Expelled historian laments subverted rule of law
ACADEMIC duty and a sense of outrage drove Brij Lal to speak out against Fiji's military-installed prime minister, Frank Bainimarama, for expelling Australian and New Zealand diplomats over alleged judiciary interference two weeks ago.
Retribution was swift. The Indo-Fijian Australian citizen was soon detained. His three-hour interrogation included an hour of haranguing by a lieutenant-colonel, after which Lal agreed to leave Fiji within 24 hours.
"I take the view that if we don't speak up for certain fundamental values of civilised society, then who will?" the Australian National University history professor says. "I think it's the role intellectuals, academics, responsible citizens everywhere have.
"There is something fundamentally wrong when a military overturns the verdict of the ballot box and if we keep quiet in those circumstances then we have failed our duty."
Lal was born in Fiji and has made its study his life's work. He was on a four-person panel convened in 1995 to make recommendations for a new, non-racial constitution .
"We toured around the country and took 800 oral and written submissions from people, so we conducted a kind of national dialogue about what kind of political arrangement was right for Fiji."
The 1997 constitution that resulted was not reframed exactly as Lal and his colleagues recommended. In it, 46 of 71 seats were reserved on the basis of ethnicity and 25 were open, the reverse of their suggestion. But it was still an important step from what had gone before, giving formal recognition and independence to the Great Council of Chiefs (and thus depoliticising it) and mandating that any party that won more than 10 per cent of the vote would be represented in government.
That was the momentwhen Fiji had a chance of becoming a liberal parliamentary democracy, Lal says. "There was a real possibility for an element of power-sharing, but the constitution was not given long enough to prove its worth," he adds...
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Retribution was swift. The Indo-Fijian Australian citizen was soon detained. His three-hour interrogation included an hour of haranguing by a lieutenant-colonel, after which Lal agreed to leave Fiji within 24 hours.
"I take the view that if we don't speak up for certain fundamental values of civilised society, then who will?" the Australian National University history professor says. "I think it's the role intellectuals, academics, responsible citizens everywhere have.
"There is something fundamentally wrong when a military overturns the verdict of the ballot box and if we keep quiet in those circumstances then we have failed our duty."
Lal was born in Fiji and has made its study his life's work. He was on a four-person panel convened in 1995 to make recommendations for a new, non-racial constitution .
"We toured around the country and took 800 oral and written submissions from people, so we conducted a kind of national dialogue about what kind of political arrangement was right for Fiji."
The 1997 constitution that resulted was not reframed exactly as Lal and his colleagues recommended. In it, 46 of 71 seats were reserved on the basis of ethnicity and 25 were open, the reverse of their suggestion. But it was still an important step from what had gone before, giving formal recognition and independence to the Great Council of Chiefs (and thus depoliticising it) and mandating that any party that won more than 10 per cent of the vote would be represented in government.
That was the momentwhen Fiji had a chance of becoming a liberal parliamentary democracy, Lal says. "There was a real possibility for an element of power-sharing, but the constitution was not given long enough to prove its worth," he adds...