With news this morning of the release of all of the Indian hostages except Chaudhry and his son (is their retention ominous?) there is perhaps some hope that THIS time the Speight gang will honour the last of their long list of promises, all to date broken on flimsy pretexts, and finally release the rest of them on schedule this Thursday.
There are, however, ominous signs that this is not the beginning of the end, but rather the end of the beginning of a very unpleasant period in Fiji's history.
First, there has been the demand on the part of the kidnappers that the sundry marauding bands now abroad in Fiji be permitted to retain their weapons (many of them stolen from the military and police). While clearly the military should be highly alarmed at the possibility of the development of "paramilitaries" such as we have seen in East Timor and the Solomons as well as in many African countries, it is hard to see how they will be ABLE to enforce a weapons handover, even if they managed to write it into any agreement with Speight.
I am told that there have been two recent attempts to take over the airports (first Nadi, then Suva), both repulsed by the military. It has been suggested to me that this may be Speight trying to secure a back door for imminent escape - but where to? Most of the countries that he and his gangmembers might wish to go to have blacklisted them. Speight has scoffed at these exclusions, saying "why would I want to go to those countries? Fiji is home, and I am happy to stay here", and announcing that he is "the safest man in Fiji" and that "anyone trying to do anything to me will have half a million of my countrymen to answer to". Hyperbole as usual, in a country with something over 700,000 people, just over 50% of them Fijians, half a million is a dodgy figure even IF all Fijians supported him, which manifestly they do not. Given the very personal agendas of most of the rag-tag crew of so-called "Speight supporters", whether any would actually lift a finger to defend him may be moot.
But whether he believes any or all of the things he says, or this is merely typical bravado, I doubt the "escape" theory. These attempts to take over the airports may merely be aimless grabs at such very visible icons of the power and affluence of the tourist industry. In the metaphor I used previously of cruising sharks, these are flashy objects at which to snap. If the actions are to be credited with more calculation, they may perhaps be seen as pre-emptive actions to prevent the possible arrival of troops from elsewhere. This could in turn be rather vague, or could foreshadow planned events that they fear might precipitate outsid intervention. The Parliament Kidnappers always thought the military would greet them like heroes, as they did Rabuka. Since that didn't happen, and they have found themselves in direct confrontation with the military, they have been fostering general civil insurrection. Their knowledge of the distaste the international community feels for this lawlessness may have revived their original fears of the arrival of troops from Australia or the US. Of course it seems overwhelmingly unlikely that either of these will ever become militarily embroiled in Fiji's strife - Australia has been unwilling to respond even to explicit requests to intervene in the Solomons, requests it has never had from Fiji, while the US also consistently weighs its involvement very carefully on the scales of self-interest. But such fears in the face of contrary evidence would be consistent with the conspiracy theories Speight has expressed on several occasions. It seems that none fear conspiracy more than active conspirators.
Then there has been the recent taking hostage of a group of tourists on Turtle Island, a luxury resort off the West coast of the main island of Vitilevu. This again is merely a localised outbreak of the virus of lawlessness that the Speight action has dispersed in the Fijian community. As in the other cases I have discussed online recently, such outbreaks appear to break out most readily in places where a history of dissidence creates a susceptibiity. Turtle Island is a case in point, but the issue is somewhat more complicated than the news reports I have seen, which have suggested that "ownership" of the island is contested by Fijians of a neighbouring island. If my memory serves me right (and I confess I have not had the time or access to old newspapers to re-confirm this), it is the case that this particular resort's management have had an ongoing dispute with certain locals. This has, as I recall, erupted into confrontation on more than one occasion previously, though kidnapping is a new low, inspired by Speight's success, even perhaps by news from the Philippines. In a more extreme and specific but similarly-based manner to the actions of the chiefs of the West and Cakaudrove, the activists have seen the instability as an opportunity to advance their cause. The action should not be seen as overt antipathy to tourists, nor should it of itself be read, as the media has tended to do, as support for Speight. As pointed out previously, the Western chiefs denounced Speight for bringing instability that would threaten the prosperity of their region, but were nonetheless quite willing in the meantime to exploit that instability for their own ends. In this case the activists may well be Speight fellow-travellers, but again their "cause" has a local history.
There are a number of disputes in Fiji between tourist resorts and traditional landowners, a number of them based on a lack of understanding of Fijian land-title tradition. This lack of understanding was understandable on the part of non-local hoteliers, but unfortunately it was not clarified to them by the Native Lands Trust Board (which certainly had all of the facts) when they approved the leases. Ownership covers every square metre of Fiji, and covers domains of BOTH land and sea. In many places the land adjacent to the sea may be owned by one clan, while below high-water mark the sea, including all fishing rights etc, may be owned by another clan. Nowehere in Fiji is the sea a "public commons", and similarly, there have recently been fishing-right disputes in other Pacific nations. When resort owners took out leases, they seldom paid any attention to such niceties, and assumed blithely that any beaches, swimming and fishing, off the land they have leased was part of the deal, and covered by the lease payments they agreed with the landowners. The traditional sea-owners understandably get very ticked off about the fact that they NEVER leased their rights, have never been paid rent for them, and so on. This may be the basis of the Turtle Island dispute, and if that is so, there are quite a number of resorts in Fiji that could, if the present anarchic situation widens, see their "guests" being grabbed by the disgruntled sea-owners in a similar way. In the foreseeable future, I would only be recommending a Fiji seaside stay to those on my "little list", to quote Gilbert & Sullivan, who "would none of them be missed"!
I was, as I have made clear in previous postings, never optimistic about things there after the first few days when Ratu Mara failed to act decisively during the brief window of opportunity to snuff out the spark before it could take hold, and then ignite the many present brushfires. I am now very pessimistic. There was never anything like the present level of lawlessness following the Coup of 1987 - perhaps the ONLY thing that can be said in mitigation of Rabuka's action at that time is the fact that after a few days he kept a reasonably tight grip on civil obedience. Speight has on the one hand not been in a position to do so, but on the other hand, as I have observed before, his is a fundamentally anarchic agenda, and he sees widespread lawlessness as a tool he can use to his advantage. The fact that the actions of hoodlums in "his" village of Korovou and other areas brought a swift capitulation from the military, seems to prove him right. But it is a dangerous tool. It would be ludicrous to imagine somehow that these hoodlums, when the parliamentary hostages are released, will hand over their weapons and quietly return to their village gardens. No-one, I believe, including Speight and certainly including the military, could guarantee that. Many of them are habitues of the aimless groups of males one sees seated endlessly around kava bowls in virtually every village today, others have abandoned their villages long ago for an equally aimless marginal urban existence. Both groups have been relatively powerless, but are now, for the first time, able to dictate terms to anyone they wish, on anything that takes their fancy.
All of which seems to me to spell a short- to medium-term future of great social insecurity throughout the Fiji Group, even in the somewhat doubtful event that something approaching stability can be achieved in the political setup. "Normalcy" in terms most of the developed world would recognise is something Fiji has almost certainly already lost in the medium- to long-term.
Rod Ewins © July 2000. © This essay is copyright. Apart from those uses permitted under theCopyright Act 1968 (as amended), no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission from the author.