Growth Predicted But More Setbacks

Climbing tourist arrival figures, work on building two large resort hotels and other projects, and other evidence of returning investment confidence suggests that Fiji has moved on, quite some way, from the wreckage caused in mid-2000 by its third coup.

However, the latest political events justify some negativism.

Qarase's Fijian nationalist inclined coalition government still duels with the Fiji Labour Party leader, Mahendra Chaudhry, the former prime minister ousted in 2000, over a rescue plan for the failing but still crucial sugar industry and over the number of cabinet seats Chaudhry says his party is entitled to under the constitution.

In May, almost to the day of the fourth anniversary of the coup, the country was dismayed by radio news and newspaper reports of an allegation by five senior army officers that their commander, Commodore Frank Bainimarama, last December ordered them to plan for the removal of the Qarase government. Bainimarama brushed the allegation aside. The government said it regarded the allegation so seriously that a commission of inquiry, led by a chairman brought from overseas, would investigate the matter.

Qarase and Chaudhry are attempting to settle their many differences of opinion by a series of Talanoa (informal talks) meetings under the sponsorship of the East-West Centre of Hawaii. Dr Sitiveni Halapua, a Tongan academic and director of the Pacific Islands Development Programme at Honolulu, chairs the meetings, which have produced useful results.

On May 10, the eighth and apparently the most productive Talanoa session, ended with advances for solving the sugar crisis. It was also agreed that a standing parliamentary committee be set up to examine all reports relating to human rights and race relations and report to the House of Representatives with appropriate recommendations for action.

The Talanoa session further agreed that a parliamentary select committee be appointed to recommend action for solving crisis over the refusal of some Fijian landowners to renew expiring agricultural land leases held by Indian tenants. The committee's report is to be ready by September.

A few days later, however, Chaudhry's lawyers were back at the Supreme Court, which had already ruled that the constitution does require the admission of Opposition Labour Party parliamentarians to cabinet. They argued that 17 Labour ministers should be appointed, not 14, as offered by Qarase.

They said Qarase had failed to discharge obligations imposed on him by Section 99(5) of the Constitution by offering minor cabinet posts ³not consistent with the necessary attributes of recognised constitutional Cabinet portfolios.² The court's decision, which Qarase says he will accept, will be given soon.

The next hitch was the Labour Party's decision to boycott meetings of a parliamentary committee on sugar, in support of Chaudhry's demand that Qarase consult him about the eight government nominations to the Fiji Sugar Cane Growers Council, an industry parliament of 38 other elected members.

Chaudhry's National Farmers' Union, really just a cane growers union, had just won 22 seats but remained outnumbered by political opponents unless it had some say about the government representatives. Qarase went ahead and appointed known anti-Chaudhry members.

Qarase announced that the sugar committee would proceed in Labour's absence and later told the annual meeting of the Fiji Institute of Accountants that sugar, on which 200,000 people, nearly a quarter of the population, depended, would be entirely lost soon after 2007 unless a plan that Labour basically accepted was implemented quickly. What would really kill sugar was politics, he warned.

On May 18, after a meeting of the National Security Committee and then cabinet, Qarase said the commission to investigate the allegation against Bainimarama would have three months to make its report.

Bainimarama described the allegation as nonsense. While he would accept the findings, these could be something which might blow back to haunt the government, he warned.

Qarase said the officers who have complained about breaches of their terms of employment by the army should turn to army law for redress.

Earlier this year, five officers were sent on leave by Bainimarama and then publicly urged by him to resign. Local newspapers reported and Bainimarama confirmed that the officers had refused to pledge allegiance to him personally although they professed allegiance to the army and government.

Bainimarama's relations with the Qarase government deteriorated in 2003 when he warned that the army would not allow suspected organisers of the 2000 coup to be treated leniently. Earlier this year, the government and the army appeared to be on a collision course when there were hints that Bainimarama's appointment as army chief might not be renewed when it expired in February.

In the event it was renewed, Bainimarama had said that he didn't want to go until unfinished business, including the prosecution and trial of all suspected coup conspirators, was completed

After the coup led by civilian militants, Bainimarama intervened by setting up a brief military government. He negotiated the release of Chaudhry and his government from Parliament, where they had been held hostage for 56 days, and then transferred power to a civilian interim regime that Qarase was appointed by Fijian chiefs to lead.

Qarase's coalition government, which is partly dependent for power on some anti-Indian politicians sympathetic to the coup, won a democratic election in 2001.