Fighting for a Slice of Heaven

In the Wailea squatter settlement on the outskirts of this capital, indigenous Fijians and Indian descendants of sugar-cane workers live side by side in squalor.

In this land of white sand beaches and dazzling vistas, they have built their homes on the same muddy street from sheets of corrugated metal and scraps of plywood. Poverty, it seems, is one thing the two races share in a bitterly divided country.

“If I had money, I would buy land,” said Leela Sharma, 56, an unemployed factory worker who has lived in the settlement for 15 years. “Who wants to live like this? How can we build our future?”

In this ethnically torn society, the chance to own property is rare for Indo-Fijians like Sharma. By law, native Fijians own nearly 90% of the land. And many would rather let it sit idle than lease it to the people they see as outsiders--even when some Indo-Fijian families have lived here for more than a century. For many Indo-Fijian farmers, the lack of land dooms them to poverty.

Despite this Pacific island nation’s reputation as a tourist paradise, Fiji simmers with resentment. Two years after a coup that ousted the country’s first Indo-Fijian prime minister, the government is polarized, the economy is struggling, and race relations have worsened.

The racial divide has grown so wide that Indo-Fijians are leaving the country by the thousands. Since the coup, nearly a quarter of Fiji’s 840,000 people have applied for green cards in the hope of moving to the U.S., officials say. Indo-Fijians once outnumbered indigenous Fijians, but over the past decade their numbers have fallen to about 42% of the population.

In a country the size of Riverside County, the two communities grudgingly coexist, interacting when necessary but maintaining their own traditions and culture. As a rule, they operate in separate economic spheres. But some commerce between the two is necessary: While the native Fijians control the land, Indo-Fijians own 90% of the country’s businesses.

Although the families of most Indo-Fijians have been here for three or four generations, indigenous people still refer to them as the “visitor community.”

“They are Fijian citizens, but they are not Fijian people,” said Penina Kaunisela, an indigenous Fijian who lives in the squatter settlement. “They don’t belong here.”

The hostility between the two groups dates to colonial times, when the British brought over the Indians to work the land as indentured servants.

When Britain granted Fiji independence in 1970, it tried to ensure that the native people would not be subjugated in their own country and guaranteed them ownership of 83% of the country’s land. An additional 9% is owned by the government, leaving only 8% available for sale to non-indigenous residents.

But although native Fijians own the land, they are not necessarily inclined to work it. The British brought the Indians here in the first place because they couldn’t persuade the Fijians to labor in the cane fields.

At independence, the departing colonial government kept the sugar industry going by leasing 30-acre tracts for up to 30 years to the Indo-Fijian farmers who were working them.

The terms were often very favorable to the Indo-Fijians, who prospered while the landowners received a pittance and grew resentful.

When the leases began expiring in 1997, thousands of owners refused to renew them. Many have let the cane fields lie fallow, preferring to get nothing rather than let Indo-Fijians farm their land.

For the Indo-Fijian community, losing the leases has been devastating. Some have been forced to abandon land their families had worked since the late 1800s. Most cannot afford to leave the country and have no other skills to fall back on.

Fiji Labor Party leader Mahendra Chaudhry, who was ousted as prime minister in the 2000 coup, likens it to the eviction of white farmers in Zimbabwe by black nationalists who have let the farms sit and decay.

Fiji’s sugar production--long a mainstay of the economy--has fallen by a third since 1997. Some predict that the industry, already plagued by drought and bad debts, may soon collapse.

Most native Fijians, however, are unconcerned by the decline in sugar output. For them, land is more than a business opportunity.

“Land is part of the Fijian identity,” explained Apisalome Tudreu, permanent secretary of the Ministry of National Reconciliation, Information and Media Relations. “It is not just an economic asset. Land is who I am.”

Land is at the center of a communal way of life that predates colonial times. Most native Fijians live in villages in clans called mataqali that are headed by a hereditary chief. Within each mataqali, everything is shared. If one member of the clan invokes the traditional obligation of kerekere and asks for something, the owner is expected to hand it over.

The system is a great equalizer and ensures that everyone in the village is taken care of. But there is little entrepreneurial spirit and no incentive to work hard: Any profit will simply be given away.

Some indigenous Fijians say they live happily off the land, surviving on the coconuts, cassava, bananas and taro that grow all around. But there is a growing desire for consumer goods, particularly among younger people, and many harbor resentment toward Indo-Fijians, who they believe have prospered at their expense.

Chaudhry, who is widely disliked by the native people, argues that the communal system is holding the country back economically and must be changed if Fiji is to prosper.

“They want to preserve their people in the 18th century at the same time they want them to live in prosperity in the 21st century,” he said. “In the long run, reforms will have to be brought into Fijian society to free them from this communal and cultural obligation.”

Despite Fiji’s abundant resources, he says, the economy has been stagnant for 25 years, barely keeping pace with population growth. Fiji’s per capita income was once higher than those of countries such as Singapore and Thailand, he says, but has fallen well behind. Half the population now lives at or below the poverty line.

Compared with other parts of the world that have similar racial conflict, Fiji has seen relatively little violence. The country remains safe for tourists, who fly in and out and travel to resorts without encountering difficulty. Both ethnic groups are generally friendly to visitors. The number of tourists is expected to return this year to pre-coup levels.

But there is underlying tension and reports of rising crime. Fijian newspapers cite a growing number of incest cases as a sign of society’s moral decay. In Suva, visitors are warned of the danger of muggings on the streets of the capital at night.

Political instability plagues the country. There have been three coups and three constitutions in the past 15 years as the two groups have repeatedly clashed over how to run the government.

Some fear Fiji is headed for another political crisis that could throw the country into chaos, scare off the tourists and bring the economy close to collapse.

“Our concern for Fiji is that things could fall apart,” said one Western diplomat who asked not to be identified. “This could become a failed state.”

Chaudhry was elected prime minister in 1999 as the leader of a coalition government. The scrappy former union leader’s desire to bring about drastic change in Fijian society quickly won him many enemies.

In May 2000, native Fijian businessman George Speight and a gang of followers seized Parliament and held Chaudhry and his ministers hostage for two months.

Eventually, the military stepped in and ended the crisis but did not restore Chaudhry to power. Instead, the country held new elections in September and Laisenia Qarase, an indigenous Fijian, was elected prime minister at the head of another coalition government.

Since the coup, the United States has not restored military ties with Fiji or allowed American naval vessels to dock here.

Most of the recent emigrants are the nation’s best-educated and wealthiest Indo-Fijians. So many doctors have left that Fiji is suffering a shortage and has begun recruiting physicians from Myanmar and the Philippines.

U.S. officials estimate that after the coup, 200,000 Fijian citizens entered their names in the U.S. green-card lottery.

Under Fiji’s most recent constitution, adopted in 1997, the prime minister is required to appoint a Cabinet that includes opposition members in proportion to their numbers in Parliament. For Qarase, that would mean naming eight of Chaudhry’s people to his 20-member Cabinet. He has refused.

“You can’t marry unwilling partners,” said Tudreu, the Reconciliation Ministry spokesman.

Chaudhry’s party took the prime minister to court and won a judicial order directing him to put the opposition members in his Cabinet. Qarase continued to refuse and appealed to the Supreme Court. A hearing is set for September.

Qarase has shown little interest in prosecuting many of the native Fijians who backed the 2000 coup.

Speight is in prison for life after pleading guilty to treason. But Jope Seniloli, who was sworn in on the second day of the coup as provisional president of Fiji, has not been tried. Instead, he is serving as Fiji’s vice president.

Chaudhry, who as finance minister was twice held hostage during two coups in 1987, is still angry at losing his post of prime minister. He remembers the verbal abuse, the cracked ribs and the torn knee he suffered at the hands of the rebels two years ago.

“The Indian people are peace-loving people,” he said. “I think they have demonstrated their good faith over the years by being good citizens, but they are regarded as foreigners in the land of their own birth.”

For many indigenous Fijians, however, the descendants of the Indian cane workers will never belong and an Indo-Fijian prime minister should never again lead the country.

“I think it’s better for Fijians to rule their own country,” said Kaunisela, who shares her Wailea settlement house with 13 relatives. “Chaudhry wanted to change the Fijian land. It’s not the right thing to do. The land is for the Fijian people.”