Japan has not invited Fijian Acting Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama to a major Pacific leaders’ forum next week, the country’s foreign ministry said yesterday, amid concerns his reforms have not gone far enough.
ISOLATED
Had Bainimarama attended the Pacific Alliance Leaders Meeting (PALM) in Japan, it would have signaled the isolated regime leader’s first major opportunity to return to the international community after years of ostracism.
Japan was closely monitoring the situation in Fiji to see if it was appropriate to invite Bainimarama, who seized power in a 2006 coup, but “decided recently that it’s impossible because of the insufficient pace of reform toward democratization,” a Japanese foreign ministry official said.
“We instead invited Fiji’s foreign minister,” the official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about the issue.
Japan welcomed Fiji’s promise to hold elections and constitutional talks, but “there are some negative moves such as enacting a law that could restrict human rights,” he said.
The decision was made after Tokyo held “intense consultations with Australia, New Zealand, the US” and others.
The issue was discussed during a meeting between Japanese Foreign Minister Koichiro Gemba and his Australian counterpart Bob Carr in Tokyo this week, the official said.
BROKEN PROMISE
When Bainimarama seized power, he said he planned to root out corruption and introduce a one-person, one-vote system intended to end entrenched racial inequalities in the nation of 840,000.
However, he then reneged on a promise to hold elections in 2009, tore up the constitution and introduced emergency measures that muzzled the media and banned public meetings.
Earlier this year, the strongman unveiled plans for a new constitution ahead of a vote in 2014 and repealed emergency laws, but he also strengthened decrees giving police and military sweeping powers.
AUSTRALIA
Carr welcomed the decision to exclude Bainimarama, whose country is suspended from the Commonwealth and the Pacific Islands Forum, a key regional grouping.
“Our view is that we maintain our position on Fiji until we have been persuaded that the process of constitutional consultation is thoroughly open,” he was reported as saying by the Australian newspaper.
“There have been encouraging signs in Fiji but the continuing process of consultation about a new constitution has some distance to go. But there should be no weakening of our position until democratic norms have been reinstated,” Carr said.
PALM, which begins in Okinawa on Friday next week, includes Japan, the Cook Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, Australia and New Zealand.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS