Back to School - around the world

As children all over the world return to school, for some the journey getting there can be long and arduous.


Grade school pupils are reflected in the water as they walk between rice paddy fields, on their way home after attending classes in Mogpog, Marinduque, August 19, 2014. The students said they walk for more than two kilometers, including walking between rice paddy fields, from Monday to Friday to go to school and back home.


Students hold on to the side steel bars of a collapsed bridge as they cross a river to get to school at Sanghiang Tanjung village in Lebak regency, Indonesia's Banten village January 19, 2012.


Children returning from school walk along a railway track in Dhaka May 29, 2014.


Students walk across a flooded street during a heavy downpour which brought traffic in parts of Manila to a standstill September 10, 2008.


Girls walk through a street as they return from school at the Kibera slum in Kenya's capital Nairobi May 19, 2014.


School children walk past anti-government protesters lying on the ground at Democracy Monument in Bangkok December 11, 2013.


A boy walks through an alley littered with the pile of smoldering waste, while heading to school during early hours of the morning in Karachi December 5, 2013.


Schoolgirls walk in the Muhalla 832 Mechanik neighborhood in Baghdad November 12, 2007. 


Xu Liangfan, 37, escorts students on a cliff path as they make their way to Banpo Primary School in Shengji county, Bijie city in Guizhou province March 12, 2013. Xu, who started working at the school last year, is the headmaster of the school and teaches mathematics and gym class. Located halfway up a mountain, the school has 68 students of which about 20 live in the nearby Gengguan village. Students from Gengguan have to edge their way along the narrow cliff path to go to class every day, alongside Xu who would escort them. The path, which was carved from cliffs over 40 years ago, is the only route between Gengguan village and the school, according to local media.


Children walk along a road to their school after having their lunch at home in Min county, Gansu province June 1, 2011. The rural primary school, consisting of five teachers and 102 pupils, is located on a mountain measuring more than 2,000 meters (6,562 ft) high.


A Palestinian school boy walks past Israeli border police during clashes with Palestinian stone throwers in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan, September 22, 2010.


Elementary schoolchildren wear protective headgear as they walk to school in Tokyo April 25, 2011. Some schools in Tokyo have asked their students to wear the protective headgear on their way to school and while returning home since March 11's deadly earthquake and tsunami.  


A school boy, carrying a backpack, walks past burning fuel tankers along the GT road in Nowshera, located in Pakistan's Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province October 7, 2010.


Palestinian school girls walk past a burning garbage bin after stone-throwing youths were dispersed with tear gas by Israeli troops in the West Bank city of Hebron February 28, 2010.


School girls walk across a plank on the walls of the 16th century Galle fort July 8, 2009.


A school girl walks on a road covered with oil and soot at an industrial area in Mumbai December 3, 2009.


Boys on their way to school walk past a building damaged during protests and clashes in 2011 in Sanaa, December 17, 2013.


A Palestinian schoolgirl walks past Israeli border police officers on her way home from school during clashes between Israeli troops and Palestinian stone-throwers in the Shuafat refugee camp in the West Bank near Jerusalem March 16, 2010.

Amid Afghanistan's escalating war, a battle to beat polio

Reuters

File picture shows a boy receiving polio vaccination drops during an anti-polio campaign in Kabul.

           

1 day ago By Krista Mahr and Mirwais Harooni of Reuters            

 

KABUL (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of volunteers fanned out across Afghanistan this week, braving deteriorating security and distrusting parents to administer two chilled drops of the oral polio vaccine each to millions of children.

Keeping the highly infectious polio disease in check in any country is a daunting task. But in a nation where Taliban militants are fast gaining ground against government forces, it's also a dangerous one.
Afghanistan is one of only three nations where the polio virus is still endemic, along with Pakistan and Nigeria. For a nation at war, its anti-polio campaign has had remarkable success, bringing the number of cases down from 63 in 1999 to just 14 in 2013. Only eight new cases have been confirmed so far this year, compared to 108 in Pakistan.
But as fighting between Afghan forces and militants intensifies ahead of the withdrawal of most foreign troops this year, health workers risk losing precious access to the places - and children - they need to keep tabs on.
This week, in some restive areas of the east and southeast, health workers had yet to go door to door to deliver the vaccine, said Dr. Mohammad Wasim Sajad, a training officer in the Ministry of Public Health in Kabul.
"People are not willing to go out," he said, adding that negotiations with local groups to allow vaccinators to do their work safely were under way.
Vaccination is the only known way to prevent polio, an infectious disease that attacks the nervous system mainly in children under five and can lead to permanent paralysis and death. It has no cure.
"We don't see a big problem now, but if (major) fighting continues long term, then access will be difficult," said Abdul Majeed Siddiqi, the head of mission in Afghanistan for HealthNet TPO, an NGO that advises the Afghan government on polio.
People's attitudes toward the vaccine are another challenge.
In a dusty hillside neighborhood of Bagh Qazi, Freshta Faizi, a volunteer, trudged from house to house on Monday, asking residents if their children had been given their drops.
"Sometimes they just say no and shut the door," said Faizi. "They say it won't make any difference. I've had people tell me the vaccine is just American urine."  (hilarious and incredibly sad/ignorant at the same time -ruthriv)
In August, Human Rights Watch reported that in parts of the southern province of Helmand, the Taliban had stopped health officials from sending out mobile vaccination teams.
That was an alarming development, because - unlike some militant factions in Pakistan, which have targeted and killed anti-polio campaigners - the Afghan Taliban have pledged support for vaccination.
A Taliban spokesman said the group had concerns that some polio vaccinators in Helmand were promoting government policy, not health. However, he told Reuters by phone that after the health ministry had organized talks on the issue, the group was satisfied. "There are no more problems," he said.
Though a win for the campaign, the scare underscores the fragility of Afghanistan's gains. Negotiations on allowing vaccinators to move freely throughout the country were conducted locally and on a "case-by-case" basis, said Sajad.
Ten years ago, Afghanistan was tantalizingly close to halting the circulation of the virus within its borders: only four cases were confirmed in 2004, according to the government.
But as security deteriorated, health workers couldn't travel to dangerous areas and were unable to make sure children were getting the vaccine. By 2012, the number of polio cases in Afghanistan rose to 37.

AN UNEXPECTED OPPORTUNITY
Complicating matters, this summer over 150,000 refugees from North Waziristan, a tribal region of Pakistan where leaders banned the polio vaccine in 2012, poured over the border into Afghanistan, seeking refuge from a military offensive against insurgents.
The influx from an area that has generated most of Pakistan's polio cases this year immediately raised alarm.
Most of Afghanistan's new cases of polio this year are genetically linked to Pakistan, according to HealthNet TPO. But the government says that, so far, only one case has been identified as having coming from a North Waziristan refugee.
The flood of refugees yielded an unexpected opportunity, however: over 400,000 vaccine doses were given out in Pakistan along the routes residents used to flee their homes, according to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.
That's good news for the global fight to exterminate polio and particularly for Afghanistan, where thousands of residents move across the Pakistan border every day.
"If there is control in Pakistan, there will be control in Afghanistan," said Siddiqi. "If there is no control in Pakistan, the problems in Afghanistan will continue."
(Additional reporting by Hamid Shalizi in Kabul; Writing by Krista Mahr; Editing by John Chalmers and Nick Macfie)

Afghanistan gives NYT reporter 24 hours to leave country

Provided by Reuters

New York Times reporter Matthew Rosenberg speaks during an interview in Kabul

           

1 day ago By Jessica Donati and Hamid Shalizi of Reuters

 

KABUL (Reuters) - Afghanistan has given a New York Times reporter 24 hours to leave the country, accusing him of not cooperating with an investigation into his reporting, the Attorney General's office said on Wednesday.

Matthew Rosenberg, 40, was summoned for questioning on Tuesday after the newspaper ran a story about officials discussing plans to form an interim government and "seize power" if a deadlock over the presidential election failed to break soon.
"Due to the lack of proper accountability and non-cooperation, the Attorney General's office has decided that Matthew Rosenberg should leave Afghanistan within 24 hours," the office said in a statement. "He will not be permitted to enter the country again."
Rosenberg said he and his newspaper had been cooperating fully.
"We simply requested a lawyer as is our right under Afghan law," he said. "We were also never informed of a formal investigation and we do not understand how insisting on the right to a lawyer is not cooperating.”
Afghanistan is in the midst of a ballot that has dragged on for months, with both candidates claiming victory after the June 14 run-off and allegations of mass fraud threatening to derail the process.
"They had brought us there under the guise of a kind of semi-informal chat," Rosenberg said of the talks. "It was kind of polite but insistent that we give them the names of our sources."
Attorney General's office spokesman Basir Azizi said Rosenberg was being investigated for publishing a story about government officials conspiring to "seize power" without disclosing the identity of his sources.
"The report is against our national security because right now, the election problem is ongoing and talks are at a very intricate stage," Azizi told Reuters by phone.
The United Nations is supervising an audit of all eight million votes cast, but the process has proceeded slowly as rival camps scrutinize each vote.
At the same time, members of a joint commission appointed by deadlocked candidates Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani are meeting to hammer out an agreement on a unity government.
The framework deal was brokered by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who has twice flown to Kabul since the run off, but little progress in fleshing out the structure of the government has been made since his departure two weeks ago.
NAI, a group supporting a free press in Afghanistan, said the expulsion order violated laws protecting freedom of expression by the media.
"We think rather than it being a legal matter, it's a political game,” said Abdul Mujeeb Khalvatgar, the head of NAI.
"There are people in the government of Afghanistan trying to somehow keep the international community out of the picture of the elections in Afghanistan."
Washington condemned the Afghan government's handling of the situation and called on authorities to reverse the decision.
"This is a significant step backward for the freedom of expression in Afghanistan that may well be unprecedented there," State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf told a daily press briefing. "We urge the government of Afghanistan to reverse this decision."
While Afghanistan's press has generally operated freely, the country has become more dangerous for both journalists and aid workers to operate.
Earlier this week, consultancy group Humanitarian Outcomes reported a record number of attacks on aid workers worldwide, with Afghanistan being the worst place for humanitarian staff to operate.
A string of attacks on journalists in the run-up to the April 5 vote reflected this trend, with a Swedish-British journalist, an AFP news agency reporter and a veteran AP news agency photographer killed in separate attacks.
(Writing by Jessica Donati; Editing by Nick Macfie and Dan Grebler)

Syria opposition: Deadly chemical attack forgotten

AP Photo: Media Office Of Douma City, File

This Aug. 21, 2013, citizen journalism image provided by the Media Office Of Douma City which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, shows a Syrian man mourning over a dead body after an alleged poisonous gas attack fired by regime forces, according to activists, in Douma town, Damascus, Syria.

 

           

19 hr ago By ZEINA KARAM of Associated Press

 

BEIRUT (AP) — The year since a chemical attack that killed hundreds near Damascus has been a strikingly good one for President Bashar Assad.

His deadly stockpile has been destroyed, but he has stayed in power, bought time and gotten world powers to engage him. Along the way, global disapproval has shifted away from Assad and toward the Islamic extremists who are fighting him and spreading destruction across Syria and Iraq.
In Syria, frustrated opposition leaders plan modest rallies Friday to commemorate an attack that they believe the world has largely forgotten.
For many Syrians, hopes for justice are fading and a deep sense of bitterness prevails. The U.S., which threatened to strike Assad's forces but backed away at the last minute, is now bombing the Islamic State group in neighboring Iraq.
Calls for Assad's ouster are no longer made publicly by Western officials.
"This is one anniversary that all free Syrians would love to forget. It was the beginning of the end of U.S. and international involvement in the Syrian conflict," said Bilal Saab, a senior fellow for Middle East Security at the Atlantic Council's Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security.
The U.S. reversal capped what many Syrians had long seen as a flippant approach in the West to the uprising.
"There has been an intention, from the beginning, to bury the Syrian revolution," said Hassan Taqieddine of eastern Ghouta, the Damascus suburb struck a year ago by an early morning barrage of rockets carrying chemical agents.
Taqieddine, who was among activists who rushed to evacuate and help casualties from the attack, said he is still haunted by images of the dead.
"And here we are, a year later, still getting bombed with barrel bombs, warplanes and chlorine, and no one cares," he said, speaking via Skype from Douma.
The Aug. 21, 2013, attack is almost certainly the single deadliest event in Syria's civil war — a conflict that has killed more than 170,000 people since it began in March 2011. Online video of the attack's aftermath showed scores of panicked victims twitching and suffocating in chaotic makeshift hospitals — shocking images that provoked international condemnation.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called it the "worst use of weapons of mass destruction in the 21st century."
Following the chemical assault, U.N. inspectors conducted a swift investigation that determined rockets loaded with sarin had been fired from an area where the Syrian military has bases. But the U.N. probe's limited mandate did not authorize the experts to identify who was responsible for the attack.
The Syrian opposition and its allies, including the U.S., accused Damascus of carrying out the attack. Assad's government denied responsibility, blaming the rebels.
The Obama administration threatened to carry out punitive airstrikes against the Syrian government, touching off diplomatic efforts that eventually resulted in Assad accepting a U.S.-Russia brokered deal to relinquish his chemical arsenal.
"The truth is that after the chemical weapons deal, Assad became a partner, and after ISIS, he became a necessity, the lesser of two evils," Saab said, referring to the Islamic State militant group by one of its acronyms.

AP Photo: Local Committee of Arbeen

This Wednesday, Aug. 21, 2013, file photo made by a citizen journalist provided by the Local Committee of Arbeen which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, shows a Syrian man helping a woman as she mourns over the dead bodies of children after an alleged poisonous gas attack fired by regime forces, according to activists in Arbeen town, Damascus, Syria. An international human rights group says on the anniversary of the deadly chemical attack outside Damascus that “justice remains elusive” for the victims and their families.

Assad has long maintained that the uprising against him was a conspiracy carried out by Islamic extremists and terrorists, not a revolt against a dictatorship. He has played on the rise of jihadi groups among rebels in Syria, and has recently stepped up his bombardment of Islamic State strongholds in Syria, in what some see as an attempt to send a message that he is a partner in the war on terrorism.
In the past 11 months, a joint mission by the U.N. and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has overseen the removal of all of Syria's declared chemical stockpile of 1,300 metric tons (1,430 tons) from the country.
More than 80 percent of those materials, which include mustard gas and precursors to sarin, have been destroyed, according to the OPCW.
Nadim Houry, deputy Middle East and North Africa director at the New York-based Human Rights Watch, welcomed the removal of Syria's chemical arsenal, but said its destruction "will do nothing for the hundreds of victims who died a year ago and the relatives who survive them."
"Closure of the chemical weapons issue in Syria will be possible only when those who ordered and executed the Ghouta attacks have been held to account and are behind bars," Houry said in a statement Thursday.
Many Syrians sought to remind the world of the Ghouta attack in various ways. Protests were being organized in parts of Syria following Muslim prayers Friday, the traditional day of protests in the Middle East.
On social media, they organized themselves under the hashtag "BreathingDeath" and "JusticeMatters" and posting photos and video of the attack.
"Never forget, never forgive," they wrote on Twitter.
Many expressed anger that the chemical weapons deal left Assad free to continue using conventional weapons against his opponents.
"Criminal Assad should have been punished, not gently partially disarmed," posted Obaida Nahas, a member of the Western-backed Syrian opposition.
Questions also linger over whether Assad is hiding undeclared poison gases or attacking rebels with chlorine. While not specified as a chemical weapon, chlorine is a toxic industrial gas. The use of any such material as a weapon is illegal under international law.
In May, an OPCW mission found evidence that chlorine gas was used in fighting between rebels and Assad's government. The OPCW stopped short of saying which side was to blame.
The main Western-backed Syrian opposition group used Thursday's anniversary to urge the international community to fully follow through with the mission to destroy Syria's chemical program.
It also mourned those killed a year ago, saying the "families of the victims deserve closure."

The Island Nation That Plans to Relocate an Entire Population

REUTERS: David Gray

Villagers watch the sunset over a small lagoon near the village of Tangintebu on South Tarawa in the central Pacific island nation of Kiribati May 25, 2013

14 hr ago By CHRISTOPHER PALA of The Atlantic

 

Mikarite Temari, the mayor of Christmas Island, Kiribati’s largest atoll, rolled his eyes and shook his head as I read off my laptop in his office what his president, Anote Tong, had said during a visit to New York.

“According to the science and the projections,” Tong, a slim 62-year-old with a trimmed mustache, a gray crew-cut and a talent for metaphor, told Fareed Zakaria on CNN , “it is already too late for us.” For Kiribati and other nations made up of low-lying atolls, Tong added, “The impact of climate change is about total annihilation.” An interviewer in The New Yorker wrote, “Kiribati’s fate is settled; Tong gives it twenty years.”
“This is not true,” Temari said with visible dismay. “None of it.” Scientists who analyze atoll island dynamics agree that any notion of existential threat for atoll nations is unfounded. Indeed, several studies have shown that the six inches the central Pacific has risen since 1950 has had no measurable effect on any island. The scientists say that the tropical white-sand islands languidly draped around aquamarine lagoons are actually sitting on live coral reefs that will grow as the Pacific rises two to four feet by the end of the century, as the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change predicts.
“The reefs will maintain equilibrium with sea-level rise,” said Scott Smithers of James Cook University in Townsville, Australia. “Waves are what will allow them to keep their head above water.”
“During big storms, the waves wash over the beaches and deposit sand inland,” explained Paul Kench, head of the University of Auckland’s School of Environment, who like Smithers is a coastal geo-morphologist. “That’s how the islands rose above the reef thousands of years ago and that’s what they’ll keep on doing as long as their reefs produce sand.” Atoll sand is made of broken bits of coral and coralline algae and of the skeletons of mollusks and tiny creatures called foraminifera. Noting that ocean acidification and a warming ocean will be increasing their mortality, he added, “That’s not significant in geological time, because a reef can produce sand for centuries after it dies.”
But no one is saying that the expected growth spurt will be as pleasant for the people living on atolls as life has been for the last 3,000 years, which were marked by sea-level stability. Even if islands aren’t submerged, scientists agree that climate change will create major problems—at the very least the same ones as coastal residents will face everywhere. “The low-lying areas will go under water more frequently as the sea level rises,” said Colin Woodroffe of the University of Wollongong in Australia. “And the narrower parts of the islands will be washed over more often.” What makes the process hard to predict is that there are no topographic maps of most atolls because the higher parts are usually covered in vegetation—trees, bushes or grasses—so satellites can’t measure just how high they are above the water. On most islands, people, like vegetation, stick to the higher, less exposed parts.
Christmas Island, which at 150 square miles is five times the size of Manhattan, is the biggest atoll island in the world by land area. There, the sea-level rise will likely be benign, the scientists agree: the peninsula where London, the capital, is located (which is also where most people live) is 20 feet above sea level. In addition, Christmas, whose Kiribati spelling is Kiritimati but is pronounced Christmas, has enough fresh water for four times its population of 6,000, according to a European Union study.
But 2,000 miles to the west in South Tarawa, Kiribati’s narrow, six-square-mile capital island crowded with 50,000 people, the picture is much darker. Over the past half-century, residents of the 15 other Gilbert Islands have flocked there in search of jobs and better schools for their children. The island, once a Japanese fortress and the site of a World War II battle, was already hardly pristine. Now, many live in flimsy beachside houses that are routinely awash in high tides. To minimize flooding, they built poorly designed seawalls that regularly collapse. Meanwhile, the government increased South Tarawa’s area by 19 percent over 30 years by building causeways between islets and creating new land over the reef with lagoon sand poured behind seawalls. The widespread erosion and flooding that resulted “is primarily due to [local] human activities,” which unless stopped will “increase erosion and susceptibility of the reef islands to anticipated sea-level rise,” one study concluded.
Though the study’s lead author is Naomi Biribo, a senior civil servant in Tarawa, Tong has ignored it and become a minor international celebrity by blaming the island’s coastal problems uniformly on climate change. “We are on the front lines of climate change,” he has often said, and Conservation International—Tong is a member of the group’s board—describes him as “a loving grandfather who is concerned that his country will no longer exist when his grandchildren grow up.”
Tong’s stirring descriptions of his people’s plight have led to the creation in Australia of a committee to promote his candidacy for the Nobel Peace Prize . (Its organizer, Philip Glendinning of the Edmund Rice Centre, did not answer several e-mail requests for comment.) Scientists like Kench say that the people of Tarawa will face the same choices as other coastal denizens when the sea rises further. Either they allow the beach to move forward and they retreat inland to higher ground, or they build concrete seawalls and the beach is washed away—a particularly unpleasant choice for places like Waikiki, the touristy neighborhood of Honolulu that is dominated by high-rises.
“Clearly, the highly urbanized atolls like Tarawa where so many people live on the narrow parts are going to require expensive engineering solutions if they can’t reduce their populations,” Kench said. Or they can move back to their home islands. Aranuka, for example, has seen its population drop to 800 as many moved to Tarawa. It has the same land area as Tarawa, but instead of being long and thin, part of it is three miles by five on the lee side of the island—“Good protection against the waves,” said Kench. “I’d say it has a good chance of surviving climate change.”
One of Tong’s signature projects has been the purchase of land in Fiji so his people will have somewhere to go to when, as he put it to Zakaria on CNN, all his country’s islands “are underwater, given the projections being put forward by the IPCC.” The search had been going on since 2011, when Tong announced his intention to buy land as insurance against climate change during his third and last campaign. In 2012, after settling on an estate in Fiji, he told the Associated Press, “We would hope not to put everyone on one piece of land, but if it became absolutely necessary, yes, we could do it... It’s basically going to be a matter of survival.” After people protested in Tarawa that they did not want to leave, Tong said that the real purpose of the acquisition was to insure food security, though Kiribati people eat mostly imported rice and local fish.
On May 23, Tong announced on Kiribati Radio the completion of the purchase for $8.7 million taken from Kiribati’s $600 million sovereign wealth fund, whose interest goes into the budget.
That night at the Lagoon Club in Tarawa, a bare-bones beachside bar that’s a favorite watering hole for senior officials, former environment minister Amberoti Nikora, who was instrumental in the purchase, was celebrating, beer in hand. “The place can hold 60,000, 70,000 people,” he told me confidently. “People should not be afraid of the future, the government will take care of them.”
But when I traveled to the estate in a remote part of Fiji’s Vanua Levu Island, during a trip made possible by the Fund for Investigative Journalism, I found a very different picture. Two-thirds of the property, called the Natoavatu Estate, was covered by impenetrable forest and the rest was an abandoned coconut plantation where some 270 Solomon Islanders practice subsistence agriculture. They were invited to settle there in 1948 by the Anglican Church, which had inherited it, in exchange for conversion. (Anyone who leaves the Church must also move out, they told me.)
The Solomon Islanders said they didn’t think the land could feed more than a couple of hundred more people. John Teaiwa, a former permanent secretary of agriculture in Fiji, agreed over coffee in Suva, the capital. The purchase, he said, “makes no sense as a food source either.”
The Solomon Islanders explained to me that they farmed 400 acres for food and grazed their cattle—which they use to plough fields—on another 300 acres. They were upset that the church had carved out 300 acres from the property and leased them to the village for 99 years without charge, in order to sell the remaining 5,451 acres to Kiribati. “We told them 300 acres is not enough,” Eparama Kelo, a retired schoolteacher, said. “They told us that’s all we’re going to get.”
In an interview in his office Suva, Archbishop Winston Halapua, who heads the Anglican Church’s Polynesian Diocese, dismissed a suggestion that the church had failed in its moral responsibility toward the villagers. “Three hundred acres is a big land,” he said. “I think this is just.” An examination of the sales records of neighboring and similar properties showed that the price Tong paid per acre was four times the average price the other properties fetched. But Hanapua denied the Church had taken advantage of an unsophisticated buyer. “We were open for any offer, and there was an offer,” he said.
As to the land’s unsuitability for resettlement, he insisted that it could accommodate several thousand more people. He noted that Chinese immigrants to Fiji “transform barren places into green ones where they produce food for the markets.” He said he saw no reason the Kiribati people could not do the same, even though that there is virtually no agriculture on atolls, whose vegetal output is mostly limited to breadfruit and coconuts from trees.
Members of the opposition in Tarawa said they had no idea of the inflated price and the land’s unsuitability for food production. They were outraged that the government had said that all the Solomon Islanders had left the property, and that Tong had wasted trust fund money on what they called a publicity stunt to glorify himself. (Tong declined to be interviewed for this article.) Tetabo Nakara, who served as environment minister under Tong but quit over Tong’s alarmist campaigning, said the purchase “was done strictly for the publicity. He did it just so he could say he’d done it,” Nakara said.
Teburoro Tito, Tong’s predecessor as president, agreed. He said the fact that Tong has variously described the purchase as being for relocation, food security and as an investment highlighted the fact that the president, who governs with little parliamentary oversight, has no clear plan. Tito pointed out that after three years of negotiating the purchase of the land (and making no effort to ascertain its value), the first thing he announced he was doing after the purchase was completed was to appoint a committee to decide what to do with it. Tong, Tito charged, is on “a mad drive to turn Kiribati into a climate change asylum to justify the many irrational and nonsensical decisions he has made so far.”
Back on Christmas Island, Temari, the mayor, told me that what he needed from his head of government was not more speeches in foreign venues—where Tong is said to be angling for a high-visibility job in climate change when his last term expires next year—but more coconuts.
For most people in Christmas, the sole source of cash is harvesting and drying coconut meat, known as copra, and selling it to the government at subsidized prices. But since several thousand people arrived from Tarawa over the past two decades, the supply of coconuts from a limited number of trees has fallen behind the demand of the growing number of harvesters.
Noting that it takes four years for a sapling to produce coconuts, Temari said, “Instead of buying land in Fiji, the government should hire people to plant trees, lots of trees.” Then, he said, people emigrating from overcrowded, flood-prone Tarawa would have not only plenty of space and drinking water, but a way to earn a living.