will provide confidence to the voters on the transparency and credibility of the election.

The 49 observers have signed their code of conduct to guide them while they are in the field.

Kaltamat said some of them would stay in the capital to monitor the elections in Port Vila and the Efate constituency, and some would be deployed in the islands.

He said the observers will be briefed before being sent to the islands by aircraft.

This is not the first time that international observers have monitored an election in Vanuatu.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz