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Fiji Rebels, Military Agree on New President
Fiji coup leader George Speight said the country took a step towards ending the hostage crisis on Monday after he had agreed with the military on who should be the next president.
He said they had agreed that former vice president Ratu Josefa Iloilo, an indigenous Fijian, should be the next president of the South Pacific nation.
"We have gotten over one big obstacle...," Speight told reporters before a second day of talks with the military aimed at ending the month-long hostage crisis sparked by Speight's May 19 coup attempt. The military seized power after the coup.
"From there let's agree on the Fijian civilian government and then from there the accords can be signed, the decrees can be promulgated, the hostages can be released, the arms can be returned and I can go back to my village," he said.
Military spokesman Colonel Filipo Tarakinikini said on Sunday that the armed forces hoped to achieve a resolution "within the next few days".
Speight and his gunmen stormed parliament on May 19 and took the country's first Indian prime minister Mahendra Chaudhry and 30 other politicians hostage. He said he staged the coup to protect indigenous Fijian rights.
Racial tensions in Fiji remain high and industry officials on Monday said the country was on the verge of an economic crisis with sugar cane rotting in the fields and tourists staying away after the coup.
GUNMEN STORM POLICE HEADQUARTERS
The tensions in the Fijian capital Suva erupted into gunfire earlier on Monday when three armed men stormed the city's police headquarters in search of an ethnic Indian prisoner.
"I heard the sound of the bullets, then I saw the police officers trying to run away from the police station," taxi driver Mohan Dutt Singh told Reuters.
"One police officer came out, I could see blood coming out of his right arm," Singh said.
Local media reported that the gunmen, who fired six shots, were searching for an ethnic Indian soldier being held on charges of shooting dead an indigenous Fijian soldier during peacekeeping duties in the Middle East.
A military statement said: "Three armed men stormed into the police headquarters in Nabua taking several people hostage, including a senior army officer".
The military made no mention of any injuries.
It said one of the gunmen was the father of an indigenous soldier killed in Lebanon two months ago, but it made no mention of the ethnic Indian prisoner.
The gunmen, who failed to find the prisoner, left the police station after about one and a half hours, local media said.
SPEIGHT SOFTENS STAND
Speight is demanding that ethnic Indians be stripped of any political role in Fiji. He believes Fijians of Indian descent, who first arrived about 100 years ago to work as indentured servants in cane fields and now make up 44 percent of the population, have failed to embrace Fijian culture.
Fiji's military has said Speight's team would be represented on a new body to change the country's multi-racial constitution, which led to the election of Chaudhry's government last year.
However it has insisted that the rebel leader is not welcome in the interim administration, due to take over in about three months, although some of his nominees will be considered.
Speight said he still believed ethnic Indians should be banned from an interim government but that a resolution to the crisis would hot hinge on an agreement for an exclusively indigenous Fijian government.
"That is my stand," Speight said. "The military would like to see one or two of them (Indians) in the interim government and that is something we will discuss today...."
"It is possible that the president will appoint some of our brothers and sisters from the other ethnic communities to participate," he said.
"If that is the case, we will accept it," Speight said.
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