'Operation Restore Public Hope': Youth and the Magic of Modernity in Vanuatu (Report‪)‬

INTRODUCTION Just before dawn on Sunday, January 25, 1998 police officers and members of the Vanuatu Mobile Force (VMF) launched 'Operation Restore Public Hope' in urban settlements around Port Vila, Vanuatu. With faces blackened and guns pointed the police and VMF burst into the settlement to round up people suspected of taking part in rioting and looting several weeks earlier. Emlene, an elderly and respected Tannese woman, explained that she 'was shocked and terrified' to find a gun aimed at her as she arose to light the morning fire. She then watched with fear as young men from her family and community were apprehended and taken away for interrogation. 'Operation Restore Public Hope' was one of the key 'clean-up' measures authorized through the State of Emergency declared on January 13, 1998 after rioting had erupted in Port Vila, the capital of Vanuatu, an archipelago of some 80 islands located in the Southwest Pacific. The riot was precipitated by the government's mismanagement of the Vanuatn National Provident Fund (VNPF), the workers' mandatory savings fund. During the State of Emergency, approximately 500 people were arrested amidst allegations of police brutality. 'Operation Restore Public Hope' which targeted youth and residents from the ever-growing urban settlements that ring the capital of Port Vila, became the focus of a police inquiry and an investigation by Amnesty International. In this paper I discuss the riot and its aftermath which included extensive police measures and the use of a sorcery technique by a small group of young men to deflect the violence of the police when the Vanuatu Mobile Force (1) descended on their settlement. While the police interventions that followed the riot were extraordinary, the police violence directed at youth who live in urban settlements has a more quotidian quality. An ethnographic understanding of both youth and magic in the context of modernity underlines the resiliency of cultural forms that have been of anthropological interest since Malinowski's and Mead's time, and the transformative capacity of young people's actions in the face of dramatic change in the contemporary Pacific. This paper contributes to an understanding of 'the points of intersection between local cultural practices and state institutions' (White 2007:1).