In the following days the military deposed the government of Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase and installed a military officer as interim premier. Bainimarama presented the takeover as part of a campaign to “clean up” the government.

The coup has so far sparked few protests in Fiji. In New Zealand, many Fijians—speaking through letters in newspapers, TV interviews, and at workplaces—have expressed satisfaction at seeing the end of the Qarase government.

The governments of Australia and New Zealand, on the other hand, have demanded Qarase’s reinstatement and imposed sanctions on the nation of 846,000 people. Tourism, the country’s main source of foreign exchange, has been thrown into crisis by the hostile stance of the two imperialist powers.

While the Australian government has stationed three warships off the Fijian coast, claiming they might be needed to evacuate its nationals, Prime Minister John Howard has rejected Qarase’s plea for direct intervention.

“The possibility of Australian and Fijian troops firing on each other in the streets of Suva was not a prospect that I, for a moment, thought desirable,” Howard said.

Numbering 3,500 soldiers, the Republic Fiji Military Forces, comprised overwhelmingly of indigenous Fijians, is well-equipped and trained, and has long years of experience as part of UN occupation forces, including in Iraq. Australia’s foreign minister, Alexander Downer, called for “passive resistance” to the military takeover. New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark asked if there are any “loyal officers in Fiji [prepared] to tell the commander at the top of the force that his time is over?”

Right after the takeover, leaders of the influential Methodist Church and Great Council of Chiefs (GCC) led a chorus of condemnation. At the same time, Mahendra Chaudhry, leader of the opposition Labour Party, said he would work with Bainimarama to oppose “the endemic corruption and scams in government.”

On December 8 the GCC said it would enter talks with the military leader.

The takeover is the latest development in a 20-year period of heightened political crisis and splits among Fiji’s ruling layers.

In 1987 the rulers were shaken by the election of a government headed by the Fiji Labour Party. The new party won support among working people with its call for an end to racial divisions.

Throughout the history of modern Fiji, both the British colonial regime and governments since independence in 1970 have worked to divide indigenous Fijians, who are obligated to show loyalty to the chiefs, from Indo-Fijians. The latter are descendants of indentured laborers brought from India in the 19th century to work in Fiji’s sugar plantations.

Labour’s stance in the mid-1980s challenged the privileged position of the chiefs and the GCC. The latter retains powers given it by the colonial British administration in the 1870s, including the right to appoint the president and almost half the senate.

Shortly after Labour’s victory, Brigadier Sitiveni Rabuka led a coup to overthrow the new government. He organized another coup later that year, and in 1992 won election as prime minister. Rabuka’s coups and later policies reinforced the racial segregation on which chiefly power depends.

At the time of Rabuka’s first coup, Indo-Fijians comprised 53 percent of the population. In the next two decades, tens of thousands of them emigrated, seeking to escape scapegoating and the continued decline of jobs in the sugar and garment export industries. Today Indo-Fijians are about 37 percent of Fiji’s population.

The Labour Party won the elections again in 1999. One year later rightist thugs fronted by businessman George Speight marched into parliament and took Mahendra Chaudhry, then Fiji’s prime minister, and other ministers hostage. Speight claimed the Labour-led government was an enemy of indigenous Fijians.

A two-month crisis was settled by the intervention of the army under the command of Bainimarama, who installed Qarase as prime minister. In the words of Fiji’s Islands Business, Qarase’s SDL party was “set up after the coup of 2000 as an all-Fijian party dedicated to the preservation of Fijian political supremacy over the Indians.” Since then, Bainimarama and the prime minister he installed have been on a collision course. The army’s commander campaigned against a bill that would have given amnesty to Speight and other perpetrators of the 2000 coup.

Bainimarama also opposed a bill that would have placed shoreline areas under so-called indigenous control, giving advantages to chiefly businessmen in the development of tourism ventures and empowering them to levy fees for fishing.

Bainimarama had said repeatedly that unless Qarase’s government backed off its chauvinist policy course, the military would act.

Fiji’s instability is fueled in part by deepening economic dislocation and insecurity that impact largely working people. The government reported in 2003 that 34 percent were living below the poverty line, up from 25 percent in 2000.  
 
 
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