Australian foreign minister Stephen Smith said the government had already imposed significant sanctions and did not want to hurt Fiji’s people.
Smith said Fiji would now almost inevitably end up suspended from both the Pacific Islands Forum and the CommonwealthHe said Australia and New Zealand was currently at the forefront of applying pressure, imposing restrictions on official travel, development assistance and dealings with the Fijian military.“Other countries haven’t gone down that road. We are certainly talking to our international community partners, members of the Pacific Island Forum, members of the Commonwealth and the United Nations itself to see what more pressure we can bring to bear on Commodore Bainimarama,” he told ABC radio.“We are not necessarily contemplating additional sanctions of our own.”Australia currently advises tourists to exercise caution particularly in Suva but not to reconsider travel.Smith said the objective was to press the regime to return to democracy.“We don’t want to do things which have an adverse impact on the people of Fiji themselves,” he said.“One thing we have seen since Fiji moved away from democracy under Commodore Bainimarama has been a very serious deleterious impact on Fiji’s economic and social circumstances,” he said.Smith said Fiji should be a premier economy in the region but it wasn’t and that could now only get worse. That follows last week’s Fiji Court of Appeal ruling that the interim government was illegal.In response, Fiji’s President Ratu Josefa Iloilo sacked the judges, dissolved the constitution, ruled out any election for five years and reappointed Commodore Frank Bainimarama as prime minister.Smith said he had twice visited Fiji last year with Commodore Bainimarama promising elections. He said the Pacific Islands Forum ministerial action group said there was nothing standing in the way of an election provided the political will was there.“I don’t think we ever asserted in public that we were convinced the political will was there,” he said.“We always wanted Commodore Bainimarama to hold himself to the faithful undertaking he gave Pacific Island Forum leaders that he’d have an election by the end of March this year.”Smith said the Pacific Island leaders meeting PNG in January and the Commonwealth had passed resolutions urging a return to democracy.“It’s quite clear that the events of the last couple of days have seen the regime take Fiji a million miles away from that,” he said.
