Bay Area Fijians Embarrassed by Coup in Homeland

New America Media, News Analysis, Viji Sundaram, Posted: Dec 08, 2006

EDITOR’S NOTE: Fiji may lose credibility internationally and the political situation may deteriorate even more as a result of the military coup, Fijians in San Francisco told New America Media’s Viji Sundaram.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Fijian immigrants in the Bay Area aren’t particularly unhappy that a military coup has taken place in their country, just that the succession of coups in the last 20 years has made their country politically unstable and a laughing stock in the eyes of the international community.

Fiji’s military on Dec. 4 took over the government after toppling the democratically elected Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase and replacing him with an interim leader, Dr. Jona Senilagakali. It then served termination notices to several senior figures in the administration.

“What the Army Commander (Frank Bainimarama) has done is for the good of the country because Qarase was working against the interests of the Indians,” asserted Krishna Reddy, who immigrated to the United States from Fiji in 1972 so his children, then four and one, could have better educational opportunities. “But four coups in 20 years is surely going to make Fiji lose credibility” internationally.

Other Fijian Americans echoed Reddy’s sentiments. The deposed leader, currently under house arrest, reportedly declared that he was still the prime minister, and that the military’s action amounted to “raping” the Fijian constitution.

Bainimarama had been threatening to topple Qarase’s government since Qarase won a second five-year term in May. The army chief has accused the government of corruption and being lenient toward those responsible for a 2000 coup.

Like the previous coups, two in 1987 and one in 2000, this week’s putsch too had its roots in the same ethnic divide between the majority indigenous population and the ethnic Indian minority. An estimated 12,000 Indo-Fijians left the country in the two years following the 1987 coups. A large number left after the 2000 coup, when Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry, a Fijian of Indian descent, was removed from power.

“There was so much marginalization of Indians, and so much of bloodshed after that coup that I went my daughter off to the U.S. in 2001 to study,” said Narayan Naidu, who followed two years later with his wife after quitting his job as facility’s manager of the Fiji Institute of Technology. His grown son decided to stay behind. Ethnic Fijians make up about 50 percent of the South Pacific island’s population, with ethnic Indians comprising of 44 percent.

The early Indian immigrants to Fiji came as indentured laborers to work in the sugarcane fields, but those who arrived after Fiji’s independence from Great Britain in 1970 came mostly from the western Indian state of Gujarat to set up businesses.

Since its independence, Fiji’s economic growth, powered largely by its sugarcane industry and its hardworking Gujarati community, soared until May of 1987, when a military coup led by Sitiveni Rabuka removed from power the coalition government of Dr. Timoci Bavadra, an ethnic Fijian who had the popular support of the Indo-Fijian community.

When the military government staged a second coup in September of that year, again under Rabuka, and declared Fiji a republic, protests by the Indian government led to Fiji’s expulsion from the Commonwealth and official non-recognition of the Rabuka regime by foreign governments, including the island’s South Pacific neighbors, Australia and New Zealand.

San Bruno, CA. resident Hari Shankar, who runs a radio program for the Fijian community called “Suron Ki Jhankaar,” said that although he immigrated to the U.S. 30 years ago to make the U.S. his permanent home, every so often he feels a tug to his homeland.


Hari Shankar (right) being interviewed by Sunil Raj on Radio Fiji Two.

“It is not called ‘Paradise of the Pacific’ for nothing,” Shankar said, sounding sentimental. “Minus the political situation, minus the corruption, it is so beautiful – the swaying coconut palms and the picturesque landscape.” Shankar said the average Fijian native is friendly and warm to the Indians living there.

“But with the frequent political upheavals, I don’t think I want to go back to live there permanently,” even though he plans to visit often, Shankar said. He is currently constructing a vacation home in Nadi, in the western part of the island.

Bainimarama said that next week he will ask the Great Council of Chiefs to restore executive powers to President Ratu Josefa Iloilo, who would then appoint an interim government. Elections will follow.


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