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Cover

The burnt out remains of an Indian restaurant following the May 2000 hostage crisis and associated ransacking of Suva’s
commercial district. Photo: I, Anton Leddin, CC BY-SA 3.0

OPENING FIJI’S CAN OF WORMS

Continued from page 12 the elders, the parents who will do the reconciliation. Many
times, the victims and offenders are not included in the
Later in the year, the government moved a motion in process. That’s the gap that I’ve seen in the reconciliation
Parliament to set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. process that we have in Fiji.”
Fijian Army Commander, Major General Jone Kalouniwai Mahendra Chaudhry defied Speight’s demands to resign
has in recent months expressed the military’s need to as Prime Minister while he and his government were held
acknowledge past wrongs and seek reconciliation with those at gunpoint for 56 days inside Parliament during the 2000
affected by its actions. Nata sees Kalouniwai’s comments as takeover.
momentous “because if there is any player or institution that “Hundreds of families in remote areas of Tailevu and the
could derail the present effort for national reconciliation, it North were displaced and driven homeless; thousands of
would be the military.” families were separated or had to flee the country. The coup
This month, Kalouniwai announced the military will engage makers owe all these people an apology, at least, for the
in a trauma healing program with the families of the three immense pain and suffering caused,” Chaudhry told Islands
Counter Revolutionary Warfare (CRW) soldiers who were killed Business.
during a mutiny at the Queen Elizabeth Barracks in November He says people like Nata and Timoci Silatolu, a former
2000, months after the Speight takeover of Parliament ended. politician sentenced to life imprisonment for being part of
After the mutiny was quelled, the military tortured and killed the Speight takeover, have done their time and must now be
four rebel soldiers, with the head of the mutineers, Captain invited to assist the reconciliation process and in establishing
Shane Stevens court-martialled in 2002 and sentenced to life the truth behind the May 2000 coup.
in prison. Another 14 were jailed. Baleinakorodawa agrees that disclosure is essential to the
Paulo Baleinakorodawa is a Fiji-based peacebuilding national healing process, including finding out who was behind
practitioner, trainer and facilitator who has worked the coups.
extensively in the Pacific and Asia in conflict prevention “People have to tell the truth. And that’s why we need
and transformation, trauma healing, restorative justice, to prepare people to tell the truth. Because it’s not an easy
reconciliation, dialogue, and gender-based violence. thing to do [and] because it’s politically motivated, it’s
Baleinakorodawa hopes national reconciliation efforts will going to be challenging. But it helps to make reconciliation
follow in the path of the military’s planned engagement with a genuine and effective process when all these things are
the families of the CRW soldiers. He says reconciliation often surfaced.
ends up being a forced process that aims to help communities “We know a lot of worms are going to come out when the
function as communities again, while there is no healing for cans are opened. But we also need to know how to close the
individuals. can again once the worms go out.”
“A lot of people carry trauma with them because in many
instances, the victims and offenders are not engaged in the - Additional reporting by Joe Yaya
reconciliation process. In the Fijian traditional setting, it’s

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