‘Lay off Bainimarama, he’s doing it for Fiji’
5-May-2009

"WHAT else is he doing all this for? Certainly not the money or to make friends:” Associate Professor Hugh Laracy.

If anyone is used to criticism, it’s Frank Bainimarama.

Every day, Fiji’s beleaguered military ruler is faced with a new barrage, with everyone from Hillary Clinton and Ban Ki-moon to the Queen and the European Union wading in with a call for him to change his ways.

Their problem is that Bainimarama is blocking democracy by failing to call an election two-and-a-half years after he staged a coup and claimed the country’s top job.

The cries of opposition have grown even louder in recent weeks after Bainimarama took things further with the abrogation of the constitution, media sanctions and the announcement that the awaited election is now five years away.

The loudest voices expressed outrage that he could “thumb his nose” at world leaders and, as one dissenter put it, “continue to cling onto his gravy train of power and refuse to let go”.

But what if Bainimarama’s battle path, for all its problems, was actually the best way forward for his country?

Some high-profile commentators on Pacific issues argue just that, saying while his means might be questionable, the end result will be better than any alternative posed by Australia or others.

“He might not be a crowd pleaser in terms of how he’s going about this, but what Bainimarama is trying to do has Fiji’s best interests at heart,” says Associate Professor Hugh Laracy, a Pacific issues specialist at the University of Auckland.

“Everyone, including Australia and New Zealand, needs to just step back, quieten down and let him get on with his job.”

The job Laracy is referring to is carrying out the provisions of Fiji’s People’s Charter, a document that aims to reform the country by embracing multiculturalism, clearing out corruption and instituting a code of ethics for the public service.

Central to this is Bainimarama’s plan to reform Fiji’s electoral system. At present, two-thirds of seats are allocated according to ethnicity, heavily favouring the country’s native indigenous Fijians over the Indian Fijian minority.

Bainimarama has said he intends to level the playing field, a notion supported by even his harshest critics.

The trouble is, these critics do not trust that the military man really intends to carry this through, believing he prefers the power of his position over problem-solving.

Stewart Firth, of the Australian National University, believes the prime minister has simply picked these virtuous goals as his “cover story” to justify his coup.

“If he’d really wanted to have reforms and democracy, don’t you think we would have had them by now?” he says.

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, his New Zealand counterpart John Key and heads of numerous countries and organisations have made repeated demands for the restoration of democracy in Fiji.

They are angered that, in the face of their calls, Bainimarama has set back the elections to September 2014.

But Laracy demurs, describing Bainimarama as “a man of honour”.

“He might be erratic, but he is to be believed when he says he wants to fix Fiji,” he says.

“I mean, what else is he doing all this for? Certainly not the money or to make friends.”

The academic also thinks the world’s impatience with Fiji’s regime is misguided, saying changes of the magnitude needed to introduce a one-person one-vote system and take it to the polls would take time.

“Fiji has been dividing everything social and political along racial lines for so long that it is deeply ingrained in how people think and do things,” Laracy says.

“It has never had the kind of democracy that everyone is demanding.

“You can’t just change that overnight with a ceremony or opening the ballot boxes tomorrow.

“It’s a serious problem and it will take time and space to fix.”

Fiji’s earlier three coups - two in 1987 and one in 2000 - were all designed to reassert ethnic Fijian supremacy on Indian Fijian-dominated governments.

Bainimarama’s coup worked the other way, to give Indians more power, but the ruler has pledged that his priority is to end the race battle altogether.

“There’s this unfortunate, dangerous streak in Fiji, and the commodore (Bainimarama) is trying to contain and control it so the country stops ending up there,” Laracy says.

Graham Davis, a Fiji-born Australian journalist with The Australian, has made similar calls for patience, writing in a recent editorial that Bainimarama is embarked on a “worthy crusade” that isn’t helped by screeching opponents.

Crosbie Walsh, an adjunct professor from the University of the South Pacific and avid Fiji blogger, is another who believes Bainimarama can be trusted.

“What he’s trying to do is good. How he’s carrying it out definitely is not, but many of his bad moves have been provoked,” Walsh argues.

For example, the media, which now operates under tough government censorship, had been notoriously anti-government in their reporting, he says.

Critics have been vocal about the stripping of press freedom, but Walsh says journalists “should have known this was coming”.

“They were writing one positive government story to every four negative ones.

“Bainimarama wasn’t going to sit back and take that.”

He says the commander’s downfall is his military style.

“He’s reactionary. He attacks when he’s threatened or pushed into a corner where a person with, say, a diplomatic background would respond differently,” he says.

“His manner is atrocious and he’s very clumsy in the way he goes about things, and that unfortunately has the effect of detracting from some of the very good things he’s doing.”

Walsh argues that many Australian and New Zealand politicians have taken a blinkered, idealistic approach to Fiji, hitting out too quickly and applying sanctions heavy-handedly.

“It’s easy to demonise Bainimarama and declare him the bad guy, as everyone seems to have done.

“As we have seen he doesn’t help himself in that respect,” the academic says.

“But is it really the way forward to force an election in a blatantly unfair electoral system, or hamstring the country if it doesn’t, when the work is being done?