Despite this, does Bainimarama enjoy the complete support of his officers and men? In his message to the troops in January 2007, Bainimarama spoke of the ‘RFMF family’ and linked it to family values, ‘I would like to remind all service personnel of one of the core values of the RFMF which is the ‘FAMILY’. As the larger RFMF family we need to re-look at our goals for our individual families and what we hope to achieve at the end of this year’.^[63] The RFMF plays the role of a ‘new vanua’ for ordinary soldiers, whose first loyalties in former times would have been to their chiefs and provinces. It offers lucrative salaries to ethnic Fijians who might otherwise be trapped in their villages or be part of the urban and peri-urban unemployed. Many expected, at the height of the 2000 crisis, that the RFMF would splinter along provincial lines and disintegrate. In fact, the army cleverly avoided pitting province against province, sending soldiers from Tailevu to suppress villagers in Wainibuka (Tailevu) in July 2000, and soldiers from Naitasiri, Rewa and Tailevu to arrest Speight’s supporters at the Kalabu School outside Suva (in Naitasiri). Since then, Bainimarama has worked assiduously to unify the RFMF, first by abolishing the CRW unit and, since, by repeatedly purging the force of dissident officers, and offering soldiers support with their problems and difficulties. The result is that when chiefs appealed to soldiers to return to their provinces after the RFMF takeover in 2006, most remained in the barracks (even if the reservists showed little enthusiasm for the call to duty). Tui Namosi Ratu Suliano Matanitobua was one of a number of chiefs who called on his people to abandon the RFMF:

The RFMF responded by forging ties with dissident lineages in Namosi, and establishing provincial groupings of soldiers to denounce the opposition to the coup, a strategy which had considerable success.

On the other hand, there is reason to doubt that Bainimarama has succeeded in convincing his force of the rightness of his multiracial and modernizing philosophy. Fijians have traditionally looked to the RFMF as their protectors in a multi-ethnic society and regarded their soldiering as an ethnic Fijian achievement – a view confirmed in both 1987 and 2000, when military intervention had the effect of returning the country to ethnic Fijian government. Yet in 2006 the mostly Fijian officers and soldiers were asked to believe that the country’s problems arose in large part from the fact that the government was favouring Fijians too much. They were called upon to support a commander who denounced Fijian institutions such as the GCC and the Methodist Church as threats to national security, and who installed Fiji’s leading Indo-Fijian politician as a senior minister in the new government. The military remained loyal to their commander, but there were also hints of discontent. Former Papua New Guinea defence force commander Jerry Singirok, who once had ties with the RFMF leadership, said he thought ‘about 90% of the officers within the Fiji military force would like to see Fiji go back to democratic government’ but were not in a position to influence events.^[65] A number of key senior officers left the RFMF in the wake of the 2006 coup.^[66] Coup opponent and human rights advocate Angie Heffernan also claimed that there was a danger of a split in the military.^[67] The subtext was that a return to democratic government would mean a return to power of Qarase and his pro-Fijian SDL party, something many soldiers might be expected to welcome.

Bainimarama sees both himself and the nation as under siege from threats of all kinds. At the UN General Assembly he told the world that he had overthrown the Qarase government in 2006 with good reason:

The coup culture was a threat, so was the Qarase government and its corruption, and so too were Australia and New Zealand because they failed to support his decisive intervention on behalf of good governance, the very thing they had demanded from Fiji for so long. As if those threats were not enough, the interim government claimed in November 2007 to have uncovered a plot to assassinate Bainimarama and a number of his ministers. Police arrested sixteen alleged conspirators, whose names read like a who’s who of people against whom Bainimarama had a grudge: They included Naitasiri paramount chief, Qaranivalu, Ratu Inoke Takiveikata and his brother-in-law and former land force commander Jone Baledrokadroka, Colonel Metuisela Mua, SDL national director Peceli Kinivuwai, a number of soldiers from the disbanded CRW unit that had supported the coup in 2000, and the millionaire businessman Ballu Khan, a New Zealand citizen who suffered a skull fracture from injuries inflicted by the police after his arrest.^[69]

Whether the assassination plot was genuine, or whether Bainimarama orchestrated the arrests on trumped-up charges – as seems more likely – there is no doubt that he and his military force want to recast the constitutional order in a way that both justifies past and legitimizes future military intervention. When a general election occurs again and when an elected government takes office, the RFMF seems likely to continue to exercise power in the affairs of Fiji, maintaining the option to intervene again whenever it deems fit. When the civil society groupings that attached themselves to the NCBBF demanded, for the sake of true neutrality, that the constitutional position of the RFMF be under consideration in the deliberations, the army’s top brass welcomed this, seeing it as an opportunity to establish permanent control over the ministry of home affairs. The elected civilian government that eventually returns to power will have a tough job carving out for itself anything like the autonomy of its predecessors.