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Fiji's draft charter - a review
The title is interesting: “Fiji draft people’s charter for change, peace & progress”.
charter – n. 1 a document granting rights, issued esp. by a sovereign or legislature. B. written constitution or description of an organization’s functions etc. 2 contract to hire an aircraft, ship, etc., to a special purpose [Latin chartula; related to CHART]
Oxford English Dictionary
It fails to qualify under the first definition, especially as Voreqe Bainimarama closed the legislature. Its authors, with an eye perhaps to later criminal charges, now try to define the document as something else; less of a constitution, more than a proposal when the reality is it about doing anything other than handing democracy back to the people.
The Forward
It begins with the assertion that President Josefa Iloilo created the charter council and came up with the membership. This fiction permeates much of Fiji life; that the “interim government” does stuff and the president orders up things. Fiji, plain and simple, is a military dictatorship. Things happen – or not – because the military wills them so. Poor old Iloilo sits there in a daze and signs things. He follows orders. This simple failure to recognise the reality of the situation completely compromises anything that follows.
(anything in bold and italics comes direct from the charter - the page number of the charter is in brackets)
It is to be regretted that some key stakeholders chose not to serve as members of the NCBBF despite the invitation to serve. (page i)
The report makes no mention of why this happened; the coup apologists will say however that its because Australia and New Zealand sanctions bullied otherwise well- meaning people into silence. The subsequent behaviour of the Fiji police and military in rounding up charter critics reveals the lie; it was already written ahead of public discussion in a Star Chamber manner, and the only people to be part of the process were coup beneficiaries. Mr Samy, the charter instigator, submitted his invoice; others with a conscience choice not to.
The first step was to prepare a comprehensive, factsbased, diagnostic, forwardlooking Report on the State of the Nation and the Economy (the SNE Report). (i)
This single sentence points to the semantic nonsense that the writers – rather than the hapless participants – wanted. The SNE Report is mentioned early in the document for the simple reason that to justify the charter, the SNE has to show things are pretty bad in Fiji; otherwise why bother with a charter?
The Peoples Charter process, as a national level inclusive and participatory undertaking, represents Fiji’s own way of addressing its deeprooted, complex and fundamental problems. Integral to this process is the firm commitment of all the stakeholders, including all the members of the NCBBF and in particular the Interim Government, to restore and sustain parliamentary democratic governance, stability and peace in Fiji. (i – ii)
So who destroyed the parliamentary democratic governances, stability and peace” of Fiji? They do not say but its the military and this exercise is about trying to justify a coup, not address deep rooted and fundamental problems. Strangely Suva's intelligencia believe their problems are so much greater than everybody else's, that they have such a unique set of circumstances that the rules and mortality of the rest of civilisation cannot apply. As the waves of emigrants fleeing the tropical paradise soon discover once they are off the small islands, Fiji’s problems are pretty much the same as everybody elses. In many ways, they are easier to deal with. It simply involves getting the loonies to put down their guns and for people to stop following the messianic leadership of the latest visionary who has delusions of another kind of Fiji.
The overarching objective of the Peoples Charter is to rebuild Fiji into a nonracial, culturally vibrant and united, well governed, truly democratic nation; a nation that seeks progress and prosperity through meritbased equality of opportunity and peace. (ii)
Who could argue with this? Its salad dressing and any high school student could have written that (this is the over-riding impression of much of the writing in this report; it is childishly unsophisticated; like, if we say really sweet things all the other problems will go away. Buried in the sentence though is a military landmine: “merit-based”. This is, of course, aimed squarely at the Qarase Government’s Blueprint.
The charter writers – all beneficiaries of the state and those who seized it – probably believe they got to where they are today because they merited it. Unlike all the other people who were lazy - or stupid! No modern state can afford to believe in exclusively “merit based equality of opportunity”. At a very basic level, how do the charter writers equate merit opportunity of, say, a child born in a remote Vanua Levu village with that of a child born in Suva? And of course the question can be applied across any number of cuts through a state system; gender, age, location and, yes, shudder, race.
The draft charter pointedly refuses to recognise race and in its key principles, for example, says a new Fiji must uplift the “disadvantaged in all communities”. It sounds good, but is meaningless. You can pretend race does not exist - and this is what the charter does - or you can recognise that people have differences. Modern states do that.
The very next principle talks of “mainstreaming of the indigenous Fijian in a modern, progressive Fiji” (ii); in short, the charter authors are saying the indigenous people of Fiji are, for the most part, primitives outside the mainstream.
This kind of language hints how the charter authors see themselves as racially and culturally superior; they cannot, of course, say that, which is why “mainstreaming” is used. One wonders how the word is translated in Fijian; how do you tell the bulk of Fiji that they are inadequate in the modern state. The use of the word highlights how snobbishness of the charter authors.
Another example of the school essay writing is the principle calling for “sharing spiritualities and interfaith dialogue”.
Copyright: Michael Field
