Fiji

• 1. Introduction

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  Fiji is a country where the map was bent to suit the clock. The 180th meridian normally marks the place where one calendar date gives way to the next. In Fiji it runs through the island of Taveuni. The International Date Line swerves around the archipelago so that every island shares the same time, UTC+12. Officially the Republic of Fiji, the country lies in Melanesia, part of Oceania in the South Pacific Ocean. Where does the name Fiji actually come from? What did the islanders build, trade and believe before foreign ships arrived? And how did a land of rival chiefs end up ruled first by a king, then by Britain, and later by its own soldiers?

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• 2. Origins And Society

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  The word Fiji reached the wider world through the writings of Captain James Cook's expeditions, whose members met Fijians while visiting Tonga. Those writers described formidable warriors who built the finest vessels in the Pacific, though they were not great sailors. Tongans stood in awe of them and prized their manufactures, especially bark cloth and clubs. Fijians called their home Viti, a name tied to the main island of Viti Levu. Tongans said Fisi instead, and it was that foreign pronunciation, spread by Cook, that stuck. Missionaries and travellers wrote the name as Feejee, an English spelling of the Tongan sound, until the late 19th century.

  Pottery from Fijian towns points to Austronesian settlers arriving somewhere between 3500 and 1000 BC. Melanesians followed roughly a thousand years later. Scholars still argue about the exact dates and patterns of migration. Either the Lapita people or the ancestors of the Polynesians may have come first, and little is known of what became of them. Archaeology shows that some migrants moved on to Samoa, Tonga and even Hawai'i. On Moturiki Island, evidence of settlement reaches back to at least 600 BC, and possibly to 900 BC.

  Fijian culture shares some features with the Melanesian cultures of the western Pacific. Its bond with the older Polynesian cultures is stronger. Trade with neighbouring archipelagos was well established long before any European made contact. In the 10th century the Tu'i Tonga Empire took shape in Tonga, and Fiji fell within its sphere of influence. Tongan influence brought Polynesian customs and language into the islands. That empire began to decline in the 13th century.

  The drua, a large and elegant sailing vessel with rigged sails, was one of the finest things Fijians made, and some were exported to Tonga. On land, villages used a distinctive architecture of communal bure and individual vale housing. Important settlements were ringed by ramparts and moats, and wooden aqueducts carried water into villages. Pigs were domesticated for food, and banana plantations existed from an early stage.

  Chiefs, elders and notable warriors led Fijian societies. Spiritual leaders, often called bete, held an important place, and yaqona was prepared and drunk in their ceremonial and community rites. Money took an unusual form. The polished teeth of the sperm whale, called tambua, served as an active currency. A type of writing existed too, and it can still be seen in petroglyphs around the islands. Makers of masi cloth turned it into sails and into garments such as the malo and the liku.

  Warfare, or preparing for it, filled everyday life in pre-colonial Fiji. Fijians were noted for their inventive weapons, above all war clubs. These fell into two broad groups, the two-handed clubs and the small specialised throwing clubs called ula. Those clubs would eventually meet European muskets.

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• 3. Contact And Conversion

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  Abel Tasman, a Dutch explorer searching for the Great Southern Continent, became the first known European visitor to Fiji in 1643. He sighted the northern island of Vanua Levu and the North Taveuni archipelago. James Cook visited one of the southern Lau islands in 1774. The islands were not properly charted until 1789, when the castaway captain William Bligh passed Ovalau and sailed between Viti Levu and Vanua Levu on his way to Batavia, in what is now Indonesia. The strait he crossed is called Bligh Water, and for a time the group was known as the Bligh Islands.

  The first Europeans to keep up steady contact were sandalwood merchants, whalers and traders in beche-de-mer, the sea cucumber. The whaling vessel Ann and Hope, the first known to call, arrived in 1799, and many ships followed through the 19th century. They wanted drinking water, food and firewood and, later, men to crew them. Some Europeans were accepted by local people and allowed to stay. By the 1820s Levuka, on Ovalau, had become the first European-style town in Fiji.

  The market for beche-de-mer in China was lucrative. British and American merchants set up processing stations on various islands, where Fijians collected, prepared and packed the catch for shipment to Asia. A good cargo could bring a dealer a half-yearly profit of around $25,000. Workers were often paid in firearms and ammunition, so by the end of the 1820s most chiefs owned muskets and many used them well. In 1834 men from Viwa and Bau seized the French ship L'amiable Josephine and fired its cannon at their enemies on the Rewa River, though they later ran it aground.

  David Cargill was among the Christian missionaries who arrived in the 1830s from recently converted places such as Tonga and Tahiti. By 1840 the settlement at Levuka had grown to about 40 houses, and a former whaler named David Whippey was a notable resident. Captain Charles Wilkes of the United States Exploring Expedition watched the conversion unfold. He wrote that "all the chiefs seemed to look upon Christianity as a change in which they had much to lose and little to gain". Converts gave up their spiritual beliefs and were pressured to cut their hair short. They also took up the sulu, a style of dress from Tonga, and changed their marriage and funeral traditions. This enforced change was called lotu.

  Wilkes himself helped organise a large punitive expedition against the people of Malolo. He ordered an attack with rockets that worked as makeshift incendiaries, and the village burned with its occupants trapped inside. Wilkes noted that the "shouts of men were intermingled with the cries and shrieks of the women and children" as they burned. He demanded that the survivors "sue for mercy" and warned that otherwise "they must expect to be exterminated". Between 57 and 87 people from Malolo died.

  The phrase "paradise wasted on savage cannibals" shows how colonists came to see the islands. Early colonists and missionaries seized on cannibalism to give their intrusion a moral purpose, and they labelled many native customs debased or primitive. That story helped justify violence and punitive action while power passed to Europeans, and traditional Fijian spiritual beliefs suffered most. Authors such as Deryck Scarr have repeated nineteenth-century tales of "freshly killed corpses piled up for eating" and of mass human sacrifice when new houses and boats were built. Some modern archaeological studies, by scholars including Degusta, Cochrane and Jones, suggest an intermittent and ritualistic form of cannibalism. Other research doubts that it existed at all. Perhaps the most reliable account comes from William MacGregor, the long-serving chief medical officer in British colonial Fiji. During the Little War of 1876 he said that the rare tasting of an enemy's flesh was done "to indicate supreme hatred and not out of relish for a gastronomic treat".

  In the 1840s, Fijian clans fought to dominate one another, and a warlord named Seru Epenisa Cakobau of Bau Island rose above the rest. His father, Ratu Tanoa Visawaqa, held the title of Vunivalu, meaning warlord or paramount chief, and had subdued much of western Fiji. Cakobau grew strong enough to expel Europeans from Levuka for five years over weapons given to his local enemies. In the early 1850s he declared war on all Christians, but the missionaries won support from converted Tongans, and a British warship appeared. The Tongan prince Enele Maʻafu, a Christian, had settled on Lakeba in 1848 and forcibly converted its people to the Methodist Church.

  American pressure arrived through the consul John Brown Williams. In 1849 his trading store was looted after an accidental fire, started by stray cannon fire during a Fourth of July celebration. In 1853 the settlement of Levuka burned to the ground. Williams blamed Cakobau for both disasters, and the American representative wanted Bau destroyed in retaliation. A naval blockade of the island was set up instead. Cakobau's heavy taxes had also driven other chiefs, who saw him as first among equals at best, to defect.

  On the 30th of April 1854, Cakobau offered his soro, a supplication, and yielded. He underwent the lotu and became a Christian. The traditional temples at Bau were destroyed and the sacred nokonoko trees were cut down. He and his remaining men then joined the Tongans, backed by Americans and British, against chiefs who still refused to convert. Qaraniqio of the Rewa was poisoned, and Ratu Mara of Kaba was hanged in 1855. Cakobau kept the self-proclaimed title Tui Viti, meaning King of Fiji, but real control now lay with foreign powers. Only the interior highlands remained outside the new order.

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• 4. Cotton, Kingdom, Slavery

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  The American Civil War, fought from 1861 to 1865, sent cotton prices climbing and drew hundreds of settlers to Fiji from Australia and the United States during the 1860s. Land was often obtained by violence or fraud, such as trading weapons or alcohol to Fijians who may not have been the true owners. With no unified government, rival land claims piled up. In 1865 the settlers proposed a confederacy of the seven main native kingdoms, and Cakobau was elected its first president.

  On the 5th of July 1865, Ben Pease received the first licence to bring 40 labourers from the New Hebrides to Fiji. The blackbirding era had begun, with labourers from the New Hebrides and the Solomon Islands shipped in for the cotton plantations. Planters had found the local people unwilling to fit their plans, so they looked to the Melanesian islands. Contracts ran for three years, at three pounds per year, with basic clothing and access to a company store. The British and Queensland governments tried to regulate recruitment and transport. In practice most recruits were lured aboard ships with gifts and then locked up.

  In 1875 the chief medical officer, Sir William MacGregor, recorded a mortality rate of 540 out of every 1,000 labourers. When contracts expired, captains were required to return workers to their villages. Most simply dropped them at the first island they sighted. The British sent warships to enforce the Pacific Islanders Protection Act of 1872, but only a small share of the culprits were prosecuted.

  The voyage of the brig Carl in 1871 became notorious. Dr. James Patrick Murray organised it to recruit labourers, and had his men reverse their collars and carry black books so they would pass as missionaries. When islanders were drawn to a religious service, Murray's men produced guns and forced them onto boats. Murray shot about 60 islanders during the voyage. He escaped trial by receiving immunity in return for testifying against his crew. The ship's captain, Joseph Armstrong, was later sentenced to death.

  Planters pushing into the hilly interior of Viti Levu met the Kai Colo, a general term for the clans of the inland districts. They lived mostly in the traditional way, were not Christian, and stood outside the rule of Cakobau and the confederacy. In 1867 the travelling missionary Thomas Baker was killed at the headwaters of the Sigatoka River. The acting British consul, John Bates Thurston, demanded that Cakobau lead coastal Fijians against the Kai Colo. Cakobau suffered a humiliating defeat and lost 61 of his fighters.

  Settlers also clashed with the Wainimala, the eastern Kai Colo, and Thurston called in the Australia Station of the Royal Navy. Commander Rowley Lambert led an armed force of 87 men that shelled and burned the village of Deoka. More than 40 Wainimala died in the skirmish that followed.

  The confederacy collapsed, and Maʻafu set up a stable administration in the Lau Islands. Other powers, the United States among them, were weighing annexation. That alarmed the settlers, who were almost all British subjects from Australia, but Britain refused to annex. In June 1871 George Austin Woods, an ex-lieutenant of the Royal Navy, persuaded Cakobau and organised settlers and chiefs into a government. Cakobau was declared monarch as Tui Viti, and the Kingdom of Fiji began. Most chiefs took part, and even Maʻafu recognised Cakobau.

  Many settlers had come from Australia, where negotiation with indigenous people almost always meant coercion. They expected to dominate by force, and they formed aggressive, racially motivated groups such as the British Subjects Mutual Protection Society. One group called itself the Ku Klux Klan, in homage to the white supremacist organisation in America. Authority grew only when Cakobau appointed respected figures such as Charles St Julian, Robert Sherson Swanston and John Bates Thurston.

  In 1871 the killing of two settlers near the Ba River prompted an expedition of about 400 armed vigilantes. They included white farmers, imported slave labourers, coastal Fijians and veterans of the American Civil War. They fought the Kai Colo near the village of Cubu, where both sides withdrew. The village was destroyed. In the east, a vigilante squad called the Rewa Rifles burned villages on the upper Rewa River and shot many Kai Colo.

  The Cakobau government disliked vigilante justice, yet it still wanted the Kai Colo subdued and their land sold. Its answer was an army. Swanston, the minister for Native Affairs, trained and armed Fijian volunteers and prisoners as the King's Troops, also called the Native Regiment. The model resembled the Native Police in the colonies of Australia. Two settlers, James Harding and W. Fitzgerald, were appointed its head officers. Many plantation owners distrusted an army of Fijians.

  In early 1873 a Kai Colo raid killed the Burns family in the Ba River area. The government sent 50 King's Troopers under Major Fitzgerald, but local whites refused their posting. Another 50 troops under Captain Harding followed to stress the government's authority. To prove the regiment's worth, the augmented force went inland and massacred about 170 Kai Colo at Na Korowaiwai. On the way back, settlers who still saw the troops as a threat confronted them. Captain William Cox Chapman, a naval officer, detained the settlers' leaders and forced their group to disband.

  From March to October 1873, about 200 King's Troops and around 1,000 coastal Fijian and white auxiliaries campaigned through the Viti Levu highlands. Major Fitzgerald and Major H.C. Thurston, brother of John Bates Thurston, led a two-pronged attack. At the village of Na Culi the combined Kai Colo clans made a stand. Dynamite and fire flushed them out of their defensive positions in the mountain caves. Ratu Dradra, a main leader of the hill clans, surrendered with around 2,000 men, women and children, who were taken prisoner. Major Thurston crushed the last resistance, centred on the village of Nibutautau, within two months. About 1,000 prisoners were sent to Levuka, where some were hanged.

  The rest were sold into slavery and put to work on plantations across the islands. Prisoners of war had become a source of revenue. As the Cakobau government, and later the British colonial government, subdued an area, captives were auctioned to planters. This also scattered rebels to isolated islands, and their former land was sold for more revenue. The Lovoni people of Ovalau, defeated by the Cakobau government in 1871, were sold to settlers at £6 per head. Two thousand men, women and children were sold, and their slavery lasted five years. Royal Navy warnings that buying these people was illegal went largely unenforced. The British consul, Edward Bernard Marsh, regularly turned a blind eye.

  Victory did not make the Cakobau government secure. Indigenous Fijians and settlers alike refused to pay taxes, and the price of cotton had collapsed.

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• 5. Annexation And Epidemic

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  John Bates Thurston approached the British government, at Cakobau's request, with another offer to cede the islands. The Tory government of Benjamin Disraeli, newly elected, favoured expanding the empire and was readier to annex than before. Public outrage over the murder of Bishop John Patteson of the Melanesian Mission at Nukapu, in the Reef Islands, added pressure. So did the killings aboard the brig Carl. Two British commissioners went to Fiji to study annexation. Cakobau and his old rival Maʻafu each vacillated for months.

  On the 21st of March 1874, Cakobau made a final offer, and Britain accepted it. On the 23rd of September, Sir Hercules Robinson, soon to be appointed Governor of Fiji, arrived aboard HMS Dido and received Cakobau with a royal 21-gun salute. After some hesitation Cakobau agreed to give up the title Tui Viti and keep Vunivalu, which was rendered as Protector. Cakobau, Maʻafu and some of the senior chiefs signed two copies of the Deed of Cession on the 10th of October 1874. The Colony of Fiji began, and 96 years of British rule followed.

  To celebrate the annexation, Robinson, who was then Governor of New South Wales, took Cakobau and his two sons to Sydney. Measles was spreading in that city, and all three Fijians fell ill. The ship that carried the convalescents home was not quarantined, although the British well understood how infectious disease devastates a population with no prior exposure. The epidemic of 1875-76 killed over 40,000 Fijians, about one-third of the population. Some Fijians allege that the lapse was deliberate. Historians have found no evidence of that. The disease spread before the new governor and colonial medical officers arrived, and the outgoing regime had left no quarantine rules in place.

  Robinson was replaced in June 1875 by Sir Arthur Hamilton Gordon, who at once faced an insurgency of the Qalimari and Kai Colo people. Earlier in 1875 the colonial administrator Edgar Leopold Layard had met thousands of highland clans at Navuso to formalise their submission to British rule and Christianity. His delegation spread measles to the highlanders, and mass deaths followed. Anger spread, and villages along the Sigatoka River and in the hills above it refused British control.

  Gordon called the suppression the "Little War". It took the form of two coordinated campaigns in the western half of Viti Levu. His second cousin, Arthur John Lewis Gordon, fought the Qalimari along the Sigatoka River. Louis Knollys led the campaign against the Kai Colo in the mountains north of the river. Both men held absolute power under a type of martial law, outside any limit set by legislation. A force under Walter Carew and George Le Hunte, stationed at Nasaucoko, kept the two groups of rebels apart. Carew also secured the loyalty of the Wainimala of the eastern highlands, so the rebellion could not spread east.

  The army combined soldiers of Cakobau's old Native Regiment with around 1,500 Christian Fijian volunteers from other parts of Viti Levu. The colonial New Zealand Government supplied most of the advanced weapons, including 100 Snider rifles. Along the Sigatoka River the campaign followed a scorched earth policy, with rebel villages burned and fields ransacked. After the fortified towns of Koroivatuma, Bukutia and Matanavatu were captured and destroyed, the Qalimari surrendered en masse. The prisoners sent to the coastal town of Cuvu numbered 827 men, women and children, among them the insurgent leader Mudu.

  At a hastily conducted trial at Sigatoka, 15 men were sentenced to death. Governor Gordon was present but left the judging to his relative, Arthur John Lewis Gordon. Four men were hanged and ten, including Mudu, were shot, while one prisoner escaped. By the end, the governor noted that "my feet were literally stained with the blood that I had shed".

  The northern campaign was similar, but it meant removing rebels from large, well-protected caves. Knollys cleared the caves "after some considerable time and large expenditure of ammunition". Whole communities lived in those caves, so many men, women and children were killed or wounded. MacGregor took part, both in killing Kai Colo and in tending their wounded. After the caves fell the Kai Colo surrendered, and their leader, Bisiki, was captured. Trials held mostly at Nasaucoko under Le Hunte ended with 32 men hanged or shot, Bisiki among them, who was killed trying to escape.

  By the end of October 1876 the Little War was over. The remaining insurgents were exiled with hard labour for up to 10 years. Some non-combatants were allowed to return and rebuild, but Gordon ordered many highland areas to stay depopulated and in ruins. He built a military fortress, Fort Canarvon, at the headwaters of the Sigatoka River, with a large contingent of soldiers. He also renamed the Native Regiment the Armed Native Constabulary, to make it look less like a military force.

  To tighten social control, Gordon introduced appointed chiefs and village constables who carried out his orders and reported any disobedience. He gave these deputies the chiefly titles Roko and Buli. He also set up a Great Council of Chiefs, directly subject to his authority as Supreme Chief. The body survived until the military-backed interim government suspended it in 2007, and it was abolished in 2012. Gordon also ended the right of Fijians to own, buy or sell land as individuals, and passed control to the colonial authorities.

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• 6. Indenture, Resistance, War

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  On the 14th of May 1879, 463 Indians arrived in Fiji, the first of some 61,000 who came before the scheme ended in 1916. Gordon had decided in 1878 to import indentured labourers for the sugar cane fields that had replaced the cotton plantations. Contracts ran for five years, after which workers could return to India at their own expense. Those who renewed for a second five-year term could choose a passage home at government expense or stay in Fiji. The great majority stayed. The Queensland Act, which regulated indentured labour in Queensland, was also made law in Fiji.

  Ships kept arriving until 1916, and returning Indians generally boarded the same vessels for the voyage home. Records give 60,553 arrivals and 39,261 repatriates. The return figure includes children born in Fiji, so many of the indentured Indians never went back to India.

  With the colonial authorities controlling almost every part of indigenous Fijian social life, charismatic figures began preaching dissent and a return to pre-colonial culture. They won followings among the disenfranchised. The movements were called Tuka, which roughly translates as "those who stand up". The first was led by Ndoongumoy, better known as Navosavakandua, which means "he who speaks only once". He promised that if followers returned to traditional ways and worshipped deities such as Degei and Rokola, the whites and their puppet Fijian chiefs would be made subservient to them. He had already been exiled from the Viti Levu highlands in 1878 for disturbing the peace. The British quickly arrested him and his followers after this open display. Exiled again, this time to Rotuma, he died soon after his 10-year sentence ended.

  Other Tuka groups soon appeared, and the colonial administration suppressed their leaders and followers ruthlessly. Figureheads such as Sailose were banished to an asylum for 12 years. In 1891 whole villages sympathetic to Tuka were deported. Three years later, in the Vanua Levu highlands, where locals had returned to traditional religion, Governor Thurston sent in the Armed Native Constabulary to destroy towns and religious relics. Leaders were jailed, and villagers were exiled or forced to merge into government-run communities.

  In 1914 Apolosi Nawai came to the forefront of Tuka resistance by founding Viti Kabani. This co-operative company aimed to legally monopolise the agricultural sector and boycott European planters. The British and their proxy Council of Chiefs could not prevent its rise, and the Armed Native Constabulary was sent in once more. Apolosi and his followers were arrested in 1915, and the company collapsed in 1917. Over the next 30 years he was re-arrested, jailed and exiled, and the British saw him as a threat until his death in 1946.

  In September 1917 Count Felix von Luckner reached Wakaya Island, off the eastern coast of Viti Levu. His raider had run aground in the Cook Islands after shelling Papeete in the French colony of Tahiti. On the 21st of September the district police inspector took a party of Fijians to Wakaya. Von Luckner did not realise they were unarmed and surrendered unwittingly.

  Citing an unwillingness to exploit the Fijian people, the colonial authorities did not allow Fijians to enlist in the First World War. One Fijian of chiefly rank, a great-grandson of Cakobau, joined the French Foreign Legion and received the Croix de Guerre, France's highest military decoration. He went on to complete a law degree at Oxford University. He returned to Fiji in 1921 as a war hero and the country's first-ever university graduate. As Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna, he became the most powerful chief in Fiji and shaped the early institutions of the modern nation.

  By the Second World War the United Kingdom had reversed its policy, and many thousands of Fijians volunteered for the Fiji Infantry Regiment. It was commanded by Ratu Sir Edward Cakobau, another great-grandson of Cakobau, and served attached to New Zealand and Australian army units. In the Solomon Islands campaign Fijians gained a reputation for bravery, and one war correspondent described their ambush tactics as "death with velvet gloves". Corporal Sefanaia Sukanaivalu, of Yucata, was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross for his bravery in the Battle of Bougainville.

  Because of its central location, Fiji was chosen as a training base for the Allies. Gun emplacements studded the coast, and an airstrip was built at Nadi. That airstrip would later become an international airport.

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• 7. Independence And Coups

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  A constitutional conference in London in July 1965 opened the road to responsible government. A. D. Patel led the Indo-Fijians in demanding immediate full self-government, with a fully elected legislature chosen by universal suffrage on a common voters' roll. The ethnic Fijian delegation vigorously rejected this. They feared losing control of native-owned land and resources if an Indo-Fijian dominated government took power. The British made clear that they were determined to bring Fiji to self-government and eventual independence, and the chiefs chose to negotiate the best deal they could.

  A cabinet system of government followed in 1967, with Ratu Kamisese Mara as the first Chief Minister. After Patel died in 1969, Sidiq Koya took over the mainly Indo-Fijian National Federation Party. Talks between Mara and Koya led to a second conference in London in April 1970. It agreed a compromise electoral formula and a timetable for independence as a sovereign nation within the Commonwealth. A bicameral Parliament would replace the Legislative Council, with a Senate dominated by Fijian chiefs and an elected House of Representatives.

  The House had 52 seats. Native Fijians and Indo-Fijians each held 22. Of those, 12 were communal seats filled by voters on strictly ethnic rolls, and 10 were national seats, allocated by ethnicity but elected by universal suffrage. The remaining 8 seats went to "general electors", meaning Europeans, Chinese, Banaban Islanders and other minorities, with 3 communal and 5 national.

  The Union Jack was lowered for the last time at sunset on the 9th of October 1970 in the capital, Suva. The Fijian flag was raised after dawn on the 10th of October, and the country had officially become independent at midnight.

  Two military coups in 1987 interrupted democratic rule. They followed a growing perception that the Indo-Fijian community dominated the government. The second coup replaced the monarchy and the Governor General with a non-executive president. The country's name changed from Dominion of Fiji to Republic of Fiji, and then in 1997 to Republic of the Fiji Islands. The coups and the unrest around them drove heavy Indo-Fijian emigration. The resulting loss of population caused economic difficulties and made Melanesians the majority. A 1990 constitution then institutionalised ethnic Fijian domination of the political system. The Group Against Racial Discrimination formed to oppose it and to restore the 1970 constitution.

  Sitiveni Rabuka, the lieutenant colonel who carried out the 1987 coup, became Prime Minister in 1992 after elections held under the new constitution. Three years later he set up the Constitutional Review Commission. The constitution it wrote in 1997 was supported by most leaders of the indigenous Fijian and Indo-Fijian communities, and Fiji was re-admitted to the Commonwealth of Nations.

  In 2000, George Speight instigated a coup that toppled the government of Mahendra Chaudhry, who had become the country's first Indo-Fijian Prime Minister in 1997. Commodore Frank Bainimarama assumed executive power after the resignation, possibly forced, of President Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara. Later that year two mutinies broke out when rebel soldiers went on a rampage at Queen Elizabeth Barracks in Suva. The High Court ordered the constitution reinstated. A general election in September 2001 was won by interim Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase's Soqosoqo Duavata ni Lewenivanua party.

  In 2005, Qarase's government proposed a Reconciliation and Unity Commission with power to recommend compensation for victims of the 2000 coup and amnesty for its perpetrators. Bainimarama, the nation's top military commander, strongly opposed the bill and called amnesty a sham. His attacks continued through May, June and July and strained his relationship with the government. He later issued a list of demands to Qarase, with an ultimatum date of the 4th of December to accede or resign. Qarase refused both.

  On the 5th of December 2006, President Ratu Josefa Iloilo signed an order dissolving parliament after meeting Bainimarama. Citing corruption, Bainimarama staged a military takeover against the prime minister he had installed after the 2000 coup. He named Jona Senilagakali caretaker prime minister. On the 4th of January 2007 the military announced it was restoring executive power to Iloilo. The next day Iloilo named Bainimarama interim prime minister, which showed the military was still effectively in control. Reports emerged of intimidation of some critics of the interim regime.

  In April 2009 the Fiji Court of Appeal declared the interim government illegal, and Bainimarama agreed to step down. President Iloilo instead abrogated the constitution and removed all office holders under it, including every judge and the governor of the Central Bank. In his own words he "appointed himself as the Head of the State of Fiji under a new legal order". He then reappointed Bainimarama as interim prime minister. He also imposed a Public Emergency Regulation that limited internal travel and allowed press censorship.

  On the 2nd of May 2009, Fiji became the first nation ever suspended from the Pacific Islands Forum, for failing to hold democratic elections by the promised date. It remains a member. On the 1st of September 2009 the Commonwealth of Nations suspended Fiji as well. The Commonwealth had demanded elections by 2010 after the 2006 coup. Bainimarama said he needed more time to end a voting system that heavily favoured ethnic Fijians at the expense of multi-ethnic minorities. Critics claimed that he had suspended the constitution and was responsible for human rights violations by arresting and detaining opponents.

  In his 2010 New Year's address, Bainimarama announced the lifting of the emergency regulations, but they were not rescinded until January 2012. The Suva Philosophy Club was the first organisation to reconvene public meetings. He also announced a nationwide consultation leading to a new constitution, under which the 2014 elections were held. The official name of the country reverted to Republic of Fiji in February 2011.

  On the 14th of March 2014, the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group changed Fiji's full suspension to a suspension from the councils of the Commonwealth. That allowed it to join activities including the 2014 Commonwealth Games, and the suspension was lifted in September 2014. A democratic election took place on the 17th of September 2014. Bainimarama's FijiFirst party won 59.2% of the vote, and observers from Australia, India and Indonesia judged the election credible.

  In 2018, FijiFirst won with 50.02 per cent of votes and held its outright majority with 27 of the 51 seats. The Social Democratic Liberal Party came second with 39.85 per cent. In October 2021 parliament elected Tui Macuata Ratu Wiliame Katonivere as president. In the 2022 election FijiFirst lost its majority. On the 24th of December 2022 Sitiveni Rabuka, head of the People's Alliance party and backed by the Social Democratic Liberal Party, became the nation's 12th prime minister, succeeding Bainimarama.

  The Republic of Fiji Military Forces number 3,500 active soldiers and 6,000 reservists, including a navy unit of 300 personnel. Relative to the country's size, that is a fairly large force, and Fiji has been a major contributor to United Nations peacekeeping missions around the world. A significant number of former personnel have also worked in the lucrative security sector in Iraq since the 2003 invasion led by the United States.

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• 8. Islands, Climate, Economy

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  Fiji lies about 1,100 nautical miles north-northeast of New Zealand, roughly 5,100 kilometres southwest of Hawaii and about 3,150 kilometres from Sydney. It sits midway between Vanuatu and Tonga. The group has 332 islands, of which 106 are inhabited, plus 522 smaller islets. Of a total area near 194,000 square kilometres, about 18,300 is land. Viti Levu and Vanua Levu make up about three-quarters of that land. Most of the islands formed through volcanic activity beginning around 150 million years ago. Some geothermal activity continues on Vanua Levu and Taveuni, while the geothermal systems on Viti Levu are non-volcanic, with low-temperature surface discharges.

  About 87% of Fijians live on the two major islands, and about three-quarters live on the coasts of Viti Levu. Many are in Suva, while others are in smaller centres such as Nadi, where tourism dominates, or Lautoka, where sugar cane does. Terrain leaves the interior of Viti Levu sparsely inhabited. Mount Tomanivi, the highest point, rises on Viti Levu, and island peaks reach 1,324 metres under thick tropical forest. Labasa and Savusavu are the main towns of Vanua Levu. Taveuni and Kadavu are the third and fourth largest islands, the Mamanuca and Yasawa groups are popular with tourists, and the remote Lau Group includes Ono-i-Lau, the most outlying of all. Rotuma, 220 nautical miles north of the main group, has special administrative status.

  Fiji contains two ecoregions, tropical moist forests and tropical dry forests. In 2018 it had a Forest Landscape Integrity Index mean score of 8.35 out of 10, ranking it 24th of 172 countries. Conservation International Fiji has supported protected-area initiatives, including work contributing to the Sovi Basin Conservation Area on Viti Levu. It has also carried out mangrove-focused blue carbon work at Navitilevu Bay in Ra Province.

  The climate is tropical marine and warm all year, with few extremes. The warm season runs from November to April, and the cooler season from May to October, when temperatures average 22 C. Rain is heavier in the warm season, especially inland, and falls more on the southeast sides of the larger islands than on the northwest. Cyclones strike about once a year, or 10 to 12 times per decade. Rising seas, coastal erosion and extreme weather make climate change an exceptionally pressing issue, with tourism, agriculture and fisheries, the largest contributors to the economy, at risk. Fiji is a party to the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Climate Agreement, and it hopes to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. With Niue, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Tonga and Vanuatu it launched the "Port Vila Call for a Just Transition to a Fossil Fuel Free Pacific", which urges a phase-out of fossil fuels and the introduction of the crime of ecocide.

  Endowed with forest, mineral and fish resources, Fiji has one of the most developed economies in the Pacific, though a large subsistence sector remains. Marion M. Ganey introduced credit unions to the islands in the 1950s, which helped that sector progress. Natural resources include timber, fish, gold, copper, offshore oil and hydropower, and gold mining is based in Vatukoula. Rapid growth in the 1960s and 1970s gave way to stagnation in the 1980s, and the 1987 coups caused further contraction. Economic liberalisation afterwards created a boom in the garment industry. Sugar production has declined as leases expired and efficiency fell, despite subsidies from the European Union, yet sugar processing still makes up one-third of industrial activity. The currency is the Fijian dollar. The main sources of foreign exchange are tourism, remittances from Fijians working abroad, bottled water exports and sugar cane.

  Tourists numbered 430,800 in 2003, and arrivals reached 894,389 in 2019, up from 754,835 in 2015. Australia, New Zealand and the United States are the biggest sources of visitors. Popular regions include Nadi, the Coral Coast, Denarau Island and the Mamanuca Islands. Fiji has a significant number of soft coral reefs, and scuba diving is a common activity. Official statistics show that in 2012-75% of visitors said they came for a holiday. Honeymoons are especially popular. CNN named Laucala Island Resort one of the fifteen most beautiful island hotels in the world.

  Hollywood has been filming in Fiji since Mr Robinson Crusoe in 1932. The Blue Lagoon in 1980 starred Brooke Shields, and Return to the Blue Lagoon in 1991 starred Milla Jovovich. Cast Away followed in 2000, and Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid in 2004. The American version of the reality show Survivor has filmed all of its semiannual seasons in the Mamanuca Islands since its 33rd season in 2016. Two 39-day competitions are typically filmed back to back, the longest consecutive period Survivor has spent in one location. Before the 35th season aired, host Jeff Probst told Entertainment Weekly that the Mamanucas are the optimal location and that he would like to stay there permanently.

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