Politics
Fiji's Fresh Bout of Turbulence
Qarase Says Partnership Impossible, While Labor Goes to Court
The outcome of a weeklong election Fiji ended in September makes it plain that the country’s festering political and racial troubles are entering a fresh bout of turbulence.
The South Pacific’s second most populous country faces the prospect of another confrontation between its 52 percent indigenous Fijian majority and economically dominant 44 percent Indian portion of the 840,000 population After a year as a post-coup caretaker prime minister of questionable legality, Laisenia Qarase, a Fijian bureaucrat turned businessman, was sworn in on September 10 as an undisputedly legal one.
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United Nations, European Union and Commonwealth observers say the election, while not perfect, was democratic and fair. Mahendra Chaudhry, leader of the Fiji Labor Party (FLP) and Qarase’s legal predecessor until he was driven out of office by a coup on May 19 last year, says that a cabinet of 20 Fijian and part-Fijian ministers sworn in on September 12 is definitely illegal.
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Chaudhry claims that the FLP is constitutionally entitled to seven or eight cabinet places. In late September the FLP was preparing to ask for a court ruling in its favor. Should Chaudhry win, Fijian hostility towards the Indian-dominated Labor Party is bound to flare up again. Legal commentators and local newspapers are predicting that Chaudhry will “probably” win his case. It would be strange if he did not. Fiji’s 1997 constitution, a very liberal replacement for one swept away by a 1987 coup, says plainly that any party winning at least 10 per cent of 71 House of Representatives seats is entitled to seats in cabinet. That formula means that Labor is entitled to seven or eight seats in a 20- member cabinet.
If Chaudhry wins and Qarase accepts the law Fiji will be landed with a government Qarase insists will be “unworkable.” Subsequent repercussions of friction in the cabinet aroused inevitably by clashes of party policy would be bound to widen yet again the gulf of political, economic and cultural mistrust between the country’s two dominant ethnic communities.
The gulf became evident a couple of decades after Indians began settling in Fiji as plantation workers and traders in 1879. For a while, after independence from Britain in 1970, it seemed to be slowly closing as early governments endeavored, although only with limited success, to forge multi-racial rule. It widened in May 1987 when a two-month-old Indian-dominated government for which Chaudhry was finance minister was removed at gunpoint by the Fijian controlled army. A new constitution brought the trade unionist and Labor Party leader to power as prime minister in May 1999 as the country’s first Indian prime minister.
But although the support of small Fijian parties added to the absolute majority the FLP won in Parliament, Chaudhry in May last year went almost the same way, although far more violently, that Labor went in 1987.
The election of August 25-September 1, which but for international pressure Qarase would have delayed for at least another year, made the polarization of Fijians and Indians, with small part European, European, Chinese and other groups caught in between, more obvious. Voters rejected a loose multi-racial group of five “moderate” parties as they came to be called.
Fijian voters gave 30 communal and open seats to Qarase’s Soqosoqo Duavata ni Lewenivanua (SDL — Fijian United Party) and six seats to the Conservative Alliance, a new grouping centered on the northern islands of Vanua Levu and Taveuni judged by commentators to be rather more extreme than the SDL in advocating protection for total Fijian political supremacy. One of its campaigning demands was an immediate amnesty for George Speight, the former salesman who led last year’s coup and with 13 cohorts led the assault on Parliament last year to hold Chaudhry and most of his government hostage there for 56 days.
Awaiting trial for treason, Speight and two of his followers were able to stand for the elections as SDL candidates. Speight won the Fijian communal seat for his home North Tailevu constituency, much to the disgust of those favoring a minimum of two decades in jail for him.
Indian support for the Labor Party gave it 27 seats. One Indian seat went to the formerly dominant National Federation Party, once the main Indian party but totally eliminated from Parliament by the 1999 election. Two seats went to the New United Labor Party, an anti-Chaudhry breakaway from the FLP, one to the United General Party (general voters are neither Fijians nor Indians); one to a Fijian independent and a seat reserved for the island of Rotuma was retained by the incumbent.
Prior to the election there were predictions that the FLP, which won 37 of the 71 House of Representative seats in 1999, wouldn’t do as well as before but would get a score in the high 20s that would put Chaudhry within reach of returning to the Prime Minister’s office with the help of several small coalition allies.
But while many liberally-inclined voters were prepared to concede the justice of that scenario they were also frankly scared of what the reaction to that event would be from Fijian extremists and the army. Another coup not too distant down the line, possibly one more bloody than last year and bound to destroy the last vestiges of international respectability for the country and its attractions as ground for investment?
The election campaign and the election itself went with surprising calm and order; with the police and army in the background insisting that law and order would be properly maintained.
From the outset of the election Qarase had rejected any possibility of becoming an ally with the Labor Party. Chaudhry was a man whose character and ideas were unacceptable to himself and Fiji, he said bluntly.
To attain the 36 seats he needed for forming government Qarase had to turn for support to the so-called moderates or to the controversial Conservative Alliance. But the demand for an amnesty for Speight was a condition Qarase couldn’t entertain if he was to win international acceptance for his government and keep a promise he made, that “justice would be done” after being conscripted in a caretaker prime minister’s role two months after the May coup.
Quick support for Qarase came from the Rotuma and Fijian independent MPs. Four more supporters were needed. The two New United Labour MPs were willing and so, it appeared were the lone National and General MPs.
But then the controversial Conservative Alliance had a change of heart. It dropped its demand for Speight’s release. “In fact that is what George wanted. He didn’t want the amnesty issue to be part of the conditions for the party negotiating with the SDL,” the party’s parliamentary leader, Ratu Naiqama Lalabalavu, told Pacific Magazine. Why was that? “Well just off the cuff this is the time for us to unite as Fijians and stand together.”
Lalabalavu says his party was far less extremist than its critics concede. Did it accept that Speight and his gang had to go to trial? “What we have accepted is that the course of law will take its own course and I will just leave it at that,” he said.
The surprise deal with the Conservative Alliance repelled the General and National Federation MPs. They couldn’t work it a coalition containing elements that had contributed to the toppling of the Chaudhry government, they protested. More protests came from Chaudhry, and the SVT leader, Filipe Bole, a former foreign minister, who had not unexpectedly failed to win the difficult Suva area seats. They and other defeated politicians claimed that vote-rigging in key certain constituencies had unjustly engineered several seats the SDL way. Chaudhry claimed Labor had been so deprived of at least six seats and would go to court to contest the results.
But a Commonwealth Observer Group declared: “We are strongly of the view that the conditions did exist for a free expression of will by the electors and that generally the result of the election reflected the wishes of people.”
Qarase went through the formality of writing to Chaudhry to invite Labor to be part of the new government as required by the constitution. After being sworn in as prime minister he told journalists “I have made it no secret that I would be happy if he does not accept because it will be an unworkable government. You see, if we follow strictly the provision of the constitution, and supposing he accepts, it means that he will have to get about eight seats, I get 12 and I have an obligation to give some to the smaller parties. Say I give five, I end up with seven. So the numbers don’t stack up. It will never work.”
Two days later Qarase named a Cabinet minus the Labor party. Qarase published a letter sent on September 12 to Chaudhry in which he explained that Labor wasn’t in the cabinet because it hadn’t accepted an express condition: that government policies would be based “fundamentally” of SDL policies, with heavy doses of discrimination intended to improve the economic and social position of Fijian.
A few hours later came the denunciation from the Labor Party. With the relish of plunging a crippling spoke in Qarase’s wheel plain on their faces, Labor’s leaders at a press conference announced that they would ask the Fiji Court of Appeal, composed normally of three to five senior foreign judges, to declare the new government and everything done by it to be constitutionally “blatantly unlawful.” Chaudhry scathingly attacked the appoint of cabinet without Labor as making Fiji “the little Indonesia of the Pacific where the country is run by corrupt politicians and businessman backed by the military.”
Labor said Fiji had been landed in “yet another constitutional crisis, only days after snap general elections called to return the country to constitutional rule following the coup and political unrest of last year.”
The FLP sent a delegation to foreign diplomatic missions in Suva to express concern about the Qarase government’s appointment. “What he (Qarase) has done effectively is making Fiji a laughing stock in the international community, the consequences of which will be very, very dire.”
Photo: Giff Johnson
