Blue Ribbon Campaign (Fiji) - Other Public Figures and Organizations

Other Public Figures and Organizations

• Former Chief Justice Sir Timoci Tuivaga has spoken cautiously, but has said that it can work provided that the various parties involved are willing to make it work.

• Jaiwant Krishna of the Labasa Chamber of Commerce expressed qualified support for the bill. The reconciliation provisions were good, he said, on 13 May. He cautioned, however, that it would work only if implemented in an honest and democratic way.

• Representatives from Lomaiviti Province endorsed the bill on 5 July. Filimone Balaimua, the Roko Tui Lomaiviti (executive head of the Lomaiviti Provincial Council) said that it would lead to reconciliation among all of Fiji's ethnic communities. He added that the Council had reservations about some of the amnesty provisions, and would be recommending certain amendments in their submission to Parliament.

• Lawyer Kitione Vuataki said on 10 July that if the Fiji Law Society went ahead with its threatened judicial challenge to the amnesty clauses in the legislation, lawyers who supported the bill might split from the society to form a separate organization. "The Law Society itself will haemorrhage because there are lawyers like me who support the Bill and we have our freedom of association and freedom of speech," Vuataki said. He warned that if the Law Society challenged the bill in the courts, he would likewise consider challenging the Legal Practitioner's Act and the 1997 Constitution. He said that if the Reconciliation, Tolerance, and Unity Bill should be put to a referendum, as the Law Society insists, the same should be required of the Constitution and the Legal Practitioner's Act.

Vuataki said he did not believe in unconditional amnesty, but believed that the proposed law would stanch the "hemorrhaging" of society. "I totally oppose that type of amnesty as was provided for Rabuka's group in the 1990 and 1997 Constitution. However, I favoured amnesty in exchange for hard data to pull the thorn out of a people who are suffering in pain," he said. He likened the bill to a doctor's stethoscope to check a nation whose institutions including the chiefs of the land, the army, police, civil service, judiciary, and the legal profession. were hemorrhaging. "One does not wait for the final heart attack for the nation to collapse," he said.

Vuataki added on 13 July that he had not received any of the five emails that Law Society President Graeme Leung said were sent out to members concerning the legislation, and said that a couple of lawyers who supported the bill were prepared to take the society to court over the issue.

• The women's organization Soqosoqo Vakamarama i Taukei endorsed the bill on 21 July, according to Adi Finau Tabakaucoro, a representative from Tailevu. Speaking in the Suva suburb of Nabua, Tabakaucoro disassociated herself from the anti-bill stand of the National Council of Women (q.v.), and said that the decision of the Soqosoqo Vakamarama to support the bill had been unanimous, a claim that appeared to contradict earlier statements opposing the bill by spokeswoman Ravesi Johnson on 26 May, as well as the presence at the meeting of Adi Koila Nailatikau, an avowed opponent of the legislation.