Nightmare continues for Fiji's prisoners of fear

Almost a year after George Speight led a coup attempt in Fiji, some people are still paying a high price, as MATHEW DEARNALEY reports.

Their forebears arrived in Fiji as fodder for the British Empire's sugar industry.

Today they are languishing behind high protective fences in a "sanctuary camp" at a centre opened in 1979 by since-assassinated Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

There is a tragic irony in the camp's location, in Fiji's northwestern sugar capital of Lautoka. For the centre was built as a centennial memorial to the sacrifices of the more than 60,000 Indians brought to Fiji over four decades from 1879 in the hope of a better life under the girmit (indentured labour) system.

India had been a cheap labour source for other British colonies and Fiji's first governor, Sir Arthur Gordon, was keen to avoid the disruption to Fijian village life that local recruitment into the sugar plantations would have entailed.

Like their ancestors, who were initially crowded into a quarantine centre on the same island on which coup leader George Speight is held on a treason charge, the Lautoka camp's 156 remaining residents have little notion of what lies in store for them.

Fiji's unelected caretaker Government claims that Fiji Indians are exaggerating their plight for political purposes, but everyone I spoke to in the camp insisted they were too terrified to return to whatever may be left of the homes they fled nine months ago.

Most arrived at the Fiji Girmit Centre camp from the remote provinces of Tailevu and Naitasiri, inland from Suva, after watching their homes being looted or burned by Speight supporters.

At the camp they at least have plenty of new tents to live in, provided by expatriate Fiji Indian communities - part of a diaspora stretching from Auckland and Sydney to Vancouver.

The New Zealand Government also donated $5250 to the Red Cross in Fiji for the camp. But Auckland cafe owner Anit Singh, who temporarily shut his business last year to rush to Fiji to organise the camp for the Fiji Human Rights Group, is irked that the Red Cross deducted more than $1500 against the costs of its own food aid.

Britain has denied a claim by the rights group that it pledged more than $300,000 for the camp, saying there may have been some confusion over a fund it established to support Fiji "in its efforts to promote peace and conciliation."

Fiji's interim Government, which is preparing for an election in August but retains the right to prohibit political meetings, says the coast is clear for camp residents to return to their own districts safely, with grants of up to $5260 to rebuild or repair their homes.

Some of last year's peak population of 343 - which included two babies born in the camp - have taken up the offer. But residents say most of those who have left are too scared to go home and instead are struggling to start new lives elsewhere.

The camp's most celebrated resident, Chandrika Prasad, fled to New Zealand amid fears for his safety after he won a court case challenging the legality of the military-backed Government installed after last May's coup.

Four students from the camp have also come to New Zealand for tertiary study, under a scholarship established by a Fiji Indian liquor-store owner, Pradeep Chand, after he won almost $2 million at Auckland's Sky City casino.

Camp cook and secretary Naren Prasad, a former restaurateur and farmer, who describes seeing his neighbours' house being burned down by thugs, says his wife and three children aged 4 to 8 are too traumatised to trust offers to return to their home with no guarantee of security. His children, who are among the camp's 46 junior residents, cannot forget hearing screams before their panic-stricken neighbours managed to break down a back door and flee, he says.

During an earlier raid, when rebels took over the Tailevu police station, his family spent three days hiding outside. Several women were raped, he says, but are too ashamed to be identified.

His own home, which he built recently for $24,000, was stripped of its contents. "My children say they do not want to go back to the place where they had to sleep in the bush."

The Fiji Human Rights Group says five families at the camp had their homes razed, almost everyone has lost their possessions, and it has interviewed at least four rape victims.

One elderly man died of a heart attack while thugs were stoning his house and a woman was burned to death in her home at Nausori, north of Suva, in August after receiving threatening phone calls.

Naren Prasad says the interim administration has not given one cent to those choosing to stay at the camp, even though many have become sick or listless through an inadequate diet of mainly rice and dahl (split pea soup).

There has been one outbreak of mosquito-borne dengue fever, and residents frequently visit the local hospital.

Camp coordinator Beni Sami says airport officials have held up a shipment of 1.5 tonnes of food from Australian-based Indians for almost two months while demanding storage and excise fees of more than $2000. He says local donations have fallen off as ordinary people in Fiji, including hundreds laid off from two Lautoka garment factories, face economic hardship.

Eight live chickens arrived during the Herald's visit - a donation from a local merchant - and were promptly killed and plucked for the pot. The camp has impressive rows of vegetable gardens, from which some produce is sold to help with school fees and other costs.

Many residents also take pride in tending flower plots around their 3.7m by 2.7m tents. Their modest clothes appear clean and tidy despite sanitary problems exacerbated by tropical rains.

At the end of March, a senior police officer assured camp residents that no crimes had been reported in their home area since mid-January, when a cow was stolen. Returning families had even started planting vegetables.

But just days later, arsonists in Tailevu set fire to the house and truck of an Indian cartage contractor who said he had lived peacefully with his neighbours for more than 30 years. Attar Khan told the Fiji Times it took three calls to the police to get help, as receptionists thought he was playing an April Fool's prank.

The Fiji Human Rights Group's New Zealand chairman, Papatoetoe lawyer Sanjay Sharma, says one family returned to the district with a modest allocation of building materials, only to have them stolen the next day.

Naren Prasad says he wishes his late grandfather had stayed in northern India rather than take the bait of a free trip to Fiji early last century.

"I know life is hard in India, but at least the people there have some say. Here we think of ourselves just like slaves. We have no freedom, no rights."

His grandfather, Shu Shankar Maharaj, intended returning to India after completing a five-year indenture term, for a shilling a day, in a sugar plantation at Rakiraki on the northern coast of Fiji's main island, Viti Levu.

But he married another indentured labourer, who would have earned the female rate of ninepence a day, and the couple headed into the interior to put down roots as peasant farmers.

Many others, once out of contracted service in which some were treated little better than animals, were eventually able to lease land for their own sugarcane farms but were rarely allowed the security of freehold title.

Hundreds of their descendants are now being served with notices of eviction from land they have occupied and worked for many years.

Maharaj and other crop farmers who moved inland to get away from the tyranny of sugarcane-growing co-existed in relative harmony with their Fijian neighbours, although the two races have tended to live on opposite banks of the broad Rewa River.

Camp matriarch Ram Pati is an exception - she lived among the indigenous people, and speaks their language, having learned it from her Fijian stepmother. But even that was not enough to spare the 77-year-old widow - Speight supporters razed her house and slaughtered her beloved horses.

Two of her 10 children live in Auckland, and she has a multiple-entry visa to stay with them, but her four grandchildren at the camp don't want her to leave. She is sad and angry that some children were kicked by thugs who told them to leave their homes or get killed.

Sami, a farmer whose house was looted, says his gravest concern is the emotional scars left on the children.

"Our children don't want to see indigenous Fijians," he says.

Visits by Fijian church groups bearing food and prayers are helping to win back their confidence. But he dares not speculate on what the future might hold for the youngest inheritors of Fiji's colonial legacy.

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