Fiji watcher says Forum communication with coup leaders essential
Updated
One long-time Fiji watcher says it's important that any decision by the Pacific Islands Forum must ensure that contact with Fiji's coup leaders remains.
Presenter: Michael Cavanagh
Speaker: Dr Jon Fraenkel from the Australian National University's Research School of Pacific and Asian studies
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FRAENKEL: One needs to bear in mind that the forum brokered talks are only one element in the effort to push discussion and dialogue. There's also a Commonwealth United Nations mission that went to Fiji last November and needs to go there again and there'll be pressure there to come up with some kind of agreed timetable towards elections, some kind of negotiating forum that will bring in members of the deposed government, members of the Fiji Labour Party, perhaps some of the other political parties. So there are a number of different efforts to get negotiations going.
CAVANAGH: The fact that some of the member nations were willing to defer would the Commodore see that as in a way a vindication and still some support for himself?
FRAENKEL: I don't think it's a question of support for himself, I think there's a lot of Forum Island countries that would like Bainimarama to front up to the meeting.
CAVANAGH: How do you think that will be perceived in the general community in Fiji? Is the Commodore quite willing to keep using this almost as a way of showing himself to be the strong man and standing up and not worried about isolation?
FRAENKEL: Well I think that's one of the problems, he's indifferent both to international opinions of what's going on in Fiji and of course to domestic opinions. Remember this is not an elected government. The fact that people are angry and frustrated that the commander doesn't go as interim prime minister to the forum meeting, he's indifferent to this because he doesn't have to respond to public opinion in that way and similarly he's indifferent to the fact that many of the regional powers, not only Australia and New Zealand, but also Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Tonga, they think that he should be at this meeting, that he should be trying to plot some kind of direction forward for Fiji with the leaders of the region.
CAVANAGH: By sending a representative does that also allow him to be able to step back and claim that he wasn't a total participant, therefore may not be in agreement with anything that the forum does come up with?
FRAENKEL: Well possibly so, but the other interesting aspect of his non attendance is if you think back to the September 2007 Tonga meeting of the Pacific Islands Forum where the commander agreed to this election timetable. If you look carefully at his statement afterwards they're very, very garbled, they talk about his dropping the term "in principle" agreeing to the elections in March 2009 or by March 2009. They reflect a clear difficulty with handling diplomatic debate at that kind of level. I think it's interesting to speculate about whether the commander's real reason for not wanting to go to the Port Moresby summit is perhaps that he's finding it very, very difficult to handle those kind of diplomatic negotiations and prefers to have other people doing it. But we found many other parts of the world also, military politicians don't tend to be very, very good at diplomacy, they don't tend to be very, very good at running foreign affairs in the way that they need to.
CAVANAGH: Your term garbled does that also indicate that possibly there's not a unified approach on how to handle this whole thing within the Fijian regime itself?
FRAENKEL: Well that would be speculation, but of course there has been a change in the foreign ministry recently, Ratu Epeli Nailatikau is no longer foreign minister, well quite a few months ago now, but he's now handling Fijian Affairs. He doesn't seem to be offside with the government but one should remember that as foreign minister back in I think it was March 2008 he gave a very firm personal commitment to the election timetable. And yet that election timetable was still reneged upon. So yes perhaps there are some signs of some differences, I think certainly some members of the interim government would have handled all this differently. One suspects that there's an ever decreasing small inner circle that's running the show and that quite a few of the ministers that are in education, in Fijian Affairs and elsewhere are probably pretty marginal to the political process at the moment I would speculate.
