BCAS Vol 19 Issue 4

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CONTENTS
Vol. 19, No. 4: OctoberDecember 1987
Stephanie Hagan - Race, Politics, and the Coup in Fiji
Anthony B. van Fossen - Two Military Coups in Fiji
Malcolm Gault-Williams - Organisasi Papua Merdeka: The Free
Papua Movement Lives
R. J. May - Mutual Respect, Friendship, and Cooperation? The
Indonesian-Papua New Guinea Border and Its Effects on Relations
Between Papua New Guinea and Indonesia
Toge Sankichi - Hiroshima Poems / A Translation by Richard
Minear
Alan Wolfe - Towards a Japanese-American Nuclear Criticism: The
Art of Iri and Toshi Maruka in Text and Film
Richard H. Minear - The Atomic Bomb Paintings / A Review
Howie Movshovitz - Hellfire: A Journey from Hiroshima / Film
Review
Robert Ware - Western Marxists in Flux Over Chinese Marxism/ A
Review Essay
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Asian Scholars (CCAS). CCAS ceased to exist as an organization in 1979,
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BCAS. All rights reserved. For non-commercial use only. www.bcasnet.org
Vol. 19, No.4/0ct.-Dec., 1987
Contents
Stephanie Hagan 2 Race, Politics, and the Coup in Fiji
Anthony B. van Fossen 19 Two Military Coups in Fiji
Malcolm Gault-Williams 32 Organisasi Papua Merdeka: The Free Papua Movement Lives
R.J. May 44 "Mutual Respect, Friendship and Co-operation?" The
Indonesia-Papua New Guinea Border and Its Effects on
Relations between Papua New Guinea and Indonesia
Toge Sankichi 53 Hiroshima Poems/translation.
Translated by Richard H. Minear
Alan Wolfe 55 Toward a Japanese-American Nuclear Criticism:
The Art of Iri and Toshi Maruki in Text and Film
Richard H. Minear 58 The Atomic-Bomb Paintings; The Hiroshima Murals:
The Art of Iri Maruki and Toshi Maruki, edited by
John W. Dower and John Junkerman/review
Howie Movshovitz 64 Hellfire: A Journey from Hiroshima, by John Dower and John
Junkerman/film review
Robert Ware 65 Western Marxists in Flux Over Chinese Marxism;
Chinese Marxism in Flux (1978-84): Essays on Epistemology,
Ideology, and Political Economy, edited by Bill Brugger/
review essay
72 List of Books to Review, and Index of BCAS, Vol. 19 (1987)
Contributors
Malcolm Gault-Williams: Freelance writer and general man
ager, KCSB-FM, University of California, Santa Barbara,
California, U.S.A.
Stephanie Hagan: Politics, University of New England,
Armidale, New South Wales, Australia
R.J. May: Political and social change, Research School of
Pacific Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, Aus
tralia
Richard H. Minear: History, University of Massachusetts,
Amherst, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
Howie Movshovitz: Film critic, The Denver Post; film studies,
University of Colorado, Denver, Colorado, U.S.A.
Anthony B. van Fossen: Anthropology, Griffith University,
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Robert Ware: Philosophy, University of Calgary, Calgary,
Alberta, Canada
Alan Wolfe: Japanese language and literature, University of
Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, U.S.A.
In accordance with East Asian practice, the surname is placedfirst in
all East Asian names.
The photo on the front cover is by Stephanie Hagan and shows indi
genous Fijians and Fiji Indians sharing the traditional Fijian ceremo
nial drink yaquona (which is mixed in the large carved bowl) at an
NFPILabour gathering in a rural village in Viti Levu, Fiji, during the
1987 general elections. The NFPILabour party seeks to appeal to
lower socioeconomic groups regardless of race, and wants to change
the emphasis of Fijian politics from race to consideration ofeconomic
change and social justice. Although this relatively new coalition came
to power in the April 1987 elections, their government was toppled
in a coup a month later.
The following two articles both discuss the coups in Fiji and the political
developments leading up to them, and they basically agree that the coups were
prompted more by conflict over preserving traditional Fijian aristocratic power
than by racial tensions ,.nd concerns over land ownership. However, we feel
that these articles are different enough in approach and content for us to
publish both of them. Stephanie Hagan's article deals at much greater length
with the colonial period and the nature oftraditional Fijian society and chiefly
rule, whereas Anthony van Fossen's article focuses on more recent political
history, particularly internal colonialism and the messianic reaction to it, and
compares the situation in Fiji with that in Malaysia. Although the original
versions of both articles were written before the second coup in September
1987, Hagan has added a brief postscript as an update, whereas van Fossen
has revised his piece to take the second coup into account. Lastly, Hagan's
article presents more material on possible CIA involvement in the coup, a
subject the Bulletin hopes to explore in depth in an upcoming issue.
The Editors
Race, Politics, and the Coup in Fiji
by Stephanie Hagan*
Introduction
The military coup that took place in Fiji on 14 May 1987 indigenous Fijian political control under a revised constitution
is generally seen as having been prompted largely by racial lend much force to such a perception. The racial explanation,
tensions in terms of a deepening conflict between "Indian" then, may not only seem obvious to the casual observer, but
political ambitions and indigenous Fijian rule. The impression also fits in neatly with plural society theory. The issues in
given is that the National Federation party/Labour coalition volved, however, are much more complex, and a simplistic
government, elected less than six weeks earlier, was a govern racial interpretation of the recent events in Fiji is not only
ment dominated by the Fiji Indians and that the Fijian popula inadequate, but quite misleading.
tion was therefore faced with a considerable threat to tradi
tional rights in their own country, particularly with respect to Background
land ownership. Certainly, the coup has been justified by its
perpetrators as a necessary measure aimed at restoring and
preserving indigenous rights. The recent upsurge of Fijian
nationalism via the Taukei movement, both immediately prior
to and following the May coup, the return to prominence of the
leading chiefs of Fiji, and the general moves to entrench
It is not possible to gain even a superficial understanding
of politics in Fiji without reference to the colonial period. It
was during this time that certain key policies concerning land,
labor, and native administration were put into place, and that
the racially (or communally) oriented political institutions of
independent Fiji were founded.
Fiji was ceded to Great Britain in 1874 by a group of high
chiefs, the most prominent of whom were from the eastern
provinces. The reasons for this voluntary cession were vari
* An earlier version of this paper was presented in August 1987 at the
annual conference of the Australasian Political Studies Association,
Auckland, New Zealand.
ous. From the British point of view there was a need to protect
British capital already invested in the islands and to bring some
authority to bear on the problems of maintaining law and order
amongst the white settlers in the islands. In addition, it was
I. See Great Britain, Parliamentary Debates (House of Lords), 17
July 1874, cols. 183-184.
2
thought that Fiji might prove useful from a strategic point of
view given its location in the Southwest Pacific. I It was also a
way for Cakobau, the most powerful of the paramount chiefs
of Fiji, both to consolidate his power and to extricate himself
from various internal difficulties. The white settlers in the
islands had also been most eager in pressing for cession. Many
of these believed that the establishment of a formal British
administration in the islands would confer on them the same
benefits and privileges that had accrued to white settlers in
other parts of the Empire. These included the opportunity to
acquire large tracts of fertile land. Further, it was believed that
responsible government under white control would evolve in a
form similar to that which existed in the neighboring colonies
in Australia and New Zealand. None of these expectations was
to be realized, although the white population in Fiji, as in most
colonial situations, would come to hold a comparatively priv
ileged position, both politically and economically, throughout
Fiji's colonial era and into independence.
One of the major obstacles to white domination, and later
to the aspirations of the large Indian population that was to
settle in Fiji, was a particular interpretation placed on the Deed
of Cession by Fiji's first substantive governor, Sir Arthur
Gordon, and successive British administrations. This interpre
tation developed into a steadfast doctrine known as the' 'para
mountcy of Fijian interests," which, briefly stated, holds that
the rights and privileges of native Fijians in respect of their
customs, heritage, and lands are virtually inalienable and shall
be paramount over any other claims. Nowhere in the Deed of
Cession itself, however, can one find precise phrases from
which such an interpretation can be gleaned. Section VII
promises that the rights and interests of the Tui Viti and other
high chiefs comprising the ceding parties shall be recognized
so far as is consistent with British sovereignty and colonial
forms of Section IV refers to the proprietorship of
all lands, not already alienated and not in actual use or occupa
tion of a chief or tribe as being vested in the Crown. These
sections certainly do not go as far as the doctrine of para
mountcy indicates. The latter appears to have emanated more
from verbal assurances given at the time of cession and backed
up by Gordon and his successors in later years. The arrival and
settlement of the Indian population in the colony served to
reinforce the doctrine further.
In the course of Fiji's colonial history, the governorship
of Sir Arthur Gordon was the most decisive in terms of Fiji's
future political development. Gordon came to Fiji with the
idea that he had "a divine mission to make the islands an
exception to the dismal history of colonialism. "2 First,
Gordon introduced a form of indirect rule by way of a separate
native administration which, while doing much to preserve the
indigenous culture and way of life, was to keep Fijians in an
The first substantive British governor of Fiji, Sir Arthur Gordon.
Gordon's attempts to protect indigenous Fijian culture and lifestyle
greatly influenced Fiji's political development: His interpretation of
the Deed of Cession led to the doctrine of "paramountcy of Fijian
interests," and he also set up the separate native administration,
introduced indentured Indian labor, and halted any further claims to
Fijian lands by nonindigenous Fijians. *
economic backwater and in relative isolation from the main
stream of colonial politics (in terms of the wider, central
political institutions as distinct from local Fijian affairs)
throughout most of the colonial era. Indeed, it can be argued
that these effects have continued to a significant extent even
into independence, and are largely responsible for many of the
economic problems that Fijians continue to experience, but
which are frequently blamed on the Fiji Indian community
which has thus become a convenient scapegoat.
The N ati ve Administration established by Gordon oper
ated through what was perceived to be the existing authority
structure of the Fijian chiefly system, with certain modifica
tions designed to ensure compatibility with the functions of
colonial government. Briefly, the formal arrangements for the
Native Administration (the name was changed in the 1940s to
the Fijian Administration) consisted of an integrated system of
native officials and deliberative bodies.
3
The highest of these
latter bodies was the Great Council of Chiefs (Bose vaka
Turaga), which had not existed previously but apparently
arose almost by accident when, at Gordon's installation as
"supreme chief" of Fiji, he had used the occasion to consult
with the Rokos (chiefs appointed as governors) who had as
sembled there from all over Fiji. The meeting became an
*This photo is from K.L. Gillion, Fiji's Indian Migrants: A History
to the End of Indenture in 1920 (London: Oxford University Press,
1962), facing p. 28.
2. T.J. MacNaught, The Fijian Colonial Experience: A Study ofthe
Neo-Traditional Order Under British Colonial Rule Prior to World
War II, Pacific Research Monograph no. 7 (Canberra, 1982), p. 2.
3. See Fiji, Regulations of the Native Regulation Board 1877-1882
(London, 1883).
3
annual event, and the council came to represent the new
, 'national" element within the traditional pattern of political
organization.
4
T.J. MacNaught has argued, and no doubt quite cor
rectly, that bodies such as the Great Council of Chiefs pro
vided an infinitely more congenial forum than the incompre
hensible offshoot of Westminster existing in the Legislative
Council. 5 Separate institutions, however, could provide only a
temporary shelter from the realities of a potentially volatile
multiracial society moving into the modem world and towards
the eventual adoption of a political system based on the West
minster paradigm. Indeed, MacNaught partially acknowl
edges this problem later in the same work when he points out
that racial lines would not have been' 'so sharply drawn in later
decades had not the government been dedicated to keeping the
communities institutionally and physically separate. "6
It is crucial to the consideration of the recent
events in Fiji, however, to note that the Fiji In
dians have rarely challenged the customary rights
of the Fijian people-they have largely accepted
the special position accorded to Fijians in their
own country, including their rights to ownership
of the land. The major concern of Fiji Indians
with respect to the land has been with adequate
agricultural leases, and it has always been in the
best interests ofthe Fijian economy to ensure some
security oftenure for Fiji Indian farmers.
In later years the maintenance of a separate administra
tion was due not so much to the policies of the colonial
government as to the desire of the chiefly elite to preserve it.
Indeed, the colonial government (although not with any degree
of consistency) and some other interested Europeans, who
propounded the virtues of individualism, were keen to see the
system displaced. Separate rule was meant to be a "transi
tional phase for thirty years or so,' q but instead it has become
a solidified and apparently permanent feature of government.
The remnants of the system exist today through a network of
statutory boards and councils, namely, the Fijian Affairs
Board, the Great Council of Chiefs, the provincial councils,
the Fijian Development Fund Board, and the Native Lands
Trust Board. 8
4. J.D. Legge; Britain in Fiji /858-/880 (London, 1919), p. 71.
5. MacNaught, Fijian Colonial Experience. p. 6.
6. Ibid.,p. 112.
7. O.H.K. Spate, The Fijian People: Economic Problems and
Prospects. C.P. 13/1959, p. 32.
8. See I. Lasaga, The Fijian People: Before and After Independence
(CanbeITa, 1984), ch. 8.
In reflecting on the survival of these remnants of the old
order in a paper published some ten years ago, Ravuvu noted
that in Fiji, as in some other Pacific societies, they have
continued to be maintained' 'far beyond their maximum utility
or survi val value, " and further, that this has given cause to the
indigenous people to "wonder whether the cry for the conser
vation of traditional culture is only another attempt at main
taining subservience or submissiveness in a population that is
starting to be critical and aggressive."9
The Fijian chiefly system was, of course, the focal point
of the separate administration and remains at the heart of
contemporary politics in Fiji. It is essential, therefore, to give
at least a cursory account of the nature of traditional Fijian
society and chiefly rule.
The koro or village was, and to a large extent still is,
despite the' 'urban drift," the primary unit of local organiza
tion in Fiji. It is generally divided into a number of mataqali.
or primary kinship divisions, which are themselves made up of
i tokatoka. or extended family groups. Several mataqali com
bine to form a yavusa or clan which is, generally speaking, the
widest Fijian partilineal group tracing descent from a common
ancestor. 10 A village may contain one or more yavusa and in
some instances members of a yavusa may be spread through
out several villages. II Beyond the village organization, a num
ber of yavusa combine to form a larger territorial unit-the
vanua-which is best described as a "socio-political associa
tion, cemented by social and economic ties, with common
allegiance to a chief." 12 The largest political unit in precession
times was the matanitu or state which combined a number of
vanua through ties of kinship, intermarriage, ceremony and
other factors. 13 The progressive structural order of these units
(excluding the koro itself) is therefore as follows: i toka
toka ~ mataqali ~ yavusa ~ vanua ~ matanitu.
The hierarchical grading of chiefs follows the same pat
tern. The traditional village chief is usually the leading mem
ber of the dominant lineage, and if his village is the most
prominent within the vanua. he may also hold the chieftainship
of that vanua. Similarly, if his vanua is dominant within the
matanitu. he will be head of the matanitu as well. The most
common form of address for a chief is "Ratu" although
paramount chiefs usually have titles as well, for example, the
title' 'Tui" designates the ruler of a vanua or matanitu.
The position of chiefs within this structure was funda
mental to social organization and control. R. R. Nayacakalou
describes the position of the traditional village chief, in sum
mary, as being
. . . based on seniority of descent and political dominance; the
authority resting on traditional loyalties and allegiance, and vin
dicated in the rights and obligations acknowledged and observed
between the Chief and his people. In the customary view, he has all
the lewa (rule, control, direction; the right to make decisions on
9. A. Ravuvu, "Pacific Cultures," Pacific Perspectives. VI, 2
(1977), p. 20.
10. Lasaga, Fijian People. pp. 21-22.
II. R.R. Nayacakalou, Leadership in Fiji (Melbourne, 1975), p. 85.
12. Lasaga, Fijian People. p. 18.
13. Ibid., pp. 18,21.
14. Nayacakalou, Leadership. p. 37.
4
behalf of the people for the good of of the village. 15
In this view of chiefly rule (which applies at all levels of
the chiefly hierarchy), the relationship between the chief and
commoners entails a mutual sense of duty in which the chief,
for his part, takes the responsibility for decision making on
behalf of his people as a right as well as a duty, and in return the
people owe strict loyalty and obedience to his authority. The
relationship, although authoritarian, is thus meant to be a
two-way arrangement providing stability, direction, and order
for the community. Supporters of this view would argue, then,
that the system was not despotic or tyrannical in the sense that
commoners were treated no better than chattels and exploited
for the sole benefit of their chief. One Fijian leader, recalling
the old times, asserts that "He [the Fijian] was governed, as he
wanted to be, by the heads of families or chiefs who shared his
faith and lived his life ... " 16
It is important to stress, however, that Mara and
many of the former Alliance ministers had much
to gain from the sudden downfall of the Bavadra
government, particularly in consideration of the
corruption issue, and it is therefore unlikely that
they would have needed much in the way of en
couragement from any external source. N everthe
less, it seems quite possible that the CIA may have
provided not only encouragement, but also some
valuable assistance.
This interpretation of chiefly rule in precession times has
been espoused frequently by some prominent Fijian leaders,
academics, and European champions of the chiefly system. 17
That there is some substance to this interpretation is borne out
by the fact that many Fijian commoners apparently hold a
similarly eulogic view of the system still. 18
But this interpretation takes insufficient account of the
mystical side of chiefly authority which was all-important in
the traditional society. A great deal of custom, ceremony, and
myth, including many pre-Christian tabus and superstitions,
surrounded the person of the chief, much of which survived the
advent of Christianity and the virtual wholesale conversion of
the Fijian people to its beliefs and teachings. Basil Thomson,
in an early twentieth century work on Fijian custom, locates
the power of the chief within the old religious context: "The
key to the Melanesian system of government is Ancestor
worship. Just as every act in a Fijian's life was controlled by
15. Ibid., p. 85.
16. Fiji, Legislative Council, Secretary for Fijian Affairs, Annual
Report, C.P. 5/1952, p. 1.
17. These include Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna, I. Lasaga and G .K. Roth.
18. Many Fijians interviewed in Fiji in 1982, 1984, 1986, and 1987
expressed views ofthis sort.
Fijian chief of earlier times. Necklaces of whale's teeth were a badge
of chiefly authority, and in Fiji to this day it is a great honor to be
presented with a whale's tooth; they are given to distinguished guests
and are exchanged at weddings, births, deaths, and when agreements
are entered into. *
his fear of Unseen Powers, so was his conception of human
authority based on religion." 19 Thomson goes on to explain
the pre-Christian deity of the Fijian and its origins in the
ancestral family founder-the Kalou-vu (Ancestor-God)
whose descendant, "the tribal chief, is set within the pale ofthe
tabu: his will may not be disobeyed, nor his body touched
without incurring the wrath of the Unseen. "20
This indicates that fear and superstition played at least as
important a role in maintaining chiefly power and authority as
any other factor. Moreover, other commentators have percep
tions of chiefly rule that bear little resemblance to those held by
its champions and supporters. One of the earliest of these, the
Reverend W. Slade, offered the following opinion in the local
press in 1900.
When the cession of the group took place, a sort of communal
system was found in existence. It would, perhaps, be more accu
rate to say that it was a despotism in which the chiefs were tyrants.
They held sole possession of the lives and property of the popula
tion, while the mass of the people were communal in complete
subservience to their chiefs. 21
A more recent commentator, also recounting the situation in
pre-Christian times, tells us that with a flick of the chiefly
wrist, and by the score, men's heads were dashed against the
*This picture is from the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago,
and was in David Stanley, South Pacific Handbook, third edition,
(Chico, CA: Moon Publications, 1986), p. 361.
19. B. Thompson, The Fijians: A Study of the Decay of Custom
(London, 1968),p. 57.
20. Ibid, p. 58.
21. Quoted in Fiji, Legislative Council Debates (16 July 1946), p.
167.
5
clubbing stones. Widows went alive to join dead husbands in
their graves. "12
Although the violence of Fijian society passed quickly
enough with the advent of Christian missionaries and British
rule, much of the absolutist nature of chiefly rule remained,
reinforced on the one hand by the early policy of indirect rule
through the chiefly system and on the other by lingering super
stitious fears and perhaps even through sheer habit.
But whether the coup was actually caused by racial
factor:s and, in particular, any real threat to indi
genous rights, is another question. As we have
seen, it is quite clear that these rights were in no
way endangered by the Bavadra government. It is
clear, also, that the Bavadra government was not
an "Indian" government. Moreover, the political
leadership of the country-including the posi
tions of prime minister and governor general
was still effectively in Fijian hands, although not
to the extent that it had been under the Alliance.
The second of Gordon's policies that needs to be con
sidered was his decision to introduce Indian labor under the
notorious indenture system. It was clear to Gordon from the
outset that a cheap and abundant supply of labor for the
plantations was essential to the financial viability of the col
ony. Gordon's native policy precluded the possibility of re
cruitment from Fijian villages since it was his declared aim to
disrupt Fijian village life as little as possible. The first in
dentured laborers arrived from India in 1879, and the system
continued until its abolition in 1916. By this time some 60,000
Indians had come to Fiji under the indenture scheme, and of
these, some 40,000 had chosen to remain as "free settlers." In
addition, a small number of Indians had come to Fiji on their
own initiative both before and after the indenture system was
terminated.
23
Since then the Fiji Indian population has ex
panded considerably. By 1945 Fiji Indians outnumbered
Fijians for the first time, and now comprise just under half of
the total population. (See table I.)
The third policy introduced by Gordon that had an im
portant bearing on political development in the colony con
cerns the land. Prior to cession, white settlers had acquired
claims to about 800,000 acres, and this comprised some of the
22. R. Keith-Reid, "The Future of the Chiefs," Islands Business
(December 1982), pp. 8, 12, 14.
23. For details of the indenture system see H. Tinker, A New System
of Slavery: The Export of Indians Overseas 1830-1920 (London,
1974) and K.L. GiIlion, Fiji's Indian Migrants: A History to the End
of Indenture in 1920 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1962).
Table 1
Estimate of by Ethnic Origin
as of December 1983
Ethnic Group No. of Percent of Cumulative
Persons Population Totals
A Fijian 304,575 44.9
Rotuman 8,336 1.2
Other Pacific Islanders 5,846 0.9
Sub-Total 318,757 47.0 318,757
B Chinese 4,651 0.7
European 3,184 0.5
Part-European 11,344 1.7
Other Races 89 >0.1
Sub-Total 19,268 2.9 338,025
C Indians 339,456 50.1 677,481
Source: Fiji Ministry of Information, Fiji Today, Suva, 1984/85.
Note: the 1986 Census has not been released in full; however,
preliminary figures indicate that Fijians now number 330,000 (46.2
percent), while Indians number 347,000 (48.6 percent). Other races,
including Rotumans and other Pacific Islanders (who are also
classified as Fijians), have so far been lumped together in the
preliminary figures.
Source: Fiji Ministry of Information, News Release No. 543, 3
October 1986.
best agricultural land in Fiji. Following cession, any further
alienation of Fijian lands was halted, and a Lands Commission
was set up to review all pre-cession claims. The commission
determined that about half of the area in respect of which
claims had been made was to be returned to Fijian ownership
while the remainder was confirmed in the possession of the
settlers. In the early twentieth century a uniform system of
land tenure was established throughout Fiji which vested own
ership of the land in the mataqali kinship groups, although in
many parts of Fiji this was not consistent with traditional
patterns of tenure. The doctrine of inalienability of land,
however, did not mean that land was unavailable for plantation
purposes. Apart from the 400,000 acres already alienated,
long-term leases on other lands could be obtained quite read
ily. Further, since the encouragement of agricultural pursuits
in the colony was essential to the economy, it was necessary to
provide sufficient land to attract such investors as the Austra
lian Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR).
A major consequence of the lands policy concerns the
large Indian population that settled in the colony. Their de
scendants have become, in effect, a landless majority in their
adopted country since, even after independence, the notion of
the inalienability of Fijian lands has remained unshakable. As
Peter France has succinctly concluded:
6 BCAS. All rights reserved. For non-commercial use only. www.bcasnet.org
Indian Fiji, probably in the 1960s: a CSR Company extension officer visiting a typical cane grower in an intensely farmed
cane zone. Most of the sugar producers in Fiji are still Fiji Indians, and farmers are still the largest category of Indians
in Fiji, but because of the restrictions on Indian ownership of land, Indian capital has tended to be invested in urban
enterprises. *
... the tenets of the orthodoxy, conceived and propagated by a
protectionist colonial administration, have become ineradicably
absorbed into the Fijian national consciousness.... The land
tenure system ... evolved from the varied administrative deci
sions of a colonial government. .. [but] it has come to be regarded
as immemorial tradition [which] depends less on its historical
accuracy than on its social significance. And the tradition which is
held to enshrine the ancient land rights of the Fijians is a power
fully cohesive force in Fijian society. 2'
The political implications of the land question are far
reaching and have become inseparable from issues such as
Fijian nationalism, racism, constitutional development, and
party politics. In these respects it is linked closely to the
doctrine of Fijian paramountcy of interests. Taken together,
the land question and the paramountcy doctrine were used
effectively as a counter to Indian claims for a greater share of
political representation during the colonial period. It is crucial
to the consideration of the recent events in Fiji, however, to
note that the Fiji Indians have rarely challenged the customary
rights of the Fijian people-they have largely accepted the
*This photo is from R.F. Watters, Koro: Economic Development and
Social Change in Fiji (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), facing p. 12.
24. P. France, The Charter ofthe Land: Custom and Colonization in
Fiji (Melbourne, 1969), pp. 174-175.
7
special positlon accorded to Fijians in their own country,
including their rights to ownership of the land. The major
concern of Fiji Indians with respect to the land has been with
adequate agricultural leases, and it has always been in the best
interests of the Fijian economy to ensure some security of
tenure for Fiji Indian farmers. Sugar is still the mainstay of the
economy and most of the sugar producers are Fiji Indians. A
further point to be noted is that the land rights of the Fijians,
the notion of inalienability, and the doctrine of paramountcy of
interests were firmly entrenched in the 1970 constitution of
independent Fiji. We shall return to that point later, but forthe
moment it remains to consider briefly some aspects of institu
tional development and political representation in the colonial
period which provided the framework for politics in indepen
dent Fiji.
Agitation for representation initially came from the small
white settler community, and in 1904 Europeans were granted
the franchise to elect six representatives to the Legislative
Council while two Fijian members were appointed by the
governor from a list of six names submitted by the Great
Council of Chiefs.
25
Indians were not even considered as
req uiring representation at that time, and it was not until 1929
that they received any form of franchise. Further, when it was
25. See Letters Patent dated 21 March 1904.
Although the National Federation party is essentially Fiji Indian, here indigenous Fijians
are helping at an NFP table during the polling in Lautoka during the 1972 general elections. *
granted, it was on a strict communal basis and at a lesser level
than that accorded Europeans. The sense of izzat (honor)
became predominant in the thinking of the newly emergent Fiji
Indian political leadership. They had won the battle for fran
chise, but lost the fight for equal political status with the
European community, and it was this as much as anything that
occupied Fiji Indian political thinking for much of the colonial
period. Most importantly, they were not concerned with the
political status of Fijians but with "a determination [to get]
what the European has got, and [to be] granted an all-round
equality of status. "26
Europeans and Fijians both resisted the further extension
of political rights for Fiji Indians and together maintained an
unshakable position against the introduction of a common
electoral roll for Europeans and Fiji Indians. European resis
tance was engendered largely by the perception that they
would eventually be "swamped," and that their own privi
leged political position would thus be undermined. They suc
ceeded in winning support for their position from the Fijians by
inculcating in the latter group a belief that they, the Europeans,
were the "protectors" of the Fijian race against the threat of
"Indian domination." The doctrine of Fijian paramountcy of
interests previously decried by many European settlers be
cause of its restrictive implications for the purchase of native
lands, was now found to be a convenient principle on which to
oppose the extension of Fiji Indian political rights. This
*This photo is from Robert Norton, Race and Politics in Fiji (New
York: St. Martin's Press, 197.1), facing p. 99.
26. Governor M. Fletcher, quoted in K.L. Gillion, The Fiji Indians:
Challenge to European Domination 1920-1946 (Canberra, 1977), p.
130.
8
marked the beginning of an alliance of interests between Euro
peans and Fijians, as opposed to Fiji Indians, thus establishing
the basis for the politicized racial divisions that were to charac
terize the later development of the party system in Fiji.
The two major parties which emerged in the 1960s with
the extension of the franchise to all races in Fiji were thus the
products and the heirs to what Simione Durutalo has described
as "the colonial racial politics of divide and rule. "27 The
National Federation party (NFP) was, and has remained, es
sentially Fiji Indian. The Alliance party, which was formed in
1966 under the leadership of Ratu K.K.T. Mara (now Ratu Sir
Kamisese Mara), has several constituent organizations. The
largest of these is the Fijian Association, which had been
founded some ten years earlier for the purpose of "protecting
Fijian political rights under Fijian leadership. "28 Another
small but important constituent organization of the Alliance
was the General Electors' Association (,General Electors' is
the name now used to officially describe members of races
other than Fijians and Indians), which had been founded only a
few months before. The essential reason for the formation of
the GEA was that since independence was likely to come about
in the near future, it was important that minority groups should
get together to participate as a cohesive group in planning
future political developments.
29
With the formation of the
27. S. Durutalo, "The Fiji Trade Union Movement at the Cross
Roads-Social and Political Options for the Labour Movement,"
Journal ofPacific Studies, 11 (1985), p. 204.
28. Fiji Times (29 November 1965), p. 3.
29. Interview with Edward Beddoes, GEA President, Suva, 16 May
1983. For further details of Alliance party structure see R. Norton,
Race and Politics in Fiji (St. Lucia, 1977), pp. 89-98.
Alliance party, then, the old infonnal political ties between
Europeans (and increasing numbers of part-Europeans) and
Fijians were consolidated in the Alliance structure and ex
tended to include the small, conservative, and business
oriented Chinese community. Writing on the eve of indepen
dence, E. K. Fisk noted that
The numerically very small European/Chinese group has enor
mous economic power. . . controlling all the large organisations
and enterprises and most of the dealings with the outside world.
They also have great political influence which, even if their rep
resentation under the new constitution is greatly reduced, seems
likely to be sufficient to make it difficult for any likely grouping of
parties to govern without their support in the near future. 30
The general idea that the British were the" protectors" of
the Fijian race also had some important implications for inde
pendence. Because Fijians had largely accepted this rhetoric,
they were initially very reluctant to even consider the prospect
of independent status. On the other hand, the Fiji Indian
community was very keen to move to independence because
they saw the British, not the Fijians, as their major political
adversaries. Moreover, as a concession to Fijian concerns, the
Fiji Indian community accepted a constitution for independent
Fiji which not only entrenched indigenous rights, but which
also retained a fairly rigid communal electoral system. 3 1
Moreover, the allocation of seats under this system clearly
gave the advantage to the Alliance party because of the dispro
portionate number of seats awarded to General Electors, as
predicted by Fisk.
Between 1970 and 1987, electoral contests were largely
fought out between the two major, racially based parties.
Neither of these two parties, however, had been entirely
monolithic in the sense that they had drawn either their mem
bership or electoral support exclusively from either of the two
major racial groupings, and this is related partially to the fact
that neither the Fijian nor the Indian communities are homo
genous. 32 Fiji Indians have always been divided along the lines
of religion, language, and other social and economic factors.
Within the Fijian popUlation, too, there are some important
cultural and political differences, and this is particularly evi
dent in the split between the western area of Viti Levu and the
eastern provinces. With the Fijians, however, the presence of
the large Indian community and the beliefs about the dangers
posed by them which were engendered during the colonial
period, have acted as an important source of fear in reinforcing
their desire to "stick together," to cling to their separate
institutions and their traditions, and to view these as a dif
ferentiating symbol of ethnic identity. As we have seen, the
chiefly system is the focal point of these traditions. It has
remained a dominant force in politics and has been used
30. E.K. Fisk, The Political Economy ofIndependent Fiji (Canberra,
1970), pp. 46-47.
31. The Alliance party, however, undertook to review the communal
electoral system after independence. A Royal Commission was
subsequently set up, and in its report recommended an increase in the
provisions for cross-racial voting (see Fiji Parliamentary Paper, no.
24 of 1975), but this was rejected by the Alliance government.
32. See S. Hagan "The Party System, the Labour Party and the
Plural Society Syndrome in Fiji" Journal of Commonwealth and
Comparative Politics, XXV, 2 (July 1987), pp. 130-132.
frequently in electoral campaigns as an effective weapon
against parties opposed to the Alliance. These factors also
account for a certain antipathy towards western democratic
institutions and practices that was evident throughout the colo
nial period and which persists in the attitudes of many Fijians
today.
The Fiji Labour Party and the Coalition
The emergence of the Fiji Labour party in 1985 opened up
a whole new dimension to politics in Fiji. Despite their rhe
toric to the contrary, the old parties had remained finnly
oriented to the racial divisions in Fiji and had ensured the
continuation of a narrow, racially-based political discourse.
The Labour party, however, sought to appeal to the lower
socioeconomic groups across the racial spectrum, and to
change the emphasis of the discourse from race to a broader
consideration of economic class and social justice. From the
outset, the new party avoided specific reference to race and
promoted itself as "a true multi-racial organisation that stands
for the interests of all the people in the country whether they
are workers or fanners, rural or urban dwellers. "33
There is little doubt that the majority ofFijians do
not understand the extent to which the 1970 Con
stitution protected their rights, and it has never
been translated into the Fijian language. Thus
when the spectre of an "Indian-dominated" par
liament blithely sweeping away their rights is
raised, many Fijians would genuinely believe that
this could happen.
The formation of the Labour party was triggered largely
by the conservative economic policies of the Alliance govern
ment and the inability of the NFP opposition to tackle these in
any effective manner. Following a period of growing levels of
unemployment, high food prices, and general economic stag
nation, the Alliance imposed a twelve-month freeze on wages,
prices, and dividends. This was done without reference to the
Tripartite Forum-a long-established consultative body com
posed of government, employer, and trade union representa
tives-and led finally to a call for a new, worker-oriented
political party. 34 At the same time, the NFP was splitting under
the strain of intraparty disunity which eventually led to the
resignation of its leader, Siddiq Koya, and his replacement by
a "neutral" candidate, Harish Sharma. 35
33. Fiji Labour Party pamphlet (October 1985).
34. R. T. Robertson, "The Formation of the Fiji Labour Party," New
Zealand Monthly Review (October 1985), pp. 3-4.
35. Fiji Times (1 May 1986), p. 1.
The incentive necessary for the formation of a coalition
between Labour and the NFP was provided by the Alliance's
victory in a by-election for the House of Representatives in
December 1985. This result was due without doubt to a three
way split in the vote under the first-past-the-post method,
giving the Alliance a narrow victory with only 38.4 percent,
while Labour and the NFP polled 37.2 percent and 24.4 per
cent respectively. 36 Negotiations between Labour and the NFP
began in mid-1986 and culminated some months later in a
formal coalition agreement. A splinter faction of the NFP
together with some members of its previous coalition partner,
the Western United Front (WUF) (a small Fijian party based in
the west of Viti Levu), threatened to turn the forthcoming
elections into another three-way contest, but the latter group
lost momentum and in the end had little impact on the overall
result.
The Plural Society Syndrome and the
1987 Election Campaign
The major problem facing the Fiji Labour party, espe
cially after coalition with the NFP, was the prevailing' 'plural
society syndrome." which can best be described as a situation
in which' 'the overwhelming preponderance of political con
flict is perceived in ethnic terms")7 and where this is widely
believed to be quite immutable. The plural society syndrome,
nurtured in the colonial era and brought to full maturity via the
party system after independence, had so dominated political
consciousness that Labour faced an enormous task in estab
lishing an alternate context for discourse.)8 This was so par
ticularly in relation to the Fijian community and the continuing
influence of the chiefly elite in national politics. The Alliance
had no hesitation in stressing the party's connection with
Fijian tradition and the chiefly system in an effort to consoli
date its electoral base, and many of the public statements made
by the Alliance contained thinly veiled warnings to the effect
that Fijians had much to lose under another government. In
September 1986, for example, Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara
warned that although Fijians were outnumbered in their own
country, they had been able to retain political leadership, but if
they failed to unite, that leadership could slip away from them.
He further asserted that' 'some people wanted to split the
Fijians, because their eyes were set on land and gaining
power. "39
Some attempted to place the chiefs beyond criticism in
any sphere. Senator Inoke Tabua, a nominee of the Great
Council of Chiefs, argued that "the chiefs represent the
people, the land and the custom. Without a chief there is no
Fijian society. When Fijian chiefs are attacked or criticised in
whatever capacity-personal or political-it is the Fijian
vanua which is also being criticised. "40
One of the strongest claims on the issues of chiefs and
land was made by Alliance deputy prime minister, Ratu David
Toganivalu, several weeks prior to the April general elections.
He was reported as stating that
... all land in Fiji was being threatened by the "designs" of the
36. Calculated from figures supplied by the Fiji Department of Infor
mation.
37. A. Rabushka & K.A. Shepsle, Politics in Plural Societies: A
Theory ofDemocratic Instability (Columbus, 1972), p. 21.
38. See Hagan "Party System," p. 127.
39. Fiji Sun (20 September 1986), p. 1.
40. Fiji Sun (2 October (986), p. 4.
Joeli Kalou. the NFPILabour candidate for the crucial Southeastern Fijian national constituency, drinking the
traditional Fijian ceremonial drink yaquona (kava) during an NFPILabour gathering in a rural village in Viti
Levu during the 1987 general elections. Yaquona is a tranquilizing nonalcoholic drink that numbs the tongue
and lips, and it is the most honored feature of the formal life of Fijians, Tongans, and Samoans. To Joeli
Kalou's right is Ratu Masiwaini Tuisawau. Mara's cousin. who feels that Mara and the Alliance party are
keeping the Fijian people from moving forward.
\0
Fiji Labour Party, and Labour's Dr. Timoci Bavadra, Dr. Tupeni
Baba and Mr. Joeli Kalou wanted to remove chiefs from politics.
This will destroy the inseparable link between the Turaga (chiefs)
and the Vanua (land) ... the Turaga and the Vanua were one
one could not exist without the other. .. the chiefs were a bulwark
of security for all and custodians of Fijian identity, land and
culture. . . to remove chiefs would pave the way for instability. 41
Statements of this kind were clearly designed to bolster the
image and importance of chiefs in the political sphere and to
instill fear and uncertainty in the Fijian community about their
own security.
The Fiji Labour party took an entirely different approach
to the role of tradition and the chiefly system in contemporary
politics. In previous campaigns, the NFP had been exception
ally wary of offending Fijian sensitivities in this respect and
had generally steered clear of these issues. Coalition leader
Timoci Bavadra, however, is a Fijian himself and although not
holding a chiefly title, is of a chiefly family. Moreover, his
wife, Adi Kuini Bavadra, has chiefly status.
4
! This, of course,
put him in a much better position to criticize the chiefly
system.
The general line of argument employed by Bavadra was
that while he respected and upheld the traditional Fijian system
and the status of chiefs within that system, traditional authority
and power should not be used in the political sphere, and that
Fijians must "recognise the difference between their tradi
tional obligations and their constitutional democratic rights. ' '43
Throughout the campaign Bavadra stressed the essential dif
ferences between modem democratic politics and Fijian tradi
tions, and drew attention to the Alliance's motives underlying
its campaign, particularly in relation to its power structure.
In the contest that democracy provides us, one person's vote is
exactly the same as another's. A chief, be he ever so high in the
traditional system, does not have five votes where his people have
four. .. In previous elections, the Alliance fear tactic used to
include asking people whether they wanted an Indian Prime Minis
ter; now, with the historic uniting of all races under the umbrella of
the coalition, the leader is a Fijian, so the question is whether a
non-chief should be Prime Minister.
One would thus imagine that if an equivalent chief from
another province challenged Ratu Sir Kamisese, the Alliance
question would be: "Can we let a Prime Minister of Fiji come from
any province but LauT '44
One of the most important criticisms leveled at chiefs
conc;emed the lot of ordinary or "commoner" Fijians.
Bavadra took up the argument that these Fijians had become
more and more economically backward through being restric
ted to "their communal life style in the face of a rapidly
developing cash economy. "45 Bavadra's claims in these re
spects were backed up by some chiefs opposed to the Alliance.
Ratu Masiwaini Tuisawau, of the province of Rewa (who is
also first cousin or "brother" to Adi Lady Lala Mara, wife of
41. Fiji Times (14 March 1987), p. I.
42. "Adi" is the chiefly form of address for a woman.
43. Fiji Times (21 June 1986), p. 12.
44. Fiji Times (31 March 1987), p. 12. It should be noted that
Bavadra is from the west.
45. Fiji Sun (17 November 1986), p. 4.
Ratu Sir Kamisase Mara, prime minister of Fiji and a founder of the
indigenous Fijians' Alliance party, was defeated in the elections of
April 1987. Mara and the Alliance party had governed Fiji since
independence in 1970, and after the May 1987 coup he returned to
power, at first as the minister offoreign affairs and later as the prime
minister of Rabuka' s new republic. Some feel that Mara was oile of
the people behind the coup, and that the CIA might have had a hand
in it as well, especially since Business International, known to do
contract work for the CIA, had helped with Mara's election cam
paign in 1982. *
Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara), argued that Mara and the" Alliance
chiefs" were trying to push the Fijian people backwards-to
make them withdraw into their culture-instead of allowing
them to move forward. He claimed that these chiefs did
nothing for ordinary Fijians and that the latter were not getting
the benefits from their lands. Rather, rental monies were going
to line the pockets of the chiefs. 46 These claims were supported
further by another Rewan chief, Ratu Mosese Tuisawau, who
stated also that the Alliance party was robbing Fijians of their
land through the Native Land Development Corporation and
the Native Land Trust Board, which were both under the
influence of large business companies. 47
Some of these problems had been raised more than six
months prior to the election campaign in a nonparty political
context. A newspaper article entitled "This Chief is for the
People," commenced with the lines: "Ratu Sunia Malewa
could have built a mansion using land rents he gets from the
Native Land Trust Board. Or he could have had a flourishing
business. Instead, the head of the Yavusa Nakoravatu, of
Kalabu in the Naitasiri province, has a modest wooden home
and happy clan members. "48 The article went on to elaborate
how Ratu Sunia spent the land rental monies for the benefit of
the people in his yavusa. The fact that this made "news" is an
interesting comment on the subject of chiefly use offunds. The
article further pointed out that there had been a rise in disputes
*This photo is from The Sydney Morning Herald, 16 May 1987,
courtesy of Joe Moore.
46. Interview, Suva (8 April 1987).
47. Fiji Sun (4 April 1987), p. 2.
48. Fiji Sun (29 July 1986), p. II.
II
Timoci Bavadra, an indigenous Fijian and the leader of the NFP/
Labour coalition that won the April 1987 election. He set up a racially
balanced cabinet and had plans for social and economic reform, but
was overthrown in the coup of May 1987. *
over chiefly titles because of the benefits in terms of land rental
monies that come with the chiefly positions.
49
There is much
more to holding a chiefly title, then, than just status and
prestige-and it is likely that the Bavadra government would
have attempted to ensure a more equitable distribution of
land-rental monies to commoner Fijians.
The Communal System
As noted earlier, political leaders of the Fiji Indian com
munity accepted a fairly rigid communal electoral system
which effectively advantaged the Alliance party. Under this
system, Fijians and Indians were allocated twelve communal
seats each, while General Electors received three. Given the
close political ties between Fijians and General Electors, this
arrangement ensured that the Alliance had a guaranteed three
seat advantage in the contest for communal seats. In addition
to these communal seats, Fijians and Indians were also al
located ten national seats each, and General Electors five.
National seats operated more or less as multimember con
stituencies. From each of the ten Fijian and Indian national
constituencies, one Fijian and one Indian were elected by all
the voters in that electorate voting together (including General
Electors). Similarly, from each of the five General Electors'
national constituencies, one General Elector was returned by
all races voting together. Fiji's House of Representatives thus
consisted of twenty-two Fijians, twenty-two Indians and eight
General Electors, no matter which party was elected to office.
A major problem with this system, however, was that it
allowed little flexibility in terms of the racial composition of
*This photo is from Islands Business (Suva, Fiji), courtesy of Stephanie
Hagan.
49. Ibid, p. 11.
the governing party. The Alliance government elected in
1982, for example, included all twelve Fijian communal mem
bers
so
and all three General Elector communal members, as
well as five Fijian, five Indian, and three General Elector
national members. The government thus consisted of seven
teen Fijians, six General Electors, and only five Indians.
51
Mara's cabinet contained only two Indians. In the 1987 gen
eral elections, the Labour/NFP coalition won all twelve Indian
communal seats as well as seven Fijian, seven Indian, and two
General Elector national seats. It is significant to note that the
four additional national seats won by the coalition in this
election (and which gave Bavadra twenty-eight seats to the
Alliance's twenty-four), were won because of a swing towards
the coalition by Fijians and General Electors. A further point
that must be noted in respect of this electoral system is that the
communal (as opposed to national) seats were obviously re
sponsible for the racial imbalance that had existed in all gov
ernments. Moreover, it must have been apparent at the time the
Constitution was drafted that any government other than an
Alliance government would necessarily consist of many more
Indians than Fijians. It is clear, then, that the defeat of the
Alliance in any future electoral contest was not anticipated,
and it is not unreasonable to assume that this was based on an
expectation that the old racially based party system would
continue to operate almost indefinitely and, further, that the
Alliance would be able to maintain a solid and united Fijian
electoral base as well as its strong General Elector support.
The emergence of the Fiji Labour party and the results of the
1987 general election indicate that the Alliance party and the
establishment chiefs had begun to lose their iron grip on the
loyalty of the Fijian people. The time-honored tactics of divide
and rule and of instilling fear and uncertainty over land and
traditional rights were no longer sufficient to keep them in
power under the relatively democratic parliamentary system
that they had been largely responsible for instituting in 1970.
Let us return briefly to the composition of the Bavadra
government and, in relation to this, consider the widely prom
ulgated notion that Fijians had "lost power" in their own
country. It is true, of course, that of the twenty-eight members
of the Bavadra government only seven were Fijians. It is
crucial to note, however, that apart from the fact that Bavadra
himself is a Fijian, his cabinet was very evenly balanced in
terms of racial representation. Of the fourteen cabinet mem
bers (including the prime minister), six were Fijian, and seven
were Indian while the remaining member was a General Elec
tor of part-European/part-Fijian descent. Moreover, the Fijian
cabinet members between them held all of the important port
folios relating to Fijian affairs. Bavadra himself took the
portfolios covering Public Service, Home Affairs, and Fijian
50. The only time that the Alliance had lost any Fijian communal
seats was in the Marchi April general election of 1977 when the
Alliance lost two Fijian communal seats-one to the leader of the
Fijian Nationalist party, Sakeasi Butadroka, and one to an indepen
dent from the west of Viti Levu, Ratu Osea Gavidi, who later formed
the Western United Front and went into coalition with the NFP priorto
the 1982 general elections.
51. This altered slightly following the 1985 by-election when the
Alliance won an additional Indian national seat in the three-way
contest.
Affairs.
52
Further, one of the Fijian cabinet members, Ratu Jo
Nacola, is a chief, and as we have seen, Bavadra himself is
from a chiefly family. It is clear, then, that the Bavadra govern
ment was by no means controlled by Indians and that it had
amongst its most important members Fijians with chiefly con
nections. In the edition of the Fiji Times published on the same
day that the full cabinet was announced, the editorial column
stated that' 'The Prime Minister has obviously given great and
careful thought to his selections ... Dr. Bavadra has ...
chosen an extremely well-balanced group of men to lead the
government. "53
However, the loss of government by the party which has
traditionally been seen as the "Fijian" party to a coalition
(which contained the party traditionally viewed as the
"Indian" party), created a situation which was very easily
exploitable by those elements bent on the destruction of the
Bavadra government. The fact that this government did have
nineteen Indian members (even though most of them were
backbenchers) was used as a strong rallying point, and to many
Fijians this would quite easily have led to an impression that
Indians actually controlled the entire parliament. This is an
important point when considering the powers ofthe parliament
in relation to Fijian land and customary rights.
The Entrenchment of Indigenous Rights
Section 68( I) of the Constitution provides that:
A bill for an Act of Parliament that alters any of the provisions of
the following laws, that is to say-
a) the Fijian Affairs Ordinance;
b) the Fijian Development Fund Ordinance;
c) the Native Lands Ordinance;
d) the Native Lands Trust Ordinance;
e) the Rotuma Ordinance;
f) the Rotuma Lands Ordinance 1959;
g) the Agricultural Landlord and Tenant Ordinance;
h) the Banaban Lands Ordinance; and
i) the Banaban Settlement Ordinance,
Shall not be passed by either House of Parliament unless it is
supported at the final voting thereon in the House by the votes of
not less than three-quarters of all the members of the house.
The effect of this section in respect of the House of Representa
tives, then, is that not less than thirty-nine members must
approve any change to the laws governing indigenous rights.
Therefore, even if all twenty-two Indian members (and all
eight General Electors for that matter), voted to change any of
these laws, they could not succeed without Fijian support.
Similarly, if all twenty-eight members of the Bavadra govern
ment had voted to change these laws, they could not have
succeeded without the support of the Alliance.
This section also provides that any alteration to these laws
must be approved by three-quarters of the members of the
Senate. The Senate is, in effect, another institution designed to
protect and entrench indigenous rights. The twenty-two
senators are appointed by the governor general under Section
45 (I) of the Constitution on the following basis: (a) eight on
the advice of the Great Council of Chiefs; (b) seven on the
advice of the prime minister; (c) six on the advice of the leader
52. FijiSun(l5ApriI1987),pp. 1-2.
53. Ibid., r. 5.
of the opposition; and (d) one on the advice of the Council of
Rotuma. Further, Section 68 (2) provides that a proposal to
alter any of the laws so as to affect Fijian land, customs, or
customary rights shall not be passed in the Senate unless it is
supported by not less than six of the eight Senators nominated
by the Great Council of Chiefs.
Moreover, according to the provisions of Section 67 (3), the
Constitution itself cannot be altered unless two-thirds of the
members of both houses of Parliament support the alteration,
and, as stated in Section 67 (2), where any proposal to alter the
Constitution deals with those sections concerned with the
entrenchment of indigenous rights, a three-quarters majority
in both houses is required. In addition, as stipulated in Section
67 (5), a proposal to alter the subsections dealing with the
composition of the Senate or the powers of the senators nomi
nated by the Great Council of Chiefs must be supported by not
less than six of the eight senators so appointed. Finally, Sec
tion 53 (4) gives the governor general the power to assent to,
or withhold assent from, any legislation.
There is little doubt that the majority of Fijians do not
understand the extent to which the 1970 Constitution protected
their rights, and it has never been translated into the Fijian
language. Thus when the spectre of an "Indian-dominated"
parliament blithely sweeping away their rights is raised, many
Fijians would genuinely believe that this could happen.
Corruption
Apart from the debate on the chiefly system and the land,
it was the issue of corruption in the Alliance goverment that
probably received more attention than any other. Some of the
allegations of corruption had been raised over a period of two
years prior to the election of the Labour party. These allega
tions went right to the top level of Alliance leadership and
referred specifically to the' 'Mara Empire. "54 An article in the
Economist published in July 1985 highlighted the relationship
between political leaders and wealthy businessmen. 55 Of the
allegations involving Mara, that which receive1 the most at
tention concerned the construction and subsequent leasing to
the Department of Education of an office complex named
"Marella House," which was owned by Mara's family. The
rental paid for the building was said to be far in excess of its
market value. 56 Other allegations included the use of hurricane
relief money and materials to construct a home for Apisai
Tora, the Alliance's minister for communications, transport,
and works; the writing off of a four million dollar loan by the
Fiji Development Bank to a company which had close family
connections with Peter Stinson, the Alliance's minister for
economic development, planning, and tourism; a pay-out of
$F52,OOO by garment manufacturers to the Alliance in return
for not implementing the garment industry tribunal's recom
mendations in respect to minimum wages; the award of
$F20,OOO to Home Affairs Minister Akariva Nabati through
the intervention of Minister for Justice Qoriniasi Bale, in a
compensation case before his case went to court, even though a
54. Fiji Sun (II February 1987), p. 8.
55. Cited in ibid., p. 8.
56. Interview, Joeli Kalou, former minister in the Bavadra
government (Suva, 6 June 1986).
13
Fiji was originally one of the leaders of the movement to make the
Pacific nuclearjree. In 1975 Fiji and New Zealand cosponsored a
United Nations resolution for a South Pacific nuclearjree zone, and
Fiji banned nuclear warships long before New Zealand did. In 1983
the United States persuaded Mara to drop the ban, which was a
contributing factor in the formation ofthe Fijian Labour party a couple
of years later. For some Americans the main issue of Fiji's April
election was Labour's nuclearjree policy.
writ had been filed; a scandal over the issuing of permits by the
Taxi Control Board involving the head of the Licensing Au
thority, Jone Veisamasama, who later became the secretary of
the Alliance party; and a $F50,OOO payment to the Alliance by
leading manufacturers of sweets in return for duty
concessions. 57
I The coalition asserted that many of the debates in Parlia
ment on corruption "were thwarted by an ever efficient but
dictatorial Speaker.' '58 In the week before the election,
Bavadra stated that' 'when we go to the polls ... it will be to
conduct a thorough spring cleaning of government. "59 The
coalition had promised also to introduce anticorruption legis
lation and to investigate fully all allegations relating to cor
ruption.60 It is obvious that such investigations would have
involved Alliance figures at the highest levels.
Foreign Affairs Policy
A further policy area of the coalition that must be con
sidered relates to foreign affairs, although this received much
less attention locally than it did in the press outside Fiji. This
policy area is also related to the ideological stance adopted by
the coalition. Even before entering into the coalition with the
more conservative NFP, the Labour party had been cautious in
its approach to ideological issues. In response to a question as
to how far to the' 'left" the Fiji Labour party would, or could,
go, Bavadra responded:
Not too far-it cannot afford to go too far. To be identified with
Soviet ideology would be a bad thing. The Fijian people are
generally afraid of the Russians. We stand for a different sort of
society anyway. We are strong supporters of democratic gov
emment.
61
Bavadra added, however, that Labour accepted that both the
U.S.A. and the USSR are superpowers, that they looked to a
57. See Fiji Sun (I April 1987), p. 3; Fiji Times (31 March 1987), p.
12; Fiji Times (27 March 1987), p. 9; and Fiji Sun (I9March 1987), p.
3.
59. Fiji Times (31 March 1987), p. 12.
61. Interview, Timoci Bavadra, Suva, 12 June 1986.
"balanced relationship" with each of them and, further, that
Labour would "use the New Zealand approach to nuclear
issues. "62
The official coalition platform for the 1987 general elec
tions made its position on the nuclear issue quite clear:
The Coalition is committed to the cause of nuclear disarmament
and believes that it must take all steps necessary to end the threat of
nuclear holocaust. The Coalition is committed to a nuclear-free
environment and it will oppose the carriage, testing, storage and
manufacture ofnuclear weapons or the dumping of nuclear waste
within the South Pacific region. 63
These policies were significant to the extent that they
would have further undermined U.S. strategic interests in the
Southwest Pacific region, which had already been damaged by
the earlier stance on nuclear issues taken by New Zealand's
Labour government. Moreover, Bavadra's desire to bring in a
"balanced relationship" between the superpowers and Fiji
indicated a move towards a more nonaligned foreign policy
(which later attracted a number of completely unsubstantiated
allegations about a "Libyan connection"). Taken together,
these factors represented a significant shift away from the very
close relationship that the United States had enjoyed with Fiji
under Mara's Alliance government, and raises the question of
external interference.
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
The evidence for CIA involvement in the coup is largely
circumstantial. Nevertheless, there are too many coincidences
for the possibility to be dismissed out of hand, and some
involvement in the coup would certainly not have been incon
sistent with the modus operandi of the CIA.
There is insufficient scope in this paper to provide any
detailed analysis of the evidence and assertions that have been
made in relation to the CIA. Indeed, given their circumstantial
nature, it is difficult to offer more than a fairly superficial
account of the various allegations that have been made. Even
so, the question of possible CIA activity cannot be ignored
entirely in this discussion, .however inconclusive it may be.
The issue of possible CIA intervention in politics in Fiji
was raised in September last year in an article based on an
interview with Ralph McGehee, a former CIA operative of
twenty-five years standing and author of the book Deadly
Deceits, which exposes destabilisation methods of the United
States agency.' '64 The article said that Fiji could become a
target because of the "electoral threat to the pro-Washington
stance of the present government. "65
In May 1986, it was reported that an organization called
62. Ibid.
63. NFP/Labour Coalition Manifesto, printed in Fiji Times (25
February 1987), p. 20.
M. U. Robie "Spectre of the CIA," Islands Business, (September
1986), p. 54. Editor's note: Readers who want additional facts and
interpretations about possible U.S. involvement in the Fiji coup may
consult the June 1987 issue of Wellington Confidential (P.O. Box
9034, Wellington, New Zealand), pp. 1-6, and the Wellington Pacific
Report, No.5 (November, 1987), pp. 1-6, available from WPR, P.O.
Box 9314, Wellington, Aotearoa (New Zealand).
65. Robie, "Spectre," p. 54.
14
the Asian-American Free Labor Institute (AAFLl) had been
active in Suva where it had set up headquarters-although
these had later been moved to Hawaii. The AAFLl is funded
through the National Endowment for Democracy, which has
been described as .. A controversial body set up by the Reagan
Administration l which I has spent almost one mil1ion dollars in
the last two years funding conservative political activities in
the South Pacific aimed, among other things, at rolling back
the move for a nuclear free Pacific.' '66 A leading figure in the
network of organizations, which also includes the AFL-CIO
and the Free Trade Union Institute, is Irving Brown, who has
been described in a book by Philip Agee, Inside the Company,
as a longtime CIA employee. 67
James Raman, secretary of the Fiji Trade Union Con
gress, has reportedly stated that "it was significant that the
establishment of the AAFLl in Fiji ... coincided with moves
to form a Fiji Labour Party. ' '68 From early to mid-1986, some
members of the Fiji Labour party and leading trade union
officials were approached by the AAFLl and offered "free,
all-expenses-paid trips to the United States." The purpose of
the trips was not specified in any detail, but the invitations
were viewed within the Labour party as an attempt to infiltrate
both the party and union movement. 69
The National Endowment for Democracy has also pro
vided funds to another organization which goes by the name of
the Pacific Democratic U nion-a group of conservative politi
cal parties which includes New Zealand's National party,
Australia's Liberal and National parties, Japan's Liberal
Democratic party, the American Republican party, conserva
tive groups from Canada, Western Samoa, and Papua New
Guinea, and Fiji's Alliance party.70 Ironically, Ratu Sir
Kamisese Mara had been busy chairing a Pacific Democratic
Union conference being held at a resort in the west of Viti Levu
at the time of the coup. 71
After the coup, it was reported that five employees of the
CIA had been acti ve in Fiji just prior to Rabuka' s takeover and
that one had actually been in the Parliament when the coup
took place. 72 It is interesting to note also that the shutters on the
U.S. Embassy in Suva were all put up several hours before the
coup took place, particularly since the cyclone season was well
and truly over. The "unofficial" response from Washington
following news of the successful coup was, "We're kinda
delighted ... All of a sudden our ships couldn't go to Fiji and
now all of a sudden they can. We got a little chuckle about the
news. "73
Since the coup, Bavadra and others have claimed openly
that there was a definite CIA involvement in the coup. During a
visit to Washington, Bavadra alleged that a Suva-based Ameri
can diplomat, William Paupe, was instrumental in a payout to
former Alliance minister Apisai Tora of a sum of $US200,OOO.
Bavadra claimed also that retired U.S. Army Major General
66. Sydney Morning Herald(l7 May 1986),p. 7.
67. Ibid., p. 7.
68. Ibid., p. 7.
69. Interview, Joeli Kalou.
70. Fiji Sun (25 July 1987), p. 3.
71. Sydney Morning Herald (16 May 1987), p. 45.
The presence of us. Army general John Singlaub in Fiji before,
during, and after the May 1987 coup lends support to the theory that
the U.S. and the CIA encouraged and exploited Fijian issues to bring
about (or at least to assist in) the coup. Singlaub has been extensively
involved infurul raisingfor the contras in Nicaragua. and there is a grow
ing body ofevidence that he may be advising or assisting in the develop
ment ofcounterinsurgency plans and capabilities in the Philippines. *
John Singlaub was in Fiji before, during, and after the coup.
Singlaub heads a right-wing organization called the World
Anti-Communist League, and is said to be a central figure in
the clandestine network that funded the Nicaraguan contras
when official U.S. aid was restricted by Congress.
74
In re
sponse to the allegations, Paupe has conceded that Tora is a
friend of his, but only one of many he has made in his capacity
as director of the South Pacific regional office in Suva of the
U . S. Agency for International Development. 75
A Hawaiian-based academic who accompanied Bavadra
to Washington, James Anthony, has reportedly claimed that
six of those involved in the scene in the Parliament were
Americans and that two others were South African mercen
aries, and that this was the reason for the soldiers involved
being masked. 76
As noted earlier, the evidence for CIA involvement is
largely circumstantial. Much of it remains at the level of rumor
a.nd may never be substantiated. Indeed, some of the claims,
lIke those made by Anthony, seem a little far-fetched. It is
quite clear, however, that the strategic interests of the United
States in the Southwest Pacific region were seen by certain
elements within the U. S. administration as being at risk under
the Bavadra government, and that they may be much better
served by the present quasi-military regime as well as any
future government that is likely to emerge. It is important to
stress, however, that Mara and many of the former Alliance
*This photo, plus some of the caption information, is from The
National Reporter, Vol. 10, No.3 (Spring 1987), p. 6.
74. Fiji Times (I8 June 1987), p. 3.
75. Fiji Times (19 June 1987), p. 8.
76. Fiji, Ministry of Information, News Release No. 336, 19 June
1987.
15
On 14 May 1987 Lt. Col. Sitiveni Rabuka, the third-ranking officer
in Fiji's 2,GOO-member army, marched into Fiji's Parliament with ten
armed soldiers and arrested Prime Minister Bavadra and twenty-seven
other government officials. Rabuka later said he launched this blood
less coup to protect indigenous Fijian rights, and promised to change
the Constitution so that Indians could never again gain a majority
and could never increase their land ownership. Here Rabuka is arriv
ing at Fiji's government building on 15 May 1987for theftrst meeting
of his newly formed Council of Ministers.
ministers had much to gain from the sudden downfall of the
Bavadra government, particularly in consideration of the cor
ruption issue, and it is therefore unlikely that they would have
needed much in the way of encouragement from any external
source. Nevertheless, it seems quite possible that the CIA may
have provided not only encouragement, but also some valu
able assistance.
It remains to review briefly the developments in the
period between the election of the Bavadra government and the
coup, and how the racial issue has dominated the context of
debate.
The Downfall of the Bavadra Government
In the first few days following the general elections and
the change of government, it appeared that the transition had
been smooth and widely accepted by the Fijian community.
*This photo is from The Sydney Morning Herald, 21 May 1987,
courtesy of Anthony van Fossen.
Any unrest was limited to a few isolated incidents of drunken
ness and stone throwing.
77
Moreover, Mara and his Alliance
colleagues gave every indication that they had accepted their
defeat gracefully. The day after Bavadra's victory was
announced, Mara, in a most statesmanlike manner, issued the
following official statement:
Fellow citizens, we have come to the end of a long, hard cam
paign. You have given your decision. That decision must be
accepted . . . I am proud that we have been able to demonstrate
that democracy is alive and well in Fiji. . . We must now ensure a
smooth transition to enable the new Government to settle in
quickly ... There can be no room for rancour or bitterness ...
Fiji has recently been described by Pope John Paul as a symbol of
hope for the rest of the world. Long may we so remain. 78
Two days after the election, following the swearing in of
Bavadra and members of his cabinet by the governor general,
Ratu Sir Penaia Ganilau, Bavadra travelled to the chiefly
island of Bau to pay his respects to the former governor
general, Ratu Sir George Cakobau, who is the Vunivalu of Bau
and the paramount chief of Bau and Fiji and a direct descen
dent of Ratu Sem Cakobau who was responsible for ceding Fiji
to the British in 1874. Bavadra said afterwards, "He appre
ciated my visit and commented that he was happy that I have
once again returned, indicating that I still recognised the im
portance of tradition. ' qq
Within days of the Bavadra government being sworn in it
became apparent that a number of Alliance figures were not
prepared to accept the verdict of the polls. Former Alliance
minister Apisai Tora (who was one of the targets of corruption
allegations and the person alleged to have received the
$US200,000 from William Paupe) and a senator nominated by
the Great Council of Chiefs, Jona Qio, set up the Taukei
(Fijian) movement and began organizing and leading demon
strations against the new government on the pretext of pro
tecting Fijian . rights. Tora promised "a campaign of civil
disobedience" and called for changes to the Constitution "to
ensure the continuation of the indigenous Fijian's para
mount position. "80 A rally in Suva organized by Tora on 24
April was reportedly attended by about 5,000 Fijians.
81
In the
week leading up to the coup, however, it was evident that the
Taukei movement's attempts to manipulate racial feelings and
create tension was losing momentum and that street protests
were attracting fewer and fewer demonstrators. 82 An ABC" 4
Corners" team's film of a demonstration led by Tora outside
the Parliament just days before the coup showed a fairly
lackluster collection of Fijians milling around-their numbers
swelled temporarily by public servants who had vacated the
government buildings following a bomb scare.
83
Further, it
seemed that the Bavadra government was rapidly consoli
dating its control again. 84 The events of 14 May, then, came as
77. Fiji Sun (14 April 1987), p. 3.
78. FijiSun(13ApriI1987),p. 1.
79. Fiji Times (15 April 1987), p. I.
81. Ibid.,p.41.
82. Ibid., p. 45.
83. ABC, "4 Corners," 18 May 1987.
84. Sydney Morning Herald (\6 May 1987), p. 45.
something of a surprise to most observers.
After the coup, Rabuka claimed that it was Bavadra's
policies that had "incited the unrest which could have led to
bloodshed." Rabuka further claimed that Bavadra's cabinet
was "dominated by the Indian race" and that "the Fijians feel
their [sic] land rights being taken away."8S These claims are,
of course, patently untrue. Nevertheless, they are notions that
appear to have been widely accepted after the coup, particu
larly amongst a significant sector of the Fijian community.
They have also been reinforced strongly by the Great Council
of Chiefs which has now taken a leading role in deliberations
oh the new constitution.
It is difficult to determine precisely who was involved in
the planning of the coup-apart from Rabuka and his soldiers.
Nevertheless, events following the coup suggest that Rabuka
had the support (tacit or otherwise) of prominent figures in
Fijian politics. The initial reaction of leading Fijians such as
the governor general, Ratu Sir Penaia Ganilau (a former
deputy -leader of the Alliance), and former prime minister Ratu
Sir Kamisese Mara was (perhaps predictably) one of' 'shock."
Ganilau, at first, appeared to be standing firmly by the Con
stitution as the Queen's representative. This facade, however,
was not maintained beyond a week or so and could be viewed
as nothing more than an exercise in tokenism designed to
maintain some semblance of legitimacy for the vice-regal role
expected to be played out by a governor general in such a
situation. For his part, Mara, together with a number of his
former Alliance ministers, had little hesitation in accepting
positions on the council set up by Rabuka just days after the
coup. While Mara has been vocal in his denials of any prior
involvement, his subsequent actions must invite even the most
generous of minds to speculate on the possibilities.
As with the question of CIA involvement, however, it is
unlikely that a clearer picture of those behind Rabuka and the
coup will emerge in the near future. What is clear is that those
responsible have been remarkably successful to the extent that
they have managed to attract far less attention than they de
serve in the circumstances, and appear also to have been highly
successful in promUlgating the notion, both nationally and
internationally, that racial issues are at the heart of the whole
matter.
I Scx.EtrWl'f sWEN. 'TO 'Iou
"..y TOTAL ......Nb
TO ftPrl",PV/..I..'f f)ftlOt.TJ.
Conclusion
Race is obviously a crucial factor in the analysis of poli
tics in Fiji. It has shaped much of Fiji's colonial history, the
political institutions of independent Fiji, and has overshad
owed the quest for power on both sides of politics. But whether
the coup was actually caused by racial factors and, in particu
lar, any real threat to indigenous rights, is another question. As
we have seen, it is quite clear that these rights were in no way
endangered by the Bavadra government. It is clear, also, that
the Bavadra government was not an "Indian" government.
Moreover, the political leadership of the country-including
the positions of prime minister and governor general-was
still effectively in Fijian hands, although not to the extent that
it had been under the Alliance.
The potential for racial issues to heighten tensions and
inculcate fear and insecurity, however, has always been high.
It had been used during the colonial period by Europeans and
chiefs alike, and successfully tapped by the Alliance in its
election campaigns since independence. However, it can be
argued that these fears and insecurities have been perpetuated
largely by the Alliance itself. The tactics of the Alliance,
however, did not enjoy their usual success in the 1987 general
elections. Bavadra's coaltion had managed to open up a new
discourse by changing the emphasis from race to the issues of
economic class, social justice, and commonality of interests.
Further development and acceptance of this new discourse
would have undermined the very foundations of the Alliance
party. Moreover, the knowledge that Fijian support for the
Alliance had started to slip away undoubtedly created no small
degree of alarm amongst those members of the chiefly estab
lishment who equated support for the Alliance with support for
themselves. There was certainly a fear amongst these chiefs
that they were beginning to lose their traditional hold over their
Both cartoons on this page are from The Sydney Morning Herald, 18
and 19 May 1987, courtesy of Joe Moore.
85. Sydney Morning Herald (18 May 1987),p. 7.
17
people. Many chiefs would have been alanned also by the
possibility that under the Bavadra government they may have
had to distribute more of their land rental monies to ordinary
Fijians.
Given these factors, together with the corruption issue,
the possibility of external involvement, the deliberate orches
tration of unrest of Tora and Qio, Mara's unseemly rush to join
Rabuka's original council and the governor general's com
plete capitulation to Rabuka's wishes, it is apparent that a
purely racial explanation cannot support the reasons for the
coup. Rather, race has been used deliberately to incite fear and
insecurity amongst the Fijians by playing on their ignorance
and, no doubt, existing prejudices, which has led in turn to an
impression of popular support for the coup, for the subsequent
imposition of quasi-military rule, and for the current proposals
to permanently entrench rule by Fijian chiefs.
Finally, it is obvious that the relatively open democratic
institutions and processes were tolerated only so long as the
All iance remained in power, and the restoration of democratic
practices which can give all citizens of Fiji an equitable share
of political representation seems even less than a remote possi
bility. Ironically, it is the indigenous Fijian commoners, as
well as the Fiji Indians, who will be the biggest losers.
Postscript
This paper was written in July 1987, two months before
Rabuka staged the second coup in Fiji. The analysis, therefore,
is necessarily confined to explaining the May coup. Events
since the second coup, however, may give the impression that
there is much more to the racial issue than my earlier analysis
allowed. and further, that the governor general may have been
treated unfairly since he appeared to make every attempt to
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18
stand firm against Rabuka' s demands following the second
coup.
On the racial question, I would argue that the overt racism
we have witnessed in the last few months is a result (not a
cause) of the first coup and that it has much to do with the
consolidation of the extremist Taukei movement. This organi
zation has continued to orchestrate racial unrest and to stir up
tensions amongst a susceptible Fijian population-although it
should also be pointed out that many Fijians do not support
either the Taukei movement or Rabuka.
With respect to the role played by the governor general, it
remains the case that despite his public support for the 1970
Constitution at the time of the May coup, he had capitulated
to most of Rabuka's demands within a matter of days. This
suggests that he gave tacit approval (if not active support) to
the original coup. His role in the events surrounding the Sep
tember coup may, in time, be seen in a similar light. It is one
thing to voice publicly a great concern for the overthrow of
constitutional practices and the severing oflinks with the British
Crown-he could scarcely have done otherwise in his position.
On the other hand, his public stance may well belie his private
views. I am not suggesting that Ratu Penaia necessarily ap
proves of all the activities of the Taukei movement or of Rabuka,
but it remains possible that he is much more sympathetic to
their essential aims than to the causes that he was obliged to
defend publicly by virtue of his office of governor general.
*
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Two Military Coups in Fiji
by Anthony B. van Fossen
l
The first Fiji coup of 14 May 1987 sought to reinstall a
feudal aristocracy which had been severely threatened by a
narrow defeat in the elections of the previous month. The coup
reaffirmed the aristocracy's control over both polity and econ
omy at a time when the newly elected government had been
attempting to divide the two realms by creating a stronger,
nonethnic state and an economy which was based upon princi
ples which were rational, rather than ethnic and feudal. The
aristocrats or chiefs2 tried to mobilize indigenous Fijian fears
of Indian domination to justify the coup. However, conflicts
within the indigenous Fijian community were at least as impor
tant in the events leading to the coup. Specifically, the new
government elevated well-educated commoners over aristo
crats, and these commoners (including Prime Minister Bavadra)
were disproportionately from western Fiji, an area which has
been subjected to the internal colonialism of eastern aristocrats
for over one hundred years. This paper sees the origins of the
first coup in class conflict and associated internal colonialism.
It concludes with some speCUlations about the future, suggesting
that Fiji is entering a new stage of ethnic relations roughly
comparable to that of Malaysia, a society to which it is fre
quently compared, and that this process has been accelerated
by the second coup of 25 September 1987.
I. I thank Ponniah Arudsothy, Barbara Misztal, and Bronislaw Misztal
for their comments on this paper.
2. Although Fijians are far more inclined to use the Scottish term
"chief' than "aristocrat," Ratu (Lord) Sir Lala Sukuna was correct in
identifying himself and others as aristocrats in an indigenous Fijian
social system where aristocracy and hierarchy were central principles.
See D. Scarr, Ratu Sukuna: Soldier, Statesman, Man of Two Worlds
(London: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 145, 147. "Aristocrat" conveys to
most readers a more accurate sense of the class system in indigenous
Fijian society.
Class Conflict
In Fiji the conflicts within the indigenous Fijian community
between the high chiefs who dominate the Alliance party and
the radical commoners who were so important in the elected
government of Dr. Timoci Bavadra are extremely significant
in explaining the first coup. Although the first coup has been
most often seen in terms of ethnic tensions between indigenous
Fijians (46 percent of the population) and Fijian Indians (49
percent),3 it may be more accurately seen as the result of ten
sions between aristocratic indigenous Fijians and their com
moner allies defending feudalism, on the one hand, and the cause
of social democracy, small-scale local capitalism, and multi
ethnic nationalism represented by middle-class indigenous Fi
jian commoners and Hindus on the other. 4
Indigenous Fijians and Indians have maintained considerable
separation, and this was accommodated and even encouraged
by British colonialists and indigenous Fijian chiefs. Although
Indians are extremely reluctant to assimilate (for example, in
marriage), they have tended to emphasize their common na
tional identity against the wealthy European minority (0.5 per
cent of the population) and the large (mostly Australian and
3. The most recent population figures for Fiji (from August 1986)
indicate that there were 348,704 Indians and 329,306 indigenous
Fijians.
4. This breakdown neglects the relatively small Indian communities
of Moslems (4 percent of the population) and Hindu Gujerati business
families who have usually voted for the Alliance party. Even after the
first coup, which united Indians and divided indigenous Fijians, Mos
lems and Gujeratis remained distinct from Hindus, although to a lesser
degree. A poll indicating that 18 percent of Indians supported large
increases in indigenous Fijian representation in Parliament noted that
they were mostly Moslems and Gujeratis. See Sunday Sun, 13 Sep
tember 1987, p. 3.
19
180'
FIJI*
New Zealand) multinationals which compete against their smal
ler family businesses. Indians have also been highly critical of
the feudal system of land allocation, and within the last few
years they have made common cause with progressive indigen
ous Fijian commoners. The Indian National Federation party
formed a coalition with the Labour party, led primarily by
Indians and progressive indigenous Fijian commoners such as
Bavadra. While the aristocrats of the Alliance party warned of
ethnic conflict if they were defeated, the coalition stressed
reforms in basic economic structures and the construction of a
common national identity minimizing ethnicity and hereditary
hierarchy.
Indigenous Fijian society is based on hierarchy. At the top
are major aristocrats or high chiefs such as Ratu (Lord) Sir
Kamisese Mara, the former prime minister, his son-in-law,
Brigadier General Ratu Epeli Nailatikau, and the governor gen
eral, Ratu Sir Penaia Ganilau. They had controlled the govern
ment from the time of independence in 1970 to the recent
elections. Below them are hundreds of other hereditary chiefs
who, unlike their ancestors, have no battles to fight, but live
to a great extent upon levies, gifts from rural subjects, and,
most of all, by their control of the Fijian Administration , which
under the Constitution holds 82 percent of the nation's land in
The governor general of Fiji, Ratu Sir Penaia Ganilau, right, talking
to sugar farmers in the west of Viti Levu island in June 1987. Along
with Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara and Brigadier General Ratu Epeli
Nailatikau, Ganilau is one of the Fijian aristocrats in the Alliance
party who controlled the government from independence in 1970 until
the April 1987 elections when Bavadra and his LabourlNFP coalition
came to power. At the time of the May 1987 coup Ganilau at first
appeared to be standing firmly by the Constitution and refused to
recognize the new military regime, but a few days after the coup he
had joined the council set up by Rabuka, and on 5 December 1987
Rabuka declared Ganilau president of the republic. *
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trust, to be allocated by aristocrats. The Fijian Administration
is often called "a government within the government." Inter
marrying, the chiefs form an interlinking web of great families
with a distinctive ethos characterized by proud traditionalism,
disdain for labor, and insistence upon a distinctive indigenous
Fijian style of conduct, speech, apparel, music, and taste.
Virtually all Fijian aristocrats oppose progressive common
ers. Bavadra
5
and the other well-educated anti-aristocratic com
moners in his cabinet were regarded by Fijian aristocrats as
being contemptuous of tradition and law, disrespectful to their
superiors, egotistical, insolent, vulgar, and envious victimizers
of the nobility. While the most influential aristocrats come from
the eastern islands, the seat of indigenous Fijian radicalism has
been the west of the principal island of Viti Levu. In Bavadra's
own village, Viseisei, and throughout western Fiji, the memory
of the Fijian commoner messianic leader Apolosi Nawai re
mains strong, and progressive politicians there continually
claim to fulfill the mission of overthrowing eastern aristocratic
authority and establishing prosperity for indigenous Fijian com
moners. Although the progressives have the support of only a
minority of indigenous Fijians (mostly westerners, working
class town dwellers, and intellectuals), the chiefs feared that
they might become increasingly popular if they created a land
reform program eroding aristocratic privilege. Ever since
Apolosi, radical commoners have wanted land to be redistri
buted along more efficient lines to indigenous Fijians through
reforms in the Native Land Trust Board and without aristocrats
taking so much control and profit.
Aristocrats also condemn commercialism. closely associated
with Indians, Europeans, and urban values, although this does
*This photo is from The Sydney Morning Herald, 4June 1987, courtesy of
Anthony van Fossen, and the map is from the lWG1A Newsletter, No. 50
(July 1987), p. 88.
5. Dr. Bavadra is a high-ranking commoner, although his supporters
attempted, often halfheartedly, to present him as an aristocrat to gain
indigenous Fijian support. His precise position is head of the Tokatoka
Werecaka of the Yavusa of the Sabutoyatoya in Vunda. His father
was the village carpenter. However, he is married to Adi (Lady) Kuini
Teimumu Vuikaba of an aristocratic family in Nokoro, Navosal
Nadroga, in western Viti Levu. One of Bavadra' s most bitter opponents
is the high chief of his village of Viseisei, Ratu Sir Jonaia Tavaiqia,
the Tui Vunda, who considers him a dangerous and subversive
parvenu.
20
Indian dress shop in Fiji.
not necessarily prevent them from entering business ventures.
The Fijian Administration leases land to Indians only for short
periods, on the understanding that it will eventually revert to
supporting the traditional aristocratic conception of mral life.
Many say that Indians, who came to the country over a century
ago as indentured laborers and have grown wealthier than the
indigenous Fijians, have no right to remain in the country.
Since Indians (the majority of whom are efficient, small farm
ers) have little incentive to develop the land under these condi
tions, there is severe erosion and poor conservation. Indians
are insecure and dissatisfied with being 49 percent of the popu
lation and owning only 1.7 percent of the land, having to lease
the vast majority ofthe land they farm from the aristocrat-domi
nated Fijian Administration. Aristocrats have tended to be am
bivalent toward Europeans, with whom they have often been
politically allied and who own most of the large businesses and
80 percent of the freehold land which is generally of the highest
quality and constitutes 8 percent of the total area.
6
Aristocratic power is enshrined in the Constitution. The Con
stitution calls for a Parliament composed of a lower house or
House of Representatives and an upper house or Senate. Elec
tion to the House of Representatives of fifty-two seats is based
on ethnicity. Indigenous Fijians and Indians are entitled to
twenty-two seats apiece; twelve of these twenty-two are com
munal seats for which only members of one's own ethnic group
can vote; and the other ten are national seats for which all
ethnicities vote. General Electors-Europeans, part-Europeans,
and Chinese-are entitled to three communal seats and five
national seats and thereby receive representation of roughly
four times their proportion of the population.
In the Senate the aristocratic principle is more obvious. Of
the twenty-two Senate seats, eight are filled by nominees of
the Great Council of Chiefs, seven by the prime minister, six
by the leader of the opposition, and one by the Council of
Rotuma (a Polynesian outlier). Furthermore, the Great Council
*This photo is from Tok Blong SPPF (South Pacific Peoples Founda
tion of Canada), No. 21 (October 1987), front cover.
6. Other groups such as the part-Europt:ans (1.7 percent of the popu
lation), Chinese (0.7 percent), and Polynesian Rotumans (1.7 percent),
have higher than average incomes put negligible political influence,
generally voting for the Alliance.
of Chiefs' nominees have the right of veto, and no legislation
affecting indigenous Fijian land, custom, and customary right
can be passed without the support of at least six of the Great
Council's nominees. Any substantive amendment to the Con
stitution relating to citizenship, the Parliament, the judiciary,
* or any of the ordinances which secure indigenous Fijian (and
~ aristocratic) power (those on Fijian Affairs, the Fijian Develop
.;::
'l::I ment Fund, Native Land, and Agricultural Landlords and Ten
.5 ants) can be achieved only with the support of at least three
~ quarters of both houses.
7
.s
I
Some Alliance party members had accumulated
great debts which they found difficult to repay.
Most ofall they feared the diminution oftheir ability
to allocate land. They feared that Bavadra, his rad
ical cabinet ministers, and Indians would substan
tially reduce their power by removing much oftheir
control over the Fijian administration, land alloca
tion, and the collection of rents from lands leased
to Indians.
As a result, the Great Council of Chiefs can indirectly block
any amendments to the Constitution. The Bavadra government
was, by necessity if not inclination, moderately reformist and
attempted to alter the content of government more than its
structures. On the highly emotional land issue, it would prob
ably have attempted to allocate ambiguously defined Crown
land (9.45 percent of the total) on a more rational basis, rather
than converting it into indigenous Fijian land, as had been done
under the Alliance government. Furthermore, without altering
the provisions of the arms of the Fijian Administration, it would
be quite possible to change personnel to reduce aristocratic
influence.
The aristocrats and their commoner allies in the Alliance
could not afford to lose their control of the government. They
had become accustomed to the power and money associated
with office. The Fiji Development Bank had made large loans
to projects which benefited aristocrats, but they defaulted. The
Labour-National Federation party coalition was intent onredi
recting money to what they saw as the more deserving' and
individualistic enterprises of commoners, who had been
neglected. Some Alliance party members had accumulated great
debts which they found difficult to repay. Most of all they
feared the diminution of their ability to allocate land. They
feared that Bavadra, his radical cabinet ministers, and Indians
would substantially reduce their power by removing much of
their control over the Fijian Administration, land allocation,
and the collection of rents from lands leased to Indians. For
them control of the polity meant very substantial control of the
economy.
7. Brij V. Lal, "Politics since Independence: Continuity and Change,"
in Lal (ed.), Politics in Fiji (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1986).
21
The development of a separate economic realm and a cen
tralized, nonethnic nation-state is inimical to the ties of kinship,
clan (mataqali) , and hereditary rights to allocate property on
which the indigenous Fijian aristocracy relies. Indians uphold
principles of mercantilism, petty capitalism, and education,
while the progressive indigenous Fijians support the ideas of
equality and democracy, and the indigenous aristocrats rely on
traditional custom. But the conflict between the Indians and
progressive indigenous Fijians on the one hand, and the indigen
ous aristocrats on the other, expresses itself in a tension between
differing political principles. The former want to create a more
distinct economic realm and common citizenship in a unified
nation indifferent to ethnicity and rank, while the latter seek
inalienable, entailed land ownership, small-scale and informal
control over laboring subjects, unequal distribution of their
products, and ethnically divided governmental functions.
Although the first coup has been most often seen
in terms of ethnic tensions between indigenous
Fijians (46 percent of the population) and Fijian
Indians (49 percent), it may be more accurately
seen as the result of tensions between aristocratic
indigenous Fijians and their commoner allies de
fending feudalism, on the one hand, and the cause
ofsocial democracy, small-scale local capitalism, and
multi-ethnic nationalism represented by middle
clllss indigenous Fijian commoners and Hindus on
the other.
The development of capitalism and industrialism in the main
center has created a small but significant indigenous Fijian
proletarian minority oriented toward town life and isolated from
the aristocracy and the land. But for the most part indigenous
Fijians are still a mass of small-scale farmers working on land
allocated by aristocrats, with most wage labor done to supple
ment farm income. Most indigenous Fijians regard themselves
as more or less contented subjects of the aristocratic polity
rather than as citizens of Fiji.
The new Bavadra government was oriented toward reforming
indigenous Fijian institutions to fit modem needs. Reforms
probably would have diluted the clan dear to the aristocrats,
created new social groupings around a bureaucracy to assume
the functions of these groupings in land allocation, and in
general relegated local associations to a secondary and super
ficial role while associations based on multi-ethnic nationalism
were brought to the fore. Whatever "socialism" may have
existed in the Bavadra government was largely nationalism (for
example, the suggestion of greater local equity in tourism and
the uncertain proposal to nationalize the foreign-owned
Emperor Gold Mines) and the desire to build a strong central
state freed of feudal entailments. Under Bavadra, aristocrats
would have been deprived of political-economic functions,
which would be vested in the nation, and many indigenous non
aristocrats would have been elevated. If these innovations had
been accompanied by prosperity and political stability, the aris
tocrats would have had reason to worry.
There were rumors of serious corruption in the Alliance
government, and Bavadra promised prosecution. The entire
hierarchical structure of indigenous Fijian society is based on
commoners' obedience to aristocrats. Receiving orders from
the commoners of Bavadra' s cabinet was an affront to aristo
cratic dignity.
After the election aristocrats inflamed indigenous Fijian
ethnic nationalism and hostility toward Indians and Bavadra's
government. There were mass demonstrations for indigenous
Fijian land rights, a road blockade at Tavua, and firebombings
of the businesses of government cabinet ministers. Under the
Bavadra government only a small privileged group in the
Alliance party had experienced deprivation, while the indigen
ous Fijian population as a whole felt little change. The attempts
of the aristocrats and their commoner allies to foment mass
turmoil were failing. A crisis came when Apisai Tora, a political
maverick and former Alliance party cabinet minister, was ar
rested for sedition, and Senator Jona Qio, an Alliance party
backbencher, was arrested for arson. Both are commoners, and
in Fiji commoners who are loyal to their chiefs rarely take
initiative but act on orders from aristocrats.
-.
*
t'
=s
~
~
.:::
oS
S
" <
..0:
C>..
Deposed prime minister Timoci Bavadra receives a hug and a kiss
from his Wife, Adi Kuini, after his release on 20 May 1987 from five
days in detention following the first coup. He said that the people
responsible for the coup should be taken to court, and that he saw
no reason a new election should be held: "As far as 1am concerned,
I am still prime minister."
*This photo is from The Australian, 20 May 1987, p. I, courtesy of
Joe Moore.
22
C
Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka leaving a parade ground in Suva on 25 Sep
tember 1987 after reviewing 500 security troops shortly before leading
the second coup. Apart from the ransacking of Bavadra' s home, this
coup appears to have taken place without any violent ac.tion. For four
months since the first coup, leaders had been developmg a plan for
governing Fiji that had finally been approved by !'oliti
ciansfrom both sides, including Governor General Gamlau. ThiS plan
was to go into effect the following week, which was not acceptable
to Rabuka since it would probably have led to his being sacked; he
and his Royal Fiji Military struck again before the plan could get
underway. *
Similarly the nationalist inclinations of another commoner,
Lieutenant Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka, were awakened by the
ethnic campaign of the aristocrats. Rabuka is a member of an
upwardly mobile family of commoners who have remained
loyal to their chiefs, the paramount being the Governor General
Ratu Sir Penaia Ganilau. When Rabuka led the first coup, the
day after Senator Qio's arrest, there was widespread incredulity
at the claim that he had ordered it.
There were strong suspicions that the coup had been dictated
from above, and that Rabuka was the tool ofaristocratic interests
which had inflamed his indigenous Fijian nationalism and would
use the almost exclusively indigenous Fijian army to achieve
its ends. The suspicions were largely confirmed when the "mili
tary" regime's new cabinet was announced. Almost all were
civilian members of the old Alliance party cabinet which had
been defeated in the election. Although Rabuka was nominally
in charge, questions were raised about whether Oxford-educated
aristocrats such as Ratu Mara would really be prepared to take
orders from a commoner such as Rabuka. At this time Rabuka's
military superior and Ratu Mara's son-in-law, Brigadier Gen
eral Nailatikau, whom Rabuka had suspended, was dithering
*This photo is from the Times on Sunday (Sydney), 27 September
1987, courtesy of Anthony van Fossen.
in Australia for a long period of time while still proclaiming
he was in command.
To say that Rabuka was a tool of the aristocrats does not
mean that he was a stooge. Clearly. he was fulfilling his own
objectives. In his initial declaration he used the prospect of
mass Fijian disorder and violence to justify seizing power so
that soldiers would not have to fight their ethnic brothers. The
implication was that the unity and morale of the army were at
stake. Rabuka's and the army's dissatisfactions were more prob
ably based on the likelihood that the
alter the system of recruitment. promotIOn, and discharge wlthm
the army to make it less of an ethnic enclave. The government
also planned to inculcate multi-ethnic nationalism and lessen
feudal loyalties. And it was considering foreign policy changes
which might reduce military aid and the army's involvement
in foreign war (for example, in Lebanon). When the Alliance
party was in power there had been no significant
between political and military principles of command, smce
both were bound to the feudal hierarchy. The coup restored
feudal principles, preserved the ethnic unity of the army, in
creased the defense budget, absolved the aristocratic brigadier
general of responsibility, and promoted Rabuka.
Virtually all Fijian aristocrats oppose progressive
commoners. Bavadra and the other well-educated
anti-aristocratic commoners in his cabinet were
regarded by Fijian aristocrats as being contemp,
tuous of tradition and law, disrespectful to
superiors, egotistical, insolent, vulgar, and envIOus
victimizers of the nobility.
For centuries Fijian aristocrats have insisted upon getting
their own way, and they have often used commoners to fight
their battles. Commoners who have refused to obey, from
Apolosi Nawai in the first half of the twentieth. to
Timoci Bavadra today, have been repressed and Impnsoned,
and their movements of resistance crushed. In the first coup
particularly, Colonel Rabuka appears to have been in
the interests of the aristocrats. He became a target of mterna
tional censure and condemnation which might have been
directed at others if the nature of Fijian society had been more
accurately understood abroad.
At one level, the first coup was a reaction to fears oflndian
land alienation. The scarcity of good land accentuates fears
that Indians will take what remains through a government which
they dominate. The productivity of the land could be increased
greatly and the sensation of overcrowding reduced or eliminated
through new types of technology and organization. But there
is a general disapproval of commoner agricultural entrepreneur
ship, since this implies commoners owning land individually
and exercising powers ordinarily associated with aristocrats.
Rich commoner farmers are sometimes accused of witchcraft,
and of all commoners soldiers have the best opportunity for
upward mobility without incurring aristocratic displeasure. The
first coup was not so much a matter of maintaining indigenous
23
Fijian land ownership (which is enshrined in the Constitution
anyway) as it is a matter of supporting a traditional aristocratic
polity and its feudal relation to the economy.
The United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) may
have supported the first coup. The United States would have
been more comfortable if the Alliance party had been reelected.
The growing anti-nuclear movement in the South Pacific was
worrying American military strategists. However, there was
evidence that the Bavadra government was backing away from
nonalignment and the prohibition of visits by nuclear ships. If
the United States were aware of this, there would have been
little reason to intervene, especially before any clear policy had
been formulated, unless it intended to establish military bases
in Fiji. Although Bavadra charged that the CIA had given
Apisai Tora $200,000 to organize civil disobedience against
his government, the United States was one of the few countries
to suspend aid after the first coup. Rabuka implied that he
would attempt to orient Fiji more toward Asia, although he
stressed continuation of Alliance party foreign policy and, like
prominent aristocrats such as Governor General Ratu Ganilau,
he attempted to preclude sanctions. After the first coup, mem
bers of Bavadra's elected government visited Apia,
Washington, London, Canberra, and Wellington claiming to
represent Fiji, but they were met so coldly as to indicate inter
national acceptance of the Rabuka regime. Internal countervail
ing powers such as trade unions and Indian sugar farmers and
shopkeepers are not sufficiently organized to be effective
against the military. The first coup was primarily the result of
internal class conflict which aligned to some extent with ethnic
ity, and international politics were a relatively minor factor. If
successful, the elected government promised real change in the
structure of power, society, and economic life in Fiji. The
primary concern of the elected government was not in interna
tional affairs, although multi-ethnic nationalism is allied to
resisting foreign domination.
The first coup primarily aimed at helping indigenous aristoc
rats maintain their feudal powers in the face of ever-greater
claims to power on the part of a centralized, multi-ethnic nation
state. While some indigenous aristocrats have suggested that
the origins ofthe present system of indigenous Fijian aristocratic
feudalism are lost in the mists of time, I agree with others who
suggest a relatively recent origin, dating from Ratu Sir Lala
Sukuna's leading role in the formation of a separate Fijian
Administration in 1944.
8
Ratu Sukuna, drawing on British sup
port, was extremely adept at reforming and revitalizing the
aristocratic principle to stem the rising tide of indigenous Fijian
democracy and European and Indian commercialism during the
first half of this century. But this was accomplished through
centralization of land control in the Fijian Administration that
was supposed to enshrine feudalism in perpetuity, becoming
what Norton has called "chiefly power bureaucratised,,,9 al
though it was increasingly open to well-qualified commoners
who are loyal to aristocrats.
Sukuna was an important architect of the feudal communal
Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna with the British minister oJstate in August 1951.
Sukuna is a Fijian aristocrat who had a leading role in the forming
oj a separate Fijian Administration in 1944, and in consolidating the
control ofthe land under this administration. He established the Native
Land Trust Board that the Federation party hopes to democratize and
rationalize.
ideology and the control of the aristocratic polity over land and
the indigenous economy, particularly in the west and interior
regions which are still the major areas of indigenous Fijian
dissent. In these areas and others, lands had been separately
owned and worked. The contlict and rebellion which Sukuna's
plan engendered, the clash between aristocrats and more indi
vidualistic and entrepreneurial indigenous commoners, are the
essence of his extreme animosity toward Apolosi Nawai's Viti
Kahani, which expressed the commoners' desire for indi
vidualistic business enterprise and their objections to the con
solidations of aristocratic power under the aegis of British
colonialism. The aristocrats' appeal to "tradition" must be
examined very critically.
During the twentieth century the authority of the aristocrats
has become based increasingly upon their political control over
the indigenous Fijian economy. This has effectively differen
tiated them from commoners, progressives, and Indians-who
had little or no political control. During the period of British
8. See, for example, P. France, The Charter oJthe Land (Melbourne:
Oxford University Press, 1969).
*This photo is courtesy of Anthony van Fossen and is from Deryck
9. R. Norton, "Colonial Fiji: Ethnic Divisions and Elite Conciliation,"
Scarr, Ratu Sukuna (London: Macmillan Company, 1981), following
in Lal (ed.), Politics, p. 58.
p. 132.
24
colonial rule, the aristocrats' increasing claims to political con
trol over the indigenous Fijian economy allowed them to con
serve the maximum possible authority without serious or pro
longed conflicts with Europeans over their supremacy in the
system of indirect rule. After independence in 1970 credible
and growing claims to power (through the Alliance party, the
Great Council of Chiefs, and the Fijian Administration) allowed
aristocrats to consolidate new political powers while simultane
ously creating an image among most indigenous Fijians that
rationalistic progressive commoners were the tools of Indians.
The rhetoric of aristocratic command in contemporary Fiji is
majestic and unqualified--claiming authority not only over the
political and military realms but also over the indigenous econ
omy and land that most Fijians rely on for their livelihoods. It
creates a popular sense that all indigenous Fijians form one body
which is represented by the aristocrats. This is a weapon that
allows them to define their interests in ethnic terms and therefore
in opposition to Indians. The coup of May 1987 upheld the aris
tocrats' desire to maintain their political control over an indigen
ous economy defined in terms of ownership which is communal
or ethnic, rather than capitalist or social democratic.
It was not so much the absence oflegitimacy which
led to the coup as the desire of the Fijian chiefs
and their military agents to prevent the development
of a strong sense of legitimacy by shortening the
elected government's tenure to a few weeks, and
thereby preventing it from developing more liberal
institutions and a national consciousness overrid
ing ethnicity and feudalism.
In Fiji in May 1987 there was little evidence of the conditions
which are often said to lead to coups---economic decline, cor
ruption in the existing government, genuine and spontaneous
mass disorders, lack of widespread political participation, weak
public commitment to civilian institutions, traditions of military
rule, rapid modernization, very low levels ofeconomic develop
ment, and the absence of a sense of legitimacy. Only 9 percent
of the indigenous Fijians voted for the government, but only
a minority appeared to approve of its military overthrow. It
was not so much the absence of legitimacy which led to the
coup as the desire of the Fijian chiefs and their military agents
to prevent the development of a strong sense of legitimacy by
shortening the elected government's tenure to a few weeks,
and thereby preventing it from developing more liberal institu
tions and a national consciousness overriding ethnicity and
feudalism.
Internal Colonialism
Indigenous Fijian society is frequently represented as aristo
cratic.
1O
But it is often forgotten that this is valid only for the
eastern societies or chiefdoms heavily influenced by Polynesia.
While these eastern chiefdoms have played the principal role
in national development over the past century (most recently
through the Alliance party), the western districts of Viti Levu
have been subjected to a form of internal colonialism that they
have often resisted. This resistance can currently be seen in
their disproportionate support for the Labour-National Federa
tion party (NFP) coalition.
It has often been recognized that Fiji is divided into eastern
and western sections, which have distinct ecological zones and
types of society. I I In the west there are hills and savannahs
poor, eroded, and often ravaged by fires. Here the best land
has been leased to Indians and the sugar monopoly, and Fijians
are the most underemployed and discontented. Traditionally
these Fijians were almost Melanesian in social organization
gerontocracies as much as elementary chiefdoms, where charis
matic religious leaders had considerable influence. In the central
part of Fiji, humid forests give way to alluvial plains and to
deltas used for agriculture, pastoralism, and timber growing.
While aristocrats live well and there is an indigenous Fijian
middle class, most indigenous Fijians are poor horticultural ists
or part-time proletarians. The further east one goes, the more
elaborate are the Polynesian and aristocratic structures and the
stronger is the support for the Alliance party.
Historically, strict hierarchy and Christianization came from
the eastern high chiefs and was imposed upon commoners,
who, in the west especially, resisted and attempted to maintain
indigenous structures and beliefs. 12 With British annexation in
1874, eastern military imperialism was sanctioned, the west
was incorporated under eastern control, and Methodism became
almost a state religion. As colonial authorities took possession
and converted westerners, the westerners turned to millen
nialism, the muffled voice of independence. The more rigidly
structured and feudal organizations of the east were relatively
unaffected. The Tuka movement began in the 1870s and con
tinues to this d'7' promising healing, immortality, and western
independence. l. The movement of the messiah Apolosi Nawai
was the most powerful challenge to the eastern aristocracy in
the first half of the twentieth century and launched a mission
of ensuring financial success for indigenous Fijian commoners
which was so successful in the west as to serve as a program
which indigenous Fijian candidates such as Bavadra and
10. R. Nayaeakalou, Leadership in Fiji (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1975).
11. A. Capell and R.H. Lester, "Local Divisions and Movements in
Fiji," Oceania XI (1941), pp. 313-41, and XII (1942), pp. 21-48;
Capell and Lester, "Kinship in Fiji," Oceania XV (1945), pp. 171-200,
XVI (1946), pp. 109-43, pp. 234-53, and pp. 297-318; Simione
Durutalo, Internal Colonialism and Uneven Regional Development:
The Case of Western Viti Levu (M.A. Thesis, The University of the
South Pacific, 1985); J. Guiart, "Institutions religieuses traditionnelles
et messianismes modernes it Fiji," Archives de Sociologie des Religions
4 (1957), pp. 3-30; A.M. Hoeart, "Early Fijians," Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute XLIX (1915), pp. 42-51; R. Norton,
Race and Politics in Fiji (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press,
1977).
12. B. Thomson, The Fijians (London: Heinemann, 1908), p. 51.
13. D. Scarr, Fiji: A Short History (Sydney: George Allen and Unwin,
1984), p. 44; F. Shaheem, "2,000 Wait on Return: Police Investigat
ing," Fiji Times, 15 March 1984.
25
l
Simione Durutalo of the Labour-NFP coalition claimed they
would fulfill. 14 The west has been the primary source of indi
genous Fijian radicalism, and its disproportionate support for
the government of Bavadra continues this tradition of opposition
to eastern aristocratic privilege.
After annexation the British harshly and rapidly imposed a
theoretical social structure heavily influenced by the eastern
seaboard polity of Mbau Island. 15 The British administrators,
conforming to the requirements of the Deed of Cession of 1874,
gave indigenous Fijians the guarantee that they could keep their
government and customs. Pushed by the necessity of adminis
tering Fiji at the lowest cost to pay the debts contracted by
King Thakombau of Mbau Island, the British applied the prin
ciple of indirect rule, well before they did in Africa. At all
levels they gave responsibilities to Fijian aristocrats, most of
whom came from the ruling classes of the eastern principalities.
In addition to the administrators the Methodist mission has
been allied for a long time with the eastern aristocracy of
Tailevu and the Lau Islands, the home of Ratu Mara. Through
the intermediary of its indigenous Fijian ministry, the Methodist
Church dominated the west. 16
Subsequently, the development of sugar cane cultivation,
performed by Indian small farmers, necessitated a survey of
traditional property titles to define who was entitled to the rents
to be collected from the Indians. The land inventory established
by the Native Lands Commission was also interpreted in terms
of the social structure of the east. It assured the supremacy of
a group defined by the concept of a chiefdom (yavllsa), divided
into five or seven lineages (mataqali), each having respon
sibilities and ceremonial prerogatives in relation to a chief of
the whole (vanlla). Land rentals (currently amounting to over
$10,000,000) are allocated to a chief of the vanlla (5 percent),
the chief of the yavllsa (10 percent), the head of the mataqali
(15 percent), the commoners of the mataqali (45 percent), and
the Fijian Affairs Board or its predecessor for administration
(25 percent). 17
But in the west the ranking of lineages was often quite vague
and rarely was a vanlla chief clearly recognized. Although there
was no ranking by conspicuous display, as in much of
Melanesia, commoners, particularly charismatic religious lead
ers, could often achieve as much influence and status as a
hereditary chief. Since chiefs in the west had small and unstable
jurisdictions, appointments of local chiefs often caused
jealousies, and the government came to favor outsiders as over
lords--either Europeans (in the early days) or eastern aristo
crats. In this way a system of internal colonialism was estab
lished over the west in half a century. 18
14. Norton, Race (1977); R. Norton, "Colonial Fiji: Ethnic Divisions
and Elite Conciliation," in Lal (ed.), Politics (1986); cf. Durutalo,
I mernal Colonia/ism (1985).
IS. Capell and Lester, "Local Divisions," (1941-42), and "Kinship
in Fiji," (1945-46); France, The Charter (1969).
16. Guiart, "Institutions," (1957).
17. S.G. Britlon, Tourism in a Peripheral Capitalist Economy: The
Case of Fiji (Ph.D. Thesis, Australian National University, 1977),
pp. 112-13.
18. Durutalo, Internal Colonialism (1985); Guiart, "Institutions,"
(1957); Norton. Race (1977). pp. 54-55, 185 ff.; Scarr, Fiji (1984)
p. 3; Thomson, The Fijians (1908), p. 59.
The constant unrelieved pressure for eliminating the bases
of their more egalitarian social organization led to resistance
among westerners. The millennial Tllka movement has been
widely discussed and drew public attention once again in 1984
when 2,000 adherents gathered secretly to demand the over
throw of the existing government and to raise the flag of a new
nation.
19
But the movement of Apolosi Nawai has a much
greater influence upon the politics ofthe west, being particularly
strong in Bavadra's birthplace of Namoli and his current home
of Viseisei. Apolosi Nawai, a commoner who called himself
"The Man from Ra" to proclaim his identity as a westerner,
sought a new basis of national identity in the European model
of a corporation of shareholders united not by kinship or geo
graphical loyalties, but by capital contributions and a common
spirit of enterprise. The Viti Company was founded in 1913
to buy and sell indigenous Fijian agricultural produce as a first
step toward a new era when eastern aristocratic power, Indian
mercantilism, and European economic and political supremacy
would end. In the west independent farming was one of the
few occupations through which indigenous Fijians could
achieve wealth and power, since until very recently almost all
the schools through which indigenous Fijians could qualify
for prestigious jobs were in the east. Yet the prospective
independent farmer would receive little encouragement from
chiefs intent upon maintaining communal labor obligations. He
would receive low prices from European, Chinese, and Indian
middlemen, and he would lack capital and credit.
20
The new
Bavadra government, like Apolosi, promised to remedy all
these problems.
There is also a spiritual alignment with Apolosi which
Bavadra and other indigenous Fijian Labour politicians em
phasized in the west during the campaign. Upon his return in
1924 from seven years of enforced exile for telling his massive
following to refuse to sell produce to Europeans and to disobey
government officials and chiefs, Apolosi made millennial
prophecies which concentrated on Vunda Point and its as
sociated village of Viseisei, Bavadra's home. Apolosi proc
laimed that the ancestors had originally landed there before
journeying east to Mt. Nakauvadra, the place of origin claimed
by eastern aristocrats. He proclaimed that Tonga, Samoa,
Rotuma, the Solomons, Tokelau, Futuna, and eventually the
entire British empire would all be subject to Fiji-and Fiji to
Vunda. He claimed to possess the "sacred box of the mana of
Fiji," which had been lost at Vunda from the canoe which
brought the ancestors of the indigenous Fijians. This claim to
priority for himself and the west further outraged the high chiefs
of the east and their allies administering the west, and he was
exiled twice more (for a total of fifteen years) as they feared
that he would create difficulties in the sugar and gold industries
and that he would endanger security during World War II
19. Guiart, "Institutions," (1957); T. MacNaught, The Fijian Colonial
Experience (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1982),
pp. 95- \01; Scarr, Fiji (1984). pp. 44, 55-56; Shaheem. "2,000,"
(1984); W. Sutherland, "The 'Tuka' Religion," Transactions of the
Fijian Society (19\0); Anthony B. van Fossen, "Priests, Aristocrats
and Millenialism in Fiji," Mankind 16:3 (December 1986);
P. Worsley, The Trumpet Shall Sound (Rev. ed.), (New York:
Schockcn, 1968).
20. Norton, Race (1977), pp. 61-64.
26
in the event of a Japanese invasion. They were particularly
concerned that he and his followers would unite with discon
tented indigenous Fijians to attempt to overthrow European and
chiefly rule.
21
Even after his death in 1946, many of his disci
ples, particularly in the west, believe that he is still alive and
will soon return as a messianic leader to usher in the millen
nium.
22
For them, the election of a prime minister from Viseisei
who expressed his link to Apolosi was a certain sign. It is no
accident that "The Taukei movement" of opposition to
Bavadra's government held its first meeting at Viseisei in an
attempt to diminish his charisma.
The strength of Apolosi's heritage and of Bavadra among
indigenous Fijians in the west is due not only to internal col
onialism but also to higher levels of individualism and pro
letarianization. There is far more individual farming in the
west, and this is in marked contrast to the eastern islands where
dependence on copra favors traditional communal villages and
aristocratic polities. 23
The question might arise to some ethnocentric Westerners
as to why there is such a "confusion" of religious, political,
and economic themes. But in Fiji, particularly in the west,
charismatic religious leadership among the indigenous people
has been the source of the greatest demands for economic
development and political change. Appeals to the ancestral
gods frequently validate modern indigenous Fijian economic
activity in a nation where even the most convinced Christians
pay a cautious respect to superseded gods.
24
One writer has
noted that it is almost as if to accumulate and invest, rather
than distribute in the conventional manner, indigenous Fijians
need the ancestral gods' special sanction. "The messianic strain
was s t r o n ~ in some later Fijian entrepreneurs, as it was in
Apolosi." 5 To create a more rational economic system freed
from eastern aristocratic control, as Apolosi and Bavadra pro
posed, it was necessary to invoke spiritual and religious themes
which have consistently opposed the eastern aristocrats' in
terests.
26
Apolosian themes dominated western movements which at
tempted to spur indigenous Fijian economic development during
the 1960s, but neither was able to survive in the face of eastern
chiefly opposition. In 1961 four villages in the southwest de
clared themselves a "communist state," rigidly regulating work
and time and rejecting chiefly control, traditional customs, and
orthodox Christianity. Eastern aristocrats opposed this militaris
tic movement and many members were evicted from the land
on which they were tenants.
27
The west was the major region
21. Norton, "Colonial Fiji," in Lal (ed.), Politics (1986), p. 59.
22. T. MacNaught, The Fijian Colonial Experience (Canberra:
Australian National University Press, 1982), pp. 151-54; Norton, Race
(1977), pp. 57-59.
23. The irregularity of copra cutting and drying fits with the irregular
demands which may be made on a person's time by communal duties.
This produces greater adherence to traditional forms on the eastern
islands, where copra is the primary crop. See R.G. Ward, Land Use
and Population in Fiji (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office,
1965). pp. 204-206.
24. France, The Charter (1969), p. 30.
25. Scarr, Fiji (1984), pp. 135-36.
26. Van Fossen, "Priests," (1986).
27. Anon., "New Way of Life in Four Villages," Fiji Times
of support for the Fijian Chamber of Commerce (FCC), a move
ment which favored capitalism for Fijians and criticized the
eastern aristocracy for not encouraging it. The first convention
was held in Lautoka in 1968. It attracted more than 4,000 of
the 45,000 alleged financial members, who watched the unfurl
ing of the FCC flag, said to be blessed by the Pope and display
ing mysterious symbols.
28
Leaders alleged that the absence of
the governor and president of the eastern aristocrat-dominated
Fijian Association, who had been invited, showed that they
were not interested in the people. It sought representation on
agricultural marketing boards and floated a company which
bought trucks for transporting produce and opened shops in
some of the towns.
29
Like Bavadra many years later, it de
veloped strong links with the Indian-dominated National Fed
eration party and particularly its mass circulation Pacific
Review, where favorable articles on the FCC attacked the Fijian
Administration, the Great Council of Chiefs, and the oppression
of indigenous Fijian commoners by the alliance of indigenous
eastern aristocrats and European business interests. The former
president of the FCC, Viliame Savu, blames Ratu Mara for its
demise,30 and its magical aspects were deplored in the Legis
lative Council by Alliance party politicans such as Ratu David
Toganivalu. Elements of the FCC were incorporated in the
Fijian Independent party, also led by Savu and other FCC
officials, but the party contested only a few Fijian communal
seats, received less than 1 percent of the indigenous Fijian vote,
and disappeared after the 1972 elections. Savu would become
a supporter and in 1987 a candidate of the Fijian Nationalist
party (FNP).
The Fijian Nationalist party had been the greatest challenge
to the establishment since Apolosi. The Alliance party lost the
3 April 1977 election as the FNP gathered 25 percent of the
indigenous Fijian vote. Under the leadership of Sakeasi Butad
roka, the FNP demanded indigenous Fijian control of Parlia
ment, nationalization of major businesses, rural development,
and education. It intimidated Indian tenant farmers who had
not paid their rent, demanded the repatriation of Indians, and
blamed eastern aristocrats for indigenous Fijian economic back
wardness. The party polled well in the west and even in Rewa,
where Butadroka won the only FNP seat. It was weakest in
(12 August 1961); anon., "Advice to Co-op in Nadroga," Fiji Times
(15 August 1961); anon., "Move to Establish a Communist Party,"
Fiji Times (25 August 1961); anon., "Only the Name is Ncw in New
Party," Fiji Times (26 August 1961); anon., "Teachers' Reaction to
Communist Party," Fiji Times (28 August 1961); Nayacakalou,
Leadership (1975). p. 75; Norton, Race (1977), pp. 67-69.
28. The president of the FCC, Viliame Savu, refused to disclose the
meaning of the flag, which bore a strong resemblance to the flag of
Apolosi's Viti Kabani. It was red, yellow, and green with white
lettering of the Fijian Chamber of Commerce in English and "Vakururu
Kei Viti" (Shelter for Fiji) in Fijian, with a moon crescent, a cross,
and four stars on a blue background. See anon., "Chamber's Call for
New Community." Fiji Times (26 March 1968). Flags have been
important in western movements from the time of early Tuka. Cf.
Shaheem, "2,000" (1984), on a recent Tuka flag. They symbolize
rejection of eastern control of the nation.
29. Anon., "Chamber's Call," (1968); Norton, Race (1977), p. 69.
30. Viliame Savu, in a conversation with Anthony B. van Fossen in
Suva, 6 January 1987.
27
Indigenous Fijians listening to a candidate of the eastern aristocrat
dominated Fijian Association in a village near Suva. *
the east
3
) and did not bother to contest four of the indigenous
Fijian seats there. The results led to a major crisis, ultimately
resolved when the governor-general, a Mbauan aristocrat,
reinstated the Alliance party, which formed a minority govern
ment until it won a solid majority in the August 1977 elections.
Butadroka and two other FNP leaders had spent much of the
intervening period in jail, having been accused of unlawful
assembly and inciting racial tensions, among other charges.
The party dwindled as it became less capable of articulating
indigenous Fijian discontent, especially in the west.
The Western United Front (WUF) drew on western indige
nous grievances against neglect by the Alliance government
and discrimination by eastern aristocrats. The focal issue was
a disagreement between western indigenous landowners and
the eastern Fiji Pine Commission (FPC)
about which overseas corporation should handle the develop
ment of this industry with major export potential. Ratu Osea
Gavidi, a western M.P. and dissident aristocrat of immense
popularity who won his seat as an independent, led the fight
against the FPC. He explicitly drew on Apolosian traditions of
western resistance and commercial development in forming the
WUF in 1981. Like leaders of previous western-based move
ments, he decried the very small numbers of western indigenous
Fijians in prominent positions in government and emphasized
the great economic importance of the region. Among the WUF
tenets was the fight for political, social, and economic develop
ment and freedom of religious expression for indigenous west
ern Fijians. Initially Ratu Gavidi attempted to form a front with
the Fijian Nationalist party, but abandoned the plan when the
FNP leader Butadroka assaulted an Alliance minister, Solomone
Momoivalu, for accusing him of practicing sorcery (draunikau)
to win votes. Finally, on 11 January 1982, the WUF entered
into a loose multi-ethnic association with the main anti-Alliance
party, the Indian-dominated NFP. This collapsed after electoral
defeat in the September elections, when the Alliance won
twenty-eight seats.
32
Westerners and commoners opposed to the eastern aristoc
racy failed to become effective politically until they coalesced
with the Indians of the National Federation party in 1987. The
new practice was a simple one, but it had never been used
before. A single Labour-NFP coalition candidate was presented
for every one of the fifty-two communal and national seats.
Before this indigenous Fijians opposed to the Alliance party
had always fielded ethnically based and often extremely anti
Indian splinter parties-the Fijian Independent party in 1972,
the Fijian Nationalist party of 1977 onwards, and the Western
United Front of 1982 and 1987. The NFP gave some covert
support to all of these and to significant independents such as
the messiah Sairusi Nabogibogi, no matter how anti-Indian
their platforms, in the hope of defeating the Alliance. After
the Western United Front decided not to join with the Fijian
Nationalists in 1982, there was even the short-lived NFP-WUF
coalition, which contested all fifty-two seats, but as individual
parties which agreed not to run for the same seats. This relatively
coordinated approach laid the groundwork for the coalition
of 1987.
These indigenous Fijian splinter parties contested only a
*This photo is from Robert Norton, Race and Politics in Fiji (New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1977), photo section after p. 98.
31. Norton, "Colonial Fiji," in Lal (cd.), Politics (1986), pp. 162-69.
32. Durutalo, Internal Colonialism (1985); Brij V. Lal, "The Fiji
General Election of 1982," Journal of Pacific History 18:2 (1983),
pp. 134-57.
28
minority of House of Representatives seats, usually just the
indigenous Fijian seats, and were doomed to electoral marginal
ity from the outset. Only the Fijian Nationalist party had ever
won a seat. Although it had gathered 25 percent of the indigen
ous Fijian communal vote then, thereby contributing to the
defeat of the Alliance party and temporarily electing the NFP,
this was but a temporary "victory." Ratu Mara was reinstated
after a few days of chaos, the Alliance won the September
1977 elections handily, and the results seemed to vindicate
Mara's claim to frightened indigenous Fijian voters that a vote
for an anti-aristocratic fringe party was a vote for an Indian
government. The FNP's proportion of the indigenous Fijian
communal vote slumped to 12 percent in September 1977,
8 percent in 1982, and 5 percent in 1987. The Western United
Front gained 7 percent in 1982 and 3 percent in 1987. The
NFP received only 2.4 percent in 1972, 0 percent in April
1977,0.1 percent in September 1977, and 0.8 percent in 1982.
In contrast, Indian support for the Alliance in communal elec
tions was 24. 1 percent in 1972, 15.6 percent in April 1977,
14.4 percent in September 1977, 15.3 percent in 1982, and
14.7 percent in 1987.
The Labour party attracted many of the dissident indigenous
Fijians and combined them with the overwhelming majority of
the Indians who voted for the NFP, so that the coalition received
9 percent of the indigenous Fijian vote and won a majority of
the ten indigenous Fijian national seats. All the indigenous
Fijians in the cabinet, including Prime Minister Bavadra, were
elected on national votes. None attracted a majority of indigen
ous Fijian votes in their constituencies. But for the first time
campaigns were effectively oriented around the theme that most
Indians and indigenous Fijian commoners faced similar
economic, social, and political problems. The strengths of in
digenous Fijian radicalism in the wese
3
and among urban pro
letarians were able to counterbalance the fact that the NFP was
weakest among Indian voters in these areas.
The Fiji Labour party (FLP) was established on 6 July 1985
as Fiji's powerful trade unions became alarmed by the Alliance
government's confrontational stance and threat to use the army
against their strikes. The government had been acting in an
increasingly truculent manner, and a crisis was reached when it
abandoned the arbitration system of government, employers,
and unions to impose a unilateral wage freeze for a year begin
ning on 1 November 1984. It had adopted a particularly hostile
stance toward teachers' unions in enforcing teacher transfers,
exploitative arrangements for recent university graduates, and
unpopular moves to desegregate schools. With monetarist
policies leading to 14 percent unemployment and export
oriented strategies of development encouraging sweatshop labor
in the clothing industry particularly, the unions were not in
clined to be conciliatory when sugar and tourism slumped and
five major cyclones devastated Fiji in early 1985. A union
33. The fact that indigenous Fijian support for the coalition was
strongest in western Viti Levu in no way implies that a majority
supported it even there. Coalition votes in indigenous Fijian communal
seats varied between 25 percent in the western BaJNadi constituency
where Durutalo was the candidate-to 2 percent in the eastern Laul
Rotuman constituency. After the first coup, all indigenous Fijian pro
vincial councils, whether in the west or east, supported the call to change
the Constitution to increase indigenous Fijian political representation.
movement which had been moderate became mobilized to re
place ethnicity by class as a major election issue, and to coalesce
with what remained of the fragmented and declining National
Federation party.
Although the party was committed to democratic socialism,
it fundamentally favored "a competitive non-monopolistic pri
vate sector, with particular emphasis on small-scale business,
farming and co-operatives, controlled and owned by the people
of Fiji" (Article VIII of the Fiji Labour party constitution). A
key proposal was to democratize and rationalize the Native
Land Trust Board established by Ratu Sukuna and to greatly
reduce charges which went to an aristocrat-dominated adminis
tration. While there were no provisions relating directly to
the west, both of these planks promised to fulfill western aspi
rations.
34
By reducing the importance of aristocracy, ethnicity, and
regionalism, the FLP attempted to represent all significant
nonaristocratic class groups in a way which offended many
university radicals who wanted the middle classes defined as
an enemy. Bavadra clearly stated that he favored rationality
over this sort of class conflict. The FLP welcomed the support
of the small capitalists (5.2 percent of the population in 1976),
government executive officers and professionals (10.3 percent),
as well as the working class (44.6 percent), farmers (13.2
percent), and the reserve army of unpaid and family workers
(25.4 percent). 35 There were only a few token eastern aristocrats
on the list of Labour party supporters.
The Malaysian Model: The Future in Fiji?
The indigenous people of Fiji and Malaysia have aristocratic
social systems and have been in conflict with large immigrant
groups, primarily Indians in Fiji and Chinese in Malaysia.
Indigenous commoners have been less prone to dissent in
Malaysia, where they have achieved greater power. Ethnicity
overshadows class more thoroughly there, and it appears that
Malaysia is in a second stage of ethnic relations which Fiji is
entering as the new regime solidifies its power. Whereas the
first stage of balanced ethnic relations defines special rights for
the indigenous people with respect to land and government, it
still leaves open the possibility of common citizenship and a
unified nation independent of ethnicity. The second, exclusive
stage involves revision of laws and constitutions which extends
the special rights of indigenes (especially in modem sectors of
the economy), supports the rights of aristocrats who were
threatened, and clearly defines immigrants as second-class citi
zens. The transition to the second stage occurred after the 1969
riots in Malaysia and it is occurring at the present time in Fiji.
There are some broad historical similarities between the
societies, which highlight their differences. In 1874 conflicts
within the indigenous ruling class led to British imperial control.
The British solidified and extended existing class structures by
supporting aristocrats and "tradition" and stifling commoner
initiative. In both cases aristocrats were deprived of much of
their power and converted into civil servants under indirect
34. Cf. Lal, "Postscript: The Emergence of the Fiji Labor Party," in
Lal (ed.), Politics (1986); R.T. Robertson, "The Fonnation of the Fiji
Labour Party," NewZealandMonthlyReview281 (Oct. 1985), pp. 3-7.
35. Robertson, "The Fonnation," (1985).
rule, but the basic hereditary class structure was frozen or, in
the Fijian case, imposed on new areas. In Fiji the British assisted
eastern chiefs in extending their control over the entire country,
creating a system of internal colonialism which lasts until this
day-the west being the locus of indigenous Fijian dissent. In
contrast, there was little regional variation in the power of
Malay sultans. They were also more secure in holding political,
economic, and Islamic power, whereas the eastern chiefs in
Fiji dominated the political and economic realms, but lacked
spiritual authority, which was held by indigenous Fijian priests.
Within the Malay community there has been little revolutionary
activity.
In both countries large immigrant populations were intro
duced in the nineteenth century to work in capitalist enterprises:
Indians for sugar plantations in Fiji, Chinese and a smaIler
number of Indians for tin mines and rubber plantations in
Malaysia. They were initiaIly treated as having few claims to
political rights, which were firmly vested with the British im
perialists and indigenous aristocrats, who favored the preserva
tion of a traditional rural life for their subjects. The paradoxical
effect of the policy was to involve the immigrants, who were
initiaIly poorer than the indigenes, in the modern, urban sectors
of the economy, al lowing them to achieve greater commercial
and educational success and creating fear in the indigenous
populations. At the time of independence in Malaysia in 1957
and in Fiji in 1970, constitutional arrangements balanced the
immigrants' economic superiority against special rights for in
digenes in politics, government, and education, while preserv
ing the possibility of eventual common citizenship. Both indi
genous Fijians and Malays identified themselves with the land,
and "son of the land" (taukei in Fijian and bumiputra in Malay)
became a badge of ethnicity in the first stage of ethnic relations.
In Fiji land is aIlocated by aristocrats, but in Malaysia it is
individually owned and can be bought and sold by any Malay.
Defining ethnicity in terms of land supports aristocratic princi
ples in Fiji more thoroughly than in Malaysia. This is particu
larly the case today, as identification with rural life is still very
strong among indigenous Fijians, even those in towns, whereas
among Malays the rural ideal has crumbled and the commitment
to the aristocracy has somewhat weakened.
The goal of most indigenous Fijians is to retain control of
land; the goal of most Malays is to be successful in the modern,
urban economy. In both Fiji and Malaysia the indigenous
peoples have seen their continued control of government as
being necessary for the achievement of their goals. This has
seemed more assured in Malaysia, where the indigenes are a
majority, as compared to Fiji, where they are outnumbered by
Indians. but a split in their vote (e.g. along class lines), as
occurred in Malaysia in 1969 and Fiji in 1987, weakened their
hold on government and produced immediate demands to alter
the Constitution to entrench their rights. 36
These changes were accomplished after bloody riots in
Malaysia, and they are in the process of occurring in Fiji after
the second military coup. The second coup of 25 September
1987 occurred three days after the coalition and Alliance parties
had agreed to form a joint caretaker government. This agree
ment would lionize Ganilau, allow Mara to make a comeback,
bury concern with corruption in the past, and minimally satisfy
Bavadra and the coalition. It appeared to give little or nothing
to the minor aristocrats and ethnic extremists who had risen to
public prominence since the first coup and who favored the
recent recommendations of the Great Council of Chiefs which
would carry Fiji into the second stage of ethnic relations.
But more crucially it gave little assurance to Rabuka and his
fellow officers who had led the first coup and who were fearful
of their future if civilian rule returned and Brigadier General
Nailatikau was restored to command. There was little talk of
amnesty, and Bavadra had spoken frequently of prosecution.
Signs were extremely ominous for those who had broken civi
lian law when Supreme Court Justice Frank Rooney ruled on
22 September that Alipate Qetaki, the advisor on justice to
Ganilau and the equivalent of acting attorney general, could
be sent to prison for two years for authorizing the unlawful
arrest and two-day detention of an Australian researcher. That
night there was a massive breakout of 114 inmates from prison
and a halfhearted attempt by soldiers to stop their parade through
the center of Suva to meet Ganilau under the pretext of de
monstrating their loyalty to a high chief. It seemed clear that
the breakout had been condoned, if not orchestrated, by Rabuka
and feIlow soldiers and police.
The return to legitimate civilian rule would moderate the
movement toward indigenous Fijian political supremacy. And
it would probably bring thorough investigations of the wide
spread accusations of collaboration between the "security
forces" and the arsonists, looters, and rioters who had been
consistently attacking the property of Indians and coalition sup
porters, particularly over the previous two weeks. Support for
Rabuka among indigenous Fijians appeared to be declining as
they suffered from increasing unemployment, severe cuts in
wages and hours of work, higher inflation, devaluation of the
Fijian dollar by 15
1
/4 percent, and the general demoralization
which affected most people in Fiji after the first coup. Crime
was rising, and everyone was subject to arbitrary arrest, harrass
ment, shootings, searches, and threats from police and army.
These were particularly directed at Indians, and to a lesser
extent, Europeans and Fijians suspected of liberal sympathies.
The "security forces" were growing considerably more confi
dent as a police state was being established over the largely
futile objections ofthe judiciary, the general public, and increas
ingly Ganilau.
Rabuka seized power for the second ti me under the pretext
of preventing violence from the extremist "Taukei movement,"
which had been implicated in recent disorders. He would do
this by implementing the resolutions of the Great Council of
Chiefs, which would establish aristocratic indigenous supre
macy in perpetuity. Several times after the second coup Rabuka
sought the approval of leading aristocrats, particularly his
paramount chief Ganilau, to whom he offered the presidency
of the new republic of Fiji which he was proposing. But this
approval was not forthcoming as Ganilau and Mara were
36. Even after the Alliance narrowly won thc 1982 elections, aristo
crats called for changes to increase their power. The current governor
general, Ratu Sir Penaia Ganilau, was then president of the Great
Council of Chiefs when it met on the aristocratic island of Mbau. It
called for the revision of the Constitution so that two-thirds of the
House of Representatives seats as well as the positions of governor
general and prime minister would be reserved for indigenous Fijians.
Ganilau called for a strengthening of aristocratic rule, which was
directed as much against dissenting commoners as it was against non
Fijians. See Brij V. Lal, "Politics since Independence," in Lal (ed.),
Politics (1986), pp. 74-106.
30
Wl/IC./'/ WIL.l
(;.UI DE uS nf'IlauG"
1l-\1C)
.
.. YO\) CAN "trr'E
fbll W\-loEVC'Q.. '101J
1,.1t(E".
angered that the new coup destroyed their hopes of reestablish
ing their prestige both nationally and internationally. Continued
instability and economic decline would damage the country.
And expUlsion from the Commonwealth, which would occur
in October, would diminish the value of their Knighthoods,
OBEs (Order of the British Empire), and MBEs (Member of
the British Empire). For his part, Rabuka felt that they had
betrayed him and his cause, although he continued to ask for
Ganilau's forgiveness and acquiescence.
Initially Rabuka had to settle for the support of the less
prestigious chiefs and ethnic extremists whose legitimacy was
not so secure. Political opponents, including politicians, judges,
university lecturers, and journalists, were arrested. Curfews
were announced which would continue for weeks if not months.
Sunday would henceforth be a day of rest, with prosecution
promised for such illegal acts as picnics, as Fiji became a
Christian country it la Great Council of Chiefs. Judges and
important civil servants were summarily dismissed, and police
and soldiers ruled the streets. Financial fears reached such a
point that banks were closed on 2 October, and five days later
there was another devaluation (of 15
1
/4 percent), as Rabuka
announced that Fiji was a republic. Although a few cosmopoli
tan high chiefs might be disturbed momentarily, the Alliance
party refused to condemn the coup and the Great Council of
Chiefs welcomed it. The new Council of Ministers contained
few soldiers and was heavily weighted toward less worldly
chiefs and indigenous ethnic extremists, but on 5 December
: 1"0 1iIREJ.J.
I Bff No PIJBLlC GA7Hf3RIN(;S
1987 Rabuka would decree that Ganilau was the president of
the new republic and Mara was its prime minister. They would
be shaping the future of Fiji as it enters a second stage of ethnic
relations.
This second, exclusive stage of ethnic relations abandons
ideas of common citizenship to identify the immigrants clearly
as inferior in political and civil rights. It substantially increases
indigenous representation in the legislature, civil service, and
universities. It abandons notions of ethnic balance and equity
according to merit and installs quotas which are meant to redress
past inequities. And it assures preferential treatment of the
indigenous group in the commercial economy, which allows
aristocrats to diversify and solidify their power in the modem
sphere and offer some benefits to commoners on the basis of
ethnicity. It tends to minimize class conflict by transforming
significant debate into disputes about the entitlements of ethnic
groups. Indigenous aristocracies can retain their supreme pos
ition. Even where, as among the Malays,37 most of the ruling
class is composed of well-educated commoners from middle
class backgrounds, the indigenous upper class incorporates a
disproportionate number of aristocrats, and rules according to
old aristocratic ideologies of command from above. *
The three cartoons on this page are from The Sydney Morning Herald;
upper left, I June 1987; upper right, 20 May 1987; and bottom,
22 May 1987.
37. John Gullick and B. Gale, Malaysia (Selangor, Malaysia:
Pelanduk, 1986), p. 126.
Organisasi Papua Merdeka:
The Free Papua Movement Lives
by Malcolm Gault-Williams
West Papua--or Irian Jaya, as it has been renamed by the
Indonesian government-is Indonesia's 26th province, occupy
ing the western half of the island of New Guinea. For the
people of West Papua, however, Indonesia is an occupying
power. Since the area is so little known, most non-Papuans are
unaware that West Papuans have been struggling for independ
ence there ever since the mid-1960s, led by the Organisasi
Papua Merdeka (OPM-Free Papua Movement).)
The OPM's basis for its claim to complete sovereignty for
West Papua "is our inalienable birth right which is firmly and
justly enshrined in the desires of the indigenous Melanesian
people of the tenitory as outlined in the New Guinea Council
resolution of 31 October 1961," stated OPM's Henk Joku, at
the first regional meeting of the World Council of Indigenous
Peoples (WCIP) , Pacific Region, in June 1984, " ... in con
formation with [the] preamble and Article 1 of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations of
December 14, 1960."2
Historical Background
The people of West Papua are Melanesians. They are of the
same ethnic origin as the Papuans who inhabit the eastern end
of the vast island and the indigenous peoples of the Solomon
Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and parts of Fiji. They have
many different languages-in West Papua alone there are at
1. Malcolm Gault-Williams, "West Papuans Fight for Independ
ence-Free Papua Movement Leads Struggle against Indonesia's Re
pressive Rule," The Militant, 9 January 1987. Published by the
Socialist Workers Party, U.S.A.
2. Henk Joku, "West Papua: The Plea of the People of West Papua,"
fWGIA Newsletter, No. 41 (1985), p. 136. Published by the Interna
tional Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, Fiolstraede 10, OK 1171
Copenhagen K, Denmark.
32
least 750 languages. The one thing they all have in common
is their Melanesian way of life and culture. Of the five million
people living on the whole island, one-half live on the West
Papuan side.
3
The island of New Guinea is the second largest island in the
world after Greenland. It lies between the equator and 12
latitude south between the Philippines and Australia. The island
is tropical, includes some of the largest tracts of unexplored
land area left on Earth, and has a wide range of different
physical conditions, ranging from the hot, swampy lowlands
to snow-covered mountains. West Papua itself is a land of high
mountain ranges, mangrove swamps, and jungles. It is domi
nated by a great cordillera, running from east to west, comprised
of the massive Carstensz mountain range. One of the most
extensively and intensively cultivated regions is the Paniai re
gion, generally referred to as the Central Highlands. This,
together with the Baliem Valley to the east, is the most densely
populated region.
4
In the days before foreign penetration, Papuans lived in
widely scattered hamlets, having little contact with the outside
world.
The tribes in West Papua were in fact sovereign small tribal states
within which the group, which was an economic, political and
military entity, was kept up by the mutual link springing from the
fact of having common ancestors. Anyone who did not by virtue
of this mutual link belong to the group ... was a foreigner who, if
he entered the territory of the tribal state without reasons acceptable
3. Fred Korwa, "West Papua: The Colonisation of West Papua,"
IWGIA Newsletter, No. 36 (\983). Fred Korwa is a member of the
Free Papua Movement.
4. Ibid.; see also TAPOL, West Papua: The Obliteration ofa People
(London: T APOL, the Indonesian Human Rights Campaign, 8a Tre
port Street, London SW18 2BP, U.K., 1984).
to that society, would be considered as an evil intruder and therefore
liquidated if need be
5
Foreign intrusions began in the fourteenth and fifteenth cen
turies with the Java-based Mojopahit empire. Later, the Tidore
sultans made frequent forays into the territory. Neither the
Mojopahit adventurers nor the Tidore missions, however, estab
lished control. This fell to the Dutch, who set up outposts
beginning in 1828, under a treaty with its vassal state of Tidore,
based on the "sovereignty of the Sultan of Tidore over the
Papuan islands in general." For over a century, West Papua
was too difficult to exploit and was used by the Dutch only as
a buffer against other colonial powers.
6
West Papua was a Dutch colony from 1828 until 1963. In
1945, lndonesia proclaimed its independence from the Nether
lands, claiming all of the Dutch East lndies. West Papua's
status was different from the rest of the Dutch East Indies in
two respects: the Dutch had retained an outpost at Merauke
throughout the war, and the island itself was recaptured and
returned to Dutch control before the end of World War n. After
the war, West Papua remained colonized by the Netherlands.
In August 1950, an agreement was made between the newly
proclaimed Republic of lndonesia and the Netherlands for the
formal transfer of sovereignty to the "Republic of the United
States of lndonesia." Indonesia deferred the matter of West
Papua in order to hasten the transfer of sovereignty in the rest
of what has become Indonesia. "These claims were based on
past colonial sentiments and had no foundation," Fred Korwa
o Oil eonc.euion -
AlIuYial extraction -_ --=-:
Mine "cation _ _ " _
Majorl'rospect _ .. -
-
West Papua: The Plunder of Resources
*This map is from Survival International, The Ecologist, p. 106, and
is attributed to Kabar dari Kampung (1984, 1/2).
5. Saul Hindom, "Resistance in West Papua: From Tribal States to
Nation State," (Deventer, Holland: Foundation Workgroup New
Guinea, undated); see also West Papuan Observer, Vol. 4:5 (Jan./Feb.
1980), and Vol. 4:6 (Mar'/Apr. 1980).
6. TAPOL, West Papua.
A Dani woman. The Indonesian government has been driving the Dani
and other West Papuan tribespeople off their land and forcing them
to cultivate rice rather than their usual sweet potatoes. It's all part
of being absorbed into Indonesian society, the authorities say, but
this cuts across Melanesian tradition since Papuan peoples have strong
ties to their traditional lands. One Enga man sentenced to prison ...
{after a] dispute is quoted as saying: "You can put me in jail many
times, you can kill me, cut off my head if you will, but my body will
walk back to that land. It is ours."
of the Free Papua Movement stated in 1983.
7
For the native people on 13,700 islands scattered over a
3,OOO-mile extent-members of what has been referred to as
"the fourth world" (peoples exploited by third world coun
tries}--the transfer of power from the Netherlands to Indonesia
merely meant that the Javanese replaced the Europeans as the
colonial power claiming sovereignty over them. Java's expan
sion of political, military, and economic control was made the
top priority of the new nation. In 1950, Indonesian president
Sukarno declared that migration to the outer islands was "a
matter of life and death for the Indonesian nation." The expan
sionist designs emanating from Jakarta have involved moving
Javanese settlers and military units from island to island, and
*This photo and the last part of its caption are from Survival Interna
tional, The Ecologist (London), Vol. 16, no. 2/3 (1986), p. 104.
7. Korwa, "West Papua."
33
the disguising of these invasions as the redistribution of over
population within the confines ofa mythical Indonesian state. 8
West Papua's natural resources became the pivotal point in
the public debate over its fate. Had West Papuan aspirations
for self-determination been acknowledged, the Papuans them
selves would have had the final say in the exploitation of these
resources. As it is, there were stronger forces vying for West
Papua's gold, silver, oil, timber, copper, and nickel. The West
Papuan issue was "resolved" in 1962 by diplomatic maneuvers
in which the U.S. played the leading role in handing West
Papua over from Dutch to Indonesian colonial administration.
"When the Dutch refused to hand over the administration of
West Papua to the Indonesians, the latter underlined their claims
by military infiltration and asked military support from com
munist sources for an invasion of West Papua," noted OPM's
Fred Korwa. It is quite likely that the United States, which
was fighting in South Vietnam, was afraid of another war in
and around Southeast Asia. This could explain why the U.S.
forced the Dutch government to hand over West Papua to the
Indonesians, without fighting, through bilateral negotiations in
1962.
9
The causes of political and social unrest in West
Papua extend far beyond the question of self-deter
mination. Whole populations are being resettled
and dispossessed of land to make way for mining
exploration and the transmigration of Javanese.
Papuan demands that an exercise of self-determination should
precede any decision about their country's fate were swept
aside as U.S. pressure forced the Netherlands to abandon the
cause of West Papuan independence. This "solution"-the
"New York Agreement," ratified by the United Nations General
Assembly-simply ignored the opinions of the Papuans and
placed them at the mercy of their new rulers. This was illustrated
by President Sukamo two days after the agreement's signing,
when he declared: "The Indonesian government only recognizes
an Irianese right to internal self-determination (autonomy) and
not external self-determination as contained in the New York
Agreement. ,,10 The Council on Foreign Relations, an influential
U.S. body with powerful connections in Washington and in
the oil industry, admitted in a 1962 report: "Noone regarded
the stipulations for 'free choice' by the Papuans as more than
mere formality. Outsiders could only hope that their progress
under Indonesian rule would not fall far behind what it might
have been if the Dutch had remained." II
8. Bernard Nietschmann, "Economic Development by Invasion of
Indigenous Nations," Cultural Survival Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 2
(1986). Published by CuIturalSurvival, Inc., Cambridge, MA, U.S.A.
9. Korwa, "West Papua," p.193.
10. loku, "West Papua," p. 142.
II. TAPOL, West Papua.
After the Dutch left West Papua in 1962, political activities
spread gradually to all parts of the country, to Kotabaru (now
layapura), Biak, Manokwari, Sorong, Paniai, Fakfak, and
Merauke. After Indonesia's formal takeover, in 1963, condi
tions in West Papua steadily deteriorated. 12 "From 1963-69, the
Indonesian military administration practised a tight campaign
of intimidation, oppression and torturing of the Papuans,"
according to the OPM. "During this period more than 30,000
people were killed by the Indonesians." Attempts by Papuans
to press for an internationally supervised exercise of self
determination were repressed by Indonesian troops. The OPM' s
Thomas Agaky Wanda, in an interview in 1986, claimed: "The
people involved came from all walks of life; the armed forces,
the police, government employees, villagers, fishermen, stu
dents, unemployed, men, women and youngsters.,,13
In 1969, the "Act of Free Choice"---called Pepera by the
Indonesians-sealed West Papua's fate as Indonesia's twenty
sixth province (Indonesia's twenty-seventh province is East
Timor, forcibly annexed after invasion by Indonesia in 1975).
The basis of the Act was the "unanimous" vote of the 1,024
members of a specially appointed referendum council. Free
Papua Movement political refugee Thomas Agaky Wanda
explained how this happened:
"They were all .... illiterate, simple-minded men, unable to read
or write.... After signing these statements they were given clothes,
wrist watches, radios or bicycles as rewards .... Everyone (including
departmental chiefs, village heads and public figures) had to sign
statements saying they were in favor of Indonesian rule.
"When Pepera was completed, everyone who had signed was
given a reward in accordance with their status. Villagers got ciga
rettes, money, radios or bicycles while departmental heads got
promotion, extra education, cars, houses and so on. All members
of Parliament, the Regional Assembly, all district heads throughout
(West Papua) .... signed statements and got the same rewards as
the departmental chiefs. These were Indonesia's velvet glove
methods.,,14
Of Indonesia's less subtle methods, the Free Papua Move
ments's Henk 10ku received information from Rev. Origines
Hokojoku alleging that Indonesian general Ali Murtopo had
'warned some of the 1,024 "representatives":
"If you want independence you had better ask God if he could
be kind enough to raise an island in the middle ofthe Pacific Ocean
so that you can migrate there. You can also write the Americans.
They have set foot on the Moon, perhaps they would be willing
to fix up a place for you there. Those of you who think about
voting against Indonesia must think again, for if you do, the wrath
of the Indonesian people will be on you. Your accursed tongues
will be cut out and your evil mouths ripped open. Then I, General
Ali Murtopo, will step in and shoot you on the SpOt.,,15
The Act, which took place simultaneously with widespread
"
12. TAPOL Bulletin, No. 81 (June 1987), p. 16. Interview with
Thomas Agaky Wanda.
13. Korwa, "West Papua," p. 194; see also TAPOL Bulletin, No. 81,
p. 16.
14. TAPOL Bulletin, No. 80 (April 1987).
15. 10ku, "West Papua," p. 143. Murtopo allegedly made this state
ment to the "representatives" who were gathered together before the
Act.
34
OPM bush camp
upnsmgs and political unrest, was nonetheless formally
acknowledged by the United Nations General Assembly. West
Papua, henceforth, ceased to occupy the attention of the world
community as Indonesia renamed the territory "Irian Jaya,"
outlawing the terms relating to West Papuan culture. For in
stance, "Papuan" is not a word acceptable to the Indonesian
military regime under any circumstances, even though
Javanese, Sudanese, Mendadonese, Moluccan, and other ethnic
designations are not frowned upon. In Indonesia today, Papuans
may only be known as "Irianese" or "anak daerah," hardIg'
translatable but best conveyed as "son/child of the region.,,1
OPM History
Many West Papuans were arrested and detained by Indone
sian para-commandos (then referred to as RPKAD) when
Indonesia took over administrative control of West Papua. In
1965 President Sukamo of Indonesia forbade freedom of
speech, gathering in public places, and both expression of
opinion and movement. "This was the start of the resistance
movement for freedom.,,1? The Free Papua Movement formed
in the Central Highlands in 1965, "in response to these arrests.
Many people fled and formed a unit which attacked an army
post in Erambu village, Kalimoro. OPM troops, armed with
knives, choppers [machetes], and bows and arrows, killed two
Indonesian soldiers and a government employee.,,18
Political refugee Thomas Agaky Wanda, interviewed last
*This photo is from Tok Blong SPPF (South Pacific Peoples Founda
tion of Canada), No. 17 (November 1987), p. 12.
17. Korwa, "West Papua."
35
year by the Indonesian Human Rights Campaign (TAPOL) ,
gave a detailed account of one of the first OPM military actions:
"Bren guns captured during this first OPM attack were used in
a second attack on Janggandur when some 30 Indonesian sol
diers were killed. They were buried at the Trikora Heroes'
Cemetery in Merauke as heroes of the Trikora Operation
(launched by Indonesia against [forces of] the Netherlands before
1962) but this is a lie. They were killed in a battle between
the OPM and Indonesian troops." The OPM forces--called
"security disruptor gangs" or "wild terrorist gangs" (GPL) by
the Indonesian military-were led by Sergeant Jaku and Cor
poral Flasi, both formerlr. of the disbanded Dutch-organized
Papuan Volunteer Corps. 9
Armed resistance to Indonesian occupation spread to other
parts of the country. That year there was an Arfak uprising
commanded by Colonel Permenas Awom. In 1967 there was
an Ayamaru uprising led by Abner Asmuruf and also an Arfak
uprising led by the brothers Mandatjan. In the same year there
was the North Biak uprising led by another Awom. In 1968
thirty out of the fifty-four members of the Provincial Assembly
were dismissed by the Indonesian government because they
wanted to debate the preparation of the coming "Act of Free
Choice. ,,20 Independence activities intensified during the period
of the Act, in 1969, with uprisings in Paniai and Ubrupwaris
18. Thomas Agaky Wanda. Quoted in TAPOL Bulletin, No. 80. Robin
Osborne says that the first OPM action occurred in Manokwari on 28
July 1965. See Osborne, Indonesia's Secret War: The Guerrilla Strug
gle in Irian Jaya (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985), p. 35.
19. TAPOL Bulletin, No. 80. GPL is an abbreviation of Gerakan
Pengacau Liar.
20. Joku, "West Papua," p.144.
and a rare peaceful demonstration in the streets of Jayapura.
Mass killings-begun in the mid-I960s-are estimated to
have claimed the lives of 150,000 people who were dead or
missing as of 1985. The victims have almost invariably been
villagers who have borne the brunt of the Indonesian military's
campaign to eliminate the guerrilla resistance led by the Free
Papua Movement. Incapable of penetrating the jungles and
discovering guerrilla hideouts and bases, the Indonesian troops
resort to terror tactics against villages, aimed at intimidating
the villagers and isolating the resistance. "Each strike by the
rebels is immediately followed by reprisals," one observer
noted. "The area is prohibited [to investigation by reporters]
and it is impossible to know the number of victims on both
sides. Rumors circulate, impossible to control, that for each
soldier killed a hundred [Papuans] will be shot, villages will
be bombed."21
Having failed either by organized political activity in the
towns or by means of armed resistance in the countryside to
influence the conduct of the 1969 Act and its formal acknow
ledgement by the United Nations, the Free Papua Movement
issued a declaration of West Papuan independence. Deep in
the jungle at his Markas Vktoria headquarters, General Seth
Jafet Rumkorem proclaimed the Republic of West Papua and
adopted a constitution and national symbols on 1 July 1971.
A period of military skirmishes and political uprisings began
after the independence proclamation. In 1977 opposition to
participation in Indonesian elections and attempts to forcibly
"modernize" Papuans by eliminating their cultural and tradi
tional practices, resulted in major uprisings in several border
regions, in the Baliem valley and in the Carstensz mountain
range in the Central Highlands.
"A lot of compulsion was used in the 1977 election .... The
authorities checked on how people voted by making a hole in
the back of the place where the different party boxes were
placed so that officials could easily see where people put their
slips," explained Thomas Agaky Wanda. This system is em
ployed throughout Indonesia and thus was also used in East
Timor elections in 1982 and again in 1987.
22
OPM Structure
The Organisasi Papua Merdeka derived from the Papuan
National Front (FPN), an early resistance front organized by
political exiles in Holland, Nicolaas Jouwe and Franz Kaisiepo.
"The OPM's founders were from the Arfak people, many of
whom had been trained in the Dutch-created Papuan Volunteer
Corps. ,,23
21. Malcolm Gault-Williams, 'The War Nobody's Told You About:
Indonesia in West Papua," Northern Sun, Vol. 9, No. 10 (November
1986). This article won mention as one of the top twenty-five under
reported stories of 1986, in Project Censored, issued by Carl Jensen,
director of the project, Sonoma State University, CA, U.S.A. Northern
Sun is published by the Northern Sun Alliance, Minneapolis, MN,
U.S.A.
22. TAPOLBulietin, No. 81, op. cit.
23. Osborne, Secret War, p. 35.
The signing of the Port Vila Declaration on II July 1987 ended nine years of conflict between the political and
military wings of the Free Papua Movement. Signing on the left is Seth Rumkorem. signing on the right is
Jacob Prai. standing on the left is Baroke Sope of the Vanuata government, and seated on the far right is A.
Ayamiseba.
36
From early leaders such as Johan Ariks, who took to the
hills when he was in his mid-seventies, to Lodewijk Mandatjan
and Perminas and Frits Awom, the movement eventually came
under the dual leadership of Seth Rurnkorem and Jacob Prai.
Rumkorem was a Papuan who had been an Indonesian intelli
gence officer, in favor of soliciting arms from communist gov
ernments, and was ambushed in May 1977 by Papenal guerrillas
loyal to Prai. Jacob Prai, unlike Rumkorem, had always been
against the Indonesians. Where Rumkorem had military experi
ence, Prai had knowledge of the Papuan underground. He be
lieved in the self-sufficiency of the struggle and that hope of
outside aid was futile.
24
The setting aside of differences by Prai and Rumkorem meant
a unification of the political and military wings of the Free
Papua Movement. The reunification took place on II July
1985. The two exiles signed an agreement in Port Vila, Van
uatu, ending nine years of discord and acrimony during the
West Papuan struggle against Indonesian occupation. The
declaration was followed by a signed agreement between the
two wings inside West Papua. M. Prawar represented Markas
Victoria of the Rurnkorem headquarters, and Fisor Jarisetow
represented Markas Pemka of the Prai headquarters.
Papuan demands that an exercise ofself-determina
tion should precede any decision about their coun
try's fate were swept aside as u.s. pressure forced
the Netherlands to abandon the cause of West Pa
puan independence. This "solution"-the "New
York Agreement," ratifred by the United
Nations General Assembly-simply ignored the
opinions of the Papuans and placed them at the
mercy of their new rulers.
The Port Vila Declaration contains a pledge to safeguard the
"survival right of the Melanesian race in West Papua." Both
leaders admitted that many casualties had resulted from their
disagreements, and that the Indonesian armed forces-the Ang
katan Bersenjata Republic Indonesia (ABRI)--had been the
ones to benefit. If disunity continued, the result would be "the
obliteration of the Melanesian race in West Papua." A division
of responsibilities was made. Jacob Prai took charge of the
political side of the movement and Seth Rumkorem took com
mand of military activities.
25
The Free Papua Movement's military arm, Papenal--or Pasu
kan Pembebasan Nasional (National Liberation Forces)--is or
ganized into seven regional commands, each one consisting of
a large number of posts known as basis. According to Jacob
Prai, the person in command of each basis takes charge of both
military planning and community activity, including popUlation
movements where necessary. Each regional command has
1,000 to 3,000 trained guerrillas attached to it. Women com
prise a significant proportion of the troops.
The OPM's most serious logistical problems are the lack of
modem weapons and the serious shortage of medicines. The
most widely used weapons are bows and arrows, spears, and
long, sharp cassowary bones. Most of the firearms are World
War II rifles, left over from Dutch times, or guns seized from
ABRI. Seth Rurnkorem stated that OPM troops had only 300
firearms total. Yet, on several occasions, Papenal has succeeded
in shooting down enemy planes, as documented in Indonesian
military internal documents. 26
As for medical treatment, not only is there a critical shortage
of medicine, but also an absence of trained medical personnel.
Prai said nurses "perform operations using pineapple fibres or
fibre from banana leaves for stitches. But, for more serious
injuries, our skills are too limited to cope. With more qualified
medical personnel, we would be able to save more lives. Most
of the medicines we use are traditional medicines coming from
roots or leaves. ,,27
The Organisasi Papua Merdeka functions as a form of gov
ernment, with such posts as defense, finance, home and foreign
affairs, information, education, and local government. In OPM
controlled areas, attention is given to education, organization
of food production, and the basic training of personnel to help
provide simple medical services. Rurnkorem has stated that the
OPM is in effective control of one quarter of the territory of
West Papua-Papua Barat-and the Indonesian military 10 per
cent. "The expansion of the liberated zone is only restricted
by the problems of supply, communications and organization."
As for the actual size of the Free Papua Movement's forces,
Rumkorem said that 30,000 Papuans are active throughout the
country. 28
Henk Joku represented West Papua at the Pacific region
meeting of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples in Can
berra, Australia, in June 1984. He premised that Irian Jaya
posed a regional security threat and proposed a six-point pro
gram to deal with that threat:
I. The West Papuan issue be brought back on the agenda of
the United Nations Decolonisation Committee for re-examination;
2. The West Papuan issue be put back on the agenda of the
United Nations General Assembly for debate;
3. Observers from neutral member countries of the United
Nations travel to the territory to gain firsthand information regarding
the freely expressed wishes of the Melanesian people there;
4. International Red Cross and Amnesty International send their
respective observers to the territory and lend assistance to the
Melanesian people;
5. Member nations of the South Pacific Forum countries send
observers to the territory and gain firsthand information regarding
the freely expressed wishes of the Melanesian people there; and
26. XVII Cendrawasih Military District Command Intelligence
Executive Agency, "Incidents in 1977 in the District of Jayawijaya,"
contained in appendix to TAPOL, West Papua (1984).
27. Malcolm Gault-Williams, "OPM: The World's Least Known
Guerrillas," September 1986. Unpublished. Based on TAPOL inter
view in 1981, interview in Nederlands Dagblad on 14 December
24. Ibid., pp. 51-65. 1982, and interview in Kora-Kora in May 1982.
25. Northern Sun, Vol. 9, No. 10, op. cit. 28. Gault-Williams, "OPM." See also Northern Sun, VoI.9,No. 10.
37
i
6. The Government of Indonesia convene a round-table confer
ence between the Indonesian Government and the OPM Govern
ment within 12 months in order that the independence and full
sovereignty of the Melanesian people of West Papua can be trans
ferred to them without further bloodshed and disturbance of peace
and security in this region
29
Indonesian Military Strategy
Although the Indonesian military is well-equipped and has
good air support, the difficult terrain in West Papua places
significant restrictions on its troop mobility. Indonesian ground
troops do not venture into some parts of the territory, which
is among the most rugged in the world. In those regions where
villagers live from sago stands, wild fruit, and vegetables, and
from fishing and hunting, greater mobility makes it less possible
for Indonesian troops to destroy communities by eliminating
their food supplies. In other regions where garden cultivation
is highly sophisticated-such as parts of the Baliem Valley
military attacks are far more damaging.
Due to the lack of modern weapons, the aPM has been
unable to answer Indonesian helicopter raids, except by fleeing.
Indonesians, as a result, are confident in the air and fairly
confident in the towns. Yet on the ground and in the villages
they know they are not safe. "It is our land," said aPM former
district commander Gerard Thorny. "And it is our place. That
is our strength.,,30
Faced with nationwide hostility and a guerrilla movement
that can function in a very protected environment, ABRI,
backed by air support, is known to engage in frequent devastat
ing attacks on village communities. The attacks usually take
one of two forms: a village or populated region is subjected to
aerial bombardment by ground-attack jets and strafing by
helicopters. The helicopters then land troops to machine-gun
the survivors and bum their homes. Even when villagers have
fled, the dwellings are destroyed, livestock shot, and gardens
or trees devastated. The other form of attack occurs in more
accessible villages, which are encircled by ground troops. Vil
lagers are then driven together and killed. Documented aerial
bombardments include:
1965: Manokwari and the surrounding North Eastern Vogel Kop.
1966: Arfak mountains, Central and North Eastern Vogel Kop.
Napalm bombs used for the first time.
1966-67: Ayamaru Lake area, Central and South Western Vogel
Kop.
1967: Angie Lake area, Central and South Western Vogel Kop.
1969: Paniai area (formerly the Wissel-Lakes Highlands).
1977: Grand Baliem Valley, Central Highlands.
1978: Arso-waris area, including villages along the northern border
with Papua New Guinea.
1982: Paniai, Highlands of Wissel Lake area. Napalm used.
1983: North Biak (warsa) areaY
There is some evidence that chemical weapons are also being
used. Jacob Prai stated:
OPM guerrillas using sharpened stakes to prevent aircraftfrom landing*
I was inspecting kampungs (Papuan dwellings) which were to be
made ready to receive evacuees from villages that had been attacked
by the colonial (Indonesian) army. Then, at about 9 in the morning
a plane and a helicopter flew past. I saw a kind of yellow-colored
smoke or spray being emitted from the aircraft. A couple of days
later, people started dying, children as well as adults. We quickly
ordered the people still alive to abandon the area and we burnt the
kampung down. We paid too little attention to this incident at the
time and didn't collect specimens of water or plants. I received
similar reports at the time from other places.
32
Documented bombardments and ground sweeps by ABRI
include:
1966-67: Ayamaru, Teminabuan, and Kaimana areas (Southern
Vogel Kop); estimated 1,500 people killed.
1969: Paniai; 600 people killed.
1970: Biak Island; 950 people killed.
1974: North Biak villages of Arwan, Makuker, and Warker;
eighty-five people shot dead. Among them was one preg
nant woman, Alfrieda Bonsapia, who had her abdomen
ripped open with a bayonet. Mother and baby were left to
die slowly.
1977: Grand Baliem Valley; 2,000 people killed by napalm bombs
and helicopters as well as Bronco UVIO's supplied by the
United States.
1982: Paniai; 7 people killed. Casualties from the bombings in
Manokwari, Arfak mountains, Angi Lake, Arso-waris, and
North Biak are not known.
33
The Indonesian armed forces have also resorted to: plain
murders, public executions, political leaders dying under sus
picious circumstances, disappearances of Melanesian leaders
29. 10ku, "West Papua," p. 145. See also Osborne, Secret War, *This photo is from the TAPOL Bulletin, No. 74 (March 1986), p. 10,
pp. 110-11. and Robin Osbourne, Indonesia's Secret War
30. Gault-Williams, "OPM." 32. TAPOL, West Papua.
31. loku, "West Papua," p. 137. 33. loku, "West Papua," pp. 138-39.
38
Melanesian deserters from the Indonesian army in West Papua who fled to Papua New Guinea
without trace, violation of women (gang rapes), imprisonment,
torture, intimidation, and armed coercion. Documented in
stances include:
In 1978 [alone], 116 people were killed on the Biak-Numfoor
islands; in Dosai-Maribu, near Jayapura, 20 people were found
dead in the bush; in Merauke, 122 people had their hands and legs
tied. They were put into copra bags and dropped into the sea; in
North Biak, 12 people went to pound sago in the bush and their
badly decomposed bodies were discovered weeks later by a passing
village hunter. Other incidences of murder are typically not reported
by those who have survived for fear of persecution by the ABRI. 34
Actions committed by the Indonesian military aimed at set
ting public examples (executions) and punishing political leaders
(suspicious deaths and disappearances) are too numerous to
document here. Also, besides such atrocities, more subtle meas
ures have been implemented by the occupying government with
the sole aim of Melanesian ethnocide.
Transmigrasi and Cultural Extermination
The causes of political and social unrest in West Papua extend
far beyond the question of self-determination. Whole popula
tions are being resettled and dispossessed of land to make way
34. Ibid., pp. 139-40.
for mining exploration and the transmigration of Javanese. W.F.
Wertheim has written that "under the present Suharto regime
the old myth of an overpopulated Java and the under-populated
Outer Islands appears still to haunt not only the minds of the
Indonesian present rulers, but also of those determining the
policies of the World Bank and other Western donors of so
called 'development aid' co-operating in the IGGI (Inter-gov
ernmental Group on Indonesia). ,,35 Specifically, funds are pro
vided by the World Bank, World Food Program, the European
Economic Community, Asian Development Bank, Islamic De
velopment Bank, West Germany, France, the Netherlands, the
United States, and the United Nations Development Program. 36
Wertheim added that the Indonesian
"military power-holders are, in spite of all the failures experi
enced in the course of the past decade, intent upon putting the
35. Mariel Otten, Transmigrasi: Myths and Realities; Indonesian Re
settlement Policy, /965-1985. IWGIA Document No. 57 (Copen
hagen: IWGIA, October 1986), p. I.
36. Malcolm Gault-Williams, "Indonesia's Genocidal Invasion of
East Timor: The War Nobody's Told You About - Part 2," Northern
Sun. Vol. 10, NO.6 (June 1987); see also "Banking on Disaster:
Indonesia's Transmigration Programme," in The Ecologist: Journal
of the Post Industrial Age. Vol. 16, No. 2/3 (1986). Published by
Survival International and available through T APOL (London).
39
x
IRIAN JAVA
POPULATION DISTRIBUTION'
1985 Estimate = 1.3 million
o &I 100 ISO 200 250 ~ O O
Indigenous People -Roads
IS Transmlgrants Proposed Roads
o Other Newcomers RegIonal Centres
Proposed SelllemenlS 19134-89
(!;nch ~ y m b o l =: 10,000 peoplel
most ambitious quantitative targets into practice, being mainly
motivated by strategie and security considerations .... the trans
migrasi strategy, far from being operated in consultation with the
people concerned and on a voluntary basis, is both in the area of
origin and in the locality of destination largely being effectuated
through sheer compulsion and deceit. ,,37
Indonesia's ]984-89 five-year plan calls for the movement
of five million people from Java, Madura, and Bali specifically
to those areas that resist Indonesia's imposed sovereignty:
Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, the South Moluccas and-of
course--East Timor and West Papua. Over the next twenty
years, some 65 million more people are planned for migration
to Javanize the Fourth World territories claimed by Indonesia.
So far, there have been between 300,000 and one million
Javanese peasants and retired military personnel resettled on
Melanesian land. The Indonesian government has envisaged
having Javanese outnumber Melanesians four to one by the
tum of the century.
Robin Osborne, who has written much on the West Papuan
situation, came to the conclusion that "it is now clear that in
Irian Jaya the prime aim of the (transmigration) programme is
to quell local separatist feelings by sheer force of numbers."
Osborne has brought attention to the "strong presence ofIndone
sian military families, many of them retired personnel, amongst
transmigrants in the border areas. Reports from Jakarta have
spoken of army families being the 'foundation' of many new
settlements. Said OPM's northern area commander James
Nyaro: 'Don't think of these settlers as ordinary civilians. They
are trained military personnel disguised as civilian settlers. ' ,,38
As groups such as Cultural Survival, Survival International,
TAPOL, and Friends of the Earth, as well as recent published
works in The Ecologist and IWGIA Documents point out, trans
migration has not just resettled Javanese, but has resulted in
"the spread of poverty; forced displacement of indigenous
peoples from their homes, communities and lands; deforestation
*This Mapoflrian Jaya(West Papua) is from TokBlongSPPF, p. 7.
37. Otten, Transmigrasi, pp. 1-2.
38. Pacific Islands Monthly (Sydney, Australia), July 1984; see also
The Guardian (New York), 13 April 1984; and ACFOA Briefing, May
1985, p. 6.
and soil damage; destruction of local governments, economies,
means of sustainable resource use; forced assimilation pro
grams; widespread use of military force to 'pacify' areas and
to break local resistance by bombing and massacring civil
ians. ,,39
In the translocation and dispossession process, heavy-handed
attempts have been made to force Papuans to abandon their
cultural traditions. Adolf Henesby, a Papuan schoolmaster,
testified how his school was raided and searched for symbols
of Papuan nationalism by Indonesian tank-borne troops. Flags,
books, charts, anything connected with Papuan culture, were
A Javanese transmigrant with West Papuan women. Some believe that
the main purpose of the transmigration program in West Papua is to
"quell local separatistfeelings by force ofsheer numbers." For others
the purpose is even more far-reaching. On 20 March 1985 Mr. Mar
tano, the Indonesian minister of transmigration, said: "By way of
transmigration, we will try to realise what has been pledged, to integ
rate the ethnic groups into one nation ... the different ethnic groups
will in the long run disappear because of integration ... and there will
be one kind of man. " *
*This photo is from the TAPOL Bulletin, No. 79 (February 1987), p.
18, and was attributed to Tempo, (6 December 1986).
39. Nietschmann, "Economic Development"; see also "Indonesia:
Transmigration - Indigenous, Political and Environmental Support
Organisations Unite To Protest at Governments Which Back World
Bank," IWGIA Newsletter, No. 45 (1986). Documents signed by Robin
Hanbury-Tennson, president, Survival International; Lord Avebury,
honorary president, T APOL; Jonathan Porritt, director, Friends of the
Earth.
40
removed. Henesby was driven off to an Indonesian army barrack
and interrogated about why he still retained symbols of indigen
ous Papuan culture as opposed to the "Irianese" culture being
promoted by the Indonesian government. "I was questioned
about many things, mainly about the elite West Papuans who,
they said, were the ones hampering the Indonesians in their
plans and programs. I was transferred from there to a military
police unit and held for 3 days.,,4o
Forest communities have been subjected to forced labor
schemes, imposed upon them by Indonesian government offi
cials acting as brokers for timber companies. In the urban areas,
Papuans face racial discrimination in government offices, and
are being driven from the towns as Javanese arrive to take over
government jobs, commerce, and business.
Refugees and Resettlement
A mission of five lawyers from the Australian section of the
International Commission of Jurists and a member of the
Netherlands Institute of Human Rights, in a rare opportunity,
visited West Papuan refugee camps along the Papua New
Guinea (PNG)-West Papuan border in 1984. It was their con
sidered opinion that "a large number of the approximately
11,000 (West Papuan) refugees now consider themselves to be
indefinitely or permanently displaced from Irian Jaya," that
"this large number of people are .... refugees within the terms
of the 1951 Convention and 1967 Protocol Relating to the
Status of Refugees," and that this "is an indication of serious
problems within Irian Jaya." The mission's crucial recommen
dation was therefore that "no one be returned involuntarily [to
West Papua]." So far, the PNG government has not returned
political refugees. though it has cooperated with Indonesia in
returning "nonpolitical refugees. ,,41
Peter Hastings, ofthe Sydney Morning Herald, visited camps
at Kungin, Trakbits, and Atkumba. He found that everyone
along the border, from north to south-PNG officials in
cluded-supported the refugees, and that anti-Indonesian feel
ings ran high. As for the refugees themselves, he wrote: "Not
a single inhabitant of the three camps, or of any others, I
suspect, will return voluntarily to Irian Jaya at this stage. Quite
possibly never. ,,42
Gerard Thomy, one of five OPM leaders who recently left
the bush and was given temporary asylum in Ghana, explained:
"They will not return home, and if an attempt is made to return
them home, they will disappear into the bush. They know that
their villages and gardens were destroyed after they left and
they know that we are fighting a war of independence.,,43
Aben Pagawak is one of twelve West Papuan refugees forci
bly deported from PNG to Jayapura in October 1985. He es
caped early in 1986 and then spent two months in a PNG jail
for "illegal entry." After eventual release and being granted
refugee status, he was interviewed by Bishop John Etheridge.
Pagawak described how the twelve deportees had been im
mediately arrested upon their return to Jayapura, held in over
crowded, unsanitary cells, and subjected to electric shock and
beatings with rubber truncheons. According to Pagawak, he
and five others were released by Indonesian security forces on
the understanding that they would spy on the Free Papua Move
ment. Of the five, one is missing and another is now blind in
one eye due to injuries sustained in the jail. The remaining
seven deportees remain in jail and have apparently been tried,
though reliable information about these trials is not available.
Speaking of the refugees Pagawak rejoins in PNG, Bishop
Etheridge said: "They are grateful to be in a safe country, but
*This photo was in Tok Blong SPPF, p. 19, and was attributed to the
Papua New Guinea Times. March, 1984.
40. Gault-Williams, "OPM."
41. PNG Times, 12-18 December 1986; see also TAPOL Bulletin,
No. 79 (February 1987).
43. PNG Times (1986, exact date unknown). Interview by Alan Smith.
West Papuan women and children arriving as refugees in Papua New Guinea after escaping thefighting
41
for two years, they have waited in what is little more than a
staging camp .... they want to get on with their own lives, and
that is not possible with the threat of relocation hanging over
them.,,44
A second group of Australian jurists who visited the border
in late 1986 has reported that the refugee situation is "as grave
as at any time since the influx began" in 1984. The mission
also reported that the United Nations High Commission on
Refugees (UNHCR) has now agreed to acknowledge all West
Papuans in the camps as refugees under the principle of "group
mass influx." The mission's chief recommendation was that
all United Nations member states, especially PNG and
Australia, should adopt the UNHCR decision to regard all those
who have crossed the border since 1984 as refugees. This
second mission, sent by the Australian section of the Interna
tional Commission of Jurists, welcomed the fact that the idea
of transferring the more politically conscious refugees to Wabo
camp--known for its isolation and concentration camp-like
organization-had been abandoned, and that, apparently, a
number of recommendations made by the first mission had
been implemented, notably Papua New Guinea's accession to
the U.N. Convention on Refugees.
45
In October 1986, the foreign ministers of Indonesia and PNG
signed a Treaty of Mutual Respect, Friendship and Co-opera
tion. Under the terms of this long-debated treaty, the two coun
tries have agreed not to threaten or use force against one another
and not to cooperate with others (i.e. OPM) in hostile or unlaw
ful acts against each other, or allow their territory to be used
by others.
46
Though there is nothing in the new treaty which either had
not been the subject of earlier and repeated verbal assurances,
or was not already adequately provided for in the existing
agreement on border administration, the new treaty seems to
formalize the cooperation between both governments that has,
in part, contributed to the suppression of West Papuan culture.
Interestingly, no provisions were made for hot pursuit across
the border. Opposition politicians in PNG described the treaty
as "naive and misconstrued," "sinister," and "an exercise in
hypocrisy. ,,47
This was a diplomatic gain for Indonesia, which benefits
more from PNG cooperation on the refugee situation than PNG
has from fear of Indonesia's greater military strength. The new
treaty follows on the heels of the PNG Defense Force and ABRI
strengthening ties. Prior to the treaty, Brigadier General Huai,
commander of the PNG Defense Force, aroused widespread
consternation with a public statement describing the Organisasi
Papua Merdeka as "a bunch ofterrorists" which he was resolved
to "wipe from the face of the earth." Speaking at a press con
ference in Port Moresby, with the Indonesian charge d'affairs,
Rapilus Ishak, Huai said it had been agreed, in discussions
with Indonesian armed forces commander Benny Murdani, that
44. TAPOL Bulletin. No. 77 (September 1986). Interview taped by
John MacLean, Labor party member of the Victoria State Parliament,
Australia.
45. TAPOL Bulletin. No. 79 (February 1987).
46. Niugini Nius. 28 October 1986.
47. Post-Courier. 29 October 1986; see also Times of Papua New
Guinea, 31 October - 6 November 1986.
PNG and Indonesia would take the same steps on both sides
of the Irian Jaya-Papua New Guinea border to ensure the elimi
nation of the Free Papua Movement. 48
Protests came from many circles. Some politicians accused
Huai of declaring war on the OPM. Others complained that he
was making pronouncements on aspects of government policy
not within his authority. Several community leaders from PNG
border provinces stressed that, whatever the Defense Force
chief may say, Papuans along the PNG side of the border are
and will remain deeply sympathetic to the OPM. PNG Prime
Minister Paius Wingti has since denied there is any change in
government policy toward the Free Papua Movement and has
claimed that Huai's remarks had been "misinterpreted.,,49
Moses Werror, the acting chairman in Papua New Guinea
of the OPM's Revolutionary Council, warned Huai to keep out
of the Free Papua Movement's struggle against Indonesia. He
also warned that guerrillas holding Indonesian prisoners would
kill them, because that is what the Indonesians do with OPM
fighters when captured. Speaking ofthe OPM military strategy,
Werror explained that Papenal's main purpose at the present
time is to go into administrative centers and "to hold the stations
as long as possible and capture food, ammunition and
weapons. ,,50
Newly appointed commander of OPM forces in the north
border region, Bas Mekawa urged Huai to stop "trying to de
stroy the Melanesian race and impose Asians in the Pacific."
The fifty-year-old former district chief claimed to be in com
mand of about 7,000 guerrillas in his region alone. They are
armed primarily with axes, bows and arrows, spears and clubs,
plus a small number of rifles. The OPM carries out mobile
warfare, he said, because it is the only viable strategy against
a far better-equipped enemy. "If they know where we are, they
will move in and immediately crush us. That's why we're
always moving. ,,51
Current Situation
Over 1,000 refugees have fled across the border from West
Papua to PNG during 1986, bringing the total to over 11,000.
The International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, an inde
pendent international organization which gathers information
about worldwide oppression of indigenous peoples, recognizes
that "the refugees have been fleeing from the increased opf:res
sion stemming from the occupying forces of Indonesia." 2
Worse than the figures on refugees fleeing into PNG are the
estimates of the numbers of Papuans killed or who have died
as a result of Indonesian repression, suppression, or neglect.
According to the Indonesian Human Rights Campaign, the total
number of Papuans killed range from 100,000 to 150,000 be
tween 1962 and 1984.
53
Without modem weapons and high-level training from the
United States, United Kingdom, France, West Germany,
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid.
52. Andrew Gray, IWGIA Yearbook /986 (Copenhagen: IWGIA,
January 1987).
53. TAPOL, West Papua, p. 6.
Australia, and Israel, Indonesia would be unable to prolong its
mobilizations in West Papua. In Indonesia's 1985-86 budget,
approximately 45 percent of the military's development funding
(totalling A$81 1.4 million) came from foreign aid and credits.
Australian aid to ABRI has averaged $10 million in recent
years and has included Sabre jets, small arms training, air
navigation training, and aircraft maintenance as well as continu
ing research and development. Between 1974 and 1984, some
1,032 Indonesian military personnel have undertaken training
or study visits to Australia. However, "Indonesia's largest milit
ary supplier is the USA. ,,54
At the beginning of 1986, two important commanders of the
OPM, Nyaro in the north and Thorny in the south, had left the
bush (Nyaro surrendered), and it is thought that much of the
OPM's increased military actions would decrease. However,
1986 saw "many clashes between the Indonesian armed forces
and the OPM." In November 1986, the Indonesians launched
"Operation Saute" which was intended to wipe out the Free
Papua Movement before the April 1987 elections. The operation
consisted of five divisions and F5 aircraft. All indications since
April point to the OPM's growth and health.
55
In fact, the first Organisasi Papua Merdeka mission ever to
visit Australia toured in November and December of 1986. The
OPM mission was sponsored by the Campaign for an Indepen
dent East Timor, the West Papua Association, the Food Preser
vers' Union, the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Group,
and the Campaign Against Repression in the Pacific and Asia.
The mission consisted of Jacob Prai, Otto Ondowame, and
Nick Messet, who are all political exiles in Sweden. The West
Papuans had hoped to lobby the Australian government but
Australia's foreign minister, Bill Hayden, refused to meet them
officially. Informally, Hayden explained that a formal meeting
"would cause more trouble than it would be worth.,,56
In an interview with Robin Osborne, Jacob Prai said that
Indonesia's presence in West Papua "ensures the OPM's con
tinued existence .... The behavior of the military guarantees the
growth of the OPM despite the dangers and difficulties of
maintaining such an organization. Everyone backs us against
the alien Indonesians and we have thousands of active sup
porters.',57 During this visit, the Free Papua Movement made
public several requests to the Australian government, in view
of the continuing abuse of human rights in West Papua. The
OPM has asked the Australian government to:
1. Discuss with Indonesia human rights claims by the OPM-FPM,
and also put these claims to the United Nations Human Rights Com
mission;
2. Support the United Nations High Commission for Refugees in
rcsettling Irian Jaya/West Papuan refugees;
3. Assist refugees in camps with medical, welfare, and educational
aid, including a scholarship program;
4. Seek at the United Nations a thorough reexamination of the 1969
so-called act of self-determination, with a view to a timetable for
independence being determined by the United Nations Decolonisation
Committec.
58
Worldwide ignorance about the events leading to West
Papuan colonization by Indonesia, the nature of the repression,
and the degree of resistance has made it possible for Indonesia
to proceed with its destruction of native Papuan life largely
unhampered by international condemnation. By their complicity
and acquiescence, most Western countries have lent their sup
port to the atrocious crimes of the Indonesian military in West
Papua, crimes that are leading to the cultural extermination of
the Melanesian people who inhabit the western halfofthe island
of New Guinea.
Outright military victory by either Papenal or ABRI is impos
sible. There is some hope, however, that by bringing the plight
of West Papuans to the attention of increasing numbers of
people, the Organisasi Papua Merdeka will, in time, muster
enough international support to facilitate West Papuan expres
sions of what they themselves wish for the future of their land.
*
54. Osborne, Secret War, pp. 146-7. From information contained in
Weekend Australian, 12 January 1985.
56. Canberra Times, 27 November 1986.
57. The Australian, 25 November 1986.
58. TAPOL Bulletin, No. 80 (April 1987).
CALL FOR P APERS/ PANELS
FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ANTI-COMMUNISM
AND AMERICAN POLITICS, CULTURE AND MEDIA
Nov. 11-13, 1988 Cambridge, Massachusetts
Sponsored by the Institute for Media Analysis
A three day conference/symposium with a decided international focus
will investigate the phenomenon of anti-communism in American and
political and cultural life; American anti-communism and its historical
antecedents; anti-communism in US foreign policy and its role in
underdevelopment and destabilization in the Third World; images in
mass culture and in the media will also be examined. Conference audience
will include scholars, students, journalists, community and political
activists, civil servants. Deadline for panel proposals, paper abstracts is
March 15, 1988. For information, forms: John P. Demeter, Conference
Director, Institute for Media Analysis, PO Box 2867, Harvard Sq. Station
Cambridge MA 02238. (617) 628-6585.
43
"Mutual Respect, Friendship and Co-operation?"
The Indonesia-Papua New Guinea Border and Its Effects
on Relations between Papua New Guinea and Indonesia.
by R.J. May
In October 1986 the foreign ministers of Indonesia and Papua
New Guinea (PNG) signed a Treaty of Mutual Respect,
Friendship and Co-operation. Under the terms of this treaty
the two countries have agreed not to threaten or use force
against one another and not to cooperate with others in hostile
or unlawful acts against each other or allow their territory to
be used by others for such purposes. Provision is made also
for consultation and negotiation in the event of any dispute.
The treaty was hailed by President Suharto as "another miles
tone in the history of both countries," while Papua New
Guinea's prime minister, Paias Wingti, and foreign affairs sec
retary, Bill Dihm, said it would give direction for the future
and inspire confidence in Papua New Guinea and its regional
neighbors. I
More skeptical opinion, however, observed that there was
nothing in the new treaty which either had not been the subject
of earlier and repeated verbal assurances, or was not already
adequately provided for in the existing agreement on border
administration. Some opposition politicians in Papua New
Guinea went further, describing the treaty as "naive and mis
construed," "sinister," and "an exercise in hypocrisy.,,2
In an attempt to throw some light on these conflicting view
points, and to promote a better understanding of the nature of
the relations between Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, this
paper looks at the problems that have arisen over the common
border between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea and at the
I.. Niugini Nius, 28 October 1986.
2. Post-Courier, 29 October 1986; Times of Papua New Guinea,
31 October - 6 November 1986.
effects of these problems on relations between them.
The Border
The land boundary between Indonesia and Papua New
Guinea stretches for some 750 kilometers. In the south it passes
through dry savannah and swampy rain forest before ascending
into the precipitous limestone ridges of the rain-soaked Star
Mountains. North of the Star Mountains it traverses the Sepik
tloodplain, another series of formidable limestone ridges and
raging mountain streams, and a thickly forested swampy plain
before rising again into the Bougainville Mountains, which
ultimately faIl, in a succession of limestone cliffs, into the sea
at Wutung. The border itself is poorly defined. Until recently
there were only fourteen markers along the entire length of the
border; additional markers are being added as the result of
recent surveys and demarcation.
Except for parts of the border area roughly from the Fly
River bulge to 100 kilometers north of it, the region is sparsely
populated by people who are shifting cultivators with smaIl
groups of predominantly hunter-gatherers. In the north and
south respectively taro and yam provide the main staples, and
in the higher altitudes some depend on sweet potato; for the
rest sago is the main staple, supplemented by hunting. As in
other countries whose borders are the product of arbitrary
decisions by past colonial regimes, language groups and
traditional rights to land as well as relations of kin and of trade
extend across the border (see map). Indeed, border surveys
during the 1960s established that the border ran right through
the middle of at least one village and that several villages which
had been administered by the Dutch were in fact in the Austra
lian territory. As recently as 1980 a village included in Papua
44
---
New Guinea's National Census was found to be inside Irian
Jaya:* The situation is made more complex for administering
authorities by the tendency, among these shifting cultivators,
for whole villages to shift, re-form, and disappear over time. 3
There has been a tendency among distant
commentators on Indonesia-Papua New
Guinea relations to refer to the problems, and
to urge greater "understanding," as though the
Indonesia-Papua New Guinea relationship is
symmetrical. Obviously it is not: border crossing
has been essentially one way; border violations
have been entirely at Papua New Guinea's
expense; Papua New Guinea does not have a
domestic insurgency problem overflowing its
border; it has been Papua New Guinea rather
than Indonesia that has hadto seek explanations
for external disturbances, and responsibility
for the frequent ineffectiveness of liaison
machinery has been largely on the Indonesian
side.
The land border is defined by an Australian-Indonesian bor
der agreement of 1973, and is the subject of an agreement
between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea concerning adminis
trative border arrangements. The latter was originally drawn
up in 1973 (when Australia was the administering authority in
Papua New Guinea, though the agreement was signed by
Michael Somare as chief minister), and has been renegotiated,
with minor but significant amendments, in 1979 and 1984.
The agreement contains provisions relating to definition of the
border area, the establishment of a joint border committee and
consultation and liaison arrangements, border crossings for
traditional and customary purposes and by nontraditional in
habitants, customary border trade and the exercise of traditional
rights to land and waters in the border area, border security,
quarantine, navigation, exchange of information on major con
struction, major development of natural resources, environ
mental protection, and compensation for damages. There is,
however, no provision for hot pursuit across the border, and
Papua New Guinea has repeated?, resisted proposals for joint
military patrolling of the border.
Border Problems
Since earliest colonial times New Guinea's borders have
been an occasional source of friction between the neighboring
* Irian Jaya is the Indonesian name for the western part of the island
of New Guinea. Although there was and is a resistance movement,
Irian Jaya is now mainly controlled by Indonesia.-ED
3. A recent population survey of the border census divisions of
Papua New Guinea's Western Province by the Papua New Guinea
Institute of Applied Social and Economic Research (lASER), provides
some documentation of this fluidity. See A. Pula and R. Jackson,
45
r--___. ~ ,
.\
\
PAPUA
INDONESIA
\ .
NEW
' ~
"./ GUINEA
,
f.
6'
6 \ .-.
Ie
I
I
I
--Phyllc or Stock Boundary
----- Family Boundary
PopulatIon denSity
One dot =1.000 people
Map of the border area, showing language groups and population
density.
administrations. In recent years problems between Papua New
Guinea and Indonesia over the border have arisen from four
sources.
(8) Border Crossers
In principle, one can distinguish four broad classes of border
crossers. First, there are villagers from the border area who
"Population Survey of the Border Census Divisions of Western
Province" (Port Moresby: Papua New Guinea lASER, 1984).
4. The agreement is reproduced in R.J. May, ed., The Indonesia
Papua New Guinea Border: Irianese Nationalism and Small State
Diplomacy, Working Paper No.2 (Canberra: Australian National
University, Research School of Pacific Studies, Department of Polit
ical and Social Change, 1979).
West Papuan refugees in Papua New Guinea*
cross from time to time, as they have always crossed, to make
sago, to hunt, or to visit kin. As mentioned above, provision
is specifically made for such traditional movement in the border
agreement. Traditionally such movement was two-way and
sometimes, in response to drought or disputes, for example,
was more or less permanent. Within comparatively recent times
there has been continuous substantial movement across the
border. During the Dutch period many Papua New Guinean
villagers from the border area travelled across into what was
then Dutch New Guinea, attracted by the superior facilities
available, especially at centers su<;h as Hollandia (now
Jayapura), Mindiptanah, and Merauke. Lately, it seems, move
ment has tended to be in the opposite direction, though greater
formality of border administration and the existence of different
lingua franca has inhibited such movement. The lASER
Survey referred to above (in footnote number three) has
documented extensive cross-border ties for the people of West
em Province: in the North Ok Tedi and Moian census divisions,
for example, 47.8 and 30.3 percent respectively of adults sur
veyed were born in Irian Jaya.
5
In view of the frequency of
movement in the past, the lASER report ventured the opinion
that "a good proportion of these border-crossers [i.e. those who
crossed into Papua New Guinea during 19841 could have good
claim to PNG citizenship.,,6 Much the same situation exists in
Papua New Guinea's northern Sandaun Province. In 1984 the
Sandaun premier, Andrew Komboni, accused the Australian,
Indonesian, and Papua New Guinean governments of ignoring
the "family aspects" of the situation created by border crossing:
"The traditional ties among the border villages in the northern
sector have not changed since the white man declared an invis
ible border line," he said; "A good number of the current
refugees ... have run this way with the natural inclination to
seek family refuge. It must be shocking ... to see blood relatives
being jailed or being held at camps.,,7 As the lASER report
observed: "As time has passed and as the rule of national laws
has reluctantly spread to the border area so people going about
their business as they have done for centuries are slowly being
made into law-breakers at worst or 'probl;;ms' at best:,8
It is a story that does not reflect well on either
Indonesia or Papua New Guinea, nor on
regional neighbors who have shown no willing
ness to help resettle those who are eventually
granted refugee status. Indonesia, having ini
tially refused to acknowledge that an influx of
border crossers had occurred, hampered efforts
at repatriation by its reluctance to formally
guarantee the safety of returnees; its refusal,
for some time, to agree to UNHCR involvement
in repatriation; and its insistence that Papua
New Guinea provide a list ofnames ofthe border
crossers.
Second, there has been a comparatively small number of
lrianese nationalists seeking political asylum in Papua New
Guinea. Some of them have been allowed to resettle in Papua
New Guinea but increasingly in recent years those granted
refugee status have been passed on, with the assistance of the
United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR), but
lately with considerable difficulty, to third countries such as
Sweden and Greece. Third, from time to time as a result of
military activity in Irian Jaya groups of lrianese villagers have
crossed over into Papua New Guinea seeking temporary
refuge-often with kin or wantoks.
9
Fourth, OPM [in Indone
sian, Organisasi Papua Merdeka, or Free Papua Movement]
guerrillas operating in the border area have on occasion crossed
over into Papua New Guinea seeking refuge from Indonesian
military patrols; this, however, is a special class of border
crosser and will be considered in more detail below.
Papua New Guinea policy on border crossers was established
during the colonial period. As I described it some years ago:
People crossing the border are required to report to one of the
several patrol posts along the border and state their reason for
crossing. If their purpose is "traditional" (the most common is
sago making) they are normally allowed to stay until they have
finished what they came to do and are then expected to return
across the border. If they apply for political asylum they are held
7. Post-Courier, 12 April 1984.
*This photo is from the TAPOL Bulletin, No. 71 (September 1985)
8. Ibid., p. 32.
5. Pula and jackson, "Population Survey," p. 35. 9. Wantoks are literally members of the same language group, but
6. Ibid., p. 33.
in more general usage, friends.
46
Blackwater Camp, a refugee camp in Papua New Guinea.
until a decision is taken and then either granted permissive resi
dence or told to return. In all other cases they are told to return.
If they refuse, they are arrested and charged as illegal immigrants,
after which they may be deported. 10
The essential features of this policy have not changed since
the 1960s, though in early 1984, in an apparent effort to dis
courage movement across the border, the Papua New Guinean
government charged all adult male border crossers as illegal
immigrants. In practice, as I noted in 1979, the stringency with
which this policy has been applied has varied since 1962.
However there is nothing to support the somewhat paternalistic
view I have heard expressed that while Papua New Guinea
was a colony Australia kept the border pretty well sealed but
that since 1975 administration of the border has been relatively
lax. In fact a close look at the available evidence suggests that
from about 1972, when the first Somare government came to
office, Papua New Guinea has taken an increasingly hard line
against border crossers in all of the above categories. II
With regard to numbers: Before 1984 the best estimate of
Irian-born residents in Papua New Guinea was around 2,000
10. May, The Indonesia-Papua New Guinea Border. pp. 98-99.
II. Ibid.; see also R.J. May, ed., Between Two Nations: The
Indonesia-Papua New Guinea Border and West Papua Nationalism
(Bathurst: Robert Brown and Associates, 1986).
47
to 3,000; many of these must have slipped across the border,
some prior to 1962, and taken up residence in villages or towns
without acquiring formal residential status. Of this number 217
have been granted citizenship in Papua New Guinea-157 in
1976 and another 60 in 1977. No Irian-born person has been
granted citizenship since 1977.
I began this section by saying that "in principle" border
crossers could be classified in four categories. In practice, of
course, border crossers are not always so easily distinguishable.
Until 1984 the number of border crossers was sufficiently small
that this was not a major problem. In 1984 this changed. Fol
lowing an abortive local uprising by lrianese nationalists in
Jayapura in February, and a subsequent military crackdown,
hundreds and eventually thousands of lrianese began to pour
across the border into Papua New Guinea. The present situation
is that there are now between 10,000 and 12,000
12
border
12. It is difficult to measure the exact number, since quite large
groups of people appear to have moved back and forth across the
border. Towards the end of 1984, however, the official estimate was
about 12,000. Following the change of government in Papua New
Guinea in late 1985 the figure generally quoted officially was 10,000
(though there was no apparent reason for the reduction, except perhaps
an earlier Indonesian claim, never verified, that 2,000 border crossers
had returned to Irian Jaya). Since then there have been several large
movements into Papua New Guinea, while about 800 border crossers
have been repatriated-but the figure quoted remains at 10,000.
An OPM camp in the border area
crossers in camps along the border, few of whom show any
inclination to return in the foreseeable future, and many of
whom claim traditional land rights. Most of these people are
"refugees" in the broad sense that they have crossed the border
to take refuge from conditions they find threatening. The Papua
New Guinea government is reluctant to refer to them as
refugees, however, because of what this implies with regard
to the U.N. 1951 Convention and 1967 Protocol Relating to
the Status of Refugees, and prefers to see them as Indonesian
citizens who will soon return to their own side of the border.
In fact, the PNG government has tried to persuade groups to
return, and has even forcibly repatriated some, in the face of
strong domestic reaction. Border crossers themselves, espe
cially those from the border area, have also been reluctant to
have themselves classified as refugees for fear that they too
might be sentenced to resettlement in Sweden.
The handling of the refugee problem during 1984-85 has
been documented elsewhere. 13 It is a story that does not reflect
well on either Indonesia or Papua New Guinea, nor on regional
neighbors who have shown no willingness to help resettle those
who are eventually granted refugee status. Indonesia, having
initially refused to acknowledge that an influx of border crossers
had occurred, hampered efforts at repatriation by its reluctance
to formally guarantee the safety of returnees; its refusal, for
some time, to agree to UNHCR involvement in repatriation;
and its insistence that Papua New Guinea provide a list of
names of the border crossers. Indonesia's foreign minister
Mochtar has subsequently made it quite clear that he has little
interest in the return of the border crossers. In an interview
with Peter Hastings 14 Mochtar is reported to have said: "The
biggest problem of these Irianese ... is ... they want to go through
life doing nothing at all. We don't need people like that." On
the other hand it is clear that, having failed to force a large
number of border crossers to return by withholding assistance,
during 1984-85 the Papua New Guinea government made little
effort to screen the refugee camp inmates with a view to sorting
out "genuine refugees" from potential returnees. The govern
ment of Paias Wingti, which came to office in Papua New
Guinea in late 1985, elaborated a new policy on bordercrossers,
which includes greater UNHCR involvement, greater commit
ment to the screening of border crossers, and the possibility
of some resettlement of refugees within Papua New Guinea.
But the situation is unlikely to be resolved easily or quickly,
and Papua New Guinea is likely to have to carry the adminis
trative and political burden of the border crossers for some
time.
15
(b) The OPM
Since the early 1960s groups of Irianese nationalist rebels
have operated in the border area of Irian Jaya, in the name of
the Organisasi Papua Merdeka, and have occasionally crossed
over into Papua New Guinea for "R & R" (rest and recreation)
or to escape Indonesian military patrols. There have also been
isolated instances of OPM sympathizers within Papua New
Guinea seeking to materially assist the OPM, but usually with
out effect. Two notable cases were a rather naive letter of 1981
seeking arms from the USSR, which was returned-and inter
cepted-because the address ("Mr George, c/o Poste Restante,
Turkey") was insufficient, and an unsuccessful attempt in 1984
to obtain weapons through an Australian mercenary soldier.
Successive Papua New Guinea governments, however, have
consistently reiterated their denial of Papua New Guinea soil
to OPM rebels, and Papua New Guinean police and military
and administrative personnel patrol the border area in an effort
to discourage movement across the border in general and to
deny the use of the border area to OPM guerrillas in particular.
In 1983 and again in 1984 budgetary allocations for police and
military border patrols were increased, and it was announced
13. See chapters by May and by A. Smith and Kevin Hewison in
May, ed., Between Two Nations.
14. Sydney Morning Herald. 16 August 1986.
15. The financial cost of maintaining the border camps has been
met in part by the UNHCR, to which Australia has contributed $2.9
million, and in part by church organizations. The Indonesian govern
ment has contributed only about $50,000 for the support of its citizens:
according to the former Papua New Guinea foreign minister, "most
of our requests have gone unanswered." See Post Courier. 20 August
1984.
48
that an infantry company would be stationed at Kiunga. In
addition several lrianese granted permissive residence in Papua
New Guinea have been deported for violating their promise,
as a condition of their residence in Papua New Guinea, not to
engage in political activity relative to their nationalist senti
ments. Indeed since the late 1970s the Papua New Guinea
government's actions against OPM supporters have brought
retaliatory threats from the OPM. For example, in 1984, in
protest against planned repatriation of border crossers, specific
threats were made against the Ok Tedi mining project and
against individual Papua New Guinean politicians and bureau
crats, and in 1985 government officers were pulled out of
refugee camps in the Western Province following threats from
the OPM's regional commander, Geradus Thorny.
The government of Paias Wingti, which came
to office in Papua New Guinea in late 1985,
elaborated a new policy on border crossers,
which includes greater UNHCR involvement,
greater commitment to the screening of border
crossers, and the possibility ofsome resettlement
of refugees within Papua New Guinea. But the
situation IS unlikely to be resolved easily or
quickly, and Papua New Guinea is likely to have
to carry the administrative and political burden
of the border crossers for some time.
Notwithstanding this, Papua New Guinea has been accused
of not devoting adequate resources to the task of "sanitizing"
the border. Whether or not Papua New Guinea should spend
more on border patrolling depends on judgements about
priorities. Personally, given the nature of the terrain and the
small number of OPM guerrillas involved, I see little reason
why a country whose main concerns are with the economic
and social development of its people should divert scarce
resources away from development in an attempt to deal with
a problem of internal security that a large, militaristic neighbor
has been unable to resolve-especially when that neighbor has
in tum denied that there is conflict in Irian Jaya, told Papua
New Guinea that affairs in Irian Jaya are none of its business,
and denied the existence of the OPM itself. But whatever one
feels on this issue, it is simply not accurate to accuse Papua
New Guinea, as some have, of not taking firm action against
the OPM.
(c) Border Violations
Although it has occasionally been proposed by Indonesia,
Papua New Guinea has stopped short of the sort of border
agreement that Indonesia has with Malaysia, which allows "hot
pursuit" across the border, and on a number of occasions Papua
New Guinea has indicated its unwillingness to enter into joint
military patrols along the border.
On several occasions since the later I 96Os, however, Indone
sian troops or aircraft have crossed the border, intentionally or
The border area, near Wutung
unintentionally. In mid-1982, for example, Indonesian military
patrols crossed into Papua New Guinea on seven occasions,
despite Papua New Guinea protests, and a helicopter flying
the regional military commander to Wamena, 240 kilometers
southwest of Jayapura, landed "off course" at a mission station
10 kilometers southeast. In March I 984, two Indonesian aircraft
appear to have violated Papua New Guinea's air space over
the Green River station, and the following month there were
three border violations, during one of which Indonesian troops
destroyed houses and gardens in a hamlet on the Papua New
Guinea side of the border.
Such incursions are perhaps inevitable given the nature of
the terrain, the poor demarcation of the border, and the cir
cumstances of a guerrilla campaign. But such "incidents" have
been magnified rather than minimized by the refusal of the
Indonesian government, or the inability of its civil and military
elements, to deal credibly with Papua New Guinea's diplomatic
protests or requests for explanation. In tlae instance of the
1982 border violations, for example, the Indonesian govern
ment denied that the incursion had occurred, saying that some
Indonesian hostages taken in an OPM raid had been recovered
from the Papua New Guinea side of the border by lrianese
villagers, and accusing Papua New Guinea of not honoring its
49
Papua New Guinea's foreign secretary, Paulias Matnane, and
Indonesia's ambassador to Papua New Guinea, Brigadier General
[man Soepomo, leaving for an inspection visit to Suwampa Village,
Sandaun Province, following reports that Indonesian troops had har
assed vi/lagers.
obligations under the border agreement; in fact, the hostages
who had been held on the Indonesian side of the border-were
subsequently released to Irianese villagers who escorted them
across to Papua New Guinea for repatriation. In the case of
the 1984 air violations the Indonesian ambassador in Papua
New Guinea initially denied that the planes were Indonesian
(despite the fact that the Antara News Agency had already
reported an exercise by the Indonesian air force in the vicinity
of Jayapura); and though the possibility of an unintentional
incursion appears to have been admitted privately in Jakarta, 16
a belated official response to Papua New Guinea's diplomatic
protests again denied that an incursion had taken place. And
with respect to the military incursions of mid-1984 (which
occurred during military exercises in the border area, of
which-despite earlier Indonesian assurances-Papua New
Guinea had not been informed), in the face of all evidence
Armed Forces Commander Benny Murdani denied the viola
tion, suggesting that perhaps the offenders were OPM guerrillas
in Indonesian army uniforms. About the same time the governor
of Irian laya was reported as saying, 'There have never been
any clashes between the Indonesian defence forces and the
OPM rebels. There have been no clashes, never.',17
Such responses to legitimate concerns of the Papua New
Guinea government have created tensions in the relations be
tween the two countries which might easily have been avoided
by a more honest response. In mid-1984, Papua New Guinea's
foreign minister stated that while Papua New Guinea did not
want to interfere in Indonesia's internal affairs, the border
crossers were not simply an internal affair. Since they had a
direct effect on Papua New Guinea, the means by which Irian
laya was governed and developed was of immediate interest
to Papua New Guinea. 18 In late 1984, frustrated and "bloody
angry," the Papua New Guinea foreign minister expressed his
dissatisfaction with the border situation in a speech to the UN
General Assembly. The Indonesian ambassador in Washington,
it was reported, was "painfully surprised."
(d) Border Development
Except perhaps at its northern extremity, the border area is
poorly endowed and poorly developed, On the Papua New
Guinea side, apart from the fortuitously placed Ok Tedi mine,
what development there has been-a little basic infrastructure
(schools, aid posts, minor roads)-is largely the result of the
attention the border area has received during periods of OPM
Indonesian military confrontation. Agricultural development
has been inhibited by the government's policy on quarantine,
A modest border program was included in Papua New Guinea's
1980-83 National Public Expenditure Plan, but the allocation
for border development was cut in 1983 as a consequence of
declining revenue from domestic sources and Australian aid.
On the Irian laya side, the construction of the trans-Irian
laya highway and the transmigration program are seen as major
conttibutions to development, and there have been announce
ments of plans to improve communications in the border area
(including, according to one report, color TV sets) in the hopes
of persuading Irianese border dwellers to stay on their side of
the border. More recently it has been reported that under a
three-year plan for development in the border area, commenc
ing in 1986, Indonesia will spend about $66 million on highway
construction, airstrips, health and education services, industrial
and agricultural developments, and the establishment of trading
centers to improve living conditions in the border area, A
further $2 million is to be spent on border security, including
an army base.
From time to time joint border development has been pro
posed as the solution to problems of Irianese separatism and
of border crossers. Indeed in 1983, before thousands ofIrianese
began flooding over the border into Papua New Guinea, Peter
17. Times of PNG, 31 May 1984.
16. Far Eastern Economic Review. 12 August 1984; Niugini Nius,
30 March 1984. 18. Times of PNG, 24 May 1984; Courier, 24 July 1984.
50
A section of the Trans-Irian Jaya highway near one of the points of incursion into Western Province
Hastings observed that Papua New Guineans from the Vanimo
area were visiting Jayapura and suggested that greater develop
ment efforts on the Irian Jaya side could soon produce a situation
where the predominant flow of border crossers was from Papua
New Guinea to Irian Jaya.
19
In fact, however, border develop
ment programs on the Papua New Guinea side, and it seems
on the Irian Jaya side, have not made much progress, and since
1984 the Papua New Guinea government has been more con
cerned with sustaining (and eventually getting rid ot) border
crossers than with providing the improved conditions along the
border that might attract more crossers. In the longer term there
is some concern in Papua New Guinea that if large-scale trans
migration to Irian Jaya takes place, and unless it proves more
successful than it has to date in Irian Jaya, the resultant tensions
could aggravate the problems of border crossing.
Relations between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea
Others have discussed the broad defense and security aspects
of Indonesia-Papua New Guinea relations. 20 The informed con
sensus seems to be that Indonesia does not have expansionist
ambitions towards Papua New Guinea (past expansionist ven
tures being the product of particular historical circumstances
that cannot be projected onto the Papua New Guinea case),
but that there are other imaginable circumstances that would
19. Sydney Morning Herald, 2 May 1983.
20. See, for example, the chapter by 1.A.C.M. Mackie in May,
ed., Between Two Nations; and H. Crouch, "Indonesia and the Security
of Australia and Papua New Guinea," Australian Outlook, 40:3 (1986),
pp. 167-74.
51
worry Indonesia and perhaps lead to intervention in one form
or another, specifically the emergence of a hostile (communist
sympathetic) regime in Papua New Guinea or some kind of
breakdown in Papua New Guinea's political system, perhaps
caused by regional dissidence.
I have no fundamental quarrel with this analysis, except
perhaps a logical quibble about the "particular-historical
circumstances" argument: granted that the particular historical
circumstances of Indonesia's original claim to West Papua, of
konfrontasi over Malaysia, and of East Timor do not apply to
independent Papua New Guinea, can Papua New Guineans be
blamed for sometimes wondering whether another set of par
ticular circumstances, domestic and/or external, might be seen
by Indonesia as justifying another expansionist venture? It is
in this context (and perhaps also in view of recurring Indonesian
claims that it has acted with "restraint") that some of us find
the discussion of possible Indonesian "intervention" in the event
of a "hostile" or "unstable" regime in Papua New Guinea dis
quieting. I hope we may assume that those who present such
scenarios agree that the emergence of an "unstable" regime
(whatever that means) in Papua New Guinea, or even one
hostile to Indonesia, would provide no justification for Indone
sian intervention. Having said that, I suggest that the more
immediate concerns in Indonesia-Papua New Guinea relations
have to do not with possible invasion or intervention but with
the problems arising over administration of the common border.
Administration of the border takes place within the
framework of the border agreement and in the context of a
mutual commitment to good relations. Since 1981 there have
been annual Joint Border Committee meetings, irregular meet
ings of a Border Liaison Committee, and a number of meetings
of technical subcommittees.
In fact, however, relations between the two governments
over the border have been marked by short cycles of tension
followed by self-conscious cordiality. When "incidents" have
occurred, the machinery of border liaison has generally proved
ineffective. For example, when in 1983 it was discovered that
Indonesia's trans-Irian Jaya highway crossed into Papua New
Guinea at three points, it took more than three months to secure
an that the incursion had taken place and
sixteen months before the offending sections of road were
closed off. (Incidentally, the incursion might have been estab
lished several months earlier had Indonesia not withdrawn from
a joint survey exercise because of inadequate funds.) Again,
in February 1984, with refugees flooding across the border,
Indonesian officials told the Papua New Guinea foreign minister
that they knew nothing of reported events and assured him that
things in Jayapura were "normal," even though residents on
the Papua New Guinea side of the border confirmed that
Jayapura was in darkness and its government radio station
silent. At this time there had not been a border liaison meeting
for over a year-allegedly because of lack of funds-and the
Vanimo-Jayapura "hot-line" had been out of service for several
months. And when in April 1984 Papua New Guinea sought
a meeting of the Joint Border Committee to attempt to achieve
some resolution of the situation, its foreign secretary found
himself sitting down with a local bupati* who was apparently
uninformed on the subject of the border crossings and had no
authority to make decisions. A scheduled meeting the following
month was cancelled at short notice when the Irian Jaya gov
ernor withdrew from the Indonesian delegation due to "over
commitment. "
This sort of situation, combined with evasive responses to
Papua New Guinea's protests over border violations as
described above, did much to generate the strains that charac
terized Indonesia-Papua New Guinea relations throughout most
of 1984-85.
There has been a tendency among distant commentators on
Indonesia-Papua New Guinea relations to refer to the problems,
and to urge greater "understanding," as though the Indonesia
Papua New Guinea relationship is symmetrical. Obviously it
is not: border crossing has been essentially one way; border
violations have been entirely at Papua New Guinea's expense;
Papua New Guinea does not have a domestic insurgency prob
lem overflowing its border; it has been Papua New Guinea
rather than Indonesia that has had to seek explanations for
external disturbances, and responsibility for the frequent inef
fectiveness of liaison machinery has been largely on the
Indonesian side. Moreover, the huge disparities in size and
military capacity between the two countries create an obvious
imbalance in the relations between them. One might be excused
for wondering too, when Indonesia's foreign minister defends
transmigrasi on the grounds that Indonesia does not intend to
* A bupati is an administrative head of a regency, which is the
administrative division just above a district.
WE HAVE CHANGED OUR ADDRESS!
Effective at once, our address is:
BCAS
3239 9th St.
Boulder, CO 80302-2112
U.S.A.
preserve Irian Jaya as "a human zoo," if there are not also
imbalances in cultural attitudes. Any sensible discussion of
possible improvements in Indonesia-Papua New Guinean rela
tions must begin by recognizing this imbalance.
Conclusion
In view of this analysis, it is difficult to see what the Treaty
of Mutual Respect, Friendship and Co-operation can hope to
achieve that could not be achieved just as easily without it. It
is, as one Papua New Guinean described it, "bi/as taso!" ("just
ornament"). At the most, it might give an assurance of goodwill
on both sides that will help ease the tensions that emerged
during 1984-85. Ultimately, however, relations between the
two countries are likely to be determined less by the rhetoric
of diplomats than by the day-to-day problems of administering
a border that divides an independent Melanesian nation from
an Indonesian province in which a Melanesian liberation move
ment remains active after some two decades ofIndonesian rule.
In this context it is perhaps worth noting that in the same week
as the much-heralded Treaty of Mutual Respect, Friendship,
and Co-operation was signed, a Joint Border Committee meeting
in Bandung broke up after four days, having failed to reach
agreement on proposals for joint search-and-rescue operations
in the border area. *
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52
Hiroshima Poems by Toge Sankichi
translated by Richard H. Minear
Translator's Note:
Toge Sankichi, 1917-1953: poet, diarist, activist; native of
Hiroshima, present on 6 August 1945. All his poems dealing
with the bomb date from 1949-52. "At the Makeshift Aid Sta
tion" includes a conceit Toge was fond of: repetition ("For
what reason?/For what reason?"). In each case, Toge wrote the
first line using kanji where appropriate, the second line wholly
in hiragana. I have set the second line in italics.
"August 6, 1950" contains two allusions that may need exp
lanation: the "expensive foreign car" likely carries an American
in an official capacity (the American occupation is still on);
"the smoke of rocket launchers" refers to the Korean War,
which started on 25 June 1950.
Except in a very few instances, the translations preserve the
structure and line order of the original.
At the Makeshift Aid Station
You girls-
weeping even though there is no place
for your tears to come from;
crying out even though you have no lips to shape the words;
struggling even though you have no skin
on your fingers to grasp anything with-
you girls.
Your limbs twitch, oozing blood and greasy sweat and lymph;
your eyes, puffed to slits, glitter whitely;
only the elastic bands of your panties hold in
your swollen bellies;
you are wholly beyond shame even though your private parts
are exposed:
who could think
that a little while ago
you all were pretty schoolgirls?
53
Emerging from the flames flickering gloomily
in burned-out Hiroshima
no longer yourselves,
you rushed out, crawled out one after the other,
struggled along to this grassy spot,
in agony laid your heads, bald but for a few wisps of hair,
on the ground.
Why must you suffer like this?
Why must you suffer like this?
For what reason?
For what reason?
You girls
don't know
how desperate your condition,
how far you have been transformed from the human.
You are simply thinking,
thinking
of those who until this morning
were your fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters
(would any of them know you now?)
and of the homes in which you slept, woke, ate
(in that instant the blossoms in the hedge were tom off;
now even their ashes are not to be found)
thinking, thinking-
as you lie there among friends who one after the other
stop moving
thinking
of when you were girls,
human beings.
August 6, 1950
They come running;
they come running.
From that side, from this,
hands on holstered pistols,
the police come on the run.
August 6, 1950:
the Peace Ceremony has been banned;
on street comers at night, on bridge approaches at dawn,
the police standing guard are restive.
Today, at the very center of the city of Hiroshima
the Hatchobori intersection,
in the shadow of the F. Department Store,
the stream of city folk who have come to place flowers
at memorials, at ruins,
suddenly becomes a whirlpool;
chin-straps taut with sweat
plunge into the crowd;
split by the black battle-line,
reeling,
the crowd as one looks up
at the department store-
from fifth-floor windows, sixth-floor windows,
fluttering,
fluttering,
against the backdrop of summer clouds,
now in shadow, now in sunlight,
countless handbills dance
and scatter slowly
over upturned faces,
into outstretched hands,
into the depths of empty hearts.
People pick them up off the ground;
arms swing and knock them out of the air;
hands grab them in midair;
eyes read them:
workers, merchants, students, girls,
old people and children from outlying villages-
a throng of residents representing all of Hiroshima
for whom August 6 is the anniversary of a death-
and the police:
pushing, shoving. Angry cries.
The urgent appeal
or the peace handbills they reach for,
the antiwar handbills they will not be denied.
Streetcars stop;
traffic lights topple;
jeeps roll up;
fire sirens scream;
riot trucks drive up-two trucks, three;
an expensive foreign car forces its way
through the ranks of police in plain clothes;
the entrance to the department store becomes
a grim checkpoint.
But still handbills fall,
gently, gently.
Handbills catch on the canopy; hands appear,
holding a broom,
sweep every last one off;
they dance their way down
one by one, like living things,
like voiceless shouts,
lightly, lightly.
The Peace Ceremony-the releasing of doves,
the ringing of bells,
the mayor's peace message carried off on the breeze
is stamped out like a child's sparkler;
all gatherings are banned:
speeches,
concerts,
the UNESCO meeting;
Hiroshima is under occupation by armed police
and police in mufti.
The smoke of rocket launchers
rises from newsreel screens;
from back streets resound the shouts
of those, children too, who signed petitions
against the bomb.
In the sky over Hiroshima on August 6, 1950,
spreading light above anxious residents,
casting shadows on silent graveyards,
toward you who love peace,
toward me who wants peace,
drawing the police on the double,
handbills fall, *
handbills fall.
54

The Marukis have been awarded honorary degrees by the
sachusens CoUege of Art in Boston. The degrees will be con-
ferred in a special ceremony in early April 1988; an exhibition
of five major murals and the original drawings for Toshi ( "
Maruki's Hiroshima no Pika will run concurrently. A sym- -
posium on art and society, with the participation of several
eminent American and European artists, wiU also be held in
honor of the Marukis. The exhibition is scheduled to travel to ( I
another East Coast and one West Coast city, although a"ange- "'I
ments are not final at press time. For updated information, 7'
<onJoct John at 61Ui28-8536. J
Toward a Japanese-American Nuclear Criticism: '\
The Art of Iri and Toshi Maruki in Text and Film r
by Alan Wolfe
In the summer of 1984, the journal Diacritics published a
special issue devoted to "Nuclear Criticism.") The editors felt
that much recent criticism appeared to be recounting "an alleg
ory of nuclear survival," and called for "the application of
literary critical procedures to the logic and rhetoric of nuclear
war." Specifically, they included in their proposal a call for
two types of criticism: one that "reads other critical or canonical
texts for the purpose of uncovering the unknown shapes of our
unconscious nuclear fears," and one which would reveal how
"the terms of the current nuclear discussion are being shaped
by literary or critical assumptions whose implications are ...
ignored" (p. 2).
One of the "terms of the current discussion" referred to here
is our conception of time. In one of the articles in the issue,
Zoe Sofia distinguishes between "the collapsed future tense ...
at the heart of our culture of space and time travel, ... the
'bound to be' of the ideology of progress" and the "future
conditional" of feminists, who understand conception as an
occurrence with a number of possible outcomes.
2
In the col
lapsed future of science-fiction culture, which Sofia assimilates
1. Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 14:2 (Summer
1984). All pages references in parentheses in this essay are to this
issue (14:2) of Diacritics.
2. Zoe Sofia, "Exterminating Fetuses: Abortion, Disarmament, and
the Sexo-Semiotics of Ex traterrestrialism," Diacritics 14:2, p. 57.

to the right-wing anti-abortion movement, embryos are adults
and the future is the present. And "if the future is already upon
us, we have no need to consider the survival needs of future
generations: we are the future generation" (p. 57). What a
nuclear criticism can do is to "reclaim a diversity of futures
from the overdetermining futurelessness of science-fiction cul
ture" and to "effect the shift from the collapsed to the conditional
future."
The lifework of Toshi and Iri Maruki, recently made more
accessible to a wider public by the impassioned professionalism
of two Americans, John W. Dower and John Junkerman,
3
stands
as an instance of such a nuclear criticism that refuses to be
reduced to a futureless narrative of progress. The multiple ten
sions inherent in the stubborn collaboration between the
Marukis themselves, in the process of Japanese and American
corepresentation of the artists' lifework, and in the very finitude
of those media of representation (art, text, film) push us not
to despair or abjectness but to a critical examination of those
issues the nuclear critics would want us to investigate: the role
and value of eschatological thinking; the power of the nuclear
horror to condition and delimit our lives and our wills; the
3. See John Dower and John Junkennan, The Hiroshima Murals:
The Art of Iri Maruki and Toshi Maruki (Kodansha International,
1985) and their film Hellflre: A Journey From Hiroshima (1986),
distributed by First Run Features.
55
The Marukis with some Japanese children. "The nuclear peril makes all of us, whether we happen to have children of our own or not, the parents
of all future generations."
theory and practice of techne whose drive to discover the atomic
origin of things has led to the nuclear danger; and the ideological
conditioning whereby the language and representation of the
nuclear dulls us to the reality it should evoke (pp. 2-3). The
story of the Mamkis is a tale of resistance to a narrative of
nonresistance. In both film and text, Dower and Junkennan
join with the Marukis to reassert conventional narrative fonns
as a symbolic protest against the "collapsed future" of the
postmodern.
4
Dower the historian and Junkennan the journalist-film maker
use the restraints of their training to allow the aura of two
unlikely human heros to emerge. Eschewing abstruseness and
avant-gardism, they rely above all on their eyes and ears to
frame for us the story they see, confident that the quiet resol
uteness of their subjects will provide the frame of struggle,
resistance, and open-endedness the future has to mean. What
distinguishes Dower's and Junkerman's projects, both the book
The Hiroshima Murals and the film Hellfire: A Journey From
.J Sec Lyotan!. The Postmodern Condition: A Report
(III 1\ II (/11 'il'l/g(' MN: University of Minnesota Press,
I'IX.J)
Hiroshima, from most other Hiroshima accounts, documentary
and fiction, is their attitude towards time as memory. In an
important sense, the modem narratives we deal with most are
about the suppression of memory, about forgetting. "The Hor
ror, the horror"-those last words of Joseph Conrad's enigmatic
character, Kurtz, in Heart of Darkness-become a haunting
emblem of our century's efforts to reduce and consign to the
archives the atrocities of twentieth century imperialism. Even
the dramatic sincerity of Alain Resnais's Hiroshima Man
Amour, for all of its theorizing on memory, focuses on forget
ting. The horror of documentaries like Hiroshima: The Harvest
ofNuclear War is in the loss of memory, of name, of place-sur
vivors who cannot find their homes, their childhoods, their
memories amidst the rubble. The ultimate collapse is that of
time-space, as in maps which can no longer be drawn. In sum,
the recountings of atomic catastrophe, from Hiroshima Mon
Amour to World War II documentaries, are obsessed with how
to deal with the nightmare, how to resolve the problem of evil,
how to dissimulate the horror.
Hellfire: A Journey From Hiroshima does not use any photos
or footage from Hiroshima after the bomb. Tts focus is entirely
and tenaciously on the present and on the production and process
of Toshi and Tri. In its eschewal of the sensational, it challenges
us to see memory itself as a construction, as a narrative that
56
we must build for ourselves. What kind of a narrative and to
what purpose? The answer to this question is provided by the
Marukis' lifework of gathering and portraying testimony not
only from Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors, but from Shan
ghai, Auschwitz, and other time-spaces as well. Yet the impact
of their open-ended narrative is apparent only in its juxtaposition
to that other narrative of nuclear war, which, as Derrida reminds
us, is a "fable," a war to be waged "in the name of nothing"
(since it is "better to be dead than red"). Derrida's "fable" of
nuclear war, a fiction because it has not happened, is of course
to be distinguished from the "reality" of nuclear stockpiles.
"'Reality' ... is constructed by the fable on the basis of an
event that has never happened ... an event whose advent remains
an invention by men" (pp. 23-4).
Their profound concern for the future--affirmed
paradoxically in their nurturing ofnon personal pa
rental responsibiity and offaith in an ongoing anti
nuclear narrative which would "struggle to open
up the pluripotent space of the future condi
tional"-is evidenced by their ability to implant and
foster in future generations not only the memory
of past horror, or even the immanence of present
Hell, but also the possibility of a future that can
and will have been.
It is in the light of this nuclear critical distinction that the
Marukis' response takes on value. Their profound concern for
the future-affirmed paradoxically in their nurturing of nonper
sonal parental responsibility and of faith in an ongoing antinuc
lear narrative which would "struggle to open up the pluripotent
space of the future conditional" (Sofia, p. 59)--is evidenced
by their ability to implant and foster in future generations not
only the memory of past horror, or even the immanence of
present Hell, but also the possibility of a future that can and
will have been. To take an example of tension and hope, con
sider Toshi's statement in the film to the effect that though
they have had no children, others "have had them for us."
Toshi's commitment to the telling of the story of the bomb to
children, evidenced in her illustrated books and in her warm
and forthright manner with children she meets, is the most
convincing statement we could have of the hopeful future of
narrative.
As we see the Marukis in their childless lives and work, we
are reminded of Jonathan Schell's cautionary assertion that "the
nuclear peril makes all of us, whether we happen to have
children of our mvn or not, the parents of all future genera
tions."s Zoe Sofia, while warning us to be wary of those mas
culine fertility metaphors of creativity, whereby one might
5. Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (New York: Avon, 1982),
p. 175.
"seek to bring life into existence out of nothing," and which
have led our leaders to invent out of nothingness the fable of a
total destructive war to be waged in the name of nothing, sees
hope in Schell's notion of a "nonbiological parenting" (Sofia,
p.5S). She theorizes that this may also be the relevance of
the Marukis' message, when, in their reaching out to children
and the future, they affirm the feminist preference for a more
relativistic and open-ended "ethics of reproduction."
A nuclear war, like a pregnancy, can be averted. If we let our
action be guided by the desire to let new life into the world, and
bear a parental responsibility for all of our creations, children might
again have the comfort of growing up on stories of a world without
end ... (p.59) *
A New Book from BCAS!
The Other Japan: Postwar Realities
Edited by E. Patricia Tsurumi, University of Vic
toria, for the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars.
The scholarly analyses and literary portraits in this volume
concentrate on the existing realities of Japan's postwar history.
Drawing the reader's attention to the unresolved conflicts be
neath the smooth surface of capitalism, they fill in awkward
gaps in our understanding ofcontemporary Japan and underline
the urgency of finding alternatives. Three major themes are
developed in a fascinating balance of critical Western scholar
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sibilities for alternatives to existing structures; (2) Japan's
atomic bomb legacy; and (3) the gargantuan human costs of
the "economic miracle." This important book is an antidote
to the seemingly endless stream of overwhelmingly positive
reporting on "the Japanese challenge" being offered to the
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Without the other side of postwar Japan's remarkable story,
half-truths and distortions in the highly affirmative reports
breed misconception and misunderstanding. This book is about
the other side of the story.
An East Gate Book, December 1987; 176 pages, withfigures, tables,
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57
THE HIROSHIMA MURALS: THE ART OF
Review
IRI MARUKI AND TOSHI MARUKI, by John
W. Dower and John Junkerman (eds.). Tokyo:
The Atomic-Bomb Paintings
Kodansha International, 1986, 128 pp., illus.,
$29.95.
It is now virtually in art alone that suffering
can still find its own voice, consolation, without
immediately being betrayed by it.
by Richard Minear
In his dissection of the writings of Brecht and Sartre,
Adorno lays out the dilemma of post-Holocaust art. I His
earlier formulation had been direct and seemingly unequi
vocal: "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. "2 Now he
characterizes that aphorism as expressing "in negative form
the impulse which inspires committed literature." Still,
Adorno's attack on "committed literature" does allow for an
art "such that its mere existence after Auschwitz is not a
surrender to cynicism. " But: Works of less than the highest
rank are also willingly absorbed as contributions to clearing up
the past. When genocide becomes part of the cultural heritage
in the themes of committed literature, it becomes easier to
continue to play along with the culture which gave birth to
murder." Adorno contrasts this situation with Picasso's
Guernica, an "autonomous" work of art; such works "firmly
negate empirical reality, destroy the destroyer .... "
Adorno's immediate concern is the work of the late
Brecht, Sartre, and Schonberg, but the dilemma is the same for
the art of atomic holocaust: how to depict without affirming,
how to control the aestheticization of art, how to make a
statement without "slithering into the abyss of its opposite."
The collaborative paintings of Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi
gathered in this stunning volume-represent their answer to
this challenge.
Of the fourteen paintings depicting Hiroshima, only two
are strikingly didactic-perhaps fitting Adorno's definition of
I. 'Commitment, " in his Aesthetics and Politics (London: NBL,
1977).
2. "Cultural Criticism and Society" (written 1961), in his Prisms,
London: Neville Spearman, 1967.
58
T. W. Adorno, 1965
"committed" art. But the results are sharply dissimilar. One,
entitled Petition (1955), depicts the anti-nuclear signature
campaign in which the Marukis played an important role. To
my eye, at least, it is the least effective of all the paintings. The
second, Yaizu (also 1955), depicts the village from which the
fishing boat the Lucky Dragon set out in 1954 on its fatal trip to
the vicinity of Bikini. This strikes me as one of the most
successful of the paintings. The entire left half of the painting
is occupied by fisherfolk-men, women, children-who
stare straight out at the viewer. The effect is eerie, Brechtian
almost (early Brecht). Still, the primary testimony of the
Marukis is to the human impact of the atomic bomb, and their
legacy reaches its high point in such paintings as Ghosts (the
first painting, 1950), Relief (1954), and Floating Lanterns
( 1969). The latter is the least representational of their Hiro
shima paintings; it uses the motif ofbon lanterns floating out to
sea, superimposing the ceremony of remembrance on the
event when thousands of corpses floated out to sea. In the
left-hand half a young woman in bright kimono kneels to set a
lantern adrift; in her shadow is a Picasso-esque figure of
horror, her Doppelganger, a victim of the bomb. The Marukis,
I submit, have created of their experience art that does not
slither into the abyss of its opposite.
Thanks to John W. Dower's essay,3 readers ofthe Bulletin
are already acquainted with the Marukis. This husband-wife
team has spent the years since 1950 painting Hiroshima and
other atrocities of the twentieth century: Nagasaki, Nanking,
Sanrizuka, Minamata, Auschwitz. They are still painting.
3. Bulletin ofConcerned Asian Scholars, Vol. 16, No.2 (Apr.-June,
1984), pp. 33-39.
This is a detail from the first and second panels of the" Yaizu" mural from John W. Dower and John Junkerman. eds .The Hiroshima
Murals: The Art of lri Maruki and Toshi Maruki, p. 64. This picture is reprinted here with the permission of Kodansha Internationa/
in Japan 1985.
59
Their latest work-Where Paradise? Where Hell?-was un
veiled in March 1986, following on the Hell (1985) that is
included here. Maruki lri (b. 1901) is the man, the ink-painter;
Maruki Toshi (nee Akamatsu; b. 1912) is the woman, the oil
painter.
This volume is made up of three sorts of material: an
introductory essay by Dower (28 pages), photographs of the
paintings (95 pages), and excerpts from interviews with the
Marukis by Junkerman (8 pages). If these page counts make
the book itself seem short, the volume's format-II V2 inches
by 9 inches-ensures that the subjects addressed are handled
at sufficient length. And in any case the focus is and should be
the paintings.
Dower's essay is entitled "War, Peace, and Beauty." It
gives the reader enough background and context to begin to
engage the paintings: biographical data on the painters, a brief
analysis of the development of their art and thought (the two
are scarcely divisible), photos of the painters at work, an
introduction to the critical reception of their work, comments
on matters of style and content in each of the murals, and
suggestions of parallels (Goya, Picasso, K611witz). Dower
describes the Marukis' achievement as "one of the most im
portant, disturbing, and moving artistic expressions of the
twentieth century" (p. II), "a graphic chronicle of war and
destruction in the mid-twentieth century" (p. 26).
Junkerman's interview-essay is made up of four long
statements by Toshi and three by Iri, each preceded by substan
tial commentary. Junkerman says only enough to provide a
setting for the Marukis' own words. Here is Iri (p. 125):
We don't paint these subjects because we enjoy painting them. It's
not out of some desire to do something for humanity or to make a
point. We painted the bomb because we had seen Hiroshima, and
we thought there had to be some record of what had happened. But
we could not have done those paintings if we had not already been
different in our way of thinking about the world. We had opposed
the war, we were socialists, and we were not satisfied only painting
pretty pictures. That's the kind of people we were, so we painted
the atomic bomb. It happened naturally.
Here is Toshi (p. 124):
My paintings were very realistic. Iri would take a look at them and
declare, 'That's far too strong. " Then he would grind some sumi
and splash it on top of my painting. At first I thought, I just worked
so hard on that and now you've ruined it! But when the ink dried,
the original image emerged from underneath. Still, I would think
he had concealed too much, and go back and paint the figure
again .... In this process of painting and concealing and repaint
ing' the images gradually became deeper. Something emerged
from the darkness, and we began to discover a surprisingly effec
tive way of working together.
The heart of this book is the pictures: double-page
spreads, in color, of twenty-one paintings, with two (some
times four) pages of detailed photos following each spread.
This volume used the same negatives as the most recent
Maruki Gallery catalog;4 but even so, there are differences in
coloring. In general, the reds seem less dominant here, less
orange; the near-purple blue in the Rainbow painting is strik
ing (the catalog's blue is almost green). Only by comparing
both catalog and volume with the original would it be possible
to say which is closer to the original.
The original paintings are 1.8 meters by 7.2 meters. The
reproductions here are 4V2 inches by 17 inches. We get the
sweep of the paintings (the catalog breaks each mural in two),
and that is a distinct advantage; the cost is a sense of scale. The
detailed photographs compensate somewhat; but it still takes
an act of the imagination to visualize the paintings as they
actually are. The paintings contain figures almost life-size;
seen in the Maruki Gallery, they surround, overwhelm the
viewer. (The 1983 Japanese-language catalog has a format of
9-% inches square, so a single Hiroshima painting-across two
2-page spreads-is 37'/2 inches by 9 3/8 inches, twice the size
of the reproductions in this volume.)
The Hiroshima paintings are accompanied by brief texts
written largely by Toshi, although attributed here to both Toshi
and Iri. At the initial exhibitions, Toshi found herself talking
with viewers about the paintings and then set down her central
thoughts-over Iri's objection. Toshi tells the story in her
autobiography: "In order to explain, I had begun giving talks.
Iri said to please stop giving talks in front of our own paintings.
But when I was asked questions, I had to answer, "5 Which led
to arguments with viewers. Said Iri, again: "Such things
happen because you say what there is no need to say." Writes
Toshi:
I decided to write a statement and paste it up instead of giving
talks .... To be sure, I ran into the criticism that I had infringed the
purity of the paintings. That may be so. But what wasn't said
completely in pictures I had to communicate orally. And what I
couldn't say completely orally, I had to write. By hook or by
crook, I wished to communicate the truth of Hiroshima to as many
people as possible. How can that be impure? What after all is art
(geijutsu)?
It is one of the achievements of the Marukis' art that this
question is forced on the viewer. (The texts are translated here
by John Junkerman. The catalog includes the English transla
tions that have long been displayed at the Maruki Gallery;
J unkerman' s are distinctly superior.)
The title of this volume, The Hiroshima Murals, invites
comment. What we have here is not merely the Maruki paint
ings on Hiroshima. Even the initial series of fourteen included
several (such as Yaizu and Petition) which had little direct
reference to Hiroshima; in 1982 they added a painting on
Nagasaki. In addition, there are the six "later murals,"
painted since 1975. So the subtitle, The Art ofIri Maruki and
Toshi Maruki, is a more accurate guide to the contents. Still, it
might have read' 'the collaborative art," since each has con
tinued to produce paintings independently of the other.
But in Japanese the label for the paintings is genbaku no
zu: the atomic-bomb paintings. The Marukis have told how for
their first showing of the initial panel in 1950 they changed the
title from "the atomic-bomb painting" to "August 6, 1945."
Back then Occupation censorship was still in force, and photo
graphs of Hiroshima were not generally available. Iri speaks of
that changed title as "strange." Perhaps in English "Hiro
shima" carries the emotional impact of "atomic-bomb" in
Japanese; but to this observer, the retention of the original title
4. Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi, Genbaku no zu (English title given as
The Hiroshima Panels), Saitama, Japan: Maruki Gallery for the
Hiroshima Panels Foundation, 1984. Available in the U.S. from the
Peace Resource Center of Wilmington College, Pyle Center Box
1183, Wilmington, Ohio 45177.
5. Onna-egaki no tanj6 (Tokyo: Asahi sensho No. 93, 1977), pp.
133-135.
60
This is a detail ofthe second panel ofthe "Floating Lanterns" mural from John W. Dower and John Junkerman, eds., The Hiroshima
Murals: The Art of Iri Maruki and Toshi Maruki, p. 77. This picture is reprinted here with the permission of Kodansha International@ in
Japan 1985.
61
This is a detail from the fifth panel of the Water mural from John W. Dower and John Junkerman. eds . The Hiroshima Murals: The
Art of Iri Maruki and Toshi Maruki. p. 40. This picture is reprinted here with the permission ofKodansha lnternational in Japan 1985.
62
would have been preferable. For one thing, much of Hiro
shima today-for better or for worse-wants little to do with
the Hiroshima of the atomic bomb. For another, the paintings
focus so completely on people that Hiroshima is not recogniz
able in the "atomic-bomb paintings" -they depict the human
impact of the atomic bomb.
This volume does not include the texts for the paintings
after the first fourteen. In most cases, those texts are avail
able-with flawed translations into English-in the gallery
catalog. Nor does this volume include all the Maruki col
laborative monumental paintings. Missing are a 4 meter by 8
meter painting entitled Hiroshima, eight 1. 8-meter-square
panels on Okinawa, and the 2.7 meter by 14.9 meter panel
entitled From the Axis Alliance to Sanrizuka (Dower does
mention this panel [po 23]). Perhaps it would have been too
expensive to include them all; perhaps the texts for the later
paintings were left out for the same reason. Whatever the case,
the reader needs to know that this volume has left them out.
As terrifying as it is beautiful, this volume belongs in
every library, certainly in every school library. Moreover,
slides of the paintings are now available commercially. 6 The
second half of the Dower-Junkerman collaboration is the 58
minute color documentary film Hellfire: A Journey from
Hiroshima. The film captures the Marukis and their art with
enormous insight and sensitivity; a large screen is even better
suited than this large- format book to the challenge of capturing
the scale of the paintings. 7 Alone or in combination, the book
and the film represent major contributions not simply to the
Japan field but to a much broader constituency: those inter
ested in art and in protest art, those interested in the arts of the
nuclear age. Although the paintings have gone on extended
tours outside Japan, they are not widely known. This volume
and the film are important steps to remedy that situation.
6. The Maruki Gallery offers three sets of slides complete with
cassette tapes, one in English, two in Japanese only. They are avail
In their 1967 catalog. the Marukis included a number of
poems. One of them was a section of a long poem, "Grave
Marker," by Toge Sankichi (1917-1953), Hiroshima's pre
mier atomic-bomb poet. Toge responded to the first publica
tion of the Maruki paintings in 1950 with a poem entitled
"Entreaty-for the 'Atomic-Bomb Paintings.' .. Toge's
poem expresses with great eloquence the effect on the viewer
of the Maruki paintings. (This translation, a quite literal one, is
mine. )
Before these grotesque figures, let me pause, stand;
against the measure of these cruel scenes,
may what I have done, will do, be tested.
Page after page, their voices close in on me,
darker than dark;
picture after picture, my tears flow freely,
never stopping.
In this book I see so graphically
the faces of close friends who fled, loved ones
who died.
Even as shudders engulf my heart
at the agony of these countless naked people,
I see beyond the flames-what is it?-fallen,
staring fixedly at me?
Can it be-my own eyes?
Ah! Who can check the desire
to straighten the twisted legs,
to cover the naked loins,
to free, one by one, those fingers, clenched
and bloody?
That an atomic flash was set off in the skies
over a dying Japan,
warning shot in a new war,
that on the instant 200,000 Japanese lives were taken
who can repress indignation, deep and growing?
able from the Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels, 1401 Shimo
karako, Higashimatsuyama, Saitama 355, Japan. Before these paintings I pledge that I will act:
7. The film is available to rent or to buy from First Run Features, 153
that in the light of this history, the future
* Waverly Place, New York, NY 10014; phone (212) 243-0600. will not be one that calls for repentance.
63
Review
by Howie Movshovitz
Certain subjects go beyond form. They're so big that anything
but the most self-denying treatment might seem rude and
presumptuous, and therefore our respect for them must express
itself as simply and directly as possible. The nuclear attacks
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of course, have that awesome
magnitude, as does the holocaust in Europe. When those
subjects come up in conversation or in art, they have the power
to silence us, to make us try to comprehend the most profound
horrors we have created and experienced. Just a few minutes
into John Junkerman's film, artist Toshi Maruki says quite
directly that we are in hell, and the rest of the film chronicles
the attempt that the Marukis, wife and husband artists, have
made to get out of it.
Hellfire: A Journey from Hiroshima is an hour-long
documentary about Toshi (wife) and Iri (husband) Maruki, and
the relationship they bear, both as artists and as plain people,
to the phenomena of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Iri's family lived
in Hiroshima, so immediately after the bombing, he went to
the city. Toshi joined him shortly afterward. What they found,
of course, was the dreadful scene which many have since
described: a devastated city, filled with the bodies of the dead
and the agonies of the dying. They walked past the famous
bamboo grove where many victims sought useless refuge. They
saw the river Ota carrying the dead up and down with its tides,
and they heard the testimonies of other witnesses. Like those
other witnesses, the Marukis were changed forever.
The Marukis had been practicing artists for some years. lri
was trained as a traditional ink painter, while Toshi's
background had led her to work in the Western tradition of oil
painting. After the war, they continued their work as artists,
but soon found themselves driven to confront the experience
at Hiroshima. With this shared recognition began their artistic
collaboration. Since the war, they have together painted fifteen
large murals about the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and
another six about horror directed at non-Japanese people. The
film shows us two people who have integrated their lives and
work to an extraordinary degree, and who have taken on the
responsibility of bearing witness to the worst moments of human
behavior and experience.
In certain ways, the Marukis and their art have become fused.
The most revealing images of the film show them working
together on their murals. These are standard shots for a film
about collaborative artists, but in this film the artists and their
work look virtually inseparable. The murals are large, so Toshi
and Iri must walk on the paper to get to many parts of the
paintings. When they sit or stand in the middle of a painting,
HELLFIRE: A JOURNEY FROM IDROSHIMA,
a r.Im by John Dower and John Junkerman. Color,
58 minutes, 16 mm. and video. Distributed by First
Run Features. *
they become part of the scene itself. They are also their own
models on occasion. In one sequence, Iri lies down beside a
mural-in-progress and covers himself with a tom sheet to
represent a victim for Toshi's painting.
The shot of lri lying beside the mural gives us a remarkable
sense of his participation in the work, and one purpose of the
murals is to bring the audience into the experience as fully as
possible. At a press conference shown early in the film, Iri
encourages the journalists and camera operators to take off their
shoes and walk on a mural. "The dust helps," he tells them.
The Marukis believe that by understanding the worst
moments of human experience, we can find a way to save
ourselves. For that reason, almost every mural has within it
some hint that decent human life is still possible. The images
are consistently angry and hellish, with smeared black ink and
unforgiving red; bodies are tom and distended or in unreal
Chagall-like postures, but there is still relief. In the first, Ghosts
(1950), one child remains unburned. Other murals contain
images of people expressing concern for one another.
Yet another image of humanity's ability to learn and survive
comes from the film itself. Junkerman and Dower consistently
place the gentle composure of the Marukis against the harsh
quality of their paintings. The Marukis are now quite old, and
their faces bear the aspect of people at ease with themselves.
The contrast with the murals reveals the point of the film (and
of the Marukis' art): humanity can only find repose by
expressing its outrage.
Perhaps the heart of the film, and of the Marukis' experience
as well, is the idea of development. The Marukis began their
work in anger at what had been done to the Japanese, but as
they continued to make pictures of the ghastly scenes at
Hiroshima, their vision widened. The fourth mural, Rainbow
(1951), included the image of two American pilots, held
prisoner in Hiroshima and also killed by the bomb. A much
later piece, The Rape of Nanking (1975), showed the Japanese
as the perpetrators of horror in China. Auschwitz (1977) moved
away from Japanese experience entirely. Suffering, they have
learned, has no racial or national affinities. This is "the journey
from Hiroshima."
What I like about Hellfire: The Journey from Hiroshima is
that it understands the form of another art. Obviously, painting
and film are different from one another, so to show the work
of two artists simply by panning the camera over their paintings
and talking about them would be tedious and deceptive. There
are many such films. Junkerman and Dower have been
perceptive enough to take a step back, to make their own film
* First Run Features, 153 Waverly Place, New York, New York
with its own original images. And therefore, the film doesn't
10014, U.S.A. Phone: (212) 243-0600. For institutions, film purchase
is US $895.00 and video purchase is US $540.00. Rental for classroom
look derivative. It stands as a distinct piece with its own
* use only is US $100.00; the rental fee for other uses is negotiable. important story to tell.
64
Review Essay: Western Marxists
in Flux Over Chinese Marxism
by Robert Ware*
I
Where is Marxism going in China? Not far, according to
Chinese Marxism in Flux (1978-84). A prominent claim
throughout this collection of essays is that Marxism has been
used as an ideological club rather than a liberating theory and
that this misuse of Marxism can be traced to metatheoretical
mistakes. The result, the authors seem to claim, is that re
volutionary change has been restricted to economic reforms.
There is "constant stress on the reality of Marxist [and some
times Althusserian] categories" (p. 9), and "some [most?]
contributors ... are" quite sympathetic to aspects of the 'left'
thinking of previous years" (p. 2).
In one way or another, the essays grapple with the im
portant question of what has happened to socialism in China
since the Third Plenary of the Eleventh Central Committee of
the Communist Party of China in 1978. That meeting shifted
the focus from class struggle to socialist modernization and
called for the household responsibility system in the country
side. Economic reforms have continued since then with the
emphasis on the cities since 1984 (after these papers were
written).
Disagreements among western Marxists abound about
what road(s) socialist countries have taken. Some conclusions
are now widely held but still subjects of debate: there is more
than one road, the market can (or should) have a role, de
centralization and workers' participation are important. How
ever, this book concentrates on some of the areas where there
*1 was helped in the preparation of this review by Jude Carlson and by
referees for this journal.
CHINESE MARXISM IN FLUX (1978-84): ES
SAYS ON EPISTEMOLOGY, IDEOLOGY
AND POLITICAL ECONOMY, Bill Brugger,
ed. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1985. Hard
cover $30.00, paper $14.95.
is less agreement: the role of ideology, the nature of socialist
politics, and the economics of socialist transition. The subtitle
is a better indication of the content of the book: Essays on
Epistemology, Ideology and Political Economy. There is not
very much on fluctuations in Chinese Marxism. It is more a
collection of metatheoretical investigations that reflects the
diversity of its conference origin. There is a tendency toward
the eclectic, technical, and sketchy. This is the most theoreti
cal of the recent conference-based books on China, with the
attendant drawbacks of jargon and abstraction. But the persis
tent reader is rewarded with interesting speculation about new
problems and alternative frameworks. It is a continuation of
the important and stimulating work in Australia on China.
The book was' 'produced in the spirit of 'letting a hun
dred schools contend'" (p. 9), with the result of diversity and
disunity. The introduction by Bill Brugger as editor (pp. 1-12)
serves some of the function of clarifying disagreements and
unifying the debate. Moreover, much of the debate centers on
Brugger's influential ideas. There seems to be general agree
ment in rejecting what Dutton and Healy call "reductionist
epistemology" and in accepting Brugger's claim that social
ism is a process. There are important differences about the
very nature of Marxism, with Brugger and Hannan arguing
that it is teleological, contrary to the view of Dutton and Healy.
McCarthy differs with Brugger, and most others, in claiming
that there is a socialist mode of production. Reglar and Brug
ger debate the existence of objective economic laws in social
ist societies and the need for a law of value in planning.
In the introduction, Brugger says that the contributors
, 'agree that the limits of official ideology are too tightly
drawn" in China (p. 10), although such agreement is not clear
from the essays published here. It is a theme in the introduction
that the unacceptable ideological role of Marxism has replaced
its critical dimension, presumably a role illegitimately im
posed by the state or the party (p. 12). He fears that the critical
dimension of Marxism has been silenced in the past and will be
in the future by denunciations (p. II) and official attacks (p.
12).
I think Brugger has missed the politics of theory for fear
of functionalism and instrumentalism. Ideas have functions in
social struggles and are instrumental when taken up by the
masses, as Marx would say. This is almost truistic, and (with
all due respect to Brugger) it does not lead to the implausible
sociological and metaphysical theories known as "functional
ism" and "instrumentalism" (cf. p. 12). I agree with Brugger
that ideas about alienation should be discussed, particularly in
view of the persistence and strength of alienation in existing
socialist societies, but the ideas about alienation must be put to
good use and not lead society away from its goals. In the
Marxist view, that requires communist leadership. Later I
return to this and its relevance to China.
The first, the longest, and the most philosophical essay is
Michael Dutton and Paul Healy's "Marxist Theory and So
cialist Transition: The Construction of an Epistemological
Relation" (pp. 13-66). It is an Althusserian critique of epis
temology, especially in its empiricist forms. I find their state
ments of theories either vague or misleading and without
real-life adherents. I try to substantiate this in the discussion
later. Although I think the issues that they discuss are enor
mous and complex, I doubt that the plausible contending
positions will differ much in their implications for political
economy.
Brugger commends (p. 2) Dutton and Healy's essay for
undermining the ideological use of the concept of 'reality' in
the Marxist tradition by criticizing all theories of knowledge.
The concern is that unjustified claims about 'the real world' are
used to rationalize ruling interests rather than to critically
understand the world. Dutton and Healy set up the problem so
that anyone who talks about the real world is creating another
world unconnected with the world we think about, the world of
concepts. Another unusual claim is that all epistemologies are
reductionist in taking one part of their theory, for example
economics or politics, as central and to which all other parts
can be reduced. In the second part I discuss some of my
criticisms of their rejection of reductionism and of episte
mology.
Basically, and contrary to Dutton and Healy, I contend
that if people make ideological claims about the real world that
ignore class struggle and the political interests of others, then
we should just show that they are wrong about the real world
and not that they have the wrong epistemology. To show that
they are wrong, we must discover what is right and convince
others on the basis of evidence and argument. Among other
things, this involves practice, technology, and politics. Dutton
and Healy have some interesting remarks on these issues in
their discussion of Marx, Lenin, Bogdanov, and Stalin, al
though I think they sometimes miss the mark in their accusa
tions of positivism and technicism.
Dutton and Healy's section on Mao is the most interest
ing, despite their confusions about reduction and their Althus
serian rejection of a knowing subject. "Mao might well have
criticised the individualised subject of humanism, but the
category of subject was not displaced, merely collectivised"
(p. 42). I think these obscure ideas tum on earlier confusions
about epistemology, which I criticize in the second part below.
Still, there are many pertinent remarks about Mao's over
emphasis on class struggle and about the rejection of class
struggle and the downplaying of politics in current theories.
There are also remarks (pp. 52ff.) that are relevant to current
claims in China about productive growth itself being political
and revolutionary. They criticize both Mao and the current
leaders for making the same mistake of using epistemology in
taking one specific practice or another as fundamental to which
all else is reduced. Their conclusion is dissatisfying in its mere
appeal to an autonomous theoretical practice that is specific in
its calculations but irreducible (p. 62). They give no content to
this proposal that even indicates an alternative to views of
those who do not reject epistemology.
Disagreements among western Marxists abound
about what road(s) socialist countries have taken.
Some conclusions are now widely held but still
subjects ofdebate: there is more than one road, the
market can (or should) have a role, decentraliza
tion and workers' participation are important.
However, this book concentrates on some of the
areas where there is less agreement: the role of
ideology, the nature of socialist politics, and the
economics ofsocialist transition.
Michael Sullivan, in the second essay, "The Ideology of
the Chinese Communist Party Since the Third Plenum" (pp.
67-97), gives a good historical account of the rise and fall of
the theory of class struggle from the Eighth Party Congress of
1956 to the current debates about socialism in China. It is a
useful account of the subtle changes in Mao's view of the
centrality of class struggle '''between the proletariat and the
bourgeoisie, between the socialist road and the capitalist
road'" (p. 70, quoting Mao). Sullivan then suggests ways in
which these notions along with those of the dictatorship of the
proletariat and of socialist society have been drained of con
tent, leaving an almost unanswerable question of how to dis
tinguish socialism from capitalism
l
(pp. 94ff.). If the only
distinction is in terms of state ownership, then there is "no
guide as to just how far the reforms ought to go" (p. 89). He
ends by giving a number of quotations showing the quandary
I. The relevance of this claim can be seen in the light of remarks by
Su Shaozhi, Director of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism and Mao
Zedong Thought in Beijing. See his "Prospects for Socialism:
China's Experience and Lessons" in Milos Nikolic, ed., Socialism on
the Threshold of the Twenty-first Century (London: Verso, 1985) and
the interview with him in Monthly Review, Vol. 38, No.4 (September
1986).
66
Students and staff of Quinghua University, Beijing, "struggle against the right deviationist wind . .. by writing big character posters and holding
criticism meetings." This was in March 1976, just before Deng Xiaoping was removed from his positions.
thl:}t Chinese theorists are in over the stages of socialism and
the process of development. He attributes the problems to
reductionism and to taking socialism as a system rather than a
process, but he has shown only the lack of clarity in the
theories of socialism. Against the fear of the restoration of
capitalism, he ends with the hope "that questions of class
struggle might become important once again" (p. 97).
In "Undeveloped Socialism and Intensive Develop
ment" Bill Brugger pursues the subject of socialism as a
process (pp. 98-118). To his earlier view that the process must
involve the negation of capitalist relations, he now adds the
necessity of a telos (p. 98), which requires some "utopian
thinking" (p. 118). He asks the question: Does the move
towards advanced socialism require a temporary abandonment
of the socialist telos?" (p. 117). His answer seems to be yes for
China, for various structural reasons.
His argument is put (with some reservations) in terms of
M. Kalecki's economic, technological, and political cycles.
He presents a plausible case for saying that the Chinese have
failed to develop a historical and cyclical account of the inten
sive development of technology as opposed to expansion in
67
terms of costly inputs. The twofold result has been ineffective
planning and the absence of guiding ideals. What is needed is a
clearer understanding, and thereby more effective control, of
the telos-governed advance. I am not convinced that the prob
lems the Chinese have lie mainly with their ignoring goals and
regarding socialism as static. It seems to me that the real
disagreements are elsewhere-over the appropriate socialist
goals and the existence of political alternatives rather than
objective economic laws. (See below for Reglar's discussion
of the disagreement over the latter.) Still Brugger has indi
cated some new lines of inquiry about the socialist road of
development.
The themes of Kate Hannan's "Economic Reform: Le
gitimacy, Efficiency and Rationality" (pp. 119-141) are
Weberian. She claims that the reforms in China are the party's
response to its damaged legitimacy (p. 139) and have resulted
in the goal of a classless society being replaced by the goal of
socialist modernization (p. 121). This seems to me misleading
both about the past and about the present. Since liberation,
China has had both goals to some extent. Still, she recounts
numerous difficulties, including systemic ones, that arise in
using state administrative and economic methods. The force of
her worries is not clear to me. She says that "central planners
are beset with a myriad of routine control problems" (p. 139),
but it is not clear whether that is meant as a fundamental
obstacle. Are they control tasks or barriers to control? It may
just be that there are a lot of things to think about and that a lot
of people at various levels (from bottom to top) will have to
think about them. It is best, of course, if the problems are
routine.
I wish Hannan had said more about some of the theoreti
cal difficulties. There is a tendency in her article (and in
literature elsewhere) to draw a sharp line between the eco
nomic mechanisms of the market and the political mechanisms
of the state. Marx himself called for the administration (virtu
ally the opposite of Weber's and Hannan's use of that term) of
things ratherthan the governing ofpeople , which also suggests
a separation of economics and politics. On the other hand, in
Grundrisse Marx foresaw wealth being measured by dispos
able time rather than labor time. Decisions about production in
an advanced socialist society would be based on time available
for needs to be satisfied. These are decisions of political
economy that require both political and economic mechan
isms. We need to know more about how the two might mix.
A central claim is that bureaucracy cannot be dealt with
by bureaucracy (see pp. 135 and 140). As usual, more needs to
be said about bureaucracy, as Brugger remarks in the introduc
tion (p. 8), but anyway I am not convinced. At least I see no
reason why some administrative problems cannot be dealt with
by administrative officers. All ofthese are important issues for
further study, and in any case I may have missed what Hannan
was trying to do. The argument seems to be that the shift in
goals has resulted in either the inefficiencies from violating the
law of value or the problems of the old mandatory planning.
How serious the "irrationalities" are depend on the alterna
tives, which are not indicated.
Greg McCarthy begins his article, "The Socialist Transi
tion and the Socialist Mode of Production" (pp. 142-170),
with a short account of the reforms since 1978, with reference
to, among others, Xue Muqiao, who gets less credit than he
deserves. The bulk of McCarthy's article is the development of
his claim that "China is not in a state of transition to com
munism, but has established a socialist mode of production"
(p. 170). His statements of the abstract issues of metatheory
are excellent and accurate, but the crucial details of theory are
absent. What are the characteristics that distinguish the rela
tions of production? Just what must a group of people do with
surplus value and for what reasons in order to constitute a
unique class? These and other questions are left unanswered.
(The same criticism is made by Reglar, pp. 193f.) McCarthy
seems to think that state and party decisions show that a
separate mode of state socialism has been established, without
considering whether it might be a combination of conflicting
relations or a type of state capitalism.
In trying to establish his point, McCarthy does go through
a lot of interesting material on changes and problems of pro
ductivity and on developments and conflicts in relations of
production. The suggestion is that any conflict or contradiction
shows class differences (pp. 149, l65f., and 169), but this is
surely not the case. The dictatorship of the proletariat or even
the administration of things is not the heavenly Jerusalem,
although it is important to analyze the relations and forces that
prevail. The possibility of a socialist mode of production
cannot be rejected out of hand, and China, among other coun
tries, gives a good opportunity to reconsider that possibility.
But McCarthy has not given us the evidence. 2 In these days of
Chinese emphasis on the dominance of state ownership, it is
interesting to consider the fact that just previous to liberation
the Guomindang state-owned industries "constituted approxi
mately two-thirds oftotal industrial capital" (p. 156).
There is a tendency in herarticle (and in literature
elsewhere) to draw a sharp line between the eco
nomic mechanisms ofthe market and the political
mechanisms of the state. Marx himself called for
the administration (virtually the opposite of
Weber's and Hannan's use ofthat term) ofthings
rather than the governing of people, which also
suggests a separation of economics and politics.
On the other hand, in Grundrisse Marx foresaw
wealth being measured by disposable time rather
than labor time. Decisions about production in an
advanced socialist society would be based on time
available for needs to be satisfied. These are deci
sions ofpolitical economy that require both politi
cal and economic mechanisms. We need to know
more about how the two might mix.
The last essay, "The Law of Value Debate-A Tribute to
the Late Sun Yefang" (pp. 171-203), by Steve Reglar,
deepens the debate about objective economic laws through a
discussion of the works of Sun Yefang and other Chinese
economists. He does show "the sophistication with which
contemporary Chinese political economists have approached
the problems" (p. 203). Reglar argues that the essential ele
ments of socialist economics should be "expressed as objec
tive economic laws" (p. 188), responding to some of Brug
ger's criticisms of such a view. As Brugger says elsewhere,3
there are natural laws of physics and biology that must be
observed, but not economic laws. It is frustrating that Reglar
does not give an explicit statement of the supposed laws. At
2. It would be worthwhile to pursue his line of argument using John
E. Roemer's A General Theory of Exploitation and Class (Cam
bridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982). Roemer gives a clear
exposition of a conception of socialist exploitation.
3. "Once Again, 'Making the Past Serve the Present'" in N. Max
well and B. McFarlane, eds., China's Changed Road to Development
(Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1984). See also Harry Magdoff, "Are
There Economic Laws of Socialism?" ed., op. cit., which
was also printed in Monthly Review, Vol. 37, No.3 (July-August
1985), and Michael Lebowitz, "Only Capitalist Laws of Motion?,"
Monthly Review, Vol. 38, No.6 (November 1986).
68
II Ha.ve you out
the twt11or'c; views
AV"e.. ye-t ?lit
J!J78
most it seems to me that there are truisms, prescriptions, and
recommendations. This is surely an important matter that will
be debated much more.
I think Reglar does give us an important reminder in
saying that there "are many different types of planning in
operation around the world and in most circumstances an
economy is neither fully planned nor fully integrated by the
market" (p. 172). A fundamental problem is that if social
choices are "bounded by objective laws" (p. 186) of econom
ics it is difficult to see what role there could be for politics. The
overemphasis on economics and economic laws in China is a
concern expressed frequently in this book. Reglar ends by
discussing some new programs in China involving guidance
planning that call for "a greater separation of state and civil
society" and involve a "different concept of ... democracy"
(p. 202). The political implications are not pursued.
II
A cluster of issues in these essays prompts further com
ment from me, although others will find many other issues of
interest. My first concern is that the essays are overly theoreti
cal in ways that are obscure, unnecessary, or misleading. For
one thing, the book makes me wish that the word" reduction"
had been banned from our vocabulary. Every author uses the
word (or one of its cognates) in one vague way or another,
although some depend upon it much more than others. In this
book (as elsewhere), the word "reduction" is used as a crude
stick to beat down a simplistic unilinear theory of the primacy
of productive It is thought that reductionists are com
mitted to the view that one thing "could simply be read off"
another (cf. pp. 3, 40, and elsewhere). No doubt some have
naively held that the productive forces determine all else but
are completely unaffected themselves. This is certainly not the
view presented in serious discussions, from those of Marx and
Engels to that of G. A. Cohen (with all due respect to
McCarthy, p. 144n.). Engels tried to develop a theory (and not
a logical relation that would allow a 'reading off') about the
way in which productive forces are the most important but not
the only forces determining interaction and change in society.
Without some such theory of historical materialism, a
crucial Marxist category will have to be abandoned, with
widespread effect on Marxism. Moreover, a simplistic under
standing of primacy tends to restrict the accounts of the change
from the cultural revolution to contemporary reforms. Mao
Zedong is accused of thinking that politics determines every
thing, while Deng Xiaoping is accused of thinking that eco
nomics determines everything. It is then difficult to see how
they might have strayed from a more sophisticated and accu
rate account of the interrelation of economic and political
forces. The mistakes are in large part a matter ofoveremphasis
and misapplication.
Dutton and Healy try to overcome reduction by trying to
eliminate epistemology. The cure is extreme for an affliction
that is questionable, although it comes at a time when the death
of epistemology is a popular theme in philosophy.4 They
claim, without argument, that "all epistemologies posit a
uniquely privileged level of discourse" (p. 27). In a sense this
applied to foundationalist theories of knowledge that depend
4. Richard Rorty proclaimed "the death of epistemology" in his
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1979). Ironically, that book was followed by many important
books in epistemology, including F. I. Dretske, Knowledge and the
Flow of information (1981), L. Bonjour, The Structure of Empirical
Knowledge (1985), and A. I. Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition
(1986).
"Formalized political study group in full swing," a cartoon in the
*This cartoon is from China Now (London), No. 115 (Winter 19851 China Daily, an Englishlanguage newspaper in Beijing, 23 February
86), p.17. 1987.
69
upon some beliefs being self-certifying, but in this sense they
are not necessarily beliefs to which al1 others could be re
duced. Perhaps their view applies to classical logical posi
tivism, but that school lost credibility decades ago. Their
claim does not, by definition, apply to coherentist epistemolo
gies. for which all beliefs are certified by being part of a
coherent theory without a uniquely privileged level of any
sort.
In this book it is strongly suggested that the con
flicts in China are class conflicts requiring class
struggle. Maybe some are, but even that still needs
to be shown. There are many political issues to be
discussed, but the discussion should not be bur
dened with the view that politics is always class
struggle. Once again China provides excellent
materialfor investigation.
The basic problem in their essay is that they use an overly
restrictive and implausible distinction between empiricism
and rationalism (p. 26). Empiricism is taken as the view that all
thought is about concrete reality (but sometimes about the
given experience, as for a phenomenalist, like Mach) (pp. 21
and 23). Rationalism, on the other hand, "works on a thought
object" (p. 16). Knowledge is about concepts rather than the
real things. The result is a lame defense of Marx that makes his
view sound like the Hegelian position he attacked. With this
dichotomy, it will be true necessarily that"all epistemologies
posit both a distinction and a correspondence between the two
realms of being" (p. 26). The problem is that they use a
dichotomy between mind and reality that was only prominent
in our philosophical past, and they then seem to claim that the
mind can think only about matters of the mind. They forget
that we normally use our minds to think about real things
(structures, etc.), just as we use our eyes to see real things. The
images and concepts that are involved are not the real things
that we think about or see.
As I mentioned above, the issues in epistemology are
enormous and complex, but I think it is a mistake to think that
positions in political economy will be much affected by posi
tions in epistemology. I have discussed these epistemological
issues at such length partly because I think Dutton and Healy's
discussion is an example of an all-too-common practice of
depending too much on solving contentious philosophical
problems. This tends to stultify or to dogmatize. I think
Chinese Marxism also suffers from this more than it should. It
is one way of drawing the limits too tightly.
Earlier I mentioned Brugger's concern that "the limits of
official ideology are too tightly drawn" (from Brugger's intro
duction, p. 10). He, and others in this book, think that open
debate has been stamped out except in a very limited area. His
example is of the limitation of debate about alienation, but
even the estimate he reports of "some 600 articles on aliena
tion" between "1978 and 1983" does not indicate "a brief
Nanjing University students make their opinions known on a seventy
fiveJoot-long blackboard.
moment" of discussion (p. 10; cf. p. 118, Hannan, p. 123, and
Reglar, p. 202). I can attest to lively debates on the subject
during the academic year 1984-85, and in 1986 Wang Ruoshui
(mentioned on p. 11) published a book on humanism and
alienation, which has been the topic of further debate.
The problem has not been the limitation of debate. The
censorship of ideas is much reduced in contemporary China
and even more so now than when Brugger was writing a few
years ago. With the "double hundreds" policy, many schools
of thought are contending, although attention is more on blos
soming than contending. The problem is to give political
guidance and avoid the most detrimental effects of influential
ideas while fostering positive effects, rather than letting other
forces determine the effects where pluralism reigns. This is
still true in the recent criticism of bourgeois liberalization
(January 1987). No doubt discussion in the Communist party
of China supporting capitalism or alternative vanguard parties
has been stamped out. However, the emphasis is on criticism
(theoretical responses) rather than a movement. 5 The impor
tant question is whether debate will now be more specific about
what socialism is and should be, and about what bourgeois
liberalization is. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has
promised more work on these issues. And it is the responsibil
ity of the party to give clearer theoretical guidance than it has
so far, for example guidance about political reforms. I have
5. There is an interesting discussion of these isssues by Deng Xiao
ping in "Concerning Problems on the Ideological Front," Selected
Works of Deng Xiaoping (1975-1982) (Beijing: Foreign Languages
Press, 1984), pp. 367-371.
70
certainly heard far too much praise in China for the American
political and ideological systems, praise that has gone without
response. Certainly Hu Yaobang did not lead or even encour
age a theoretical discussion about the socialist road versus the
capitalist road. Contrary to Brugger, I think the limits of
ideology are quite wide. The problem is that the party has not
sufficiently participated in the debates.
In this book there are various comments about decisions
and actions of the party and the state, but very little is said
about what their roles should be. When they are discussed,
there is a tendency to think that conflicts require a state, along
lines that Lenin encouraged. Certainly the planning of ad
vanced production requires more administrative problems
(tasks) than Marx-and even more so, Lenin-foresaw.
(Marx did anticipate that accounting would and should become
more important in a planned economy.) In this book as else
where, the problems are too often taken as reasons for aban
doning planning and control. But Marx thought planning and
control would be performed by the society rather than by the
state, which would wither away. In many ways China's policy
of reducing state involvement and encouraging locally con
trolled schools, collectives, and horizontal cooperation seems
to be just what Marx advocated in his' 'Critique of the Gotha
Program." More needs to be clarified about state and social
functions, and it is a pity that so little has been said about these
theoretical issues that are in the background of the discussions
in this book.
6
Another issue in the background that is of more direct
importance is that of the role of politics and the realm of the
political. As in other literature, politics is commonly taken as
nothing but class struggle, so that any political conflict is a
matter for contending classes. The result is either to extend
class struggle too far or to ignore the political conflicts and
difficulties in a free association of workers with social plan
ning. The first was the mistake of the cultural revolution, and
the second is a mistake that is prevalent in studies on socialist
transition, including those here. Many of the authors (but not
Brugger) lament the abandonment of class struggle but point to
conflicts as indications of class differences.
The problems come partly from Mao and partly from
Marx. Mao did tell us about contradictions among the people,
but then he saw class struggle all around him and thought that
the struggle between the socialist road and the capitalist road is
always the same as class struggle (see p. 70, quoted in my
comments on Sullivan). Disagreements about whether a soci
ety is keeping to the socialist road do not have to be disagree
ments between class enemies. Recently there have been state
ments in China about keeping to the socialist road without
taking that as involving class struggle. The authors here do not
consider the relation between politics and class struggle, and
those who conflate them have given no reason for doing so.
More needs to be said about politics without restricting it to
matters of class.
6. These issues are discussed in Victor Nee and David Mozingo,
eds., State and Society in Contemporary China (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
Univ. Press, 1983) and in Kjeld Erik Brodsgaard, "State, Party, and
Economy in the Transition to Socialism in China: A Review Essay,"
Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Vol. 18, No. I (Jan.-March
1986), pp. 46-55.
A problem from Marx is that he used the word' 'political"
in a narrower sense than we do now. In his terminology, there
would no longer be power in the political sense under com
munism. In our terms, political questions also arise in every
day planning and administration. Marx neglected the difficult
problems of power in administrative control and coordination.
There is definitely no reason to think that all conflicts and
disagreements would fade away, although that seems to be the
message of Lenin's State and Revolution and the suggestion of
many writings on the socialist transition. In this book it is
strongly suggested that the conflicts in China are class conflicts
requiring class struggle. Maybe some are, but even that still
needs to be shown. There are many political issues to be
discussed, but the discussion should not be burdened with the
view that politics is always class struggle. Once again China
provides excellent material for investigation.
Chinese Marxism in Flux, for all its difficulties, raises
many important theoretical issues in sophisticated ways. Other
readers will be prompted to reconsider and to speculate in ways
different from mine. This book helps confirm the view that (as
Brugger puts it, p. 10) "current debates on the role of the state
in China [and other matters] are more stimulating than they
have been for decades."
June 1987
*
M. E. Sharpe Inc.
Policy Conflicts in Post-Mao China
A Documentary Survey, with Analysis
Edited by JOHN P. BURNS and STANLEY ROSEN
"Burns and Rosen have provided us with the most up-to-date, comprehensive.
and accessible collection of materials on postMao China now available."
-Lowell Dittmer. University of California. Berkeley
An East Gate Book 360 pp. Cloth $39.95 Paper $14.95
China's Establishment Intellectuals
Edited by CAROL LEE HAMRIN and TIMOTHY CHEEK
" ... one of the most absorbing and penetrating accounts to date of the fragile
tension-filled, often puzzling relationship between China's intellectuals and
the Chinese party/state." -Paul A. Cohen, Wellesley College
State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle
THOMAS B. GOLD
Thomas Gold utilizes the "historical structural approach" to offer the first
comprehensive sociological analysis of Taiwan's unquestioned success at rap
id economic growth with stability and equity.
The Marginal World of Oe
Kenzaburo
MICHIKO WILSON
In this study of the writings of Japan's most prodi
gious writer, Professor Wilson brings to bear a wide
range of contemJX>rary critical techniques.
An East Gate Book 168 pp. Cloth $30.00
Media and the Chinese Public
Edited by BRANTLY WOMACK
This translation makes available an extensive survey
of the Beijing media audience carried out by the
Beijing Journalism Association. The poll is the first
large-scale media survey in China. (A special issue of
Chinese Sociology and Anthropology.)
200 pp, Paper $14.95
M. E. Sharpe, Inc.
80 Business Park Drive, Armonk, New York 10504
71
East Asia
Books to Review
Jeff Gillenkirk and James Motlow, Bitter Melon: Stories from the Last
The following review copies have arrived at the office of the
Bulletin. Ifyou are interested in reading and reviewing one or
more of them, write to Bill Doub, BCAS, 3239 9th Street,
Boulder, CO 80302-2 1I2, U.S.A. This brieflist contains only
books that have arrived since the last issue. Please refer to the
list in the previous issue as well for other books currently
available from BCAS. Reviews of important works not listed
here will be equally welcome. The Bulletin prefers review
essays on two or more related books, and if there are books
you particularly want for an essay but are not listed, we can
probably get them for you.
Richard H. Solomon and Masataka Kosaka (eds.), The Soviet Far
East Military Buildup (Dover MA: Auburn House Publishing
Company, 1986).
Southeast Asia
Susan Abeyasekere, Jakarta: A History (Singapore, Oxford, and New
York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Desmond Ball, A Base for Debate: The US Satellite Station at Nur
rungar (Sydney, London, and Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1987).
John Bresnan (ed.), Crisis in the Philippines: The Marcos Era and
Beyond (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).
Susanne Thorbek, Voices from the City: Women ofBangkok (London
and New Jersey: Zed Books Ltd., 1987).
James T. Siegel, Solo in the New Order: Language and Hierarchy in
an Indonesian City (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press,
1986).
Women's International Resource Exchange, Philippine Women:
From Assembly Line to Firing Line (New York: Women's Interna
tional Resource Exchange, 1987).
South Asia
Lawrence A. Babb, Redemptive Encounters: Three Modern Styles in
the Hindu Tradition (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: Uni
versity of California Press, 1986).
Atiur Rahman, Peasants and Classes: A Study in Differentiation in
Bangladesh (Atlantic Highlands NJ and London: Zed Books Ltd.,
1987). Distributed in the U.S. by Humanities Press.
V. T. Rajshekar, Dalit: The Black Untouchables ofIndia (Atlanta and
Ottawa: Clarity Press, 1987).
Raju G.C. Thomas, Indian Security Policy (Princeton NJ: Princeton
Uni versity Press, 1986).
Northeast Asia
Roger Bowen, Innocence Is Not Enough: The Life and Death of
Herbert Norman (Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre,
1986).
Joo-Hong Nam, America's Commitment to South Korea: The First
Decade of the Nixon Doctrine (Cambridge, London, New York,
New Rochelle, Melbourne, Sydney: Cambridge University Press,
1986).
David Pearson, KAL: The Cover-Up (New York, London, Toronto,
Sydney, Tokyo: Summit Books, 1987).
Yukiko Tanaka (ed.), To Live and To Write: Selections by Japanese
Women Writers, 1913-1938 (Seattle WA: The Seal Press, 1987).
Shunsuke Tsurumi, An Intellectual History ofWartime Japan, 1913
1945 (London, New York, Sydney, and Henley: KPI Limited,
1986).
Rural Chinese Town in America (Seattle and London: University
of Washington Press, 1987).
Pierre Rousset, The Chinese Revolution. Part I: The Second Chinese
Revolution and the Shaping of the Maoist Outlook; Part II: The
Maoist Project Tested in the Struggle for Power (Amsterdam:
International Institute for Research and Education, 1987). Pam
phlets, total pages 75.
Gilbert Rozman, The Chinese Debate about Soviet Socialism, 1978
1985 (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987).
The Bulletin is indexed or abstracted in The Alternative Press
Index, The Left Index, International Development Index, Inter
national Development Abstracts, Sage Abstracts, Social
Science Citation Index, Bibliography of Asian Studies, IBZ
(International Bibliographie der ZeitschriJten Literatur), IBR
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Abstracts, Historical Abstracts, and America: History and Life.
Back issues and photocopies of out-of-print back issues are
available from BCAS. Microfilms of all back issues are available
from University Microfilms International (300 N. Zeeb Road,
Ann Arbor, MI 48106, U.S.A., phone: U.S., 800-521-0600);
Canada, 800-343-5299).
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