On The Wind...
Kiribati bans, Dark Fleets, Wild Flights and Ancient Navigation Collide
A banned journalist recalls Kiribati’s messy shores, YouTuber Josh Cahill’s Pacific odyssey stirs fresh debate, Tuvalu and Micronesia fly into the frame, Cook Islands retreats from Putin’s dark fleet, and Marshallese wave-piloting earns scientists’ attention - from polluted beaches to cognitive science in one tangled Pacific sweep.
Banned, Beaches and Badlands: A Kiribati Tale Revisited
One day in August 1999, the eighth edition of the Kiribati Gazette carried a cheery little notice from Tebaroro Tito, the republic’s Beretitenti, or President.
“In exercise of the powers conferred upon me by section 11 (2)(f) of the Immigration Ordinance (Cap. 41), I hereby declare MICHAEL J. FIELD, Journalist, to be an undesirable immigrant… prohibited from entering the Republic of Kiribati until further notice.”
Why I was barred depends on who you believe. Diplomats insisted an Agence France-Presse story I’d written about a Chinese satellite spy base on Tarawa had rattled an election. Tito insisted it was an article in Pacific Islands Monthly about Tarawa’s appalling, excrement-covered beaches. My intro was blunt:
“Were American Marines to storm across the beaches of Tarawa these days they’d risk serious injury - from the thousands of rusting cans, the car wrecks and any of a number of major diseases that can come from having great piles of human excrement everywhere.”
In this blog:
Banned, Beaches and Badlands: A Kiribati Tale Revisited
Cook Islands says it quit Putin’s Dark Fleet
Marshallese Help Re-Write Neuroscience
This all came to mind recently when YouTuber Josh Cahill turned up in Kiribati as part of a solid series on Pacific aviation - Tuvalu’s runway, the Micronesian Island Hopper, the Marshalls, Nauru, and his centrepiece, remote Kiritimati (Christmas Island).
Cahill has a global following, and he was completely smitten with Kiribati. But even he, 26 years after my own diplomatic exile, couldn’t ignore Tarawa’s beach problem:
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