Correspondent's Notebook
Fiji’s interim PM threatens to call off elections
23 May 2008
As this week ends, in Fiji once again there are doubts the Pacfic Island Nation will hold the elections its promised the world. On Thursday, speaking in Fijian, interim Prime Minister and coup leader Commodore Frank Bainimarama, told a gathering at Nadoi village outside Suva, if the country’s chiefs and politicians don’t accept the political and electoral change he wants, there will be no election in March 2009.
Campbell Cooney, Radio Australia’s Pacific Correspondent, delivers this week’s Correspondent’s Notebook.
As well, Commodore Bainimarama said the military will ensure only political parties which accept the charter, will contest the election, if it goes ahead. Last year, the Commodore, promised his fellow leaders in the Pacific Islands Forum, Fiji will return to democratic rule, with elections in late March 2009. But the next day he told reporters, elections won’t happen until Fiji has a new voting system, and if that means changing Fiji’s constitution, so be it.
Commodore Bainimarama wants a system where one vote has one value. To set the rules for this, and also for Fiji’s political future, he wants a peoples charter, and to formulate it, he’s created the “National Council for Building a Better Fiji”.
The Commodore’s aim has support. But how he and his supporters are trying to achieve it, it has those same people worried. Some of Fiji’s political groups, and civil society leaders, have been excluded from the charter process. Others, while first accepting an invitation to be part of the council, have pulled out, saying it became clear to them they were only welcome to provide the veneer of acceptance of all views.
In many villages its opposed by chiefs and church leaders. They’re worried it’ll remove their influence, and those fears have been added to concerns this latest coup, unlike the other three in the past 20 years, is pro-Indo Fijan, and anti- the indigenous population.
But the big issue, is the growing concern the real purpose for the charter, is to ensure Commodore Bainimarama, and the military, have an exit strategy, ensuring they get out of government, without ending up in court, or prison. Whenever the concerns are raised by neighbouring nations, the international media, and NGO’s, the Commodore, his interim ministers, and even the Council he created to implement the change, have dismissed them.
But Commodore Bainimarama seems to be shaping the message depending on the audience, and hoping the others don’t hear what he’s saying.
And on Thursday, before an audience of Fijians, speaking the Fijian language, it seems he though his threat to politicans and the like, to get on board or get out of the way, would go no further. You could also speculate he knew very well the story would travel, and is trying to keep his opponents on their toes? The Commodore doesn’t accept many invitations to talk to members of the international media, so we couldn’t ask.
But it would be unfair to say all Fijians are opposed to what he said.
Whatever the opinion, Commodore Bainimarama comments at the end of the week, have thrown a shadow over the positive feelings about Fiji’s future, being embraced at the start of it.
On Monday, he, and the man he removed from office, Laisenia Qarase, met for the first times since before the coup. It was described as an informal meeting, and hopefully the first of many. In Fiji they were seen as a step towards a return to normality, in a country which has suffered both socially and economically, in the past 18 months.
It’s yet to be seen if the event on Thursday remove the goodwill generated on Monday.
