In 1968, a young Tongan man arrived in the territory of Papua and New Guinea as a youth worker with the Methodist Church in Rabaul.
Kalafi Moala, then a restless 19-year-old looking for meaning and purpose in life, had opted out of studies in New Zealand to pursue missionary work.
He spent four years in Rabaul and still treasures the experience in PNG.
“It was a part of my growing up, a search for answers which I found in PNG.”
His time in the territory was the beginning of a journey that would eventually see him become a key figure in the dramatic reforms that are happening to the system of government in his island kingdom of Tonga.
Meeting him at Penang in Malaysia last month at the Asian Media Information and Communication (AMIC) conference, the big friendly Tongan with a hearty grin and a booming voice seemed an unlikely person to be advocating revolutionary changes in his country.
Spend a moment with him and you will see why. His sociable demeanour will soon have you associating him with the stereotypical imagery of Tonga – that of friendly tropical islands filled with happy contented people.
However, there is a serious side to Moala. And back in his homeland, things have not been quite so ‘friendly’ for some time now. In fact, this is what he had travelled half way around the world to Malaysia to talk about.
Moala is the founder and publisher of Taimi ‘o Tonga (Times of Tonga) newspaper which has been in production for the last 17 years.
It never occurred to him that setting up an alternative newspaper in Tonga to the established media owned by the government and churches would be a risky endeavour.
His aim then was to offer an alternate voice to the majority of commoners (ordinary people) in the Kingdom and to challenge the absolute power of the King and the nobles who ruled the kingdom.
The Kingdom of Tonga is made up of 171 islands with a population of 100,000 living in Tonga and 140,000 outside of Tonga. Of those outside, 70,000 reside in US, 41,000 in New Zealand and 29,000 in Australia. It has a constitutional monarchy government with the highest executive power vested in the Privy Council which is made up of the royal appointed cabinet and is presided by the King (or his appointed representative).
Parliament is made of 30 lawmakers – 12 are occupied by cabinet ministers and two governors appointed by the King; nine representatives of the 33 noble titleholders; and nine representatives elected by the rest of the population. A prime minister appointed by the King heads up the cabinet.
The structure of the government makes Tonga an authoritarian, undemocratic country, under almost absolute rule of a monarch, whose wishes is often regarded as ‘divine’ and must be obeyed.
Unlike elsewhere in the Pacific, in Tonga political power and domination is guaranteed perpetually by birth to an elitist family who have used the power structure to make themselves wealthy at the expense of their ordinary people.
The establishment of the independent Taimi O Tonga immediately posed a challenge to the ruling elites who had no control over the paper. The Government’s response was ruthless and unrelenting aimed at crushing and silencing the dissenting voice forever. Moala and his Taimi O Tonga bore the brunt of a regime bent on maintaining power and status quo.
Over the course of the 17 years, Moala found himself unlawfully imprisoned, was banned from his country of birth for four and half years, subjected to death threats and other indignities, prosecuted on drummed up charges; his newspaper office in Nuku’alofa raided by police over 12 times in a 3 year period; his colleagues detained several times for many hours for questioning; and eventually the government amended the freedom of speech and press freedom clause of the 130 year old constitution in order to introduce new media and newspaper legislations that would ban Taimi ‘O Tonga from being published and distributed in Tonga.
The persecution would have broken a lesser man, but not Moala. Instead the government’s repressive actions to silence him only strengthened and convinced him and his Tongan readership and supporters that what he was doing was right.
Amongst the many charges against him and his newspaper, were ones associated with articles ran by the paper which were deemed ‘seditious, inciting violence, causing disaffection for the King’, and so on. Yet those articles were normal interviews with church ministers, academics, and a column pointing out the inconsistency in the King’s decision to open a cigarette factory in Tonga despite the fact that he had campaigned against smoking for the last 12 years. In PNG and other Pacific democracies, these articles would have hardly raised an eyebrow.
Taimi ‘O Tonga also challenged the infamous royal economic schemes of King Taufa’ahau Tupou IV, which was losing millions of dollars for Tonga and, besides causing acute embarrassment, also cost the country economically.
“Our king is well known for a host of failed projects or simply plans that never got off the ground for one reason or another,” Moala said.
He said these projects range from bringing toxic and nuclear waste to store in Tonga, building oil refineries for Iranian crude oil, bringing old tyres from USA to be burned in Tonga for fuel, changing sea water to fresh water and using the process to generate electricity, starting “Tongan agricultural projects” in Malaysia, PNG and Hawaii, investing the country’s trust fund in high risk insurance which ended losing US$26 million, registering of ships flying the Tongan flag which some ships ended up carrying arms and personnel suspected of terrorism, off-shore banking, his insistence to have a national airline which recently went bankrupt and is estimated to cost the country over $50 million, and many such failed schemes.
He said one of the most oppressive assumptions made by the ruling elite was that commoner people are not only ‘stupid’ and ‘barbaric’ but they do not know what is good for them. So the ruling elite must decide what is good for people.
Moala and Taimi ‘O Tonga’s battle for changes in Tonga finally began to produce results. In the last two years, there has been progress in Tonga towards reform.
“This started when we took the government to court over the Constitutional amendments and the new media and newspaper legislations”, Mr Moala said.
In 2004, the Supreme Court of Tonga overturned the Constitutional amendments and declared unconstitutional the new media and newspaper laws. The judicial decision not only ended the legislated control of the media by government, but also enabled Taimi O’ Tonga and other independent media to operate in Tonga.
“It started a series of events that took place having a domino effect, in which the powers at be and the country have become more open toward greater freedom and political reform,” he said.
This year there have been dramatic changes in Tonga. A new Prime Minister Dr Feleti Sevele became the first commoner Prime Minister appointed in Tonga, who is also an elected Member of Parliament and one of the leaders of the pro-democracy movement. The country has also witnessed several major protest marches averaging over 10,000 marchers, a crunching civil service strike demanding pay rises of up to 80 per cent, a hiking of the lowest level of civil service pay so as to keep up with the raises imposed by the highest levels on themselves.
Several ministers were asked to resign, and a new crop of ministers was appointed to form a new cabinet more open to reform. Three of these ministers were elected members of Parliament as people’s representatives.
Moala said Tonga is entering a new era were the government is seizing the initiative for reform and are working to reconstruct Tonga politically and economically to reflect a more democratic structure.
“The issue now is no longer whether there is going to be reform but that reform is taking place right now, and it is only a matter of time when elected officials will be running the government, making government in Tonga finally accountable to the people.”
Looking back Moala says: “The last 17 years have been fulfilling.”
He has written a book about his experiences titled Island Kingdom Strikes Back, which was published by Pacmedia in New Zealand in 2002. Today he lives with his family in the US while Taimi O Tonga is being produced in New Zealand and circulated in Tonga, New Zealand, Australia and US. He is writing his second book titled In search of the friendly Islands, which is about Tonga.
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