A strange sort of coup in Fiji

Looking closely at the tsunami of reportage out of Fiji during the first ten days of the coup, Commodore Frank has added some interesting sections to the loose leaf edition of The Book of Coups.

Soon after Commodore Frank announced he was taking power on Tuesday evening, December 5, soldiers turned up at local newsrooms demanding no news from the Qarase Government or its members be published or broadcast.

The next day's edition of the News Corporation-owned The Fiji Times was in production, but senior management told the military they were not going to publish under military censorship. They promptly announced their position on the Times'  website.

That night's late edition of Fiji TV News was also pulled, for the same reason, and this was also announced on air.

The next day, several Fiji media executives met with the military, put their position in very clear terms, and were assured their reportage would not be circumscribed provided they did not incite resistance to the coup (whatever that means in routine, responsible, ethical reporting). Following the mayhem of 2000, the Fiji media has long since put crisis reporting guidelines and procedures in place against possible future need. These have been implemented.

Of course, the military had earlier threatened the pro-Qarase Government. The Fiji Daily Post, which had suspended its print editions, continued to update its website.

International press freedom organisations, and even the News Corporation, moved quickly to criticise the threat to media freedom the military coup posed.

The Fiji-based media, at time of writing, remains in a “business as usual” but in wary mode.

Something else extremely interesting was also underway.

In Boston, US, Ms Jamila Raqib, a staffer with a non-violence think-tank, The Albert Einstein Institution, founded by the West's leading scholar of non-violence, Dr Gene Sharp, was e-mailing copies of the institution's 72-page The Anti-Coup Handbook to every email address she could find in Fiji.

"Individuals whom we were able to actually reach (I am excluding a number of emails that were returned to me as ‘undeliverable’) included a diverse group of more than 200 human rights organisations, government bodies, civil society groups, business councils, religious associations, as well as radio, television, newspaper, and web media networks to bring their attention to our publication," Ms Raqib told me in an email last week.

Fiji has an extremely diverse civil society which is very experienced in non-violent protest and associated organising and communications strategies and tactics. Receiving The Anti-Coup Handbook was extremely encouraging for such groups, reminding them that they were not isolated or forgotten.