Nagriamel
political party
Nagriamel (sometimes seen as Vemarana, Vemerana or the Nagriamel Customs Union or Nagriamel Movement) is a political party in Vanuatu.
History
The party was established in January 1966 at a meeting of chiefs in Espiritu Santo convened by Chief Buluk of Big Bay. The first territory-wide political movement in the New Hebrides, by 1969 it was estimated to have around 10,000 members (around one in eight of the population), mostly in the north of the territory. The name 'Nagriamel' was taken from combining the names of two plants, nagria (a croton) and mel (a cycas). Soon after its establishment, Jimmy Stevens became involved with the party after offering to sell guns to the chiefs. He used much of the funds donated to the party to build an agricultural complex in Vanafo.
The party called for the return of all European-owned land that had not been used for agricultural development, It also held the view that the New Hebrides was not ready for independence and the modernization it would bring, though the party was reputedly manipulated by anti-independence French factions and the Phoenix Foundation. In the 1975 elections, the party won two of the 29 popularly elected seats in the new Representative Assembly.
As the independence movement gathered momentum after 1975, led by the more Anglo-centric Walter Lini and the Vanua'aku Pati, Nagriamel sought to delay the end of British–French condominium. With backing from the Phoenix Foundation, Nagriamel declared the independence of the 'Republic of Vemerana' on Santo on the eve of independence in 1980.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nagriamel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.