The Always Enligthened Jean D’Ark

This post was a comment by Jean D’Ark on HydeNceek’s blog, in response to Interim Attorney General Aiyass Khaiyum’s constitutional blunder in the appointment of Koila Nailatikau in accepting the position of Constitutional Boundaries Commissioner. As always the thinking behind Jean D’Ark’s comments show a level of maturity and objectivitythat is sadly lacking in the current Interim Regime. Go on Jean tell them like it is, we need more people like you!!

If the Military Council was really interested in dealing with Fijian development problems, they would approach it in a different kind of way that didn’t alienate the very people they were trying to help.

No – the recent divisive and provocative statements by the Military Council and Frank against Fijians, points us to who their real audience actually was.

That audience was the FLP support-base (and the Diplomatic Corps), and the reason was to make sure they stay “on-side” with the IG while the economy continues to struggle and the Sugar Restructure remains under a cloud. I also think it strongly points to the likelihood that some “bad news” is on the way in next month’s budget. So this is probably just an advance propaganda campaign to pacify a possible FLP revolt (or split) beforehand.

As we know, FLP supporters have always been more sensitive to economic pain than the broader Fijian electorate. FLP supporters were always the loudest critics of the ousted Government even when small things went wrong with the economy. So in light of that more sensitive and hardnosed FLP attitude, the Military Council needs to make sure they’re distracted with political “sleights of hand” like this, since things are clearly worse post-coup on the economic front.

The IG already has little real Fijian support to speak of! So once the FLP grass-roots support-base begins to equate the downturn in their own personal circumstances with the false promises and poor performance of the IG, many Indo-Fijians may also begin to turn on it, too. Then the Regime will start to become truly isolated, unpopular and untenable. So it will be “divide and rule” all the way by the MC as long as the economy stays sick.

It’s not hard to follow the Military Council’s cynical propaganda plotting in all this since 2003.

Their coup history and their refusal to re-install the then-elected Government post-2000 meant that they had badly alienated the Indo-Fijian population by that time. On the other hand, their handling of the 2000 coup and its aftermath, also alienated a significant chunk of the Fijian population.

So when Frank decided in 2001 that he was going to remove Qarase, the first problem he had to deal with was the military’s political isolation from most Indo-Fijians and many conservative Fijians.

No problem! A change of political persuasion is a cinch for someone who has no real political convictions (or whose ethics extend only to “ends-justify-the-means”). People like Poseci Bune, Jim Ah Koy, Kavekini Navuso, Epeli Ganilau and the late Isireli Vuibau do it all the time when there are opportunities to be had.

So the military leadership re-invented itself politically, and all of a sudden we started hearing strident political statements from Frank about a host of nameless and obscure “national security” dangers related to certain Government policies which nobody else could really perceive or appreciate. These public shenanigans carried on sporadically for years, damaging economic confidence and the military’s professional reputation, but also slowly “turning” its PR fortunes amongst its former political enemies amongst the Indo-Fijian electorate.

By November 2003, the Indo-Fijian electorate had almost entirely “fallen” for the military’s propaganda campaign designed to woo them. Additionally, the internal purge and sidelining of possible opponents in the officer corps was complete by then, too.

Now all they needed for their coup was to either neutralize Fijian opposition, or possibly even recruit Fijian support.

Time for a new propaganda façade then!

And so after almost four years of public military attacks on the Government of the day that related almost exclusively to national security concerns, all of a sudden we started hearing about the anti-corruption “clean up” and nearly nothing else.

Let me just re-state here that the clean-up theme was chosen solely because of its propaganda value to the military. Not because they really cared about clean-up, but simply because that is what they calculated was their best chance of getting Fijian support after having already “pocketed” the support of the majority of the Indo-Fijian electorate.

That “clean up” propaganda campaign theme continued unabated until just recently – the military leadership sticking doggedly to it despite being unable to turn up any “smoking gun” evidence of corruption against any member of the ousted Government. Again, they could ignore reality like that because their original decision was entirely a propaganda policy one which had nothing to do with reality, or of what they actually thought about it!

Well, not that this mattered because the expected backlash from the Fijian community never eventuated anyway. And besides, now they had a new and greater problem – the International community!

So, you guessed it – time for another propaganda re-invention! This time, their coup message was re-engineered to the egalitarian and anti-racist “tastes” of the Diplomatic Corps in an effort to “gloss over” the illegality of the coup and garner international support regardless. And so yet again, the public of Fiji suddenly started hearing a new propaganda emphasis from the IG/MC – this time a “non racial” one which had only ever been mentioned in passing prior to that.

Frank’s speech to the UN was a classic example. It was well-written and noble and would have been well-received at home if it had even the tiniest connection what actually transpired in Fiji over recent years (or with the actual major motivations of the MC/IG). However as I said before, these political re-inventions have more to do with the military imperatives for the “success of the coup mission” (and staying out of jail) than they do with what these people actually believe.

Despite the very clear cynicism in the military council’s contrived propaganda artifices, such “spin doctoring” is not unusual in politics. What is unusual though, is the bald-faced audacity of trying and spin their way out of such blatant crimes as treason, murder, torture and wrongful-dismissal, etc. Intelligent people in Fiji and abroad do not appreciate having to put up with such horror in the first place, let alone the insult of dimwit military propaganda conspirators telling them brazen and shameless lies that a coup is not a coup!