(by Jone Dakuvula)

It is little wonder that Dr Samisoni and his son had taken the most unusual decision to publicly dissociate themselves from the views and beliefs of their wife and mother, Mere Samisoni. In her article, Mere Samisoni continues to venerate George Speight and his batis' seizure and holding hostage of a democratically elected government and threatening to murder them unless the Council of Chiefs accepted their demands to install them as the Government.

Mere is no worse than the wife of a prominent FAP politician telling Bruce Connew of the New Zealand Listener magazine (when the government was still held hostage) that she wanted George Speight's men to kill some of the Coalition Members of Palriament because she had had enough of bloodless coups and wanted this one at least to spill some blood and have some members of Government dead!

Mere Samisoni argues that Chaudhry's "style of leadership" justified the illegal actions that George Speight's gang took and that his vision as Prime Minister was mostly "cut and paste". She had obviously had not read the Fiji Labour Party's manifesto which I think did have a good coherent vision for this country although the attractive promises were but deficient in costing. Having read all the manifestos of political parties in the last thirty years, I believe the FLP's manifesto in the 1999 General Election was the most original and indigenous (in the sense that its own party intellectuals wrote it) in the history of this country. It was unfortunate that the FLP had not produced it much earlier and promoted it amongst indigenous Fijians because it could have attracted them more support for their Coalition.

It was a real contrast to the SVT manifesto which was almost wholly based on a paper prepared by free market economists in the Central Planning Office and even its "adherents" never spoke about it in the General Election because they did not understand the economic jargon in it. In the SVT Party "policies" were never a matter of real concern because the only thing that mattered was getting back into political power by whatever means possible.

This was very evident to me when at our first meeting of successful and unsuccessful election candidates after the General Election we got together to evaluate the election results. I had put together a preliminary discussion paper but very few people read it and it was not even discussed! The meeting was taken over by retired politicians such as Militoni Leweniqila presenting the outlines of a strategy for the overthrow of the Chaudhry government and asking Major-General Sitiveni Rabuka to develop it further and implement it. Rabuka said, "No".

A few days later after Rabuka had given Ratu Inoke the leadership position he wanted, another meeting of the SVT Management Board was called where Ratu Inoke said people must be prepared to shed blood and die to get rid of the Chaudhry government in the shortest time possible. (Only two nights earlier Ratu Inoke had been arguing vehemently in the SVT Caucus that we accept Mr Chaudhry's invitation to join.) I remember Mere Samisoni was in that election evaluation meeting but she never said a word.

So all this talk by Mere about there being a spontaneous uprising by the Taukei behind George Speight's gang because of Chaudhry's "anti-democratic intrigue and manipulation of the 1997 Constitution" and other ex post facto rationalisations for the coup really do not wash.

The coup was the culmination of an orchestrated campaign in which the SVT leadership was heavily involved. There was no real threat indigenous Fijian interests in the Bills that the Chaudhry Government introduced but SVT politicians and activists distorted them in the Parliamentary speeches and in chats around the yaqona bowls to suit the theory and bogey that Chaudhry was cleverly pushing an Indian takeover and anti-Fijian agenda. (Dr Afghanistan of course was busy drafting behind the scenes at the SVT office).

When one examines how the coalition Government was going about issues such as the rental to be paid under ALTA or the Land Use Commission, it was all correct and above board. There was a Fijian Ministerial Committee formed to negotiate these issues with the NLTB and all would have gone through the appropriate consensual channel of NLTB to FAB and thence to the BLV and Parliament. It was the same thing that SVT would have done had it been in Government.

The problem that the Coalition Government encountered and could not handle was the quite blatant political campaign of Maika Qarikau and his officials in the Provincial Councils against the elected Government. This was like taking a red rag to a bull as far as Fijian opinion at the grassroots is concerned. Fijians in the villages are susceptible to conspiracy theories and perceiving unreal threats to their land or vanua.

A good example of this was the Coalition's policy for the Land Use Commission, which was played up by the SVT and the NLTB as a Trojan horse for a land grab by the Indians and for emasculating the NLTB. But when Poseci Bune had opportunity to explain the progressive development plan behind the idea for indigenous Fijians, it was supported by the Council of Chiefs, to the embarrassment of the NLTB.

In the Chaudhry-led government its indigenous Fijian politicians were too complacent and did not realise that the most important public relations priority in Government was to explain and explain and explain to Fijians at the grassroots the rationale of their policies and, to counter the SVT and NLTB propaganda effectively at that level. They needed to work ten times as hard as the Opposition in this area but they did not tell Chaudhry that he had the wrong people in Lekh Ram Vayeshnoi and Rajendra Chaudhry handling their media relations. These two concentrated on letters to the Editors in English newspapers, which Fijian villagers do not read.

The odds stacked against the Chaudhry government could have been countered. But the poverty of political judgment in their public relations effort is well illustrated in their unwise pushing into Parliament the package of "minor" amendments to the Constitution, that were quite unnecessary and served only to fuel the inflamed feelings of Fijians at the grassroots.

These were by and large the same package of amendment that the SVT had intended to introduce before the General Elections but ran out of time. Chaudhry's government thought they had played a clever Fijian card by reintroducing them (especially the one relating to homosexuals) but it rebounded against them when the SVT politicians successfully distorted them, in the minds of the indigenous Fijian people, into another Chaudhry ploy to undermine Fijian institutions.

Mere Samisoni apparently shares this delusion in her belief that the Coalition Government intended to amend the Constitution to make the Cabinet the sole adviser to the President and not the NLTB. She does not realise that under all three Constitutions since Independence, the Cabinet through the Prime Minister were the only constitutionally- recognised advisers to Government House on all matters of legislation including Fijian legislations. The NLTB was not constitutionally recognised as a direct adviser to Government House. In any case this was unnecessary because the President was Chairman of the NLTB and FAB and had direct influence on policy making in these bodies.

In fact the intention of the amendment to the President's powers to seek outside advice was to regularise this colonial hangover situation where the Head of State was still actively involved in the deliberations of a statutory bodies that came under the Minister of Fijian Affairs' portfolio.

Unfortunately for the Coalition Government, this amendment was successfully distorted into the opposite intention - by the NLTB Manager and the SVT - that it was another sinister Chaudhry bogey to undermine the President's relationship with the NLTB! It just shows how easy it is for unscrupulous Fijian politicians to misinform and play an indigenous Fijian suspicion.

Mere Samisoni defends "George Speight's batis" taking advantage of the SVT and NVTLP organised marches but she glosses over the fact that George was a very late convert to Fijian nationalism. He had emigrated from this country and only returned because of the failure of his marriage and his legally dubious business ventures in Australia. Speight retaliated against his sacking from the Fiji Pine and Hardwood Corporation Boards and the loss of his opportunity to become a millionaire with the TRM bid, by helping arouse the feelings of the mahogany landowners of Tailevu, Naitasiri and Namosi against the choice of CDC as preferred bidder.

Again this was an issue in which it was easy to inflame Fijian landowners with falsehoods and half-truths. Indigenous Fijians' desire to develop the resources on their land are worthy and legitimate aspirations, but these are always endangered by clever people like George Speight who arouse these desires to further their own personal agendas to sell indigenous Fijians short.

We have got to a stage where because of the intensity and fanaticism of these campaigns preying on claustrophobic indigenous Fijian nationalism, many Fijians, now can only talk about their rights to all manner of things: their right for compensation for the Monasavu dam for example, ($58 million), their right to own the mahogany on their land etc.. but there is no idea that rights came with obligations and responsibilities. The responsibility to care about other people and the interest of the nation as a whole. The duty to consider whether the state can afford these claims. From a Fijian cultural perspective, this is pertinent because the past injustices perceived by such compensation claimants were the fault of indigenous Fijians leaders.

The "grab, grab" mentality of the coup has instilled in the indigenous Fijians the notion in the absence of development, that riches can be achieved merely through assertion of an indigenous right bordering on blackmail. Like the present desire of the Interim administration that all opponents of the Coup forcibly accept another more racially weighted Constitution or else ship out. It is all very well for Mere Samisoni to assert that the core of these coups is "indigenous rights and indigenous self-determination to control their destiny".

But when the espousal of such legitimate and honourable aspirations comes from a political party which is led by people who are selfish and opportunistic because their own personal interests are bound up with their personal ambitions for political powers then it lack credibility because to such people the means do not matter. They will dishonour at the first opportunity a Constitutional settlement that was the product of hard work and careful consideration and that they had voted for in the Parliament.

And then they turn around argue to the indigenous Fijian people that they had made a mistake in agreeing to that Constitution which they now claim had caused the political divisions amongst Fijians resulting in the SVT defeat!

It is so surprising that a successful businesswoman like Mere Samisoni still believes that the solution to the indigenous Fijian peoples 'problems in the modern age lies in having a new authoritarian Constitution that reduces more drastically rights of political representation of other communities. Not only will that be contrary to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other UN Conventions that Fiji had ratified, it will not remove the contradictory causes of Fijian political divisions which have their roots in Fijian culture and religions, that influence individuals, families, the mataqali, vanua, provinces and the state.

There is the demand for unity under Fijian nationalism and the Chiefs' party (SVT) but then it comes apart from within because the "leadership" will not undertake a real critical and searching examination of themselves and what is wrong with them. For that we need honest leaders as Adi Kuini Speed has pointed out. The " leaders" who are raising the banner of Fijian nationalism are horrible models for the indigenous Fijians of the 21st Century.

As Tomasi Vakatora had observed, they have university degrees but are ill equipped mentally and they are overcome by their ambitions and their arrogance from answering simple questions of what are morally and legally right from wrong. They go and support George Speight's treasons and criminal acts in Parliament then get back into their civil service executive offices or turn up in their gowns in the law courts or get themselves appointed to the Constitutional Review Commission to defend the criminal acts that they had enthusiastically endorsed.

Mere Samisoni should be commended for raising some of these issues in her articles even though she had gone overboard in defending the weaknesses of indigenous Fijians to the extent that she blames everyone including the whole world but not the SVT Party that she still belongs to. Almost the whole Parliamentary leadership of this party will not be able to travel overseas because they are banned for their active complicity in George Speight's seizure of the Government.

Its former leader and Prime Minister, Sitiveni Rabuka had more or less pulled the curtains on the future of the SVT when at his 51st birthday celebrations last month, he publicly called for the formation of a new Fijian political party!