Pac Books
Understanding Fiji's Situation
An Interpretation of Events Since the Coups that First Toppled Democracy in 1987.
Some sections make heavy reading. But for truly earnest students of Fiji’s affairs, many of the 321 pages of "Confronting Fiji Futures" are a useful brief on the background of recent events that have reduced the crossroads of the South Pacific to the tragic political, social and economic condition it wallows in now.
A shade of embarrassment for some authors of the 12 articles the book is composed of is that it was at the press when the May 19, 2000 coup occurred. What they wrote is based on an interpretation of events since the coups that first toppled democracy in 1987 and the adoption in 1997 of a constitution hailed initially as the means of averting and then finally removing Fiji’s deep-rooted racism-tainted politics. Ganesh Chand, a cabinet minister with the Labor Party-led government toppled last May, in an article in which he discusses efforts by the former government to curb trade union power, greets the 1997 constitution as offering scope for the repeal of labor laws that many people regarded as being unjust. This in turn might partly explain the outcome of the 1999 election as a landslide Labor victory, he says. Thus the past history of labor market regulation could be undone. But, he adds with unconscious irony, "whether the peoples of Fiji continue to choose to do so remains to be seen."
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Satendra Prasad, of the Department of Sociology at the University of the South Pacific, analyses the result of the 1999 election. The alternative vote system, copied, with modifications, from Australia and other places was designed to promote racial harmony and national unity by "moving Fiji gradually but decisively away from the ‘politics of race’," he notes. It replaced the previous system of "first past the post" voting system rejected by critics as one bound to preserve and deepen "us versus them" vote battles liable to cause head-on confrontations between Fijian and Indian political blocs. But alternative voting didn’t work as it was meant to, since paradoxically in "open" constituencies in which voters were not restricted, as in communal constituencies, to voting only for candidates of their own race, voters of the dominant racial group plumped for candidates of their own ethnic community anyway.
The suitability of alternative voting needs to be critically assessed as does the ratio of open to open to reserved (communal) seats (presently 25 open to 46 reserved), Prasad suggests. Confronting Fiji Futures turns some light on one of the hottest issues of all — the question of the renewal of expiring leases of Fiji tribal land held by Indian, but also not a few Fijian, tenants.
Dr Steven Ratuva, one of the USP’s Fijian academics, assesses the outcome of efforts by past Fijian-led governments to ease Fijians into the world of business with policies discriminating in their favor. The post coup interim government has announced a 10-year burst of such favoritism. All that past efforts succeeded in doing, Ratuva says, is to make a small number of well-off Fijians much richer.
Holger Korth, an anthropologist at the University of Otago, New Zealand, writes on the theme of "Ecotourism and the politics of representation in Fiji." Ecotourism became an official thing from 1986, he reports, but in terms that are difficult to digest. For example: "Of course any attempt to classify or essentialize ecotourism (as attempted in a tourism ministry report) is inevitably reductionist. Ecotourism’s definitional transience resists closure, and it is quite possibly an unworkable task to create a comprehensive classification system based on a term that is subject to constant change." Quite.
