'Though disabled people constitute nearly 10 percent of the population in the Pacific islands, they are among the most disempowered, neglected, almost invisible groups in the region.'


With all that has happened in Fiji, Tonga and the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea's ongoing spat with Australia, last year will no doubt go down in history as the year of huge diplomatic failures and uncharacteristically violent unrest in the Pacific Islands region.

And all that bad news overshadowed some great new positive developments that happened in the islands-a lot of them in fields of human endeavour: human rights, disease control, art, culture and sport.

One significant development in an almost completely unreported sector of disability rights was the regional workshop on disability, organised by the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat in Fiji, to develop human rights training for disability advocates in August.

Though disabled people constitute nearly 10 percent of the population in the Pacific islands, they are among the most disempowered, neglected, almost invisible groups in the region.

Denied equal access to education, they are often unable to find gainful employment and even disqualified from enjoying certain property rights, not to speak of the lack of specialised health care avenues.

The workshop gave an impetus to the Pacific Regional Rights Resource Team's (RRRT) to develop an innovative new training programme to place highly skilled human rights advocates in Pacific islands countries. Most advocates are Pacific people with disabilities. This will enable people with disabilities to take on human rights-related skills and knowledge usually the exclusive purview of professional lawyers.

The RRRT will partner with the Pacific Disability Forum, the regional apex organisation for disability, to coordinate the programme. As part of it, deaf sign interpretation and Braille courses are being planned at physically accessible training venues across the islands.

These initiatives will hopefully help put the rights of people with disabilities in the right perspective. It is also hoped that society and governments will learn to accept people with disabilities as economically and culturally productive community members as they are in other parts of the world.

This is perhaps the biggest initiative aimed at the Pacific islands region's disabled population, which indeed is considerable in number.

The other commendable development was the Papua New Guinea Government's initiative in getting former president of United States Bill Clinton to the country last month. Long accused by international agencies and domestic NGOs of not going far enough in the fight against HIV/AIDS that has reached near epidemic proportions, this event brought not just the nation's but the entire region's focus on the problem.

The charismatic former president urged Papua New Guineans in his trademark straight-from-the-heart style to "move forward from denial, to embrace and educate". His visit which coincided with the country's AIDS awareness week helped launch one of the region's biggest non-political, non-religious campaigns ever: The Voluntary Counselling and Testing Campaign.

The campaign involves both counselling and testing to inform people if they are infected with HIV. The exercise aims to let every Papua New Guinean to know his or her HIV status. The service is already available in most of the country's provinces. This will go a long way in creating awareness in a population that is suspected to have close to 100,000 infected persons against a confirmed number of just about 15,000.

In addition, the Clinton Foundation has signed a MOU with PNG that will make expensive anti-retro viral medicines available to the infected.

A number of new initiatives too have been announced and all that will definitively give a fillip to the country's fight against the rapidly spreading ailment.

The year just gone by was also a great year for Pacific art and culture. The first ever conference of Pacific epistemologies in Fiji drew participants from all over the world and exposed them to the region's cultures in perhaps the largest organised event of its kind. The Melanesian Arts Festival in Fiji again exposed some of the region's little known arts and crafts-and the people behind it-to a wider audience.

A prestigious art gallery in London exhibited artworks by Pacific islands artists for the first ever time drawing critical acclaim for the region's little known artists. Smaller exhibitions in New Zealand and Australia did go some way in exposing islands art in the wider region.

It was a watershed year for Pasifika films as well. With not one, but two feature-length films based on Pacific Islands themes-"Sione's Wedding" and "No. 2". Late last year, the first-ever Rotuman feature-length film "The Land has Eyes" received rave reviews in film festivals in several countries.

Encouragingly, common people of the region-as well as some of their leaders-won some prestigious environment awards both for their work in preserving habitats and their projects in sustainable growth. Some countries took significant strides in developing alternative fuel sources from sustainable agro-based by-products.

Let's hope that this year all Pacific conflicts will be restricted to the sports arena-for it is the very last time the South Pacific Games will be held in its present format in Apia, Samoa.