THE POLITICAL TWILIGHT OF CULTURAL AUTONOMY: a critical confrontation with Aiyez Sayed-Khaiyum

FDP contributor, Dr Bruce Wearne, challenges the central ideas of Fiji A-G, Aiyez Sayed-Khaiyum's masters degree thesis - Cultural Autonomy: its Implications for the Nation State - the Fiji Experience LLM Thesis - undertaken at the University of Hong Kong in 2002. S-K's thesis is widely believed to be a blueprint behind the governing Fiji First Party's agenda for the nation:

Introduction:

Fiji's September 2014 election has now come and gone. Those elected under the military-imposed constitution and its new electoral system can now take their seats in the Parliament convened for the first time since December 2006. The Fiji First Party resounding victory seems to have been as much a referendum upon the personal popularity of the former military commander. If one looks carefully at the results, there was much more support for candidates of other parties than their numbers now suggest.

So questions will persist about the result and the degree to which this election confirms the view that the Fiji Government is back on the road to a fully accountable and transparent parliamentary democracy. As of today's date (20 March 2015) we are still waiting for the final report of the international monitors concerning the fairness of the conduct of the election.

The Attorney General, Aiyez-Sayed Khaiyum, the prime mover behind the setting up of the Fiji First Party, presents himself, via his web-site - aiyezsayedkhaiyum.org - as the progressive and necessary force in recent Fijian political history. He has qualifications from Australian universities, has developed his legal career via Australian legal companies and, when he deems it necessary to do so, launcher bitter invective against the Australian Government. That has been the hallmark of his contribution to regional politics ever since he became "interim attorney general" in the military junta's regime after December 2006. The document that we refer to here is the University of Hong Kong LLM thesis written under the supervision of Professor Yash Ghai, the respected Kenyan constitutionalist whose proposed constitution was subsequently trashed by the Fiji military.

I have never been to Fiji. Back in the 1980s when I was engaged in doctoral research I met Robert Wolfgramm another student at LaTrobe University. His doctorate, Kai Viti - on being Fijian without being Fijian, conferred in 1994, provides insight into Fiji's "coup culture", digging much deeper than can be extracted from newspaper reports. His thesis comprehensively explains the problems Fijians face with Fijian "identity". Then from 2005 until 2010, when he served as Editor in Chief of the Fiji Daily Post, he asked me for occasional assistance, via email and IT connections, and I composed articles on Christian democracy and proof-read editorials for the newspaper's salient opposition to the military demands of Commodore Bainimarama both before and after December 5th, 2006.

Christianity in the South-West Pacific & Coup Culture

It was also over this same time that I became better informed of the involvement of my own Methodist ancestors in the South Pacific colonies. My great-great grandfather, the

Reverend John Eggleston (1813-1879), was sent out from Newark-upon-Trent to this antipodean region, in "full connection" to assist in the supervision of South Pacific missions. This meant he was directly involved in forming policy for the Fijian church, although I have no record of him ever setting foot in the Fiji islands.

Eggleston came from a family that had long supported the Liberalism of William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898). His grandson Frederic W Eggleston (1875-1954) was a prominent associate of Robert Menzies, a key figure in the formation of the' Liberal Party. John Eggleston died in Brighton, Victoria, in 1879, the year Gladstone's "Midlothian lectures" set forth his view of Empire. He was speaking as a former Prime Minister (1868-74) and would again take up that office in the years that followed (1880-6, and 1892-4). British Government policy should be limited by a strong emphasis upon liberty and trade, with foreign affairs only ever developed with due and proper respect for all the peoples of the world. Such an attitude also required the formation of just state-crafting at home. That was a presupposition of any political engagement with the peoples of the Empire. This conservative High Church Anglican politician set forth his view in these terms:

I first give you, gentlemen, what I think the right principles of foreign policy. The first thing is to foster the strength of the Empire by just legislation and economy at home, thereby producing two of the great elements of national power namely, wealth, which is a physical element, and union and contentment, which are moral elements and to reserve the strength of the Empire, to reserve the expenditure of that strength, for great and worthy occasions abroad. Here is my first principle of foreign policy: good government at home. My second principle of foreign policy is this: that its aim ought to be to preserve to the nations of the world and especially, were it but for shame, when we recollect the sacred name we bear as Christians, especially to the Christian nations of the world the blessings of peace. That is my second principle. ("Inspired by the Love of Freedom" 3rd Speech, Tues 27th November 1879 West Calder.)

Now, when we talk about political life, it is not enough merely to identify the prevailing intention, as if justice can ever be merely what a statement of good intentions brings about. But it can be said that the two principles as enunciated here by Gladstone would have had a high resonance with those helping to establish the Methodist cause in the South West Pacific. These may have been the years of what historians call the "Protestant ascendancy". But we should not on that account neglect the profoundly self-critical side to the way Gladstone formulated these two democratic principles. The Methodists, liberals and democrats, when subsequently drawn away by new nationalist impulses, may well have felt constrained to depart from these guidelines. But, any good Christian associate of John Eggleston, let alone any follower of the teachings of John Wesley in the South Pacific, would have had to work within the conscientious constraints of these taken-for-granted principles upon their initiatives.

The discussion of South Pacific Methodism and its Galdstonian tendencies is not to render the Methodist missionaries in Fiji as the "good guys", nor is it to suggest that any evident failure on their part to develop these principles in a corresponding self-critical political way would render them as the root cause of Fiji's "coup culture". But we cannot now avoid the fact that 100 years later, in 1987, the Methodist church did give evidence of such a radical departure from such a previous principled commitment. They did so by giving support to the unilateral action taken by Colonel Rabuka of the Royal Fiji Military Forces when he took over the Parliament, and dismissed the democratically elected government of Dr. Timothy Bavadra. Fiji's subsequent "coup culture" was initiated. Given the Gladstonian political vision that was very much part of the global horizon of those who founded the Methodist church in Fiji, one can easily conclude that such latter-day Methodist endorsement indicates a profound historical reversion in political thinking. But in this case it was not the "crown and empire" ideology of Gladstone's opponent, Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1891). Rather the church's public support for Rabuka endorsed a presumed Fijian ethnic paramountcy, as if support of Fijian ethnicity required such political support. Was that how the church came to see its mandate in Fiji? Many have concluded it was by this presumption that Fiji's Methodists lost their way in Christian political terms.

The question for Fijian Methodism is whether as a Christian church it has subsequently repented of this injustice. But then, when a person or an institution presumes upon its own autonomy, is it able to properly understand what repentance means coram Deo?. Of course, a purely this-worldly (politically correct) sense of regret and sorrow for past deeds, now considered inappropriate, is not a biblically-directed view of repentance. To repent one needs to acknowledge not only that what one did was wrong but that it was an offense against God Almighty. That then is part of the dilemma facing any development of Christian democracy in Fiji, but also across the region.

The Twilight of Cultural Autonomy in the Sayed-Khaiyum View of Politics

In his LLM thesis, Cultural Autonomy: its Implications for the Nation State - the Fiji Experience, Aiyez Sayed-Khaiyum does not actually address the question of whether the Methodist church should be classified as an institution with its own "cultural autonomy", let alone whether it was a spiritually compromising presumption of autonomy that led it to endorse Rabuka's coups. As a matter of fact, Khaiyum avoids analysis in these same classificatory terms of the nation's military. By all accounts, the RFMF remains an institution with only minority involvement of non-indigenous (non-iTaukei) persons. As a consequence, the actual systematic implications of his treatise for historical and sociological judgement remain significantly blurred. Evidently there are other issues he judges to be of greater political significance. But that also means that his argument, as a sociological discussion, seriously lacks comprehensivity. Nevertheless he claims to set forth a definitive evaluation the political experience of the Fiji nation-state.

Of course, the historical parallel we have suggested above (Gladstonian democracy versus Disraelian immperialism) has only limited usefulness even if it serves to highlight for us the way in which that elusive term "liberal" can take on illiberal connotations when subjected to the force and fraud of political manoeuvering. For Sayed-Khaiyum, the liberal constitutional concession of "cultural autonomy" to indigenous institutions had validity for a time, a holding pattern preventing people from being alienated with their familial roots. But such a lawful and constitutional assertion of ethnic autonomy has its limits. In his view it must, after a time, reach its "use-by" date. This will be when it is no longer appropriate to allow it to function "autonomously", which means, until then, the retention of some kind of "reserve power". And although liberalism allows for such a concession to be made which grants "group rights" to previously colonized people and their institutions, even if for a time after they gain independence, it is yet the "unencumbered individual" who emerges as the principle focus basic to this concessional compromise and which then remains as the normative historical benchmark in his analysis of the Fijian nation-state.

Whatever the value of Khaiyum's attempt at a comprehensive political-legal analysis, there are yet many absences from his discussion. What his analysis lacks is an account of other vital "social compartments", at least those that, by their contribution to civil society, have claimed some kind of autonomy (cultural or otherwise) for themselves. To assess the extent of "cultural autonomy", attention has to be given to other non-state institutions, in this instance, the place occupied by Christian churches (outside the strict confines of the nation-state), in the historical and political processes he describes.

There are also institutions within the state - that continue to manifest "a life of their own" - such as the military, the judiciary, the police, and other non-state and non-church institutions, organisations and relationships - business enterprises, schools, community groups, legal and other professional groups and fraternities, and family and tribal structures, not forgetting political parties. In other words, Sayed-Khaiyum's discussion of the concept "autonomy" is arbitrarily limited to what he calls "cultural groups" which are supposed to be the loci for "identity" prior to the full cultural disclosure of liberal individualism in his version of the liberal nation-state (with its Hobbesian overtones). In limited "autonomy" in this way, the question is raised as to whether it is the Fijian military that now, for an unspecified time, retains "reserve power". This crucial element of his political theory he does not broach.

Hence the study is at best an outline of what should be undertaken by further research and is not a completed study at all. It is seriously incomplete even if it is evidence of a dynamic élan which one Australian journalist has construed as "hyper-active" (Rowan Callick "Death by a Thousand decrees" The Australian April 13, 2013). But it leaves too many questions that need to be asked unanswered about the author's evolving and, apparently, dynamic standpoint. That the author continues to refer to it on his web-site, when it is so evidently incomplete is curious. Does he, perhaps, feel constrained to do so out of respect for his supervisor, professor Yash Ghai?

By raising that question, we also confront questions about the taken-for-granted standards of scholarship that have prevailed in the region's universities as a consequence of the relentless neo-liberal "reforms" of higher education that have continued on to this day from the 1980s and 1990s. And the author is now one of various prominent players in Fijian politics having, after December 6th, 2006, joined other jurists qualified from studies and practise in Australia (Jocelyn Scutt, Shaista Shameem) and New Zealand (Christopher Pryde), who have gained prominent positions and subsequently served in high public office within the "interim regime". Khaiyum is now that nation-state's democratically elected parliamentarian who has been given the office of Attorney-General.

We are left with many questions: how does Khaiyum's legal and political frame-of-reference as set forth in this Masters thesis relate to his subsequent contribution to statecrafting of the nation-state of Fiji under martial law? Is there some kind of inner connection between the political philosophy espoused in his dissertation and the policies he has developed as a member of Fiji's ruling junta and now as a sworn-in Minister of Fiji's "democratic" parliament?

Conclusion: A Christian Democratic Politics for Fiji?

In writing this, I am not the only one to link my attempts to set forth a political viewpoint in this part of the world to Methodist ancestors. The Prime Minister of Australia at the time of Fiji's December 6th 2006 coup, found it convenient on occasion to refer to his Methodist background as he justified his realpolitik by reference to the values held by earlier "liberals". But the appeal to colonial Christianity effectively allows for the perpetuation of an approach to politics that scrupulously avoids the question of how a biblically-directed view of public justice should be worked out by Christian citizens across the region. And so the appeal is cosmetic to a process by which Christians became complicit in the notion that political life is religiously neutral. And so today, Christian citizens in Australia and New Zealand, let alone in Fiji - have no consciousness of their own political contribution to the emergence of "coup culture" in Fiji (and elsewhere). By way of contrast, in the months immediately after the coup the Fiji Daily Post persisted in its effort to contribute to Christian public discussion until it was no longer possible to do so due to the imperious demands of the self-installed initiators of Fiji's militarized democracy. Even so, such marginal attempts to set forth a Christian response to Fiji's "coup culture" were eclipsed by machinations that involved other undisclosed matters that we can now see in a clearer light.

Recent proceedings in the Fijian Parliament have leant support to our view that what we witness in Fiji's "democracy" is a concerted effort to confirm the hypothesis basic to Khiayum's thesis - C u l t u r a l A u t o n o m y is founded on an undisclosed ideological presupposition that the 1997 constitution was an anti-democratic document. Khaiyum's own "proof" of this allegation cannot be found in the thesis because, quite frankly, he does not argue it there. Instead what proof there is for this hypothesis is actually found in the results of the recent election. These are the "proof" because an equally undisclosed presupposition of C u l t u r a l A u t o n o m y is that it is popular support that gives any state its normative basis. The September 2014 election has effectively given approval to the 2006 coup, and to the ongoing efforts of the former military commander to move the country to genuine democratic independence. In so doing it has given historical confirmation to the underlying hypothesis of his thesis. The 2014 election, as his web-site states, was "the first ever truly democratic election".

But despite having had such a resounding endorsement of his view, it seems that there is still an implicit weakness in Fiji's emergent democracy. This weakness is found in the continued ban on Professor Brij Lal of the Australian National University. In pointing to this weakness, and in taking the Attorney General's estimate of the indispensability of his own contribution to Fijian parliamentary democracy, we begin to see that democracy in Fiji is now inextricably tied to his own evaluation of the scholarly worth of his LLM thesis under Professor Yash Ghai at Hong Kong University in 2002.

We can therefore explain the underlying reason that Professor Lal is not welcome. It is because he is a prominent scholar. His scholarly contribution to Fijian democratic governance, which includes his oversight of the 1997 constitution, is simply too much of a threat to the now democratically elected Attorney General. One might ask how it could be that having inaugurated the "first ever truly democratic election", Professor Lal and his scholarship could be a threat to state security. If, as we have suggested, the legitimacy of this "first ever truly democratic election" has effectively confirmed the scholarship of Mr Khaiyum, then why should the scholarship of the one who framed the 1997 constitution be now classified as an enemy of the state. Is the real reason for the ban on Professor Lal because the Attorney General is wanting to canonize his own LLM thesis, or at least its underlying hypothesis, as a foundational tenet for the Republic of Fiji? Professor Lal's status as "enemy of the state" was confirmed recently by the brutal and mean statement of the Minister for Defence and Immigration in the Fijian Parliament 18/3/15 - http://www.fijitimes.com/story.aspx?id=298677. Moreover that statement is simply an endorsement of a dogmatic adherence to raison d'état - "Fiji is a sovereign state and the authority to prohibit a foreigner to enter or re-enter the country rests with the State", Mr. Natuva said. In other words: we do what we like and we are not telling you why we make the decisions that we make.

It thus proves very difficult to avoid the conclusion that Professor Lal is not welcome in Fiji simply because he does not endorse Khaiyum's many-sided self-promotion via his web-site, let alone his LLM thesis. It comes down to an undefended and unsupported hypothesis. Of course it has been endorsed by populist sentiment, generated by the election campaign of September 2014, but a dogmatic adherence to an unargued hypothesis is no foundation for a just state.

We are left with the suspicion that Fiji's Attorney-General is very uncertain about the quality of his own scholarship. His web-site now, in the light of the ban upon Professor Lal and his wife, puts a much larger question mark against his scholarship that this review could ever do.

Bruce C Wearne

FDP welcomes FEEDBACK and SUBMISSIONS – email: fijidailyposter@gmail.com

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