Q1. What factors led to Fiji's 2000 Coup. Identify the role played by George Speight during the Coup? [Discussion Forum Question]
In 1987, a military seizure of power in Fiji jolted the South Pacific. It was led by Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka, who staged a further coup the same year before leaving the military to subsequently hold office as Prime Minister. In 2000, failed businessman George Speight spearheaded a further illegal seizure of power, in totality; these events caused economic and social dislocation, Fiji's loss of international status, and overt challenges to the rule of law. Most particularly, however, the resort to force highlighted serious and unresolved differences within the indigenous Fijian community. This article analyses and compares these coup events and discusses the implications for Fiji's unresolved challenges of nation-building.
Before outlining the essential narratives of Fiji's coups, some general features warrant attention. A first concerns the role of random factors, in particular the availability of those willing to conspire to lead such risky operations. They may rationalize such risk by identifying themselves as the anointed chosen ones, ready to lead the country out of its wilderness. For Fiji, such allusion is deliberate; key figures shaping the coup episodes looked to Biblical inspiration with alacrity. However once tasted, the coup experience can regenerate and mutate, providing local operational knowledge (how to do it), or arousing expectations that, once disappointed, inspire fresh recourse to violence. This compounds risk and uncertainty. The mix of determining who might lead a coup, relevant motivational considerations, and the vagaries of subsequent public response necessarily clouds any too ready comparison of these events. A second comparative question concerns underlying conditions incurring recourse to force. Features here may include failed representation, growing disparities within and between major communities and, for most of the public at least, the opaque dynamics of élite rivalry and feuding. A third comparative aspect concerns civil-military relations before, during, and following a resort to force, and whether the state's security apparatus is operating within the rule of law. All three points assume relevance when comparing Fiji's coups of 1987 and 2000.
Moreover, On May 19 2000, failed businessman George Speight and accomplices seized Mahendra Chaudhry's constitutionally elected government at gunpoint in Fiji's parliamentary this action was supported by members of the Army's Counter Revolutionary Warfare unit, an entity Rabuka established in 1987, led on this occasion by Major Ilisoni Ligari. While not physically present in the parliamentary complex to support the coup, Speight sympathisers included senior police and security intelligence operatives. They included Colonel Metuisela Mua, a previous head of intelligence dismissed by Chaudhry, In November 2000 Justice Anthony Gates, ruling in a case brought by an Indo-Fijian farmer for material losses caused by the coup, determined that the 1997 Constitution remained intact and that Qarase's interim administration was accordingly illegal. The interim administration appealed that outcome. In early March 2001, the Court of Appeal upheld the Gates ruling on grounds that the interim administration could claim neither necessity nor public acquiescence as grounds for its power holding and constitutional abrogation. Hence the Court ruled that 'the Interim Civilian Government has not discharged the burden of proving acquiescence and has accordingly failed to establish that it is the legal government of Fiji.
A second factor was the erosion of respect previously paid to indigenous national leaderships, increasingly viewed as corrupt, incompetent and unable to discharge customary responsibilities to ordinary Fijians within a market economy under the rule of law. Although Speight lacked the endorsement that his backers claimed, the bored, the unemployed, and the poorly educated within the indigenous community rallied in number to his ethnic demagoguery. Speight's people significantly included those alienated by the post-1990 'affirmative action' that, while privileging certain indigenous Fijians, seriously neglected most others. Assisting their drift from authority was a pervasive sense of aimlessness within the indigenous community. The May coup did nothing to reduce those divisions by helping to revitalize longstanding attempts in West Viti Levu to found a fourth Fijian confederacy. These aspirations sought autonomy and relief from Tovata and other confederacy interests. Among Speight's confused objectives, clear at least was a determination to break with the established chiefly order epitomized by the Mara family and its influential marriage connections. These resentments resonated within the military, giving Speight scope to nominate those he sought to lead an interim post-coup administration in return for eventual hostage release. Third, the upheavals revealed the costs sustained by an attrition of Fiji's stock of social capital. While attempts to advance the rights of women, environmental sustainability, and youth welfare had occurred, a shared vision of the national public good remained elusive. The coup crisis of 2000 widened, yet also stemmed from a vacuum at the center of Fiji's public life. Social linkages needed to bind legitimizing consensus proved either absent, ephemeral or personalized, political collaboration more about shared antipathy than prospective mandate. This left Speight well primed to detonate his coup, crucially assisted by former SAS officer Ilisoni Ligairi using arms stolen by sympathizers in the Meridian counterrevolutionary warfare unit. Support also emerged from civilians fearful over facing a planned corruption commission investigation.
Q2. What do you understand of the hostage crisis and how it was resolved? [Tutorial Questions]
As in Fiji, the MEF insurrection sparked not just one crisis but crises at many levels. First, there is a crisis associated with the hostage-taking itself, the terrorizing of the individuals and families involved, and ending the tactical means of ending the unconstitutional threat of force in a situation where there is a sign can’t amount of sympathy with the objectives of the coup-makers in significance can’t segments of the wider community. The hostage crisis in Fiji, like that in Suva, has also created a security crisis for many in the wider community outside the group directly being held hostage. They have also created a severe economic crisis for both countries. More broadly, the hostage crisis in each country quickly merged into a series of deeper crises to do with the legitimacy of the elected government, of the constitution, of ‘democracy’, and even of the idea of the post-colonial state itself as a continuing political entity. This is not just because the handful of coup-makers have in each case claimed their actions in the name of a larger community which ends the current governance arrangements to be unjust or against their interests, or that changes to governance arrangements form the central demands of the hostage-takers. It is also because important segments of the wider society, and of the state itself, clearly are sympathetic to their objectives and share their interests. In each case the coup-makers have tapped a pre-existing concern about the legitimacy of the existing system of governance, whether from self-serving or sincere motives.
The four women among the 31 hostages being held by the extreme nationalist Fijian leader, Mr George Speight, rejected an offer of freedom at the weekend because they did not want to desert the remaining captives, As the stalemate that began as a coup attempt, but has since developed into a wider crisis of national identity, ended ,the husbands of the four women had asked to exchange places with their wives, who are cooped up in the parliament compound in the capital, Suva. The other woman captured when the rebels seized the parliament on May 19th, Ms Adi Ema Tagicakibau, was freed last Thursday to attend a relative's funeral and was told she did not have to return to captivity.
Fiji's military rulers and the rebels said yesterday that they had reached a draft accord to end the crisis and restore the South Pacific country to civilian rule. The main sticking point of the accord remains the composition of any interim government after the release of the hostages, in particular the involvement of Mr Speight's supporters and the armed forces. The military want to retain control for a period after the release of the hostages. Mr Speight's self-styled Taukei Civilian Government wants executive control of the country passed from the military to the indigenous tribal leaders, the Great Council of Chiefs, before it will release the hostages. This is no cause for complacency, however. While the particularly difficult crises to do with ethno-nationalism are less likely to appear, attention will need to be focused on other elements in these crises, broadly under the rubric of uneven development, if democratic and peaceful change is to be upheld in these societies.
Finally, in both coups we note the importance of the middle class businessman and politicians whose personal wealth and status are tied up with who controls the state. In Fiji, Speight himself, and many of those supporting him, lost a great deal of income and status when the Rabuka regime fell. They were also threatened by the Chaudhry Government’s reform policies aimed at controlling the corruption and preferment that was a feature of the Rabuka Government. Speight had not only lost his position as Chairman of the Fiji Hardwood Corporation, but he was about to be tried for extortion. In the Solomon Islands, as in Fiji, the Ulufa’alu Government was introducing anti-corruption regulations which would have upset established business connections.