Fiji Problem
This in from a correspondent of ours:
Thought you might be interested in this, which I've sent to the PM, Winston, Mikky Cullen, Ron Mark, Leighton Smith, Rodney Hide Gerry Brownlee and Bill English
Methinks 'tis time for a modicum of good old-fashioned honesty, credibility, and integrity. This was sent to me by Thakur Ranjit Singh, a migrant from Fiji who is concerned about the way New Zealand is trying to undermine the progress of the return to a non corrupt government. It has been claimed that the "democratically elected government" was not above some dodgy dealings involving the Fiji Holdings Limited, no doubt more information will be forthcoming in due course. Jim Sowry, Warkworth
Michael Green and Field cannot blame others for their Fiji expulsion
Thakur Ranjit Singh, Auckland, New Zealand
If NZ Government claims that the expulsion of Michael Green came as a surprise then it is a white lie. This is because the NZ government was warned about Michael Green's behaviour some four months earlier by members of Fiji community in Auckland.
NZ Labour Party had been concerned with its falling ratings and intelligence that Fiji's migrant community had been unhappy with its uncompromising and insulting attitude towards Fiji. To gauge the feeling, it commissioned a meeting with Fiji's community leaders in Auckland at Ministry of Internal Affairs office where I was in attendance. The meeting was attended by a NZ Labour Party Minister, a listed Member of Parliament and leaders of Fiji community.
The meeting was told about Michael Green's behaviour towards the military regime as well as people of Fiji seeking services from NZ High Commission. It was reported that Michael Green was very close to Qarase regime and could not fathom the fact that he would no longer be in the cocktail circuit after Qarase's removal in December last year.
Subsequent to that it was recently revealed to me by an Auckland taxi driver where one of his Kiwi passengers reportedly told him that Michael Green was cross with the military because his brother had been involved in some investment in Fiji under SDL regime, and that was on hold at the moment. This I have not been able to confirm, and perhaps is a job involving some investigative journalism. Therefore it has yet to be revealed whether Green's wrath with the military was professional or personal.
We need to see how Fiji citizens got treated by Michael Green's regime at NZ High Commission in the Reserve Bank Building where the Commission is based. Before the coup, anybody seeking services could go up to their offices but after December, people were herded outside the building where you had to queue like herd of Kiwi sheep to seek services, in sun rain and storm.
While Australian High Commission could issue visitors visa in just ten days, NZ High commission took at least 30 days. An aunt of mine who is mother of two leading journalists in Fiji has applied for her visa to visit Auckland so see her sick brother in early April, 2007 but has only got her visa in June, only when the sponsor from Auckland had to call NZ High Commission.
New Zealand professes itself as a country leading in productivity, yet the time it takes them to process visas in Fiji after December shames them when compared to Australians or any other Embassy in the world. Perhaps it would be interesting to know how many unprocessed visa applications are held by NZ High Commission in Fiji today. It would run into thousands, and perhaps the reason why Air Pacific had to cut back on flights, as increasingly larger numbers of Fiji people are visiting New Zealand now.
Every man and his dog either applying for a NZ visa or already on NZ work permit were made to fill forms declaring that they were not related anyway to Frank Bainimarama. Under Michael Green's regime, you were your brother's keeper. Joe Rokocoko's fiancée, daughter of former military spokesperson had her work permit not renewed because she accidentally happened to be daughter of her father, while her cousin, bearing the same surname was denied a NZ scholarship because of accident of birth.
While Helen Clark and Winston Peters are political animals, Michael Green is not. He is supposed to be a respected career diplomat, but he revealed little evidence of this. Merely dancing to tunes of political leaders, who come and go, is not a very good habit for any astute civil servant. As the Commander recently said, we cannot argue about the legality of the events. We must be pragmatic and understand that Military was governing the country with the mandate of the President.
He failed to appreciate the reality of the situation and has now paid a heavy price for it.
The other Michael also came into prominence. The supposedly expert in Pacific affairs, Michael Field was detained at Nadi on the eve of marching orders to Michael Green and deported the following morning to New Zealand.
On 20th December, some two weeks after the removal of Qarase regime, Coalition for Democracy in Fiji held a panel discussion on Fiji affairs in Auckland. Apart from Suliana Siwatibau and N Z MP Keith Locke, I was also one of the speakers. Michael Field also attended this forum. In my presentation which was reported in Fiji as well as NZ papers, I revealed the ills of Qarase regime. The theme of my presentation was that: democracies that are devoid of or lacking in granting freedom, rights and equality to all its citizens and those without social justice are not worth defending. Qarase's regime that Bainimarama removed was an epitome of such a democracy. Michael Field did not report any part of my presentation. I am not cross that he did not report me but he displayed acute case of dereliction of media ethics in not telling Kiwis what they deserved to know.
Michael Field works for a very influential NZ mainstream media which shuns migrants as its journalists. When you look around at the paternalistic NZ mainstream media, they profess to be experts in Pacific affairs but hardly employ any sizable Fiji or Pacific journalists, as they rely on Kiwi parachute journalist to cover Pacific issues, and hence New Zealand's jaundiced views on Pacific.
While Michael Field had a strategic position to inform ignorant Kiwis on the actual Fijian politics, he missed this opportunity and abused his position in joining the bandwagon in calling the military thugs from day one and failed to reveal the shortcomings of Qarase to NZ. It is surprising that I as a migrant to New Zealand was made to reveal the actual truth about atrocities under Qarase's regime. I have difficulty in getting articles to mainstream media in NZ because the perception here is that migrants cannot write.
If Michael Field was indeed the veteran journalist then he should not have abused his position and status in keeping Kiwis ignorant about what was really happening in Fiji. My experience shows that like NZ Labour Party, New Zealanders generally are still ignorant about Fiji and this had to do with a journalist like Michael Field who while occupying an influential position indulge in news selling reporting rather than informative reporting.
Therefore the two Kiwi Michaels, both Green and Field had it coming. It is not only Bainimarama who needs to learn the art of Diplomacy, but on his return to NZ, Green needs to attend a course on diplomacy himself. Michael Green needs to be pragmatic about the situation as the interim administration was governing the country and decides what it does. As a diplomat, he was not a politician and hence should have respected Fiji's sovereignty.
And it is so important for New Zealand mainstream media to have Pacific or Fijian journalists reporting on Fiji issues and informing the ignorant Kiwis on local politics, so that they get the correct picture.
But unfortunately, the mainstream media in New Zealand is in no hurry to use Fiji journalist who have migrated to New Zealand, and will depend on jaundiced views from parachute journalists from New Zealand. Unfortunately, such views appear to get copied as New Zealand's foreign policy in the Pacific.
E-Mail: thakurji@xtra.co.nz
(About the Author: Thakur Ranjit Singh is Fiji migrant to NZ, commentator on Fiji issues and is human rights activist and advocate of good governance.)
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Another intriguing view of the expulsion of New Zealand's High Commissioner was a blog posting from Micheal Tarry's blog titled Magnus Frater Spectat Te.
This is an excerpt:
Fiji: It's an independent country now.
Sovereignty is a difficult and complex thing. Philosophers in several countries, in several centuries, in several notable tomes, have considered the concept. Thinkers from Aristotle to Bodin to Mill to Schmitt and others have thought and pondered, and each has a different position. Each has dismissed their predecessor, and each in turn was dismissed by their successor.
It would seem that the nature of sovereignty presents conundrums without answers at all; indeed, asking the political theorist to define sovereignty is akin to asking the theologian to define God, or the metaphysicist to define love.
Similarly, asking the theorist to determine who may exercise sovereignty and what rights and prerogatives such a sovereign might have would be like asking our theologian, having defined God, to tell us why we ought to believe in Him and not some other deity, or of our metaphysicist, who once setting out what constitutes love, is then called upon to tell us why, as the case might be, love is limited to relations between people and not animals.
The problem of sovereignty has been brought to the attention of this part of the world by the expulsion of the ambassador of New Zealand to Fiji by that country's current leader. The New Zealand High Commissioner, Michael Green, was ordered to leave Fiji by it's military ruler, Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama because the latter had believed Green was interfering in Fijian domestic political matters.
Consequently, and understandably, governments across the Pacific have vented their collective spleen upon Bainimarama. One simply cannot go about expelling diplomats left and right. New Zealand and Australia talked of upping the ante with more sanctions, and our Prime Minister declared that Cabinet (which met this morning) would "weigh up it's options." Such is well and good, and Helen Clark is welcome to consider her position all day and well into the night.
In doing so, she would merely be exercising her right to make whatever decisions she likes as the leader of a sovereign and utterly independent country. New Zealand is it's own master: we have cocked snooks before at the United States, and the United Nations, and Australia, and China, and anyone whom we don't particularly wish to kowtow before on such-and-such an issue.
We lose all semblance of having anything approaching the moral high-ground when it is realised that Fiji, like New Zealand, is a sovereign state. Bainimarama's government can expel whomever it pleases, whenever it pleases, entirely upon whim. Clark could do precisely the same for such is what sovereignty allows.
Crawford (in 1979) wrote "Sovereignty does not mean actual equality of rights or competences: the actual competence of a state may be restricted by its constitution, or by treaty or custom. The term sovereignty accurately refers not to the totality of powers which all states have, but to the totality of powers which states may, under international law, have." It doesn't matter whether we approve of Fiji's sovereign actions - we don't need to. We didn't approve of the coup - we didn't need to.
We condemned it, certainly, and we can heap opprobrium and sanctions upon Fiji for the reminder of eternity but it will not diminish in the least the existence of Fijian sovereignty and concordantly the prerogative of Fiji to do whatever it damn well wants within it's own borders. If they want coups galore, so be it: there's nary a thing we can or should do to prevent it. If they want to expel our ambassadors and ignore our entreaties, so be it: we have ignored their demands before.
If New Zealand does succeed in getting it's own way, then we will have proved only one thing. We will have shown that we are merely bullies of the sort we usually disapprove of. We will have refuted the principle that "sovereignty is the ultimate territorial organ which knows no superior." We will have trumped Bodin and his fellows, and will have added our own name to the list of philosophers-of-sovereignty who simply beg to be rebutted.
Interesting enough, the issue of sovereignty was raised last year as reported by Island Business article that, accused Australia of breaching it. Along with ignoring the moral dimensions raised by Journalist Graham Davis in his article.
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