Runaway colonel puts Fiji in focus

Writing in The Australian, Jon Fraenkel a Senior Research Fellow at the Australian National University, says that while a proposal to break the deadlock by embracing the September 2014 election date is depicted as an innovative foreign policy stance it is merely a rehash of the failed approach - inspired by the Commonwealth's Millbrook Declaration - tried immediately after Fiji's 2006 coup. In early 2007, Australia, New Zealand, the European Union and the Pacific Islands Forum urged Fiji to accept a two-year "road map" towards elections by early 2009.

That allowed the aid money to keep flowing, and a joint working group was established to focus on the technical electoral issues, ignoring the politics.

Frankel says many of those who sympathise with Bainimarama like to depict the policy debate as being about whether Canberra should engage with Bainimarama. "Of course there needs to be dialogue, but negotiations need to encourage the removal of draconian public emergency regulations and intense media censorship, the normalisation of diplomatic relationships, getting the soldier-civil servants back to barracks and - above all - kick-starting talks involving Fiji's civilian political leaders".

Meanwhile in Fiji, the junta has reportedly frozen the assets of the Mara family and "interviewed" his wife and several others.

One member of his family, Adi Ateca Mara-Ganilau, was reportedly taken for questioning by six soldiers. The troops demanded her mobile phone, but she refused saying that the she would only give it to the coup leader, Bainimarama, or the police chief.

Mara's wife, Dolores, was also held after being arrested for trying to send her husband a bag of clothes on a Tonga-bound Air Pacific flight. .

Seems the Greek idea of taking a holiday anywhere but in a dictator's fiefdom would be worth backing.