Election Date Set Amidst Chaos

In April, armed police had to be sent from Port Vila to quell violence between John Frum's followers and a rival breakaway sect led by the self-acclaimed Prophet Fred.

Bows and arrows, catapults and axes were reported to have been wielded, several houses and a Presbyterian church set on fire, and 25 of the combatants treated at a hospital for bad injuries. Later, the two sides made peace.

At Port Vila, the scene was possibly less stable as political parties splintered into factions, swapped sides, bartered deals and otherwise engaged in strategies intended to remove the shaky coalition government of Prime Minister Edward Natapei.

Mounting political chaos culminated with a ruling by Chief Justice Vincent Lunabek, which means that a general election for a new government will be held on July 6.

As a sideshow, parliament's speaker, Roger Abuit, took over as Vanuatu's president after the Chief Justice on May 7 ruled that the election a month earlier of Alfred Massing Nalo, a former member of parliament, as president, was invalid because he was convicted for fraud on a two-year suspended sentence that wouldn't expire until April 2005.

Prime Minister Natapei's trouble began in November with a revolution against him in the ranks of his own Vanua'aku Party. In December, there were flopped attempts to knock him down with parliamentary no confidence motions that didn't get off the ground.
On May 10, a no confidence motion landed on the desk of Speaker Abuit backed by 19 Opposition MPs, five MPs from the Greens' group of foreign minister Moana Cacasses, a member of another party and four Vanua'aku MPs including former prime minister Donald Kalpokas, who had quit the cabinet a month earlier, as had two other ex-ministers, Joe Natuman and former finance minister Sela Molissa.

Natapei's reaction was to ask the acting president to dissolve parliament, hoping that a snap election would keep him in power. But Natapei's opponents, including former prime minister and former foreign minister Sergei Vohor, of the split Union of Moderate Parties, went to the chief justice asking him to overturn the order for dissolution.

Lunabek upheld the dissolution as being entirely proper. Vanuatu's Electoral Commission almost immediately set July 6 as the general election date.

The political convulsions arose mainly from personal ambitions and jealousies and, in the Vanua'aku Party, personality clashes.
In Vanuatu, as is normal, a lot of people hanker to be top dog. Those who become so, quickly get torn down.
At Tanna, where restored peace reigns, the story is less complicated. John Frum's bosses didn't have their believers poached by the Prophet Fred, whose prophetic powers were confirmed in 2000, reportedly, when a lake at the foot of the island's volcano, Yasur, suddenly drained into the sea, as he had said it would.