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PfNet not assisting porn; West Papuan Melanesians; Cradle of Polynesian culture
PfNet not assisting porn
I refer to the article titled “Sex scandal rouses public attitude”and, in particular, the paragraph:
“...Like most of the Melanesian nation states, the Solomon Islands has more than 80% of its population in rural areas. But thanks to PFNet and the high information exchange amongst the Honiara-based network, what goes around, gets around....”
I take strong exception to the assumption that PFnet is assisting the circulation of porn.
PFnet uses HF radio email which is low-bandwidth and usually only text documents are able to be received and sent.
Furthermore, it is a facilitated service with a shared community address and an operator who is in fact a gatekeeper. Unless the system is being wilfully abused by the operator, no such images can be circulated.
PFnet now has a fully automated information management and reporting system and such abuses can easily be picked up by the administration. PFnet filters all email using a professional service and the new Distance Learning Centres with broadband will be filtered using a special “Content Keeper” appliance.
They will also have other human-based controls with full-time supervisors who can keep checks on how the centres are used. In both PFnet and DLCP, there are community management committees who will also be made aware of the residual risks and how to deal with them.
—David Leeming
Technical Advisor,
Solomon Islands People First Network SOLOMON ISLANDS
West Papuan Melanesians
I am offering this comment concerning the sole letter to the Letters to the Editor’s column about “Hear us Forum Leaders” which appeared in the October issue of ISLANDS BUSINESS.
The silent majority of Melanesians in PNG as well as other black people in the world will never accept the West Papuan Melanesians to be part of Indonesia because Indonesians are Asians, pure and simple. The island of New Guinea was made by God Almighty for the Melanesians.
The three European colonial powers made a mistake when they divided up the islands of New Guinea into three parts—Dutch New Guinea, British New Guinea and German New Guinea.
Joe Collins’ fight for the liberation of West Papua Melanesia because of the 1962 UN so-called freedom of choice to become part of Indonesia was illegal because the Netherlands never ceded Dutch New Guinea to Indonesia.
From this standpoint, I suggest the Kingdom of the Netherland0s must take up the cause for the de-colonisation of West Papua at the United Nations.
The case of East Timor can be followed by the Kingdom of the Netherlands when Portugal dared the action which saw the independence of that country.
Only the Kingdom of the Netherlands can take up the decolonisation of West Papua at the United Nations because it never ceded Dutch New Guinea to Indonesia.
—Peter Ipu Peipul, OBE
Boroko,
PAPUA NEW GUINEA
Cradle of Polynesian culture
The history of Fiji has many similarities to the history of Hawai’i and the recent ethnic strife in Fiji raises important questions for Hawai’i’s future.
In both Fiji and Hawai’i, racial equality with the natives has been called into doubt in recent years as citizens with native ancestry assert with increasing stridency that they have a right to racial supremacy in political power and control of the land.
For Hawaiians, the stakes are high indeed: self-determination or the yoke of perpetual wardship. In the meantime, marginalisation and exploitation of Hawaiians, their culture and their lands continues.
Elsewhere in the Polynesian Triangle, native Austronesian peoples struggle with the same dilemma.
The Maori, like the Hawaiians, a minority in their own land, have been dispossessed through conquest and occupation by a foreign white people (WASPs) and have suffered psychologically from cultural suppression.
They, too, have been demanding a form of sovereignty, seeking identity and cultural integrity by returning to their lands.
And they have supported Hawaiian resistance as fellow Polynesians and as fellow colonised people.
Linguistic and archaeological evidence suggests that the proto-Polynesians came from the ‘Lapita’ culture of the southwest Pacific, somewhere between New Britain (which lies near Papua New Guinea) and Fiji (which lies farther southeast).
The culture, which flourished between 3600 and 2500 years ago, was characterised by navigational skills and pottery. The Lapita settlers, in turn, came from the islands of Southeast Asia.
Fijian is an ancient Austronesian (otherwise known as Malayo-Polynesian) language that is related to its more modern cousins such as Tongan and Samoan.
Historical linguists often trace a language’s roots against such cousins by noting which sounds and features have been kept or dropped, determining that newer languages and dialects tend to have fewer sounds and features.
In this simplistic explanation, therefore, linguists have shown that Fijian is much more ancient than Tongan or Samoan, which are likewise older than Tahitian and Hawaiian.
Archaeological evidence from carbon dating of Lapita pottery and linguistic reconstruction of the proto-Polynesian language point to Fiji as the original home of the Polynesians where they arrived 3000 years ago.
Shortly after this period, they settled in Tonga and then, at the beginning of our era, Samoa. The triangle thus formed by Fiji, Samoa and Tonga is the cradle from which the Polynesian language and culture sprang.
Fiji is the “hub” of the South Pacific, a melting pot of both the Polynesian and Melanesian races.
Fiji today retains the same socio-ethnic tensions that would have arisen on those first fateful encounters between Papua and Lapita: between Austronesian voyagers and Papuan (Old Melanesian) villagers 3500 years ago.
—Jonathan James Wickham
Sydney
AUSTRALIA
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