Why Palau’s Traditional Law Must Endure
By J. Ngoriakl
“Are we wrong?” This was a question I kept asking myself during a dark time of my life. It was October 2022, and while I was getting myself situated to work in the private sector as a contractor consultant for an international organization, I received the court papers showing I was being charged for a list of felonies as the former Chief of Staff of Koror State. My former boss and Governor, Franco B. Gibbons, was also charged with similar felonies. For the next few months, we underwent the judicial process, a process I revere for its role in ensuring the abstract yet very real value of justice. The prosecution tried to frame a service that’s rooted in our traditional values and built into Koror State’s decades old public service system as corrupt (for example, the state helping families during funerals, events, cutting trees at people’s homes, etc.). While I came out of that pretty much unscathed and proved my innocence, I believe to this day that my trial served as a test of how we uphold our Palauan Democracy. It exposed a clash of our traditional values and the copy-and-paste system we inherited from the West. As we celebrate Koror’s Constitution, we should ask ourselves, how are we protecting the dualism of our uldelid el llach (traditional law) and democracy, which are equally valid and protected in both the state and the Republic’s constitutions?
The trial highlighted not only the gaps in our dual system of traditional law that coexists with a democratic government, but exposed the greater injustice of how we use a colonial-era system with actual foreign agents such as the former Special Prosecutor, April Cripps, to force on our people the idea that our culture is corrupt (a sentiment Cripps loved to say in her tirades and public appearances). That our over 3,000-year-old way of helping each other, is wrong and grotesque because it doesn’t align with the little-over-200-year old U.S. system. Throughout my ordeal, I kept asking the question, “Are we wrong?” not as myself in particular but “we” as in Palauans. Are we wrong to live and practice as community-based people, el kaingeseu e kaiudingel e chachelim ra chelbuled? This question set me on a path to educate myself on how other indigenous people set up their societies and how they deal with such collective dissonance.
What I found and have reflected on for the past three years is this: Not only are we NOT wrong, we have continued to live in a semi-colonial state where we import lawyers who continue to persecute us for being essentially different from their own infant society. While this is a critique of the way things are today, it’s more of a call for us to look inwards. We are letting this happen. We put out government vacancies and hire foreign lawyers, some perhaps fresh out of law school and lacking perspective, others not equipped with the deep understanding of our cultural context. They come here and, with unearned confidence, tell us our culture is corrupt. This is an “us” problem because we enable and fund it. Thus, the call to action that I beg of us as we celebrate our constitution days and our independence, is to reassess our practices today and to ask ourselves, are we protecting the dual system of traditional law and democracy protected by the Republic and therefore all the state constitutions?
This is not to justify real corruption, as that exists, but rather to look closer, with an examining eye, at the decisions, events, and issues happening in Palau today. We must ask if they protect our way of life and our traditional values, or if such things, happening in the name of development, are eroding our unique and communal society.
As the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius warned us, “That which is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bee.”
Our ancestors understood a similar yet more tried and tested concept. For thousands of years, they perfected a system that ensures the health of the village, the beehive. Our job now is to see its value, recognize how it’s slipping away, and protect it, so that our children and future generations can live under the protection of the village.