Bula Coup D’Etat!

Since I last wrote part of this blog, Fiji, has been subject to a military coup. Military leader Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama deposed the country’s Prime Minister, Laisenia Qarase, in a bloodless coup on Dec. 4 after threatening to overthrow the government at an earlier deadline. (For a more definitive account, check out Wikipedia.)

At first, when I heard about the coup, I was pretty nervous. I mean, who wants to hear that a country that you’re about to visit is undergoing its fouth military coup in the past twenty years? Not me. Visions of landing on the Fijian tarmac and being abruptly swept away to a sweaty tropical jail (without mai tais!) started dancing through my head. But a quick check of Fiji’s history showed that most of the coups were largely non-violent, and that this one looked to be no exception.

So we’re still planning on traveling to Fiji on our way to Auckland. Little seems to have happened in the past week in Fiji since the coup, and, as I mentioned, it’s looking like the non-violent form of overthrow that has happened before in Fiji. While Australia and New Zealand recommend their citizens not visit Fiji now, it doesn’t look like tourists are in any danger there, and there have been no news reports stating such. The U.S. State Department hasn’t issued a travel advisory for US citizens either. Unless the return of the Prime Minister to the capital Suva brings major violence in the interim, I believe I’ll feel okay about traveling to Fiji. (We weren’t planning on going near Suva anyway, so yay for that.)

Still, any coup is bound to frighten off some tourism, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend that anyone plan a trip there now while there’s a fair bit of political uncertainty. For one thing, coups aren’t a behavior you’re supposed to encourage, so it just seems irresponsible to reward relatively bad behavior from a country with your hard-earned vacation dollar. After all, there’s a lot of paradises out there, many with more stable governance. But since our tickets/rooms are already booked there, I’m thinking it’s still alright for us to go.

However, this is all subject to further developments, so I’ll refrain from getting overconfident that this will go off without a hitch. Still, it never hurts to be optimistic. To be continued…