Pacific Islands Report

Peace summit in Solomon proposed

HONIARA, Solomon Islands—Talks are under way in eastern Guadalcanal to persuade militants to take part in a major peace summit on Easter Sunday.

Commonwealth special envoy Sitiveni Rabuka is meeting with national government and Isatambu Freedom Fighter representatives in an effort to head off an increasingly tense ethnic situation involving immigrants from neighboring Malaita.

If unchecked, Rabuka said, the situation could disintegrate into civil war. The two sides have been battling for more than 18 months over land rights and jobs

Earlier, Malaitan Premier David Oeta said he was confident the rival Malaitan Eagle Force would attend the peace meeting.

PNG landowners take BHP to court

PORT MORESBY, Papua New Guinea—Landowners have gone to court to stop BHP, an Australian mining company, from polluting the Ok Tedi and Fly rivers.

Lawyers representing the landowners claim the company is continuing to dump up to 90,000 tons of waste into the river system each day, a violation of a settlement reached four years ago.

The company said it recognizes the mine’s environmental impact and is working to pull out of the Ok Tedi operation, but that may take years.

Few tourists visit PNG

PORT MORESBY, Papua New Guinea—Tourism numbers are declining because the country continues to be seen as a country of lawlessness.

According to government statistics, holiday visitors dropped from 22,467 in 1998 to 19,610 last year.

Tourism Minister Andrew Baing said media coverage of violent crimes, including local newspaper reports distributed worldwide on the Internet, did little to help the situation.

French Polynesian women obtain paid maternity leave

PAPEETE, French Polynesia—President Gaston Flosse has announced that women government workers now will retain their full salaries during maternity leave.

Last February, about 150 women staged a successful protest in the streets of the capital, when mothers and grandmothers holding babies chanted a revised version of the French national motto Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. They shouted instead, Liberté, Égalité, Maternité.

Recent statistics show that 6,000 out of an estimated 21,000 working women do not get full reimbursement when going on maternity leave.