THE ANZ BANK in Fiji is allegedly engaged in bad business practice. Many of its customers have contacted Fijileaks to complain that the bank has closed down some of its branches throughout Fiji. In Suva alone, they have closed the Tappoo City, USP, Samabula and Centre Point branches, making it extremely inconvenient for customers to use the Bank. Our contacts inside the bank claim the management are systematically engaged in making their books look better so they can sell their Fiji operations. Their intention to sell to the BRED bank failed. They are giving no leeway to customers who have banked with them for years by not granting businesses even small loans and this is adversely affecting their businesses and livelihood. Many customers have ceased using this Bank and are using other Banks like the Bred Bank and BSP. The ANZ Bank has been accused of even transferring accounts of small businesses to their asset management department, which is led by Mohammed Faiyaz, a very junior bank officer with little or no understanding of business or for that matter banking. | Recently, the ANZ Bank (Australia) paid a fine of around AUD$50million for Interest rigging in Australia. The Reseve Bank of Fiji ought to be more vigilant and scrutinize the operations of this Bank. |
The Australian Securities and Investment Commission (Asic) had commenced legal proceedings against the ANZ Bank (Australia) for ‘unconscionable conduct and market manipulation’ over setting of https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-22/anz-bank-settles-rate-rigging-case-with-securities-regulator
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Fijileaks: We want to make it very clear that we are not presenting this video as a race related incident but hope it will serve as a warning to students of all races in Fiji the peril of misbehaving in the age of social media. The incident took place at the Tagore Memorial School in BA The Tagore schools in former British colonies with large Indian indentured population has its roots in India where the Tagores, in 1863, established the Santiniketan school, with the aim of helping education go beyond the confines of the classroom. Santiniketan grew into the Visva Bharati University in 1921, attracting some of the most creative minds in India. Located about 158 km northwest of Kolkata in Bengal’s rural hinterland, Santiniketan embodies Rabindranath Tagore’s vision of a place of learning that is unfettered by religious and regional barriers. “The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence.” - TAGORE Award Ceremony Speech, on 10 December 1913 Presentation Speech by Harald Hjärne, Chairman of the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy In awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature to the Anglo-Indian poet, Rabindranath Tagore, the Academy has found itself in the happy position of being able to accord this recognition to an author who, in conformity with the express wording of Alfred Nobel's last will and testament, had during the current year, written the finest poems «of an idealistic tendency.» Moreover, after exhaustive and conscientious deliberation, having concluded that these poems of his most nearly approach the prescribed standard, the Academy thought that there was no reason to hesitate because the poet's name was still comparatively unknown in Europe, due to the distant location of his home. There was even less reason since the founder of the Prize laid it down in set terms as his «express wish and desire that, in the awarding of the Prize, no consideration should be paid to the nationality to which any proposed candidate might belong.» (Fijileaks: In Rabuka's Fiji, Tagore would have been disqualified because of his Indian heritage) Tagore's Gitanjali: Song Offerings (1912), a collection of religious poems, was the one of his works that especially arrested the attention of the selecting critics. Since last year the book, in a real and full sense, has belonged to English literature, for the author himself, who by education and practice is a poet in his native Indian tongue, has bestowed upon the poems a new dress, alike perfect in form and personally original in inspiration. This has made them accessible to all in England, America, and the entire Western world for whom noble literature is of interest and moment. Quite independently of any knowledge of his Bengali poetry, irrespective, too, of differences of religious faiths, literary schools, or party aims, Tagore has been hailed from various quarters as a new and admirable master of that poetic art which has been a never-failing concomitant of the expansion of British civilization ever since the days of Queen Elizabeth. The features of this poetry that won immediate and enthusiastic admiration are the perfection with which the poet's own ideas and those he has borrowed have been harmonized into a complete whole; his rhythmically balanced style, that, to quote an English critic's opinion, «combines at once the feminine grace of poetry with the virile power of prose»; his austere, by some termed classic, taste in the choice of words and his use of the other elements of expression in a borrowed tongue - those features, in short, that stamp an original work as such, but which at the same time render more difficult its reproduction in another language. The same estimate is true of the second cycle of poems that came before us, The Gardener, Lyrics of Love and Life (1913). In this work, however, as the author himself points out, he has recast rather than interpreted his earlier inspirations. Here we see another phase of his personality, now subject to the alternately blissful and torturing experiences of youthful love, now prey to the feelings of longing and joy that the vicissitudes of life give rise to, the whole interspersed nevertheless with glimpses of a higher world. English translations of Tagore's prose stories have been published under the title Glimpses of Bengal Life (1913). Though the form of these tales does not bear his own stamp - the rendering being by another hand - their content gives evidence of his versatility and wide range of observation, of his heartfelt sympathy with the fates and experiences of differing types of men, and of his talent for plot construction and development. Tagore has since published both a collection of poems, poetic pictures of childhood and home life, symbolically entitled The Crescent Moon (1913), and a number of lectures given before American and English university audiences, which in book form he calls Sâdhanâ: The Realisation of Life (1913). They embody his views of the ways in which man can arrive at a faith in the light of which it may be possible to live. This very seeking of his to discover the true relation between faith and thought makes Tagore stand out as a poet of rich endowment, characterized by his great profundity of thought, but most of all by his warmth of feeling and by the moving power of his figurative language. Seldom indeed in the realm of imaginative literature are attained so great a range and diversity of note and of colour, capable of expressing with equal harmony and grace the emotions of every mood from the longing of the soul after eternity to the joyous merriment prompted by the innocent child at play. Concerning our understanding of this poetry, by no means exotic but truly universally human in character, the future will probably add to what we know now. We do know, however, that the poet's motivation extends to the effort of reconciling two spheres of civilization widely separated, which above all is the characteristic mark of our present epoch and constitutes its most important task and problem. The true inwardness of this work is most clearly and purely revealed in the efforts exerted in the Christian mission-field throughout the world. In times to come, historical inquirers will know better how to appraise its importance and influence, even in what is at present hidden from our gaze and where no or only grudging recognition is accorded. They will undoubtedly form a higher estimate of it than the one now deemed fitting in many quarters. Thanks to this movement, fresh, bubbling springs of living water have been tapped, from which poetry in particular may draw inspiration, even though those springs are perhaps intermingled with alien streams, and whether or not they be traced to their right source or their origin be attributed to the depths of the dreamworld. More especially, the preaching of the Christian religion has provided in many places the first definite impulse toward a revival and regeneration of the vernacular language, i.e., its liberation from the bondage of an artificial tradition, and consequently also toward a development of its capacity for nurturing and sustaining a vein of living and natural poetry. The Christian mission has exercised its influence as a rejuvenating force in India, too, where in conjunction with religious revivals many of the vernaculars were early put to literary use, thereby acquiring status and stability. However, with only too regular frequency, they fossilized again under pressure from the new tradition that gradually established itself. But the influence of the Christian mission has extended far beyond the range of the actually registered proselytizing work. The struggle that the last century witnessed between the living vernaculars and the sacred language of ancient times for control over the new literatures springing into life would have had a very different course and outcome, had not the former found able support in the fostering care bestowed upon them by the self-sacrificing missionaries. It was in Bengal, the oldest Anglo-Indian province and the scene many years before of the indefatigable labours of that missionary pioneer, Carey, to promote the Christian religion and to improve the vernacular language, that Rabindranath Tagore was born in 1861. He was a scion of a respected family that had already given evidence of intellectual ability in many areas. The surroundings in which the boy and young man grew up were in no sense primitive or calculated to hem in his conceptions of the world and of life. On the contrary, in his home there prevailed, along with a highly cultivated appreciation of art, a profound reverence for the inquiring spirit and wisdom of the forefathers of the race, whose texts were used for family devotional worship. Around him, too, there was then coming into being a new literary spirit that consciously sought to reach forth to the people and to make itself acquainted with their life needs. This new spirit gained in force as reforms ere firmly effected by the Government, after the quelling of the widespread, confused Indian Mutiny. Rabindranath's father was one of the leading and most zealous members of a religious community to which his son still belongs. That body, known by the name of «Brahmo Samaj», did not arise as a sect of the ancient Hindu type, with the purpose of spreading the worship of some particular godhead as superior to all others. Rather, it was founded in the early part of the nineteenth century by an enlightened and influential man who had been much impressed by the doctrines of Christianity, which he had studied also in England. He endeavoured to give to the native Hindu traditions, handed down from the past, an interpretation in agreement with what he conceived to be the spirit and import of the Christian faith. Doctrinal controversy has since been rife regarding the interpretation of truth that he and his successors were thus led to give, whereby the community has been subdivided into a number of independent sects. The character, too, of the community, appealing essentially to highly trained intellectual minds, has from its inception always precluded any large growth of the numbers of its avowed adherents. Nevertheless, the indirect influence exercised by the body, even upon the development of popular education and literature, is held to be very considerable indeed. Among those community members who have grown up in recent years, Rabindranath Tagore has laboured to a pre-eminent degree. To them he has stood as a revered master and prophet. That intimate interplay of teacher and pupil so earnestly sought after has attained a deep, hearty, and simple manifestation, both in religious life and in literary training. To carry out his life's work Tagore equipped himself with a many-sided culture, European as well as Indian, extended and matured by travels abroad and by advanced study in London. In his youth he travelled widely in his own land, accompanying his father as far as the Himalayas. He was still quite young when he began to write in Bengali, and he has tried his hand in prose and poetry, lyrics and dramas. In addition to his descriptions of the life of he common people of his own country, he has dealt in separate works with questions in literary criticism, philosophy, and sociology. At one period, some time ago, there occurred a break in the busy round of his activities, for he then felt obliged, in accord with immemorial practice among his race, to pursue for a time a contemplative hermit life in a boat floating on the waters of a tributary of the sacred Ganges River. After he returned to ordinary life, his reputation among his own people as a man of refined wisdom and chastened piety grew greater from day to day. The open-air school which he established in western Bengal, beneath the sheltering branches of the mango tree, has brought up numbers of youths who as devoted disciples have spread his teaching throughout the land. To this place he has now retired, after spending nearly a year as an honoured guest in the literary circles of England and America and attending the Religious History Congress held in Paris last summer (1913). Wherever Tagore has encountered minds open to receive his high teaching, the reception accorded him has been that suited to a bearer of good tidings which are delivered, in language intelligible to all, from that treasure house of the East whose existence had long been conjectured. His own attitude, moreover, is that he is but the intermediary, giving freely of that to which by birth he has access. He is not at all anxious to shine before men as a genius or as an inventor of some new thing. In contrast to the cult of work, which is the product of life in the fenced-in cities of the Western world, with its fostering of a restless, contentious spirit; in contrast to its struggle to conquer nature for the love of gain and profit, «as if we are living», Tagore says, «in a hostile world where we have to wrest everything we want from an unwilling and alien arrangement of things» (Sâdhanâ, p. 5); in contrast to all that enervating hurry and scurry, he places before us the culture that in the vast, peaceful, and enshrining forests of India attains its perfection, a culture that seeks primarily the quiet peace of the soul in ever-increasing harmony with the life of nature herself It is a poetical, not a historical, picture that Tagore here reveals to us to confirm his promise that a peace awaits us, too. By virtue of the right associated with the gift of prophecy, he freely depicts the scenes that have loomed before his creative vision at a period contemporary with the beginning of time. He is, however, as far removed as anyone in our midst from all that we are accustomed to hear dispensed and purveyed in the market places as Oriental philosophy, from painful dreams about the transmigration of souls and the impersonal karma, from the pantheistic, and in reality abstract, belief that is usually regarded as peculiarly characteristic of the higher civilization in India. Tagore himself is not even prepared to admit that a belief of that description can claim any authority from the profoundest utterances of the wise men of the past. He peruses his Vedic hymns, his Upanishads, and indeed the theses of Buddha himself, in such a manner that he discovers in them, what is for him an irrefutable truth. If he seeks the divinity in nature, he finds there a living personality with the features of omnipotence, the all-embracing lord of nature, whose preternatural spiritual power nevertheless likewise reveals its presence in all temporal life, small as well as great, but especially in the soul of man predestined for eternity. Praise, prayer, and fervent devotion pervade the song offerings that he lays at the feet of this nameless divinity of his. Ascetic and even ethic austerity would appear to be alien to his type of divinity worship, which may be characterized as a species of aesthetic theism. Piety of that description is in full concord with the whole of his poetry, and it has bestowed peace upon him. He proclaims the coming of that peace for weary and careworn souls even within the bounds of Christendom. This is mysticism, if we like to call it so, but not a mysticism that, relinquishing personality, seeks to become absorbed in an All that approaches a Nothingness, but one that, with all the talents and faculties of the soul trained to their highest pitch, eagerly sets forth to meet the living Father of the whole creation. This more strenuous type of mysticism was not wholly unknown even in India before the days of Tagore, hardly indeed among the ascetics and philosophers of ancient times but rather in the many forms of bhakti, a piety whose very essence is the profound love of and reliance upon God. Ever since the Middle Ages, influenced in some measure by the Christian and other foreign religions, bhakti has sought the ideals of its faith in the different phases of Hinduism, varied in character but each to all intents monotheistic in conception. All those higher forms of faith have disappeared or have been depraved past recognition, choked by the superabundant growth of that mixture of cults that has attracted to its banner all those Indian peoples who lacked an adequate power of resistance to its blandishments. Even though Tagore may have borrowed one or another note from the orchestral symphonies of his native predecessors, yet he treads upon firmer ground in this age that draws the peoples of the earth closer together along paths of peace, and of strife too, to joint and collective responsibilities, and that spends its own energies in dispatching greetings and good wishes far over land and sea. Tagore, though, in thought-impelling pictures, has shown us how all things temporal are swallowed up in the eternal: Time is endless in thy hands, my lord. There is none to count thy minutes. Days and nights pass and ages bloom and fade like flowers. Thou knowest how to wait. Thy centuries follow each other perfecting a small wild flower. We have no time to lose, and having no time, we must scramble for our chances. We are too poor to be late. And thus it is that time goes try, while I give it to every querulous man who claims it, and thine altar is empty of all offerings to the last. At the end of the day I hasten in fear lest thy gate be shut; but if I find that yet there is time. (Gitanjali, 82.) Throughout his life, Tagore remained deeply critical of nationalism, a position that pitted him against Mahatma Gandhi. Tagore argued that when love for one’s country gives way to worship, or becomes a “sacred obligation”, then disaster is the inevitable outcome. “I am willing to serve my country; but my worship I reserve for Right which is far greater than country. To worship my country as a god is to bring curse upon it,” Tagore wrote in his 1916 novel, The Home and the World BUT this GROWN-UP Methodist LAY PREACHER and racist coupist is yet to be brought to JUSTICE for his violence, torture, rape et al of Indo-Fijians, and other forward-looking progressive native Fijians and Others, and is now leading SODELPA to become Prime Minister of Fiji. He was once dubbed the 'Little Hitler' for his treatment of Fiji's 'Brown Jews' - the Indo-Fijians - who he hoped would flee Fiji in their thousands!!!!! |
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 is to be shared, in two equal parts, between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change. Indications of changes in the earth's future climate must be treated with the utmost seriousness, and with the precautionary principle uppermost in our minds. Extensive climate changes may alter and threaten the living conditions of much of mankind. They may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the earth's resources. Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world's most vulnerable countries. There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states. |
Through the scientific reports it has issued over the past two decades, the IPCC has created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming. Thousands of scientists and officials from over one hundred countries have collaborated to achieve greater certainty as to the scale of the warming. Whereas in the 1980s global warming seemed to be merely an interesting hypothesis, the 1990s produced firmer evidence in its support. In the last few years, the connections have become even clearer and the consequences still more apparent.
Al Gore has for a long time been one of the world's leading environmentalist politicians. He became aware at an early stage of the climatic challenges the world is facing. His strong commitment, reflected in political activity, lectures, films and books, has strengthened the struggle against climate change. He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted.
By awarding the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 to the IPCC and Al Gore, the Norwegian Nobel Committee is seeking to contribute to a sharper focus on the processes and decisions that appear to be necessary to protect the worlds future climate, and thereby to reduce the threat to the security of mankind. Action is necessary now, before climate change moves beyond mans control. Oslo, 12 October 2007
Al Gore has for a long time been one of the world's leading environmentalist politicians. He became aware at an early stage of the climatic challenges the world is facing. His strong commitment, reflected in political activity, lectures, films and books, has strengthened the struggle against climate change. He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted.
By awarding the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 to the IPCC and Al Gore, the Norwegian Nobel Committee is seeking to contribute to a sharper focus on the processes and decisions that appear to be necessary to protect the worlds future climate, and thereby to reduce the threat to the security of mankind. Action is necessary now, before climate change moves beyond mans control. Oslo, 12 October 2007
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/nov/03/climate-change-report-us-government-contradicts-trump
The Nobel Peace Prize is the most contentious of Alfred Nobel's prizes. The following extract from our Founding Editor-in-Chief VICTOR LAL's forthcoming book TOWARDS A WORLD WITHOUT WAR: Andrew Carnegie, The Peacemakers, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Nobel Peace Prize, 1901-1951 (which Lal researched and wrote while holding a Guest Nobel Fellowship at the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo) gives us a glimpse of the history and controversy of
the Nobel Peace Prize:
THe Nobel Peace Prize, created out of the 1895 will of the dynamite king Alfred Nobel, has been routinely described as the greatest honour that a man get in this world. The Oxford Dictionary of Twentieth Century World History states that the Nobel Peace Prize is ‘the world’s most prestigious prize awarded for the preservation of peace’. In 2001, the Prize celebrated its centennial. The Norwegian Nobel Committee decided to award the last Nobel Peace Prize for the 20th Century, in two equal portions, to the United Nations (U.N.) and to its Secretary-General, Kofi Anan. The Prize was given out in the Norwegian capital Oslo on 10 December 2001, three months after the most horrific terrorist attack of September 11 on the United States, which houses the UN.
The Nobel Committee had announced in October that it wanted ‘in its centenary year to proclaim that the only negotiable route to global peace and cooperation goes by way of the United Nations’, although the Committee was acutely aware that UN had provided the legal basis for the immediate military response to the attacks. On 12 September, the day after the Twin Tower attacks, both the UN Security Council and General Assembly had condemned them. In its resolution 1368 the Security Council defined them as ‘a threat to international peace and security’. This authorized the military response of the United States, since Article 51 of the UN Charter declares that any country has the right to defend itself if attacked until the Security Council takes measures to ensure peace and security.
Since its inception in 1901, several men, and a few women and organisations, have become Nobel laureates. There have been the ‘also ran’ ones, popularly referred to as the ‘Nobel Peace Prize Nominees’. In the first half of the twentieth century, between 1901 and 1951, some of the nominees included the likes of Adolf Hitler of Germany and Joseph Stalin of the former Soviet Union, ‘the twin demons of the twentieth century’, and also Hitler’s comic side-kick and fascist dictator Benito Mussolini of Italy.
Imperial monarchs like Wilhelm 11 of Germany, Franz Josef of Austria and Hungary, Czar Nikolai II of Russia, Alfonso XIII of Spain, Albert 1 of Belgium, and Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, joined them on the peace list. So did the ‘Men of God’, the Popes in Rome: Benedict XV, Pius XI, and Pius XII, the last described frequently as ‘Hitler’s Pope’ for failing to save the Jews from Mussolini’s Italy, and one British historian describing the pontiff as ‘arguably the most insidiously evil churchman in modern history who did more than fail to speak out against Nazi crimes’.
The Presidents and Prime Ministers were not to be left behind in their rush for Nobel’s peace prize. Among those sharing nomination with Hitler in 1939 was his co-signatory to the infamous Munich Pact, the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Other British Prime Ministers who made it on to the list included Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George, Clement Atlee, and Ramsay MacDonald. Alexander Papanastassiou of Greece, Édouard Herriot and Pierre Laval of France, General Jan Smuts of South Africa, and Francesco Saverio Nitti of Italy became the ‘also ran’ prime ministers. Tómaš Masaryk and Edvard Beneš (that ‘little swine’ as Lloyd George described him) of Czechoslovakia, and Count Albert Apponyni of Hungary, also found their names on to the Nobel Prize Nominees List.
Laval, together with British Foreign Secretary Samuel Hoare, had developed the so-called Hoare-Laval Plan for the partition of Ethiopia between Italy and Ethiopia after Mussolini had invaded Abyssinia causing Emperor Selassie to flee to Great Britain. In 1936 both men were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1945, as leader of the Vichy government during the Second World War, Laval was convicted and executed for treason. Mussolini, whose son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano (executed by the Germans) had described the Italian dictator in a letter intended for Winston Churchill as ‘Hitler’s tragic and vile puppet’, was also executed and his mutilated body was hung by his feet from the girders of a garage roof in the Piazzale Loreto. Two days later, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in a Berlin bunker.
Meanwhile, from across the Atlantic came nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize in support of the Roosevelts: Theodore, Franklin, and Elena Roosevelt. The United States presidents included Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, Warren Harding, William Howard Taft, and Herbert Hoover. The US Secretary of States included Elihu Root, Charles Hughes, Frank Kellog, and Cordell Hull. Their counterparts in Europe included Milovan Milovanovitch of Yugoslavia, who was nominated in 1910 for his efforts to prevent the Serbian-Austrian conflict from turning into war. Similarly, Sir Edward Grey (Lord Grey of Falloden) was put forward for the Treaty of London of 1915, by which Italy joined the Allies, in the First World War. Foreign Ministers Gustav Stresemann of Germany, Astride Briand of France, and Austen Chamberlain of Great Britain later shared the prize with Kellog for signing the Lorcano Pact that guaranteed peace around Germany’s frontier, and the Briand-Kellog Pact, which ‘outlawed’ war. Stresemann’s colleague Hans Luther, the former Chancellor and German Foreign Minister, however missed out.
Many peacemakers at the Paris Peace Conference 1919, which saw the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, were also put forward as deserving candidates. They included the Aga Khan, who had strenuously fought on behalf of Turkey in the Treaty of Sèvres, to the economist John Maynard Kenyes, who had resigned in disgust at the final reparations settlement, describing it as ‘Carthaginian Peace’ in his The Economic Consequences of Peace, to Lord Cecil of Chelwood and the Italian Vittorio Scialoja, for their roles in the creation of the League of Nations.
Even some military generals found themselves among their peace adversaries. In 1949 the American Major General Frank Ross McCoy was nominated for democratising Japan after the Second World War. From Germany came the nomination of Baron Paul von Schoenaich, a former army officer and president of the German Peace Association, who had become an opponent of war and advocated democracy, pacifism, and radical disarmament. And from Britain came the name of Brigadier-General and jurist John Hartman Morgan, who was nominated for his efforts to disarm Germany between 1919 and 1923, and for his plans after the World War Two. And General Dwight Eisenhower, later President but who in 1944 was the Supreme Commander of the troops invading France.
Moreover, while Hitler’s name was to be eternally linked to infamy, genocide, and mass murder, some of his countrymen could still be considered by their international admirers as the peacemakers: the 1936 Nobel laureate Carl von Ossietzky, the journalist and pacifist who died in Hitler’s concentration camp, pacifists like Ludwig Quidde, and the eugenicist and biologist Alfred Ploetz, the founder of racial hygiene in Germany, who was nominated for warning against biological consequences that inflicted on human reproduction.
Although men of war and men of peace dominated the world, a few courageous women like Jane Addams, Emily Balch, and Baroness Bertha von Suttner found their voices heard in the deliberations of the Nobel Committee. All three were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize before the first half of the twentieth century. If politicians, presidents, and prime ministers grabbed international headlines, there were scores of other soldiers of peace, including Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boys Scout, who made it to the Nobel Peace Prize Nominees list. Among them was the most famous and richest of them all – Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish born American steel magnate.
This book, accordingly, focuses on Carnegie, his peace activities, the founding of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and his failure to receive Alfred Nobel’s peace prize. Carnegie was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1908, 1911, and 1913, and yet the story has never as yet been related at all. Nor has any considerable attempt been made as yet to explore his peace activities, the role of CEIP, which he founded to promote international peace and harmony, and his relationship with the Nobel Peace laureates.
The eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm forcefully argued in his classic The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 that preparations for war became vastly more expensive, especially as states competed to keep ahead of, or at least to avoid falling behind, each other. This arms race began in a particularly modest way in the later 1880s, and accelerated in the new century, particularly in the last ten years before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. One consequence, he continued, of such vast expenditures was they required either higher taxes, or inflationary borrowing or both. But an equally obvious, though often overlooked consequence, was that they increasingly made death for various fatherlands a by-product of large-scale industry.
Hobsbawn however pointed out that two men in particular, ‘Alfred Nobel and Andrew Carnegie, two capitalists who knew what had made them millionaires in explosives and steel respectively, tried to compensate by devoting part of their wealth to the cause of peace’. In this, Hobsbawm concludes, ‘they were untypical’. Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, whose main objective was the elimination of war in international relations, created the Peace Prize and Carnegie, the steel magnate, founded the Endowment for International Peace with the professed aim ‘to hasten the abolition of international war, the foulest blot upon our civilisation’. He had also concluded that war was wasteful and disruptive to international commerce.
And yet the 21st Century is already engulfed in wars, ethnic conflicts, and the increase in nuclear arms race. Governments, organisations, statesmen, church leaders, and ordinary and men and women are therefore once again being challenged to find ways and means to organize peace. In our never ending quest and hope for a peaceful 21st Century, it would be worth recalling two extraordinary but controversial advocates of peace - Alfred Nobel and Andrew Carnegie - who provided the opportunity and recognition to those who believed, and continue to believe, in peace, justice, and a stable world order. After all, the 20th Century was one of the bloodiest that had also challenged and tested the will and power of those who never lost faith in working towards a world without war. If the last century was the century of wars, it was also the century of celebrations and anniversaries in the organization for peace.
The year 1996, especially, is of significance, in the context of this study. On 10 December 1996 it was the 100th death anniversary of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist, who wrote his will on 27 November 1895 in the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris, establishing the Nobel Peace Prize, hailed as the ‘greatest honour a man can receive in this world’.
The year 1995, and onward, was also the years of anniversaries. For example, 1995 marked the ninetieth anniversary of the formal opening of The Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo established ‘to follow the development of international relations, especially the work for their peaceful adjustment, and thereby to guide the [Nobel] Committee in the matter of the award of the [Nobel] Peace Prize’. The Nobel Committee building near the gardens of the Royal Palace in Oslo, according to one veteran chronicler of the Nobel Peace Prize, Irwin Abrams, ‘is a dignified structure, but modest indeed compared to the grandiose Palace of Peace that Andrew Carnegie built a few years later in The Hague for the Permanent Court of Arbitration’. Today, the Peace Palace is host to The International Court of Justice, the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, The Permanent Court of Arbitration, The Hague Academy of International Law, and the Peace Palace Library.
That year also marked the one hundred and sixtieth anniversary of the birth of Carnegie, who was born on 25 November 1835, into a family of disfranchised craftsman and Chartists, in the ancient Scottish town of Dunfermline. Moreover, 14 December 1995 was the eighty-fifth anniversary of the deed of gift by Carnegie to his Trustees establishing the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace [CEIP]. Further, the year 1997 also marked the fiftieth anniversary of the CEIP's failed attempt to win the 1947 Nobel Peace Prize.
The Austrian peace activist and Alfred Nobel’s former secretary, Countess Bertha von Suttner, for example, was also an acquaintance of Carnegie. She became the first woman in 1905 to become a Nobel laureate. Generally regarded as the one who stimulated both Nobel and Carnegie’s interests in peace, the two men, independently of one another, rewarded her during her last years: she used Nobel’s 1905 peace prize money to support herself and in the last years the Countess received a pension from Carnegie.
The book moreover recounts how Nobel and Carnegie reached the same goals: renunciation of war and the advocacy of international peace, arbitration, and disarmament. Nobel established the Peace Prize and Carnegie gave away his fortune in the pursuit of peace. Carnegie hoped that men would some day view ‘those machines made expressly for the destruction of their fellow men only in the Museum, as relics of a barbarous age’. Between 1904 and 1919, as one of Carnegie’s biographers points out, he gave more than £25,250 to fund a ‘Temple of Peace’ and major foundations concerned with peace and ‘the heroes of peace’.
Nobel, on the other hand, while establishing the peace prize, ‘gave the world thirty years to found a system of peace or else revert to barbarism, but he cherished the hope that within that time the enlightening effects of scientific progress would rid the earth of war’. Briefly, in his will of 1895, Alfred Nobel wanted exceptional people to be honoured for their significant contributions in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and work for peace. He stipulated that Swedish institutions should award the scientific prizes and the prize for literature. The award for the peace prize was left to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, appointed by the Norwegian Storting or Parliament, to award an annual prize to people and institutions ‘who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses’.
First awarded in 1901, the peace prize went to Jean Henri Dunant, the Swiss founder of Red Cross and originator of the Geneva Convention, and to Frederic Passy, the doyen of the pre-1914 peace movement and founder and president of the first French peace society. In subsequent years there have also been some spectacular omissions for the Nobel Peace Prize: Mahatma Gandhi, the greatest proponent of non-violence, and the Russian pacifist Count Leo Tolstoy, the author of the magisterial War and Peace. Many others generally considered as ‘advocates of peace’ failed to make it on to the winner’s list.
This book does not claim that Carnegie deserved Nobel’s peace prize but explores Carnegie’s advocacy for international arbitration, justice, world peace, and the abolition of war. It is, however, anchored in his unsuccessful attempts to win the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize. But the book is more: it follows the activities of statesmen and peace advocates at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 who drew up the Treaty of Versailles, and created the League of Nations that was to promote international co-operation and to achieve international peace and security. It examines why one of those at the Conference, President Woodrow Wilson, was rewarded with a Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the founding of the League while others like British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, was overlooked.
And so was Carnegie, the most active peace campaigner, who embodied everything the Nobel Peace Prize demanded and yet was passed over three times during his lifetime. He had once written to Theodore Roosevelt, who had become the first statesmen to receive the prize in 1906 for mediating the Russo-Japanese War: ‘The man who passes into history as the chief agent in banishing war or even lessening war, the great evil of his day, is to stand for all time among the foremost benefactors. Only as the strongest apostle of peace of your day, you can take permanent rank with the very few immortals whom the tooth of time is not to gnaw into oblivion.’
In reminding Roosevelt, Carnegie was portraying something of his own life and character as an active peace crusader. In general, although Carnegie never became a Nobel laureate, in spirit and action he did share the characteristics of Alfred Nobel who has been described as ‘the pessimist with the optimistic program, the realist whose efforts were based on idealistic premises’.
The pages that follow tell the story of two of the world’s remarkable millionaire pacifists but within the framework of war and peace, and the Nobel Peace Prize which celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2001. The book confines itself to the first half of the twentieth century, for it was one of the bloodiest that tested the will and staying power of the peacemakers, among them Carnegie, the millionaire pacifist. The struggle is not, of course, over yet. The book begins with the inventor of dynamite Alfred Nobel, who never conceded that his inventions were incompatible with peace, and ends with Andrew Carnegie, to whom Nobel’s Peace Prize eluded him.
Moreover, can we look back at the past to find solutions to the present, for not a day passes without the outbreak of a conflict or the failure of a peace process that is not reported in the world press.
Are the peacemakers of the past a reference point for the present, or the future?
The Nobel Committee had announced in October that it wanted ‘in its centenary year to proclaim that the only negotiable route to global peace and cooperation goes by way of the United Nations’, although the Committee was acutely aware that UN had provided the legal basis for the immediate military response to the attacks. On 12 September, the day after the Twin Tower attacks, both the UN Security Council and General Assembly had condemned them. In its resolution 1368 the Security Council defined them as ‘a threat to international peace and security’. This authorized the military response of the United States, since Article 51 of the UN Charter declares that any country has the right to defend itself if attacked until the Security Council takes measures to ensure peace and security.
Since its inception in 1901, several men, and a few women and organisations, have become Nobel laureates. There have been the ‘also ran’ ones, popularly referred to as the ‘Nobel Peace Prize Nominees’. In the first half of the twentieth century, between 1901 and 1951, some of the nominees included the likes of Adolf Hitler of Germany and Joseph Stalin of the former Soviet Union, ‘the twin demons of the twentieth century’, and also Hitler’s comic side-kick and fascist dictator Benito Mussolini of Italy.
Imperial monarchs like Wilhelm 11 of Germany, Franz Josef of Austria and Hungary, Czar Nikolai II of Russia, Alfonso XIII of Spain, Albert 1 of Belgium, and Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, joined them on the peace list. So did the ‘Men of God’, the Popes in Rome: Benedict XV, Pius XI, and Pius XII, the last described frequently as ‘Hitler’s Pope’ for failing to save the Jews from Mussolini’s Italy, and one British historian describing the pontiff as ‘arguably the most insidiously evil churchman in modern history who did more than fail to speak out against Nazi crimes’.
The Presidents and Prime Ministers were not to be left behind in their rush for Nobel’s peace prize. Among those sharing nomination with Hitler in 1939 was his co-signatory to the infamous Munich Pact, the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Other British Prime Ministers who made it on to the list included Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George, Clement Atlee, and Ramsay MacDonald. Alexander Papanastassiou of Greece, Édouard Herriot and Pierre Laval of France, General Jan Smuts of South Africa, and Francesco Saverio Nitti of Italy became the ‘also ran’ prime ministers. Tómaš Masaryk and Edvard Beneš (that ‘little swine’ as Lloyd George described him) of Czechoslovakia, and Count Albert Apponyni of Hungary, also found their names on to the Nobel Prize Nominees List.
Laval, together with British Foreign Secretary Samuel Hoare, had developed the so-called Hoare-Laval Plan for the partition of Ethiopia between Italy and Ethiopia after Mussolini had invaded Abyssinia causing Emperor Selassie to flee to Great Britain. In 1936 both men were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1945, as leader of the Vichy government during the Second World War, Laval was convicted and executed for treason. Mussolini, whose son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano (executed by the Germans) had described the Italian dictator in a letter intended for Winston Churchill as ‘Hitler’s tragic and vile puppet’, was also executed and his mutilated body was hung by his feet from the girders of a garage roof in the Piazzale Loreto. Two days later, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in a Berlin bunker.
Meanwhile, from across the Atlantic came nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize in support of the Roosevelts: Theodore, Franklin, and Elena Roosevelt. The United States presidents included Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, Warren Harding, William Howard Taft, and Herbert Hoover. The US Secretary of States included Elihu Root, Charles Hughes, Frank Kellog, and Cordell Hull. Their counterparts in Europe included Milovan Milovanovitch of Yugoslavia, who was nominated in 1910 for his efforts to prevent the Serbian-Austrian conflict from turning into war. Similarly, Sir Edward Grey (Lord Grey of Falloden) was put forward for the Treaty of London of 1915, by which Italy joined the Allies, in the First World War. Foreign Ministers Gustav Stresemann of Germany, Astride Briand of France, and Austen Chamberlain of Great Britain later shared the prize with Kellog for signing the Lorcano Pact that guaranteed peace around Germany’s frontier, and the Briand-Kellog Pact, which ‘outlawed’ war. Stresemann’s colleague Hans Luther, the former Chancellor and German Foreign Minister, however missed out.
Many peacemakers at the Paris Peace Conference 1919, which saw the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, were also put forward as deserving candidates. They included the Aga Khan, who had strenuously fought on behalf of Turkey in the Treaty of Sèvres, to the economist John Maynard Kenyes, who had resigned in disgust at the final reparations settlement, describing it as ‘Carthaginian Peace’ in his The Economic Consequences of Peace, to Lord Cecil of Chelwood and the Italian Vittorio Scialoja, for their roles in the creation of the League of Nations.
Even some military generals found themselves among their peace adversaries. In 1949 the American Major General Frank Ross McCoy was nominated for democratising Japan after the Second World War. From Germany came the nomination of Baron Paul von Schoenaich, a former army officer and president of the German Peace Association, who had become an opponent of war and advocated democracy, pacifism, and radical disarmament. And from Britain came the name of Brigadier-General and jurist John Hartman Morgan, who was nominated for his efforts to disarm Germany between 1919 and 1923, and for his plans after the World War Two. And General Dwight Eisenhower, later President but who in 1944 was the Supreme Commander of the troops invading France.
Moreover, while Hitler’s name was to be eternally linked to infamy, genocide, and mass murder, some of his countrymen could still be considered by their international admirers as the peacemakers: the 1936 Nobel laureate Carl von Ossietzky, the journalist and pacifist who died in Hitler’s concentration camp, pacifists like Ludwig Quidde, and the eugenicist and biologist Alfred Ploetz, the founder of racial hygiene in Germany, who was nominated for warning against biological consequences that inflicted on human reproduction.
Although men of war and men of peace dominated the world, a few courageous women like Jane Addams, Emily Balch, and Baroness Bertha von Suttner found their voices heard in the deliberations of the Nobel Committee. All three were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize before the first half of the twentieth century. If politicians, presidents, and prime ministers grabbed international headlines, there were scores of other soldiers of peace, including Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boys Scout, who made it to the Nobel Peace Prize Nominees list. Among them was the most famous and richest of them all – Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish born American steel magnate.
This book, accordingly, focuses on Carnegie, his peace activities, the founding of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and his failure to receive Alfred Nobel’s peace prize. Carnegie was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1908, 1911, and 1913, and yet the story has never as yet been related at all. Nor has any considerable attempt been made as yet to explore his peace activities, the role of CEIP, which he founded to promote international peace and harmony, and his relationship with the Nobel Peace laureates.
The eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm forcefully argued in his classic The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 that preparations for war became vastly more expensive, especially as states competed to keep ahead of, or at least to avoid falling behind, each other. This arms race began in a particularly modest way in the later 1880s, and accelerated in the new century, particularly in the last ten years before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. One consequence, he continued, of such vast expenditures was they required either higher taxes, or inflationary borrowing or both. But an equally obvious, though often overlooked consequence, was that they increasingly made death for various fatherlands a by-product of large-scale industry.
Hobsbawn however pointed out that two men in particular, ‘Alfred Nobel and Andrew Carnegie, two capitalists who knew what had made them millionaires in explosives and steel respectively, tried to compensate by devoting part of their wealth to the cause of peace’. In this, Hobsbawm concludes, ‘they were untypical’. Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, whose main objective was the elimination of war in international relations, created the Peace Prize and Carnegie, the steel magnate, founded the Endowment for International Peace with the professed aim ‘to hasten the abolition of international war, the foulest blot upon our civilisation’. He had also concluded that war was wasteful and disruptive to international commerce.
And yet the 21st Century is already engulfed in wars, ethnic conflicts, and the increase in nuclear arms race. Governments, organisations, statesmen, church leaders, and ordinary and men and women are therefore once again being challenged to find ways and means to organize peace. In our never ending quest and hope for a peaceful 21st Century, it would be worth recalling two extraordinary but controversial advocates of peace - Alfred Nobel and Andrew Carnegie - who provided the opportunity and recognition to those who believed, and continue to believe, in peace, justice, and a stable world order. After all, the 20th Century was one of the bloodiest that had also challenged and tested the will and power of those who never lost faith in working towards a world without war. If the last century was the century of wars, it was also the century of celebrations and anniversaries in the organization for peace.
The year 1996, especially, is of significance, in the context of this study. On 10 December 1996 it was the 100th death anniversary of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist, who wrote his will on 27 November 1895 in the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris, establishing the Nobel Peace Prize, hailed as the ‘greatest honour a man can receive in this world’.
The year 1995, and onward, was also the years of anniversaries. For example, 1995 marked the ninetieth anniversary of the formal opening of The Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo established ‘to follow the development of international relations, especially the work for their peaceful adjustment, and thereby to guide the [Nobel] Committee in the matter of the award of the [Nobel] Peace Prize’. The Nobel Committee building near the gardens of the Royal Palace in Oslo, according to one veteran chronicler of the Nobel Peace Prize, Irwin Abrams, ‘is a dignified structure, but modest indeed compared to the grandiose Palace of Peace that Andrew Carnegie built a few years later in The Hague for the Permanent Court of Arbitration’. Today, the Peace Palace is host to The International Court of Justice, the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, The Permanent Court of Arbitration, The Hague Academy of International Law, and the Peace Palace Library.
That year also marked the one hundred and sixtieth anniversary of the birth of Carnegie, who was born on 25 November 1835, into a family of disfranchised craftsman and Chartists, in the ancient Scottish town of Dunfermline. Moreover, 14 December 1995 was the eighty-fifth anniversary of the deed of gift by Carnegie to his Trustees establishing the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace [CEIP]. Further, the year 1997 also marked the fiftieth anniversary of the CEIP's failed attempt to win the 1947 Nobel Peace Prize.
The Austrian peace activist and Alfred Nobel’s former secretary, Countess Bertha von Suttner, for example, was also an acquaintance of Carnegie. She became the first woman in 1905 to become a Nobel laureate. Generally regarded as the one who stimulated both Nobel and Carnegie’s interests in peace, the two men, independently of one another, rewarded her during her last years: she used Nobel’s 1905 peace prize money to support herself and in the last years the Countess received a pension from Carnegie.
The book moreover recounts how Nobel and Carnegie reached the same goals: renunciation of war and the advocacy of international peace, arbitration, and disarmament. Nobel established the Peace Prize and Carnegie gave away his fortune in the pursuit of peace. Carnegie hoped that men would some day view ‘those machines made expressly for the destruction of their fellow men only in the Museum, as relics of a barbarous age’. Between 1904 and 1919, as one of Carnegie’s biographers points out, he gave more than £25,250 to fund a ‘Temple of Peace’ and major foundations concerned with peace and ‘the heroes of peace’.
Nobel, on the other hand, while establishing the peace prize, ‘gave the world thirty years to found a system of peace or else revert to barbarism, but he cherished the hope that within that time the enlightening effects of scientific progress would rid the earth of war’. Briefly, in his will of 1895, Alfred Nobel wanted exceptional people to be honoured for their significant contributions in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and work for peace. He stipulated that Swedish institutions should award the scientific prizes and the prize for literature. The award for the peace prize was left to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, appointed by the Norwegian Storting or Parliament, to award an annual prize to people and institutions ‘who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses’.
First awarded in 1901, the peace prize went to Jean Henri Dunant, the Swiss founder of Red Cross and originator of the Geneva Convention, and to Frederic Passy, the doyen of the pre-1914 peace movement and founder and president of the first French peace society. In subsequent years there have also been some spectacular omissions for the Nobel Peace Prize: Mahatma Gandhi, the greatest proponent of non-violence, and the Russian pacifist Count Leo Tolstoy, the author of the magisterial War and Peace. Many others generally considered as ‘advocates of peace’ failed to make it on to the winner’s list.
This book does not claim that Carnegie deserved Nobel’s peace prize but explores Carnegie’s advocacy for international arbitration, justice, world peace, and the abolition of war. It is, however, anchored in his unsuccessful attempts to win the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize. But the book is more: it follows the activities of statesmen and peace advocates at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 who drew up the Treaty of Versailles, and created the League of Nations that was to promote international co-operation and to achieve international peace and security. It examines why one of those at the Conference, President Woodrow Wilson, was rewarded with a Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the founding of the League while others like British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, was overlooked.
And so was Carnegie, the most active peace campaigner, who embodied everything the Nobel Peace Prize demanded and yet was passed over three times during his lifetime. He had once written to Theodore Roosevelt, who had become the first statesmen to receive the prize in 1906 for mediating the Russo-Japanese War: ‘The man who passes into history as the chief agent in banishing war or even lessening war, the great evil of his day, is to stand for all time among the foremost benefactors. Only as the strongest apostle of peace of your day, you can take permanent rank with the very few immortals whom the tooth of time is not to gnaw into oblivion.’
In reminding Roosevelt, Carnegie was portraying something of his own life and character as an active peace crusader. In general, although Carnegie never became a Nobel laureate, in spirit and action he did share the characteristics of Alfred Nobel who has been described as ‘the pessimist with the optimistic program, the realist whose efforts were based on idealistic premises’.
The pages that follow tell the story of two of the world’s remarkable millionaire pacifists but within the framework of war and peace, and the Nobel Peace Prize which celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2001. The book confines itself to the first half of the twentieth century, for it was one of the bloodiest that tested the will and staying power of the peacemakers, among them Carnegie, the millionaire pacifist. The struggle is not, of course, over yet. The book begins with the inventor of dynamite Alfred Nobel, who never conceded that his inventions were incompatible with peace, and ends with Andrew Carnegie, to whom Nobel’s Peace Prize eluded him.
Moreover, can we look back at the past to find solutions to the present, for not a day passes without the outbreak of a conflict or the failure of a peace process that is not reported in the world press.
Are the peacemakers of the past a reference point for the present, or the future?
"The Norwegian Nobel Committee rarely raises its voice. Our style is largely sober. But it is a long time since the committee was concerned with such fundamental questions as this year. Desmond Tutu, Peace Prize Laureate in 1984, put it as follows in Tromsø's Arctic Cathedral in connection with World Environment Day on the 5th of June: "To ignore the challenge of global warming may be criminal. It certainly is disobeying God. It is sin. The future of our fragile, beautiful planet is in our hands. We are stewards of God's creation". We congratulate the IPCC and Al Gore on receiving this year's Peace Prize. We thank you for what you have done for mother earth, and wish you further success in a task that is so vital to us all. Action is needed now. Climate changes are already moving beyond human control."
The Norwegian Nobel Committee, 2007
Qualified Nominators for the Nobel Peace Prize
Revised September 2016 by Norwegian Nobel Committe
According to the statutes of the Nobel Foundation, a nomination is considered valid if it is submitted by a person who falls within one of the following categories:
• Members of national assemblies and national governments (cabinet members/ministers) of sovereign states as well as current heads of states
• Members of The International Court of Justice in The Hague and The Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague
• Members of Institut de Droit International
• University professors, professors emerita and associate professors of history, social sciences, law, philosophy, theology, and religion; university rectors and university directors (or their equivalents); directors of peace research institutes and foreign policy institutes
• Persons who have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
• Members of the main board of directors or its equivalent for organizations that have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
• Current and former members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee (proposals by current members of the Committee to be submitted no later than at the first meeting of the Committee after 1 February)
• Former advisers to the Norwegian Nobel Committee
Revised September 2016 by Norwegian Nobel Committe
According to the statutes of the Nobel Foundation, a nomination is considered valid if it is submitted by a person who falls within one of the following categories:
• Members of national assemblies and national governments (cabinet members/ministers) of sovereign states as well as current heads of states
• Members of The International Court of Justice in The Hague and The Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague
• Members of Institut de Droit International
• University professors, professors emerita and associate professors of history, social sciences, law, philosophy, theology, and religion; university rectors and university directors (or their equivalents); directors of peace research institutes and foreign policy institutes
• Persons who have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
• Members of the main board of directors or its equivalent for organizations that have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
• Current and former members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee (proposals by current members of the Committee to be submitted no later than at the first meeting of the Committee after 1 February)
• Former advisers to the Norwegian Nobel Committee
The death of a high-profile Papua New Guinean journalist at the age of 41 has sparked a national debate about the country’s continuing epidemic of violence against women, after graphic photographs were shown at her funeral.
Family members of Rosalyn Albaniel Evara, who was an editor at PNG’s largest newspaper, have received support from the Port Moresby governor for their calls for a police investigation into her death.
Evara died last week after she collapsed at her Port Moresby home, and was rushed to hospital. The Post-Courier journalist was farewelled at a funeral in Port Moresby on Monday, where an aunt, Mary Albaniel, used her eulogy to allege Evara had been violently assaulted.
Albaniel, wearing a “say no to violence” T-shirt, showed photographs of her battered body and alleged a history of abuse.
“When I heard that you died, I regretted that I should have done more than just talk to you, but how?” said Albaniel.
She said they discovered the bruises when preparing Evara’s body, and decided to take photos in the hope it may lead to criminal prosecution.
Albaniel told the Guardian she felt compelled to raise the allegations at the funeral, which was attended by Evara’s husband.
“I’m using the same surname as the deceased’s maiden name. To continue advocating in my job as a defender of human rights would be useless if I can’t get justice done,” she said.
“I strongly advocate against all forms of violence against women. That’s why I decided to wear my job cap yesterday.”
On Tuesday morning the Port Moresby governor, Powes Parkop, reportedly ordered the woman’s burial be deferred for a postmortem and investigation, overriding the initial wishes of Evara’s mother, who later that day decided to formally request a postmortem.
Parkop has spoken out against gender-based violence in the past, and Albaniel is a human rights and anti-violence against women campaigner.
“It’s not only in PNG. I know from my job [the attention on Evara’s death] will make a big difference, and a big step forward [in addressing gender-based violence]. Because women don’t get the full support from the men, even their own husbands and brothers,” she said.
“Men don’t understand what it means to allow justice to prevail. There is a lot of fear. I told her family and I tell the public that I am advocating against it.”
Papua New Guinea is considered to be one of the worst places in the world for violence against women and girls. Earlier this year Human Rights Watch reported little had changed, despite public promises of reform by the government.
Human Rights Watch said police and prosecutors rarely prosecuted cases against perpetrators of family violence, and the government was still yet to act on family protection legislation passed in 2013.
Evara is survived by a daughter. According to reports, two of her children had died in the past two years.
The allegations raised at Evara’s funeral received national media attention, albeit little from her former workplace.
A former editor of the Post-Courier, Alexander Rheeney, accused the paper of failing in its duty of care and failing to seek justice for Evara. He said the Post-Courier, which is owned by News Corp, belittled her death by running a story on page 16, compared with the front-page treatment given by rival paper, the National.
“Your [gender-based violence] campaigns are worthless if you cannot effect change and become champions of change by starting in your own backyard,” Rheeney said.
The Boroko police commander, Titus Bayagau, confirmed to the Guardian there was now a police investigation.
Todagia Kelola, an editor at the Post-Courier, defended the news coverage of Evara’s death.
Kelola said he had been closely involved with the family, assisting with the funeral and other arrangements, as well as mourning the loss of a colleague. He said her death had come as a shock, and he had urged the family to have a postmortem done but respected their initial wishes.
He said the paper couldn’t report the allegations raised as they were unsubstantiated without a postmortem.
“Because there was no postmortem carried out, how can I say it was a GBV case?” he said.
Asked why he had not run a front-page report like the National, Kelola said he had wanted a report to focus on Evara.
“It really hurt me because I know if I was on the outside, the story by the National was telling a really good angle. But I was more concerned to bring out the life of Rosalyn when she had arrived in the Post-Courier, and as a journalist in PNG.”
He said he was glad the family had changed their minds and was requesting a full investigation.
“I can assure you that if it’s what has been stated we will aggressively go with it. When she was alive she never told us,” he said.
In an unbylined statement, the Post-Courier rejected a “tirade of accusations” which it said “sarcastically berated and belittled Post-Courier as a leading advocator against GBV and allegedly doing nothing to stop the treatment of a passed colleague from being one such victim”.
“We have never deviated at any one time in our stated commitment as a publishing entity to be included in the fight against gender-based violence,” it said.
“Through our factual reports and news stories, law enforcement agencies and taskforces have seriously reacted and responded to many specific and referred cases we have highlighted. And indeed there have been measurable successes for many of the victims of GBV, their families, parents and siblings.” The Guardian, October 2017
Family members of Rosalyn Albaniel Evara, who was an editor at PNG’s largest newspaper, have received support from the Port Moresby governor for their calls for a police investigation into her death.
Evara died last week after she collapsed at her Port Moresby home, and was rushed to hospital. The Post-Courier journalist was farewelled at a funeral in Port Moresby on Monday, where an aunt, Mary Albaniel, used her eulogy to allege Evara had been violently assaulted.
Albaniel, wearing a “say no to violence” T-shirt, showed photographs of her battered body and alleged a history of abuse.
“When I heard that you died, I regretted that I should have done more than just talk to you, but how?” said Albaniel.
She said they discovered the bruises when preparing Evara’s body, and decided to take photos in the hope it may lead to criminal prosecution.
Albaniel told the Guardian she felt compelled to raise the allegations at the funeral, which was attended by Evara’s husband.
“I’m using the same surname as the deceased’s maiden name. To continue advocating in my job as a defender of human rights would be useless if I can’t get justice done,” she said.
“I strongly advocate against all forms of violence against women. That’s why I decided to wear my job cap yesterday.”
On Tuesday morning the Port Moresby governor, Powes Parkop, reportedly ordered the woman’s burial be deferred for a postmortem and investigation, overriding the initial wishes of Evara’s mother, who later that day decided to formally request a postmortem.
Parkop has spoken out against gender-based violence in the past, and Albaniel is a human rights and anti-violence against women campaigner.
“It’s not only in PNG. I know from my job [the attention on Evara’s death] will make a big difference, and a big step forward [in addressing gender-based violence]. Because women don’t get the full support from the men, even their own husbands and brothers,” she said.
“Men don’t understand what it means to allow justice to prevail. There is a lot of fear. I told her family and I tell the public that I am advocating against it.”
Papua New Guinea is considered to be one of the worst places in the world for violence against women and girls. Earlier this year Human Rights Watch reported little had changed, despite public promises of reform by the government.
Human Rights Watch said police and prosecutors rarely prosecuted cases against perpetrators of family violence, and the government was still yet to act on family protection legislation passed in 2013.
Evara is survived by a daughter. According to reports, two of her children had died in the past two years.
The allegations raised at Evara’s funeral received national media attention, albeit little from her former workplace.
A former editor of the Post-Courier, Alexander Rheeney, accused the paper of failing in its duty of care and failing to seek justice for Evara. He said the Post-Courier, which is owned by News Corp, belittled her death by running a story on page 16, compared with the front-page treatment given by rival paper, the National.
“Your [gender-based violence] campaigns are worthless if you cannot effect change and become champions of change by starting in your own backyard,” Rheeney said.
The Boroko police commander, Titus Bayagau, confirmed to the Guardian there was now a police investigation.
Todagia Kelola, an editor at the Post-Courier, defended the news coverage of Evara’s death.
Kelola said he had been closely involved with the family, assisting with the funeral and other arrangements, as well as mourning the loss of a colleague. He said her death had come as a shock, and he had urged the family to have a postmortem done but respected their initial wishes.
He said the paper couldn’t report the allegations raised as they were unsubstantiated without a postmortem.
“Because there was no postmortem carried out, how can I say it was a GBV case?” he said.
Asked why he had not run a front-page report like the National, Kelola said he had wanted a report to focus on Evara.
“It really hurt me because I know if I was on the outside, the story by the National was telling a really good angle. But I was more concerned to bring out the life of Rosalyn when she had arrived in the Post-Courier, and as a journalist in PNG.”
He said he was glad the family had changed their minds and was requesting a full investigation.
“I can assure you that if it’s what has been stated we will aggressively go with it. When she was alive she never told us,” he said.
In an unbylined statement, the Post-Courier rejected a “tirade of accusations” which it said “sarcastically berated and belittled Post-Courier as a leading advocator against GBV and allegedly doing nothing to stop the treatment of a passed colleague from being one such victim”.
“We have never deviated at any one time in our stated commitment as a publishing entity to be included in the fight against gender-based violence,” it said.
“Through our factual reports and news stories, law enforcement agencies and taskforces have seriously reacted and responded to many specific and referred cases we have highlighted. And indeed there have been measurable successes for many of the victims of GBV, their families, parents and siblings.” The Guardian, October 2017
The (not so) mysterious death of Rosalyn Albaniel Evara
"Some of her co-workers [on Post-Courier] would take her in after she had been beaten and patch her up – supplying tea and sympathy. Rosalyn begged them not to report her husband’s assaults to the police, as she was afraid for her daughter. And they didn’t. But they all knew. Her beatings were a likely cause of her death – and they all knew..."
As an Australian tax-payer, I object to my hard-earned tax dollars going to a foreign government that tacitly condones the wholesale abuse of half of their population – and then does it with my money.
It is time that international sanctions were applied to Papua New Guinea – time to hit them where it will hurt – in the money pocket. The international community need to express their disgust at the ongoing human rights abuses in PNG – we (the international community) can stop this, even if they won’t.
Let’s make this stop at Rosalyn Albaniel.
Her Story
She died suddenly. People were shocked.
“But I only just saw her yesterday,” and “I was to meet with her Monday,” they wrote incredulously.
For all intents and purposes, for the Senior Business Journalist with one of Papua New Guinea’s leading newspapers, Post Courier, it was ‘business as usual…until she died, that is.
There were outpourings of grief on social media and no doubt many more in the physical world. If there’s one thing that Papua New Guineans do well it is expressing their grief.
“Nooooo – it cannot be true,”
“Why did you leave us so soon?”
they write on social media in the case of loss. And at funerals, even men are heard (expected, even) to wail and cry out “Why, Lord?”
But the shocking truth is, that they had no need to ask “why,” they knew the answer – but they weren’t telling.
Rosalyn Albaniel Evara had been suffering ongoing physical abuse. Her husband often beat her senseless.
The injuries that she sustained are the probable cause of a suspected brain haemorrhage that killed her.
THEY KNEW
It is time that international sanctions were applied to Papua New Guinea – time to hit them where it will hurt – in the money pocket. The international community need to express their disgust at the ongoing human rights abuses in PNG – we (the international community) can stop this, even if they won’t.
Let’s make this stop at Rosalyn Albaniel.
Her Story
She died suddenly. People were shocked.
“But I only just saw her yesterday,” and “I was to meet with her Monday,” they wrote incredulously.
For all intents and purposes, for the Senior Business Journalist with one of Papua New Guinea’s leading newspapers, Post Courier, it was ‘business as usual…until she died, that is.
There were outpourings of grief on social media and no doubt many more in the physical world. If there’s one thing that Papua New Guineans do well it is expressing their grief.
“Nooooo – it cannot be true,”
“Why did you leave us so soon?”
they write on social media in the case of loss. And at funerals, even men are heard (expected, even) to wail and cry out “Why, Lord?”
But the shocking truth is, that they had no need to ask “why,” they knew the answer – but they weren’t telling.
Rosalyn Albaniel Evara had been suffering ongoing physical abuse. Her husband often beat her senseless.
The injuries that she sustained are the probable cause of a suspected brain haemorrhage that killed her.
THEY KNEW
The ongoing beatings would take place within the gated accommodation compound of the employees of Post Courier.
I once went to this complex in Port Moresby to drop off a colleague (a Post Courier journalist), who lived there. Whilst I never went inside the building, my impressions of the complex were that it looked like a block of cheap motel units of flimsy construction.
Living cheek by jowl with your co-workers in this way would not offer much in the way of privacy – and it didn’t. All witnessed the beatings that Rosalyn endured – if not by sight, certainly they would have heard them.
Some of her co-workers would take her in after she had been beaten and patch her up – supplying tea and sympathy. Rosalyn begged them not to report her husband’s assaults to the police, as she was afraid for her daughter. And they didn’t. But they all knew.
Her beatings were a likely cause of her death – and they all knew.
In the wake of her passing, not one word was reported by the Post Courier about the circumstances surrounding her death – yet they all knew.
They attended her funeral yesterday, they sat there and grieved for her, yet they did not utter a word of what they knew. Amongst the grievers would have been her husband. They sat beside him even though they knew what he’d done.
It took a brave lady, Rosalyn’s aunt, Mary Albaniel, to tell all. She chose to tell it at the funeral. It was a tale of sustained abuse and beatings leading to her niece’s death.
Mary Albaniel also had post mortem pictures she had taken of her niece’s body – and she showed these too. Rosalyn’s body was covered with the evidence of her husband’s abuse.
Yet with her bruised and battered body, Rosalyn turned up for work each day and performed her journalistic duties on behalf of Post Courier, her employer – her clothes hiding most of the evidence of her abuse.
Everyone considered Rosalyn Albaniel a good journalist who never failed in her duties to Post Courier – however, as a media outlet wedded to the idea of ‘the fourth estate’ whereby the media are tasked with a duty to expose wrongdoing, Post Courier surely failed Rosalyn.
Why wasn’t the perpetrator stopped (even if he wasn’t formally charged)?
Tea and sympathy for the victim before she’s sent packing back to her tormentor for more of the same, just doesn’t cut it.
Yet, the fault for her death must surely lie with the person who caused it – and that wasn’t her colleagues at Post Courier. But it could have been her husband.
Post Courier employees and others who knew were merely upholding a sick tradition that has emerged in PNG society whereby violence against women has become normalised and where very few men are ever prosecuted for violence perpetrated on women – especially ones deemed to ‘belong’ to the men through an intimate relationship or those that are said to be witches (yes, you heard right – they still burn witches alive in PNG). However, truth be told, women are fair game for men in most circumstances and age is no barrier.
THE SICK TRADITION
When Rosalyn’s Aunty Mary exposed what Post Courier should have at her niece’s funeral, she was wearing an orange T Shirt that said “No to violence against women.”
It was the T Shirt that we wore when we demonstrated against gender-based violence in Port Moresby on 16 December 2016. It was, we thought, a landmark day.
Together with the Governor of the National Capital District (wherein Port Moresby resides) Powes Parkop, who is arguably the sole champion of the cause in the PNG parliament, we managed to put enough pressure on the PNG government that the National Executive Council (PNGs caucus) passed a strategy for combating violence against women that had been languishing in a government department for over 15 months. The irony of that situation was that the negligent minister overseeing that department was one of only three women in the PNG parliament at the time (there are none in this current line up).
The catalyst for the demonstration was a breathtakingly violent incident in the Highlands of PNG.
There was a report of a young woman suspected of cheating on her husband for which her husband sought revenge. He arrived in her village with up to six of his friends and family and they chopped off both her legs with bush knives (machetes) that men habitually like to carry – a bit like Americans like to carry their guns.
I don’t know whether she survived or whether anything was done to those who committed this act because neither matter a damn in Papua New Guinea. She was a woman, and one suspected of being wanton – she got what she’d deserved. As for the men, well, they had every right, didn’t they? That’s the PNG attitude.
It is what enabled Rosalyn’s colleagues to turn a blind eye to her habitual, and clearly savage beatings – even though they are media and are expressly meant to do the opposite. The sick tradition of condoning or ignoring violence against women prevailed.
Since that fateful day last December, not much has changed. Apparently, implementing government strategies take time – and time is something that the PNG parliament seems to have plenty of. Unfortunately time ran out for Rosalyn.
Rest in peace, my esteemed colleague, this journalist is aware of her obligations.
IN THE FINAL ANALYSIS
The female half of the population of PNG are placed in such low esteem that no one cares when she is brutalized.
It is a national emergency treated by the government as a second or third tier priority, if indeed a priority at all or one which deserves more than lip service. People have given up expecting that anything can or will be any different; that anything will change.
But they are wrong. It must be changed. It’s an abomination that needs resources thrown at it.
Yet the PNG government are blazé because there are no votes in it for them and government in PNG is all about hanging onto power.
Besides, many in parliament would have a problem casting the first stone for the reason that one survey (disputed) found that 70% of PNGeans beat their wives. That would make 78 out of 111 MPs potentially wife beaters themselves.
It is time the PNG government was given an urgent imperative to tackle this problem as their priority. To shake them awake from their smug reverie that it’s not their problem because they are men. Let’s do it.
I once went to this complex in Port Moresby to drop off a colleague (a Post Courier journalist), who lived there. Whilst I never went inside the building, my impressions of the complex were that it looked like a block of cheap motel units of flimsy construction.
Living cheek by jowl with your co-workers in this way would not offer much in the way of privacy – and it didn’t. All witnessed the beatings that Rosalyn endured – if not by sight, certainly they would have heard them.
Some of her co-workers would take her in after she had been beaten and patch her up – supplying tea and sympathy. Rosalyn begged them not to report her husband’s assaults to the police, as she was afraid for her daughter. And they didn’t. But they all knew.
Her beatings were a likely cause of her death – and they all knew.
In the wake of her passing, not one word was reported by the Post Courier about the circumstances surrounding her death – yet they all knew.
They attended her funeral yesterday, they sat there and grieved for her, yet they did not utter a word of what they knew. Amongst the grievers would have been her husband. They sat beside him even though they knew what he’d done.
It took a brave lady, Rosalyn’s aunt, Mary Albaniel, to tell all. She chose to tell it at the funeral. It was a tale of sustained abuse and beatings leading to her niece’s death.
Mary Albaniel also had post mortem pictures she had taken of her niece’s body – and she showed these too. Rosalyn’s body was covered with the evidence of her husband’s abuse.
Yet with her bruised and battered body, Rosalyn turned up for work each day and performed her journalistic duties on behalf of Post Courier, her employer – her clothes hiding most of the evidence of her abuse.
Everyone considered Rosalyn Albaniel a good journalist who never failed in her duties to Post Courier – however, as a media outlet wedded to the idea of ‘the fourth estate’ whereby the media are tasked with a duty to expose wrongdoing, Post Courier surely failed Rosalyn.
Why wasn’t the perpetrator stopped (even if he wasn’t formally charged)?
Tea and sympathy for the victim before she’s sent packing back to her tormentor for more of the same, just doesn’t cut it.
Yet, the fault for her death must surely lie with the person who caused it – and that wasn’t her colleagues at Post Courier. But it could have been her husband.
Post Courier employees and others who knew were merely upholding a sick tradition that has emerged in PNG society whereby violence against women has become normalised and where very few men are ever prosecuted for violence perpetrated on women – especially ones deemed to ‘belong’ to the men through an intimate relationship or those that are said to be witches (yes, you heard right – they still burn witches alive in PNG). However, truth be told, women are fair game for men in most circumstances and age is no barrier.
THE SICK TRADITION
When Rosalyn’s Aunty Mary exposed what Post Courier should have at her niece’s funeral, she was wearing an orange T Shirt that said “No to violence against women.”
It was the T Shirt that we wore when we demonstrated against gender-based violence in Port Moresby on 16 December 2016. It was, we thought, a landmark day.
Together with the Governor of the National Capital District (wherein Port Moresby resides) Powes Parkop, who is arguably the sole champion of the cause in the PNG parliament, we managed to put enough pressure on the PNG government that the National Executive Council (PNGs caucus) passed a strategy for combating violence against women that had been languishing in a government department for over 15 months. The irony of that situation was that the negligent minister overseeing that department was one of only three women in the PNG parliament at the time (there are none in this current line up).
The catalyst for the demonstration was a breathtakingly violent incident in the Highlands of PNG.
There was a report of a young woman suspected of cheating on her husband for which her husband sought revenge. He arrived in her village with up to six of his friends and family and they chopped off both her legs with bush knives (machetes) that men habitually like to carry – a bit like Americans like to carry their guns.
I don’t know whether she survived or whether anything was done to those who committed this act because neither matter a damn in Papua New Guinea. She was a woman, and one suspected of being wanton – she got what she’d deserved. As for the men, well, they had every right, didn’t they? That’s the PNG attitude.
It is what enabled Rosalyn’s colleagues to turn a blind eye to her habitual, and clearly savage beatings – even though they are media and are expressly meant to do the opposite. The sick tradition of condoning or ignoring violence against women prevailed.
Since that fateful day last December, not much has changed. Apparently, implementing government strategies take time – and time is something that the PNG parliament seems to have plenty of. Unfortunately time ran out for Rosalyn.
Rest in peace, my esteemed colleague, this journalist is aware of her obligations.
IN THE FINAL ANALYSIS
The female half of the population of PNG are placed in such low esteem that no one cares when she is brutalized.
It is a national emergency treated by the government as a second or third tier priority, if indeed a priority at all or one which deserves more than lip service. People have given up expecting that anything can or will be any different; that anything will change.
But they are wrong. It must be changed. It’s an abomination that needs resources thrown at it.
Yet the PNG government are blazé because there are no votes in it for them and government in PNG is all about hanging onto power.
Besides, many in parliament would have a problem casting the first stone for the reason that one survey (disputed) found that 70% of PNGeans beat their wives. That would make 78 out of 111 MPs potentially wife beaters themselves.
It is time the PNG government was given an urgent imperative to tackle this problem as their priority. To shake them awake from their smug reverie that it’s not their problem because they are men. Let’s do it.
Fiji Labour Party says the Fiji Police Force cannot take up offers of a free ride by any bus company as it will be tantamount to accepting an inducement.
“No State institution can allow its integrity and independence to be comprised by accepting offers of such nature,” said Labour Leader Mahendra Chaudhry.
He was referring to media reports (FT 30.10) that NFP parliamentarian Parmod Chand announced at the Party’s campaign meeting in Labasa on Saturday that from today Police officers in uniform will be allowed free travel on buses owned by Parmod Enterprise Ltd. if they need to go for an investigation.
Mr Chaudhry has also questioned the timing of the offer. “This is clearly a vote buying tactic, announced at a political campaign meeting just months before an election.”
“Shortage of transport has been a chronic problem within the Police Force for years. Why is the offer being made now and that at a political meeting? In any case, the Police Force cannot accept such inducements,” Mr Chaudhry said.
FLP calls on the Electoral Commission to investigate this sort of vote buying tactics as they contravene the Electoral Act.
“These corrupt practices need to be nipped in the bud before they contaminate our entire electoral process. The EC must also investigate the $1000 cash cheques being handed out by the Prime Minister.
“These are blatant vote buying tactics which also contravene the Electoral Act. There is no criteria, no transparency in the handing out of these moneys. Nor is there any follow up to see that it is utilized for the purpose given.
“It is an abuse of the Government of India funding for micro finance. I am sure the Indian Government did not mean the fund to be used for political purposes,” Mr Chaudhry said.
“No State institution can allow its integrity and independence to be comprised by accepting offers of such nature,” said Labour Leader Mahendra Chaudhry.
He was referring to media reports (FT 30.10) that NFP parliamentarian Parmod Chand announced at the Party’s campaign meeting in Labasa on Saturday that from today Police officers in uniform will be allowed free travel on buses owned by Parmod Enterprise Ltd. if they need to go for an investigation.
Mr Chaudhry has also questioned the timing of the offer. “This is clearly a vote buying tactic, announced at a political campaign meeting just months before an election.”
“Shortage of transport has been a chronic problem within the Police Force for years. Why is the offer being made now and that at a political meeting? In any case, the Police Force cannot accept such inducements,” Mr Chaudhry said.
FLP calls on the Electoral Commission to investigate this sort of vote buying tactics as they contravene the Electoral Act.
“These corrupt practices need to be nipped in the bud before they contaminate our entire electoral process. The EC must also investigate the $1000 cash cheques being handed out by the Prime Minister.
“These are blatant vote buying tactics which also contravene the Electoral Act. There is no criteria, no transparency in the handing out of these moneys. Nor is there any follow up to see that it is utilized for the purpose given.
“It is an abuse of the Government of India funding for micro finance. I am sure the Indian Government did not mean the fund to be used for political purposes,” Mr Chaudhry said.
RAJENDRA Chaudhry slams "LAMU SONA" native Fijians silence over torture and assault video on YOU TUBE:
''My question: are you going to just sit there like lamusonas or do something about it?...Nothing - and show the other races in Fiji that you are real lamusonas and to the world that you are a race of peoples who have no guts, commitment and dedication to stand up to wrong doing to your own race...Or are you going to grow some balls and take on the regime on this and other issues affecting your race?"
ALL THAT GLITTERS IS TO FOOL: Coupist and Sodelpa leader Sitiveni Rabuka [photo below] in Brisbane, Australia, last week promising 'heaven' to Fiji while waxing lyrical about his 'illustrious military career' to his cheering overseas mob. But only last year he was falsely accusing another fellow military officer, now residing in Brisbane - JIM SANDAY - of persuading him [Rabuka] to execute the coup. SANDAY denied it
Last year Rabuka told a Commonwealth Oral Histories project recording momentous events in Commonwealth history that he only executed the coup after a 'KAI LOMA' army officer - Lt Colonel Jim Sanday, the then RFMF Chief-of-Staff, told him to DO IT.
Sanday denied Rabuka's claims in June 2016 after we had published the Rabuka interview
[SHIFTING BLAME! Rabuka: “Either you or the Commander have got to do this. I can’t do it: I’m KAI LOMA, I’m a white European [JIM SANDY].”
Bula Victor,
My attention has been brought to your post above by some of my friends who follow your site.
For the record, I categorically deny that I did utter those words.
If I did, then it implies I had foreknowledge of the coup.
I had no pre-knowledge and was never involved in the 1987 coup plot.
With respect
Jim Sanday
Brisbane, Australia
From Fijileaks archive, 2016:
The then Chief of Staff Jim Sanday had stood before Rabuka shortly after the 14 May 1987 coup and had ordered him (Rabuka) to hand to him (Sanday) his (Rabuka's) 9mm Browning pistol and to empty the NINE bullets if he wanted to enter Government House to speak to the Governor-General Ratu Sir Penaia Ganilau...Rabuka sheepishly complied and in Sanday's presence, unloaded the bullets.
In retaliation, Rabuka denied Sanday the Fiji Republic Medal because he [Sanday] did NOT support the 1987 coups - Rabuka promoted himself (told Ratu Penaia) to promote him as Major-General of the RFMF
In his Commonwealth Oral History Project interview Sitiveni Rabuka claimed that it was Sanday who had asked him to carry out the 1987 coups. Replying, Sanday has denied the claim. In the same interview Rabuka also claimed that he had deliberately set up an interview between Sanday and Ratu Penaia so he (Rabuka) could go ahead with his coup plan.
But we can disclose for the first time what has not been spoken about or revealed by Rabuka in his autobiography No Other Way and the sanctioned biography Rabuka of Fiji.
As we know, Rabuka had rocked up to Government House on 14 May 1987 after the coup at 10.00am. A day before, he had arranged for his immediate superior Lt-Colonel Sanday to represent him for a briefing meeting on national security with Ratu Penaia. In fact, Rabuka had set up the meeting through Ratu Penaia's ADC Lesi Korovavala, a third class ambitious and unimpressive young officer. It was Korovavala who had rung Sanday's wife on 13 May to arrange the meeting.
A Fijileaks investigation reveal that when Rabuka turned up to Government House, Sanday went out to meet him before he [Rabuka] went in to see Ratu Penaia. Sanday saw that he (Rabuka) had a 9mm Browning pistol in his pocket. He had arrived with his escort of soldiers, some of whom were members of the Army Rugby 1st XV. Sanday was President of the Army Rugby Club and they turned away out of shame when Sanday went out to meet them.
As his life time Army buddy and as his Commanding Officer at the time, and, in the best traditions of a professional military officer that Sanday was, he invited the coupist Rabuka to remove the pistol from his coat pocket and unload it as there was no need for him to take a loaded pistol into discussions with the Queens representative in Fiji.
Rabuka sheepishly complied and in Sanday's presence unloaded nine (x9) 9mm rounds from the magazine of the 9mm Browning pistol which he carried with him to Government House.
Sanday realized there and then, that his dear Army buddy that he had joined the Army together with in January 1968, and in whom Sanday had given him his (Sanday's) complete trust, had a darker side to his character that was prepared to shaft his closest buddies in his quest for his self-serving quest for national leadership.
The coupster never forgave Sanday. When Rabuka introduced the Fiji Republic Medal, Sanday was told by senior officers loyal to Rabuka that he was not entitled to it because he did not support the coup. So Sanday told them to shove that medal up where the sun don't shine. And, Sanday has never worn that medal since.
But we can disclose for the first time what has not been spoken about or revealed by Rabuka in his autobiography No Other Way and the sanctioned biography Rabuka of Fiji.
As we know, Rabuka had rocked up to Government House on 14 May 1987 after the coup at 10.00am. A day before, he had arranged for his immediate superior Lt-Colonel Sanday to represent him for a briefing meeting on national security with Ratu Penaia. In fact, Rabuka had set up the meeting through Ratu Penaia's ADC Lesi Korovavala, a third class ambitious and unimpressive young officer. It was Korovavala who had rung Sanday's wife on 13 May to arrange the meeting.
A Fijileaks investigation reveal that when Rabuka turned up to Government House, Sanday went out to meet him before he [Rabuka] went in to see Ratu Penaia. Sanday saw that he (Rabuka) had a 9mm Browning pistol in his pocket. He had arrived with his escort of soldiers, some of whom were members of the Army Rugby 1st XV. Sanday was President of the Army Rugby Club and they turned away out of shame when Sanday went out to meet them.
As his life time Army buddy and as his Commanding Officer at the time, and, in the best traditions of a professional military officer that Sanday was, he invited the coupist Rabuka to remove the pistol from his coat pocket and unload it as there was no need for him to take a loaded pistol into discussions with the Queens representative in Fiji.
Rabuka sheepishly complied and in Sanday's presence unloaded nine (x9) 9mm rounds from the magazine of the 9mm Browning pistol which he carried with him to Government House.
Sanday realized there and then, that his dear Army buddy that he had joined the Army together with in January 1968, and in whom Sanday had given him his (Sanday's) complete trust, had a darker side to his character that was prepared to shaft his closest buddies in his quest for his self-serving quest for national leadership.
The coupster never forgave Sanday. When Rabuka introduced the Fiji Republic Medal, Sanday was told by senior officers loyal to Rabuka that he was not entitled to it because he did not support the coup. So Sanday told them to shove that medal up where the sun don't shine. And, Sanday has never worn that medal since.
The Mess Up with Officers Mess Fund saw Jim Sanday jump ahead of Sitiveni Rabuka in career terms
OPERATION KIDACALA |
"During a period when he was Secretary/Treasurer for the Mess, Rabuka found himself in serious trouble. He was also running the books for the Vanua Levu Club, a social club for men from his region. The men came to borrow on their account, which they paid back on pay-day with a slight interest charge. When the Club money ran out, and to satisfy the requests of his Club members, Rabuka used funds from the Mess account to run the Club accounts...Unfortunately for him, a spot audit was run on the Mess account and he was discovered. Unbeknown to him his superior officer, Colonel Paul Manueli, ordered the audit in order to stop, once and for all, the traditional misuse of the Mess accounts. Several of his superiors wanted him court-martialed but Manueli was adamant, if the young officer was to be tried, then he wanted the President of the Mess to also face court-martial. The idea of a court-martial was dropped. However, a significant punishment was levied on the young officer for Manueli believed he should be disciplined properly to set an example. Not only was Rabuka required to repay the money and have it treated as a regimental debt, he was also punished by losing twelve months seniority. This was a significant demotion which suddenly saw his friend and colleague, Jim Sanday jump ahead of him in career terms, along with a number of officers who had commenced their service after him."
Fijileaks: In 1987, the third-ranking army officer Rabuka not only overthrew Sanday in a cowardly coup, assisted by soldiers from his village and the province, but he also became Commander of the RFMF, promoting himself as Major-General, and was lately showing off those 'coup medals' in Brisbane, Australia; the abuse of funds continued - in fact, became a scandal, after the Rabuka coups in 1987 that saw the Cakaudrove Provincial Council disappear with $73,179.64 from the National Bank of Fiji, not to forget his fellow 'coupist' debtors names from his province, and elsewhere in Fiji
Last week SODELPA were selling RABUKA as Fiji's next Prime Minister. He told his adoring fans he always wanted to be a soldier. So what did he do? He became one, liu muried fellow army officers, misused the Officers MESS FUND, carried out two coups, promoted himself Major-General, got Immunity, and changed his tune from "No Other Way" to blaming Lt-Colonel Jim Sanday, basically claiming he carried out the coups "Sanday's Way". Now, he is not only SODELPA leader but is waxing lyrical about his grand vision and leadership qualities he possesses!
MY DREAM AS A YOUNG BOY
"Please allow me to tell a personal story, so far only known to my family and those who were with me in Class 6 at Provincial School Northern, Bucalevu, Taveuni, Cakaudrove in 1958. We were asked by a Mr Stevens, the Visiting Education Officer, Taveuni; ‘What do you want to be when you leave school?’ Some boys said they wanted to be teachers, doctors, policemen, and join other professions, but I was the only one who wanted to be an Army Officer. I was severely ridiculed, because I was the smallest and youngest boy in our class. I was 9 years and six months old and was in Class 6, and I had a dream to become an Army Officer! Ten years later, at the age of 19 and three months, I was accepted into the Fiji Military Forces to undergo Officer Training. I arrived at my dream! I refused to be distracted from my dream. Nineteen years after that, at the age of 38 and 8 months, I was Commander of the Fiji Army [Fijileaks: After treasonously seizing power as a third-ranking army officer]. What comes to mind, is what the great Mahatma Gandhi once said “Champions are made from something they have deep inside of them-a desire, a dream, a vison.”
"My vision for Fiji is based on my conviction and my faith that we must build a united and progressive Fiji where we can live in peace and in harmony with each other.
At the same time we must all acknowledge, embrace and recognise native rights or indigenous rights which is not discriminatory but consistent with and embodied in United Nations Declaration on Indigenous Rights and the ILO Convention No. 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples.
All communities must embrace that indigenous rights are human rights that must be respected and embraced by all facets of socio-economic development.
I sincerely believe that strong leadership, and the will and commitment to listen, gives me the opportunity to realise my dream.
The key elements of strong leadership that I will continue to embrace is good governance based on a number of characteristics and values. These include:
- Leadership that encourages effective participation of all citizens in the decision making to embrace ownership in policies;
- Leadership that is committed to consensus building to awaken and embrace the collective will of the majority.
- Leadership that is responsive, effective, efficient, inclusive, and equitable.
My vision can only be realised with your generous support.
We must work together to realise our collective dream to build Fiji to be a progressive, dynamic and united country as we move towards the elections in 2018."
~ Sitiveni L Rabuka (speech given 28/10/17 at the SODELPA Queensland Spring Ball in Brisbane, Australia)
At the same time we must all acknowledge, embrace and recognise native rights or indigenous rights which is not discriminatory but consistent with and embodied in United Nations Declaration on Indigenous Rights and the ILO Convention No. 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples.
All communities must embrace that indigenous rights are human rights that must be respected and embraced by all facets of socio-economic development.
I sincerely believe that strong leadership, and the will and commitment to listen, gives me the opportunity to realise my dream.
The key elements of strong leadership that I will continue to embrace is good governance based on a number of characteristics and values. These include:
- Leadership that encourages effective participation of all citizens in the decision making to embrace ownership in policies;
- Leadership that is committed to consensus building to awaken and embrace the collective will of the majority.
- Leadership that is responsive, effective, efficient, inclusive, and equitable.
My vision can only be realised with your generous support.
We must work together to realise our collective dream to build Fiji to be a progressive, dynamic and united country as we move towards the elections in 2018."
~ Sitiveni L Rabuka (speech given 28/10/17 at the SODELPA Queensland Spring Ball in Brisbane, Australia)
30 YEARS AGO, in 1987, Rabuka had announced his own ILLEGAL MINISTERS after overthrowing the Bavadra Government, and now SODELPA, in 2017, have honoured him to announce their 2018 Election Candidates; below Rabuka is seen in his famous red four wheel vehicle heading for the army barracks during the bloody 2000 mutiny, with allegations that he had dusted off his old army uniform and had taken it with him in the hope of replacing Frank Bainimarama as
Commander of the RFMF
2 NOVEMBER 2000: The 17th Anniversary of BLOODY MUTINY at QEB
The Australian lawyer MARK TEDESCHI who prosecuted Rabuka in 2006
"Despite everything that was happening at the Queen Elizabeth barracks, Rabuka remained at the Sun Insurance lunch until around 5 p.m. when he finally left the Sun Insurance building with his driver and bodyguard and went to the apartments where he lived. It was alleged that the reason for him going home was to pick up his uniform as a Major General in the Army Reserves. He then went to the Queen Elizabeth barracks, armed with his uniform so that if called upon he could assume the role of Commander. When he arrived in his vehicle at the barracks sometime around 5.30-5.45pm, Rabuka was sitting in the front passenger seat of his red four wheel drive vehicle. His bodyguard was in the back seat. Various soldiers at the barracks, both loyalists and rebels, noticed that there was a senior officer’s uniform hanging in the back of the car. At that stage, the Lieutenant Colonels commanding the loyal soldiers were planning a counter-attack which was due to commence at 6 p.m.. When Rabuka found out about the planned counter-attack, he was horrified. It was alleged that he wanted a stalemate from which he could take some advantage, not a fierce fire-fight in which the rebels would most likely be decimated. Neither, it was suggested, did he want the rebels to surrender, because one cannot bargain from a position of surrender. It was alleged that Rabuka attempted to convince the senior officer in command of the loyalist soldiers to negotiate with the rebel soldiers, rather than launching a counter-attack, but the senior officer refused. Major General Rabuka was unceremoniously placed sitting on the floor in a secure room and then moved to another part of the barracks where he was out of the line of fire during the counter-attack. At one stage, he was chastised for using his mobile phone, and eventually his mobile phone was confiscated. At 6 p.m., the counter-attack commenced and by 6:45 p.m. the rebel soldiers had been completely defeated. Some of the rebel soldiers surrendered at the barracks, while some of them, including Lt Charles Dukuliga, literally ran away from the barracks in fear of their lives. Many of those who ran away were hunted down over the next few days and taken into custody. Five of these captured rebel soldiers were taken back to the barracks where they were bashed to death. This was the subject of later police investigations, but at the present time no one has been charged with these killings and the investigation has recently been terminated. Lt Charles Dukuliga was bashed into unconsciousness, but remained alive.
Many of the loyalist soldiers were convinced that Major General Rabuka had played a role in assisting the mutiny. After the rebels had been defeated, some of the loyal soldiers wanted to summarily execute Rabuka where he had been sheltering during the counter-attack, but a middle-ranking officer (now a senior legal officer in the DPP Office) refused to allow them to do so, largely because he could not establish the identity of the officer who had given the order to kill Rabuka. Later that evening, as Rabuka was leaving the QEB, he allegedly rang Seruvakula again and said "There has been a setback in what has happened. It has failed, and some lives have been lost. I'm going out to drink yaqona]." It was alleged by the prosecution at the trial that what had failed was Rabuka's grand plan to replace the Commander [Bainimarama].
On 11th December 2006, the five Assessors returned with their recommended verdicts. By a majority of three to two, they recommended that Rabuka be acquitted on the first charge. By a majority of four to one, they recommended that Rabuka be convicted on the second charge (the conversation with Seruvakula during the mutiny). When Justice Winter retired to consider his verdicts, it never seriously occurred to me that he might depart from the recommendations of the Assessors. The five Assessors came from a broad spectrum of the Fijian community as a whole and I was of the view that it was highly unlikely that an expatriate New Zealander who had only been a local judge for a little over 18 months would depart from the views of these representatives of the community. However, when Justice Winter returned about an hour later, he announced the acquittal of Rabuka on both charges. As required by law, he provided his reasons.
He stated that he was of the view that the prosecution had failed to prove its case on either count beyond a reasonable doubt.
Fijileaks: We wonder if Parmod Chand has seen the contents of "Father McEvoy Report" which detailed the atrocities committed against Indo-Fijians during the 2000 crisis?. The Report also covered Vanualevu including Seaqaqa, a cane growing area. Most Indo-Fijian victims accused Chand, "a bus company owner who owned farms in Seaqaqa of financing the rebels". We cannot establish the veracity of the claims nor we have been able to obtain a comment from him
editor@fijileaks.com
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