The Anti-Corruption Movement in Melanesia - Introduction

The anti corruption movement has been around since the late 80s and today it is part of a big network of a grassroots movement that extends all across Melanesia.

Two main interruptions to that movement included the Bougainville crisis and the Australian RAMSI occupation of the Solomon Islands.

In the beginning it was civil society and the churches alone, although there were many very qualified people from government who were resigning from their government jobs to be involved in actions that reached the people at the village level.

Video: NGO workers and their community leaders 

travelling on the Aramia River, Western Province 2002

This movement saw in the  late 80s, the creation of the first ever national volunteer service in a third world country - that was the "National Volunteer Service of Papua New Guinea" - an NGO and civil society organisation that was placing NGO technical, social, health and literacy workers etc. all over Papua New Guinea especially in the rural areas.

The National Volunteer Service was probably the best aid organisation in PNG, because it was local and it's philosophy is still:

• Community self determination and organisation, 

• Individual and Community Empowerment. 

That means that the projects it was involved in were community funded and managed through the effort, energy and drive of the target community itself.

Along the way, some crooked politicians have used the movement to launch their political careers and the civil society has seen and experienced that. So they have mainly been disabused of any previous hope and trust they had in upcoming promising politicians. Now all they concentrate on is the war against corruption and  looking beyond the pretense of the rule of law to see the underlying injustices.

The creation of the world wide web in 1991 certainly helped the movement through the use of emails and when facebook started, that whole movement also migrated to the new platform. On facebook there are several groups and pages that carry the determination of Melanesians to regain the independence they lost through the corporate take over of their governments. 

The main advantage of moving to this platform is that it provides greater networking capacity and it is a great rally platform for the masses of voices that were once denied representation on the public forum of the Newspapers and the "National Televisions". Facebook is a space that many governments are trying to control for various reasons. But so far the civil society movements of Melanesia have taken to the internet like fish to water.