An Unlikely Coup Leader Rallies Ethnic Fijians

People here call it “the Pacific way.” Calm, polite, nonconfrontational, it is a way of looking at the world that befits a place of soothing trade winds and incomparable beauty.

It may help explain the response of Fijians to the events of the last week, as a failed businessman took the prime minister and much of his Cabinet hostage at gunpoint, declared himself in charge and demanded that the president scrap the constitution, dismiss the imprisoned government and resign.

The coup was accompanied by a looting spree and a rash of arsons, marring Fiji’s reputation as a South Seas paradise. But it has been free of bloodshed so far, and is perhaps typified by the hooded gunmen surrounding the Parliament complex who stop visitors with a polite, “Excuse me, sir.”

On Thursday, President Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara appeared to have agreed to most of coup leader George Speight’s demands, including amendments to the constitution that would in effect relegate the country’s large ethnic Indian population to second-class status.

Fijian media reported this morning that Speight had rejected the proposed settlement.

Indians were brought to Fiji, a horseshoe of more than 300 islands about 3,200 miles southwest of Hawaii, as indentured servants by the British in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They now account for 44% of the population, dominating the country’s business elite.

The prime minister, Mahendra Chaudhry, is the first person of Indian descent to lead a Fijian government. In fact, under the constitution that existed until 1997, only ethnic Fijians were allowed to be prime minister.

Now Chaudhry appears almost certain to be removed and, under the deal proposed Thursday, no Indian could be prime minister or hold any of an unspecified number of other top government positions.

The proposal was announced by the country’s elder statesman, Sitiveni Rabuka, the chairman of the powerful Great Council of Chiefs. The chiefs are links to Fiji’s tribal past and still wield enormous influence, including the power to appoint the president. A group of them brought the proposed deal to Speight late Thursday, parading past an arm-linked cordon of his guards to enter a modern version of a traditional Fijian bure, or peak-roofed hut, on the lush Parliament grounds.

Rabuka, who became a national hero by leading two coups in 1987, conceded that the leadership was in effect giving in to blackmail. But given the “real danger” of the hostage situation, he said, he saw no other way out.

“We need to assess which is the least damaging of the bad choices,” he told reporters gathered at the Information Ministry headquarters.

The Fijian media said this morning that Speight, a muscular man with a shaved head, had rejected the settlement because he wanted assurances that he and his followers would be granted amnesty, the president would resign and the current constitution would be rewritten, not merely amended.

“The will of the people do not accept the 1997 constitution,” Speight told reporters Thursday at one of his frequent, lengthy news conferences. “If you don’t have the will of the people behind you, it’s meaningless.”

Speight, at first glance, appears an unlikely man to be leading a rebellion. Before last Friday, the son of a former member of Parliament was a little-known businessman. But he has tapped a nerve among many indigenous Fijians, thousands of whom have traveled from throughout the archipelago to join a continuous sit-in on the Parliament grounds.

Throughout Thursday, the demonstrators sat in large groups, some singing Methodist hymns in native Fijian, their voices wafting through the palm-studded terraces in four-part harmony.

“We just want the government to be ours,” said one man, Epi Tamani, a 38-year-old farmer from near the old capital city of Levuka, on Ovalau Island. He has been camping at the Parliament complex for a week, spending his days sipping kava--a traditional, tranquilizing beverage--and eating food cooked in an enormous iron kettle suspended over a fire.

“We don’t want any Indians or anyone else to come in and run our government,” he added, voicing a commonly heard sentiment. He denied being racist but said that indigenous Fijians should be the only ones allowed to hold power.

While indigenous Fijians own virtually all the land in the country, many are poor, living in crude huts and making meager livings as subsistence farmers. They have been particularly outraged by legislation passed by Chaudhry’s government that gives the government the power to renew leases on private land. Many of the leases involve land owned by Fijians and leased by Indians, and many Fijians see the legislation as in effect stripping them of power over their land.

At his news conference, Speight said he was determined to hold out for radical, long-term change. “We are doing this for the benefit of generations to come,” he insisted.

Without change, he said, “There can be no happy Fiji.”