Fiji’s Interim Attorney General Aiyaz Sayed Khaiyum said Fiji was open to the Forum.
“Fiji is one of the major founders of the Forum,” Sayed-Khaiyum said. “We have always participated in the Forum and we will continue to do that.”
Sayed-Khaiyum said the only reason Fiji pulled out of the meeting on Niue was because they were not granted visas by New Zealand to attend bilateral meetings in Auckland.
“For all Forum meetings there are bilateral meetings that are to be held,” he said. “The bilateral meeting for the Niue Forum meeting was to be held in New Zealand and we weren’t given visas to attend.”
He added, “That’s our right as a sovereign state to participate in bilaterals. What the New Zealand government said to us cheekily was that ‘You have your bilaterals in Niue.’ And we had only a few ours to do that whereas all the other participants would have all gone to New Zealand and in the goodness of time had bilaterals and we weren’t allowed to have bilaterals in Auckland where they were all held.”
Sayed-Khaiyum said the decision by New Zealand was not fair and did not give Fiji full sovereign status.
“It was not because the prime minister did not want to front up to the meeting,” he said.
