Cover Story
What Next?
It won't be easy for Caretaker Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase as he guides Fiji towards elections.
Fiji Islanders can be sure of little about the directions in which their country is moving. One thing they can be sure of is that despite a March 1 landmark court ruling that a constitution the military claimed was abrogated in May 2000 is still the supreme law, Fiji's immediate political future remains near as unsure as it became after the May 19 coup. Those who are not indigenous Fijians can be sure of something else. This is that now reduced by a torrent of migration and demographic factors to about 48 percent of the population -- and with the numerical gap widening rapidly in favour of indigenous Fijians -- Indian and other ethnic communities are now confirmed in a condition of subordinate political status.
It will be 20 to 30 years before indigenous Fijians will readily accept non-Fijian leadership. And that's a position non-indigenous Fiji citizens have to swallow, according to caretaker prime minister Laisenia Qarase. After what some local lawyers judged to be his illegal reappointment as prime minister on March 15, Qarase, said that August would be the month of an election for a new parliament. The parliament would replace the one closed down by nationalist gunmen last May. In March it was formally, and some lawyers argue illegally, dissolved by a decision of the country's president, Ratu Josefa Iloilo, supported by the almost 100 percent indigenous Fijian-manned military and the country's Great Council of Chiefs.
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Since May, the Council of Chiefs has become an institution which now appears to have established a degree of non-constitutional paramountcy over the elected parliament: What indigenous Fijians want, as decided by the chiefs, comes first. Everything else, including the opinion of parliament, is now becoming secondary.
There are forecasts that despite the coup against the Labour-led government, August ballot boxes will restore the Indian-dominated Labour Party as the government with a repeat of the election victory it had in May 1999.
The win would not be as overwhelming, because of Labour's loss of support from some small indigenous Fijian political groups. Nor would it be led by trade unionist Mahendra Chaudhry, for a year the country's first Indian prime minister until nationalists led by George Speight captured him and most of his government in parliament. They were held there as hostages for 56 days.
With or without Chaudhry, whose abrasive character is regarded by a growing number of Labour politicians as an obstacle to forging goodwill between indigenous Fijians and Indians, Labour's return to power as the next government would be ripe ground for more violent anti-Indian agitation.
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Even if the government is headed by an indigenous Fijian prime minister, probably university academic Tupeni Baba, one of the Chaudhry government's two indigenous Fijian deputy prime ministers and now in public an unabashed enemy of the deposed prime minister.
The number of Indian MPs sitting as a majority on government benches would be a provocation that indigenous Fijian nationalists and business opportunists would seize as an excuse for again whipping up indigenous Fijian fears about Indian political and economic domination.
Baba wants to lead a government of national unity composed of all of parliament's political groups dedicated to rebuilding a democratic government in a way acceptable to all. Some Fijian nationalist factions spurn that proposition. Chaudhry, in what Labour Party officials concede is a strategy to allow him to make a graceful exit from leadership, if he chooses, say that he is unable to be part of a government that includes Fijian politicians implicated in the plot against his government.
The turning of Baba and Adi Kuini Speed, Chaudhry's other deputy prime minister and head of the significant Fijian Association Party, against him in March, put the deposed prime minister in a weak light politically. But local analysts say that back at the polls in August, the Labour Party would be certain to again attract Chaudhry's powerful base of Indian rural, trade union and some civil service support. Plus at least some support from urban Fijian voters resistant to the dictates from the traditional Fijian political aristocracy.
Since the election will be held under the restored constitution, the poll will be conducted with a controversial alternative voting system. This, several academics agree, in May 1999 swung to Labour a number of seats it would not have won otherwise. Iloilo, in a speech after being again sworn-in again as president, warned indigenous Fijians that unless half a dozen competing indigenous Fijian political parties united, then they could not hope to constitutionally regain a position that nationalists demanded: a strongly entrenched indigenous Fijian dominated government led by an indigenous Fijian prime minister.
By late March militant factions of the Soqosoqo Vakavulewa ni Taukei, leader of the ruling coalition beaten by Labour in the 1999 election, and four other groups were claiming to have teamed up to fight for an indigenous Fijian victory. The others included dissident supporters of the Fijian Association, previously Chaudhry's main coalition government ally, and the Christian Democrats.
Whether this assembly of minor politicians without a charismatic leader could be welded into an effective election-fighting machine is doubtful. A pointer to the future nature of indigenous Fijian leadership came when after his reappointment as head of a caretaker government, Qarase announced his intention to stand for election.
Qarase is a generally widely respected bureaucrat who last July got leave of absence from his job as head of an indigenous Fijian owned credit company after being picked by the army and chiefs to head an interim government. This was formed to replace the military government established after the civilian-led May coup.
Qarase is from Kabara Island in the Lau Islands and thus in customary terms a subject of Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, Lau's paramount chief and former president and prime minister.
A March meeting of the Council of Chiefs to approve political directions saw the removal of Sitiveni Rabuka, leader of the defeated Soqosoqo ni Vakavulewa ni Taukei led government, from the influential chairperson's post.
He was replaced by Mara's son-in-law, Ratu Epeli Ganilau, an easy-going former military commander, with no great political sway except as a high chief of his home region.
Rabuka's loss of influence was probably engineered by the Mara family, who regarded him as an upstart. It was helped by a growing feeling in the indigenous Fijian community that the grassroots popularity Rabuka won as leader of a 1987 military coup against a new Indian dominated government had waned.
With the patronage of Mara, Ganilau and President Iloilo, Qarase, with no past political experience, could emerge as a political leader of the calibre the indigenous Fijians so obviously lack.
All this complex turn of events began on March 1 when the Fiji Court of Appeal of five foreign judges (two New Zealanders, an Australian, a Papua New Guinean and Tonga's British chief justice) upheld a November high court ruling.
This is in response to a petition from an aggrieved Indian farmer, Chandrika Prasad, that the overthrow of the democratic government earlier in the year violated his constitutional rights and that the constitution dumped by the military was still the country's supreme law. The appeal court ruling appalled and embarrassed the Qarase administration, which had been confident of winning the case and which was committed to holding an election by March next year. On the fourth day of the appeal court hearing the government appeared to surrender by announcing that it would accept a decision that went against it.
But in a broadcast on the evening of the ruling, Qarase said it would be a while before his administration would actually begin complying with constitutional requirements. Qarase's then embarked on a series of delaying fudges. These were to apparently gain time for the marshalling of indigenous Fijian opinion behind it and to avoid the very real risk of a violent indigenous Fijian backlash against the ruling that militant extremists could easily engineer.
The court's opinion had to go to the Council of Chiefs for a blessing or otherwise and President Iloilo, after hearing the council's views, would decide what to do next, the administration explained.
The military, since May the real power in the land, said only that it respected the court's decision and would support any decision by the president.
Since the appeal court had declared that Mara had not formally resigned until December 15, not in May, 10 days after Speight's coup, as the military had claimed, Iloilo's appointment by the Council of Chiefs as president last June was held to be unconstitutional. He'd become only acting president with a commission constitutionally bound to expire on March 15.
The March meeting of the chiefs reappointed him constitutionally before that deadline. They also agreed that the country should be returned to the constitutionally proper path.
Iloilo then announced that he had formally dismissed Chaudhry as prime minister because Chaudhry had formally advised him to dissolve parliament. The inference was that by tendering such advice Chaudhry admitted that he had lost the confidence of parliament. Chaudhry, who during the February appeal court hearing had won no points at home by being in India talking to "Mother India", furiously rejected that notion.
To comply, supposedly, with constitutional niceties, Iloilo then appointed his nephew, Ratu Tevita Momoedonu, who was the Chaudhry government's labour minister, as prime minister for fewer than 24 hours.
Mara had appointed Moemoedonu as temporary prime minister in May as a ruse for purportedly dismissing the then George Speight-held Chaudhry. As in May last year, Moemoedonu resigned a day late and so, according to advice from the president's lawyers, whoever they were, the way was cleared legally for the appointment of a "caretaker" replacement to replace Qarase's "interim" one, which had resigned. So what to do? Bring back Qarase.
A government statement explained that the president had "reserve powers". What these were wasn't explained since there's no reference to them constitutionally.
But apparently they allowed him to ignore a constitutional requirement to dismiss a prime minister only after the incumbent has suffered the indignity of a no-confidence vote against him; to ignore a letter signed by 40 of parliament's 71 elected members asking for the recall of parliament (a minimum of 18 signatures is required constitutionally); and to appoint as a caretaker government a prime minister and cabinet ministers who are not constitutionally qualified to hold their appointments.
Minutes after swearing to uphold the law, the 80-year-old president, an obliging gentleman surrounded by minders intent on fending off people the administration doesn't wish to reach him, was doing everything but that. It wasn't long before writs to challenge the legality of Iloilo's moves were being drafted by the Labour Party, and the Fiji Citizens Constitutional Forum, which is an assembly of concerned non government bodies and other opponents of what, critics said, was the illegality of the advice the president.
Attorney-General Alipate Qetaki's response to questions by journalists was: It is sometimes necessary to act outside a constitution to uphold it. Appeals against the lower court's decisions arising from the writs would be heard by the appeal court at a session due after the August election. A lower court decision before August that upheld the writs would lessen the feasibility of holding any election this year.
