(-) DominionPost Editorial: Floods offer way back for Fiji
The Dominion Post Friday, 16 January 2009

[A typical example of the media's bias and lack of knowledge. The floods were the worst in human memory. Many towns and cities are without drinking water. Thousands of people are homeless. Sugar and food crops have been ruined, and roads and bridges damaged. Damage in Nadi alone is estimated at $100 million. And all the editor can see is an opportunity to force Fiji's Interim Government to toe the NZ line. Do what we say and we'll give you more aid.]

Every once in a while, catastrophe has its uses. To borrow a cliche, every cloud has a silver lining, even a cloud that has delivered rain of biblical proportions across the Fiji islands since last Friday, The Dominion Post writes.

Flash floods have forced Fiji's people out of their homes, caused officials to urge them to head for higher ground and ruined tourists' holidays. At least 11 people are believed to have died because of the weather and at least 9000 have been displaced.

The miserable weather might just, however, provide New Zealand and Australia with an unexpected opportunity to reconnect with a renegade Fiji regime led by a military figure who seems incapable of grasping why both neighbouring governments find his illegitimate.

This week, the National-led Government announced it would donate $100,000 to the Fiji Red Cross to assist locals to cope with the emergency and its aftermath. Pointedly, the sum went to an aid agency, not to interim Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, who has appealed worldwide for cash for a disaster relief fund that he controls.

Nevertheless, the message sent was that, though tensions bedevil the relationship, old friends can still be relied upon in an hour of need. Sentiment has its value.

The donation is a gesture that, if Commodore Bainimarama is smart, his administration will capitalise on because it says, in essence, that though New Zealand disapproves of his pretence of a government, its door is not closed to Suva. The next move is his.

New Zealanders might sometimes wonder why this Government and its predecessors have bothered themselves so much with the antics of the succession of bullies that have subjected the Fiji islands to four coups in 21 years. The answer is simple they comprise the largest nation in the Pacific and, like it or not, what happens in our backyard affects New Zealand. Take the migration here of hundreds of Indian families who fled Fiji after the first Rabuka coup of 1987.

The commodore's approach since he seized power in December 2006 does not make maintaining a relationship easy, however. Before Christmas, he crossed unnecessary verbal swords with new Foreign Affairs Minister Murray McCully over this country's refusal to extend the student visa of George Nacewa, whose father works for the Fijian president, and thus fell foul of New Zealand's travel ban.

In retaliation, Fiji expelled our acting high commissioner, Caroline McDonald, saying she had indulged in "undiplomatic behaviour". Such a claim, the returning diplomat said, was "arbitrary and unwarranted".

Young George and his father no doubt feel aggrieved. But their wrath should be directed at the proper target their interim prime minister, who might have had good intentions when he ousted what he saw as a corrupt government, but whose blatant lie about when new elections would be held and oppressive style lost him much of any empathy felt around the Pacific, within the Commonwealth, and by the United States, the European Union and the United Nations.

Nonetheless, natural disaster sometimes brings together the unlikeliest of people. If the awful Fiji floods encourage that, some good will come out of bad.