Law & Empire in the Pacific: Fiji and Hawai`i

6 Promised Lands From Colonial Lawgiving to Postcolonial Takeovers in Fiji

A major question for contemporary postcolonial societies is understanding how legally defined identities have shaped contemporary social groups. In Latourian fashion, I would like to generalize this question to ask as well about entities and events: How have legally defined entities in Fiji’s colonial history shaped contemporary events? We will consider how Sir Arthur Gordon’s structuring of the relationship of courts, markets, and other systems more powerful than law at the inception of colonial Fiji has shaped contemporary events in a dialogical colonial history. We will also think about ethnic Fijians as agents and consider how they have remade Gordon’s structures, indeed, how they have taken them over.1 Takeovers in Fiji have challenged or ignored constitutional rule, electoral democracy, and legal titles. Coups have twice ousted democratically elected national governments in Fiji. Some Fiji citizens, notably Indo-Fijians and Labour Party supporters, have been dispossessed of political rights. Other Fiji citizens have reclaimed property, or newly claimed it, especially land. This introduction first describes the coups, the legal challenges to them, and some of the resulting landholding and dispossession. Then it describes the events of a more local 153 6 Promised Lands From Colonial Lawgiving to Postcolonial Takeovers in Fiji Martha Kaplan 153 takeover. At both the national and very local levels, we will observe a dialogical transformation of “ownership” as a ritual and political category . The juxtaposition of events of recent national history with the story of one rural takeover enables us to pose this question: What is the connection between colonial legally defined entities that established rule to current assertions of ownership and current ethnic-Fijian certainties about God’s promises to them? In 1987, Fiji had been independent for seventeen years. At Independence, there were 715,375 Fiji citizens. Indo-Fijians, people descended from Indian indentured laborers (and from other immigrants from South Asia), were 48.7 percent of the population, and ethnic Fijians, people of Fijian Pacific islander descent, were 46 percent (Fiji Bureau of Statistics 1989). In 1987, a multiethnic Labour Party coalition, headed by an ethnic-Fijian commoner, was democratically elected, replacing the colonially groomed, ethnic Fijian-dominated, chiefly-led Alliance Party government that had governed Fiji since Independence.2 Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka led a military coup against the Labour government, claiming to do so on behalf of ethnic Fijians. Following this coup, under the government led by Rabuka, a pro–ethnic Fijian and racially discriminatory constitution was promulgated in 1990. In 1997, it was replaced by a well-crafted, far more democratic constitution. In free, well-conducted elections in May 1999, a multiethnic coalition led by the Fiji Labour Party defeated and replaced Rabuka’s government and made Labour leader Mahendra Chaudhry Fiji’s first Indo-Fijian prime minister. In 2000, a failed businessman named George Speight, past head of the Fiji Hardwood and Fiji Pine Commissions in the Rabuka government , saw his carefully laid plans to sell Fiji’s mahogany reserves (planted by colonial planners in the 1950s) to a US buyer overruled by the newly elected Labour coalition government. Speight had incited and championed the ethnic-Fijian landowners (on whose rented land the mahogany was growing) to back his plans for its sale (Kahn 2000). On May 19, Speight got the jump on other potential coup leaders and led a group of armed soldiers into Parliament to begin a coup against Chaudhry’s Labour coalition government. Speight’s haphazard coup was overtaken and solidified, from the top down, by ethnic-Fijian stalwarts, including high chiefs and the miliMartha Kaplan 154 tary. An interim government installed ethnic-Fijian bureaucrat Laisenia Qarase as prime minister, with Fiji’s military forces under Commander Frank Bainimarama as guarantor. Qarase then began to announce and implement a range of programs to solidify ethnic-Fijian paramountcy in the nation. However, a suit by an Indo-Fijian farmer, arguing that Speight’s coup and the ensuing abrogation of the constitution violated his civil rights, led Justice Gates of the Lautoka High Court to rule that the 1997 constitution should not have been set aside. On March 1, 2001, the ruling was upheld by the five-member Appeals Court, and it was not appealed to the Supreme Court. This ruling would seem to declare the coup and the interim government illegal. On the one hand, it required new elections under the 1997 constitution. On the other hand...