Forum, Commonwealth eyes on Fiji yet again

Samisoni Pareti
Fiji’s military-led regime hopes the Commonwealth envoy will help convince political dissidents to accept its much-touted work on a people’s charter.

But the envoy, former New Zealand Governor-General, Sir Paul Reeves, denies he is initiating political dialogue in the island nation only to help the regime achieve its objective.

“Sir Paul Reeves’ main objective is to facilitate dialogue between the interim Prime Minister and all the leaders of the main political parties (in Fiji),” said Reeves’ aide and political adviser on the Pacific in the Commonwealth Secretariat, Samoa’s Albert Mariner.

“Hopefully, Reeves will be able to create an environment where leaders of Fiji will be able to discuss in a honest, constructive and robust manner and hopefully reach an agreement on how to collectively address and resolve the current challenges in the country.”

ISLANDS BUSINESS sought clarifications from Malborough House, headquarters of the Commonwealth Secretariat in London, after Reeves seemed to have suggested in Auckland in March of an acceptance by all political leaders of the work of Fiji’s interim regime on its people’s charter as a possible outcome of his work.

Speaking after attending the foreign ministers meeting on Fiji of member countries of the Pacific Islands Forum, Reeves said while the political dialogue he is engineering in Fiji is parallel to the regime’s work on the charter, he would not rule out possible “convergence” at a later stage of the talks.

“There are all sorts of possibilities out there,” Reeves told a group of journalists at Auckland’s Heritage Hotel where the foreign ministers met.

“At the moment, we use the world parallel but I think we must leave open the fact that there could be some convergence.”

Asked by this magazine whether convergence meant leaders who lost their positions during the military coup of December 2006 like Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase and Mick Beddoes, Leader of the Opposition, would have to accept the work of the regime on the charter, Reeves said the question was one for the leaders of Fiji to answer.

“I’m not sort of committed to convergence. I’m saying it could be. It would depend on the participants themselves.”

Asked to clarify the position of the Commonwealth Secretariat on the matter given the strong opposition people like Qarase and Beddoes had shown towards the charter and the refusal by their parties to participate in the process, Mariner said via electronic mail: “The convergence Sir Paul Reeves referred to in Auckland is an issue the interim government would like to see eventuate out of the dialogue process.

“Our view is that it could only happen if a consensus is reached during the dialogue between all the political leaders. We have discussed this with all the leaders during our recent visit.”

In promoting political dialogue in Fiji, the Commonwealth Secretariat is pursuing an idea suggested by Beddoes himself.

As president of his United Peoples’ Party, the ousted opposition leader had initially accepted a position on the National Council for Building a Better Fiji, a vehicle the regime created to formulate its charter.

But Beddoes resigned a month later in protest against the forced removal in February of Fiji Sun publisher and Australian national, Russell Hunter.

Yet creating a parallel dialogue of political leaders was one of Beddoes’ intentions for joining the charter process as he had explained in a political forum convened in Suva last February by the Pacific Centre for Public Integrity.

Although the forum was abandoned three hours after it started due to a bomb threat -- which later turned out to be a hoax -- Beddoes did put in a strong plea for dialogue as a way forward for the island nation.

Even Qarase who also attended the forum did not shout down the suggestion.

Both men -- according to Reeves -- together with a representative from the National Federation Party and the National Alliance Party of Ratu Epeli Ganilau (now defence minister in Frank Bainimarama’s interim cabinet) -- agreed to attend the first round of talks the Commonwealth envoy had scheduled in Suva in March.

The talks, however, did not eventuate after Bainimarama bailed out at the eleventh hour.

Reeves told journalists in Auckland that Fiji coup leader, now interim Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, cited the court challenge Qarase had brought about following the coup as the reason for his decision to stay out of the talks.

Qarase’s case was being heard in the Fiji high court during the same week Reeves had scheduled the talks.
Reeves said the Fiji Labour Party leader Mahendra Chaudhry, who is Bainimarama’s interim finance minister, had also declined to participateŃpointing to the Qarase court case as his reason too. Talks have now been re-scheduled to this month.

The Commonwealth Secretariat opted not to respond to ISLANDS BUSINESS questions about the potential contradictions between Reeves’ current work in Fiji and the work he did on the island’s constitution.

Reeves himself had told journalists in March that he was aware of the intentions of the proponents of the people’s charter that a national referendum should determine the adoption or otherwise of the charter and did wonder about the legality of such intentions.

The former New Zealand governor-general was an observer at last March’s one-day meeting in Auckland of the Pacific Islands Forum’s foreign ministers.

The meeting was no different from the previous two the foreign ministers had held to specifically discuss their ornery member; big on words but small on action.

There was the usual reference of getting Fiji to honour its undertakings of holding elections in the first quarter of 2009, that the elections be held in accordance with the Fiji Constitution and its outcome “accepted by the Fiji interim government and the Republic of Fiji Military Forces”.

Australia’s foreign minister Stephen Smith attending his first Forum-related meeting since the Australian Labor Government took power in December 2007 did contribute that the outcome statement they produced at the Auckland meeting was “strong.”

But Fiji’s representative to the meeting, interim foreign affairs minister Ratu Epeli Nailatikau returned home satisfied the military-led regime was not taken to task for still failing to produce a chronological programme on how the elections would be held by March 2009, nor was it issued with any deadline on when one such chronology ought to be made available.

Both Smith and his New Zealand counterpart and meeting host Winston Peters had on the eve of the Auckland summit put the tabling of an election timeline by Fiji as a sign of a successful meeting.

“A good outcome of the meeting would be all of the Forum countries agreeing that we want to see a full and free election in Fiji in March of next year, and we want the commitment of the interim Fiji Government to effect that,” Smith had told journalists a day before the foreign ministers’ summit.

“Fiji should come prepared and committed with a chronological forward programme of what they are going to do, so we can sign off and see that it is achieved in the interest of the people of Fiji and the region itself,” added Peters.

At the post-meeting press conference afterwards, Peters said no such timelines were submitted by Fiji. Instead, its representative said such a programme would go before its cabinet in a fortnight’s time. There has been no word on this since.

Peters did propose that Fiji’s hosting of  regional offices like the Secretariat of the Pacific Islands Forum and the regional university could be jeopardised if Fiji’s interim regime continued to remain defiant.

Yet this threat was delivered a day after the foreign ministers’ meeting ended and the item never appeared in the ministers’ three-page outcome statement. In addition, Fiji has yet to deliver on another promise it offered at the Auckland meeting; that it appoints a new Supervisor of Elections.

Bainimarama’s regime even went to the extent of declaring on the same day the foreign ministers were meeting in Auckland that the new appointee was a New Zealand lawyer, but offered no names.

Already the man this appointee is going to replace, Semesa Karavaki, is saying an election by March 2009 is untenable especially if the military-appointed government is going to avoid the problems of the previous general elections of May 2006 of incomplete voter registration and ballot paper printing delays.

Producing an error-proof voter registry by early next year is almost an impossibility given that its 71 electoral boundaries had to be redrawn now that the island nation had completed its census. Even then, the new electoral administrators will have to contend with the insistence by Bainimarama that the island nation discards ethnic representation in parliament.

And this is in spite of the commitment he personally gave his counterparts in the Pacific that elections would be held without having to change the island’s current constitution.

Under that constitution which Reeves helped wrote in 1997, 46 of Fiji’s 71 parliamentary seats are reserved along ethnic lines with the remaining 25 seats declared open or cross-ethnic seats.

Students of Fiji’s modern constitutional history will tell you that when invited to help draw up the island’s current constitution, Reeves and his Constitutional Review Commission of 1996 had suggested a 46 open, 25 ethnic seat formula. And this was a compromise as the Reeves commission had preferred a 100% open seat representation in parliament but recognises that such a change should be introduced gradually.

It was the joint parliamentary committee led by then Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka and Opposition Leader Jai Ram Reddy that made the switch to 46 ethnic and 25 open seats.

No doubt, the likelihood that Bainimarama will not be able to meet his promise of a March 2009 election was the subject of an urgent but secretive meeting of the Fiji military leader with the prime ministers of Papua New Guinea and Tonga last month.

Sir Michael Somare and Feleti Sevele are the past and present chair respectively of the Pacific Islands Forum.
It is public knowledge that Somare played a big part in persuading Bainimarama to recognise the need to allow Fiji to get to the polls as quickly as possible.

A day or two before Bainimarama gave his March 2009 election undertaking to Pacific islands leaders at their annual summit in Tonga last October, the two men had met at the same resort in Nadi.

Whether the two leaders have succeeded in getting Bainimarama to stay true to his promise, remains to be seen. A few weeks earlier in Auckland, Somare’s new foreign minister Sam Abal was talking of the need for quiet diplomacy when handling Fiji.

“I’m an elected leader of PNG and I don’t know what goes through the mind of a military leader,” Abal told journalists.

“What the Forum is trying to do is engage them (Fiji) in a dialogue and influence the way they are thinking.”
Papua New Guinea, according to Abal, sees no reason why Bainimarama would lie about holding an election and that “we hold him to the fact that he made a promise before the leaders of Forum countries. We will hold him to that”.

Work of the Fiji interim regime on its people’s charter meanwhile continued to be  embroiled in a controversy, the latest being the revelation about the salary of the Fiji-born but New Zealand citizen head of the charter secretariat, John Sami.

Disclosures that he’s getting F$12,000 (US$8000) a month attracted an uproar from politicians and trade unionists  alike.

Forum foreign ministers decisions • Fiji’s interim government should honour the undertakings it made to Forum leaders that a parliamentary election would be held in the first quarter of 2009, that it would be held in accordance with the Fiji Constitution and that the outcome would be respected; • Concern about slow progress of election preparations and encouraged the Fiji interim government to intensify preparations; • A detailed timetable for election preparations should be produced by the Fiji interim government and this timetable should faithfully reflect the commitments it had already made. The timetable should be implemented without delay; • Welcomed advice that a Supervisor of Elections has been finalised; • The Fiji interim government’s people’s charter process should not delay or distract from the holding of elections in the first quarter of 2009; • Adequate and timely resources to be made available for the elections both by Fiji’s interim government and the international community; • Noted Fiji’s complaints against the travel bans imposed on members and supporters of Fiji’s interim government by Australia and New Zealand and the two countries’ refusal to lift the ban; • Concerned about human rights abuses, threats to media freedom and judicial independence and similar actions inconsistent with the creation of a free and fair elections; • Acknowledged that overall resolution of Fiji’s issues would be a long-term exercise but affirmed at the same time that elections constituted a crucial prerequisite to such a resolution; and • Welcomed the work of the Commonwealth in encouraging political dialogue in Fiji that is independent and inclusive.