SYDNEY — An Australian newspaper has fired an editorial salvo at the military government of the Republic of the Fiji Islands while reminding the world of what happens when a country tramples on media freedom.
Such anger goes well beyond the diplomatic niceties in the latest review of the Fiji problem by the Pacific Islands Forum of Oceania countries meeting last week in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. The forum did manage to break loose from the usual bland communique to warn its nonattending member, self-appointed Fijian Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, that Fiji will lose financial and technical aid unless he allows a free election by December. The army commodore remains unfazed, having already ignored similar warnings from the United States, the European Union, New Zealand and Australia.
"If it takes us five years or 10 years to hold elections, so be it," he told loyal troops in the capital city Suva. Having ousted an elected government, he figures it will take time to fix an electoral system based on Fiji's peculiar system of ethnic majority.
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