Former New Zealand Governor-General Paul Reeves was in Fiji for two days last week for talks with Fiji’s ruler, Commodore Frank Bainimarama, who toppled the elected government in a Dec. 2006 coup.
Fiji was suspended from the Commonwealth at the start of this month after refusing demands to schedule elections by October next year and insisting on its own roadmap for a vote by Sept. 2014.
“We were looking for ways in which we could help Fiji restore constitutional democracy soon but there was no compromise,” Reeves told Radio New Zealand.
“At this stage I’m saying to the secretary-general of the Commonwealth (Kamalesh Sharma) I think I should go back to Fiji only when there are some signs of positive movement from the interim government.”
Reeves said Bainimarama was deluding himself over the economic deterioration of Fiji, which relies heavily on the ailing sugar and tourism industries.
“He has an optimistic view of the economy of Fiji and in fact thinks it is growing and coming out of the economic recession we all face,” he said. “That is not my point of view. I see signs of disinvestment rather than investment.”
Reeves cited a move by Australia’s Qantas to consider selling its 46 percent stake in Fiji’s international airline Air Pacific.
The envoy was forbidden by the Fiji’s leadership from meeting other Fijian political leaders, including ousted Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase and another former prime minister, Mahendra Chaudhry, who was ejected in an earlier coup in 2000.
“If the commodore talks about democracy, and if what we see now is his idea of democracy, well that is not a good look,” Reeves said.
Bainimarama insists that Fiji’s electoral system needs to be reformed to end voting along racial lines, which he said has aggravated divisions between the majority indigenous population and the ethnic Indian minority.
He plans to introduce a new voting system and constitution in 2013 before elections the following year, saying his reforms will end the “coup culture” which has seen four governments removed at gunpoint in the past two decades.
