Small Island States Lead the Way on Climate
Small Island States Lead the Way on Climate
Facing shared vulnerability, they can also rely on a long history of building solidarity across oceans
Vanuatu is hardly a household name. Yet this small island country in the South Pacific, approximately 1,000 miles east of Australia, is now playing a prominent role in global debates about climate change.
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Under joint British and French control and known as the New Hebrides during the colonial period from 1906 to 1980, it now has a population of approximately 300,000 spread out over an archipelago stretching almost 800 miles from northwest to southeast. In 1990, it was one of the founding members of the Association of Small Island States (AOSIS), now made up of 39 small island and low-lying coastal developing states.
This global alliance of member states includes 16 Caribbean countries, 14 in the Pacific, and 9 in Africa, the Indian Ocean, or the South China Sea. The alliance was formed during the Second World Climate Conference in Geneva, thus prioritizing climate justice even before the first UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992.
This year Vanuatu headed a global campaign culminating in March with a unanimous resolution by the UN General Assembly calling for the International Court of Justice to rule on the obligations of states on climate justice.
Although the ruling would be advisory, it would significantly reinforce the growing number of court cases requiring climate action by national and subnational governments as well as oil companies. Environmental law experts say the UN resolution could be a turning point in climate justice.
Interviewed by global media, residents of Vanuatu vividly describe the disasters already posing an existential threat to the country's survival. The short clips below come from The Independent (6 minutes), the global video network Brut (10 minutes), and Newshub in New Zealand (4 minutes).
A Long History of Black Internationalism
In addition to the formal alliance of island states, Vanuatu also has built on strong links to progressive movements in Africa, the African diaspora in the United States, and global Black Power networks.
Two activists making these connections in person were Pauulu Kamarakafego (Roosevelt Brown) and Robert Van Lierop.
Kamarakafego grew up in Bermuda, was active in the civil rights movement in the United States, and later worked in Vanuatu and other countries in the South Pacific as an environmental engineer.
In his book Pauulu’s Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice, historian Quito J. Swan provides a fascinating description of Kamarakafego´s journeys. The full book is available open-access on JSTOR.
“It was May 1975, and Bermudian Black Power organizer Pauulu Kamarakafego had just arrived in Port Vila, Vanuatu. It was not the environmental activist’s first visit to the political condominium then known as the New Hebrides, which lay some thousand miles east of Australia. As an architect of Tanzania’s Sixth Pan-African Congress (6PAC), Kamarakafego had passed through the joint British and French colony the year before to organize a black delegation from Oceania. Seeking black internationalist support in their bitter anti-colonial struggle, the New Hebrides National Party (NHNP) sent representatives to the 1974 Congress.
While in Dar es Salaam, the party invited Kamarakafego to Vanuatu to conduct political education among its rural indigenous masses, a black Melanesian people known as the Ni-Vanuatu. Numbering about 100,000 people, they represented 85 percent of the total population and formed the political base of the NHNP. He accepted this invitation without reservation.
But after Kamarakafego gave speeches to rural audiences of about two hundred people, British and French colonial administrators moved to deport him from the 4,739 square mile archipelago for “propagating Black Power doctrines.” From the state’s perspective, his other “crime” was developing environmental projects that enabled the Ni-Vanuatu to make key commodities from natural resources, such as natural soaps from lye, oil from coconuts, salt from the ocean, sweeteners from sugar cane, and cement from calcium carbonate deposits and clay. As a result, their communities could avoid having to buy these products from European and Australian multinational companies.”
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Robert Van Lierop is probably known to AfricaFocus readers for his classic film A Luta Continua (1972) portraying the liberation struggle of the Mozambique Liberation Front on the ground in northern Mozambique. Van Lierop, Harlem-born of a father from Suriname and a mother from the Virgin Islands, became a lawyer after graduating from NYU Law School in 1967.
From 1981 to 1994, however, he also served as the Permanent Representative of Vanuatu to the United Nations. In that capacity, he was the first chairman of the Alliance of Small Island States, from 1990 to 1994.
In an interview in 2004, Van Lierop told me how he made these connections.
And then subsequently, in '77, '78, I did go back to practicing law, hoping to [finance more] films. After that is when Vanuatu asked me about representing them at the United Nations. And when they first approached me, I said no. And I told them that I was going to be going off back to Mozambique to make another film.
Q: And how did you make that connection?
VAN LIEROP: They actually knew of me through some people at the UN and through the Sixth Pan-African Congress. And they wanted an African American to handle it, somebody with legal experience and who had been involved in international relations.
Q: And did you attend the Sixth Pan-African-
VAN LIEROP: I was supposed to be there, but I didn't go at the last minute. And they were there, and I began doing some things for them before their independence, just helping them out a little bit when they came with their petition at the United Nations. And I didn't think that I did anything significant. I don't think I did much at all, but they couldn't send someone, and so they asked me to do this temporarily. At first I said no. And they also had a connection with me through East Timor. And of course, East Timor had a connection with me through Mozambique.
Q: So you knew José [Ramos Horta]?*
VAN LIEROP: Yeah, I knew José very well.
Q: From Mozambique or-
VAN LIEROP: From Mozambique and from here. He was the representative here. As a matter of fact, José was at the premiere of O Povo Organizado. And so all of this goes back again to Mozambique. Mozambique was the thread of my connection with East Timor, which was also an important thread in my connection with Vanuatu, which was an important thread for my connection with all of the Pacific. Vanuatu, East Timor, and Mozambique, that thread all runs through there. And I even took the films to the South Pacific and showed it over there. It was shown in very, very remote areas of Vanuatu.”
* Mozambique hosted José Ramos Horta, now a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and President of Timor-Leste, in exile after Mozambican independence in 1975.
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