Fiji is a bit like Churchill’s Russia, a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”.
Here is a beautiful country full of a talented population, sophisticated infrastructure and abundant natural resources which is sadly prone to debilitating self-inflected wounds that hobble its present and dent its future.
One coup is bad enough for any country, but three (or four) in short succession is sheer madness. Yet, despite the mayhem, there has never been a serious reflection on why things have turned out the way they have, why “the centre cannot hold”, to quote Chinua Achebe again. Its leaders kept sweeping the dust under the carpet, but the dust never goes away. Or, to change the metaphor, they keep trying to turn the hands of the clock back, but that does not do the clock any good.
The ghosts of past misdeeds have never been exorcised. They will continue to haunt the country: that is the lesson of history. There will always be a misguided colonel or a commodore lurking in the shadows dreaming of grandeur and glory, and fancying his chances. It has happened before. Fiji’s problems lie in the failure of its leaders to confront the conundrum of its history.
Instead, they have always averted their eyes and kept on pouting pious platitudes about being a “beacon of hope to the world” as Pope John Paul II intoned on a fleeting visit to Fiji in November 1986. Alas, prophesy was not his forte.
Colonial heritage
Fiji’s problems start with the policies Fiji’s founding governor Sir Arthur Gordon promulgated soon after the cession of the islands to the United Kingdom on October 10, 1874. Three contending, not say contradictory, understandings formed the foundations of Fiji’s political culture.
The indigenous Fijians, now iTaukei, were by policy shielded from mainstream society and confined to their subsistence lifestyle under the leadership of their traditional elders with powers codified at law.
n time they came to believe, or rather, were led to believe that their interests would be paramount in their own affairs. It was a protective concept. Europeans, for their part, believed they would enjoy a privileged place on account of who they were and their preponderant contribution to the colonial economy.
And Indo-Fijians, in their turn, demanded parity with other groups as full British subjects. These competing demands constituted the critical conundrum of colonial Fiji.
The British never really seriously sought to reconcile, preferring instead to invoke the happy metaphor of a three-legged stool upon which each group made their different and distinctive contribution. Fiji began to believe the myth. The protocols and practices of the colonial government were occasionally challenged through strikes and boycotts, but never seriously threatened. Tropical torpor did the rest. The status quo prevailed.
Towards decolonisation
In 1960, London sent a new Letters Patent to Fiji, the first since 1937, expanding the Legislative Council, enfranchising women, extending voting rights to all Fijians who until then had been represented in the Legislative Council by Great Council of Chiefs’ nominees. Internal selfgovernance was on the horizon and, beyond that, independence itself. These proposals elicited distinct responses in Fiji, especially about the pace of change and its precise character.
Fijian leaders saw no need for haste. The emerging Fijian leader Ratu KKT Mara explained in 1961 that he saw no advantage in independence, saying “we are not as stupid as that to ask for that”, rupturing Fiji’s “happy and historic relations” with the United Kingdom. European leaders concurred.
AD Patel, the Indo-Fijian leader, disagreed. Independence would come to Fiji sooner rather than later, he said.
The question was whether it would come as Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, or as Durga, goddess of destruction. For him, colonialism as a form of government “stands universally condemned in the modern world”. London listened to the democratic argument, but it sympathised with the Fijians.
They had ceded the islands to Britain in the fi rst place, and they were the “loyal race”, in Julian Amery’s words. So, they worked to devise a formula with all the appearance of democratic representation, but left the Fijians in control. Race formed the cornerstone of colonial thinking.
Independence
That was reflected in the 1970 Constitution. The principles of paramountcy, privilege and parity were retained, and ethnicity occupied the primary focus of electoral representation.
The death of AD Patel in October 1969 had silenced a compelling voice for non racial political culture. His successors had succumbed to the logic of racial politics. On the electoral system, the main cause of disagreement in the past, Governor Sir Robert Foster in his last Despatch of October 8, 1970, the UK had “fluffed” – his word – the issue.
The British did what the British do best: shift responsibility to a royal commission to be appointed after the fi rst general elections to look into the matter, knowing that the entrenched power elite would never countenance any change that could conceivably jeopardise their own position, even if it was in the greater national good.
A royal commission under Sir Harry Street was appointed in 1975 and recommended proportional system for Fiji, but its report was still-born and hurriedly buried unmoaned in the bowels of the parliamentary library. The British had quietly washed their hands of the mess they had created. Ensconced in office, the Alliance would not budge, and the NFP was imploding. An opportunity for progressive political reform went bagging. “Race is a fact of life” became the new mantra of independent Fiji.
Accordingly, every issue of public policy came to be seen through the prism of race. You were asked for your race when you opened your bank account, took out your or re-entered the country. Race stared you in the face at every turn.
The logic of racial politics came to the fore in the April 1977 general elections when 24 per cent of the Fijian communal votes went to Sakeasi Butadroka’s Fijian Nationalist Party, causing the Alliance’s temporary defeat. The Alliance leader Ratu Mara realised anew the advice of David Butler of Nuffield Collage, Oxford, that Fijian unity would be a prerequisite for Fijian rule. To that end, the Alliance government put its multiracial ism on hold and began to consolidate its ethnic base.
Predictably, the leading and indeed the founding members of the Indian Alliance, including Sir Vijay R Singh and James Shankar Singh, left the party and headed towards the NFP and later the Fiji Labour Party. The racial chasm became deeper.
Orthodoxy challenged
The old understandings were finally ruptured in 1987 when the NFP-FLP Coalition narrowly won the general elections. A military coup was unleashed to restore the status quo ante. Opinions differ about its causes and the involvement of key players in it.
Sitiveni Rabuka, still in public life, might one day shed light on the events, but until then, certain things can be safely assumed. Rabuka got carried away by hubris and public adulation to claim the sole authorship of the coup, but it is now clear that there were many individuals, interests and institutions behind him: the Methodist Church, the Taukei Movement, defeated politicians, sections of the Great Council of Chiefs, a concert of disgruntled forces united by the single goal of turning the hands of the clock back.
We will never know who or what because, no one bothered to enquire in case the truth cut too close to the bone. In the mid-1990s when Rabuka forged a remarkable working relationship with his once arch nemesis, Jai Ram Reddy, in a rare moment of epiphany to embark on the road to reconciliation which culminated in the promulgation of the 1997 Constitution. It was an achievement of proportions whose import was not fully appreciated at the time. Another opportunity lost.
1997 and beyond
But that triumph was shortlived. Once again, the politics of race reared its ugly head. Some iTaukei leaders who had voted for the 1997 Constitution began to campaign for its repudiation; one or two would miraculously join Frank Bainimarama’s cabinet as champions of multiracial. In 2000, backed by these ethnonationalists, George Speight launched his improbable putsch against the government of Mahendra Chaudhry.
Surprisingly, the GCC asked for the constitution to be changed. The very same one they had unanimously supported a few years back. “Right mission, wrong method”, some chimed in. George Speight is languishing in jail, but there can be no doubt that he was a frontman for others who quietly slunk into the shadows when the putsch seemed destined to fail. Where are they now? Once again, there was no enquiry into the causes of this tragedy.
Six years later, in December 2006, Commodore Frank Bainimarama overthrew the democratically elected government of Laisenia Qarase. It was not a coup, he said, but a “clean up campaign”, he said. But a coup by any other name is still a coup. And cleaning a country of corruption, no matter how endemic, can never by itself be a convincing enough reason to commit treason.
The motives behind the coup remain murky. Police Commissioner Andrew Hughes spoke of “shadowy characters” behind the Commodore, and Mr Bainimarama has himself said that prominent citizens, including businessmen, wanted him to do his coup. But no one was brought to justice, there was no enquiry.
Who were these enablers of treason? Where are they now? Might they not be plotting their next move if things do not go their way? They should be called out and held accountable for their nefarious activities.
2013 Constitution
The 2013 Constitution is promoted as heralding a new, bright future for Fiji. It is true that it has many features which have ended the foundations of Fiji’s politics of the past. Fiji’s character has changed dramatically. The paramounts are gone and Indo-Fijian are now a third of the population.
Many more Fijians live in urban and per-urban areas whose needs and interests are different to those of their rural counterparts. Travel and technology make the national boundary porous. It is not clear that the light some see on the horizon comes from a new dawn breaking or from the flames of a funeral pyre of the old order dying.
The fatal flaw of the present constitution lies in its provenance. It was conceived in secrecy and imposed by a decree. Citizens had no say in its formulation of implementation and therefore no ownership of it.
Loyalty cannot be coerced, nor the deep human yearning for freedom extinguished by a decree. There can be no honour in illegitimate usurpation of power no matter what the excuse.
The end will come. hopefully not with a bang but with a whimper. Meanwhile, for the foreseeable future, to use the words of Matthew Arnold, Fiji is fated to wander “between two worlds, one dead and the other powerless to be born”.
DR BRIJ V LAL, an Emeritus Professor of The ANU, was a member of the Fiji Constitution Review Commission chaired by Sir Paul Reeves. The views expressed in this article are his and not of this newspaper.
