Friday, October 9 2009

Fifty-one heads or their representatives will assemble at The Hyatt for the talks.

Two countries have been suspended — the Fiji Islands which was suspended from membership on September 21, 2009 and Nauru, which is in arrears.

We continue today with a daily feature on the Commonwealth and will feature the Heads of these States who are expected in Port-of-Spain in November.


The 33 atolls that make up Kiribati — the former Gilbert Islands — occupy a vast area in the Pacific. They stretch nearly 4,000 km from east to west, more than 2,000 km from north to south, and straddle the Equator.

The country won independence from the United Kingdom in 1979. Many of the atolls are inhabited; most of them are very low-lying and at risk from rising sea levels. Its President is Anote Tong, who also heads the Government.

Kiribati used to lie either side of the International Date Line, but the government unilaterally moved the line eastwards in 1995 to ensure the day was the same in the whole country.

This was a shrewd move as Kiribati marketed itself as the first inhabited place on Earth to greet the new millennium on January 1, 2000. The world’s media descended on Caroline Island, renamed Millennium Island, to record the event.

Kiribati’s economy is weak and is affected by rises and falls in the world demand for coconut.

Fishing licences, foreign aid and money sent home by workers abroad also play their part, as does a trust fund set up with revenues from phosphate mining on the island of Banaba. The mines were depleted by 1980, precipitating the evacuation of much of the population.

Anote Tong’s family name is of Chinese origin but it is now considered as Gilbertese by Kiribati people) He was born in 1952, and won the election in July 2003 with a slim plurality of votes cast (47.4 percent) against his brother, Dr Harry Tong (43.5 percent) and the private lawyer Banuera Berina (9.1 percent). The elections were contested by the opposition, due to allegations of electoral fraud but the High Court of Tarawa had confirmed that there was no fraud. He was easily re-elected on October 17, 2007, for a second term (64 percent).

The son of an Chinese migrant who settled in the Gilberts after World War II and of a Gilbertese woman, he went to St Bede’s College for his secondary school education, graduated from Canterbury University with a degree in Science, and then gained a Masters in Economics degree from the London School of Economics.

During the campaign, he promised to review the lease of a spy and satellite tracking base used by the People’s Republic of China and “to take appropriate actions at the right time.” On November 7, he established relations with the Republic of China on Taiwan, which led the People’s Republic of China to sever relations and vacate its satellite base nearly a month later. His wife is Kiribati named Meme and they have seven children.

President Tong has attracted international attention by warning that his country may become uninhabitable by the 2050s due to rising sea levels and salination provoked by climate change. Tong has stated on several occasions that Kiribati may cease to exist altogether, and that its entire population of 94,000 may need to be resettled as climate refugees. In June 2008, he stated that Kiribati may already have reached “the point of no return”; he added: “To plan for the day when you no longer have a country is indeed painful but I think we have to do that.”