Samoa's 'Rochelais monster' adds beef to the French Roosters

Profile (in French) on La Rochelle captain Uino Atonio. Source: Pierre Ammiche

FORMER Samoan and New Zealand prop Uini Atonio - the man they call the "Rochelais monster" - looks set for his Six Nations debut, making the 23-man French squad for this Saturday's assignment in Paris which his coach predicts will be an emotional moment in the wake of the country's recent terrorism attacks.

The 24-year-old, born in Timaru and a former Samoan under-20 international, gained his residency eligibility last year after joining French club La Rochelle in 2011 and made his debut against Fiji in November.

Unio Atonio

He made three appearances for France in that international window and has held his favour with coach Philippe Saint-André.

He's unofficially the biggest man to pull on a French jersey. So big in fact, that they had to get a special jersey made to accommodate his 1.97-metre and 146-kilogram frame.

For comparison's sake that makes Atonio shorter than the Wallabies' Will Skelton (2.03m tall, weighing 135kg), lighter than former Wellington and Fiji prop Bill Cavubati (1.89m tall, weighing 165kg), but all-around bigger than All Blacks loosie Jerome Kaino (1.96m tall, weighing 113kg).

A Samoan side to Campbell Live - Tuilaepa's 'Kiwi nemesis'

HOW IRONICAL: While a four-day International Federation of Journalists-organised training workshop for media freedom monitors was under way in Apia last week, an intrepid “investigative” journalist from New Zealand was feuding with the Samoan prime minister.

TV3’s John Campbell was staking out a local restaurant in an ill-fated attempt to corner the prime minister for a response to his controversial “missing aid millions"story on Campbell Live on September 29. When his lame door-stopping attempt failed – “we don’t do door-stopping in Samoa,” insisted one senior local journalist at the IFJ Pacific workshop – Campbell didn’t hesitate in branding Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi a “coward” for canning a promised interview at the last moment. The New Zealand Herald followed up with the same insult. (Actually, this isn’t the way Tuilaepa sees it. According to local media reports, the PM’s version of events is that the interview was lined up for November 4 and Tuilaepa wants to take Campbell and his crew on a tour of the inland aid areas where considerable progress has been made. He also wants Samoan TV journalists in on the act.)

Campbell told the country’s only daily newspaper, the feisty opposition publication Samoa Observer:

We had a formal agreement [with the PM, reportedly arranged through an Auckland legal go-between]. This is a man who has slagged us off for the past month. He slagged us off on Samoan TV, on TVNZ and on Australian radio – and Australia hasn’t even seen the story. When it comes to the crunch, he is too much of a coward to do an interview – he pulled out at the last moment.

In an Observer editorial, editor-in-chief Savea Sano Malifa branded Campbell “Tuilaepa’s Kiwi nemesis”, explaining the TV journalist’s assignment in Samoa. He described the “real mission” as one to find out about how the millions of dollars donated in aid had helped improve the lives of tsunami victims since Campbell Live had reported on the disaster on 29 September 2009. Some 143 people died in the tsunami and 4000 were left homeless.

What [Campbell Live] saw shocked and distressed. Aleipata was torn apart, people had been killed, others were swept away by the wave and were never found, stories of survival were sad and heart-rending.

Back home when they returned, they told their story on the screen across New Zealand and people went silent.

Soon afterwards, New Zealanders started giving. Moved by Campbell Live's story they donated generously towards helping Aleipata's tsunami victims.

However, when John Campbell visited on the tsunami's first anniversary he was disappointed. Aleipata's broken homes along the coastal villages were still there. Some homes had neither running water nor electricity. Village after village, sadness and depression reigned.

And so this time, the images and story Campbell Live put on the screen across New Zealand were hardly flattering. Instead, they might have inspired disappointment and even revulsion.

He even suggested that "up to $US45 million in aid had been misappropriated, while many tsunami victims are left without water or electricity".

However, this was a very different story from Pacific Scoop's Alex Perrottet who recently did a compelling series on aid and development in Samoa. Tuilaepa retaliated by branding the Campbell Live report as "stupid and uninformed" in a Radio Australia Pacific Beat item. He told interviewer Geraldine Coutts the claims were "all ridiculous and based on the report by this amateur reporter, Mr Campbell, who came here and spent all his time talking to the Observer newspaper - and then, in his own words, spent much time on the coast. People have moved inland, and therefore he could not have seen what has taken place." Talamua also carried a story describing the Campbell report as "sensational" based on very few interviews and information.

For many of the Pacific journalists who watched and discussed the Campbell Live report during an ethics and democracy workshop at the conference, the item was stunning for its crassness, cultural arrogance and ignorance and lack of evidence underpinning the sweeping allegations. No doubt there is a story there, but Campbell Live hasn’t yet exposed it.

A follow-up story inevitably featured the door-stopping incident on Campbell Live last night. And again, the question was posed – “Where has the tsunami relief money gone?” – and yet again failed to offer any real answers. Once again, not much balance and fairness in sight. The story said:

In New Zealand, the government would be compelled to answer it – and would do the same as a matter of course.

But the Samoan government was outraged by it and embarked on a sustained campaign against Campbell Live’s story – including making a formal Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA) complaint.”

Yes, there are new roads and electricity is back in the region. The Samoan government says it has spent 68.74 million tala so far, but many tsunami victims feel deserted by their government and wonder why so little of the money has made its way back to them.

Documents obtained by Campbell Live suggest many millions more dollars have been received than have been spent around the coastline.

Nevertheless Café Pacific reckons the “investigation’ will need a lot more hard facts and evidence to get anywhere.

Last word - from a blogger who, while acknowledging the money trail is worth following, dismissed the original report as a “shocking abuse of his viewers”.

Describing Campbell’s visit to a typical fale, offered by the journalist as "evidence" of the misuse of aid – including an extraordinary “houses without walls” comment, the blogger, Pervach, wrote the situation was portrayed out of context:

[Campbell] knows that most of his viewers in their cosy western houses in New Zealand will compare this shack to what is normal in New Zealand. Now, I have been to Samoa – I have seen normal Samoan villages, where people live in fales.

There are no toilets, bathrooms, kitchens, windows made of glass [and] water pipes. We are talking about Samoa here – a Third World country. It is normal in Samoa to have none of these things.

In Samoa, if you have these things, you are rich.

• Campbell video link (Nov 1) - Where has the tsunami money gone?
• Campbell video link (Sept 27) - Samoan tsunami: Has aid been used effectively?
• Samoan PM denies misuse of tsunami rebuilding funds
• Wave of controversy over PM tsunami interview
  

Fiji Times 'buy out' - who are the jackals?

THE jackals are circling around the great Fiji Times carve-up, but no serious contenders have so far emerged. The Australian news group, wholly owned by News Limited, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's US-based News Corp, is still hoping for a reprieve. Although the military-backed regime is insistent that the newspaper must be ready to divest 90 percent of its shareholding to local Fiji interests when the draft media decree becomes law, Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum says there is no need for the country's largest and most influential newspaper to "close down".

Sections of the draft Fiji Media Industry Development Decree 2010 relating to media ownership include:

s36(1): In every media organisation -

(a) in the case of a company, all the directors and in the case of any other legal entity, partnership, joint venture and of an individual, any person or persons holding analogous powers shall respectively be citizens of Fiji permanently residing in Fiji;

(b) up to 10 percent of the beneficial ownership of any share or shares in a company or any interest in the nature of ownership, partial or total, of any other person holding any interest in a media organisation may be owned by foreign persons, but at least 90 percent of the beneficial ownership of any shares or shares in a company or any interest in the nature of ownership, partial or total, of any person holding any interest in a media organisation must be owned by citizens of Fiji permanently residing in Fiji, whether any such interests subsist at the present time or are sought with a view to future ownership.

A key Fiji entrepreneur, Mahendra Patel, has scoffed at rumours linking him to a buy-out of the Fiji Times:

A prominent businessman has denied rumours that his company is interested in leading a buyout of Fiji Times shares. Mahendra Patel, of Motibhai & Co Limited, laughed off rumours that the company was interested in the newspaper.

Speaking from his Nadi office yesterday, Mr Patel said the rumours were news to them.

“We did not even know that Fiji Times was on sale,” he said when queried about the rumours.

“We are not interested and there have been no negotiations whatsoever.”

Australian newspaper company News Limited owns the Fiji Times.

However, under the draft of the Media Industry Development Decree, 90 per cent of such ownership must be held by local interests.

Meanwhile, the Fiji Sun, which editorially takes an opposing view to the Fiji Times and is seen as being more pragmatic and accommodating to the regime, has condemned the Samoan prime minister, Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi, over an "erratic" attack on regime leader Voreqe Bainimarama.

A message should be sent to Tuilaepa not to waste his time commenting on issues about Fiji...

Tuilaepa talks about democracy. Yet he ruthlessly presides over the closest thing in the Pacific Islands to a one-party state.

It takes a brave person in Samoa to take on Tuilaepa’s party machine. Tuilaepa talks about media freedom.

Yet he shamelessly presides over some of the most draconian media laws in the Pacific Islands.

They constantly threaten freedom of expression in Samoa.

In fact, Tuilaepa still has much to learn, especially about leadership in the region.

Tuilaepa would do well to learn from prime ministers like Papua New Guinea’s Sir Michael Somare, Vanuatu’s Edward Natapei and the Solomon Islands’ Dr Derek Sikua ...

• The Fiji Sun editorial in full
  
• Samoan PM's comments on Pacific Scoop
• Earlier Cafe Pacific posting
  

Media7 spotlight on reporting of Pacific issues

MEDIA7 turned to the Pacific for a change this week and profiled coverage of the region in the wake of the unveiling of the draft media freedom decree in Fiji. The controversial Barbara Dreaver report on Samoa's "gangs, guns and drugs" also got an airing - with some tart criticisms of the Broadcasting Standards Authority from the panel. Here is Media7's blurb on the programme (running four times over this weekend on digital TVNZ7). Watch it on YouTube - Part 1 and Part 2 - or on TVNZ on demand:

New Zealand television viewers were this week served up the first instalment of the $200-million dollar drama series, The Pacific.

But what about the real life dramas that are being played out in the Oceanic region and the millions of New Zealand dollars and other nations' foreign aid money that is spent to prop up various Pacific nations?

The reporting is patchy at best, given the shrinking budgets of mainstream media and the difficulties inherent in reporting from this sensitive region.

News organisations are finding it hard to report Pacific issues and hold regional governments to account in the face of increasing media censorship and repression.

Some of the problems can be put down to a clash of cultures. But journalists and editors face a daunting task when reporting on the actions of a military dictatorship, a semi-feudal monarchy and a group of emerging nations where tribal and clan loyalties are often at odds with basic democratic rights.

The Royal Commission into the sinking of the Tongan ferry, Princess Ashika, has opened up an unsavoury can of worms and the latest "media rules" about to be imposed by the Fijian regime will further stifle debate in that country.

Media7 this week surveys the media landscape in the Pacific with David Robie, Barbara Dreaver and Tim Pankhurst joining Russell Brown in the studio.

Dr Robie is director of the Pacific Media Centre and convenor of Pacific Media Watch. Dreaver is a seasoned Pacific affairs reporter who has experienced the heavy hand of a Pacific Island politician on many occasions.

Pankhurst, former Dominion Post editor and now chief executive of the Newspaper Publishers' Association, is a fierce advocate of media freedom in the face of threats and intimidation, such as we are seeing in Fiji.

• Media7 is recorded in front of a live audience in the TVNZ Auckland Television Centre on Wednesday evenings at 6pm.
  
  
• Also, hear David Robie commenting on the Fiji media and the proposed draft decree on Radio NZ's Mediawatch, hosted by Colin Peacock and Jeremy Rose.
  

Gangs, guns, drugs and a Samoan media backlash

BARBARA DREAVER’S exclusive TVNZ report from Samoa this week on gunrunning and drug peddling featuring a group of kids (some masked) has struck a chord in the region. A bit too much in Samoa. One of the young bloods featured in the programme was forced to drop his bravado and apologise in tears. Savali ran a story questioning the integrity of the report. And now TVNZ has issued a statement defending the story as ripples flowed through the Samoan community both in Aotearoa and NZ. Editor Paul Patrick declared:

TVNZ stands by the investigative story it aired on Monday [April 6] night exposing gangs engaged in smuggling drugs and guns into Samoa from NZ and the USA. We believe the story was a very real, accurate and fair portrayal of the criminal activity happening in Samoa and will continue to follow this story as it unfolds. Protecting news sources is of the highest priority to TVNZ News and you cannot underestimate the seriousness with which we take this fundamental journalism ethic on a story such as this – therefore we will not comment on any aspect of the story or how we sourced it, including our news crew’s movements in Samoa.

Tupuola Terry Tavita, writing in Savali, described how since the screening of the One News item, an alleged gang member, Vaitagutu Lefano, interviewed by Dreaver, had claimed they were asked by the reporter to "play act American gangsters". He also claimed the alleged cannabis they had been smoking was instead "just rolled-up tobacco".

The whole episode was staged, claims Lefano. "She told us to act like American gangsters and we thought she was shooting a movie. We didn't know she was doing the news." Not so, says Barbara Dreaver in a telephone interview with Savali. "We took video footage the moment we stepped off the car and those boys were already heavily into it…we also asked them to cover up they faces but they didn’t want to."

On supposed rolled-up tobacco, Dreaver says, "well it didn’t smell like it." Dreaver describes the knife and axe-wielding youths she interviewed "as little guys and not the major players." "They were just guys who sold drugs." A teary-eyed Lefano, who appears in his teens, made a public apology on TV One last night "for the misery our stupidity had caused the country". "We're not gang members, just a bunch of harmless boys messing around.”

Police Commissioner Papalii Lorenese Neru told Tupuola that the youths' actions on television amounted to public intimidation and were being investigated. The saga reminds Cafe Pacific of an event in Fiji in 1998 when Monasavu landowners - unhappy about the lack of state royalties for the Wailoa dam in the Viti Levi highlands that supplies 80 percent of the country’s electricity - staged an “intimidating” protest. Daubed in warpaint and wielding traditional clubs, spears and machetes, their protest sparked a complaint to the Fiji Media Council against Fiji Television for screening the item. But clearly for the average viewer it was theatre and not at all threatening.

And, finally, Happy Easter!

NZ drug trade fuels Samoa gun smuggling
Guns, drugs and gangs in Samoa: Barbara Dreaver explains

Tuilaepa's Fiji salvo unleashes the newshounds

"AN EXTRAORDINARY verbal attack on a neighbour," says Fijilive. While it is recycling a Michael Field take on Stuff.com over a widely circulated article by Savali editor Tupuola Terry Tavita, it is all fairly remarkable non "Pacific Way" stuff. It also signals a hardening of polarised positions against Fiji's Voreqe Bainimarama and increasing regional frustration. According to the Savali interview, Samoan PM Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi has slated the military leader for "lying to the Forum" and his "intention of never relinquishing power and returning Fiji to democratic government".

In his breach of diplomacy interview, Tuilaepa says on Australian and NZ travel bans on those linked to the regime:

Only Bainimarama and his guns control the road to democracy in Fiji. Only Bainimarama controls Fiji's return to democratic rule, not the travel bans.

On his "backpay" of F$200,000 in arrears:

That's public money. And yet he has been telling everybody that he needs to clean up Fiji.

On aid funding for Fiji:

The last time I looked, neither the United Nations nor the Commonwealth have a fund to prop up unelected dictators and coup-installed military regimes. Because that's exactly where any air money will go in Fiji - to propping up Bainimarama and his cronies' military junta, not the common people who need it the most.

About putting military personnel in plum civilian government posts:

That's what madmen who appoint themselves to office do. They appoint other madmen to positions of power.

On the gagging of the media and suppression of "dissenting voices":

It's a sign of inexperience. A sign of weakness. Every good government needs alternative views to discern its policies. Those actions are reminiscent of Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler. Well, where are they now? And how are they remembered?

On the need for the military - the South Pacific's largest force:

Perhaps Bainimarama fears a combined canoe attack from Tuvalu and Kiribati, its closest neighbours. That must be it.

Croz Walsh's critical and informed Fiji blog responded to the "inflammatory" Savali interview by touching on Pacific hypocrisy. He pointed out the Samoan leader's own criticised role in eroding customary land tenure and other highly questionable policies in recent years.

In New Zealand, Gerald McGhie, a former diplomat who now chairs the local branch of the global anti-corruption agency Transparency International, is the latest commentator who has publicly criticised NZ policies over Fiji. Writing in the Listener in an article entitled "Fiji's Gordian knot", he warns "strident" NZ against blind faith in elections.

Elections have so far failed to untangle the complex colonial legacy Fiji inherited, and our sometimes strident attitude is not helping the country reach a solution.

What Fiji TV viewers didn't see: The recent Media7 programme on Fiji - but minus the crucial "missed Fiji news" item at the beginning - was rebroadcast on ABC's On the Mat programme on Friday and on Fiji Television's Close Up last night.
While both programmes featured the debate with David Robie, Barbara Dreaver and Robert Khan, a significant contextual component was denied viewers. Exactly the sort of problem with partisan media raised by Media7 in the first place. The missing clip can be viewed here.

• Fiji's Gordian knot
• Samoan PM berates Voreqe
• Fiji lied to Pacific Forum: Samoa
• Reclaim your government, Fiji people told
• On the May podcast on Fiji media

TVNZ upgrade planned for Pacific partners

IT'S good to see Television New Zealand taking the Pacific region more seriously. Economic self-interest for sure - just look at the Olympic success of the Pacific Service. But there is also a sincere attempt at contributing to New Zealand's aspirations in the region as the basis of its report to the parliamentary Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Select Committee - in a rather more holistic way than Australia seems to manage. A pity that our newspapers don't follow the lead with better regional coverage.

New Zealand was actually a television pioneer in the region. It first set up broadcasts by the fledgling Niue Broadcasting Service in 1988. And it quickly followed this pilot project with TV start-ups in the Cook Islands (1989), Nauru (1991), Fiji (1991) and Samoa (1991). The 1991 Rugby World Cup was an impetus for this. TVNZ also provided nightly feeds of Network News gratis to these broadcasters until 2005, when it lost the use of the satellite providing the transmission. Then higher costs forced TVNZ to take a good hard look at its overall model for the region. Over the past few years the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has footed the bill for seven hours of news broadcasts a week and a grab-bag selection for four hours a week - programmes like Close Up, Tagata Pasifika and Mucking In being in the mix.

Now, mindful of the competition in the region from broadcasters like the ABC and Australian Television with far more resources, TVNZ is stepping up for the challenge to boost the NZ presence in the region. Its proposal, first raised in October 2007, and reworked the other day before the select committee, offers three scenarios:

• Immediately expanding the current service from 11 to 15 hours a week - and then to 20 hours a week further down the track. The bill? $320,000 a year.
• Creating a Pacific Broadcasting Trust starting in the 2008/9 financial year. About $1 million would be spent over three years to "assist broadcasters in the Pacific increase the numbers of viewers they can reach".
• Developing a dedicated TVNZ Pacific Channel from the 2009/10 financial year. And this would cost around $2.24 million a year. Expect this to be one of the topics for discussion at PIMA 2008.

The state-owned broadcaster sees a definite payoff for the country: "An expansion of the Pacific Service would be a simple and cost-effective (as it would extract greater value out of the public funding already spent on TVNZ7) New Zealand foreign policy initiative in the region."

• TVNZ Pacific Service select committee report
• Olympic Games: Record-breaking coverage in the Pacific
• TVNZ 7
• Tagata Pasifika

In defence of Samoa's public radio 2AP

Jason Brown, writing in an editorial on his stirring Avaiki website, makes an impassioned plea against the sale of Samoa's public radio 2AP. Responding to the Prime Minister, Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi - who says the sale decision has been in the pipeline for years and "there is nothing to worry about", Brown says:
"Listeners next door in the Cook Islands might disagree.
"For years, for example, residents on the atoll of Pukapuka have tuned into 2AP not just because the language is closer to their own but because the signal from their supposed capital, Rarotonga, has been too weak to pick up.
"That's because the station was privatised in the mid-1990s by an acting broadcasting minister and friend of the current owners, while the real broadcasting minister was out of the country.
"Among other things, like cutting news bulletins, the new owners dialed down the broadcast strength to save power, i.e. money.
"This had tragic consequences for the northern atoll of Manihiki.
"Fatally unaware of looming hysteria in Rarotonga over cyclone warnings of an approaching cyclone, 19 people died in Manihiki on the first day of the cyclone season, 1st November 1997.
"Not everyone could be reached by phone, local Manihiki police did not have time to travel the large lagoon warning everyone, not everyone took the warnings seriously....
"No commission of inquiry was ever held despite it being the worst loss of life in the country's history ..."

Listen to Mailbox on RNZI tomorrow (Monday, January 21) when David Ricquish of the Radio Heritage Foundation is due to explore some of the public radio issues. Visit http://www.rnzi.com/ for shortwave frequencies and times.

• Samoa should say no to sale - Avaiki editorial
• Call on Samoan government to retain Radio 2AP - Radio NZ International