The continuing Fijian trauma

Matai Akauola isn’t the kind of guy to display emotion in public. Like most Fijian men, even when injured on the rugby field, he usually presents as being genial, even-tempered and calm. As a leading Fijian journalist, the News and Sports Director at the Fiji Broadcasting Corporation no less, he’s “been there, done and seen that” when it comes to Fiji’s periodic, self-inflicted, traumas.

Yet during a morning session on threats to media freedom in the Pacific at the 2007 Pacific Islands News Association (PINA) Convention in Honiara, Solomon Islands, in late May, he was hunched over the table in tears as he related how his family was deeply divided by the continuing governance crisis in Fiji.

One of his sons is in the Fiji military, so when he comes home for Sunday lunch after church, the rest of the family have to be very careful with their conversations. Matai Akauola also told how he could no longer even trust his own staff, as the Fiji military has its spies and snouts scattered through every newsroom.

The News Director of Fiji TV, Netani Rika, also an extremely experienced Fijian journalist, looked at his colleague in sincere sympathy, and then proceeded to tell a harrowing tale of being summoned to the Fiji military camp in the northern Suva suburb of Nabua in April where he was severely admonished for a story Fiji TV had run about a death, allegedly caused by the military, on Fiji’s main northern island of Vanua Levu: one of at least three such deaths since last December’s coup.

Like Matai Akauola, Netani Rika’s a tough, experienced, operator who’s usually afraid of no one. He was expecting to be carried out of the camp on a stretcher after a beating, and felt lucky he was only verbally scared with a tongue lashing by a senior officer, well known to him, prominently wearing a hand gun.

A Solomon Islander senior journalist colleague drew wry, muted, laughs when he said he’d rather have a high powered weapon pointed at him by somebody supposedly trained to use it, like a Fijian soldier, than by a drunk or crazed Solomons militia thug who stole his machine gun from a looted police armoury, as occurred during the Solomon crisis.

Recalling how the Fiji media heroically faced down soldiers sent to occupy their newsrooms on the night of last December’s coup, I later asked Netani why the Fiji media hasn’t continued to exhibit industry solidarity when journos like him were seriously harassed, but rather had reverted to their usual extremely competitive ways. Surely they can’t be ignorant of the many tactics which can be deployed against coups? (I was one of several who scattered the Albert Einstein Institution’s PDF format Anti-Coup Handbook around NGO and media contacts in Suva just before and after the coup.) “Pigs might fly”, was Netani’s weary, somewhat exasperated, reply.

At least Matai and Netani were able to travel to Honiara to speak to PINA delegates.

The former boss of Fiji Broadcasting, Francis Herman - a widely respected senior regional media executive - when he was about to travel to an academic conference in Melbourne in early July where he was a scheduled keynote speaker - discovered he was on a travel ban list and is now the subject of an investigation into alleged corruption.

His former Board Chair spoke forcefully in Mr Herman’s defence. In response, the corruption investigators are taking their time to interrogate him while he languishes in Suva, unable to take up an AusAID-funded extended media consultancy in Vanuatu.

The Fiji media reported that corruption allegations against Mr Herman were made by a disgruntled former Radio Fiji employee. My suspicion is that Mr Herman’s travel ban is no more than payback for Radio Fiji’s occasionally “incorrect” reporting about the interim military regime’s “clean up campaign”: the campaign has yet to expose and charge a single person for serious, allegedly endemic, corruption and was one of the main justifications for the December, 2006, coup.

Public critics of the military regime, such as Fiji human rights leader, Shamima Ali, and former Law Society President, Graham Leung, have also been recently prevented from boarding their overseas flights as they lined up at the departure gates at Nadi airport. Given both were later cleared to travel, stopping them at the immigration counter at the airport was simply vindictive harassment. Other critics remain grounded in Fiji, their administrative or legal appeals being ignored or proceeding with all the alacrity of a non-existent Fijian glacier.

Matai and Netani’s separate but related stories, to which Francis Herman’s tale can be added, are vivid insights into how badly the Bainimarama coup has come unglued and seriously stagnated. These insights can be replicated across Fijian society, as was vigorously displayed at the recent Fiji Law Society annual conference, where some delegates exchanged loud, and bitterly personal, condemnations over each other’s respect, or lack of respect, for the Rule of Law.

Through the shouting came the measured excoriation of the military regime by former vice-president, respected senior lawyer and former jurist, as well as Commodore Bainimara’s high chief, the Roko Tui Bau, Ratu Joni Mandraiwiwi. He criticised the general arbitrariness the regime is demonstrating when it comes to government and diplomatic sackings and appointments, including the recent appointment of Human Rights Commission head, Dr Shaista Shameem, lawyer and early coup apologist, to the Ombudsman’s post.

Ratu Joni wasn’t prevented from travelling to Canberra recently to speak at the launch of an excellent book of papers on the 2006 Fiji elections also containing after words on the coup. (From Election to Coup in Fiji by Jon Fraenkel & Stewart Firth, ANU Press, 2007.) Being consistent, a few months ago, the military government banned two Suva law firms, including Howards, for which Ratu Joni’s a consultant, from any government legal work.

Allowing for the unevenness of how everything works, or doesn’t, even in Suva, deep divisions between pro- and anti-coup groupings are adding to the general uncertainty and unease which pervades the country, particularly its capital. Recent protracted water cuts in the Suva area, and looming restrictions due to drought, just contribute to the continuing irritation. Add probable electricity cuts because the dams which feed the hydro-electricity plant in the mountains northwest of Suva are emptying, and the misery just gets worse.

Irritation is giving way to looming strike action by Fiji’s large public service. Denied a mandated pay rise earlier this year, and with the economy stagnant and looking like contracting further, nurses, teachers, and bureaucrats are on strike. The military’s been publicly rehearsing riot control tactics, seeking to intimidate intending strikers. Earlier this week, Australia raised its travel advisory warning on Fiji a notch in response to the likely strikes, a move which will also affect the already lower tourism numbers.

The so-called “smart sanctions” and travel bans by Australia and New Zealand on anybody involved with the interim government are noticeably slowing the regime’s expressed desire to return Fiji to democracy as soon as practicable. This is because prospective appointees to key government posts to do with mounting a census, electoral reforms, and general governance enhancement are not coming forward.

Major European Union assistance is dependent on the regime demonstrably progressing towards a return to democratic rule. The New Zealand Government is still smarting over the expulsion of its High Commissioner from Fiji, and PM Helen Clark is promising to ignore Commodore Frank should he attend the 2007 Pacific Islands Forum meeting in Nuku’alofa, Tonga, in October.

Legal cases being brought by the ousted prime minister, Laisenea Qarase, still in internal exile on his home island to the east of Fiji’s main islands, some sacked senior bureaucrats, and coup opponents defending mild public order charges, will start to see the inside of a court in August. It remains to be seen how Fiji’s apparently compromised legal system handles these matters.

The recent Law Society conference also discussed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Daniel Fatiaki, who has been stood aside and what this means for the Rule of Law in Fiji.

Some observers, myself included, thoughtfully and extremely reluctantly gave very cautious support to the military coup in Fiji, hoping it would be a swift and decisive intervention to wrench the country towards better governance, with an equally swift return to democracy after necessary administrative and electoral reforms. However, Fiji’s situation is slowly sliding into a messy, grumbling, arbitrary swamp, with no clear indications of it being drained any time soon.

Ratu Joni’s remarks at ANU in early July, as usual for this wise and brilliant man, amply summed up the dashed hopes of ordinary Fijians. He said:

The legal gymnastics one is obliged to perform, all the while chanting the Constitution is intact like a mantra, would test a contortionist. The dilemma is that the legal apologists and their collaborators in the military wished to depart from the Constitution without breaching it. We are still continuing on this “Alice in Wonderland” journey.