Sitiveni Rabuka

Sitiveni Ligamamada Rabuka launched Fiji's first military coups in 1987, was elected prime minister five years later, and returned to the office by election again in December 2022. He was a career soldier who had served with Fijian peacekeeping contingents in Lebanon and Sinai, and a well-known rugby player. In April 1987 an election brought to power a coalition supported mainly by Fiji's Indo-Fijian population, which was then a narrow majority of the country. Rabuka, a lieutenant colonel, walked into parliament with masked soldiers on 14 May and removed the government, saying he was protecting the political position of indigenous Fijians. A negotiated settlement began to take shape over the following months, and in September he staged a second coup to stop it, declared a republic and severed Fiji's link with the Crown. The country was expelled from the Commonwealth. A constitution in 1990 entrenched indigenous control of parliament, and under it he became prime minister in 1992. In office he moved in the opposite direction from the coups that made him, accepting a constitutional review that produced the far more equal 1997 constitution and readmission to the Commonwealth. He lost the 1999 election and later chaired the Great Council of Chiefs. He has publicly apologised for the coups more than once, and in 2022 campaigned against Frank Bainimarama, who had himself taken power by coup in 2006. Fiji's politics for four decades has largely been a conversation between men who seized the state and then tried to give it back.

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