Only bad boy we can afford to heavy
Greg Sheridan,
Foreign editor
The Australian
November 05, 2009 12:00AM
THE Rudd government has mishandled the Fiji situation from the start. This is a classic case of moral grandiloquence producing absolutely rotten outcomes.
We live in a very nasty world. The Taliban murders people by the hundreds in Afghanistan and Pakistan and boasts about how many girls' schools it blows up.
Most of the nations in our large aid budget are mired in corruption and governance crises.
A good part of Africa is struggling to avoid being failed states. In our own neighbourhood, the Melanesian world, you cannot find an unequivocal success story.
There's not much we can do about all this. But there's one thing we can do. We can beat up on Frank Bainimarama in Suva.
This is the true rule of international relations. The strong do what they will, the weak give what they must.
China can beat up on us because it's big and we're small. And we hear very little of jailed Australian executive Stern Hu these days. We can beat up on Fiji because in this case we're big and it's small.
Of course, the morality of our actions is different.
Bainimarama came to power in a coup. His political plans, which once had a touch of coherence, have totally unravelled.
This, too, is partly because of external pressure. By some accounts Bainimarama is now determined not to give up power because he fears that, out of power, he would be prosecuted, either by a future Fijian government or by some expression of that fatuous construct, the international community.
This might almost be a textbook case of how international law retards the resolution of real world problems, if in fact it's impossible now to negotiate Bainimarama out of office.
But perhaps the most important aspect of Bainimarama's rule is that he hasn't killed anybody since he came to office. That doesn't make him a good dictator. His determination not to restore democracy is wholly objectionable. But it does make him an almost unique dictator.
Undoubtedly, Australia can crush Fiji. There are not many countries about which you can say that.
If we want to we can isolate Fiji, destroy its economy, impoverish its people, radicalise its Melanesian militants, set the army on a violent path, expose the Indian population to who knows what in the chaos that might follow. We sure can do that if we want to.
Surely the Sri Lankan judges thinking of taking on Fiji government appointments could have been left to work out all for themselves that they might come under our (ill-advised) travel bans, without our telling them so before they took up their appointments.
Now we don't have a high commissioner in Fiji and they don't have one here. Congratulations, Canberra, a brilliant result.
We are in grave danger of making a very bad situation much worse. We can certainly isolate and punish Fiji with unique effectiveness, if we want to.
God knows why anyone in Canberra thinks it's a good idea.
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