We’re Speechless…

...and stumped. Dumbfounded. Flummoxed. Flabbergasted. Staggered.

Is there an end to this nightmare?

Watch the latest tomfoolery on the link below to see your hard-earned taxes “at work” for you and your voting rights:

http://images.tvnz.co.nz/tvnz_video/windows/one_news/ws_6pm_fiji_050209_128k.asx

This is the story carried by TVNZ:

Doubts surround the future of New Zealander Felicity Heffernan who heads Fiji's electoral office.

A video skit, made by her staff for a local competition on democracy, has been posted on YouTube. It shows the elections' supervisor saying it will be a superhuman effort to conduct free and fair elections in Fiji.

Parliament may be silent but staff at Fiji's electoral office feature prominently in the video posted on the internet and criticising the way ahead for Fiji.

In the video, Heffernan says they are hellbent on creating international history by achieving the superhuman event of conducting free and credible elections in Fiji while under-financed, understaffed and under-resourced.

Just days after being condemned by the region for not holding elections, the elections' supervisor casts doubt over the nation's ability to do so.

Electoral office staff talk about the lack of support they are getting and how this is affecting their performance.

An electoral office spokesperson has told ONE News that three of its junior staff filmed the video and they should get the credit for it. But far from credit, Fiji's interim government is not expected to take this lightly.

Nobody from government was publicly talking but sources have told ONE News that Heffernan's days in Fiji may be numbered.

Like the elections itself, the future of some electoral office staff is in doubt.

Pacific agony over Fiji folly

A Lowy Institute weblog opinion on the outcomes of the recent special PIF leaders meeting written by Graeme Dobell who is one of the ABC's most experienced reporters of Asia Pacific affairs.


Pacific agony over Fiji folly


Fiji’s military regime is a slow-motion folly that seems to roll inexorably towards further disaster. And the disaster dynamic is now confronting the Pacific Islands Forum. The Forum is edging towards the expulsion of Fiji, knowing that this would deeply damage the Forum itself.

A sense of sad inevitability now dogs the Forum. Bainimarama claims to be helping Fiji but, in truth, inflicts ever greater damage. The Forum inches along the path to an expulsion that would rend its own fabric. Expulsion would cut across the original conceptions of the ‘Pacific Way’. It would set back newer ideas about the Forum taking a great role in running and coordinating Pacific governance.

By giving itself the power to expel, the Forum could damage broader hopes to centralise and utilise power for the region. The conundrum centres on both the nature and personality of Frank Bainimarama and evolving ideas of Pacific regionalism. Ignore Bainimarama’s protestations of good intentions and commitment to democracy. Look, instead, at his actions in imbedding the coup culture deeper than ever in Fiji.

Fiji has had four successful coups, and Bainimarama staged two of them. Rabuka ran the same coup twice in 1987 — the first to seize power and the second coup to ensure the shape of the emerging power arrangement. In 2000, George Speight and some renegade troops staged what was, ultimately, an unsuccessful coup — at least for George and his cohorts. The lawful government was ejected from power, but this was achieved by the President and Fiji’s military, not by the Speight gang.

Speight seized control of the parliamentary compound and kidnapped the Prime Minister, Mahendra Chaudhry and his cabinet. This was a major criminal act. But the real overthrow of the legal government was carried out by Bainimarama, not by Speight. The initial response to the Speight siege in Parliament was that the President, Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, relieved Chaudhry and his ministers from office. Mara argued that the cabinet was being held captive and could not carry out its lawful functions. So far, probably so legal.

The successful coup took place nearly a fortnight after the start of the Speight siege. Bainimarama, as chief of the Fiji military, went to Mara and told him the military was taking power. The President was dispatched to his home island on a patrol boat. As Mara departed, so went the legal basis for the regime response to the kidnapping siege.

Bainimarama deposed Mara, Fiji’s founding leader, to unite the military. Dangerous splits were opening in the ranks. Too many of Bainimarama’s officers had direct links to the renegades inside the parliament. The first Bainimarama coup in 2000 had more to do with uniting Fiji’s military than it did with protecting democracy. The military commander eventually negotiated a peaceful end to the siege. But when Fiji’s elected Prime Minister emerged from captivity he was sidelined. Instead, Bainimarama maintained the regime he had installed and put in place Laisenia Qarase as Prime Minister.

The irony is that Qarase went on to win an election. So when Bainimarama staged his second coup in 2006, he wasn’t merely casting aside the man he’d put in power. The military chief was again discarding an elected leader.

All this history weighs on the Forum. The reason the Forum may finally act against Fiji has much to do with the South Pacific’s experience of Bainimarama’s personality and style. The old Pacific Way was built on ideas of mutual respect, dialogue and slow persuasion. The formula isn’t working this time. The Forum no longer believes what it is told by Bainimarama. And privately, many in the region worry about the character and stability of Fiji’s military supremo.

The argument for the Forum to expel Fiji is strong. Expect Papua New Guinea, though, to strain to create some wriggle room. If Bainimarama were smart enough to lift his eyes from the Suva melee for a moment, he still has some cards. Getting into the game would involve more regional sensitivity and less Fiji chauvinism. A quick check of the old Ratu Mara playbook would help.

The debate about expulsion leads to a separate but equally important question — the future of the Forum and Pacific regionalism.

Imagine the ructions in Southeast Asia if ASEAN decided it had to expel Thailand because of its military-political shenanigans. This is a fanciful notion. ASEAN can’t even bring itself to throw out Burma. The strengthening of ASEAN’s institutional order gave the grouping a stronger voice but no real teeth (the Singapore formulation).

Ejecting Fiji from the Forum would be like expelling Thailand from ASEAN. Or make the formulation even weightier. Imagine ASEAN without Indonesia at its centre. Impossible. This, though, is the bureaucratic significance of Fiji. The ASEAN secretariat is in Jakarta. The Forum secretariat is in Fiji.

A Pacific Islands Forum without Fiji is a significantly weakened regional grouping. The ambitions of the Pacific Plan for the Forum would be indefinitely suspended. If Fiji were thrown out of the Forum would it also be ejected from the Melanesian Spearhead Group? Probably not. It is going to be hard enough for PNG, Vanuatu and Solomon Islands to agree to action by the Forum.

As patrons and players of the Forum, Australia and New Zealand are pushing for action against Fiji. Distaste for Bainimarama might help Canberra and Wellington to achieve something unprecedented in the four decades of the Forum — the expulsion of a member.

As patron of the Melanesian Spearhead Group, China wants a strong and united MSG, with Fiji on the inside. And one of the unintended consequences of expelling Fiji might be to lift the standing of the MSG and weaken the Forum. Fiji’s folly would truly turn into a regional tragedy.

The Fellowship of the Thugs

This recent Letter to the Editor was wickedly apt in its analogy:

Beware, power corrupts

EVERY leader in Fiji, elected or otherwise, walks up the steps of Parliament with noble intentions, I am sure.

Once they step inside Parliament however, there is a sudden change of heart. Power is infamous for its ability to corrupt the mind of even the noblest of man or woman.

It is like the ring in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Once you handle it, it is impossible to let go. Are our leaders turning into gollums – the hideous creature from Lord of the Rings who once used to be a noble hobbit?

M MUDALIAR
Christchurch
New Zealand

One thug ring to rule them all,
One thug ring to find them,
One thug ring to bring them all,
And in the darkness bind them.

The IIG Locks n Loads

Bainimarama’s continued defiance of democratic norms means he will just have to learn the hard way. That is, that the people always have the last laugh. We laughed Rabuka out and oh how the mighty did topple. We laughed Speight out (luckily the constitution saved his life). We will laugh out Frank et al too.

It will undoubtedly be a clash of resolve. Whether our resolve is to last for 10 or 50 years, the people will sit it out. Depending on whether the junta themselves live that long, their unfettered access to the free-for-all hogging at the trough is never guaranteed. The reality of unjustly frog-leaping your way to the head of the trough will always mean hogging with eyes at the back of their heads. Always.

You see Frank, the future of Fiji are learning first-hand best life-long experiential lessons that a safe, secure and just society can only exist if respect for each other and the rule of law remains paramount. History, being the wonderful storyteller that it is, continuously points to tales of the limitless strength of human resolve in the face of oppression. Indeed our own people of yore were themselves leading characters of many episode’s that are Fiji’s.

So. When opinions vary about our constitution and its impending death we find it truly unconvincing that some of us would just give up the Supreme Law of this Land without so much as a whimper. Are our founding documents that inferior that we continue to mimic Rabuka in ever demeaning the document that holds much promise for us as a people? Moreover, is our ambivalent but silent acquiescence perpetuating the disrespect for the laws of our land to our future generations?

Already we see that the IIAG naively continues to pave the way for the demise of our blue book by sugar coating it as just a teeny-weeny change to the constitution that really (really, really, REALLY) is in the best interest of urban Fijians who are giving away too much power to rural representatives. The IIAG has learned well from his mentor. He is after all emulating the teeny-weeny stepping "out of" the constitution stunt that Bainimarama (who copied from Rabuka) pulled in 2000 where he deliberately hid from the long armed tentacles of modern law, under the skirts of tradition through the now bastardized token tabua offering. It did not, it does not, and it never will be OK for such a grave assault on the constitution. That's called Treason and no amount of judicial activism can ever sugar-coat that even if the illegal appointment of a Chief Justice now guarantees him active front row seats in the Supreme Court.

But wait. There’s more on our still grey horizons. It has become quite evident that there has been an almost rapid eruption of activity on the higher education scene.

The II Cabinet has approved yet another university for the country. Apart from the University of the South Pacific and the very recent University of Fiji , that currently services higher education needs for our students we will now have a National University of Fiji. The recent acquisition of academics by the Fiji Institute of Technology (full paged ad in Saturday’s Fiji Times of 31 Jan 2009), which is one of the 6 institutions (many of them boast regional enrolments) to be amalgamated under this new university is fascinating.

Especially as now the University of the South Pacific announces that some remaining staff could be facing job losses.

Incidentally we are told that this new university could be up and running as soon as “policy guidelines and mechanisms are in place”. With the advertised position of the head of the Council also featuring in the Saturday Fiji Times of 31 January, that could be sooner than the cited time-frame of 9 month.

This initiative begs the question of whether at this critical juncture of nation building so soon after our recent disaster, could not such a wasteful venture have waited until our already competing priorities are met?

In this already complicated mix we now add the impending arrival of valiant Knights in Red soaring to Frank's trough hogging rescue this weekend in the form of the Vice President of China. The contingent boasts an 80-member delegation that includes investors. No wonder there was the illegal fast-tracking of amendments to the Income Tax Act which currently guarantees unchecked access to new tax free zones in Vanua Levu, Rotuma, Kadavu, Levuka, Lomaiviti and Lau.

There will undoubtedly be international ripples about this one.

But more to the point the entourage will come bearing gifts. They are gracious and kind. No doubt. We only have to look to the Dalai Lama and the Falun Gong to see how truly kind China can be.

So yeah it’s all happening right now. The balls rolling. They’re in Lock n Load mode ladies n gents.