Fiji’s military ruler defied international pressure to announce elections by yesterday, confirming that he would not hold them for at least five years and setting the stage for his country’s ouster from a South Pacific bloc.
“I think we made it quite clear that is not going to happen,” military chief Commodore Frank Bainimarama told Australia’s Sky News TV in an interview broadcast yesterday.
“There will be no elections until September 2014,” he said.
Bainimarama ousted the ethnic Fijian-dominated government in a 2006 coup and installed himself as prime minister. He has vowed to rewrite the Constitution and electoral laws to remove what he says is discrimination against the country’s large ethnic Indian minority before holding elections.
The Pacific Islands Forum, a key 16-nation bloc that includes Australia and New Zealand, had given Fiji until yesterday to announce elections for this year.
New Zealand Foreign Minister Murray McCully said there would be “an immediate trigger” for Fiji’s suspension once the deadline passed at the end of the day.
Under the suspension, Fiji would be barred from all the forum’s meetings and lose out on development funding until a democratic government is restored.
“You’ve got a dictator up there now who doesn’t want to listen to anybody else other than himself,” New Zealand Prime Minister John Key told Radio Dunedin yesterday, ramping up his rhetoric against the regime.
“My view is that they will be automatically suspended from the forum and I think you may see similar reaction from other bodies like the Commonwealth,” he said, referring to a group of 53 countries that are mostly former British colonies.
Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said yesterday that Fiji had shown “no intention to return to democracy and on the contrary has torn up its constitution.”
He said because Bainimarama had failed to meet the deadline, Fiji would be suspended from the forum after midnight.
But a defiant Bainimarama reiterated his refusal to schedule polls before 2014 and said there was no need to suspend his country because no one was being killed in the streets.
“If it was up to me, we would remove Australia and New Zealand from the forum. They’re putting undue pressure on the Pacific islands,” Bainimarama said in an interview on Sky News.
He said censorship laws would be extended when they expire later this month, because “we want this calm to continue for a while.”
“If I don’t muzzle the press, is it going to bring extra food on the table?” he said.
“That’s the way things should happen in Fiji — rugby back on the front page,” Bainimarama said.
Bainimarama said within two weeks he would announce a five-year timetable for reforms leading to the 2014 elections.
“We have to get rid of racism in the country in the next five years,” he said, referring to the long-standing conflicts between indigenous Fijians and ethnic Indians. Bainimarama is an indigenous Fijian.
He also called for Australia and New Zealand to be expelled from the Pacific Islands Forum, saying the were putting undue “pressure on the Pacific Islands and that’s not how we operate.”
People with missing teeth might be able to grow new ones, said Japanese dentists, who are testing a pioneering drug they hope will offer an alternative to dentures and implants. Unlike reptiles and fish, which usually replace their fangs on a regular basis, it is widely accepted that humans and most other mammals only grow two sets of teeth. However, hidden underneath our gums are the dormant buds of a third generation, said Katsu Takahashi, head of oral surgery at the Medical Research Institute Kitano Hospital in Osaka, Japan. His team launched clinical trials at Kyoto University Hospital in October, administering an experimental
IVY LEAGUE GRADUATE: Suspect Luigi Nicholas Mangione, whose grandfather was a self-made real-estate developer and philanthropist, had a life of privilege The man charged with murder in the killing of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare made it clear he was not going to make things easy on authorities, shouting unintelligibly and writhing in the grip of sheriff’s deputies as he was led into court and then objecting to being brought to New York to face trial. The displays of resistance on Tuesday were not expected to significantly delay legal proceedings for Luigi Nicholas Mangione, who was charged in last week’s Manhattan killing of Brian Thompson, the leader of the US’ largest medical insurance company. Little new information has come out about motivation,
‘MONSTROUS CRIME’: The killings were overseen by a powerful gang leader who was convinced his son’s illness was caused by voodoo practitioners, a civil organization said Nearly 200 people in Haiti were killed in brutal weekend violence reportedly orchestrated against voodoo practitioners, with the government on Monday condemning a massacre of “unbearable cruelty.” The killings in the capital, Port-au-Prince, were overseen by a powerful gang leader convinced that his son’s illness was caused by followers of the religion, the civil organization the Committee for Peace and Development (CPD) said. It was the latest act of extreme violence by powerful gangs that control most of the capital in the impoverished Caribbean country mired for decades in political instability, natural disasters and other woes. “He decided to cruelly punish all
NOTORIOUS JAIL: Even from a distance, prisoners maimed by torture, weakened by illness and emaciated by hunger, could be distinguished Armed men broke the bolts on the cell and the prisoners crept out: haggard, bewildered and scarcely believing that their years of torment in Syria’s most brutal jail were over. “What has happened?” asked one prisoner after another. “You are free, come out. It is over,” cried the voice of a man filming them on his telephone. “Bashar has gone. We have crushed him.” The dramatic liberation of Saydnaya prison came hours after rebels took the nearby capital, Damascus, having sent former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad fleeing after more than 13 years of civil war. In the video, dozens of
RSS