Fiji Labour Party 'was poised to oust Chaudhry'

ADELAIDE - Fiji's deposed multi-racial Government had been set to dump its ethnic-Indian leader, Mahendra Chaudhry, but was pre-empted by the May 19 coup, says a senior Australian diplomat.

The Australian High Commissioner to Fiji, Sue Boyd, said Chaudhry's Labour Party could have averted the political crisis that has racked Fiji if it had acted more quickly to quell rising indigenous discontent in the South Pacific nation.

"What is actually ironic is that our friends in the Fiji Labour Party tell us that they themselves had decided that Mahendra Chaudhry had to go," Boyd told Australian Broadcasting Corp radio, ahead of her return this week to Fiji.

"[We were told] that they had resolved that at their party meeting the following week [after the coup] that they would ask him to step down and put in his deputy, Tupeni Baba, who is an indigenous Fijian ... as Prime Minister," she said.

"Had that happened maybe a week before ... the crisis may have been averted." Boyd's confirmation of reports that Chaudhry's party planned to dump him came as he was in India as part of an international tour to rally support for his deposed Government.

Nationalist rebels led by failed businessman George Speight seized Chaudhry and held him hostage, along with most of his cabinet, including Baba, for 56 days as they pressed their demands for indigenous Fijian political domination.

Boyd said Australian diplomats did not believe Chaudhry had been trying, as some indigenous Fijians feared, to advance ethnic Indian interests at the expense of indigenous rights.

"But the problem was he did not manage the perception of his policies very well. He didn't sell his message well."

Thousands of indigenous Fijians had marched in anti-Chaudhry protests through the capital, Suva, in the weeks before the coup. Boyd was withdrawn from Fiji last month by the Australian Government in protest over the coup.

- REUTERS