Michael Field

In 1979 a 25 year old Fijian signed onboard to a Chilean Navy sailing ship Esmeralda. He was to spend six months aboard.

While an undoubtedly beautiful barque that ship then was a certifiable madhouse, a torture ship. Amnesty International, the US Senate and the Chilean Truth and Reconciliation Commission agreed that hundreds of opponents to Augusto Pinochet’s military regime were brutally tortured to death.

In the middle of it, for six months, was Sub Lieutenant Voreqe Bainimarama.

This was the formative part of his career that is otherwise marked by limited achievement.

What he made of it all is open to speculation; he has not talked about it.

Switch to November 2000 and that moment when his own men tried to kill him. Not only did he run, head-over-heel down the steep bank behind Queen Elizabeth Barracks and ran right out of Suva to Togalevu. There he mentally collapsed into a bloodlust rage; he was incapable of ending the mutiny. That job had was carried out by several other colonels; and they have now been removed, perhaps in part because they knew the truth about Bainimarama.

That night, quivering in the Navy Base, Bainimarama finally learnt who had led the mutiny against him; it was on of his boys. Shane Stevens. He was wounded and in hospital.

In an enraged and psychotic state Bainimarama ordered his men to take him to the hospital where, he said – before witnesses – that he intended to kill Stevens.

His men talked him out of it.

But something did happen, something that recalled Esmeralda.

Five of the rebels were tortured to death. One had his penis cut off, while alive. Another, his fingers torn out and in another, the tongue was ripped off. Pathologist reports showed they had been tied up while tortured.

Bainimarama was, until December 2006, under a slow and secret police investigation for having a direct role in all that.

Now all this is not mere incidental history; it is crucial to understanding the very nature of Fiji today.

A slew academics and commentators are using a kind of appeasement language, saying that while they could not possibly agree with Bainimarama’s method in mounting a coup, they did agree with his ideas. A bit like getting trains running on time; let us overlook the character and instead accept the cause. Yes, Mr Hitler was a bit of an unfortunate character; but look at what we got – autobahns, men in nice uniforms everywhere and A Thousand Year Reich.

“A new Legal Order means there is no longer the old,” he proclaims. Bainimarama, not Hitler. “There is no need, to speculate as to what happened, how it happened, what should have happened or what should not have happened. What is, is now, and the future.”

It has a kind of Year Zero ring about it.

The problem New Legal Order followers have, is they want us to believe that the banquet has nothing to do with the cook.

No one really doubts that Fiji needs a new and better voting system. Even the winners under the old system would readily agree; and it is interesting to realize they would win again under a new system.

When a man becomes a dictator though, it is no longer appropriate to just debate the idea. The author must be questioned and his motives examined.

The strangeness of Bainimarama needs closer investigation. Why was he sent home under disciplinary charges from the RFMF’s Sinai detachment? What did he do on Esmeralda, what skill he pick up from the Chileans? What did he do, or have done, to those soldiers who took part in the mutiny.

“This is an attempt by Satan to destroy us,” Bainimarama said two days after the mutiny. “They say Fiji will soon be blessed but we have yet to see.”

Bainimarama is a psychopath, clearly exhibiting the key traits of this mental illness. He lives a predatory lifestyle so characteristic of the psychopath and he seldom learns from experience of earlier mistakes. What he has been doing is to set up ways in which he can move forward and not get caught again.

He has a grandiose sense of self worth; best exposed just before the coup when he marched his soldiers into Suva wearing designer sunglasses and a khaki scarf.

Bainimarama is a successful psychopath; the problem is that Fiji has to pay for it.

The commodore combines psychopathic state with signs of clinical Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). Two of its main symptoms are a grandiose sense of self-importance and a preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success and power.

He also believes he is special and can only be understood by other special people. NPD requires excessive admiration and a special sense of entitlement – who, for example, managed to cash up decades of allegedly unused leave for a big cash settlement.

Is he mad, or bad, or both? Time will, of course, tell us this but it seems a particularly foolish idea that we should all entrust Fiji’s fate and security to a man over whom there are many unresolved questions around.

It is curious to note that one of the biggest cheerleaders for the Commodore, the Australian’s Graham Davis, more or less concedes that Bainimarama is not normal.

I am not going to particularly critique Mr Davis’ article. After all, the literary genius of the modern Pacific era, drummer Neumi Leweni, has proclaimed Mr Davis as brilliant, saying ”on the whole very well written”.

On the whole, I will be happy if I go to my grave without the endorsement and praise of the Master of the Grog Bowl, Drummer Leweni.

The Australian article does say this: “Frank Bainimarama can be autocratic, stubborn, wilful, obstinate and disdainful of the traditional nuances of civilian politics.”

But, says Mr Davis, he may be the best hope Fiji has.

Well, sorry, but this is the old don’t-agree-with-the-method-but-love-the-cause that was such a regular part of George Speight’s coup.

The outcome will be the same.

19 April 2009

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