A 1989 submission by senior military officers to the Manueli Committee, which was charged with preparing a draft constitution, reveals a shift in military thinking that did not go away. The officers talked of Fiji needing a ‘very strong and firm government even if we have to temporarily sacrifice Constitutional Government until all remedial, corrective and upgrading actions are finalized in favour of the indigenous people of this country’.[8] Such a strong government, in their opinion, should remain in power for 15 years. The officers did not get their way. Fiji adopted a new constitution in 1990 and held an election in 1992. But the seeds of future military interventions into politics had been sown, and the military had displayed its impatience with the compromises of democratic government.
Rabuka left the military forces, and was selected by Fiji’s Great Council of Chiefs (GCC) as leader of the Soqosoqo ni Vakavulewa ni Taukei (SVT) party in preference to Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara’s wife, the high chief of Burebasaga, Ro Lady Lala Mara.[9] At the helm of this new mainstream indigenous party he won two elections, remaining prime minister until 1999, while Ratu Mara was selected by the chiefs as President of the republic. Schisms emerged within the SVT, leading eventually to the formation of the Fijian Association Party, with Ratu Mara’s clandestine blessing. Power struggles in the mid-1990s were dramatized as a feud between Ratu Mara, figuring as the archetypal Polynesian chief, and the ‘commoner’ Rabuka, as the self-made Melanesian big man.[10]In office, Rabuka’s thinking about the primacy of indigenous rights moderated, and his government commissioned a review of the constitution. The review was ‘a fundamental, wide ranging exercise’, covering the composition and functioning of parliament, the electoral system, ‘the relationship between the executive and legislative branches, institutions of government and the mechanism for improving accountability and transparency, the administration of justice, citizenship, ethnic and social justice issues, rights of communities and groups, the operation of local government bodies, public revenue and expenditure, emergency powers and a Bill of Rights’.[11] The 1997 constitution adopted by parliament was equally comprehensive.
However detailed and wide-ranging the provisions of the 1997 constitution might have been, no constitutional issue mattered more than control of the military forces, though this was less obvious at the time than it is now. As Fiji’s 1997 Defence White Paper put it,
[the] starting point in any free democracy is that the military is one of the functions of the central national government and must be the servant of its policies and priorities. The ethics of the profession of arms must always include, as it does in all established democracies, total loyalty to the government in power and must reject as unacceptable any active political endeavours by servicemen either collectively or individually to act otherwise than as directed by the government.[12]
The constitution-makers thought the same way. They wanted to return Fiji permanently to Westminster-style parliamentary supremacy, and to subordinate the military forces to the democratically elected government as had been the case before 1987 – and they assumed this would happen. And so they included the usual Westminster safeguards: The President is the commander-in-chief of the military forces (Section 87), he appoints the military commander ‘subject to the control of the minister’, and parliament may make laws relating to the military (Section 112).
[8] Lal, B.V. 1998. Another Way: the politics of constitutional reform in post-coup Fiji, Asia Pacific Press, ANU, Canberra, p. 13.
[9] For more details, see Fraenkel, J. 2000. ‘The Triumph of the Non-Idealist Intellectuals? An Investigation of Fiji’s 1999 Election Results’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 46(1): 86–109.
[10] Garrett, J. 1990. 'Uncertain Sequel: The Social and Religious Scene in Fiji Since the Coups', The Contemporary Pacific, 2 (1): 87–88.
[11] Lal, Another Way, p. 60.
[12] Parliament of Fiji, 1997. Defending Fiji: Defence White Paper 1997, Suva, 1997, par. 6:30.