Author: Editorial
Publication: The Wall
Street Journal
Date: June 8, 2000
Toss out those old copies
of National Geographic that depict the islands of the South Pacific as
amiable outposts, places where locals roast pigs on spits against a backdrop
of palms and bougainvillea. Nothing could be further from today's truth.
Paradise, in fact, is going to the dogs.
In two of the countries
that fleck the map down there, Fiji and the Solomon Islands, armed thugs
asserting ethnic claims have taken the prime ministers hostage. In Fiji,
Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry was imprisoned in the parliament building
on May 19, along with almost his entire cabinet. He's still there, and
reliable reports indicate that his captors aren't treating him with the
appropriate protocol. His counterpart in the Solomon Islands, Bartholomew
Ulufa'alu, was seized, just as unceremoniously, by rebel gunmen on Monday.
Although the crisis in
the Solomons has been the more violent, the hostage-taking in Fiji is the
more intractable problem. Mr. Chaudhry's kidnapper is one George Speight,
an incendiary man who claims to be acting in the interests of indigenous
Fijians, people of Melanesian stock, who make up just over half of their
archipelago's population. He has declared that the 44% of Fijians of Indian
origin, descended from indentured sugar workers brought by the British
a century ago, are "the enemy."
The Indian "enemy," by
the way, is already legally prohibited from owning land in Fiji in all
but the most exceptional cases. Indian farmers work the soil under 30-
or 50-year leases, which are now up for renewal by Fijian landlords. Nine-tenths
of Fijian territory is in indigenous Fijian hands. But the Fijian economy
is run largely by Indo-Fijians, who grow the crops, work the shops and
run the businesses. Under a complex set of legal arrangements, Indians
were, until recently, shut out from political office. Only in 1998, 28
years after independence from Britain, did the country get a constitution
that allowed an Indian to become Prime Minister.
This enabled Mr. Chaudhry
to take office in 1999, with support from most Indians and some Fijians.
That he has been toppled by Fijian hotheads exactly a year later reveals,
however, the extent to which Indian political rights stick in Fijian gullets.
Mr. Speight's clamor of Fiji for the Fijians is neither original nor unpopular
with sections of Fijian society. And the commander of Fiji's army, who
opposes Mr. Speight and is calling for the immediate release of the hostages,
wasted little time in acceding to one of the rebels' major demands -- that
the 1998 constitution be scrapped.
There are of course broader
points here. Fiji gives the lie to the glib liberal notion that racial
discrimination is just about Westerners oppressing "people of color." Mr.
Speight and his Fijian supremacist cohorts (not to mention Fiji's land-tenure
system and some of its electoral laws) show that non-Westerners cede no
ground in the matter of being oppressive to people of a different race.
A form of apartheid has long been alive and kicking in Fiji, though we
haven't heard calls on American campuses for the boycott of Fijian sugar.
Fiji is also a compelling
study in how fomenting racial hyper-consciousness can be a disastrous business.
An emphasis on "racial integrity," so beloved of our own multiculturalists,
can be tolerated to an extent in countries like the U.S., where the results
are only marginally destructive. But in Fiji (or the Solomon Islands),
the outcome is likely to be calamitous. There, it is ethnic collaboration
that produces the jobs, grows the food and conjures the political stability
that attracts tourists from faraway places. The Indo-Fijian population
is not the "enemy." Fiji's true foe is Mr. Speight and his ideas.
