So, the ongoing strategy and tactics of the Commodore – even since the 2000 coup – need to be more clearly and carefully defined so they can be understood. I wonder: is not the slow-motion, carefully crafted strategy of the Military Commander, over this decade, and with his more recent efforts to slow down Fiji’s return to parliamentary democracy, not part of his ongoing determination to weed out the “dangerous leaven” he perceives within the military itself, from officers who are not militaristic, from officers who have not bowed the knee to the military idol and who refuse to do so?
Here’s my “two bob’s worth”. First, try and think about what happened in Fiji in a global context where, more and more, the US has become the dominant peace-keeper around the world. Think of the efforts of President Woodrow Wilson to make the world “safe for Democracy”. Insightful commentary has suggested that this was an attempt to do for the early 20th century what Emperor Constantine the Great did when he made the Roman Empire safe for Christianity many centuries before that.
And so, what has been the long-run impact of the American effort to “make the world safe for democracy”, after the Great Depression, the Second World War, the cold war, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the war on terror? The US has increasingly been involved in a process which, by its military might, renders the world susceptible to US-type leadership, if not US type control. Usually American imperialism goes like this – “We are the ones who by our historical calling will prevent any (other) nation from engaging in imperialism.” The US is the world-stage actor which wants to be known as anti-imperialist – and we might say they are the anti-imperialist imperialists.
Under President Bush the US as a nation – with all its power and control – has, more and more, become deeply anxious about itself, about its ability to keep itself safe, about its own ability to promote freedom and democracy, let alone prosperity, let alone make the world a safer place “for ever”. And GWB’s militarism simply brought that anxiety to fever-pitch.
Now, think about the coups in Fiji of December 2006 and Good Friday 2009, and the rationale given for them by the Military Commander, and also by all of his over-anxious apologists wherever they have been found. What have they been saying? What have they suggested the coups have been about? These coups are allegedly about making Fiji safe for all Fijian citizens, (the coup to end all coups etc etc) but, from this distance, it seems quite obvious that this has been a massive and repeated failure which simply winds up the military’s own levels of anxiety and paranoia. This creates further hardship for all of Fiji’s peoples. It is nothing less than a series of repeated attempts to find a safe path for the nation to take in order to make Fiji safe for Fiji’s military! That’s my suspicion about these last two coups – making Fiji safe for Fiji’s military.
The arguments, when they have been given, have been little more than poor attempts to suggest that Fiji cannot be a safe place for democracy until Fiji is a safe place for the Fiji Military (and thus any laudable search to reform the military gets taken up within the military by those who want to make the military a safe haven for all those who have engaged in treason and justified the recent and previous coups).
Clearly Fiji’s own emergent parliamentary democracy was viewed as a massive threat to Fiji’s own military and especially to those who nurture a desire to maintain a militaristic faith at the heart of the republic’s life.
But not all soldiers are militarists. Not all soldiers worship the military idol. And, it would seem, that those soldiers are precisely the ones who have long threatened the militaristic regime and its pretensions. Are they not the “enemy within” to the ruling junta? So we note that the Military Commander, by continuing down this path, to ensure his own safety under his version of militarism, has actually changed this institution into something else, something at odds with its founding mandate. Hitherto the RFMF has given Fiji reason to be proud of its place among the nations; but that is well and truly in the balance. The question is: when will those who reject the worship of the military idol within the RFMF, among the Chiefs, and in the Methodist Church and other political parties, stand up and together refuse to bow?
No comments:
Post a Comment