Kiribati

Kiribati

Kiribati is about as big as the United States in area. Its vast economic zone in the Pacific Ocean straddles both the Equator and the International Date Line. Yet it has a population of just 70,000 - the equivalent of an English country town.

Kiribati's 33 islands stretch 3,900 kilometres from Banaba (Ocean Island) in the west, where in 1900 a British company acquired for £50 a year the rights to mine phosphate for 999 years, to Christmas Island in the east, where Britain tested nuclear weapons in the 1950s and the US in 1962.

The sun is generally thought to have set on the British Empire long ago yet Kiribati's independence from the UK came as recently as 1979. Until then it was part of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands - and in fact the name Kiribati itself (pronounced 'kiribas') is a local corruption of the English name Gilberts.

A third of the people - the I-Kiribati - live on Tarawa, the main atoll, best known internationally for one of the fiercest US landing assaults of the Second World War, against a strongly entrenched Japanese garrison in 1943. Tarawa today is headquarters of the Republic of Kiribati - but its people are braced against a different kind of assault from the ocean. The highest point of the atoll - which is 64 kms long but for the most part only 100 metres wide - is only two metres above sea level. So the I-Kiribati, having lived down the centuries with a lurking anxiety about hurricanes and tidal waves, now face the prospect of being submerged as a result of the Greenhouse Effect.

About 1,000 I-Kiribati sailors work around the world on merchant ships, mainly German-owned vessels; their remittances account for nine per cent of gross domestic product. The Government is now attempting to redirect these skills to more direct local benefit through the creation of a Kiribati-based fishing industry concentrating on tuna.

Kiribati's President since independence, Ieremia Tabai, is widely seen as the Pacific island states' most able leader. In the mid-1980s President Tabai, a modest former accountant with a strong fear of aid dependency ('better poor but free') aroused considerable controversy when he signed a tuna deal with Soviet fishing authorities. However, it was not renewed; the Russians claimed the catch was not worth the license fee Tabai demanded. Kiribati has preserved its earnings from phosphate in a trust fund whose interest is drawn down annually for development projects.

Tabai, who is only 40, must retire under the constitution in mid-1991, after serving three terms as President. He is likely to move on to a senior regional position but he will be sorely missed by so tiny a nation with such a dispersed population.

Rowan Callick

				Little conspic-uous wealth but urban poverty has arrived		Good intentions, but re-placing phosphate income has proven hard			Improving, but yet to take key positions
	Parliament of 35 with president chosen by vote		80% Compulsory primary schooling has boosted the rate			In theory fine, but lack of independent media prevents ultimate test		60 years (US 75 years). Vital environmental health projects will help