Cover Story
Ratu Mara: A Family Man Leader And Statesman
Why he was admired and treated with kid's gloves
Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara's personality was one moulded by a strong Polynesian influenced culture, western education, colonialism, Roman Catholicism, golf, cricket, notions of chiefly behaviour, and towards the end, a desire to do well financially for himself as well as the Fijians, and particularly the Lauan people.
Within Fiji as its first prime minister, he battled currents of suspicion and resentment between indigenous Fijians and settlers from India who by the 1980s, 110 years after they began arriving, were briefly 51 percent of the population.
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Within the Pacific Islands region he was widely accepted as being senior statesman, greatly admired but also treated with kid gloves by Australia, New Zealand and other non-Pacific Islands leaders and bureaucrats who were well aware that a Mara who didn't have it his way was daunting to cope with.
He became an important figure in the Commonwealth circles and in the group of more than 70 African, Caribbean and Pacific nations that are in an aid and economic relationship with the European Union.
As the first statesman of the Pacific Islands, he was courted by the Americans in the days when they wanted to use him as a tool from keeping the Russians out of the Pacific Islands region, by China and by Japan.
He was the buddy of India's Indira Gandhi and of Lee Kuan Yew, whose authoritarian style of rule for Singapore Mara to an extent tried to emulate.
But Fiji was not a Singapore‹all obedient Chinese. It was a country split by race. Ratu Mara strived to weld the country into one but in the end he was defeated. Under the authority of British colonial rule and chiefs, of which he was one, selected and cultivated for the purpose by the British, the Fijians for a hundred years were a compliant and united community.
That condition prevailed for a while after Fiji's independence from Britain from 1970, with Ratu Mara as prime minister. But as older senior chiefs faded away and commoner Fijians became influenced by education, trade unionism and western style politics Ratu Mara lost his grip on them. He came to claim that he had been betrayed by the Fijians.
He often complained that "Fijians accused me of being too pro-Indian and Indians say, 'I'm too pro-Fijian.'"
As Tui Nayau, the paramount chief of historically heavily Tongan-influenced Lau, Ratu Mara was regarded by Fijian clans to the west as being too pro-Lauan.
The Lauans, more than 40,000 now living in the main islands compared with a little more than 12,000 in Lau, became resented by other Fijians because they are dominant in the public service.
The erosion of Fijian support narrowly lost him an election in 1977 but he was re-appointed as prime minister by the then governor-general, Ratu Sir George Cakobau, also then the senior Fijian chief, who rightly judged that the Indian party that had barely won the election was too divided internally to be able to form a government.
The splintering of Fijian loyalties persisted. It cost Ratu Mara another election in 1987. This time the Indian dominated Fiji Labour Party was able to form a government with a Fijian, Dr Timoci Bavadra, as Prime Minister. It was removed a year later with an anti-Indian coup by the Fijian dominated army.
Ratu Mara subsequently supported the interim regime initially as foreign minister, engaged really to keep the country's imperilled aid and trade connections going.
He explained that when one's house caught fire, one had a duty to try and put the flames out. He then became prime minister of a semi-respectable interim government and was elected president in 1992 by the Great Council of Chiefs.
Regionally, the young Ratu Mara was firstly a rebel when in the 1960s
he led a revolt by Pacific Islands delegates that led to the restructuring
of the colonial-inspired South Pacific Commission (now the Pacific Community),
so that its work programmes and policies were decided by islander delegates,
not the colonial officials of Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand
and the United States.
In the late 1960s, he was instrumental in forming the Pacific Islands
Producers' Association, set up to promote banana exports. This later
became the South Pacific Bureau for Economic Cooperation, now the Suva-headquartered
Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat.
Ratu Mara was the last survivor of the leaders of the countries who founded
the Pacific Islands Forum at a meeting in Wellington in 1971. He became
the Forum's dominant islands leader and then father figure.
His international reputation became clouded when in May 1987 the Fiji
army toppled the year-old Indian dominated government.
He was out of Suva, 150 kilometres away at a conference in a hotel at
that time but inevitably was accused of being involved in the coup, as
his eldest son, Ratu Finau Mara, definitely was.
He angrily denied any knowledge of it. Eventually, the stigma of the accusation faded. He was welcomed back in the international circles and invited to Buckingham Palace in London for tea with Queen Elizabeth.
The coup had also removed her as Fiji's sovereign head since the country had been declared a republic.
Ratu Mara wanted Queen Elizabeth back. He knew that the affection with which most Fijians continued to regard Britain's monarch was a strong underwriting prop for the fading power of Fiji's own chiefs.
In 1998, he urged the Council of Chiefs to consider restoring Queen Elizabeth as the Queen of Fiji. The matter remains in abeyance although such an event is now very unlikely.
Ratu Mara was born at the island of Vanua Balavu, in northern Lau, in 1920. In 1946, when he was a medical student in New Zealand, he was directed by Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna, the great revered chief of his time, to go to Oxford University for further studies that would qualify him for the Fiji civil service. Ratu Sukuna, a man of undoubted wisdom and vision, foresaw Ratu Mara's destiny.
Ratu Mara later joined the Fiji colonial government as a district officer. In the 1960s, he was selected by the British colonial government as the man to be cultivated to persuade the reluctant Fijians to accept independence.
Fiji had become an economical and political liability that Britain wanted to dump. Ratu Mara later was appointed to be chief minister and at independence in 1970 automatically became prime minister. His Alliance Party won a general election in 1972. It sank without trace after the 1987 coup.
Ratu Mara is survived by two brothers and a sister, his wife, Ro Adi Lady Lala Mara, two sons Ratu Finau Mara and Ratu Tevita Uluilakeba, and his daughters Adi Ateca, Adi Koila Nailatikau, Adi Kakua, Adi Litia and Adi Elenoa. A third son died in a road accident.
