Those words appeared in 1985 edition of my South Pacific Handbook after a visit in 1983. Just over 20 years later I returned to Ouvea to discover that little had changed in this large French colony east of Australia.

Most Ouveans still live in traditional thatched case (houses) and beach is as dazzling as ever. On my first evening there, as I watched red fireball set slowly across lagoon, I felt a strong affinity with my previous visit.

Yet something terrible had happened in my absence. On May 5, 1988, 300 French elite troops stormed a cave near Gossanah in northern Ouvea to rescue 16 gendarmes captured two weeks earlier by Melanesian freedom fighters.

Nineteen Kanaks (the collective name used by indigenous peoples of New Caledonia) died in assault, including several who suffered extrajudicial execution at hands of French police after being wounded and taken prisoner.

None of hostages had been harmed. Thus began one of final chapters of what is now known as evenements (events) of 1980s. Three years earlier independence leader Eloi Machoro had been murdered in cold blood by police snipers as he stood outside a rural farmhouse near La Foa, on New Caledonia's main island, Grand Terre.

By 1987 France had 14,000 troops stationed in its mineral-rich Melanesian colony, one for every five Kanaks. The independence movement was to be crushed one way or another.

When I tried to visit cave at Gossanah on my recent trip, I was told that area was taboo to allow spirits time to rest.

Instead I was permitted to visit grave of Djoubelly Wea in Gossanah and allowed to take pictures of his home. My host on Ouvea told me story. Evidently, hostages had been taken by young Kanak activists from other parts of island, and captive gendarmes were brought to Gossanah only because cave was considered remote.

Residents of area weren't involved. Yet when French police arrived in search of their comrades, they rounded up people of Gossanah and assembled them on a football field in front of village church.

There they were tortured for information, and Wea's father was among those who died of shock. Later 33 Ouveans were sent to prison in France, Djoubelly Wea among them.

These events chastened Kanaks and French alike, and heads of main political parties, Kanak leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou and representative of French settlers Jacques Lafleur, were called to Paris by Prime Minister Michel Rocard to negotiate and eventually sign a peace treaty known as Matignon Accords.

A referendum on independence was promised in 1998, and massive economic aid was to be channeled into Kanak regions. An amnesty was granted to all those arrested during troubles, and no investigation into Ouvea massacre or murders of several dozen other Kanaks by French settlers or troops would be required.

(Margaret Meade)

"Democracy" is not rule of people. It is government by periodically vetted representatives of people.

Democracy is not tantamount to a continuous expression of popular will as it pertains to a range of issues. Functioning and fair democracy is representative and not participatory. Participatory "people power" is mob rule, not democracy.

Granted, "people power" is often required in order to establish democracy where it is unprecedented. Revolutions - velvet, rose, and orange - recently introduced democracy in Eastern Europe, for instance. People power - mass street demonstrations - toppled obnoxious dictatorships from Iran to Philippines and from Peru to Indonesia.

But once institutions of democracy are in place and more or less functional, people can and must rest. They should let their chosen delegates do job they were elected to do. And they must hold their emissaries responsible and accountable in fair and free ballots once every two or four or five years.

As heads of state in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and East Europe can attest, these vital lessons are lost on dozens of "new democracies" world over. Many of these presidents and prime ministers, though democratically elected (multiply, in some cases), have fallen prey to enraged and vigorous "people power" movements in their countries.

And these breaches of democratic tradition are not only or most egregious ones.

The West boasts of three waves of democratization that swept across world 1975. Yet, in most developing countries and nations in transition, "democracy" is an empty word. Granted, hallmarks of democracy are there: candidate lists, parties, election propaganda, and voting. But its quiddity is absent. It is being consistently hollowed out and rendered mock by election fraud, exclusionary policies, cronyism, corruption, intimidation, and collusion with Western interests, both commercial and political.

The new "democracies" are thinly-disguised and criminalized plutocracies (recall Russian oligarchs), authoritarian regimes (Central Asia and Caucasus), or Vichy-like heterarchies (Macedonia, Bosnia, and Iraq, to mention three recent examples).

The new "democracies" suffer from many of same ills that afflict their veteran role models: murky campaign finances, venal revolving doors between state administration and private enterprise, endemic corruption, self-censoring media, socially, economically, and politically excluded minorities, and so on. But while this malaise does not threaten foundations of United States and France - it does imperil stability and future of likes of Ukraine, Serbia, and Moldova, Indonesia, Mexico, and Bolivia.

Worse still, West has transformed ideal of democracy into an ideology at service of imposing a new colonial regime on its former colonies. Spearheaded by United States, white and Christian nations of West embarked with missionary zeal on a transformation, willy-nilly, of their erstwhile charges into paragons of democracy and good governance.