Like what you've read?

On Line Opinion is the only Australian site where you get all sides of the story. We don't
charge, but we need your support. Here�s how you can help.

  • Advertise

    We have a monthly audience of 70,000 and advertising packages from $200 a month.

  • Volunteer

    We always need commissioning editors and sub-editors.

  • Contribute

    Got something to say? Submit an essay.


 The National Forum   Donate   Your Account   On Line Opinion   Forum   Blogs   Polling   About   
On Line Opinion logo ON LINE OPINION - Australia's e-journal of social and political debate

Subscribe!
Subscribe





On Line Opinion is a not-for-profit publication and relies on the generosity of its sponsors, editors and contributors. If you would like to help, contact us.
___________

Syndicate
RSS/XML


RSS 2.0

What lurks beneath

By Mark Hayes - posted Wednesday, 30 July 2008


There were precious few heroes in the midst of the chaos in Fiji during the 2000 crisis.

A bunch of armed, mutinous, special forces soldiers, incited by shadowy, still largely alleged plotters, surrounded by opportunists and grievously deluded and manipulated villagers, fronted by a charismatic, rather wild eyed, garrulous, shaven headed character named George Speight, himself a kai Loma (mixed Fijian-European), charged into Fiji’s Parliament on Friday morning, May 19, 2000, declaring they’d carried out a “people’s coup” against the Labour Party Coalition Government led by Fiji’s first Indo-Fijian Prime Minister, Mahendra Chaudhry. The coup - “the cause” - was to protect Indigenous Fijian rights from a land and political grab by the crafty Indo-Fijians.

In downtown Suva, mayhem erupted, with widespread looting and arson as mobs rampaged around the town, often targeting Indo-Fijian businesses, helping themselves to anything they could steal in the chaos.

Advertisement

The police and military were powerless to prevent Fiji’s third, and most violent, coup.

For the next 56 days, Speight and his gang held Chaudhry and 30 other politicians, including several Indigenous Fijians including a senior Fijian female chief, hostage in the Parliament complex, which was surrounded by loyal soldiers.

Heroically navigating through this fraught and potentially exceptionally dangerous mess was the Director General of the Fiji Red Cross, John Scott.

Pictures of Mr Scott, wearing his Red Cross tabard, walking into and out of Parliament surrounded by armed thugs were published world wide as he and his staff carried out the organisation’s strictly neutral mission to provide aid and comfort to all in distress. The hostages called him “an angel” and he joked about feeling around underneath his tabard looking for his wings.

Books and analytical articles published after the crisis eventually abated all paid ample testimony to Mr Scott’s genuinely heroic courage and work. At times, however, he was scared shitless.

Just when the Fiji situation seemed to be stable, on Thursday lunchtime, November 2, 2000, soldiers from the then disbanded Counter-Revolutionary Warfare unit, Fiji’s SAS, some of whom had supported the Speight-fronted putsch and were in detention at the military headquarters in Northern Suva awaiting trial, escaped. Getting weapons, they rampaged around the camp with the intention of killing military commander, Commodore Vorque (Frank) Bainimarama, who they blamed for the failure of the May 2000 coup.

Advertisement

The fortuitous return to barracks by the Third Fiji Military Regiment, generally regarded as the most professional in the Fiji military, assisted loyalists to put down the mutiny while Bainimarama was hurried away from the shooting, barely escaping alive.

When the shooting ceased, surviving rebels captured and locked up again, and the camp secured, several rebel’s bodies were delivered to the Colonial War Memorial Hospital and Suva’s morgue, bearing clear signs of having been beaten to death after capture. The Red Cross’ John Scott saw some of those bodies, later giving rise to rumours he knew more about the killings than he ever let on.

When some of the coup perpetrators finally got to court, Mr Scott declined to be a prosecution witness, saying that doing so would compromise his organisation’s strict neutrality.

The foregoing gives the barest overview of the context in which John Scott became known outside Fiji.

The Red Cross is OK, John Scott - “wasn’t he that white guy in that Fiji thing last year?” - and Fiji itself slipped away from world attention as the country groped to understand and perhaps recover from its latest self-inflicted traumas.

The coup of December, 2006, orchestrated and led by another of the apparent heroes of 2000, Bainimarama, demonstrated how poorly Fiji had, and continues, to recover, and hasn’t, from the 2000 crisis. There are almost no even minor heroes emerging from the current Fiji situation.

Early on Sunday morning, July 1, 2001, John Scott and his long term partner, New Zealander, Greg Scrivener, were horribly murdered at their Suva home.

On Fiji TV News that night, Police Commissioner Isikia Savua growled that Scott and his partner’s lifestyle had played a part in the murder. They had it coming, he clearly implied.

Watching Savua darkly opine on the motives of the then still unapprehended perpetrator in ways which any defence lawyer could readily exploit, and whose role, or lack of it, in the mayhem the previous year raised many still unanswered questions about where his loyalties might really lie, I nearly threw up. Seeing how the Fiji media, often eager to report every grisly detail of such altogether too common crimes in that very violent society, all but salivated over the story, I repeatedly cringed. Much overseas reportage was also seriously deficient, seizing on rumours and police innuendo about porn videos, drugs, implied pedophilia, and wild parties.

In London, John Scott’s younger brother, Owen, who’d made a career as an actor, was taking phone calls from Fiji and New Zealand, trying to comfort John Scott’s young adult son, Piers, struggling, and largely failing, make his own sense of what had apparently occurred. They traveled to Fiji to bury their brother and father, finalise his affairs, and seek some answers and perhaps even justice.

Eventually, Owen Scott wrote Deep Beyond the Reef (Penguin, 2004), a memoir of his family’s life in Fiji through four generations, the Scotts being a leading kai Vulagi (European Fijian) family, something of a biography of his late brother, and his own groping towards some sort of explanations as to why his brother had been murdered.

The title came from a popular 1948 song, Beyond the Reef, by Jack Pitman and recorded since then by Bing Crosby, Jimmy Wakley, Alfred Apaka, Andy Williams, and Elvis Presley, which Owen and his father would sing together when he was growing up.

Beyond the reef
Where the sea is dark and cold
Where love has gone
And our dreams grow old
There'll be no tears
There'll be no regretting
Will you remember me
Will you forget …

Deep Beyond the Reef is an exceptionally clever title because, beyond the protective reef, which embraces the islands in its care, lies the deeper, colder, sea containing darker secrets, including the feared tevoro vasua, the devil clam, symbolic of demons lurking just out there, beyond the protection of society’s conventions and beliefs.

Trying to find out why his brother was murdered, the means and suddenness making the awfulness of this murder so much more awful, takes Owen Scott into the murky deeps beyond the protections of society’s conventions and illusions. He knew the tevoro (demons, devils) lurk in Fiji, having experienced one of them in the person of his, and John’s, war hero, lawyer, leading politician, knight of the colonial realm, serial philanderer, and chronic alcoholic father. At times, John Scott had been something of a father figure for Owen, protecting him from their father’s excesses.

Deep Beyond the Reef is itself a compelling read and rewards by drawing the reader into and along with the story being told. Its exotic location, the reasons for it being written, the innuendo and many rumours swirling around the murders and subsequent, botched, police investigation, and the building of the story to its partial resolution also makes this story worthy of a documentary treatment.

It would appear that the confessed murderer, a Fijian man from a village near Suva, was insane when he committed the deed. How convenient for almost everybody associated with the interminably protracted case, except Owen and Piers Scott, Greg Scrivener’s family, their friends, Red Cross supporters, and those seeking justice for this awful crime, because so many loose ends were disposed of, swept under the mat, and neatly tied off. The murderer was nuts. Guilty but insane. End of story.

Not quite, and certainly not for Owen Scott.

Making reliable sense of almost anything to do with Fiji is decidedly difficult because Fijian affairs are often as murky as a tanoa (bowl) of yangona (kava), and the place often seems to run on rumours from the genuinely fantastic, through variously implausible, to the occasionally accurate.

Award winning New Zealand filmmaker Annie Goldson, who’d examined the 1991 murder in East Timor of 21-year-old Malaysian - New Zealand student, Kamal Barnadhaj in Punitive Damage (1999), and trans-gender New Zealand politician, Georgina Beyer, in Georgie Girl (2002), was drawn to Owen Scott’s story for all the obvious reasons.

In An Island Calling, Owen Scott appears as an excellent narrator and reference person through the complex story, itself told like a woven tapa mat being unpicked, its several strands needing careful attention lest the story become too dense and complicated, an important strand becoming lost. The circumstances of the murders, the familial and historical contexts, and then the immediately preceding events of 2000-2001 place Owen Scott’s, and his late brother’s, story into a clear narrative.

The most powerful sequences in An Island Calling occur when Owen visits the village, the vanua, from whence the confessed murderer, Apete Kaisau, comes. Colo-i-Suva is located just north west of Suva, and one drives past it if one takes the hilly route into town from Suva’s airport, Nausori. It’s something of a cooler, rain forested, retreat, a respite from the sometimes-stifling humidity down around the city and Suva harbour.

Kaisau’s family and church, with its pastor, welcome Owen into their midst, offering some sort of explanation for their son’s terrible act. After the long postponed trial, Owen and his family tentatively, warily, and then sadly, embraced the Kaisau family. Nobody came out of this with any real closure (to use an overworked piece of psychobabble). Owen’s line near the end of An Island Calling, about his having an invisible scar or a wound hidden on his skin forever is tellingly apt. He has a brother-sized hole in his soul.

The documentary, An Island Calling, makes a major contribution to Vulagi (outsider, Westerner) understanding of a major but neglected feature of contemporary Fiji, the continuing role and influence of so-called fundamentalist or Pentecostal sects and their pastors.

If the visitor keeps one’s eyes open on the King’s Road from Nausori into town, one passes large warehouses which are obviously supermarkets, next to which, and usually the same size, or even larger, are churches used by several Pentecostal sects. On Sundays, for the twice or more daily services, these are packed to overflowing. Down at the National Stadium near the University of the South Pacific, on Sundays crowds gather to pack the place and be bellowed at by a steadily more hysterical Fijian preacher. When Benny Hinn, whose tele-evangelism shows Fiji TV routinely runs, along with Australia’s Hillsong, visited Fiji near the end of January, 2006, the National Stadium was packed for three straight nights, though attendance figures were grossly inflated.

The long established Fiji Methodist Church - the Scott family forebears being early Methodist missionaries - still the largest mainstream Christian denomination, is struggling to keep its “market share” against predations from these newer, more entertaining, imports. Almost all churches in Fiji prey on their adherents, expecting, demanding, and receiving major collections and additional donations, to the point where church “obligations”, coupled with expected vanua obligations, could well be a significant contributor to growing poverty in a country already beset by globalisation’s economic strains, made worse still by self-inflicted traumas such as serial coups.

The influence of homophobic, Pentecostal, churches and pastors on already disturbed minds such as Apete Kaisau’s, who, in his more rational moments, explained his actions by reference to his pastor’s teachings, can lead to a lethal mix. His Bible, seized as part of the prosecution’s evidence, was annotated with underlining and scribblings about God’s terrible wrath to be visited upon licentious sodomites. On these kinds of issues, it seems the New Testament is edited out of many believers’ Bibles.

Throughout An Island Calling we meet members of Suva’s small but openly, often persecuted, gay community who point to the layered hypocrisies which burden their, and Fijian, society. They have very clear ideas why John Scott and his partner were murdered, the murky dynamics which coalesced that terrible Sunday early morning, and then polluted official investigations and public reactions.

Maybe, as Owen Scott suggests, his brother and partner, Greg Scrivener, made an ultimately fatal decision to return to Fiji, live their double lives as an openly gay couple with an open relationship while John led the Red Cross, assuming Fiji had not significantly changed since he grew up there. Perhaps the influence of Pentecostal preaching is over emphasised and John Scott and his partner would have been murdered anyway, such was the state of their killer’s delusions. Kaisau was apparently part of John Scott and Greg Scrivener’s gay circle until spurned by Scrivener, a casting out which preyed on his mind while in New Zealand until a few weeks prior to the murders.

Once you’ve deeply experienced Fiji it gets into you, under your skin, and you’re never the same. Even knowing the murkier nastiness which lurks just beneath the surface.

An Island Calling is an excellent contribution to deepening our understanding of what’s really going on in that fraught and still traumatised society.

  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. 4
  6. All

An Island Calling is directed and produced by Annie Goldson. It is screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival, 5.00pm, Thursday, July 31, 2008, Greater Union 4. A promotional clip is on YouTube here. First published in New Matilda on July 24, 2008.



Discuss in our Forums

See what other readers are saying about this article!

Click here to read & post comments.

Share this:
reddit this reddit thisbookmark with del.icio.us Del.icio.usdigg thisseed newsvineSeed NewsvineStumbleUpon StumbleUponsubmit to propellerkwoff it

About the Author

Dr Mark Hayes is a lecturer in the journalism program at the University of Queensland where he specialises in Pacific media and journalism contexts and practices. He still wishes he was back in Suva teaching journalism at the University of the South Pacific.

Other articles by this Author

All articles by Mark Hayes

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Photo of Mark Hayes
Article Tools
Comment Comments
Print Printable version
Subscribe Subscribe
Email Email a friend
Advertisement

About Us Search Discuss Feedback Legals Privacy