Fiji, democracy, and superpower politics: a conversation with Maikolo Horowitz

[The ‘Atenisi Institute’s Maikolo Horowitz recently visited Fiji and New Caledonia to file reports on the political situation there for an American radio network. When Maikolo got back to Tonga I talked with him about his experiences in Fiji, and about his analysis of superpower politics in the Pacific.]

Maikolo: 2014 will be a fulcrum year in Pacific politics, with elections scheduled in Fiji and in New Caledonia. Fiji is supposed to emerge from military rule, and New Caledonian voters will be offered independence from Paris. I wanted to talk to some of the big political players in Noumea and Suva, and they were happy enough to chat, although some of the Fijians were – how can I put this? – looking over their shoulders. Journalists and lawyers gave me introductions and addresses, but didn’t want me to mention their names in my broadcasts.

Commodore Bainimarama claims to want to hand power to a democratically elected civilian government next year, but he is still running a dictatorship. And all of the significant political parties, not to mention the trade union movement, have criticised the constitution he recently unveiled. The document offers an amnesty to Bainimarama and everyone involved in his government, that it sets limits on freedom of speech, and that it makes many types of trade union activity illegal.

One day, on the streets of Suva, I watched as a peaceful protest against the constitution was dispersed. The protesters – there were a couple of hundred of them – had looked like they expected to be confronted with overwhelming state power, and they fled as soon as they were confronted by riot police armed with long batons and tear gas.

I talked with the head of the Methodist church, which used to be such a pillar of the Fijian establishment, and Mahendra Chaudhry, the leader of the Labour Party. The Methodist spoke venomously about Bainimarama, and repeatedly warned that the grassroots of his church might escape his control and seek an extra-parliamentary solution to the country’s problems. I was very impressed by Chaudhry – he’s an intellectual with considerable experience of trade union politics, and with his mixture of worldliness and erudition he reminded me of some of the great American left-wing leaders of the early twentieth century, like Norman Thomas or Eugene Debs. Chaudhry complained about the beating and jailing of Labour Party members. After experiencing the atmosphere on the streets of Suva, I didn’t find his allegations hard to believe.

Scott: After Chaudhry was ousted from the Prime Minister’s office by George Speight’s coup in 2000 even sympathetic commentators suggested that he had helped to bring about his fate by behaving in a high-handed manner. Did you find him arrogant?

Maikolo: Not at all. I think he is a very skilled communicator. He knew he was talking to an American radio audience, and he repeatedly used American anxieties about growing Chinese power to help justify his opposition to Bainimarama and to the new constitution. Bainimarama has grown close to China, accepting Chinese aid and trade as Fiji copes with Australian and New Zealand sanctions, and taking China’s side at the United Nations. Chaudhry criticised Bainimarama for the breakdown in Fiji’s traditionally good relations with Australasia and America, and promised to restore those relationships.

Scott: Chaudhry’s relations with Bainimarama haven’t always been so cool. He initially served in the government the commodore set up after his coup.

Maikolo: They’ve obviously fallen out. I would characterise Bainimarama as, in Marxist terms, a Bonapartist ruler – a ‘man on a white horse’, who rode in to save the nation in the midst of a crisis. Bainimarama may initially have had a degree of popular support, but he has grown increasingly isolated and authoritarian, and now seems to be opposed by a large majority of Fijians.

Scott: I think Bainimarama can be compared and contrasted with Hugo Chavez. Both men were able to enter politics through the military because of the way in which the armed forces had achieved a special status in their respective countries. In Venezuela the military was seen as the friend of the people and the guardian of democracy; in Fiji it was created as an outlet for indigenous males excluded from the modern economy, and was allowed to grow until it had become a state within the state –

Maikolo: But Bainimarama isn’t Chavez.

Scott: No. Chavez tried gaining power through a coup, but then got elected. After the old Venezuelan establishment and the Americans jumped on him, he built up a mass movement of the urban and rural poor as a counterweight, and found himself under pressure from this movement, until he ended up offering his supporters more and more radical reforms, like the nationalisation of businesses and the redistribution of land. Bainimarama faced opposition from the Methodist church and traditionally powerful indigenous Fijian chiefs, and began by trying to build an alliance against those opponents – besides Chaudhry’s Labour Party, he turned to Fiji’s Catholic and Muslim communities, which have traditionally been marginalised by the Methodists. But he fell out with many of his early allies, and doesn’t seem to have been willing or able to build a mass base. Bainimarama has increasingly stacked his government with members of the military.

Maikolo: Bainimarama has presented himself as the protector of Fiji’s Indians, who were undoubtedly discriminated against by the Qarase regime he overthrew, and as the enemy of the Great Council of Chiefs, the faux-traditional body set up by British colonisers late in the nineteenth century. But the Indo-Fijians I talked with, including of course Chaudhry, were very negative about Bainimarama, and Fijians in general regarded the chiefs as yesterday’s men.

Scott: While you were away yet another newspaper appeared here in Nuku’alofa. One of the first issues of the Tonga Daily News – the title is deceptive, as the paper has only been turning up once a week – included an interview with the Catholic Archbishop of Suva, Peter Chong, who argued that Bainimarama, for all his rhetoric about reforming Fiji, had retained the essence of the country’s old political system.

Chong said that Fijian politics have typically featured a clique of leaders who distribute largesse to a set of clients. In the pre-Bainimarama era, most of those leaders were members or close associates of the Great Council of Chiefs; today, they tend to come from the military. Chong characterised the Qarase regime as ‘corrupt and racist’, but insisted that Bainimarama had simply made the military, rather than the Great Council, into the ‘institution of patronage’.

Maikolo: And arguably Bainimarama himself has become a client of a foreign patron – China.

Scott: Bainimarama’s constitution is so controversial that any democratically elected government is likely to amend or abrogate it. Bainimarama overthrew an elected government, albeit a government elected with the help of gerrymandering and race-baiting, and he has used violence and rigorous censorship of the press to maintain his rule. If the amnesty he has given himself in the new constitution is revoked, then he might well face a long spell in prison. Bainimarama has an interest, then, in holding onto power. Dictators don’t always enjoy long and pleasant retirements.

Why, given his situation, hasn’t Bainimarama formed a political party to contest next year’s elections? With the muscle of the state on its side, and perhaps some residual support from enemies of the old order, such a party would presumably have a chance of helping to form the next government.

Maikolo: I asked Chaudhry a similar question. He told me that he thinks Bainimarama’s failure to form a party is a sign that the elections will not be held.

Scott: Australia and New Zealand reliably act as American proxies in the Pacific: is their dispute with Bainimarama, who has become such a close ally of China, another episode in the new Cold War that Washington and Beijing are waging in this part of the world?

Maikolo: American diplomats are careful not to talk about China as an enemy. There is no question, though, that the two superpowers are vying for influence in the Pacific. Fiji is, in Pacific terms, an important place – it dwarfs the Polynesian nations to its east like Tonga. The Australasian hostility to Bainimarama has opened the door for Chinese influence over his government. China is funding major pieces of infrastructure in Fiji like dams, and helping counter the effects of the Australasian economic sanctions.

An interesting parallel can be seen in Tonga, where an unpopular government, which was formed by the nobility against the will of the people, is surviving by going into debt with China. Chinese are e verywhere, raising buildings and running shops. Both Fiji and Tonga have traditionally been close allies of Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, and many Fijians and Tongans are distressed by the rising influence of China and the declining influence of the old allies. There is a great fear of China, which is seen as culturally alien and rapacious. Chaudhry is canny enough to play on this fear, and in Tonga the Democratic Party, which won the support of seventy percent of voters at the last election and should be in government, is also lining up behind the old allies and warning about China.

Scott: In the latest issue of Ko e Kelea Viliami Taufa, who generally seems to reflect the thinking of the Democratic Party, asks in apparent seriousness whether the Chinese annexation of Tonga is imminent. Taufa raises good questions about whether Tonga can afford more and more loans – or ‘gifts’, as the nobles now seem to call them – from China, but his anti-Beijing rhetoric seems almost hysterical, as well as potentially dangerous, given the series of anti-Chinese riots we’ve seen in the Pacific over the last decade.

I don’t understand the thought process which leads to the conclusion that America and its puppets Australia and New Zealand are benign powers, while China is a grave threat. We only have to look at the history of Anzac imperialism in the Pacific, from the disastrous New Zealand colonisation of Samoa to –

Maikolo: But that’s history, and probably not relevant to anyone in Tonga and Fiji. Don’t forget that Tonga was never really colonised.

Scott: Well, let’s consider the relative abilities of China and America to intervene in the twenty-first century Pacific. China has of course a burgeoning economy, and can throw money at small island nations in the hope of influencing them. But China’s economy is still smaller than that of America, and China still spends considerably less on aid to the Pacific than Australia, America’s key ally here.

China has little way of guaranteeing the loyalty of its newfound friends in the Pacific – we’ve seen, for instance, some island states switching their allegiance backwards and forwards between China and Taiwan, in search of the richest harvest of aid – whereas America and its allies have all sort of institutional resources available to discipline allies who go ‘astray’. We’ve seen Fiji suspended from the Pacific Forum, we’ve seen New Zealand using its constitutional powers over Niue’s foreign policy to twist the arm of that country when it got too friendly with China, we’ve seen the World Trade Organisation discipline Samoa when it attempted to put controls on food imports. And America and its allies can ultimately resort to violence against errant Pacific states, because, unlike China, they have a network of bases across the regions.

Of course China is growing more powerful, both economically and militarily, but a coalition of medium sized powers can thwart a new superpower which doesn’t have the global military and economic infrastructure the United States relies upon. China recently got into a dispute with Japan over some islands, and the whole of southeast Asia seemed to jump to Japan’s defence –

Maikolo: Because, like Pacific Islanders, they are terrified of China’s growing power!

Scott: I would have thought that the entry of a new superpower into the Pacific region would give small states additional options, when they seek crumbs from the table of the developed world and try to hold back nastier aspects of capitalist globalisation.

Maikolo: As you know we have a fundamental difference of opinions about the Pacific. You’re a romantic who reads Marx’s late writings and thinks that societies on the periphery of the global economy can bypass the stage of capitalist development and build something like socialism on the foundations of pre-capitalist modes of production, like the primitive modes of production that still exist in Tonga.

I’m a realist who agrees with Marx’s earlier statements that capitalism is an essential prerequisite for anything better. Tonga needs more capitalism not less. Bring on the Democratic Party and open up the economy, I say – but make sure that the new wealth is captured as tax revenue and benefits the wider population. If Chinese largesse is just delaying the inevitable by allowing a dysfunctional, moribund semi-capitalist economy to limp on, then Chinese largesse is a bad thing.

 

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]