Cover Story
Shadows Over The Games
Why South Pacific Games chief, Robin Mitchell, has a nagging worry
Between June 28 and July 12, and for some days before and after those dates, Fiji will host nearly 6000 athletes and officials at the South Pacific Games in Suva.
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It’s costing the South Pacific Games committee F$17 million (US$8 million) to stage the event . The government puts its contribution at around F$20 million.
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The Games will be history’s largest ever assembly of Pacific Islanders from 22 countries.
Suva will be crammed with people for the event.
But the chairman of the Games organising committee, Robin Mitchell, a physician, has a nagging worry.
He told a media conference he hoped the government might delay or advance a critical court case due to open in Suva on June 18.
After a hearing expected to run for three days, five mostly overseas judges will rule, probably with speed, on the legality of the 20-member cabinet of Fiji’s Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase.
Apart from one Indian and one part European, the cabinet is composed of indigenous Fijians drawn from the coalition of parties Qarase organised after a September 2001 election that positioned his brand new SDL (Soqosoqo ni Duavata ni Lewenivanua) party to form a government.
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The hitch is that Fiji Labour Party leader Mahendra Chaudhry, whose one-year tenure as the country’s first Indian prime minister, was ended by a coup in May 2000, credibly argues that the 1997 Constitution requires his party to have at least eight seats in the cabinet—a structure rejected by Qarase as not only “unworkable” but a recipe for “political chaos, deadlock and strife, and a weak government”.
The constitution requires the Prime Minister to establish a “multi-party”—really meaning multi-racial—cabinet with all parties with at least 10 percent of the 71-member House of Representatives to have cabinet places in proportion to their parliamentary strength.
Labour has 29 seats. Chaudhry claims this number entitled him to eight ministries.
Qarase’s stand is that Chaudhry rejected his invitation to be part of the cabinet by setting unacceptable conditions, one being a refusal to bow to the policies of Qarase’s party, the Soqosoqo ni Duavata ni Lewenivanua (Fijian United Party).
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Most legal commentators believe Chaudhry will win his case.
This prospect places the Games chief in a bind. One way or another, a victory for Chaudhry so close to the opening of the Games is bound to produce a heavily charged political atmosphere.
This could easily be ignited to cause the anti-Indian explosions of Fijian nationalism that produced the coups of 1987 and 2000.
If Chaudhry wins, then Qarase, who has declared that he will accept the court’s ruling, will either have to swallow hard and replace seven or eight of his ministers with MPs drawn from the Indian-dominated Labour Party or, more likely, as expected, opt for another general election.
Either way, it is likely to arouse yet another surge of racial tension between indigenous Fijians and the descendants of migrant plantation workers and traders from India.
With 6000 visiting guests thronging Suva, an outburst like the riot that wrecked the city’s centre as an immediately organised prelude to the May 2000 coup, would be a disaster. It would be a risk threatening to wreck the Games before they started. Nervous national sports contingents would shy off at the first hint of trouble.
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After Mitchell’s suggestion, Attorney-General Qoriniasi Bale told Fiji Television that the government had no power to interfere with the time of a court case—a matter that Chaudhry for months has accused the government of delaying for the sake of keeping power.
Only the judicial administration could adjust the hearing, Bale said.
In the past months Qarase, a mild-looking former bureaucrat and businessman who freely admits that he had nil experience of politics until he was plunged into the cauldron of them after the May 2000 coup, has been running an upbeat personal campaign to present with feelings the Fiji image with a positive glow.
In February, he called local print, radio and television publishers, editors and managers to his office to implore them to publish more good news. It would help, he said, in repairing the country’s mangled race relationships and rebuilding local and foreign confidence in the country.
He complained that the local media carried a “chronic” amount of bad news that left stories of genuine political, economic and social repair achieved since the events of May 2000 completely in the shade.
Qarase’s complaint is the familiar lament of politicians unhappy with reports that present an unflattering portrayal of their performance.
However, some senior journalists present at the gathering agreed that there was justification for Qarase’s disquiet.
Yet, in the months ahead the journalists of Fiji, however willing they are to help ease uneasy race and political relations by balancing the bad news of the day, the week and the month with more good news, are bound to focus their attention on the dangerous hurdles Fiji has to jump to reach Qarase’s declared objective of restoring real harmony, stability and growth.
Except for the fight with Chaudhry over the cabinet membership issue, none of the formidable challenges on Qarase’s plate are of his making. All are the failures of previous governments; worsening unemployment and violent crime, official corruption, unrest in the army, deteriorating medical, education and other critical services such as water supplies, deteriorating public service standards, and political unrest aggravated by not merely tensions between Fijians and Indians but the revival of Fijian tribal and regional rivalries that nearly 90 years of former British colonial rule clamped a lid on.
Pile of worries
Qarase doesn’t look as if he despairs of victory over that formidable pile of woes. He is generally remarkably accessible to the media and even more remarkably willing to sacrifice personal time to go and meet the people.
Chaudhry’s quest for cabinet places and the alarming consequences that could be generated ranks as a challenge that may be overshadowed by a possibly greater threat.
This is the prospect of the imminent collapse of the 120-year of sugar industry, for more than 80 years the core of the Fiji economy and still a vital part of it.
It directly and indirectly employs 40,000 people, a figure extrapolated by some analysers of the industry to as much as 240,000 people, or nearly one-third of the whole population.
It normally generates over 30 percent of domestic exports and 16 percent of foreign exchange earnings, with much less leakage than tourism and other industries.
Sugar Industry
But for domestic and external reasons, the sugar industry is desperately ill. The government-controlled Fiji Sugar Corporation, operator of all four sugar mills, is insolvent. According to its chair, Hafiz Khan, and the independent chair of the Fiji Sugar Commission, Gerald Barrack, the industry is a death’s door, with a drastic reconstruction plan, due to begin on April 1, as its only hope of survival.
But canegrowers, particularly Chaudhry, whose political power base lies heavily in the National Farmers’ Union, backed by many of the 22,000 mainly Indian canegrowers, are fighting the plan as its stands now.
Chaudhry now opposes it entirely, having accepted the basics of it as Prime Minister, while other growers’ organisations are pressing for a year of further consultations about it.
Qarase has warned that there is no point trying to keep the sugar business alive if restructuring doesn’t proceed as planned from April. The Fiji Sugar Corporation’s chair in a television interview warned that if the plan doesn’t proceed, the mills won’t open to crush this year’s crop.
What the government wishes is to turn the Fiji Sugar Corporation into four stand-alone sugar mills business in which growers, mill workers and the government would share ownership. The restructuring is much more complex than that; thousands of canegrowers would be encouraged really to evacuate the industry and the mill worker numbers would drop drastically.
What worries the Fiji Sugar Corporation is that critical supporting finance from the European Investment Bank and other institutions might not arrive if the restructuring is delayed any further or foiled by local sugar politics.
The collapse of sugar with inevitable grave destabilising political and social as well as economic consequences would be a national calamity.
Yet, industry chair Barrack expects that a compromise will be achieved and that the next harvest will get under way in June on schedule.
In a speech in February dealing with “The way to more jobs and economic prosperity”, Qarase focussed on the “positive” side of the Fiji dilemma because, he lamented, “too many people in Fiji are caught in a negative mindset. They do not see a glass that is half full. They see it as half empty. It is difficult for them to look to the future with confidence because they are conditioned to be pessimistic.”
Despite the wreckage left by the 2000 coup, Fiji undoubtedly retains “huge potential and promise.”
Progress in the two and half years since the coup was “indisputable”.
“We have gone from insurrection and chaos to military and then civilian rule, to democratic elections and legitimate parliamentary government. We have taken the economy from a contraction to expansion and established a foundation for sustainable high growth. There is just one Constitutional issue to resolve on a matter of interpretation and that will be before the courts in June.”
Economic growth
The real worries, he said, was that economic growth was “less than impressive” at only an average of 2.5 percent GDP growth annually for the last 20 years, well below the rate of most other developing countries.
“Investment was low at only 10 percent of GDP compared with the 25 percent enjoyed by many other developing countries. Income per person was stagnant, the quality of life deteriorating, infrastructure lay neglected and poverty, unemployment and crime were worsening.”
Qarase said he was alarmed about unemployment—up from 7.8 percent in 1996 to 14.1 percent in 2002. Over 77 percent of the unemployed had secondary school education. That meant schools were educating young people for whom there were no jobs (about 17,000 school leavers annually, with less than one-third absorbed by the labour force), according to other figures.
On the other hand, the Prime Minister asserted that Fiji’s business community was responding positively to government efforts to accelerate growth and investment.
“So far, we are on track. Real GDP growth was 4.3 percent in 2001 with 4.4 percent expected for 2002, and 5.7 percent projected for 2003.
“These figures take little account of sugar. They rely on the performances, actual and predicted, of tourism, fresh and canned tuna export, gold mining, garment exports, timber exports, including preliminary output from now maturing mahogany plantations and a widening variety of other lesser but significant goods and services exporting businesses.”
Qarase railed against criticism of his “50/50 by the year 2020” plan designed to move 50 percent of “all economic activities”—meaning business—to indigenous ownership within a 20-year period beginning in 2001.
Affirmative action plan
This shift of ownership from mainly Indian, Chinese and European hands is to be achieved by giving Fijians a considerable range of business licences, contract awards, education, finance, quota and other advantages. Indian critics condemn it as discrimination against them. There’s nothing really new about such policies; it’s just that previous lesser schemes tended to flop.
Not a few senior Fijian civil servants harbour private reservations about the outlook for the success of the Qarase plans.
Unfortunately for Qarase, the 50/50 formula is more fuel for critics like Chaudhry, who claim his political philosophies and efforts to reform land lease conditions that are another hot issue affecting relations between Fijian tribal owners and Indian tenants, are proof that he’s a Fijian nationalist.
In his February speech he complained: “It is disturbing that affirmative action is constantly misrepresented as a sinister bid for racial superiority.
“The Fijians (about 52 percent of the 840,000 population) were at the very bottom of the ladder in education, the professions, business and incomes. They were generally the poorest and most disadvantaged citizens, yet they owned most (about 90 percent) of the land.
“To ignore their plight is to imperil our collective future. So our aim is to remove inequities and inequalities, which in themselves pose a threat to our social stability. Failure to address this would be to ignore some of the lessons of our history.
“I repeat, for the sake of the dissenters, there is no intention of depriving or suppressing others.”
Qarase, without question, is regarded favourably by the Fiji business community, including large influential Indian-owned businesses who were nervous of Chaudhry’s socialist-inclined government. He’s also been well received by foreign governments like those of Australia, New Zealand and European Union, which responded to the 2000 coup with trade, aid and sports sanctions.
Domestically, however, apart from his feuding with Chaudhry over constitutional, land, sugar and affirmative action issues, there are other contentious matters where his government does not see eye-to-eye with even Fijian critics.
The government has resisted calls from Chaudhry, Opposition Leader Mick Beddoes, minor political parties and various organs of “civil society” for an independent inquiry to discover the identity of the behind-the-scenes backers of the May 2000 disaster.
The government insists there is no need for one because the law should be left to take its cause.
But in Fiji there is scepticism about whether some lawmen, and not just policemen, have the desire or the ability to delve to the bottom of the May 2000 buckets.
Court cases
Few in Fiji believe that George Speight, a shady former salesman bumped up by a former government to a giddy height as the head of statutory timber companies, was the real coup leader.
Speight pleaded guilty to treason charge without identifying any of the people who pulled strings to destroy the Chaudhry government.
Leo Smith, a Chaudhry cabinet minister and one of the MPs held hostage in Parliament by Speight, later related to a court that a gunman told him he would be surprised by who would arrive to direct Speight. A lot of people think they know who that was.
Speight was “frantically trying to reach someone on the mobile telephone and appeared frustrated because he was not getting a response,” Smith recounted.
On February 20, the first three of nine other men convicted with Speight on lesser charges were freed from their Nukulau Island prison, near Suva, with time off for good behaviour. Six others can expect a similar remission, leaving Speight, according to one of the freed men, alone on the island in the company of several army men convicted on coup-related mutiny charges.
With probably at least a dozen years imprisonment ahead of him, there is speculation that Speight might crack and turn whistleblower in return for earlier freedom.
A former senior army officer, Lt Colonel Viliame Seruvakula, said on his transfer to the New Zealand Army (which wouldn’t have accepted a coup-tainted recruit) that he could name nine prominent chiefs, politicians, and businessmen behind Speight.
Chaudhry told Parliament and in December in another treason trial that he had also given the names of 20 Speight backers to the police.
In February, after a witness in a current treason trial said Speight told him that two large Indian companies had financed Speight, Chaudhry told parliament that the named companies, Punja & Sons Limited and C.J. Patel & Co Ltd, were two of the names he’d given police.
The two companies published angry denials and acting Police Commissioner Moses Driver issued a statement saying that extensive police investigations into the coup, which were continuing, had not yielded a scrap of evidence against them.
However, the protracted trial of journalist Josefa Nata and telecommunications technician and former MP Ratu Timoci Silatolu, expected to produce a verdict by mid-March, two court martials and another coup related trial, have produced a string of names that provoked Chaudhry and others to complain of “selective justice”. Are certain publicly compromised figures immune from prosecution?, he and others, local newspapers included, are asking.
Nata and Silatolu were accused with Speight of treason, but elected to plead not guilty. At their trial before Australian judge Andrew Wilson they chose to give evidence on oath, so exposing themselves to cross-examination. Both men claimed they knew nothing about the coup until it happened, when circumstances unavoidably swept them into it.
Television news tapes shown in evidence depicted the present Fiji Vice President, Ratu Jope Seniloli, constitutionally elected by chiefs to this office after the coup, being sworn-in as purported president by Nata on May 19, the day of the coup, and then purporting to swear in Silatolu as Prime Minister and a number of others as “cabinet ministers”.
They included Qarase’s youth and sports minister, Isireli Leweniqila, one of six MPs of the Conservative Alliance/Matanitu Vanua, a hot-and-cold hardline nationalist group that wants Speight to be pardoned and freed, and the Parliamentary Deputy Speaker, Ratu Rakuita Vakalalabure, the Conservative Alliance leader.
Vakalalabure, a lawyer, is awaiting a Fiji Law Society disciplinary committee ruling on whether he should be penalised for his role in the coup.
Another compromised person is a senior chief and former government minister, Adi Samanunu Cakobau, who when the coup happened rushed from Malaysia, where she was Fiji High Commissioner, and in apparent association with Speight was touted to be prime minister. A secret Public Service Commission inquiry cleared her of impropriety, but when Britain refused to accept her as High Commissioner in London her Malaysian job was renewed. Another controversial figure is former army colonel Isikia Savua, who after years with the Fiji mission at the United Nations, returned to Fiji as police commissioner. Chaudhry accused Savua of having misled him as Prime Minister, about the risk of a coup; Savua had actually predicted trouble months before.
Savua’s failure to avert the riot that immediately preceded the coup was condemned by suspicious critics, including one senior police officer. An inquiry into Savua’s conduct was conducted by then Chief Justice Sir Timoci Tuivaga, sitting with two lay commissioners.
Savua said he was happy to have the inquiry conducted in public. Tuivaga insisted on secrecy. His findings, which cleared Savua, remain unpublished. In February, Savua returned to New York to be ambassador to the United Nations.
The police insist they are investigating every lead but have difficulty in producing solid evidence against suspected coup plotters.
Sources at the Prosecutor’s Office told Islands Business that some of the files turned into the office by some police investigators were so full of holes that suspects were obviously being shielded.
However, according to one prosecutor, the office is determined not to be deterred by the social or political standing of any suspect and was examining scope for mounting prosecutions under the Penal Code provisions covering the administration and taking of seditious oaths.
The credibility of Qarase’s government has been harmed by a popular belief of what critics say is its attempts to avoid full exposure of the coup’s real backers.
Chaudhry remarked that the government was intent on “protecting some of its own parliamentarians and senators who were key players in the unlawful events of 2000”.
Qarase, whose SDL party has 30 seats, gained power only with the support of the six Conservative Alliance MPs and several independents.
But in February, the theory that his government is engaged in a cover-up began to falter when several influential Fijian coup supporters were charged. One was another cabinet minister, lands and minerals minister Ratu Naiqama Lalabalavu, who as the Tui Cakau is a paramount chief of a big area of northern Fiji. He and a lesser chief were charged with the comparatively minor matter of unlawful assembly in November 2000 at Labasa during a mutiny there and at Suva, where eight soldiers died in a battle to remove army commander Frank Bainimarama and set up a pro-Speight military regime.
Former MP Apisai Tora, now a senator, organiser of demonstrations leading to an anti-Indian coup in 1987 and a figure in the demonstration and riot before the 2000 event, was charged with others with unlawful assembly in July 2000, when they allegedly took over an army roadblock.
Continuing army unrest over who should succeed Bainimarama as army chief, flaring corruption and hot Indian opposition to his planned land lease reforms are more ingredients in the pile of worries on Qarase’s plate. The sugar crisis will most likely to be resolved—it has to be-but not in quite the way the government had intended to initiate on April 1.
While Chaudhry insists that a multiracial government in which Labour would have one-third of the cabinet seats could be made to work to Fiji’s enormous benefit, Qarase can count on hundreds of thousands of people, a sizeable portion of them Indians, who have grave doubts about that. They think that confrontational Chaudhry is too difficult a personality to work with.
If the constitutional case in June goes Chaudhry’s way, then Qarase, the general opinion is, will have no alternative but to ask President Josefa Iloilo to dissolve parliament and order another. Would the outcome be any different from the September 2001 result? Some Indian commentators believe that Chaudhry might get a shock. His hardline tactics in defending Indian interests by attacking notions of Fijian nationalism could be wearying many of his supporters, it seems.
Would Qarase return as prime minister? Not necessarily, suggest some Fijian observers. They suspect that some backbench MPs and maybe some ministers have reservations about him, too.
