Taklama

Less than three months ago, Vanuatu's Foreign Minister Sato Kilman met with his Abkhazian counterpart Viacheslav Chirikba in Moscow and confirmed that although Vanuatu had established diplomatic relations with Georgia, it had never stopped recognising Abkhazia, and that he hoped relations with Abkhazia would soon be 'finalised' as well. While somewhat surprising, this statement was not directly contradictory, because there did not in fact seem to exist any explicit previous statement by Vanuatu terminating its recognition of Abkhazia.

That is, until now, because last week Kilman was dismissed as Foreign Minister by Prime Minister Joe Natuman and in a press conference on Tuesday, Natuman listed Kilman's meeting with Chirikba among the reasons for his dismissal, claiming that the government's position had always been that Abkhazia is part of Georgia. (Of Natuman's complaints, the most serious was that Kilman reportedly failed to properly represent Vanuatu's support for West Papuan self-determination, in particular declaring that Vanuatu planned to open an embassy in Indonesia, a statement already publicly refuted by Natuman at the time.)

However, according to Natuman, the immediate reason for dismissing Kilman was his support for opposition plans to topple him. And in another twist befitting Vanuatu's political tradition, today the opposition managed to pass a vote of no confidence against Natuman and to elect Kilman as the new Prime Minister.