|
Michael Field, Pacific journalist
|
||
|
|
||
|
Fiji Watch
Fiji's assassination trial - plot or set-up An assassination plot against Fiji’s Voreqe Bainimarama was to have used weapons purchased in New Zealand and involved a New Zealand businessman, the Fiji High Court in Suva has heard this week.
As a junior officer, Voreqe Bainimarama spent a year serving with the Chilean navy, at the worst time of the brutal Augusto Pinochet regime. Bainimarama's response, including fatal torture of soldiers who opposed him, suggests he learned the arts of oppression there. Now, he is cancelling the pensions of those senior citizens who are suspected of opposing him.
What is surprising about Fiji's "test" of New Zealand, is that Foreign Minister Murray McCully fell for it. Not for a second did he believe, I am sure, that Fiji would be so stupid as to put up a completely unacceptable character as its diplomatic representative in Wellington.
In Samoa today, Prime Minister John Key took a cup of 'ava. As is inevitable in such matters, the harmless little travelled souls of television made a great deal of this. As if it were life threatening. He as asked what was superior; Fijian or Samoan 'ava? Key, who plainly as much about Pacific history as those who seemed actually interested in the answer, replied, it was like having to decide on a favourite child, even if one of them was a "wayward child".
Speech to the NZ Fiji Business Council I mention this tendency to stage coups because, not matter what Bainimarama says about ending the coup culture, I put to you that the only way in which power is now able to be passed on in Fiji is by coup.
"The greatest danger is silence. A dangerous, pregnant silence into which many things fall ; a silence that comes in two forms. The silence of leaders who fail to speak out for whatever reason. And the silence of the people."
Perhaps unwittingly, one Ana Rokomokoti has thrown the entire Bainimarama dictatorship into international peril. At the very least, the Commodore will now find his travel options severely limited – somewhat like the Burmese generals and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe.
Fiji’s military dictatorship is moving to outlaw lawyers. Suva sources says a decree is expected ordering the disbanding of the Fiji Law Society. Last night military lawyer Ana Rokomokoti led seven plainclothes police in a break in to the society’s Gordon Street offices.
A Fiji newspaper editor has given a striking account of the daily struggles in his newsroom to get stories past military censors.
Fiji extends martial law and says media censorship working.
In 1979 a 25 year old Fijian signed onboard to a Chilean Navy sailing ship Esmeralda. He was to spend six months aboard. While an undoubtedly beautiful barque that ship then was a certifiable madhouse, a torture ship. Amnesty International, the US Senate and the Chilean Truth and Reconciliation Commission agreed that hundreds of opponents to Augusto Pinochet’s military regime were brutally tortured to death. In the middle of it, for six months, was Sub Lieutenant Voreqe Bainimarama.
Bainimarama gives himself medal Fiji's dictator Voreqe Bainimarama has been given a medal for services to humanity. State owned Fiji Broadcasting said Bainimarama was awarded the Companion of the Order of Fiji by ailing 89-year-old President Josefa Iloilo.
Bainimarama says he is the future Fiji dictator Voreqe Bainimarama has claimed his new "legal order" is the future of the island nation. In an extraordinary speech to civil servants this morning he said that with the abrogation of the constitution "a new Legal Order has been created.
“However we are not going to let in the people that we did not allow in the first place, people like Michael Field..."
|
|
|
