Asia-Pacific Network: 25 May 2000
MEDIA: SCOOP OF A LIFETIME IN FIJI INSURRECTION
With Fiji's telephone communications sabotaged by a rebel sympathiser, for two days the world depended on four websites for digital pictures and news updates of the hostage crisis. And the armed seizure of the Prime Minister and Parliament was scooped by a student journalist.
By DAVID ROBIE in Suva
Rebel leader George Speight talking to journalists.
Photo: Latu Matoto Pacific Journalism Online
FOR A student journalist on attachment with state-owned Radio Fiji, it was the scoop of a lifetime. Tamani Nair was sitting in the newsroom listening to a live broadcast from Parliament when he heard shouts and gunshots.
He was despatched to the sprawling parliamentary complex in suburban Veiuto with colleague Samisoni Pareti. They arrived before police or any other news team to find the gates locked and masked gunmen guarding the grounds.
"We were told, 'Get the hell out of here!," recalls Nair, a final-year University of the South Pacific student journalist.
"So we hid in nearby cassava bushes and watched what was going on."
Then they filed a brief report by cellular phone that caught the 11am news bulletin and plunged the usually peaceful South Pacific country of the Fiji Islands into turmoil.
They had stumbled on the start of an insurrection on May 19 in which gunmen seized the elected Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry and his government hostage and held the nation to ransom.
Inside Parliament, the chamber doors slammed shut as masked gunmen, indigenous Fijians armed with M16s, AK47s and shotguns, mounted guard.
In strode a former state-owned timber corporation chief executive, rebel leader George Speight, also masked, giving orders.
Amid the uproar, Speaker Dr Apenisa Kurasaqila rose and asked: "What's this? This is an illegal takeover."
Prime Minister Chaudhry, the country's first Indo-Fijian prime minister and head of the Fiji Labour Party-led coalition government, was dragged from his seat, handcuffed and forced to kneel in front of the House.
His deputy, Dr Tupeni Baba, a former University of the South Pacific professor and an indigenous Fijian, and other cabinet ministers and backbench MPs followed.
But the gunmen had forgotten the upstairs press gallery, occupied at the time by three journalists - two from the major daily newspaper, The Fiji Times. The reporters were finally flushed out.
With the telephone communications sabotaged by a rebel sympathiser, for two days the world depended on four websites for digital pictures and news updates - Fiji Live (the Review and Daily Post), FijiVillage (FM96, Fiji Times and Islands Business), Pacific Journalism Online (USP journalism programme) and Pacnews (Pacific Islands Broadcasting Association).
For a country with barely 3000 Internet users, this was a remarkable development. Just three years earlier, newspaper websites had come of age in Papua New Guinea during the Sandline mercenary crisis in the Bougainville war.
Covering the hostage crisis, Fiji's third coup attempt after two successful ones by the military commander Sitiveni Rabuka in 1987, was often paradoxical.
On one hand, self-styled "prime minister" Speight threatened to execute his hostages one by one if his demands for overthrow of the multiracial 1997 constitution and the ousting of the reformist Chaudhry government were not met. Chaudhry was roughed up and had a gun put to his head at least twice.
But on the other hand, the leader welcomed journalists into the tightly guarded complex to interview and videotape the 45-year-old Speight. He was also delighted to play up to the international media. And this easy access was in spite of a military and police cordon around the outskirts of Parliament.
However, on other occasions danger loomed when journalists were forced to duck for cover when shots rang out. On May 27, television cameraman Jerry Hamer, a Briton working for APTN, was wounded on the lower arm during a skirmish and gunshots at one military blockade outside Parliament. Two soldiers were also wounded in the same incident.
There was also a touch of the surreal when Speight suddenly kissed a young journalist from the Maldives Republic at a press conference, saying: "You're Indian?" Previously, he had made no apologies for chauvinist views supporting indigenous Fijian supremacy and racist statements against Indo-Fijians.
Speight himself is mixed race, the descendant of a fourth generation white settler. And he has Australian residency. About 48 per cent of the country's 800,000 population are indigenous Fijian and 44 per cent Indo-Fijian.
A mild clampdown by the presidential authorities after four days troubled Fiji Television Ltd which believed a one kilometre "no-go zone" for the media and "play down Speight" request was unfairly directed at the one local television company (it owns one free-to-air and two pay channels).
"We don't know why we were singled out for this directive while other TV crews still freely entered Parliament," says news and current affairs head Richard Broadbridge.
The station also dropped two of its foreign news service relay feeds - BBC World and and Australian Television - after some of the reports carried appeared to breach the spirit of the presidential directive. However, they were reinstated after two days.
In fact, Fiji Television had been particularly successful at scoring some exclusive interviews during the drama, including an interview by star local political reporter Riyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, who did an early morning jogging exercise with mediator Sitiveni Rabuka.
Major-General Rabuka, now the chairman of Fiji's traditional Great Council of Chiefs, staged Fiji's first two coups.
Ironically, Speight was just as upset by the apparent "ban" on some media. But he saw it as also applying to the international media: "If [President Ratu Sir Kamisese] Mara believes his position is in the best interests of indigenous people, why is he restricting the international press in capturing this news and dispersing (sic) it widely?"
During the propaganda war over the crisis, journalist and publicist Jo Nata emerged as the media minder for Speight. Two years ago, Nata was the coordinator of the Fiji Journalism Training Institute (operated by the Fiji Islands Media Association [FIMA], an affiliate of the Pacific Islands News Association [PINA]. The institute has been embroiled over an investigation into the spending of funds provided by international donors such as UNESCO.
As the drama unfolded, the focus shifted from the hostages to Fiji's international reputation as an United Nations peacekeeper, and to the economy in the wake of $30 million damage from looting and arson.
"George Speight is history now," says Mesake Koroi, who is associate editor of the Daily Post, which was forced to halt publication for three days during the state of emergency.
"We're more interested in talking to business people about rebuilding the shattered economy."
Threats against journalists and news media began late in the siege. The state-owned Radio Fiji was forced to call in a 24-hour police guard after phone calls purporting to be from Speight henchmen threatening to "storm" the newsroom in a midnight raid.