One of the few universally acknowledged achievements of current Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka is how his Coalition has ended almost all the restrictions that have strangled the local media since December 2006.
But it wasn’t always thus. The 1987 version of Rabuka was terrifying. The one man who would stand up to him in his own understated and deliberative way was Vijendra Kumar, the editor of The Fiji Times from 1975 to 1991. Mr. Kumar worked out Rabuka quickly. An article in The Age printed the day after May 14, 1987, said The Fiji Times editor had spoken with the coup leader for two hours after he had taken control of Parliament in the morning.
“(Rabuka) does not have anything more than a soldier’s brain,” Mr. Kumar was quoted as saying.
By the time of Fiji’s second coup – in September 1987 – Mr. Kumar told The Independent he had met the army leader and de facto prime minister a further two times.
“He seems personable, gentle, and reasonable to meet. But he changes his mind according to who he talks to.” Those were the tricky parameters that Mr. Kumar had to work with. The local media was the obvious friction point between a country and her people that on Thursday, May 13, 1987, had exulted in being the Pacific’s most talented and meritocratic young nation, disputatious yet joyful.
Just a day later, thanks to that fateful injection of coup-culture to our body politic, Fiji was being hammered into a grim, self-dealing monoculture by Rabuka’s military and his ethno-nationalist supporters. The press was now expected to be an unthinking and obedient tool of state communication.
Unless you lived through those weeks, months, and years, you can have no idea how painful and chaotic things were, as we tried to process the shredding of everything that we thought we knew and loved about Fiji. The Fiji Sun responded by blowing up after the first coup like a Roman candle with coverage that was dramatic and punchy but ultimately doomed.
They published an extraordinary series of broadsides against Rabuka and those he asked to lead Fiji forward.
In Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, the jaded servant Enobarbus could have been talking about the Fiji Sun and not his boss, Mark Antony, when he lamented: ‘When valour prays on reason, it eats the sword it fights with.’
The Fiji Sun ate its own sword in the end, not even making it to the end of 1987, the owners laying off the entire staff.
By contrast, Mr. Kumar’s leadership of The Fiji Times was stoic and pragmatic. He was reason personified and calmness manifest. Every day, Mr. Kumar must have steeled himself to stare down the commonplace thuggery of those Rabuka years, and the intellectual awfulness of so many banal minds suddenly holding such commanding levers of power. But his eye was on the bigger prize: striving to keep the country’s relationship anchored with The Fiji Times, to keep her lights on, printing presses rolling and staff employed.
That daily diet of Hagar the Horrible, Madhur Mittal from Bollywood, Robert Keith-Reid’s Sidetracks, Jo Dimuri from Labasa, the Fiji Sixes, Bharat Jamnadas in the courts, Seona Smiles on Sundays, Nadi Airport aircraft movements, Mesake Koroi’s flying byline and The Phantom (of course), gave us a reassuring handhold to a past that we all trusted and understood while the present and future slithered and skidded wildly in front of us.
We all made it through in the end, as readers, as citizens and, for a precious few, as members of one of the most special newsrooms in the world led by an oh-so-modest man of genuine majesty and absolute integrity. Thank you Mr. Kumar for teaching us that it is the courage to continue that counts the most.
CHARLIE CHARTERS was a sub-editor and sportswriter with The Fiji Times from 1988-1990.