Interim Prime Minister Commodore Frank Bainimarama and the leader of the Fiji Labour Party Mahendra Chaudhry have both said that Australia and NZ are practicing double standards by recognizing and assisting the Qarase led interim government in 2000 and 2001 but lashing out at the current interim administration.
In his statement for the leaders in Niue, Bainimarama said NZ and Australia, against the judgment of their own senior judges who sat on the Fiji Court of Appeal in the Chandrika Prasad case, helped organize an illegal election that put in power the very people who are now hypocritically posing as supporters and defenders of the 1997 constitution.
Commodore Bainimarama claimed that those politicians who came into power corruptly spent about $20 million of public funds to fund their election campaign in 2001. He said on that occasion too, Laisenia Qarase had allegedly lied to the Court of Appeal that his interim government would implement the judgment. Bainimarama said this meant that they should have resigned in March 2001.
Meanwhile, Mahendra Chaudhry said Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands Forum should critically analyze the problems in Fiji and stop passing decisions by just sitting for a few days. Chaudhry said he also remembers that Australia and New Zealand supported the illegal Qarase government in 2000 and 2001.
“That is correct because at that point in time, both these countries took a position that they recognized the interim administration. Now of course their stance has changed, for whatever reason I don’t know. But that aside, my view is that they should come to terms with the ground reality here in Fiji. Really the electoral system is fraud. Let them sit down and look at it, analyze it. Is it fraud or is not fraud? And if it’s fraud then we have to fix that because that has been the root cause for problems in this country. We can’t be having coup after coup after coup. We have to get the fundamentals right and certainly it is for the people of Fiji to resolve it. We may have our own differences but at the end of the day we want a peaceful and progressive Fiji. The Forum should look at all these things in a very comprehensive fashion rather than just meeting for a day or two and making decisions.”
