Reuters

ONE of Walter Lini's minor pleasures was to get the better of the French. His country, Vanuatu, was for 74 years jointly run by Britain and France. It might have been thought that there were enough islands in the South Pacific for the colonial powers to take their pick without getting in each other's way. But both the British and the French fancied the New Hebrides, as Vanuatu was then called, and refused to budge. The two European administrations ran separate legal, educational and security systems in an atmosphere of mutual dislike, which persisted after the country's independence in 1980.

Mr Lini's first betterment of the French was in securing independence at all. France was reluctant to pull out and after Britain insisted gave covert support to a rebellion led by French settlers. Mr Lini put down the rebels in a skirmish, which briefly, if grandly, was called the “coconut war” by foreign newspapers.

Mr Lini could not afford to hold grudges: about a third of the population of 170,000 spoke pidgin French (and numerous local languages). All the same, he was one of the strongest voices in the Pacific region against French nuclear testing in Mururoa and against colonialism. From time to time Mr Lini expelled a French ambassador, seemingly just to remind Paris that he was keeping an eye on its artful ways. The French still remain in New Caledonia, French Polynesia and a number of other islands, the last of the European colonialists in the Pacific, and seemingly unshiftable. But, partly as a result of public opinion led by Mr Lini and others, they have stopped testing their nuclear weapons there. In Vanuatu (Our Land Eternally) Mr Lini sought to integrate the British and French communities on the 83 islands and their ways of doing things, a process that is still going on. Parliament is largely based on the British model. Among the better-off in the capital, Vila, French cuisine is generally preferred.

The tide of ideas

Along with Bibles and hymn-books Christian missionaries carried to the Pacific European ideas about culture, property and politics. God set them a daunting task: even now some islanders still believe in the cargo cult, dating from the second world war when American soldiers distributed goodies with divine abandon. But the missionaries were undeterred. The island where Walter Lini was born is called Pentecost, commemorating the missionaries' landing on Whit Sunday. Young Walter was a keen Christian. He was educated at a missionary school and sent to New Zealand to study for the priesthood. He was ordained in 1970. He returned with ideas about nationalism and joined an independence-minded party supported by the Anglican church. (The French-speaking Roman Catholics had a political party with similar aims.) Walter Lini was the obvious choice to lead the independent state's first government.

Belonging to a world-wide religion helped Mr Lini to overcome the sense of remoteness felt by Pacific islanders. Unlike the strident (though at present muted) countries of the Pacific rim, the island-states are lonely specks in the ocean with few natural resources. Mr Lini appreciated that copra and cocoa, plus a dollop of international aid, were not going to do much to raise living standards. He turned to the dodges of the capitalist world. Vanuatu became a tax haven and a place to register a flag of convenience. In the 1980s Vanuatu sold licences to Russian fishing boats to trawl in its waters and there was talk of Soviet warships using its ports. America, which regarded the Pacific as its private pond, seemed about to offer tempting counter-proposals when, sadly for Vanuatu, the Soviet Union collapsed.

Lonely they may be, but the island-states are among the world's most peaceful places. Nothing much happens there. Even their occasional troubles—Bougainville's rebellion, Fiji's military coup—seem mere frolics in a world of Kosovos and Iraqs. Under Mr Lini, Vanuatu became one of the most desirable tourist destinations in the South Pacific, rivalled perhaps only by Tahiti. Rich Australians, especially, have villas there and pop over for the weekend.

Walter Lini gave an impression of modest confidence. There were no guards, not even a policeman, at his official residence when the writer of this article visited him. Yes, he believed in material progress, but it should be unhurried. He favoured small government, and not just for a small country. Any medium-sized nation, he said, could be run efficiently by a political leader and half a dozen able civil servants. Perhaps because of such views, his critics called him a dictator. But when his party was defeated in a general election in 1991, he stood down after 11 years as prime minister. Subsequent governments have been coalitions of parties linked to both the French-speaking and English-speaking communities. He served them as justice minister. The French were not at all bad, he said, those that had ethnic roots in Vanuatu.