1987

 Part 2

The Government,The Security and the People.

In May 1987, Rabuka had launched his coup to remove ‘an Indian 

dominated’ Labour government that had won office from the long-

serving Ratu Mara just one month before. Mara rushed immediately to 

Rabuka’s side and was restored – eventually – to the prime ministership. 

Fijian paramountcy returned and with it the dominance of an eastern 

chiefly elite.  Thirteen years on, the 80-year-old Mara was halfway 

through his second five-year term as president. Rabuka, the commoner 

who had succeeded him as prime minister for seven years until defeated 

by Chaudhry, now headed the GCC, ostensibly in order to maintain 

control.

 This supreme Fijian institution had also rushed to endorse 

Rabuka’s coups in 1987, bestowing on the commoner life membership 

of the chiefly council. In return a new Constitution in 1990 bestowed on 

the GCC the power to appoint members of the Senate and to choose Fiji’s 

president. Later it was rewarded with a secretariat of its own. 

In addition, 

the Council’s main investment company, Fijian Holdings Ltd, profited 

greatly from Rabuka’s affirmative action policies, as did many of its 

individual shareholders.

Rabuka’s own former institution, the military, also benefited from the 

coups. Its official size had nearly doubled since 1987 and, during 

most of the 1990s, the country’s leaders turned a blind eye to successive 

blowouts in the annual military budget. Now members of one of its 

more highly politicised units were holed up in parliament with over 

43 hostages. Thus compromised, the military found it difficult to resolve 

the situation decisively. It did not storm parliament; nor did it cordon 

parliament off. ‘Let us not use the universal template of the army coming 

in to restore order,’ Rabuka advised: ‘There are friends and relatives in 

there. 

The army would think twice about going in.’ Draunidalo warned 

the officers’ think tank advising the Commander that even setting up 

checkpoints around the parliament could endanger life. That its officers 

may not have supported either the Chaudhry government or Speight 

counted for little when there was no one prepared to take control and 

end the situation.This generated an ‘atmosphere of distrust’ in which many soldiers found it useful ‘to hedge their bets’, as Tarakinikini put it.

Thus officers who proposed action were often viewed with suspicion, an 

outcome not lost on the rebels holed up in parliament. They constantly 

rang them at the QEB, offering inducements for their support or threats 

if it failed to be forthcoming. And they sought to divide the military. 

Tarakinikini (a founding officer of the CRWU) and Col Ulaiasi Vatu 

(Strategic HQ) – both supportive of the cause but not the method – 

were publically promoted as new heads of the RFMF by the rebels and 

found their loyalties suspected as a consequence. In the long term, their 

military careers suffered. Lt Col Jone Baledrokadroka, chief staff officer 

Operations at Land Force Command, believed that, had Speight alone 

headed the coup, there might have been less contention and military 

uncertainty. He was seen as a nobody, a part-European businessperson 

and beneficiary of Rabuka’s cronyism. But the military had no such doubts 

about Ligairi and, if alleged backers such as Draunidalo had actually come 

forward, the coup would have gained much more credibility.

A kind of psychological warfare now began, its goal to divide and paralyse 

the RFMF, and its effects on trust between officers would be long-lasting. 

The ambitious and frustrated Tarakinikini became an easy target. His 

efforts to promote the reorganisation of the RFMF in the 1990s had 

achieved little. Bainimarama had denied him leadership of the CRWU 

in 1999 and of security for the ACP conference in 2000. He was on leave 

and sitting an MBA exam at the University of the South Pacific (USP) 

when the coup took place, but quickly volunteered to act as a negotiator. 

‘I could see through these guys,’ Tarakinikini told the board of inquiry, 

‘I could see the lies they were spinning in the name of the indigenous 

Fijian cause and especially George Speight when he came on, I could see 

the line he was coming on, I had to match him … if I did not step in … 

the situation was going to deteriorate not by design but by inactions.’ 

As a spokesperson for the RFMF, the highly personable and articulate Tarakinikini proved effective. Although his goal was to establish rapport 

with the rebels in order to prevent bloodshed, he also became dangerously 

effective as an official counter to Speight: ‘I knew all along what they 

were trying to do, they were really trying to undermine me and when 

they knew that it was not going to work then they came out and started 

accusing me of being with them … in order to … pull the rug under my 

feet.’ Once the rebels knew that the army would not support them, ‘their 

tactics then was to try and put in the Trojan horse inside the RFMF to 

try and break us from within’.

 To some extent it worked. Bainimarama 

allegedly told Tuatoko not to trust Tarakinikini and Raduva.

Complicating matters also were divisions between serving officers and 

reservists. The presence of many reserve officers, particularly Rabuka, 

created discomfort among some serving officers. But this discomfort 

paled in comparison with the army’s physical inability to act. Despite 

Rabuka’s largesse while in office, the RFMF lacked equipment, weapons 

and vehicles to support domestic operations. Even the weapons it 

possessed were poorly managed. The CRWU kept its own armoury but 

the RFMF possessed no master register. What records it did keep were 

woefully inadequate. When the police belatedly requested its assistance 

to deal with the rioting and looting that broke out in downtown Suva at 

1 pm following the NVTLP march, the military lacked sufficient vehicles 

to send its soldiers into the city. It tried to hire buses, but most of the city’s 

buses were busy taking children from their rapidly closing schools. Hence 

soldiers did not arrive on Suva’s streets until 6 pm, three hours after the 

initial request and well past the time when they could be most effective. 

If  the intention of the riot had been to stretch Fiji’s forces during the 

coup, the rebels did not have to try too hard. 

That both the Commander and chief operations officer were overseas 

probably did not assist the RFMF either, but without contingency 

planning and training to deal with a national crisis, it is doubtful that 

their presence could have made much difference. Of course many officers had long been aware of the RFMF’s deficiencies but felt constrained by 

the vision of their leaders. Plans to reorganise the institution had lain 

dormant for years with the result that its many parts such as HQ FMF, HQ 

Land Force and Strategic HQ were disconnected, although restructuring 

in late 1998 brought these together as Strategic HQ and Land Forces 

HQ. Additionally, too many rapid promotions in the past conspired to 

create tensions over how the institution was run, and much of this came 

to the fore after 19 May and focused on the Commander himself.

Commodore Josaia Voreqe Bainimarama had served with the Fiji Naval 

Squadron since its inception in 1975 and replaced Ratu Epeli Ganilau 

as commander in March 1999, when the latter left – unsuccessfully – to 

enter politics as part of Mara’s VLV challenge to the SVT. Many senior 

officers, perhaps feeling that they were more deserving, resented that 

their commander was a naval officer; moreover an officer who lacked 

the combat experience and Sandhurst training of the colonels. One even 

argued, ‘That  is where the whole thing starts’. Bainimarama had not 

taken kindly to this reception and posted perceived dissidents to the 

military’s Strategic Headquarters in Suva, away from the QEB in Nabua 

suburb. ‘We now operate [more] like a gang than a military force,’ 

Tarakinikini told the board of inquiry. 

Rent by internal division and constrained by its ethnic identity, the 

RFMF dithered as the coup evolved. Many of its officers refused to 

commit, leaving their troops confused.79 Fijians confronted Fijians as 

never before. Their leaders no longer acted as a united political force. 

Mara and Rabuka had never trusted each other and their differences now  resurfaced. Given how quickly events unfolded, Mara possibly 

believed that the military’s slow reaction meant that it was colluding with 

the coup-makers. Certainly, many provincial chiefs saw the attempted 

coup as an opportunity to redress long-perceived inequalities within the 

community; others saw it as a chance to consolidate a new and more 

radicalised Fijian leadership. Ligairi played to all these divisions. 

Hundreds of supporters flocked to the parliament to act as human shields 

in case the military decided to attack. Ligairi organised them into fighting 

units. By threatening to stir the rumblings of commoners, Ligairi sent 

a strong message to all chiefs: commoners would take over if necessary. 

Ligairi’s transformation of the forces within the parliamentary complex, 

however, created tensions that he found difficult to control, although this 

was not always obvious to outsiders at the time. He headed the military 

wing, which – with the addition of more CRWU soldiers and reservists 

– soon comprised over 56 soldiers. By the end of May he had established 

an intelligence and operations centre, a logistics cell, as well as duty and 

weapons rosters. 

Speight headed the political wing, a fluid group that grew strongly due to 

the army’s failure to blockade the parliament. Politicians, former soldiers, 

public servants, Methodist ministers and chiefs assembled at the 

parliament, ostensibly to find out what was happening but in many cases 

to participate in what they undoubtedly viewed as a transformative event. 

The former intelligence chief, Metuisela Mua, provides a useful example. 

He went into parliament within hours of the coup, joined in an early meeting, and eventually became part of Speight’s team. Negotiations 

were a key activity for this wing and a special negotiating room was 

established alongside the ops room, symbolically located above where the 

bulk of hostages were held.

But the key innovation remained the vanua wing; its formation was 

a direct result of military inaction, in particular its failure to storm 

parliament during the first weekend of the crisis. That failure enabled the 

rebels to encourage hundreds of ordinary Fijians to flock to parliament 

and organise them loosely into provincial groups that provided a veneer 

of traditional legitimacy. Such groups were publicly marched around 

the parliamentary complex and sometimes sent out to attack police or 

soldiers.

 Ligairi bragged that his new soldiers would soon be better than 

the military. They got one opportunity to prove themselves on Sunday 

28 May. Led by CRWU soldiers, over 500 rebels slipped into Suva, 

firing at the Presidential Palace en route. There they trashed the offices 

of Fiji TV, which had aired a program ridiculing the rebels, in particular 

Speight and Duvuloco. During the rampage, a ricocheting bullet killed 

a police officer. A security officer also died from heart failure. Both deaths 

destroyed the notion that the rebels opposed confrontation. Indeed, they 

secretly plotted to escalate violence by destroying both the Presidential 

Palace and Suva in order ‘to show Ratu Mara that even though he was the 

head of government and in total command of the Army, Police and Civil 

Service … the vanua was much stronger than him’.

 A group of hymn-

singing women would lead the vanua and rebel soldiers on a destructive 

march to the capital. However, rain thwarted their plans. But the events 

of 27 May were not the first foray outside parliament.

Early Sunday morning, 21 May, CRWU personnel in two vehicles 

journeyed across Viti Levu on the Queens Road to snatch Bainimarama 

as he returned from Norway. Alert to their intentions, Seruvakula sent 

30 troops to meet their commander and they prevented the would-be 

kidnappers gaining access to Nadi airport, quickly spiriting Bainimarama 

along the longer northern and eastern Kings Road route to Suva instead.

On Friday 26 May, Speight and 20 armed men strode out of parliament 

and confronted troops who had replaced police outside the parliamentary 

complex. The next day 200 rebels and supporters challenged 10 soldiers 

in a shootout at a checkpoint that injured three soldiers, one rebel and 

a British journalist.

The rebels’ descent into violence and death made many CRWU soldiers 

uneasy; some even contemplated returning to their barracks. But the 

vanua felt emboldened. They demanded their own weapons and swore 

at Ligairi when he refused. Leadership of the vanua now became 

difficult. Speight and Duvuloco clashed over who should head it; Speight 

wanted only chiefs in such a role, Duvuloco believed he was best suited.

Difficulties over vanua leadership, Silatolu claimed, ‘distracted us from 

resolving the issue with the military’. Those difficulties, however, went 

far beyond leadership. The vanua was unruly. Looting, drunken parties, 

gang rapes and orgies conflicted with the disciplined order Ligairi wished 

to project. But it had its uses also; across Fiji, isolated IndoFijian 

communities were terrorised or their homes looted and razed. The military 

‘won’t rise up against its own people’, Speight taunted.

Speight played his part, too, holding court in the parliamentary complex 

with his supporters and engaging with international and local media. 

Unlike most politicians in Fiji and the rarely seen Commander, he was 

articulate and comfortable with the media – too comfortable, according 

to some journalists. They felt that their presence ‘aided the rebel leader’s propaganda fire … gave him political fuel’. They were not alone.

 Many Fijian leaders who flocked to parliament were concerned to promote 

their particular Fijian brand; none wished victory to accrue solely to the 

political outsider.