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Workers' Liberty
the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class Workers Liberty Australia |
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international - asia-pacific
As I write, negotiations are still dragging on between Fiji's military and coup leader George Speight to agree a new government.
With seven armed men, Speight, a businessman,
seized Fiji's parliament on 19 May. He took, and still holds, the elected
government hostage. Military chief Voreqe Bainimarama declared martial
law on 29 May.
The big powers have denounced Speight,
but Australia and the USA have been so circumspect in their comments about
the army's intervention and the prospect of a new government imposed by
the military as effectively to approve them.
The prospects, at present, are for a military-sponsored
government eventually to emerge and be applauded by big capital for "ending
the crisis". But Fiji's trade unions demand nothing less than the restoration
of the elected government. And in the messages he has been able to send
out, elected Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry, of Fiji's Labour Party,
has insisted that he will not resign. If necessary, he will form a government-in-exile.
Between Speight and Bainimarama there appears
to be much rivalry, jockeying for position, and, probably, attempted double-crossing.
The
evidence, though, is that Speight, the military hierarchy, and big capitalist
interests in Fiji are all playing the same side of the street.
The armed men who carried out Speight's
coup are from the Counter-Revolutionary Warfare Unit, which was trained
by and is Fiji's equivalent of Britain's SAS. They were led by the unit's
commander, Colonel Ilisoni Ligiari. Once they had seized the parliament,
the army pointedly failed to intervene.
The army has a central role in Fiji's international
relations, economy, and communal politics. Already once before, in 1987,
it has carried out a coup against a Labour-led government.
It is a highly professional army, foreign-trained,
which brings large earnings into Fiji by hiring itself out for UN "peacekeeping"
missions. At present about one third of its strength is overseas on such
missions. It is also almost exclusively indigenous-Fijian, with very few
soldiers from the Indian-Fijian minority which makes up 44% of the islands'
population.
Fijian history
The communal divisions in Fiji are essential
background to the coup, though, as we shall see, it is class forces that
act on that background. The divisions are a legacy of British imperialism.
In 1874 Ratu Seru Cakobau, then the dominant chief in Fiji, invited Britain
to take the islands over. He wanted to maintain his position - under threat
in the warfare between rival provincial chiefs which by then was endemic
in Fiji - and to persuade Britain to pay off his debts.
Britain agreed. Fiji was fertile and would
give them a useful base in the Pacific. But the British government was
also cautious. It wanted Fiji only if it could run the new colony with
minimum trouble and with no expensive conflicts or wars. To stabilise its
rule, it set up an elaborate deal with the chiefs, which both transmuted
and froze archaic social structures on the islands.
Chiefdoms were made hereditary. The Great
Council of Chiefs, which has helped give Speight leverage in the current
crisis, was set up. Its balance was weighted towards the chiefs of the
eastern areas of Fiji. Britain promised to guarantee Fiji's traditional
structure of landholding. When the chiefs, despite long argument, could
not agree what the traditional structure was, the British Governor told
them to make a deal or see Britain seize all the land. The deal they came
up with, freezing most of Fiji's land in "communal" landholdings effectively
controlled by the chiefs, has been maintained ever since.
The Methodist Church came in and made itself
a central pillar of indigenous-Fijian culture and, in time, of indigenous-Fijian
chauvinism.
Indian workers
Meanwhile Britain also wanted make profits
by developing the sugar plantations and other industry. So as not to disturb
the deal with the chiefs, the British administration made no attempt to
draw indigenous Fijians into modern wage-labour. Instead, it brought indentured
workers from India.
Many of the Indian workers stayed after
their indentures ended. A capitalist sector, based on Indian labour and,
increasingly, Indian capitalists, developed alongside the "frozen" chief-dominated
indigenous-Fijian society. Britain imposed strict laws to keep the communities
apart. As late as the 1950s, indigenous Fijians who came to live in towns
could by law be returned to their villages. Today most Indian-Fijians live
in the west and north of Fiji, while the centre of Fijian chiefly power
and the capital (and site of the coups) Suva is in the east. Even under
the 1997 constitution, an improvement on previous efforts, there are separate
indigenous-Fijian and Indian-Fijian electoral rolls. In the aftermath of
the 1987 coup, coup leader Sitiveni Rabuka - still a major figure in Fijian
politics - publicly praised South Africa's apartheid system.
After independence in 1970 the deal was,
fundamentally, that indigenous Fijians - in the first place the chiefs
- would own the land (other than that large chunk of the best terrain owned
by Europeans), monopolise the army, and control political power and a large
chunk of state patronage. Indian-Fijians would farm the land (on leases),
run almost all the private capitalist businesses, hold almost all the skilled
jobs, and dominate the media and the university.
There was and is racism on both sides.
Indigenous Fijians feared having their culture swamped, resented any Indian-Fijian
inroads into political power, and talked episodically about driving out
the Indian-Fijians. According to John Davies (On the Source of Inter-Ethnic
Conflict in Fiji, http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/rhimona/karere/davies.htm):
"Of course not all Indians are rich... But... the contrast between the
neon, concrete, chrome and steel, which proclaims in urban Fiji Indian
affluence, and the ramshackle tin, block and wood shacks of the contemporary
rural or peri-urban Fijian village - looking much like an aboriginal reservation
in Australia or Canada - is something which is not lost on the Fijians".
The indigenous-Fijian upper crust was educated in a conservative, pro-Anglo-American,
Cold-War outlook at elite schools and military colleges; it suspected the
Indian-Fijians as "reds" and "socialists".
Indian-Fijians, for their part, tended
to dismiss indigenous Fijians as backward and lazy. John Davies again:
"the newspapers still regularly feature advertisements in the 'to let'
and 'situations vacant' classifieds stating 'Indians only' or 'Indians
preferred'." Davies asks: "What was the role of the indigenous inhabitants
in... the Indian community... dream of establishing... a home free of the
oppressive and hated colonial yoke... The short answer is that they did
not figure at all. At best they were simply passive spectators in the Indians'
struggle, spectators who were literally out of sight and out of mind in
their villages and who appeared to be a dying race". Despite all the obvious
differences, many of the attitudes on both sides are similar to those which
developed historically between Jews and Arabs in British-occupied Palestine.
Neither the 1987 coup nor the recent coups,
however, can be explained just by communal tensions rising to the boil.
In the period up to 1987, personal relations between the communities had
improved considerably on what they were in the colonial era. The government
being held hostage by Speight has a majority of indigenous-Fijians. Indigenous-Fijian
chiefs in the west of Fiji have organised rallies against Speight and in
support of Chaudhry, and even talked of seceding. According to Tamarisi
Digitaki in the Fijian magazine The Review, writing just before
the coup, while "a certain group of elite [indigenous] Fijians" led the
plotting against Chaudhry, "a handful of prominent Indian [Fijian] business
people have lent their support to the group - both morally and financially.
Chaudhry has ruffled quite a few feathers in the business community in
the past 12 months [since taking office]... His policies have been aimed
at redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor [and] there are... many
business people who would be more than happy to see his government go under...
"
Balance of forces
So long as indigenous Fijians were firmly
under the control of a stable hierarchy of chiefs, and the Indian-Fijian
bourgeoisie had solid hegemony in the Indian-Fijian community, the two
elite groups were quite able to do a deal with each other and with the
multinational capital which plays a very big part in the Fijian economy.
What upset the balance was the rise of
industry, of indigenous Fijians moving to the cities, of an organised working
class, and of more fluid relations inside the indigenous-Fijian community.
The Fiji Trades Union Congress is now a powerful force in the land, Indian-Fijian
in its majority but by no means exclusively. It founded the Fiji Labour
Party in 1985. Despite a mild reformist program and frequent alliances
with bourgeois parties both Indian-Fijian and indigenous-Fijian, the Fiji
Labour Party has been able to win wide support among both Indian and indigenous
Fijians.
As Rory Ewins writes (Colour, Class
and Custom: http://speedysnail.com/pacific/fiji_coup/),
"Labour changed the face of local politics: unlike the [indigenous-Fijian]
Alliance and [Indian-Fijian-bourgeois] National Federation Party, it placed
economic and labour problems squarely on the political agenda, and thereby
gained support among Indians and Fijians... Labour's policies attracted
those Fijians who had left the village system and felt left out. Some were
rural workers, but most were young, educated, and primarily urban".
Indigenous bourgeoisie grows
There are also more and more indigenous-Fijian
bourgeois oriented to state contracts and patronage. According to Robert
Robertson and Akosita Tamanisau (quoted by Ewins), the leaders of the taukei
movement behind the 1987 coup "were mostly commoners on the fringes of
the Fijian establishment who saw the [Labour-led] Coalition's election
as dashing forever their chances of patronage or power". That coup helped
foster (as Teresia Teaiwa puts it: Wansolwara News, June 2000) "a
brash nouveau riche elite of 'indigenous' Fijians... The chiefs and church
ministers stir their people, but... they do not control them: a group of
alert and ambitious businessmen has used this feature of Fijian leadership
to its advantage".
That is where Speight comes in. Of mixed
race, not speaking Fijian fluently, and having spent much of his life as
an unsuccessful businessman in Australia, he seems an unlikely champion
of "taukei" (indigenous-Fijian) interests. But he was aiming - jointly
with US and New Zealand interests - to get the contract for the development
of Fiji's mahogany industry. The Chaudhry government looked like preferring
other tenders, and Speight was under investigation for corruption. His
coup solved a lot of problems for Speight. Soon after it, the government
Hardwoods Office, with all the documents for the investigation into corruption,
was burned down.
Press reports of the coup have made much
of the idea that Chaudhry brought it on himself by being "abrasive". In
fact, in his last speech before Speight's coup, Chaudhry emphasised that:
"The rights and interests of our indigenous community, the Fijians and
the Rotumans, take precedence over the rights and interests of other communities
should there be a conflict". Chaudhry is evidently a tough character: despite
being held hostage for over a month, repeatedly beaten and threatened,
he has not made any concessions to his captors. Good for him.
The double coup (Speight-Bainimarama) is
fundamentally - over and above all intrigue and personal ambitions - an
attempt by a section of the propertied classes to reconsolidate their rule
and fend off revolt from below. Teresia Teaiwa writes: "The impoverishment
and disaffection of indigenous Fijians is not a result of 12 months of
leadership by an Indo-Fijian. It is the result of thirty fraught years
of modern indigenous Fijian leadership that have sacrificed the economic
and cultural well-being of a people for the advancement of a few".
A democratic and socialist program in Fiji
has some complex questions to unravel as it tries to deal with the legacy
of British imperialism there. Full integration of the schools, with all
children taught Fijian, Hindi and English; laws against discrimination
in employment and renting; guaranteed proportions of Fijian content in
the media - all these might be part of it. Such a program, however, cannot
undertake to preserve forever the "traditional" structures of indigenous-Fijian
society - "traditions" mostly invented by the British administration. On
the contrary, it must aim for the overthrow of the power of the chiefs,
and the replacement of their domination of landholding by democratic and
cooperative structures.
Progress for workers and the poor in Fiji
depends crucially on unity with workers and the poor of other countries,
and forcing a better deal from the multinational capitalist interests which
so dominate Fiji's economy, in order to level up conditions for both Indian-Fijians
and indigenous Fijians.
STOP PRESS: Unions lift bans on Fiji
The ACTU the has lifted the bans placed
on Fiji since the coup - these are mostly postal and cargo bans. The bans
have been lifted at the request of Fiji TUC General Secretary Felix Anthony.
At a meeting of representatives of the Fiji Trade union Congress, the main
employer groups, religious groups and other civil society groups. An agreement
was signed calling for the crisis to be resolved within the framework of
1997 constitution and they think it can provide a lead out of the crisis.
They later met with the military commander which appears to have been positive.
The bans could be re-imposed if there is no proper solution.