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PORT MORESBY - Fiji's military leader has suggested New Zealand and Australia are callous for demanding he attend a regional summit while his country struggles to recover from deadly floods.
Both countries have expressed anger over coup leader Frank Bainimarama's refusal to attend next week's meeting of regional leaders in Papua New Guinea.
Members of the 16-nation Pacific Islands Forum will meet in Port Moresby on Tuesday to discuss possible new sanctions against Bainimarama's regime for failing to keep a promise to hold democratic elections by March.
Earlier this week, Bainimarama said he would not attend because he needed to lead relief efforts after recent deadly floods in Fiji. He called for the meeting to be deferred.
But New Zealand and Australia on Wednesday said Fiji's self-appointed interim prime minister owed it to forum delegates to attend.
He must offer a personal explanation for his failure to restore democracy following his December 2006 coup, said New Zealand Foreign Minister Murray McCully and his Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith .
The two agreed the meeting should proceed even if Bainimarama failed to show, but on Thursday he insisted he was needed at home and would not bow to pressure.
"My mind and soul is here in Fiji with what's happening here. You tell the Aussies and the Kiwis, there is a disaster here, full-stop," Bainimarama told AAP.
He said Fiji's flood disaster, which has claimed 11 lives, was not a poor excuse for his absence from the Port Moresby summit.
"Everyone should know my reasons," he said.
"Don't they know that's there is a disaster happening here in Fiji?"
He said it was up to forum members to decide if Fiji would be expelled from the grouping.
"That's for them to decide, not me. It's their call," he said.
Bainimarama has failed to live up to promises he made at a forum meeting in Tonga in 2007 that free and fair elections would be held by the end of the first quarter of this year.
- AAP