So last week proved to be an interesting time if you have an interest in free speech.
Salman Rushdie was attacked in New York and stabbed within an inch of his life.
I have had to explain to some people the story of Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses – because, I realise, it has been 33 years since all that stuff and some adults weren’t actually born when all that started.
At the same time I was mulling over the political finger-pointing and indignation over a social media post by Liliana Warid, an intending The People’s Alliance election candidate, whose only sin, as far as I can tell, was to compare non-indigenous Fiji citizens to visitors to a house who continued to hang around.
Salman Rushdie is a world-famous (well at least I thought he was) multiple-prize winning Indian author.
He was catapulted to fame by his book Midnight’s Children, which described a magical network of all the children born in India at the moment of its independence in 1947 and how their lives develop, alongside India’s history.
It is a good read, as is much of his other writing.
In 1988 he wrote The Satanic Verses.
For me the book was a difficult read; I gave up.
Others were also having difficulty, claiming that it insulted Islam.
A worldwide controversy blew up.
There were violent riots in which people died.
A number of governments banned the book (including in India).
And Ayatollah Khomeini, the then ruler of Iran, issued a religious ruling, a fatwa, suggesting that it would not be a bad thing if Rushdie lost his life.
Rushdie spent the next 10 years largely in hiding from possible assassins.
He is now regarded (in Western countries anyway) as a totem of freedom of expression.
Ms Warid is less famous (though maybe not in Fiji now).
From what I can tell she is from Vanuabalavu and is married to an Indo-Fijian man.
She wrote a social media post.
In it she tried to draw attention to the facts (as she saw them) that iTaukei communities were not faring as well as others in the areas of poverty, housing, rural marginalisation and education.
She opened her post by asking her readers to imagine how “visitors” had come to their homes and not left; and how “over time, you find that by no fault of (the visitors), life has become extremely hard for you, but your visitors appear to be thriving while you continue to struggle”.
You don’t have to be a genius to work out that “the visitors” in the sentence are non-indigenous people and the struggling hosts are the Taukei.
People started to get excited, including the Attorney-General.
This, he said, was a “racist” post.
This rhetoric was picked up by the slavish pro-Government media.
Suddenly, before we knew it, the line seemed to be that Liliana was racist; therefore the whole of her party was racist; therefore PA’s election partner the National Federation Party was racist.
Racists were everywhere.
One of the assumptions underlying this rhetoric, of course, is that everybody in a political party thinks exactly the same way as everyone else.
That appears to be true in the governing political party where nobody ever seems to disagree with the Prime Minister or the Attorney-General.
Not for nothing does the Opposition dub its other MPs “the silent 25”.
The Supervisor of Elections got into the act.
He has now apparently referred the “racist” post to the Fiji Independent Commission Against Corruption (FICAC) for investigation.
Fault lines
So now – could we all, perhaps, just stand back now and calm down?
In my view – and those words “in my view” are quite important here – the post was not racist.
I am not sure I would have written it quite the way Ms Warid did.
And you might say that comparing non-indigenous people in Fiji to “visitors” to a house was clumsy, inappropriate – or, yes, offensive.
But not everybody is going to express themselves in ways that other people like.
Ask Mr Salman Rushdie about that!
In every multiracial country, ethnic divisions are a natural fault line.
That’s a simple fact which most of us should be able to accept without getting hysterical about it.
And if we are smart and sensible about it, we will encourage people to talk about this and deal with the issues as they
see them.
This is whether they are right or not and whether we agree with them or not.
Because that’s called freedom of expression.
It’s also encouraging diversity of views (and people) which most civilised societies think is a good thing.
Our current government’s approach is to talk about “equal citizenry” and how “we are all Fijians”, and to just cover their ears whenever it is suggested that ethnic differences might be important to understand – and to pretend that nobody else talks about this either.
We are in the absurd position where we cannot officially share any data broken down by ethnic categorisations and if you are the Government statistician and you release information on poverty broken down by ethnicity, you get fired.
So it means that we cannot even talk in an informed way about how one ethnic group may be more vulnerable to certain health conditions and how another ethnic group may have different approaches to education.
We have a media law that prevents media organisations publishing material that is “against the public interest or order” or “against national interest” or which “creates communal discord”.
The problem is that nobody knows what that means – except, I suppose, the Government.
And nobody really wants to test the thing out, because as some media organisations know when they are prosecuted, that means a long, expensive and stressful fight in court which you might lose and go to jail.
So better just to avoid the risks and just not say anything at all which you think may upset the Government.
Freedom of expression is a fundamental human right, one of the most important.
Most civilised societies organise themselves in a way that protects and supports fundamental human rights.
Why?
Not just because of the moral imperative that people ought to have those rights.
Because it’s efficient.
When people speak up about what is bothering them, the rest of us get to know what they are thinking.
And it is important for us to know what people are thinking, because if that creates a problem, we have to find a
solution.
Controversial views
What people say or believe may be completely wrong.
But if thousands of people have a belief that’s wrong in fact, we – that is, all of us, not just the government – need to try to show them, with evidence, why they are wrong.
But how can we do that – how can we know if people hold the wrong views – when people are not even allowed to express controversial views?
Some people may not express their views in a way other people like.
They may be downright rude, or offensive.
But is freedom of expression now to become a right that is only exercised if you don’t offend anyone else?
And people may want to express their views on subjects that other people don’t want to talk about.
Is freedom of expression now to be confined only to things that we all want to talk about?
For most of Fiji’s 50 years of independence, there has been a dialogue about how indigenous Fijian people are disadvantaged in areas such as commerce and education.
Some governments have put into place affirmative action policies to try to bridge the gap.
Some of these policies were attacked as racially discriminatory.
Others have been attacked as stupidly inefficient or even encouraging corruption.
And the non-indigenous people were able to say – and quote the data – that it was they who were disadvantaged by these policies.
But the important thing is that we were talking about it.
We were not pretending these issues are not there.
The Government and its functionaries seem happy to talk about gender discrimination and discrimination against albinos, etc – and even quote the data.
But they don’t seem to want to talk about, or listen to, or let anyone else talk about anything which suggests that there are differences of any kind between our ethnic groups.
This is not healthy.
This is a sign of a repressed, uncomfortable, insecure society that would just rather avoid confronting uncomfortable issues.
And, just as in any personal relationship or in any business or nongovernment organisation, when you don’t confront uncomfortable issues, things do not get better; they get worse.
Could Ms Warid have expressed herself better when she talked about “visitors”?
Well, I think so.
And if people are upset about how she expressed herself, well, they are allowed to say so.
But let’s all be a bit more mature about this.
She wants to raise some issues.
She may be right – or wrong.
Why can’t we listen to what she’s said, look at the evidence (“follow the science” is what we say these days).
If we agree that there is a problem, maybe we should be looking at solutions.
If there is no problem but people think there is, well – that, too, needs a solution.
In Fiji we sometimes use a local term for civilised discussion – talanoa.
When our government talks about climate change in various places around the world, it’s all about talanoa.
Maybe, on issues like this, it’s time we were allowed to have some at home?
• RICHARD NAIDU is a Suva lawyer. Someone in New Zealand mistook him for Salman Rushdie as he passed him on an escalator. The views expressed in this article are not necessarily the views of The Fiji Times.
