Trouble in Paradise

Gazing out the window on the short ride from the airport to my guest house in Nadi, I could see
the tropical beauty for which Fiji is so famous. In the distance were the great green peaks of the rugged interior and along the road were brightly colored homes on small plots with palm trees, and hibiscus and frangipani flowers blooming in their tiny yards. It was the spitting image of a holiday in paradise brochure. On the radio however, it was a different story. As my taxi driver and I careened around one beautiful vista after another, we listened in silence as a newscaster launched into a scathing rant about the inefficiency and negligence of the current interim government. For from without bias, it was absolutely merciless. It seemed that mud-slides during the recent rain had destroyed a number of villages on the north side of the main island, one of which had not received aid in three days. The newscaster made it abundantly clear that the blame was squarely on the incompetency of the current regime. After a good deal of this I turned to the driver and said something of the effect of "wow, that guy really has it in for the government" to which he replied, "yes, but of course here in Fiji we have a radio station for every persuasion."

He turned the dial, and after a few commercials, but right on cue, another newscast was releasing a statement that made it clear that the stranded village was a result of the previous regime's failure to modernize agriculture in the sector, and that the situation was further evidence of the type of mismanagement that made its removal necessary. It went on to describe the improvements that the current regime had already begun to implement in order to rectify the failures of their predecessors.

Not the kind of politicizing you would expect such a beautiful place to produce, but there was no chance that these mud-slides and the havoc that they the reeked could be left to blame on the rain alone.

In fact Fiji is no stranger to political instability - four coups in just 15 years have left their mark. The first took place at 10am on Thursday, May 14th, 1987, when Lt. Col. Sitiveni Rabuka (number three in the Fijian army), and 10 heavily armed soldiers dressed in fatigues, their faces covered in gas masks, entered the House of Parliament in Suva and forced the legislators inside to board army trucks at gunpoint. The resulting chaos has been a severe blow to the islands' economy and strained race relations in an ethnically divided society. Like most current events these coups have their origins in much more distant historical happenings.

Much of the political instability in Fiji has its routes in the ethnic tensions that exist there, and the foundations of a multiracial Fiji were laid in the late 19th century, when Fiji was a British colony. The first colonial governor of Fiji, Sir Arthur Gordon, introduced Indian indentured laborers to work on sugar cane plantations. Indians began arriving in 1879, and by 1916, when Indian immigration ended, there were already 63,000.


To come to Fiji, the Indians had to sign a labor contract or girmit, in which they agreed to cut sugarcane for their masters for five years. During the next five years they were to continue to work on the plantation, but they were allowed to lease small plots from the Fijians and plant their own cane or raise livestock. More than half of the Indians decided to remain after their contracts expired, and today their descendants make up the Indo-Fijian segment of Fiji's population.

In a rare example of good natured concern for its native subjects, the British decided to safeguard Fijian culture by prohibiting indigenous Fijians from commercial employment and protecting their land by law. The result was that Fijian land cold not be sold, only leased. To this day 83% of the land in Fiji is inalienable native Fijian land which can not be sold. Instead it is leased out in small plots, mostly to Indians. The effect has been that the Fijian chiefdom system has been largely maintained and the traditional Fijian way of life can still be seen throughout most of Fiji.

But this system, with its European capital, Fijian land, and Indian labor, has had its consequences. Fijian's have had little motivation to modernize, accumulate capitol, or invest in business. Instead they have been content to sit back and collect off of leased land. Indo-Fijians however, unable to purchase native protected land, have invested in their own businesses. Today it is estimated that less than 100 of the 5,000 businesses operating in Fiji are native Fijian owned. By 1946 the census held that Indians had already outnumbered native Fijians 120,000 to 17,000. Add to this the fact that Indo-Fijians pay nearly 80% of all taxes collected in Fiji, and their cries for equivalent political representation becomes obvious. Yet, the constitution has explicitly reserved the post of president, prime minister, and army chief for ethnic Fijians.

Prominent Fijian nationalists insist that Indo-Fijians must content themselves to be second-class citizens, or at least let indigenous Fijians run the country. They claim political leadership as a birthright by virtue of their status as the indigenous people of the country. They claim that any government in Fiji must legally safeguard native Fijian's position as the "taukei ne gele" or "owners of the soil." Even prior to the first coup in Fiji, at a rally protesting increased Indian participation in government, Apisai Tora, a prominent Fijian Nationalists, stated that Fijians must "act now" to avoid ending up as "deprived as Australia's aborigines."

It is an interesting historical and moral dilemma in Fiji. On the one hand you have an indigenous peoples' struggle to maintain sovereignty over their land. On the other hand you have victims of a racially discriminatory system, who, if left to legitimate representative democracy, could only expect to play a significant political role in the society.