Three colour pieces from the Speight coup
By Michael Field
This is a story of hardship, of long hours of tedium, terrible food, wet
and cold clothes, per diems and lying, tragedy and yes, worst of all, mixed
up laundry orders.
Oh and lots of booze, every night.
Forget the poor sods being held at parliament, the real scandal in Fiji
can be found among the celerated "international media" trapped in the
Centra Hotel.
No Red Cross parcels for these guys (yes, its mostly the same guys who
their mothers might be in love with, but its a bit like being in the army)
and no Geneva Convention on civilised treatment either. They are suffering
the worst indignity of the lot -- the world is losing interest in their
story.
It has, since May 19 when George misheard the quote about "five minutes
of fame" and thought it meant five months, been a tough assignment, but the
payback has been in the charming way in which we of the international media
have been given a glorious status.....
Back at our various homes we're just the same run-of-the-mill reporters
the folks here are. Come to Fiji though, add in a coup and a bit of
shooting, and suddenly we're something different. Lots of photos in the
newspapers to start with. Reporter A looking stupid with umbrella; Reporter
B sleeping; Reporter C and D sitting close together. C and D close together
again. And again. Lots of reporters playing touch outside Iliolo's house.
Back home no one would notice. Just another bunch of hacks, but here we are
"international media". We're special. Not that it saves us from parking
tickets.
Perhaps before going on we should try to define this body that has
acquired this august status.
Back when May 19 dawn not a single representative of the species could
be found in Fiji. By about midnight there was a serious flocking of them at
Nadi. All trying to convince hapless rental car employees that although
they were in Nadi they were not really going to drive their rental cars to
war-torn Suva. They're not that stupid in the West.
Within a couple of days around 150 of us were cluttering the Centra
which was immensely grateful to see us and our Amex goldcards. Disturbingly
each time we would reach $6000 they'd ask us to sign the bill -- like they
were kind of worried we wouldn't make it to $7000.
A kind of caste system exists among the media. Camera and sound
equipment operators for example. Got on with everybody, always helpful.
Just so long as their camera is right in front of everybody else. Then
there were radio journalists who, acting on the principle that size really
is important, had bigger and better phalic symbols -- called microphones --
which they insisted in sticking into everybody else's pictures. Free
publicity for obscure Sydney radio stations. Rumour had it that if their
microphon showed up in some picture in Oz, they got a free trip to, oh,
Waggawagga. Or something like it.
Camera and radio people fight a bit. Lots of elbows and bad words.
In that first week there was a great flock of New Zealand journalists.
But they fled. First to Pacific Harbour. Then to Nadi. And on to
Christchurch. Classics in gutlessness. And superficiality.
There were the newspapers. Dailies first. Always ernest, one story a day
people. And the weeklies. One story a week. And then the agencies.
Australian Associated Press once even had a house and home in Suva, but
they soon lost interest and went home. Only three agencies matter and
between them most of the world gets its news about Fiji. Reuters, the
imperial British outfit for example, was keenly interested in the state of
the Suva Stock Exchange -- the "sex" as the shorthand had it -- in that
first week. Sugar futures too. Finance is their big interest. Associated
Press is the American outfit which had a bit of a struggle here. The United
States was not interested. And then there is my outfit, Agence
France-Presse or AFP, the oldest of the lot.
Only a handful of the original May 19ers remain in Fiji. News
organisations, once they realised Fiji was not a quick fix, rotated staff
through with great speed. One news organisation, seemingly unaware of just
where Fiji was, assigned somebody from South America to come through. Hey,
coup, must be near Boliva, right?
Spanish speaking Fijians please make yourself available at the Centra.
Some of my fellow international scribes were pretty dumb. This may or
may not be true. A Fiji reporter tells of being asked by a foreign
journalist whether this fellow Ratu Mara was Fijian or Indian. I kind of
believe it.
Some desk somewhere asked why so many of these Fijians had Ratu as first
name.
The poor local journalists have mostly had a hard time. First trick of
the tourist journalist here for the coup is to drain information from the
local just as rapidly as possible. Mahogony over breakfast with a local
journo, for example. Astonishing too was the speed with which first timers
in Fiji became expert. You could hear them on their "two ways" or "Q and
As" back to their homelands speaking like, well, like they had been here
for years.... Or hours. People who otherwise write about horse-jumping or
something, intoning at length about the significance of the Great Council
of Chiefs.
We of the international media have a bible, known as "Scoop", a classic
novel written by Evelyn Waugh. Its about a bloke, William Boot, who is the
nature correspondent for the Daily Beast in London. By mistake he's sent
off to a war in Africa he knows nothing about. He finds there is no war and
no story, but his masters do not like this but William, honest to a fault,
fails to sell out to the story, and instead sticks with the truth.
Much of what we write and broadcast would shock people in Fiji, possibly
because it seems mostly superficial and often inaccurate (most stories
mention sugar production figures and the ratio of Indians to Fijian; like
it really matters?). Who to blame for this is not an easy question because
it really is a product of what readers in other countries are deemed to be
interested in.
Places like Fiji are expected to provide to readers everywhere else a
good-guy-bad-guy story; victims-and-oppressors. Nothing complicated, okay?
The respect accorded we of the international media is, perhaps, not
really deserved. If one thing has become readily apparent, hopefully to the
public of Fiji, is that their own domestic media does a much better job on
the Fiji story than the international media does. And they do it because
they live here, they care about it, they know people, they raise their
children here and, unlike most of us, when it is all over they live here.
We fly off home.
So, if you really want to bug the international media get a camera and
notebook and run like hell through the lobby of the Centra.
Dozens of reporters and cameramen will run after you -- because you
will look as if you know what the next story is. We of the international
media don't have a clue.
ends
Farewell to coup coup land
by Michael Field
So where were the Isa Lei's, the medals and the tearful scenes as media grunts and lovers parted -- or something, anything?
The celebrated international media have finally checked out of the Centra Suva, leaving the Coup Story again to the local reporters who never had an option on a Boarding Pass.
Suva could, perhaps, do with some trauma counselling after the pillage inflicted by hosting the world media for nearly three months.
But our numbers, at most around 150, were never enough to do anything like the damage George Speight and Fiji did in a kind of reckless national suicide.
Certainly we propped up a beleagured economy -- just ask Fintel, Vodaphone (and by extension Centra, who with some of the planet's worst phone lines in each room, charged at high rates, meant massive bills for those filing by computers) and the sword sellers who never had it so good. One American reporter ended up with hand engraved swords for every member of his family. Should have read his Lonely Planet more carefully.
Shoeshine boys outside RoC soon enough picked up the reporters who cared about leather. A couple of cab drivers who spent months with Australian TV crews will be wanting to quickly organise another coup or two.
Mostly people seemed bemused by the international media who were forever holding forth profound ideas on what was happening and why; but who were mostly on their first trip to Fiji.
A lot of detail was confused with substance; confusion was taken as conspiracy. Many of those who came, sometimes for just a week or two, had the whole thing figured out long before the dumb locals.
One Australian reporter has proclaimed he'd like to be a Pacific reporter now because it was "so easy". His frequent screw-ups on pronounciation and routine denunciations of island culture point to a less than lengthy career here.
The coup and martial law were internationally unusual because of the free media access to all the players throughout. One detected the liberal hand of Colonel Filipo Tarakinikini who, it seems, has a less than military idea of the value of a free and open debate. Some of his fellow officers, however, needed lessons in how to avoid making fools of themselves. More than once they denounced media for exaggerating (for example the situation in Vanua Levu) and then a day or two later they are announcing some big military operation with a body or two.
It is perhaps too soon to say, but I leave wondering how much of the coup and its twists and turns was the product of the media itself. And how much the media was in turn used.
The coup itself followed severe media criticism of the Chaudhry Government. Chaudhry and some of his ministers helped poison the atmosphere further with counter-abuse which, given what has since happened, can clearly be seen as creating an atmosphere that in part led to the events of May 19.
Obviously George Speight was something of a ring master at this game, and for a time he became our monoster, our property. He could whistle us up to Parliament in a shot and we'd be there, listening to his endless raves. He would try too to engage reporters in friendly banter -- but fortunately most of us resisted the idea of backslapping and laughing with a man holding a gun at others.
And then, like the fundamentally stupid man he turned out to be, he decided it was a good idea to take some of us prisoner for a while.
Some of us got frightened (one said "terrified" but it didn't seem that bad) while in my case I was irritated to find less than a year after being the bunny in a prisoner drama in the Solomons, I was the doe rabbit again.
Bad luck the first time, but the second time -- well there was no defence to a friend's contemptous blast: "I told you not to go there...."
I wish I could figure a clever response to that, but none has come around.
For a number of us who pretty much went the full distance in covering the story it proved a tough assignment. Time zones meant long nights, coming on top of quite long days. Media people just got plain tired and burnt out. Mistakes were often made that way.
I found it more personal than any other story I've ever covered. People who had long ago stopped just being contacts and stories, but were friends to cherish and love, were hurting so much during these three months. The pain of knowing this was not a pain worth much at all compared to those who were seeing lives and dreams disappear in some indigenous nightmare.
Back in 1996 in a hazy, distant, now dreamlike time I had, by happy chance, ended up in Suva after a hypnotic exotic race across much of the Pacific. The rewards were profoundly personal and unforgettable. Among them, at the time incidental, was to be the only foreign reporter in Parliament when then Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka presented the Constitution Review Commission report.
I couldn't get a copy until House Clerk Mary Chapman gave me her's and made my job as a backseat witness to history so much easier. What little I knew of her then, and since, tells me what she must now feel when something as precious as the place she ran has been so defiled.
That report bought to an end, then, the indigenous dream - some would say fantasy - Rabuka ignited with his military coups nine years earlier.
I quoted a line from the report that was a striking refutation of everything the coups stood for: "...trying to keep a predominantly Fijian government in office in perpetuity may not be the best way of securing the paramountcy of Fijian interests."
For a foreign audience I wrote of the beautiful new parliament: "richly wooded in native Fijian timbers with large tapa or bark cloth hanging from the ceilings. Indigenous Fijian items adorn the walls and giant fighting clubs assume the purpose a mace would in another parliament."
The last time I was in the chamber the tapa was torn, the mace was gone.
President Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara seemed that day to offer an apology of some kind.
I wrote: "In one of the more telling moments Mara spoke of the way traditional Fiji had a procedure for reconciliation. Like other Polynesian cultures the business of saying sorry is deeply engrained and much honoured. What he did not say was who was meant to apologise to who. And for what."
Speight and his henchmen have not, and could not, destroy the memory of that 1996 day for me. But the connections, the people, the dreams, the hopes from then, to now, have so been distorted and twisted in these three mad months that one can only really feel the pain.
In an earlier piece I wrote about the media and the coup I wrote that running through the Centra lobby with a notebook was a good way to bug the media. They would follow because nobody had a clue of what was going on.
Three months later most of us wouldn't follow now -- some of us have a decent vision of what we'll find... and nobody much wants to run to that fate.
Namaste... Fiji?
ends
Return to Coup Coup Land
By Michael Field
When Sitiveni Rabuka took over Fiji’s Parliament 14 years ago this month the news only slowly filtered out to the world -- mostly through a telex machine in the home of the then Australian Associated Press (AAP) correspondent in Suva.
Where I was living, Boston, it did not make it and in those barely imaginable pre-Internet days there was very little way of finding out what was happening.
Indeed Rabuka was able, at least for a time, to control the flow of news.
How it’s all changed now.
A year ago today I was having coffee and reading the Dominion in Auckland’s St Luke’s Mall when an email on my mobile phone turned life chaotic for the next four months.
A Hindi radio station in Auckland was reporting shooting at Parliament.
Quickly the news went global:
Fiji-unrest
URGENT ¥¥¥ Fiji PM taken hostage: report
AUCKLAND, May 19 (AFP) - Fiji's Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry has been taken hostage by seven men following an indigenous protest in the capital Suva, Radio New Zealand reported Friday.
mjf/sls
Fiji became “Breaking News” on CNN -- the ultimate confirmation that they’re watching you in the White House situation room, at No 10 Downing Street and in Canberra. It happened several times more during the following months -- although Fiji failed the biggest test of the lot; CNN did not send its own staff to cover the coup. They did send somebody for Mir‘s return to Earth in March.
On that May 19 day last year information from the scene was hard to come by as the phones stayed out. Email worked in an erratic way. One came from a friend at the Fiji Times which helped put some meat on the bone: “Apparently seven men walked into parliament about an hour ago and are holding opposition and government members. Still developing. …“
Another email came in from a friend at USP advising that armed men were in Parliament, the city was burning and concluding with the words “I’m going to lunch”.
A well placed official emailed: “There is unrest in Fiji... Big problems next to parliament complex, following march from Taukei movement...”
Gate 7 at Auckland airport that afternoon saw a lot of reporters and rugby player Joeli Vidiri. The plane was way late.
“We’re waiting for the word from Helen,” one of the airline staff said.
“Helen who,” dumbly I asked.
“Helen Clark,” she said with disdain.
Seven months later, in an entirely social setting, I met a man who told me what room I had been in at the Centra during the first few days of the coup. He was with the Special Air Services and he was one of the mysterious “government officials” who the plane was being held up for.
Way back in May 1974 -- I cannot remember the actual day -- I had sailed into Suva Harbour for my first experience of life outside New Zealand. I remember it vividly and recalled it with profound sadness arriving into looted Suva. Aimless policemen were wandering around with looted golf clubs, shops smouldered and looted goods lay scattered everywhere.
As a foreign journalist it’s easy enough to feel hostility towards Fiji. People like government official Joiji Kotobalavu or the Pacific Islands News Association, who choose to make vitriolic and always deeply personal attacks, make it all much worse.
They tend to make targets of the reporters who give the most to trying to understand what is going on here; and who, more than most, feel obliged to try and explain it all to the world.
As people we’re all heading down the same dumpy, potholed riven road towards something we all define as progress and development. By accident of birth some of us ride in an air-conditioned limousine, peering out at the vast crowd of much poorer people walking down that same road.
Democratic and showing signs of a thriving economy, Fiji nearly made it into the limo. Instead Fiji not only is not in the limo, it’s walking in the opposite direction to everybody else now.
While PINA can lament what they so fondly call parachute journalists hitting Fiji (ignoring the way their own members routinely “parachute” into glamorous cities), they’ve overlooked a much worse fate that has befallen this country now.
Inside the limo there is no interest in Fiji. Fiji inhabits a curious, perhaps dangerous media limbo. Its not a political basket case but nor is it a nation to be taken seriously.
On May 19 last year there were dozens of media people checked into the Centra; the story was unusual, it captured international attention. Then it dragged on, with no resolution and the media numbers declined. When the hostage drama ended there were only two of us still in Suva who had been there on May 19.
When the barracks mutiny took place just a handful of international reporters came in. Fiji was into the freak category -- strange events were no longer news, just routine. It’s not as bad in Suva, just now, as it is in Honiara; making any international story out of the Solomon‘s basket case is a heroic feat.
To the big media managers of CNN, the BBC and the rest, the issues, complexities and dreams of all the people of Fiji mean very little. Fundamentally there was no ideological or cultural difference in the way they covered last year’s coup or March’s return of the Mir space station over Nadi. Both were oddities; man bites dog stuff.
Fewer international reporters will come for the elections, but those that are here will be better informed and will care much more about the outcome. Reporters became attached to their stories and in discussions with their offices in Auckland, Sydney, Hong Kong and London they’ve got to sell the story as being important, of significance.
The Fiji story is already a parody, expressed in the term “Tailevu hill tribes”, these mythical, mysterious and headline-grabbing people always poised to plunder Suva.
Recently on a radio programme about Fiji the interviewer asked, “who cares, if these people want to go on like this, why does it matter to us?”
In a user-pays world countries are expected to sort out their own problems. While they fail they can be interesting to the media managers for a while, and then they disappear into the world of the eccentric specialist: Sierra Leone, Mozambique, Albania, Burma…. Fiji is not there yet, but it’s off the international media agenda.
AAP, which broke the news of Rabuka’s coup 14 years ago, has long since closed up its office and moved out of Fiji.
Those parachutist journalists who now come are those who believe in their very bones that Fiji does matter, that we are all in One World and that what affects people on small isolated Pacific islands, affects us all.
The problem is that in Fiji there are more and more politicians, supported by a cabal in the local media who makes war on other reporters, who say they are not part of this world and wish to be left alone....
They should be careful what they wish for -- it might come true.
ends
Copyright: Michael Field
