Marijuana a Fiji election issue

George Speight, awaiting trial on treason charges

By Connie Chew

SUVA, Fiji -- A Fijian high chief has said his people should be shot dead if found planting marijuana, sparking controversy a week ahead of fresh elections.

The elections are the first since a coup attempt last year.

Fiji voters go to the polls on August 25 in a week-long election that will see candidates from some 18 political parties vying to form the next new government.

A former member of parliament in the Rabuka regime, Ratu Sakuisa Matuku, who is paramount chief of the Nadroga province on Fiji's main island of Viti Levu, offered shooting as a solution to the growing problem of marijuana cultivation, a local newspaper reported.

Matuku made the call when opening a new magistrates court in the town of Sigatoka, located in his province.

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Just two days earlier, a Fijian soldier shot dead a villager in the neighboring province of Navosa in a drug raid that netted the tiny Pacific island nation's largest marijuana haul, worth $1.7 million (Fijian).

"While I'm, sorry for the shooting incident, at the same time I think people who are growing the illegal plants need to be shot," said Matuku, who earlier this year dropped out as an election candidate on a Fijian ticket in the Indian political party, the National Federation Party.

Navosa's paramount chief, Adi Kuini Speed, who is leader of the Fijian Association Party and a deputy prime minister in the toppled democratically-elected Chauhdry government, has called for a national strategy to combat the growing use of maijuana.

Poverty cycle

Adi Kuini, a strong candidate in the general election, said it was tragic that indigenous Fijians were resorting to the marijuana trade as they sought ways to break away from the poverty cycle caused by years of government mismanagement and a lack of alternative sources of income.

Chaudhry, Fiji's first ethnic Indian prime minister, whose government was toppled in May 2000 after failed businessman George Speight and armed gunmen stormed parliament in the name of indigenous rights, said Fiji must break away from its gun culture if it is to reclaim some of the credibility in the international arena.

Indo-Fijians, who make up 44 percent of Fiji's population of 830,000, controlled much of the economy before the coup attempt, although they own little of the land and are mainly tenant farmers.

Chaudhry and many of his cabinet ministers were taken hostage for 56 days by Speight, who is awaiting trail on treason charges on an island jail.

A confident Chaudhry campaigning as leader of the Fiji Labor Party in a town just outside the capital Suva told a rally of indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians that Fiji had earned a reputation as a "country of coups" and in order to move forward, the country needed to get away from being "run from the barrel of a gun."