Q 1. What were the reasons for the two Fiji's coups in 1987? What role political parties played during the Coup? [Tutorial Question]
On 7 April 1987, the people of Fiji went to the polls for the fifth time since attaining independence from Great Britain in 1970. After a long three-month campaign and a week’s polling, the newly formed Fiji Labour Party-National Federation Party Coalition won a convincing and historic victory over the long-reigning Alliance party, capturing twenty-eight of the fifty-two seats in the Fiji Parliament. The new Cabinet, young, exceptionally well educated and nominally left-leaning, promised a new direction designed to create a non-ethnic state and a distributive society for Fiji, a move that sought to end the legacy of communally divisive politics bequeathed by seventeen years of Alliance rule. The government was a month old. It was, in fact, Indian-dominated.
Moreover, obliging and not surprisingly, some members of the former Mara administration and the Alliance party, their vested political and personal interests threatened and their careers in ruins, organized themselves into a militant indigenous force named the “Taukei Movement” and launched a carefully orchestrated campaign to derail the newly elected government. Within a week of the election, Fiji was rocked by a violent and terrifying campaign of arson, sabotage, roadblocks, and protest marches, climaxing with the military-led overthrow of the Bavadra government on May 14. The coup leaders attempted to reinstall the defeated Mara government back into power, but were thwarted in their efforts by determined but peaceful internal resistance and considerable external pressure. Unable to achieve their immediate goal and isolated, rebuffed, and ostracized by the international community, they then struck with a second coup on September 25 ended the monarchy, and was shortly followed by the proclamation of a republic on 7 October. Both military actions were led by Lieutenant Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka, who was third in command of the Royal Fiji Military Forces.
Q 2. Explain the Role of Great Council of Chiefs during the Coups? [Discussion Forum] [Refer to week 3 Lecture on GCC]
The Great Council of Chiefs the major symbol of Fijian identity and strength in the colonial political structure and continued to have this significance after independence, ritually affirming an ethnic political unity transcending geographical and cultural differences among Fijians in opposition to the other sections of Fiji’s population.
In 1987 coup Rabuka’s overthrow of the new government were marked by a sometimes conflicting interplay of several forces in the political arena, centring on the issue of entrenching indigenous power. The army, the sometimes violent Taukei Movement whose leaders included several people of high chiefly rank and chiefly authority in the form of the GCC and the paramount chiefs (the former Prime Minister Ratu Mara and the Governor General Ratu Ganilau) who, with GCC support, had long held leadership of the State. Rabuka became manager and mediator of these forces. The GCC and the paramount chiefs were the crucial political resources with which he endeavoured to control the extremists within and outside the army. To secure legitimacy for his coup and restore stability, he sought to bind Taukei objectives to chiefly leadership. Most Fijians acclaimed Rabuka's coup as a legitimate assertion of indigenous power against the perceived threat of Indian domination.
Furthermore, Rabuka’s first council of ministers, set up in the face of Ganilau’s opposition, was headed by Rabuka and Mara, and included many Taukei Movement leaders, some of them formerly Mara’s colleagues in the Alliance Party. Rabuka then convened a meeting of the GCC in Suva’s Civic Centre, while Taukei Movement supporters massed in an adjacent park. This assembly, and subsequent Fijian provincial council meetings, approved the coup and endorsed the Taukei goal of changing the constitution to entrench indigenous control of government. After the GCC meeting, Ganilau agreed to lead a new council including Mara and Rabuka, but with fewer Taukei activists. There soon followed meetings of the two paramount chiefs with Timoci Bavadra, the deposed new prime minister. They proposed a caretaker government, to be recruited equally from the Alliance Party and the overthrown Labour-National Federation Party (NFP) coalition, and headed by Ganilau. A Constitution Review Committee's majority report to Ganilau had just endorsed the GCC call for Fijian dominance. But the agreement reached in the Mara/Ganilau/Bavadra talks promised only to take ‘full account of Fijian aspirations for the betterment of their interests’. When young men rampaged against Indians and their property, Taukei spokesmen excused the outburst as legitimate anger at the lack of progress towards fulfilling the GCC’s resolution.
Moreover, Rabuka soon yielded to the militants, pushed the two high chiefs aside, and appointed a new governing council, this time dominated by Taukei leaders and army officers. But, as his new cabinet foundered on a combination of personal ambitions and inexperience, pressure on Rabuka to regain the chiefs’ cooperation mounted. He dismissed his council and appointed Ganilau as president of the newly declared Republic of Fiji. Ganilau then gave the office of prime minister to Mara, who excluded most Taukei from yet another council and brought back some old Alliance Party colleagues. This interim government endured under Mara’s leadership until the election in 1992, which was conducted under a new constitution designed to secure Fijian political dominance. In its support of the demand for ethnocentric constitutional change, the GCC might be seen as essentially at one with the Taukei Movement. But there was more to its part in the crisis than this. The GCC was crucial in constraining a volatile nationalist movement that might well have become more violent and oppressive than it did.
In addition, what most stood out in the turbulent events was Rabuka’s attempt to control and mediate the different political forces: Initially relying on the GCC and the two paramount chiefs for legitimacy and stability, later sidelining them under pressure from the extremists, and eventually turning back to the chiefs when the Taukei pressure threatened to overwhelm him.