Vanuatu 2018
Yearbook 2018
Vanuatu. In March, Deputy Prime Minister Joe Natuman of the Supreme Court was sentenced to two years of conditional sentence for attempting to influence a police investigation unduly during his time as Prime Minister (2014-15). In 2014, Natuman ordered then-Chief of Police Aru Maralau to prevent a police investigation by senior police officers accused of trying to rebel. According to Countryaah.com, Port-Vila is the capital city of Vanuatu, a country located in Melanesia. Natuman, who pleaded guilty, explained that he had no intention of leaving his seat in the government but did so in May. This after the President suspended him from Parliament and declared his place vacant. In July, the Court of Appeal upheld the decision of the President. In November, Natuman also resigned as leader of Our country’s party.
- According to Abbreviationfinder: VUT is an three letter acronym for Vanuatu.
In March, two children drowned when they were swept away by the bodies of water from a flooded river. This, in turn, was a consequence of the tropical cyclone Hola, which caused another casualty.
In July, a new political party, Leleon Vanua, was formed, which was described as a women’s party and whose stated aim was to change the fact that none of Parliament’s 52 members are women.
History. – Former Anglo-French condominium, on 30 July 1980 Vanuatu gained independence. The constitution provides for the republic of Vanuatu a single-chamber parliament elected by universal suffrage for four years and a president of the republic elected for five years by the parliament and the presidents of the regional councils. The country’s political scene, characterized by substantial instability and the weight of widespread clientelism, is marked by the contrast between the French-speaking and English-speaking groups. In the parliamentary elections of November 1979, the Anglophone party Vanuaaku Pati (VP) won the majority of seats (26 out of 39) and its leader W. Lini, an Anglican priest, assumed the post of prime minister. Confirmed in office in the subsequent elections of November 1983 and December 1987, the Lini government gradually lost consensus in the country: attacked in terms of respect for civil rights by the annual conference of the French-speaking opposition party, Union of Moderate Parties (UPM, November 1985), subjected to accusations of bad governance by an opposition that was being divided into new parties (in 1986 the National Democratic Party, the New People’s Party and Vanuatu’s Labor Party were born), in the summer of 1988 Lini he faced a tough battle within his party against the secretary general, B. Sope. This opposition was radicalized with the split of a large group of militants and deputies who formed a new party, the Melanesian Progressive Party. The by-elections of December 1988, to elect the vacant seats after the expulsion made by Lini in parliament, if they registered a further victory for the VP, however, took place in a climate of great tension in the country and saw a very low participation in the vote, so much so that President G. Sokomanu (head of state since July 1980) dissolved parliament, entrusting Sope with the interim government and calling new general elections for February 1989. But the refusal of the Australian, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea governments to recognize the Sope government, as well as the support Lini enjoyed among the armed forces, led to the arrest and then to the conspiracy trial of Sokomanu, Sope and other members of the interim government(who were however released after the intervention of the International Commission of Jurists in April 1989). Replaced Sokomanu with the former Minister of Health F. Timakata, the return of Lini as head of the government (March 1989) did not resolve the crisis: in early 1991 the attacks on Lini were resumed by various parties (Council of Ministers, party, and parliament), so that the former secretary general of the party, D. Kalpokas, replaced him as president of the VP, and, in September, at the head of the government itself.
From the elections of December 1991, in which the UfM won the majority of votes (19 seats, against 10 for the VP and as many for Lini’s new party, the United National Party), a new coalition government was unexpectedly led by leader of the UPM, M. Carlot, and of which the United National Party was a member. But the contrasts between the two sides, the strike for wage claims of about 2000 public employees (November 1993), as well as the difficulties encountered by the political forces in reaching an agreement for the election of the president of the republic (the agreement was reached after long negotiations with the choice of the UfM candidate, J.-M. Leye) in March 1994 led once again to a government crisis, resolved with the coalition between the UfM and the People’s Democratic Party, a new grouping just formed after a split from the VP.
Joined the UN in 1981, Vanuatu went through more than one crisis with France (accused of supporting the opposition), until, with Carlot’s first French-speaking government, relations between the two countries were fully restored (July 1993: friendship and cooperation treaty between the two countries). In October 1986 Vanuatu had entered into a fisheries agreement with other Pacific area countries with the United States which guaranteed US fishing vessels the exclusive right to fish for tuna in the country’s territorial waters.
