Commodore Frank Bainimarama’s Easter break was unusually short.

While the rest of the country was on holiday over the long weekend, Bainimarama stepped down as interim Prime Minister following the Fijian Court of Appeal’s ruling that the December 2006 dismissal of the Laisenia Qarase Government and the appointment of his interim Government in its place were illegal. But just a day later he was in back in business as Caretaker Prime Minister.

The development has led to an unprecedented constitutional crisis of a kind that has shocked the Western world into silence.

Though state lawyers applied for a stay on the decision, the Court, comprising Justices Ian Lloyd, Randall Powell and Francis Douglas, refused to grant it. The Court ruled that the President had no authority under the 1997 Constitution to appoint an interim Government, which President Ratu Josefa Iloilo did in February 2007 that supposedly legitimised Bainimarama’s December 2006 military action. But at the same time, the Court also asked the President to appoint a new interim Government with the proviso that neither Bainimarama, Qarase nor anyone from the former’s interim Government should be appointed as the interim Prime Minister.

The President responded to this contradiction in his address to the nation: “I note with interest that the Court of Appeal has said that the appointment of the Interim Government is invalid because it was not in accordance with the Constitution as I had no express written powers to appoint it. The court however has said that I should appoint a third person as the caretaker prime minister when there is no written provision in the Constitution for appointing such a third party.”

Given the situation, the President decided to abrogate the Constitution, sacking the entire judiciary. In the process, the country was left not only without a Prime Minister but also both without legislature and judiciary. In this complete political vacuum, he appointed himself the President, clamped on a state of emergency for the next month – and of course brought Bainimarama back as caretaker Prime Minister.

Bainimarama has denied that he advised the President in the hours following the Court of Appeal ruling but the events that followed leave little room for doubt that there was some sort of understanding between the President and the army chief.

Several factors point to this: The speed with which Bainimarama stepped down and “returned to the barracks,” as the Fijian media reported, almost immediately on hearing the Court’s ruling apparently with little or no deliberations with his powerful –and increasingly belligerent– military council on his decision to step down indeed sounds unusual.

Having abrogated the Constitution on the grounds that he had no Constitutional sanction to appoint a new government, now as in February 2007, President Iloilo could well have respected the spirit of the Court’s proviso that neither Bainimarama nor Qarase be appointed as the new Prime Minister.

Instead, he chose to hurriedly reappoint Bainimarama under the pretext that the country faced a political crisis that had the potential to spiral into a violent civilian one and therefore needed the military to be in charge – which, given the situation sounds plausible but many in Fiji feel would have been unlikely. In fact there was some jubilation that the interim government had stepped down and there was expectation that here was a chance for a way out of the two-year long crisis.

President Iloilo did not think it fit to consider any other option – one of which could well have been appointing an interim Administration with a set of widely acceptable prominent apolitical, neutral citizens drawn from a cross section of Fijian society – assisted by the military forces to maintain law and order. Sensible as it may sound, that was clearly not an option for the President under his so-called “New Legal Order”.

In the absence of a Constitution, the country is being ruled by decrees: the President is expected to issue a series of them (five already issued), which will be enforced by the re-appointed military administration in the coming months (possibly years, if one goes by the President’s statement that elections would not be held before 2014).

The first decree to have been issued is about the state of emergency, section 16 of which asks the media to be “responsible” in their reporting. The managements of media outlets have been informed that a Ministry of Information official and a policeman in civilian clothes would be placed in their newsrooms.

The publishers and editors of two of the country’s dailies were questioned for leaving blank spaces in their Sunday editions in protest of the censorship. Overseas correspondents reporting on the crisis have also been questioned and deported with some of reports f their equipment being seized.

Fiji Times’ pulled its social networking SotiaCentral website on Easter day sending the following message to members: “The new Fiji Interim Government has issued regulations requiring publishers to first submit all content to Government officials for clearance before publishing it. Because you, not we, generate this content, we are unable to comply. Accordingly, sotiacentral.com has been taken down until further notice.”

Last weekend’s developments have not only thrown the international community’s two year long efforts to work with Fiji to bring back democracy – however sporadic and slow they might have seemed – to a grinding halt, but also left it completely stupefied at how it should possibly respond to this new chapter of extreme uncertainty that may well have pushed the island nation over the brink.

The Pacific Island Forum’s deadline imposed on the regime in February this year to come up with a plan by May 1 to hold elections before the end of 2009 as well as the Commonwealth’s September 2009 deadline are now completely meaningless.

There is little doubt that over the past two years, the Fijian military has dug its roots deep into the island’s soil and the international community has long lost the window of opportunity of engaging meaningfully with Bainimarama, following instead a relentless policy of isolation of driving his regime to the corner.
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A version of this article appeared in the New Zealand Herald on April 15, 2009