Transitional Justice Forum

The Fiji reconciliation bill: more ironic than ever

It's starting to look as if Fiji's controversial Reconciliation, Tolerance and Unity Bill may die the death of inertia. When the bill was proposed last summer by Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase, it was bitterly opposed by the military and the Indo-Fijian minority due to the possibility that it might free some of the May 2000 coup plotters and throw dispossessed Indo-Fijian farmers out of court. In response to a veiled coup threat by the security forces, the government substantially revised the bill to narrow the scope of its amnesty provisions and restrict its pre-emption of judicial remedies. Due to continued military opposition, however, the government has scheduled another round of consultations before presenting it to parliament, which may well remain incomplete when the country goes to general elections later this year.

In its short life, however, the truth commission bill - which was ostensibly designed to promote reconciliation and tolerance - has done more to lay bare the conflicts within Fijian society than any other event since the coup itself. The past six months have seen a flareup not only of tensions between the indigenous majority and the Indo-Fijians but between the government and the military, between traditional chiefs and the dispossessed, and between church and state. At the heart of these conflicts are three fundamental questions of transitional justice: what is the goal of the transition, how should it be accomplished and who should be held accountable for it.

One of Fiji's major post-coup problems is the fact that it has never reached a consensus on transitional goals. The most elementary aspect of the transition - the return to constitutional rule after a period of military government - has already been accomplished. However, the issues surrounding the coup, including indigenous land rights, the tension between traditional and modern law, and the conflict between the politically dominant indigenous people and the market-dominant Indo-Fijians, remain unresolved. All the major parties recognize these issues and pay lip service to national reconciliation, but there is no real agreement on how they should be resolved. At the one end are those who favor equal rights and the rule of law, and at the other are those who support hard-wired indigenous political supremacy, and the current government has vacillated between the two throughout its tenure. With the country still so sharply divided on fundamental issues of governance, the unity bill was at best a palliative.

The methods of national reconciliation have also proven divisive, with the truth commission bill being a case in point. Historically, the Indo-Fijians have favored the judiciary and the rule of law as the best way to protect their rights. The return to constitutional rule in 2001 was accomplished by a court decision, and since then, the Indo-Fijian community has relied on the courts to obtain compensation for the damage done during the coup. The indigenous Fijians, in contrast, come from a restorative-justice culture with relatively informal legal mechanisms - and many of them don't trust the courts, seeing them as a mechanism by which traditional laws are undermined. There has in fact been a recent movement by the indigenous Fijians to effectively secede from the common-law system by restoring native courts. Thus, it was natural a bill that shifted responsibility for resolving post-coup issues from the courts to a truth commission would inspire the distrust of the Indo-Fijians and sharpen the tensions between the two communities.

Last of all, and possibly most divisive, is the issue of who should oversee the transition. This has pitted two of Fiji's most powerful institutions - the Methodist Church and the army - against each other. The church, which has been heavily tied in with the traditional chiefs and the indigenous Taukei movement, has been one of the unity bill's most prominent supporters. This has brought it into new conflict with many of the civil society groups with which it has historically worked, and led it to take on a political role even beyond its prior influence. In contrast, the military – which has also been a bastion of indigenous control – has taken a hard line against the bill on the basis that Fiji's transition requires maintenance of law, order and judicial accountability. The army has also broadened its political stance to favor non-racial government and rule of constitutional law. Unfortunately, it has chosen to enforce these principles in a manner similar to the Turkish army, by means of repeated coup threats and most recently extorting a consultative role in national security and policy matters. So the net result of the reconciliation bill has been to lead Fiji's supposedly neutral arbiters toward unveiled partisanship and make the security forces increasingly lawless in enforcing the law. An aimless, ill-thought-out transition is proving quite a bit worse than none at all.