Two men who helped shape the modern Pacific died over the last few days. In Honiara, Sir Peter Keniloria the first Prime Minister of the Solomon Islands, and, in New York City, Stuart Beck, a lawyer and television executive who was also Palau's first Ambassador to the United Nations. More from Neal Conan in the Pacific News Minute.
Peter Keniloria was just 35 when he lead the first independent government of the Solomons... a blood soaked battleground of the Second World War and a distant outpost of the British Empire. Many years later, he told Radio New Zealand that there was no real struggle for independence "They had had enough of the Solomon Islands and just wanted to go away." And they left little behind. The new government inherited just one school, and responsibility for dozens of islands with very different cultures and traditions.
Sir Peter helped write the constitution and laws that established tribal land rights for the first time. He would later serve as Foreign Minister, Speaker of Parliament and played a key role in the resolution of the civil war that erupted on Guadalcanal in the 1990s.
By contrast, Stuart Beck was a Harvard Educated lawyer who visited Palau on what he called a boondoggle in 1976. He met his wife there, became an honorary citizen and helped with the transition to independence after a hundred years of Spanish, German, Japanese and American rule. According to his obituary in the New York Times, he later persuaded the government to claim a seat at the UN. "I said to them, 'Look, you don't produce anything, you don't manufacture anything, nobody's after your labor pool, the US already has defense and basing rights, so the only thing of value you have is your UN vote.' So, they said to me, 'Why don't you do it?'"
Which Stuart Beck did, for ten years, at a dollar a year, and leveraged that UN vote into a generous package of American aid.