PACIFIC ISLANDS REPORT

Pacific Islands Development Program/East-West Center
With Support From Center for Pacific Islands Studies/University of Hawai‘i

By Peter Wagner

HONOLULU (Pacific Islands Report, Aug. 4) – The latest in a series of attempts by the Tongan government to silence a defiant newspaper seems to have had little effect on its burly publisher.

"One of the most annoying things to the rulers in Tonga is that people are buying the paper like it is bread," said Kalafi Moala, whose embattled twice-weekly Taimi ‘o Tonga has survived threats, arrests, and outright bans in its 14-year history. "I think now that the people have had a taste of the free flow of information, they’ll never go back."

The Tongan government on July 28 introduced a measure to the Legislative Assembly restricting foreign ownership of any media to 20 percent of company assets. Moala has little doubt that Media Operators Act, approved after three readings on the same day, is aimed at his Auckland-based newspaper.

"We can switch," he said calmly.

The Tonga-born naturalized United States citizen said he would respond to the new law by incorporating his newspaper as a Tongan company under his wife, a Tongan citizen.

The Tongan government, a constitutional monarchy headed by 85-year-old King Taufa'ahau Tupou IV, in February banned the importation of the Taimi ‘o Tonga as a foreign threat. According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, no offending article was cited by the Tongan government in ordering the ban. But editors of the newspaper said they believed the crackdown stemmed from exposes of alleged corruption by government officials and the royal family.

The ban followed a March 2002 sedition charge against the newspaper’s editor, Mateni Tapueluelu, for writing an article alleging large royal bank accounts overseas. The sedition charge was later dropped.

If the Taimi ‘o Tonga has had a rough time in its homeland, the little publication is flourishing in Tongan communities abroad. According to Moala, Tongan readers in Honolulu, San Francisco and Salt Lake City are paying a hefty US$3.50 per copy to find out what is going on back home.

"The U.S. would be our biggest market, but we haven’t even touched it," he said.

Moala said the Tongan-language Taimi is in high demand among the 41,000 Tongans in New Zealand, 35,000 in Australia, and about 60,000 in the U.S. The numbers add up to a far larger expatriate market than current circulation within Tonga.

According to Moala, the Lali Media Group - which currently publishes Taimi ‘o Tonga, Samoan International, Cook Island Star, and the Indian Tribune - last year grossed about US$1.8 million. The company currently has 25 employees and is scouting for locations in Hawaii or the West Coast to print Taimi ‘o Tonga for expanded U.S. distribution.

Also in the works is a website - www.taimiotonga.com - which Moala hopes will be up and publishing his newspaper in two languages by the end of this month.

"If they shut us down in Tonga, we’d continue to survive," he said.

Moala, a big, affable man, was not always a pioneering journalist. He spent 25 years abroad, as a youth worker in Hawaii and a communications specialist and magazine editor in Tokyo before returning to Tonga in 1989. That’s when he decided to try his hand at newspapering for the first time.

"I didn’t know anything – how to write stories or lay out pages," he said.

But as Moala went about his early efforts to gather local news, he found his newspaper being snapped up.

"I found out that people were extremely hungry for news," he said. "They wanted to find out what was going on in their government."

Struggling to put out the fledgling newspaper on a single-sheet press, Moala decided to move the operation to Auckland, where he could run off the Taimi on a more productive "web" press. The paper’s production shot up from about 3,000 copies to nearly 10,000 per issue.

"It’s important for us to continue to publish in New Zealand because we can make the paper quickly available and because our foreign readership has surpassed our Tongan readership."

Moala said he has fought government attempts to silence his newspaper because, while Tonga is ruled by a king, it remains a constitutional monarchy. And the country’s 130-year-old constitution, he said, guarantees freedom of speech and the press.

But a new effort by the ruling royal family to amend the constitution would remove those freedoms, and threaten other liberties, Moala said.

"We have a king that has almost absolute authority in Tonga," said Moala. "We have a system that essentially rubber-stamps everything that comes from the palace."

Still, Moala said he harbors no ill for the country’s venerable monarch.

"We don’t want to overthrow this king," he said. "He is a part of the national identity. But he should reign, not rule."

Copyright © 2003 Pacific Islands Report. All Rights Reserved