Letter from Suva: Scoop of a lifetime and other tales from attempted coup
By
David Robie
Special to The Freedom Forum Online
06.14.2000
SUVA, Fiji Islands ó For a journalism student working at state-owned Radio Fiji, it was the scoop of a lifetime.
Tamani Nair was in the newsroom, listening to a live broadcast from Fijiís Parliament when the proceedings suddenly were interrupted by shouting and gunshots.
Nair and a colleague, Samisoni Pareti, were sent to the sprawling complex, arriving before the police or any rival news team. They found the gates locked and the grounds guarded by masked gunmen.
"We were told, 'Get the hell out of here!' " said Nair, who is in his final year of studies at the University of the South Pacific.
"So we hid in nearby cassava bushes and watched what was going on."
They filed a brief report by cellular phone that made the 11 a.m. newscast ó announcing in effect that Fiji, the usually tranquil South Pacific island chain, had been plunged into turmoil.
That was May 19, when rebel leader George Speight and about 60 armed supporters stormed the Parliament building and took 31 hostages, including the elected prime minister, Mahendra Chaudhry.
Speight, a failed businessman, declared himself prime minister and announced an interim government.
A military regime led by Commodore Frank Bainimarama took control of Fiji 10 days later. It has pledged not to use force to free the hostages. Speight has promised not to harm the hostages if the military keeps its distance.
And a standoff ensued.
Covering the takeover and its aftermath has seemed, by turns, paradoxical, dangerous and even surreal.
Although Speight at first threatened to execute the hostages, and Chaudhry reportedly was beaten, the rebel leader welcomed journalists inside the Parliament compound for interviews. At least during the days immediately following the takeover, Speight took obvious delight in dealing with representatives from international news media.
That relationship soured in late May, however, when Jerry Harmer, a British television cameraman working for Associated Press TV, was shot and wounded as he filmed a confrontation between military forces and Speightís supporters.
It was then that many journalists suspected they were effectively being used as human shields by Speight's supporters. Journalists boycotted Speight's press conference that night.
The next day, the Fiji Television station was ransacked and transmission was cut for nearly 24 hours.
The standoff brought strange moments, too, such the news conference when Speight without warning kissed a young journalist from the Maldives, asking her: "You're Indian?"
Speight is mixed race, the descendant of a fourth-generation white settler. Ethnic Indians compose 44 of Fiji's population of 813,000, while indigenous Fijians account for 51%.
Since Chaudhry's election last year, tensions between ethnic Indians, who control much of the island's commerce, and the indigenous Fijians has been growing. Speight has said he wants to give indigenous Fijians control of their destiny.
As the standoff wore on, media critics increasingly questioned the close, at times almost fawning, relationship of many journalists with Speight that marked the first days of the takeover. They pondered the ethics of currying favor with someone widely denounced abroad as a terrorist.
"We've seen a mass outbreak of this virulent strain of ego-journalism," complained Tony Parkinson, a journalist for the Melbourne Age newspaper. "It is not a pretty sight, and it raises an awkward ethical question: To what extent have the visiting media in Suva become unwitting accomplices in George Speight's brutal game of brinkmanship?"
And for student journalist Nair, the unfolding drama brought bitter irony.
University authorities, worried by the attack on Fiji Television, pulled the plug on
Nairís reports-filled online site, Pacific Journalism Online; that move stirred protests about censorship. However, an alternate site was soon established at a journalism school in Sydney, Australia.
The author is journalism coordinator at the University of the South Pacific.
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