Timoci Bavadra

Timoci Bavadra was prime minister of Fiji for thirty-three days before the first of the country's four coups removed him. He was a public health doctor and a trade unionist, an ethnic Fijian chief of modest rank from the west of Viti Levu, and he led a Labour-National Federation coalition to victory in April 1987 on a platform of non-alignment, a nuclear-free Pacific and better conditions for workers. The coalition's parliamentary majority included many Indo-Fijians, descendants of indentured labourers brought by the British, who were then close to half the population and owned almost none of the land. That was the pretext: on 14 May 1987 Lieutenant Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka walked into parliament with ten masked soldiers and removed the government, saying he was protecting indigenous Fijian rights. Bavadra was detained, released, and spent his remaining time trying to restore the constitution through the Great Council of Chiefs and the courts. A second coup in September declared a republic and Fiji left the Commonwealth. He died of spinal cancer in November 1989 at fifty-five. Fiji had further coups in 2000 and 2006, and Rabuka returned as an elected prime minister in 2022. His widow Kuini Speed led his party afterwards and later served in government. The 1987 coups established a pattern the country has not escaped: every Fijian constitution since has been written after a seizure of power rather than before one. The Indo-Fijian share of the population fell from about half to roughly a third through emigration in the decades that followed.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history