New Hebrides/ Vanuatu

Vanuatu, officially the Republic of Vanuatu, is a Melanesian island nation located in the South Pacific Ocean. The archipelago is located some 1,750 km (1090 mi) east of Australia, 500 km (310 mi) north-east of New Caledonia, west of Fiji and south of the Solomon Islands. more...

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Vanuatu was first inhabited by Melanesian people. Europeans began to settle in the area in the late 18th century and in 1906 Britain and France officially claimed the country, jointly managing it through the British-French Condominium. An independence movement was established in the 1970s, and the Republic of Vanuatu was created in 1980.

History

Many of the islands of Vanuatu have been inhabited for thousands of years, the oldest archaeological evidence found dating to 1300 BC.

In 1606, the Spanish expedition led by explorers Luis Váez de Torres and Pedro Fernández de Quirós became the first Europeans to reach the islands, believing it to be part of Terra Australis. Europeans began settling the islands in the late 18th century, after British explorer James Cook visited the islands on his second voyage, and gave them the name New Hebrides. In 1887, the islands began to be administered by a French-British naval commission. In 1906, the French and British agreed to an Anglo-French Condominium on the New Hebrides. Vanuatu suffered from the practice of blackbirding, wherein half of the adult male population of some of the islands became indentured workers in Australia. Because of introduced diseases, the population fell greatly, to 45,000 in 1935.

During World War II, the islands of Éfaté and Espiritu Santo were used as allied military bases. In the 1960s, the ni-Vanuatu people started to press for self-governance and later independence; full sovereignty was finally granted by both European nations on July 30, 1980. It joined the UN in 1981, and the Non-Aligned Movement in 1983. During the 1990s, Vanuatu experienced political instability, which eventually resulted in a more decentralised government. The Vanuatu Mobile Force, a paramilitary group, attempted a coup in 1996, because of a pay dispute. There were allegations of corruption in the government of Maxime Carlot Korman. New elections were called several times since 1997, most recently in 2004.

Politics

Vanuatu has a republican political system headed by a President who has primarily ceremonial powers and is elected by a two-thirds majority in an electoral college consisting of members of Parliament and the presidents of Regional Councils. The president serves a 5-year term. The President may be removed by the electoral college for gross misconduct or incapacity. The Prime Minister, who is the head of government, is elected by a majority vote of a three-fourths quorum of the Parliament. The prime minister in turn appoints the Council of Ministers, whose number may not exceed one-fourth of the number of parliamentary representatives. The prime minister and the Council of Ministers constitute the executive government.

Read more at Wikipedia.org