Muanweni district's fields are overgrown with weeds. Houses previously occupied
by generations of Indian
farmers are dark and empty.
The Indians of Muanweni - adjoining rebel leader George Speight's home province
of Teilavu - want to move
on and about 200 have already left.
They have joined some 215 Indian Fijians sheltering in a school in Lautoka,
in the west of Fiji's main island.
Others are from the island's Sigatoka district, where Indian leaseholders have
found that access to their
holdings has been blocked.
The refugees are appealing to governments in Australia, New Zealand, Britain,
the United States and other
countries to make special concessions and take them in as refugees.
The violence that swept through the Muanweni district, outside Suva, after
Speight launched his coup attempt
more than four weeks ago was horrendous. Fijian thugs raped a girl in front
of her parents and a young
mother with a two-month-old baby hid for two days in a forest without shelter
in teeming rain.
Mr Ram Jattar, who is helping a group refurbish a new police station, said:
"I am frightened. My brother, Ram
Lagan, has already left with his wife and seven children and is in Lautoka trying
to get another country to take them."
Mr Lal Muhammed, an indigenous Fijian Muslim who identifies with the Indians,
said: "We are very worried.
Nobody has told us what is happening. A lot of the Indian people from here
have gone to get another chance."
But the malaise of the Indians went far deeper, said Mr Jagannath Siri, general
secretary of the Fiji Canegrowers' Association.
The non-renewal of leases for Indian farmers had started in 1997, when about
20 per cent of leases up for renewal had been refused, he said.
From the election of the Chaudhry Government last year, the campaign had intensified.
Of 1,800 cane farmers whose leases had come up for renewal, 838 had been told
they had no future here.
Mr Siri said that with some 1,200 leases up for renewal this year and about
5,000 up for renewal over the next five years, he did not expect the situation
to improve, with 15,000 Indian Fijian cane farmers at risk of eventually being
put onto the street.
He said cane-cutting had started in Ba province, in Fiji's west, because the
cane farmers were desperate for money. But even if the cane was cut, Indian
farmers were facing serious difficulty because banks - no longer confident that
leases would be renewed - were refusing credit.
He believed that these cane farmers, descendants of the indentured labourers
brought by the British from 1879 forward, many of whom had worked for the Australian
company CSR, had a special claim for refugee status, particularly in Britain
and Australia.
There had been an exodus of Indians after the first two coups in 1987, reducing
the Indian component of Fiji's population from about 53 to 44 per cent.
Up to 1,200 Indians have left in the past month, but many were professionals
who would have had little difficulty meeting immigration criteria.
"What they [indigenous Fijian militants] want us to do is to become economic slaves," Mr Siri said.
Suva: The interim military government of Fiji expects to conclude an accord
with the rebel leader, George
Speight, today and to make an announcement this afternoon relating to the imminent
release of the hostages.
A spokesman for the military government, Lieutenant-Colonel Filipo Tarakinikini,
said last night there would
be a meeting between military negotiators and Speight's group this morning at
the home of the Vice-President,
Ratu Josefa Iloilo.
But soon after Colonel Tarakinikini's comments, the Speight group's media spokesman,
Jo Nata, said that
while the group would like a resolution to the crisis, the release of the hostages
was low on its list of priorities.
Malcolm Brown
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