"You know what politics are. It's the same in all countries."
"Doctor Philipot is out?"
"He has not been seen for a week. He is said to be on holiday."
The Comedians,
by Graham Greene
The guns are there. So are the thugs, the sunglasses, bougainvillea, tropical
languor, exotic drinks, occupation of holiday resorts, road blocks, fleeing
tourists, prayer meetings, spivs, fraudsters, and the doublespeak. All you need
is
a bit of name merging - like, say, Papa George Speight - and the similarities
between Haiti under Papa Doc Duvalier and today's Fiji are even closer.
Now that the remaining hostages, including former Fiji prime minister
Mahendra Chaudhry, have been released, Fiji could slowly re-build its
institutions, and even return to full democracy, or it could continue its rapid
descent into another Haiti-style tropical hell.
One of Graham Greene's most chilling novels, The Comedians, is set in a Haiti
ruled by Papa Doc and the Tontons Macoute, his sinister, gun-toting,
sunglasses-wearing secret police, who specialised in torturing and murdering
impoverished citizens and "disappearing" political rivals. They would
go on
"holidays" and never return.
Like Fiji, Haiti had a proud past. A French plantation economy, it lived off
slaves, but the slaves had other ideas and threw off their colonial yoke and
won
their freedom.
Led by a former slave, Toussaint L'Ouverture, they established the first free
state
on the American continent for former slaves, more than 70 years before slavery
was abolished in the United States and about 170 years before many southern
US blacks secured full voting rights.
This heroic effort is recorded in one of the classics of history, The Black
Jacobins, by C.L.R. James, a West Indian historian who also wrote memorably
about cricket.
Haiti became a fully fledged democracy, with a vibrant, distinct culture. But
this
promise changed into a cruel mirage under the insane regime of Papa Doc
Duvalier, a country doctor.
Thirty years later, Haiti remains a wreck of a state - denuded, ravaged by
AIDS,
impoverished and living in violence and fear. Fiji has a long way to go down.
There have been deaths, destruction and intimidation there in the past two
months, but not on a level even remotely comparable to Haiti.
It also has the institutions and people to regain its national self-respect.
Ten years after the 1987 coups, Fiji was operating under a democratic,
multi-racial constitution.
But in a possible foretaste of the sort of news we can expect from the South
Pacific for years to come, the US Government this week warned Haiti that it
risked losing international aid if it did not quickly correct the flaws of its
recent
elections. Like in a future Fiji, where George Speight wants the electoral scales
heavily weighed against the Indo-Fijian population, a corrupt electoral structure
in Haiti could hold up badly needed foreign aid.
For some outsiders the most chilling similarity between Duvalier's Haiti and
Speight's Fiji is in the doublespeak employed by George Speight. He talked of
changing Fiji's constitution to reflect the country's "Christian"
values, while his
thugs kept figures from the elected Government of Mahendra Chaudhry,
including the Prime Minister himself, locked up. One moment Speight says he
wants to be prime minister - because it is the "will" of the "indigenous
Fijians" -
and another he says he'll return to his dairy farm.
As the Fiji Post said in a recent editorial: "We cannot claim to be Fijians
and
then act in an un-Fijian way. We can also not claim to be Christians and support
these acts of disobedience and disrespect."
Speight and his gunmen stormed parliament on May 19, seizing Chaudhry and
most of his multi-racial cabinet, and demanded an end to Indian political power.
Since then there have been almost as many false dawns as kava-drinking
ceremonies. But the hostages remained locked up, while, in a cruel parody of
tropical tranquillity, prayer groups sang their hymns, and brightly dressed
children danced nearby.
Finally, on Thursday, after the almost total humiliation of the state's key
institutions - army, police, parliament, courts - the last of the hostages,
including
Chaudhry, were released. This was quickly followed by the Great Council of
Chiefs appointing a Speight nominee, the ailing 80-year-old Ratu Josefa Iloilo,
as President.
Fiji, like Haiti, now faces the prospect of international condemnation, and
the
withdrawal of Australian aid and other economic favors. But the dilemma for
Australia and other states is that a crippled Fijian economy will hit the poor
and
innocent. The thugs - Papa George's own Tonton Macoutes - may continue to
plunder the spoils of power.
As the Fiji Post says: "We urge the Fijian race to wake up today from
its trance
and to take a good look at the man in the mirror and see if he measures up to
the
virtues of the `Good Fijian'. Because when it comes to the crunch, only the
man
in the mirror can make that change."
Andrew Clark is an associate editor of The Age.
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