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.
