The Fiji Coups
Lieutenant Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka walked into the Fijian parliament on 14 May 1987 with ten masked soldiers and removed a government that was a month old. Fiji's problem was demographic and had been created by colonial policy. The British had brought some 60,000 indentured labourers from India between 1879 and 1916 to work the sugar plantations, having protected indigenous Fijian land from sale, and by the 1980s Indo-Fijians slightly outnumbered indigenous Fijians while owning almost no land. The constitution of independence in 1970 had balanced the communities in parliament, and the Alliance Party had governed as an indigenous-led coalition for seventeen years. The April 1987 election returned a Labour-led coalition under Timoci Bavadra, an indigenous Fijian doctor, whose cabinet was mixed but whose parliamentary support was predominantly Indo-Fijian. Rabuka's justification was that indigenous paramountcy was threatened. He staged a second coup in September when a negotiated settlement looked likely, declared a republic in October, and Fiji was expelled from the Commonwealth. A constitution in 1990 guaranteed indigenous control outright, and something like a fifth of the Indo-Fijian population emigrated over the following decade, taking much of the professional class. The pattern then repeated. A more balanced constitution in 1997 produced an Indo-Fijian prime minister in 1999, who was taken hostage in a coup in 2000; and Frank Bainimarama, who had suppressed that one, staged his own in 2006. Rabuka was elected prime minister democratically in 2022. The country has spent forty years working out how to be governed by a majority without frightening a minority into removing the government.
- Year: 1987 CE
- Category: Political
