Events in the year following Rabuka’s overthrow of the new government were marked by a sometimes conflicting interplay of several forces in the political arena, centring on the issue of entrenching indigenous power: The army; the sometimes violent Taukei Movement whose leaders included several people of high chiefly rank; and chiefly authority in the form of the GCC and the paramount chiefs (the former Prime Minister Ratu Mara and the Governor-General Ratu Ganilau) who, with GCC support, had long held leadership of the State.

Rabuka became manager and mediator of these forces. The GCC and the paramount chiefs were the crucial political resources with which he endeavoured to control the extremists within and outside the army. To secure legitimacy for his coup and restore stability, he sought to bind Taukei objectives to chiefly leadership. Most Fijians acclaimed Rabuka's coup as a legitimate assertion of indigenous power against the perceived threat of Indian domination. Yet, what was most significant about the popular response to the crisis was the way in which the old institutions and symbols of ethnic Fijian leadership helped to both articulate and control it, taking from Rabuka – for the most part with his encouragement – the function of asserting the ethnic claim, and so limiting the independent power of the aggressive nationalists.

Rabuka’s first council of ministers, set up in the face of Ganilau’s opposition, was headed by Rabuka and Mara, and included many Taukei Movement leaders, some of them formerly Mara’s colleagues in the Alliance Party. Rabuka then convened a meeting of the GCC in Suva’s Civic Centre, while Taukei Movement supporters massed in an adjacent park. This assembly, and subsequent Fijian provincial council meetings, approved the coup and endorsed the Taukei goal of changing the constitution to entrench indigenous control of government.

After the GCC meeting, Ganilau agreed to lead a new council including Mara and Rabuka, but with fewer Taukei activists. There soon followed meetings of the two paramount chiefs with Timoci Bavadra, the deposed new prime minister. They proposed a caretaker government, to be recruited equally from the Alliance Party and the overthrown Labour-National Federation Party (NFP) coalition, and headed by Ganilau. A Constitution Review Committee's majority report to Ganilau had just endorsed the GCC call for Fijian dominance. But the agreement reached in the Mara/Ganilau/Bavadra talks promised only to take ‘full account of Fijian aspirations for the betterment of their interests’. When young men rampaged against Indians and their property, Taukei spokesmen excused the outburst as legitimate anger at the lack of progress towards fulfilling the GCC’s resolution.

Rabuka soon yielded to the militants, pushed the two high chiefs aside, and appointed a new governing council, this time dominated by Taukei leaders and army officers. But, as his new cabinet foundered on a combination of personal ambitions and inexperience, pressure on Rabuka to regain the chiefs’ cooperation mounted. He dismissed his council and appointed Ganilau as president of the newly declared Republic of Fiji. Ganilau then gave the office of prime minister to Mara, who excluded most Taukei from yet another council and brought back some old Alliance Party colleagues. This interim government endured under Mara’s leadership until the election in 1992, which was conducted under a new constitution designed to secure Fijian political dominance. 

In its support of the demand for ethnocentric constitutional change, the GCC might be seen as essentially at one with the Taukei Movement.^[10] But there was more to its part in the crisis than this. The GCC was crucial in constraining a volatile nationalist movement that might well have become more violent and oppressive than it did. What most stood out in the turbulent events was Rabuka’s attempt to control and mediate the different political forces: Initially relying on the GCC and the two paramount chiefs for legitimacy and stability, later sidelining them under pressure from the extremists, and eventually turning back to the chiefs when the Taukei pressure threatened to overwhelm him.

The Taukei Movement had potential to grow as an independent force, reconstructing Fijian political leadership, for some of its leaders wanted to marginalize the principal chiefs. But the militants were unable to sustain an aggressive ethnic movement independently of the ideology that affirmed the legitimacy of chiefly leadership. Chiefs and their councils continued to hold the cultural and political high ground throughout the crisis.

The ethnocentric government and constitution that resulted from Rabuka’s coups are thus more accurately understood as a constrained expression of a potential for a more oppressive ethno-nationalism than as the unbridled triumph of that potential. In this respect, the GCC might be understood as an institutional ‘shock absorber’ in Fiji’s body politic, its long-established ritualized assertion of indigenous Fijian identity and strength dampening the force of aggressive nationalism. Without the GCC, and without the influence the leading chiefs held over it, militant Taukeism would likely have had a more damaging sway.

The coup crisis from 1987 to 1990 dramatized the dual character of the GCC. The GCC embodies, in powerful but institutionally constrained form, the indigenous Fijian conviction of their entitlement to political paramountcy that since the 1960s has co-existed in tension with the constitutional political order bequeathed by the colonial rulers. While political and social order have been disturbed by volatile ethno-nationalist movements driven by that conviction, the GCC has, as an institution, served the national society by allowing the claim of indigenous paramountcy a form of expression that can constrain such movements and facilitate the restoration of order. This explains the paradox of public talk, since 1987, about the GCC’s national importance while it continued to uphold ethno-nationalist political demands.