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SUVA - Fiji businesses are bracing for another backlash after this week's military takeover, with many shopowners simply shrugging their shoulders in resignation that they are about to suffer yet again.
Business associations have pleaded with Fiji's trading partners not to add trade restrictions to cuts in military ties because ordinary Fijians will be the victims.
"It's not just the hotels that suffer when tourists don't come," Fiji-Australian Business Council president Caz Tebbutt-Dennis said.
"It's the people who grow the fruit to sell to the hotels and the people who sell the petrol to the people who deliver the fruit to the hotels," she said.
Tourism, Fiji's biggest earner of foreign dollars, is already suffering, just as it did after the last coup in 2000 when it took four years for visitor numbers to fully recover.
Australia, New Zealand, Britain and others issued travel warnings as a months-long power struggle played out and tourist resorts are already reporting big drops in bookings.
The National Union of Hotel and Catering Employees said on Thursday that 800 of its workers had lost their jobs.
"Christmas is only two weeks away and some parents don't have money to put food on the table," the union's secretary Mikaele Ruru said.
Fiji's economy shrank 2.8 per cent after armed indigenous nationalists staged their racially motivated coup in May 2000 and similar contractions followed two military coups in 1987.
Military chief Frank Bainimarama's latest coup comes after economic growth slumped to 0.7 per cent in 2005 because the European Union began the gradual phasing out of subsidies for Fijian sugar which had propped up the outdated and uncompetitive local cane industry.
Indians make up about 40 per cent of the 900,000 population and dominate the economy but thousands, many of them well-educated professionals and skilled workers, fled after the 1987 and 2000 coups.
Business owners fear a repeat of those trends. Nand Ram, a 46-year-old Indian fruit vendor in the central Suva market, said business was already beginning to slow.
Others say that all they can do is hope.
"There's concern for everybody but we have to try to be positive, try not to be depressed. We've got to stick around, we've got staff to look after," shop manager Newton Yuen said.
The Yuen family's Yon Tong Chinese grocery has traded in Marks Road, a bustling and colourful precinct of Indian, Chinese and Fijian businesses, for 50 years.
Some shopowners in the same area were reluctant to talk because they fear a repeat of the wave of looting and arson which targeted Indian businesses in the same area after the 2000 coup. Many have already fitted metal grilles to their windows.
Racial tensions simmer below the surface in Fiji because many indigenous Fijians fear that the economic power of ethnic Indians will be matched by political clout.
The repercussions from Tuesday's coup have been rippling out of the capital to tourist resorts in the west of the main island of Viti Levu. One Australian family holidaying at a Pacific Harbour resort about 45 minutes' drive outside Suva said they had decided against visiting the capital.
"I've never seen this happen in my life and to be part of it, or nearby ... it's been a daunting experience," said Frank Giannini, from Perth in Australia's west.
The story just gets worse for Fiji's fragile economy.
Fiji's outraged neighbours have suspended military ties but remittances of $F311 million ($354 million) from overseas workers, many of them in the army and private security companies, were the second largest foreign reserve earner last year.
On Tuesday, the day Bainimarama executed his coup, Fiji's third biggest foreign reserve earner took a massive hit when South African gold miner DRDGOLD announced it had closed its unprofitable Vatukoula mine in central Fiji with the loss of 1700 jobs.
Moody's Investors Service changed its rating for Fiji's domestic and foreign currency government bonds from stable to negative following the latest coup.
"It is possible that the effect of this coup on tourism could be less than in 2000 in that it appears to have been carried out peacefully and the military commander has stated he will restore a civilian government relatively quickly," said Moody's vice-president Steven Hess.
"Nonetheless, the coup will have economic effects that need to be monitored."
- REUTERS
