Fiji Week, 2004

Fiji Week was a week of prayer meetings and multicultural programmes that took place the week of 4–11 October 2004. Organized at a cost of US$410,000 by a multiracial national committee chaired by the Prime Minister, Laisenia Qarase, Fiji Week was intended to foster reconciliation among Fiji's diverse ethnic communities, especially native Fijians and Indo-Fijians, whose mutual rivalry for political power has dominated Fijian politics for the last generation, and whose relationship has been especially strained since the overthrow of the Indo-Fijian-led government of Mahendra Chaudhry by ethnic Fijian nationalists in the Fiji coup of 2000. Organizers of Fiji Week hoped that it would help to bring about a sense of closure to those events, but the controversy that it generated made this appear difficult to achieve.

On 15 September 2004, a source close to the government told the Australian Associated Press that George Speight, the chief instigator of the 2000 coup, currently serving life-sentence for treason, had had a change of heart towards the Indo-Fijian community following a religious conversion experience in jail, and that he wished to take part in the Fiji Week activities as a gesture of reconciliation. However, the government refused his request to be allowed to leave his Nukulau Island prison to participate in the observances.

Fiji Week was politically controversial. The Fiji Labour Party of deposed Prime Minister Chaudhry boycotted the observances, claiming that they were a political ploy aimed at defusing the lingering post-coup ethnic tensions without addressing the real problem, that many of those responsible for organizing and funding the coup remain unidentified and at large. There could be no reconciliation without justice being done, various party spokesmen said. At a personal level, however, a spokesman said on 11 October that Chaudhry would consider meeting Speight and forgiving him - provided that he name the persons responsible for instigating and financing the 2000 coup. As of December 2004, Speight has not done so.

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