By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
Later this year, Fiji will hold its second election under its new 2013 constitution.
Has the ruling FijiFirst Party, created just four years ago, managed to transcend the country’s deep ethnic tensions, or just papered them over?
A South Pacific archipelago, Fiji was bitterly divided between an Indigenous ethnic Fijian population and the South Asian descendents of indentured labourers who arrived during British colonial rule.
Fijian nationalists contended that independence in 1970 should have been a reversal of the 1874 Deed of Cession that turned the islands into a British colony, returning the country not to all the people of Fiji but to the Fijians alone, as it was before the arrival of the Indians.
Race was institutionalized in the post-independence politics of Fiji, under a constitution that preserved communal representation and indigenous rights.
Fiji was an ethnocracy, a type of political regime that facilitates the control of a dominant ethnic group within the state.
In the lower house all 52 seats were reserved for one racial group or another. Variations of this communal-based “first past the post” electoral system would remain in place until 2013.
While the moral claim of the Fijians was based on their prior occupation of the Fiji Islands, stretching back thousands of years, that of the Indians was on their presence, as individuals, in a polity that ought to support rights of equal citizenship.
This was a circle that couldn’t be squared. Instability, turbulence, division and hatred became the norms of political life.
By 2014, Fiji had already weathered four coups: two in 1987, the third in 2000, and the fourth in 2006.
The perpetrators typically claimed they were motivated by the fear of an “Indian takeover,” politically, economically, and territorially.
Those who overthrew the government in 2000 erected a sign outside the parliament that warned: “Fiji Indigenous Rights are Paramount in Fiji. We Will Fight to Uphold Them.”
An election held in 2001 had returned a government which stood for advancing “indigenous rights.” This was to remain a sacred political principle.
But it hasn’t turned out that way. In 2006, following further turmoil, Fiji’s military commander, Voreqe (Frank) Bainimarama, seized power.
Although he, and almost the entire military, are ethnic Fijians, Bainimarama depicted his coup as aiming to save Fiji from destruction at the hands of the ethnic-Fijian civilian government.
He began to shape the identity of the army as the guide for a multi-ethnic nation. The new political class that emerged was based on an alliance between the military, progressive indigenous Fijians, and Indo-Fijians.
The military implemented de-ethnicisation strategies and dismantled many of the aboriginal structures of governance in Fiji, including, in 2012, the once-powerful Great Council of Chiefs.
It had met yearly to discuss native Fijian concerns. The council, which was formerly responsible for appointing Fiji's president, was composed of 55 Fijian chiefs selected from the 14 traditional provinces.
A 2010 decree also shifted the word “Fijian” from being a marker of ethnic identity to one of national identity, and so now also describes Indo-Fijians. The indigenous population are now referred to as iTaukei.
In 2012, Bainimarama discarded Fiji’s race-based single-member constituencies. Elections would now be held through party-list proportional representation open to all.
In the 2014 election this system delivered a clear victory for his FijiFirst Party, which gained 59.2 per cent of the vote in the new 50-member parliament, giving him 32 seats. (One seat has been added for the 2018 vote.)
The Social Democratic Liberal Party (SODELPA), a successor to earlier indigenous Fijian parties, won 28.2 per cent, good for 15 seats.
Indians now saw no need to remain loyal to Indo-Fijian groups, and the National Federation Party received just 5.5 percent, electing three members.
As for the Fiji Labour Party, once the dominant force in the Indian community, it did not even manage to cross the five per cent threshold needed to elect members, providing an obvious indication of one key source of FijiFirst’s new support base.
While aboriginal peoples in settler societies such as Canada are seeing redress for past wrongs, in Fiji the iTaukei have lost the supports that had managed to protect them.
Bainimarama has created a “multicultural” country, to the benefit of the Indo-Fijians, but also in order to please neighbouring liberal Australia and New Zealand, and global capital.
