Perfectly Frank - Fiji

Comment by Daniel Leuck on December 11, 2009 at 4:45am

Disclaimer: This is an opinion from an outsider. I've visited Fiji, interviewed people in Fiji and frequently read about Fiji, but I am certainly not an expert on the matter.

I'm no fan of military dictatorships, but Bainimarama makes some good points in this interview, in particular with regard to race based voting. If you have a substantial racial majority, and that race enjoys special privileges, how do you change the status quo via a popular vote? You could say, "Wait for a civil rights movement", but was that realistic given Fiji's zeitgeist? All attempts to do so over the past 30 years failed, and there didn't seem to be any indication of progress. Nobody likes military coups for manifold reasons that hardly require enumeration, but what was the correct answer to this question?

There is an interesting exchange at 9:00 in this interview:
Interviewer: "You've got intelligence offers sitting in the TV station there as this journalist does this story."
Frank: "And why do you think they are sitting there?"
Interviewer: "To make sure there is nothing that criticizes you or upsets you."

This video, which doesn't paint Bainimarama in a particularly flattering light, stands as evidence against the interviewer's assertion that Fiji's censorship, "...would do North Korea proud." Clearly there is some censorship going on, which he admits, but an implied comparison to Kim Jong-il was hardly appropriate.

If a constitution that removes all the racial baggage is put in place, and power is handed over to elected officials in 2015, it seems possible Bainimarama will leave Fiji in a better place than he found it. Do the ends justify the means? Perhaps not, but the path to a stable democracy is rarely clean and organized.

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