Young and brave
By Sean Ransom Posted Fri, Sep 1 2000
Fiji’s young media corps had a front-row seat to a strange coup in the Islands earlier this year. On May 19 businessman George Speight led a group of armed rebels into Fiji’s Parliament, took the multi-ethnic government hostage and then waited as the nation’s military and tribal leaders gave in to his demands one by one.
The situation ended 10 weeks later, on July 26, when Speight and many of his followers were arrested by Fiji’s army. The military installed a new civilian government and called for elections in three years.
Covering this insurrection was a test for Fiji’s mostly young corps of journalists, who have an average age of 22, and average only two-and-one-half years of experience, according to University of the South Pacific journalism coordinator David Robie. Robie writes that at first, some of them had trouble determining the legality of the would-be regime. A few showed a too-swift readiness to give legitimacy to, and cozy up with, Speight’s rebellion. Fiji’s print media largely failed to give insightful and critical analysis. Even when the media performed well, mob violence forced some journalists to curtail reporting. Others gave in to threats.
Confusion over the government’s status in the days after the coup was evident in the reports filed by some of Fiji’s press organizations, Robie writes. The newspapers referred to “self-proclaimed head of state” George Speight when clearly there was only one legitimate prime minister — the hostage Mahendra Chaudhry. Likewise, after Speight named Ratu Timoci Silatolu “interim prime minister,” the media began referring to Silatolu as such. Within a week, the Fiji Sun was already calling the rebels the “Taukei civilian government,” in reference to the Taukei protest movement, which had demonstrated against Chaudhry’s government and had given tacit approval to Speight’s takeover, according to Robie.
Meanwhile, local media were missing big stories, including stories run in Australian newspapers on alleged corruption while Speight was an official in the government-operated timber industry. Speight was scheduled to be in court on May 19, the day of the coup, to explain kickbacks he allegedly received in 1998, thought to be in payment for steering timber business to an American company. Fiji’s press was late on this angle, even though Speight ran a public campaign to clear his name in the days before the coup, purchasing ads in local newspapers to tell his side of the story.
Six days after the coup began, an extraordinary full-page statement by opposition Parliament member Jim Ah Koy, reputedly Fiji’s richest man, was run in all three daily newspapers and read out in full on Fiji Television like a paid election advertisement, Robie reports. Ah Koy denied any link with the insurrection, but Fiji’s media also made a highly unethical and unprofessional decision to run Ah Koy’s bitter attack on Chaudhry and his government when the hostages’ lives were still at risk.
Robie criticizes some journalists for seeming to “bask in Speight’s glow” — something he says would rarely happen in other countries. Speight opened the Parliament compound to journalists and gave regular news conferences inside it.
Sometimes the rebels even shared meals with visiting reporters.
“We’ve seen a mass outbreak of this virulent strain of ego-journalism,” Tony Parkinson, a journalist for the Melbourne Age newspaper, told Robie. “It is not a pretty sight, and it raises an awkward ethical question: To what extent have the visiting media in Suva become unwitting accomplices in George Speight’s brutal game of brinkmanship?”
Robie writes that two attacks on journalists abruptly ended their delusions about the “nice guy” coup leader. On May 27 Associated Press camaraman Jerry Harmer was shot in the wrist during a skirmish between rebels and soldiers at a roadblock near the Parliamentary compound.
The next day Fiji Television was raided by an armed mob of some 200 men after a Close-Up panel program that focused on media coverage of the crisis and included criticisms of Speight by panel members. The mob caused an estimated US$500,000 in damage and knocked the station off the air for nearly two days.
The attack also had an unanticipated result, USP journalism student Christine Gounder writes. USP officials, who feared that mobs would also target the campus, subsequently yanked a university-run web site — Pacific Journalism Online — that posted reports about the coup written by USP journalism students like herself.
The USP news team consisted of some 20 unpaid students and played an important role in coverage of the coup. One student, who was at the Parliament at the time of the coup, was briefly held hostage, and another, Tamani Nair, broke the news of the coup while working as an intern at Radio Fiji, Gounder wrote.
The journalism program avoided the web blackout when the department of social communication and journalism at Australia’s University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) agreed to host a site carrying the students’ reports.
“This is a great example of how international cooperation and the use of the Internet can get around political censorship,” Fran Molloy, the UTS online editor told Gounder.
Gounder reports that journalists in the region were shocked that the university would cave in to rebel threats and pull the plug on the student site.
“The suggestion that journalism staff … might somehow desist from reporting … on the current situation is akin to suggesting that doctors and nurses should turn their backs on wounded people in a conflict,” says Chris Nash, director of the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism at UTS. “It is unconscionable.”
University officials eventually reversed course and restored the web site a month later, on June 28.
Despite setbacks, Robie, who covered Fiji’s 1987 coup, said the students were performing excellent work with limited transport and logistics facilities.
“I don’t know of any other journalism school that has covered an attempted coup as part of the general course program,” Robie said.
One student, Nair, became a major source of information for Fiji’s ethnic Indian community. Half-Indian and half-Fijian, Nair says he was the only Hindi-speaking reporter allowed into the Parliament compound during the crisis.
“I had to be careful not to be caught giving my Hindi reports in front of one of the guards,” Nair said, “so I would hide behind bushes, or behind a building, struggling with my Hindi report.”
The rebels’ relationship with the media soured after influential regional newspapers from Australia and New Zealand began running banner headlines like “The Madness of King George,” Robie writes. Local reporters, after hearing terms like “coup,” “insurrection” and “rebellion” from abroad, began following this lead.
Thanks to the international media, local journalists became more detached in the reporting.
The situation was partially defused on July 14 when Speight released the last remaining hostages, including Chaudhry, but he had by then appeared to have achieved most of his goals: Chaudhry’s government had been dissolved, Fiji’s constitution had been scrapped and the nation’s ethnic Indian minority, which makes up 44 percent of the population, had found themselves stripped of political rights. Speight and his rebels were given amnesty, but it was revoked on July 26 because the rebels had not turned in weapons stolen from the military. Speight and hundreds of his supporters were later arrested.
As for Fiji’s young journalists, Robie writes that, despite reporting flaws that ought to be examined, they generally performed admirably. Daryl Tarte, chairman of the Fiji Media Council, said that Fiji’s media have emerged from the ordeal freer and stronger, and has proved the value of independent media in a society.
“It has been an extremely difficult and dangerous time,” Tarte said. “Many of the reporters would never have experienced the circumstances of a coup or hostage situation. Yet in my opinion, they constantly provided viewers, listeners and readers of Fiji with balanced, accurate and interesting reports.”