The pressures arising from the 2000 coup, and even more importantly, the March 2001 court ruling, led Bainimarama and Qarase in different and increasingly opposed directions. Qarase’s ‘Blueprint’ and most of his interim government’s policies were aimed at placating indigenous discontent, and avoiding a recurrence of the Speight uprising by appeasement. By winning the 2001 election, Qarase gained political legitimacy in his own right, and lost the need to be beholden to his patron. Qarase’s new SDL party won more seats than the Fiji Labour Party (FLP) – 31 to 27 – but, in order to gain a parliamentary majority, Qarase turned to the six elected members of the ultra-nationalist Conservative Alliance–Matanitu Vanua (CAMV) party (one of them George Speight, who had been elected from prison), some of Bainimarama’s bitterest enemies. The CAMV drew its support from Vanua Levu and northern Tailevu, precisely the areas where the RFMF had firmly clamped down in the wake of the May 2000 coup. Having gone to the election promising to deliver amnesty for George Speight and for the army officers who had conspired against their commander in the mutiny of November 2000, the CAMV now sat in government, a permanent affront to Bainimarama, the man who had been acclaimed for saving Fiji from just such people the previous year. Worse than that, the vice-president of the SDL was Naitasiri paramount chief, the Qaranivalu Ratu Inoke Takiveikata, who was charged with involvement in the 2000 army mutiny and was later to be convicted.

For Bainimarama, the exigencies of consolidating influence in the RFMF, and decisively eliminating those forces that had backed the mutiny of November 2000, suggested a quite different course of action. Loyal officers had suppressed dissident chiefs and villagers in mid-2000, and critics within the armed forces had been dismissed, sent on leave or consigned to token jobs under the commander’s close gaze at military headquarters in Berkley Crescent. In the wake of the 2001 election, Qarase’s government was politically tied to reinforcing and elevating into office precisely those forces that the commander felt he had to suppress and bring to justice. As Bainimarama told the UN General Assembly in 2007, ‘a prominent High Chief connected to the ruling SDL Party incited a mutiny within the Military, and attempts were made, not only to remove me, but also to eliminate me’.^[27]Relations between commander and Prime Minister deteriorated steadily from the time of the 2001 election. Bainimarama was reported as asking Qarase why he had stood for election when he was only an interim prime minister, and as calling on Qarase to resign if the Supreme Court ruled against him in 2003 on the issue of sharing power with the FLP as required by the constitution.^[28]

One issue dramatized Fiji’s fundamental problem of civilian control of the military: The government was determined not to extend Bainimarama’s contract as head of the military when it came up for renewal in February 2004 – the commander was equally determined to stay for another five years. In the end the military won. Bainimarama refused to accept that the minister for home affairs could replace him and directly confronted the permanent secretary of Home Affairs, Jeremaia Waqanisau, over the issue. The government not only conceded Bainimarama’s demand for another five years at the head of the armed forces, it also removed Waqanisau from his position and sent him to Beijing as Fiji ambassador. At the same time, Bainimarama purged the top ranks of the RFMF of officers he considered disloyal. They were, former chief-of-staff Colonel George Kadavulevu, together with colonels Alfred Tuatoko, Samuela Raduva and Akuila Buadromo, and commander Timoci Koroi.^[29] They claimed Bainimarama had urged them to arrange a coup, then demanded a personal pledge of loyalty. When they pledged loyalty only to the RFMF, he asked them to resign.

The new acting chief-of-staff was Lieutenant Colonel Jone Baledrokadroka. He had been in charge of storming the Kalabu District School in 2000 to arrest the fleeing remnants of Speight loyalists after they had left the parliamentary complex, and he was seen as a Bainimarama loyalist. In 2006, Baledrokadroka became land forces commander, but within three days he too fell victim to the Commodore, who relieved him of his duties after accusing him of conspiring with other senior officers to take over the military. ‘There was an instant when he threatened my life’, Bainimarama said. ‘He threatened to shoot me but I hope that threat will have gone away by now.’^[30] Rather than risk the disloyalty of another land force commander, Bainimarama then appointed two chiefs-of-staff to occupy that position under his direct supervision. They were Lieutenant Colonel Pita Driti and Captain Esala Teleni, and both were to benefit considerably from their commander’s patronage after the 2006 coup. Driti was Bainimarama’s choice to become Fiji ambassador to Malaysia (though Malaysia declined to accept him) and Teleni, newly promoted from captain to commodore, became police commissioner, ensuring RFMF control of the police.

All attempts by the Qarase government to rein in the military proved futile, partly because the commander proved able to exert strong influence through military appointees in the Office of the President. Nothing about the government pleased the commander, who considered it his duty to campaign publicly against the Prime Minister and in particular against the Promotion of Reconciliation, Tolerance and Unity (RTU) Bill introduced into parliament in 2005. The RFMF responded with hostility to official attempts to reform it. The RFMF offered little cooperation to a 2004 national security and defence review and rejected outright its principal recommendation, which was to halve the size of the force. The idea surfaced again in the government’s 2006 National Security White Paper, though the re-elected Qarase government was quick to reassure the RFMF that it would not seek to reduce its size.^[31]

The White Paper, reflecting the views of the Qarase government, argued that, while the military could support the police in times of unrest, it:

The White Paper recommended that the term of the commander be reduced from five years to three years, and added: ‘This will also prevent the military as an organization from being associated with the persona of a commander, a situation which more often than not could result in the retardation of organizations’.^[32] Far from accepting government direction, the RFMF adopted Bainimarama’s own strategic plan, which called for the force to ‘maintain military capability to deter, respond and react to any contingency’ and ‘to maintain capability that responds effectively to internal crisis’.^[33]

Bainimarama came to see his original handover to civilian government in 2000 as having been conditional: ‘As Military Commander, I played a key role in the handing over of executive authority back into civilian hands in the wake of the 2000 coup. This rested on a number of critical pre-conditions being met, in taking Fiji forward.’ They were: That new elections be held; ‘all of the perpetrators of the May 2000 coup, including the military rebels, would be prosecuted’; and that ‘the 2000 coup would be publicly renounced as racially motivated’.^[34] That conditional empowerment of Qarase and his interim cabinet by the RFMF was deemed a firm mandate, unlike that arising from popular endorsement at the polls. As for the 2001 and 2006 elections, both of which returned Qarase and the SDL to power, Bainimarama dismissed them as ‘not credible’ and ‘characterised by massive rigging of votes’.^[35] So too did Mahendra Chaudhry, whose FLP found itself with a similar share of seats at both elections (See Fraenkel, chapter 8, for an assessment of the accuracy or otherwise of these claims). Ratu Epeli Ganilau headed a new party in 2006, the National Alliance Party of Fiji, but it gained only 2.9 per cent of the national vote and not a single seat. In between the two elections, Ganilau had been chairman of the GCC, but had been removed after controversies about his moderate orientation. Ratu Epeli Nailatikau had been speaker of parliament, but lost that position after the May 2006 election. He had been nominated for an overseas diplomatic posting by the new Qarase government, until the December coup landed him the foreign affairs portfolio. Election-driven hostility to the incumbent government, coupled with a rapprochement driven, above all, by opposition to the RTU Bill, permitted the FLP, the Mara loyalists among the eastern chiefs, and the military to come together in support of yet another coup in Fiji.