MAY 19, 2000: As editor of the Fiji Daily Post newspaper in Suva, I was expecting some big stories that day but nothing like what happened – today, 18 years ago. A march by radical indigenous Fijians had been planned and Parliament was sitting, with an Indo-Fijian Prime Minister leading the government benches.

My news editor and I made sure we had everyone in place, then went for breakfast.

Back in the newsroom I was told the march was getting violent and continuing on to Parliament, which got me worried. I quickly drove to pick up the children and, after seeing them home safely, returned to work, knowing for sure that I wasn’t going to be home for dinner.

Fiji had crashed into another coup, this time led by a man called George Speight and rogue soldiers from the Fiji Military Forces’ elite Counter Revolutionary Warfare Unit (CRWU).

There was an eerie calm in the newsroom, almost like the lull before a storm with people seeming to be expecting something bad to happen but pretending to be going about a normal day.

I quietly disappeared into the tearoom to make coffee. The sound of breaking glass brought me out and I said to myself, perhaps someone has broken something.

From my experience of past coups in Fiji I knew that there was always going to be violence no matter how much the coup perpetrators tried to paint over their actions using a noble brush.

Two sides
There were always two sides to the argument and one side was always going to get hurt, but even then I had not expected to see what I saw that day, with the situation deteriorating as quickly as I was seeing.

In a matter of minutes, maybe a short 30 minutes or less since I returned to the newsroom, our part of Suva had turned from nothing much to a seething, angry pit of senseless violence — all in the time it took to make a cup of coffee.

Hundreds of people, maybe a thousand even, I don’t know, filled the streets below our second-floor vantage point.

Shops were burning and men and women were smashing through glass windows and doors and looting every shop on the streets below.

A group of men led the way, breaking through doors and windows then moving on, allowing the throng behind to get in and take as they pleased in a free-for-all scramble for anything that could be carried away – TVs, shoes, clothes, stereo sets, food, anything.

There was cursing and shouting and the noise was deafening and frightening. The sound of breaking glass would haunt me for months after that.

Indo-Fijians had abandoned the city and fled for their lives, and many who had been unable to leave had gone into hiding in back rooms and anywhere, leaving their business at the mercy of this maddest march of madness; a few Indo-Fijians drove by still trying to get out, and some of them were forced to stop, dragged out of their car and assaulted.

I was really scared
I was scared, really scared, especially for the Indo-Fijian members of our staff. Our financial controller was Indo-Fijian, and a big man too, but when he came up to me in the newsroom and put out his hand, I knew he was afraid for his life and when I held his hand I felt him trembling.

Indo-Fijian members of the staff, especially women, like my young reporters, fresh out of university, had crawled under desks, crying, “I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die”.

Our newsroom was quickly turning into a sanctuary, too, with owners of shops and anyone nearby who had been slow to leave the city, seeking safety there. We called the police several times but no one came.

Our marketing manager, Lionel Heffernan, was a big man ­– strong — a farmer on his days off, and he walked up the stairs into the newsroom armed with a crowbar, presenting me with the first sign of a willingness to fight back.

We knew we had to do something, we had to protect our staff. We called all our indigenous Fijian staff members and briefed them and together we walked downstairs in silence.

Our offices were down a short alleyway and accessible only from the front, from the main street where the burning and looting were taking place.

Stood together in defiance
We closed the grill gate and everyone of us, men and women, stood together in defiance, completely blocking any access to our offices, and thereby providing as much protection as we could to those on the second floor.

Heffernan stood beside me, the crowbar clearly visible in his hand, saying words of encouragement.

There were men and women beside me with far more courage and strength than I could ever muster in several lifetimes and without them the outcome would have been very different. But the weak and the strong and the older and the young, we stood together that day, indigenous Fijians facing up to indigenous Fijians, until the sun started to go down and soldiers arrived to set up roadblocks and empty the streets.

Police Commissioner Isikia Savua and his officers finally turned up in a pointless show of useless force after the damage had been done and no one was about. Suva was already in ruins.

It was too dangerous after that to put out a newspaper, so we cancelled that night’s edition and, using only indigenous Fijian drivers, dropped everyone home, including those who had come off the street to seek safety.

As a journalist it is my job to report and not to judge but the events I witnessed that day affected me in ways that would swing me to one side and keep me there for a long time.

Terrorist act
That day was not political. It was a criminal and terrorist act and I decided that from then onwards our coverage of George Speight and the events that would follow would focus on terrorism, even though I knew that the course I was taking would bring me into a collision course with the terrorists themselves, some of whom I knew well, including Speight himself.

Finally darkness enveloped Suva and I got into the car and left. At home, my wife Maureen had used the beds to barricade the windows and put the children and everyone else to sleep on the floor in the hallway.

I walked in and hugged and kissed her then went down on my knees and kissed all our children and all the other children on the forehead.

Then I sat down and cried. A month later to the day, on June 19, 2000, I walked into The Southland Times newsroom in Invercargill, New Zealand, and signed on as a subeditor.

Jale Moala, one of Fiji’s most experienced and talented journalists, is currently night editor of The National daily newspaper in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. George Speight is currently serving a life sentence in prison for treason.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The General’s Goose – three decades of Fiji “coup culture”. And what now with the second post-coup election due this year?

Author Dr Robbie Robertson … challenges “misconceptions” about the Bainimarama regime and previous coups, and asks fundamental questions about Fiji’s future.

A chorus of voices continually argued for the restoration of “democracy” – not only the flawed version of democracy that had persisted in various forms since independence from colonial Britain in 1970, but specifically the arguably illegal and unconstitutional government of merchant banker Laisenia Qarase that had been installed on the coattails of the third (attempted) coup in 2000.

Yet in spite of superficial appearances, Bainimarama’s 2006 coup contrasted sharply with its predecessors.

Bainimarama attempted to dodge the mistakes made by Sitiveni Rabuka after he carried out both of Fiji’s first two coups in 1987 while retaining the structures of power.

Instead, notes New Zealand historian Robbie Robertson who lived in Fiji for many years, Bainimarama “began to transform elements of Fiji: Taukei deference to tradition, the provision of golden eggs to sustain the old [chiefly] elite, the power enjoyed by the media and judiciary, rural neglect and infrastructural inertia” (p. 314). But that wasn’t all.

Robertson is well-qualified to write this well-timed book, The General’s Goose: Fiji’s Tale of Contemporary Misadventure, with Bainimarama due to be tested again this year with another election. He is a former history lecturer at the Suva-based regional University of the South Pacific at the time of Rabuka’s original coups (when I first met him).

He and his journalist wife Akosita Tamanisau wrote a definitive account of the 1987 events and the ousting of Dr Timoci Bavadra’s visionary and multiracial Fiji Labour Party-led government, Fiji: Shattered Coups (1988), ultimately leading to his expulsion from Fiji by the Rabuka regime. He also followed this up with Government by the Gun (2001) on the 2000 coup, and other titles.

Robertson later returned to Fiji as professor of Development Studies at USP and he has also been professor and head of Arts and Social Sciences at James Cook University in Townsville, Queensland, as well as holding posts at La Trobe University, the Australian National University and the University of Otago.

He has published widely on globalisation. He is thus able to bring a unique perspective on Fiji over three decades and is currently professor and dean of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne.

Since 2006, Fiji has slipped steadily away from Australian and New Zealand influence, as outlined by Robertson. However, this is a state of affairs blamed by Bainimarama on Canberra and Wellington for their failed and blind policies.

Even since the 2014 election, Bainimarama has maintained a “hardline” on the Pacific’s political architecture through his Pacific Islands Development Forum (PIDF) alternative to the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), and on the Pacific Agreement on Closer Economic Relations (PACER) Plus trade deal.

‘Turned their backs’
While in Brisbane for an international conference in 2015, Bainimarama took the opportunity to remind his audience that Australia and New Zealand “as traditional friends had turned their backs on Fiji”. He added:

How much sooner we might have been able to return Fiji to parliamentary rule if we hadn’t expended so much effort on simply surviving … defending the status quo in Fiji was indefensible, intellectually and morally (p. 294).

“Government still remained the familiar goose,” writes Robertson, “but this time, its golden eggs were distributed more evenly than before”. The author attributes this to “bypassing chiefly hands” for tribal land lease monies, through welfare and educational programmes no longer race-bound, and through bold rural public road, water and electrification projects.

Fiji’s cast of coup leaders. Image: Coup 4.5

Robertson’s scholarship is meticulous and drawn from an impressive range of sources, including his own work over more than three decades. One of the features of his latest book are his analysis of former British SAS Warrant Officer Lisoni Ligairi and the role of the First Meridian Squadron (renamed in 1999 from the “coup proof” Counter Revolutionary Warfare Unit – CRWU), and the “public face” of Coup 3, businessman George Speight, now serving a life sentence in prison for treason.

His reflections on and interpretations of the Republic of Fiji Military Forces Board of Inquiry (known as BoI) into the May 2000 coup are also extremely valuable. Much of this has never before been available in an annotated and tested published form, although it is available as full transcripts on the “Truth for Fiji” website.

‘Overlapping conspiracies’
As Robertson recalls, by mid-May, “there were many overlapping conspiracies afoot … Within the kava-infused wheels within wheels, coup whispers gained volume”. Ligairi’s role was pivotal but BoI put most of the blame for the coup on the RFMF for “allowing” one man so much power, especially one it considered ill-equipped to be a director and planner’ (p. 140).

The BoI testimony about the November 2000 CRWU mutiny before Bainimarama escaped with his life through a cassava patch, also fed into Robertson’s account, although he admits Colonel Jone Baledrokadroka’s ANU doctoral thesis is the best account on the topic, “Sacred King and Warrior Chief:The role of the military in Fiji politics”.

It was a bloody and confused affair, led by the once loyal [Captain Shane] Stevens, 40 CRWU soldiers, many reportedly intoxicated, seized weapons and took over the Officers Mess, Bainimarama’s office and administration complex, the national operations centre and the armoury in the early afternoon. They wanted hostages; above all they wanted Bainimarama. (p. 164)

One drawback from a journalism perspective is the less than compelling assessment of the role of the media over the period, considering the various controversies that dogged each coup, especially the Speight one when accusations were made against some journalists as having been too close to the coup makers.

One of Fiji’s best journalists and editors, arguably the outstanding investigative reporter of his era, Jo Nata, publisher of the Weekender, sided with Speight as a “media minder” and was jailed for treason.

However, while Robertson in several places acknowledges Nata’s place in Fiji as a journalist, there is no real examination of his role as journalist-turned-coup-propagandist. This ought to be a case study.

Robertson noted how Nata’s Weekender exposed “morality issues” in Rabuka’s cabinet in 1994 without naming names. The Review news and business magazine followed up with a full report in the April edition that year, naming a prominent female journalist who was sleeping with the post-coup prime minister, produced a love child and who still works for The Fiji Times today (p. 118).

Nata then promised a special issue on the 21 women Rabuka had had affairs with since stepping down from the military. However, after Police Commissioner Isikia Savua spoke to him, the issue never appeared. (A full account is in Pacific Journalism Review – The Review, 1994).

Fiji Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama (right) with his Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum … facing an uncertain challenge for their FijiFirst Party in this year’s election. Image: PMC

The Review had earlier been threatened with deregistration over its publication of Rabuka’s affair[s] in 1994; now both papers were threatened with Malaysian-style licensing laws to ensure that they remained respectful of Pacific cultural sensitivities and did not denigrate Fijian business acumen. (p. 121)

On Coup 1, Robertson recalls how apart from Rabuka’s masked soldiers inside Parliament, “other teams fanned out across the city to seize control of telecommunication power authorities, media outlets and the Government Buildings” (p. 65).

But there is little reflective detail about Rabuka’s “seduction” of the Fiji and international journalists, or how after closing down the two daily newspapers, the neocolonial Fiji Times reopened while the original Fiji Sun opted to close down rather than publish under a military-backed regime.

About Coup 3, Robertson recalls “[Speight] was articulate and comfortable with the media – too comfortable, according to some journalists. They felt that this intimate media presence ‘aided the rebel leader’s propaganda fire … gave him political fuel’. They were not alone’ (p. 154) (see Robie, 2001).

On the introduction of the 2010 Fiji Media Industry Development Decree, which still casts a shadow over the country and is mainly responsible for the lowest Pacific “partly free” rankings in the global media freedom indexes, Robertson notes how it was “Singapore-inspired”. The decree “came out in early April 2010 for discussion and mandated that all media organisations had to be 90 percent locally owned. The implication for the News Corporation Fiji Times and for the 51 percent Australian-owned Daily Post were obvious” (p. 254).

The Fiji Times was bought by Mahendra Patel, long-standing director and owner of the Motibhai trading group. (He was later jailed for a year for “abuse of office” while chair of Post Fiji.) The Daily Post was closed down.

Facing a long history of harassment by various post-coup administrations (including a $100,000 fine in January 2009 for publishing a letter describing the judiciary as corrupt, and deportations of publishers), The Fiji Times is heading into this year’s elections facing a trial for alleged “sedition” confronting the newspaper.

In spite of my criticism of limitations on media content, The General’s Goose is an excellent book and should be mandatory background reading for any journalist covering South Pacific affairs, especially those likely to be involved in coverage of this year’s general election in Fiji.

The General’s Goose: Fiji’s Tale of Contemporary Misadventure, by Robbie Robertson. Canberra: Australian National University. 2017. 366 pages. ISBN 9781760461270. This review was first published by Asia Pacific Report.

References
Baledrokadroka, J. (2012). The sacred king and warrior chief: The role of the military in Fiji politics. Unpublished doctoral thesis. Canberra: Australian National University.

Robertson, R., & Sutherland, W. (2001). Government by the gun: The unfinished business of Fiji’s 2000 coup. Sydney & London: Pluto Press & Zed Books.

Robertson, R., & Tamanisau, A. (1988). Fiji: Shattered coups. Sydney: Pluto Press.

Robie, D. (2001). Coup coup land: The press and the putsch in Fiji. Asia Pacific Media Educator, 10, 149-161. See also for an extensive media coverage examination of the 1987 Rabuka coups: Robie, D. (1989). Blood on their banner: Nationalist struggles in the South Pacific. London: Zed Books; 2006 coup and 2014 elections: Robie, D. (2016). ‘Unfree and unfair’?: Media intimidation in Fiji’s 2014 elections. In Ratuva, S., & Lawson, S. (Eds.), The people have spoken: The 2014 elections in Fiji. Canberra: ANU Press.

The Review (1994). Rabuka and the reporter. Pacific Journalism Review, 1(1), 20-22.