/ 11 December 2006

Fiji coup: ‘This is not fair play’

Fiji’s balmy South Pacific vistas stand in sharp contrast to its occasionally nasty politics, so the coup in Suva is a familiar reversion to type. Like the three previous military takeovers since independence, this one — happily bloodless — is rooted in old tensions between the country’s majority Melanesian community and the economically dominant Indians who make up 44% of the island’s population. Its leader, Commodore Frank Bainimarama, who is also president of the Fiji Rugby Union, repeatedly signalled his intentions for several months — but insists he acted with great reluctance to safeguard the interests of the entire nation, not one ethnic group. Still, this is not fair play.

Bainimarama’s very public beef was that the Prime Minister, Laisenia Qarase, was corrupt, populist and far too lenient towards the plotters who struck in 2000 under George Speight, now serving a prison sentence for treason: their unashamedly racist goal was to depose the first Indian prime minister in favour of indigenous Fijians. So a benign interpretation of this coup would be that the military had no choice but to break the law, as it certainly has done, to keep the enemies of Fiji’s multicultural democracy safely behind bars.

Even if Fiji’s neighbours privately agreed with this view, they could hardly condone the overthrow of a multi-party government elected last May with a large majority. Australia’s John Howard prudently refused an urgent request from Qarase for armed intervention, but severed military links with Fiji while keeping development aid flowing. New Zealand’s Prime Minister Helen Clark followed suit, as has Britain. Fiji also rightly faces quick suspension from the Commonwealth, which, in recent years, has acquired some teeth as an enforcer of standards of democracy and good governance — and acted successfully over Nigeria. Don McKinnon, its Kiwi secretary-general, may well be able to use the organisation’s famous ”good offices” to calm things down in Suva.

Peaceful or not, the military take-over has already brought the closure of newspapers threatened by censorship and a suspension of broadcasting — hardly conducive to calm. Tourism and the sugar industry are certain to suffer, as they did after the previous coups, which speeded emigration and slowed growth. Regional security is already fragile, with trouble attracting Australian concern in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Tonga, to say nothing, on a vastly larger scale, of Indonesia.

Fiji may be in a distant corner of a Pacific paradise, but its democracy must not disappear.