Indian and Fijian share pain

By WARREN GAMBLE

Jioji Tikodei tells off his boss Krishna Lal as they read about the uprising ruining their homeland.

Mr Lal had been grinning at Mr Tikodei's description of attempted coup leader George Speight as "your bald-headed friend."

"No smile," said Mr Tikodei as a photographer readied the camera. "It would be no good to have the Fijian Indian smiling and not me."

Beneath their good humour at the Auckland taxi business Mr Lal runs and Mr Tikodei drives for, neither is happy at the racial divisions being fanned by the armed overthrow of Mahendra Chaudhry's Government.

Mr Tikodei, an indigenous Fijian who has lived in Auckland for 12 years, condemns the actions of Speight, his supporters and Suva's looters as wrong, illegal and sinful.

"This is the work of some power-hungry, failed business people and failed politicians.

"What some Fijians have done is just jealousy of the Indian race because they are ahead in education and commerce because they just work harder for it."

Watching television reports of the armed takeover, the looting and burning last Friday, Mr Tikodei said it made him sick and very sad: "I feel very bad because I see my own people, men, women and children doing this."

Across town, an ethnic Fijian Auckland University student said she was so ashamed of the attempted coup she did not return to her classes until Thursday.

Salote - she did not want her real name used for fear of harassment at home - believed the race issue was a mask for a deeper frustration Fijians had with their own leadership.

"It's really stupid for right-thinking Fijians to blame the Indians because they have done so much work for Fiji," she said.

"Without the Indian community Fiji would not be in the [economic] position it is now.

"They have nowhere else to go. Fiji is their home and they deserve the right to be Fijians."

Salote said the real seeds of the present crisis lay in the failure of successive ethnic Fijian Governments and tribal leaders to address the plight of ordinary Fijians.

Governments had focused on big infrastructural projects, such as roading, instead of bringing basics like electricity and running water and better education to villages.

The Great Council of Chiefs and its district and village councils had been more worried about retaining land in Fijian ownership than caring whether the land was productive.

Salote said her husband's indigenous family were kicked off their sugar cane farm near Nadi when the lease expired in 1998 after being subjected to threats from the Fijian village owners. Two years later, the land is still barren.

Mr Tikodei acknowledged he had been sympathetic to the 1987 coup, but had seen the damage and division it had caused to the country and its people.

He bristles at Speight's pronouncements on indigenous rights when he is not even a full-blooded Fijian and has now ignored the basic protocol of not questioning chiefly decisions.

Krishna Lal said he despaired at the future of the homeland he left after the 1987 coup. "Everyone wants to leave now, especially if we lose the right to vote.

"Even if this is sorted out there is no confidence it won't happen again; if someone doesn't like the rules, they will just take in their guns."

Mr Tikodei and Mr Lal's easy friendship - which extends to the occasional home visit and kava session - appears to be a reflection of the limited but warm interaction between the city's large Fiji Indian community, estimated at 45,000, and the 3000 or so indigenous Fijians.

Auckland's Hindi-language station, Radio Tarana, said that among the thousands of talkback calls since Friday, it had received several from ethnic Fijians sympathetic to the plight of Prime Minister Chaudhry and the other hostages.

The station itself has taken an editorial stand to avoid or cut off callers who try to spread racial division on the airwaves.

Managing director Robert Khan said the station did not want to make a bad situation worse. "The crisis is in Fiji, the crisis is not here. The last thing we want is to have that sort of problem here."

Mr Khan, who came to New Zealand from Fiji as a 13-year-old, said indigenous Fijians were a regular, if small, presence at Indian festivals and nightclubs.

"The Indian and Fijian communities are doing well here, they have fitted well in this society.

"If they can't do it in Fiji, it doesn't mean we can't do it here."

More Fiji coup coverage

Main players in the Fiji coup

Under seige: map of the Parliament complex