Exclusive Report for Before It’s News

By Deborah Dupré

Australian aid officials and Vanuatu government officials have known for over a decade that Vanuatu residents would starve if for any reason, essentials were held from delivery 10 days. The nation has only a ten-day supply of food on any given day, including local crops. Five days ago, those crops were destroyed throughout the nations 64 islands. The excuse today for being unable to get aid to people – lack of access – is the same used for well over ten years to rationalize suffering and death of the forgotten people of Vanuatu.

Vanuatu has received more aid money per capita than any other nation in the world. While the money has poured into the nation and most aid workers and “volunteers” live in solid structures on decent salaries, locals barely survive on less than a dollar a day. The suffering is unimaginable for westerners who’ve not ventured too far from their comfort zone.

Dengue fever, malaria, dental pain, birth complications… along with a taboo killer plague and no access to adequate health care but easy access to kava was killing them ten years ago. Today, on top of all that, children there are forced to drink salt water and have no food. Some have just become orphans.

Behind Vanuatu’s exceptionally beautiful sites and smiles that tourists see, is an ocean of despair. The taboo killer plague is suicide. Sick, injured, in pain with no hope of relief, many Ni-Van men and a growing number of women self-medicate with kava. For some, kava addiction meets criteria of unconscious slow suicide. For others who decide one night that their despair is beyond repair, so they mix kava with alcohol, it is conscious rapid suicide. Through coconut radio and / or health care providers, few locals would not know that mixing the two drugs can be and often is fatal. 

(Above photo) Fresh Wota Ralph and Mary Yalu and family home destroyed by cyclone Pam. Their local school is also gone. (Credit RNZ International)

If not airlifted soon, Jacobeth, a 9-year-old girl on Tanna Island will likely die in the stricken hospital where equipment was damaged in the storm, the doctor told CNN Tuesday. She needs surgery, a bed in an intensive care unit, potable water and her mother. Jacobeth has none of those.

The 9-year old suffered a head injury when the roof of her family home fell on her and her family as Cyclone Pam raged over their Tanna Island home. The storm, one of the most powerful ever to make landfall, killed her mother and brother. A child can be heard crying in pain the CNN interview.

“We are working closely with our partners to get the people of Vanuatu what they need as quickly as possible to respond to this devastating cyclone,” said Shin Young-soo, WHO’s regional director for the Western Pacific.

Young-soo would presumably know very well, however, that WHO and its partners have failed in providing what Vanuatu people needed for years. Before Cyclone Pam, too many ni-Vans, as local people of Vanuatu are called, were like a woman in the late 1990′s who committed suicide by jumping off of a cliff. She had been in pain too long. There was no end in sight.

That woman was mother of two small children. Babes in arm, she walked to the highest nearby cliff and jumped off to their death. Not only malaria and dengue fever, but also pain from untreated tooth aches leads to despair few people developed world nations can comprehend.

Such were the stories that the Australian government banned WHO from publishing in the year 2000. With documented evidence in hand, WHO lost the battle to get word out to the world that without genuine aid solutions, Vanuatu people would increasingly suffer an die. That would have reflected too poorly on Australian government “advisers” working alongside all Vanuatu department heads. It would have reflected poorly on the Vanuatu government leaders, all well aware of the suffering of their people.

The Australian government along with the Ministry of Health covered up the WHO research. That research report, authored by Deborah Dupré and signed by the then WHO Pacific Region director Yves Renault, remains in a WHO office file cabinet in Port Villa.

Now, add to that report the surviving, weary, homeless, poverty-stricken mothers having to give to their babies and children salt water for over four days. Dehydration from he salt would already be setting in. Those babies and children are dying. Aid workers are justified in fearing the reported death toll will rise as aid finally gets to remote villages

One aid organization has said Cyclone Pam could be one of the worst disasters ever to hit the Pacific. In Pam’s aftermath, the clock is ticking. No access to survival essentials most Westerners take for granted, the most basic of human rights, means more  preventable suffering and death for Earth’s oldest living culture, the forgotten people who deserved much better than what some day might be called genocide.

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