Jimmy Stevens (politician)

Jimmy Stevens (1916 or 1920s – 24 February 1994), known as "Moses", was a Ni-Vanuatu nationalist and politician.

Proposed flag of the Republic of Vemerana (1980)

As leader of the conservative Nagriamel movement, he declared the independence of Espiritu Santo island as the "State of Vemerana" in June 1980 and referred to himself as "prime minister". After the Republic of Vanuatu was granted independence in July, Prime Minister Walter Lini deployed Papua New Guinean troops and the revolt was crushed in August.

At Stevens' trial, it was revealed that Stevens and Nagriamel received US$250,000 from the American-based Phoenix Foundation, a libertarian group that previously attempted to establish an independent tax-haven state in Abaco Island, the Bahamas in 1973. Stevens was convicted and sentenced to 14 years' imprisonment. In September 1982, Stevens escaped from prison but was recaptured just two days after his escape.[1] Stevens was released from prison on 14 August 1991.[2]

Stevens was of part-European, part-Melanesian, and part-Polynesian descent. He claimed that his father was Scottish and that his mother was Tongan.[2] He reportedly had 23 wives and fathered four dozen children. He died in Espiritu Santo of stomach cancer.

Notes
  1. "South Pacific Rebel Seized", New York Times, 14 September 1982.
  2. "A memory of the Coconut War: Rebel Leader Jimmy Stevens Freed", The Economist, 31 August 1991.
gollark: I'd prefer something which makes the config for each service into just one file, and has something nice like `systemctl status` to see the running status and last few output lines of a service.
gollark: Also simpler, since you would avoid having to have weird interfaces between the `runsvdir` and `runsv`s.
gollark: I feel like it would be more efficient to move that into one process which can then do dependency management and stuff.
gollark: `runsvdir` has one `runsv` process *per service*? Huh.
gollark: You could avoid having to maintain some kind of weird local-specific API for them, conveniently manage stuff on remote systems if you wanted to for whatever reason, and... okay that's about it.

References
  • Obituary. The Times 7 Mar. 1994.
  • Theroux, Paul. The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific. New York: Ballantine Books, 1992. (ISBN 0-449-90858-5)
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