Draft:Vincent Boulekone

Vincent Boulekone
Minister of Finance for Vanuatu
In office September 1997 – November 1999
Prime Minister	Serge Vohor
Preceded by	Willie Jimmy
Succeeded by	Sela Molisa
President of the Parliament of Vanuatu
In office 27 August 1991 – 16 December 1991
Preceded by	Tele Taun
Succeeded by	Alfred Maseng
Leader of the Opposition
In office 1981–1988
Preceded by	Position created
Succeeded by	Maxime Carlot
In office 1988–1991
Preceded by	Maxime Carlot
Succeeded by	Joseph Jacobé
Deputy in the Parliament of Vanuatu
In office 10 November 1975 – 2 May 2002
Constituency	Pentecost Island
Personal details
Born	1944 (age 79–80) Pentecost Island, New Hebrides
Spouse	Blandine Boulekone

Vincent Boulekone (born 1944) is a Vanuatu former politician. He was the co-author of the Vanuatu Constitution, founding president of the Union of Moderate Parties, the first leader of Vanuatu's parliamentary opposition, and was briefly Minister of Finance from 1997 to 1998.

Early life

Boulekone was born in the village of Illamre attached to a Catholic mission on Pentecost Island, in what was then the Franco-British condominium of New Hebrides. His father, a traditional chief from Pentecost Island, was killed in a conflict between native tribes when Boulekone was six. Educated at the colony's French-speaking Catholic elementary school in Luganville on the island of Espiritu Santo, he continued his secondary education in New Caledonia. He then studied law in Nouméa, where he met and married a French nurse, Blandine Marchand. After graduating from university in 1972, he returned with his wife to the New Hebrides, where he was employed as a judicial assistant to native people in the colony's courts in Port Vila.

Political career

Colonial period

When English-speaking independence fighters created the National Party in the early 1970s, French-speaking anti-independence fighters, including those who wanted a more gradual transition to independence, set up the Union des Communautés des Nouvelles-Hébrides (UCNH) in 1974. Although in favour of eventual independence, Boulekone was one of the founders of the UCNH (along with Gérard Leymang and Jean-Marie Léyé, among others), as he wished to "act within the French-speaking community". In 1975, the first legislative elections were held with universal suffrage, and Boulekone was elected deputy for Pentecost in the Representative Assembly on the UCNH ticket.

In August 1976, he was one of four New Hebrides deputies to address the Special Committee on Decolonization in New York. The Vanuatu delegation was made up of two pro-independence English-speakers (Walter Lini and George Kalkoa) and two so-called moderate French-speakers (Léyé and Boulekone). Boulekone spoke out against Lini's call for an independence referendum in 1977; instead, he called for dialogue between the different parties, and criticised the United Kingdom and the English-speaking Protestant churches for pushing the colony towards independence too quickly. In 1977, he co-founded the Union tan, a French-speaking party that accepted the idea of eventual independence for the archipelago, but argued that New Hebrides should only achieve full independence after a period of economic and social development. The Union tan united the UCNH, the Tabwemassana, the Friend Melanesian Party, the John Frum movement, the Kapiel and the Namangi-Aute. It distinguished itself from the anti-independence Movement for the Autonomy of the New Hebrides and Nagriamel, which advocated secession for Espiritu Santo.

Re-elected as a Member of Parliament in the 1977 elections, Boulekone was appointed Minister of the Interior in George Kalsakau's government, the first responsible government in the country's history. He held this post for only one year, before the Kalsakau government gave way to a government of national unity in December 1978; Boulekone supported it but did not participate.

Having left the UCNH in 1978, Boulekone was re-elected to the Pentecost seat in the 1979 elections as an independent, expressing his disagreement with the French-speaking parties, which he considered too closely linked to France, too unsympathetic to the country's indigenous populations and willing to support secessionist movements on the islands of Tanna and Santo.

1980s: leader of the opposition

The New Hebrides became independent in July 1980, taking the name of the Republic of Vanuatu. Boulekone was one of the members of the committee that drafted the Vanuatu Constitution. Walter Lini, leader of the Vanua'aku Pati (formerly the National Party), became the Prime Minister and head of government. In 1980, a French-speaking secessionist rebellion broke out in Espiritu Santo, led by Jimmy Stevens and supported by leaders of the French-speaking parties. Boulekone criticised secession. It was suppressed when the Lini government called in the Papua New Guinea Defense Force to crush it; secessionist MPs were suspended from the Vanuatu Parliament, imprisoned or even expelled from the country when they had or could obtain French citizenship (as in the case of Guy Prévot and Georges Cronsteadt). As a result, Boulekone was one of only three opposition MPs to retain his seat, along with Gérard Leymang and Maxime Carlot. In October 1980, this small group of three elected Boulekone to be leader of the opposition, the first in the country's history.

In 1981, the various French-speaking parties, including the Union tan, merged to form the Union of Moderate Parties (UPM), and Boulekone was elected its founding leader. The UPM proposed concentrating the country's financial resources on the development of small rural islands, reconciling tradition and modernity by working with traditional chiefs, and defending French-speaking schools under attack from the Lini government. In 1985, he became a traditional chief himself, receiving the traditional name of Viresanial at a ceremony on Pentecost Island.

Re-elected in the 1983 and 1987 elections, Boulekone remained leader of the parliamentary opposition until 1988, when he was ousted as leader of the opposition in favor of Carlot, and resigned as party leader. Carlot attempted to bring down the Lini government by deciding that UPM deputies would boycott Parliament. Of the party's twenty deputies, only Boulekone and Gaetano Bulewak refused this strategy of confrontation, and continued to sit. The eighteen other UPM deputies lost their seats by court decision, as they were no longer active members of Parliament. Excluded from the UPM, Boulekone re-established the Union tan as a separate movement, and led this party in by-elections for the eighteen vacant parliamentary seats, elections which were boycotted by the UPM. Union tan won four of these, taking a total of six seats, while the Vanua'aku Pati won the remaining fourteen, giving it an overwhelming majority of forty out of forty-six seats in Parliament. As leader of the only opposition party in Parliament, Boulekone once again became leader of the parliamentary opposition from 1988 to 1991.

1990s: minister

On 27 August 1991, Vincent Boulekone was elected President of Parliament. He handed over to Joseph Jacobé as leader of the opposition. In early September, Donald Kalpokas challenged Lini for the leadership of the Vanua'aki Pati and the government. Boulekone's Union tan, believing that Lini had become too autocratic, supported Kalpokas in Parliament, giving him enough seats to become Prime Minister and form a minority government with the non-participating support of Union tan. In the 1991 elections, however, the Union tan was swept aside, winning only 4.6% of the vote and retaining just one seat - that of Boulekone. In Carlot's short-lived, unstable coalition government from February to September 1996, he was Minister of Agriculture.

In December 1997, he was Vanuatu's signatory to the multilateral peacekeeping agreement during the civil war in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea.

From September 1997 to November 1998, Boulekone was Minister of Finance in Serge Vohor's government. In March 1998, the Reserve Bank of Vanuatu devalued the vatu, the country's currency, by 20%, a decision immediately reversed by Boulekone as the finance minister, who argued that devaluation would reduce the purchasing power of the Vanuatu people and create "trade, economic and social problems". He rejoined the UPM ahead of the 1998 elections, but was expelled again in 2000 by party leader Vohor.

In 2001, the briefly revived Union tan merged with the Green Confederation. In 2002, the ombudsman published a report revealing that in 1997 Boulekone had obtained public funds for the construction of public infrastructures in his constituency, but had used the money to finance a Catholic church festival and to fund his 1998 election campaign. After twenty-seven years in Parliament, he did not stand for re-election in 2002, but ran unsuccessfully for the indirect presidency of the Republic in 2009. In 2008, he became president of the Alliance française in Port Vila.

References

Bibliography

• Boulekone, Vincent (1995). "Politics of Tan-Union". In Van Trease, Howard (ed.). Melanesian Politics: Stael Blong Vanuatu. Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, University of Canterbury and Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific. ISBN 978-982-02-0119-4.
• Jupp, James; Sawer, Marian (1979). "New Hebrides 1978-79: Self-Government by Whom and for Whom?". The Journal of Pacific History. 14 (4): 208–220. doi:10.1080/00223347908572377. ISSN 0022-3344. JSTOR 25168391.
• Macdonald-Milne, Brian; Thomas, Pamela, eds. (1994). Yumi Stanap: Leaders and Leadership in a new Nation. Institute of Pacific Studies, The University of the South Pacific and Lotu Pasifika Productions.
• Rich, Roland; Hambly, Luke; Morgan, Michael G., eds. (2008). Political Parties in the Pacific Islands. ANU E Press. ISBN 978-1-921313-76-9.