SYDNEY, (Reuters) – The Commonwealth, Australia and New Zealand called on Fiji’s military ruler, Commodore Frank Bainimarama, to hold credible elections and restore democracy after he announced an end to emergency laws imposed since 2009.
The Commonwealth suspended Fiji and its two more powerful neighbours, Australia and New Zealand, imposed sanctions after a bloodless coup in 2006.
Bainimarama, who took power in the 2006 coup and imposed emergency laws in 2009 prohibiting protests and censoring the media, announced in a New Year’s message that the emergency laws would end in February.
Commonwealth Secretary-General Kamalesh Sharma said that was a positive step but added he hoped there would be “credible elections and the return of a democratically elected government without further delay”.
“We do want to see action. We do want to see democracy restored,” Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard told a news conference in Sydney today.
Bainimarama said consultations would start in February on a constitution to replace one annulled in 2009, at the height of a political crisis over his rule.
In 2009, a court ruled that Bainimara’s coup was illegal, but then president Ratu Josefa Iloilo responded by annulling the 1997 constitution, and reappointed Bainimarama as prime minister the next day, along with his government. Bainimara then imposed emergency laws.
Fiji has suffered four coups and a bloody military mutiny since 1987, mainly as a result of tension between the majority indigenous Fijian population and an economically powerful, ethnic Indian minority.
Bainimara said he wanted to end the ethnic tension.
Any new government must be founded on “a truly democratic system based on the principle of one person, one vote, one value; we will not have a system that will classify Fijians based on ethnicity”, he said.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch say democracy activists in Fiji have been arrested and beaten, some sexually assaulted, under the military’s emergency laws.
Any criticism of the military has been stifled. Fiji’s media must now be at least 90 percent owned by Fijians permanently living in Fiji. In 2010 Rupert Murdoch’s Australian News Limited was forced to sell The Fiji Times, the oldest and largest of the country’s newspapers, to local interests.
Fiji’s journalists can be punished for publishing material the military deems “against the public interest or order, or offends against good taste or decency” and there are military censors in every media office.
The emergency laws also required trade unions in Fiji to re-register and virtually ended the right to strike.
In December, Fiji’s military refused entry to a trade union delegation from Australia and New Zealand which planned to investigate allegations of human and labor rights abuses.
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