Heavily armed Fijian troops have been ordered on to the streets of the capital, Suva, after military chiefs said that they feared foreign powers were set to invade Fiji to quell an imminent military coup.
Australia and New Zealand, considered the most likely countries to intervene in Fiji, have both denied any such plans.
However, the Australian Army confirmed that a Black Hawk helicopter that crashed while trying to land on an Australian navy ship off Fiji hours before was carrying six members of the Australian Special Air Service (SAS).
The crash left one dead and another missing. Air Marshall Angus Houston, the chief of the Australian Defence Force, said that the aircrew and SAS members were part of an Australian force stationed off Fiji to help evacuate Australians if another coup took place. “We were preparing for evacuation operations out of Fiji,” he said.
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Foreign ministers from Pacific nations, including Australia and New Zealand, will gather in Sydney on Friday to discuss the Fijian crisis. Laisenia Qarase, the Fijian Prime Minister, requested the meeting under the terms of the South Pacific Forum’s Biketawa declaration.
That document stipulates that a Pacific nation may request intervention from other regional states to counter a threat to its security. Pacific leaders meet annually under the auspices of the South Pacific Forum.
Mr Qarase has not ruled out seeking armed foreign intervention in Fiji, saying only that he hoped “it would not come to that”.
In Suva late this evening, Fijian soldiers had secured strategic sites including the Vodafone and Fiji Telecom headquarters, the Fijian electricity authority and government offices. Troops were also stationed outside the Fijian Parliament.
Colonel Pita Driti, the Fiji military’s land force commander, said: “We are just taking precautionary measures tonight because a foreign intervention could be imminent.”
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He said that troops had been stationed around the Suva peninsula. “This is to prepare for any invasion and the military has maintained its stand that we will not accept any foreign intervention,” said Colonel Driti. “Even though we are a small army, we are not afraid.”
Mr Qarase and the country’s military commander, Commodore Frank Bainimarama, who have been in a tense stand-off for two months over his increasingly strident threats to use the military to oust the Government, met today in Wellington.
Their meeting was organised by Helen Clark, the New Zealand Prime Minister, in an eleventh-hour attempt to stem a coup that had been expected to take place this week. It would be the fourth in 19 years.
Defiant as he entered the meeting at the Governor-General’s residence, Mr Bainimarama, said: “He [Mr Qarase] is going to be wasting his time debating issues with me. The meeting’s going to be the shortest meeting he’s ever attended.”
But Mr Bainimarama emerged after two hours of talks appearing subdued and refusing to talk to journalists. He boarded a commercial flight to Fiji, while the Fijian Prime Minister flew the same route home aboard a New Zealand military jet.
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Mr Bainimarama and his senior commanders have repeatedly threatened another coup unless Mr Qarase agreed to drop legislation that would exonerate the leaders of the 2000 coup, sack the police commissioner, the Australian Andrew Hughes, and curtail police investigations into whether Commodore Bainimarama was guilty of sedition.
Mr Bainimarama was almost killed in a failed but bloody mutiny linked to the coup six years ago.
Mr Hughes left Fiji yesterday after saying earlier this week that Commodore Bainimarama considered himself above the law and that his statements were “mind-boggling”. Reports from Fiji claimed that the police commissioner’s safety had been threatened.
Mr Qarase said that today’s meeting in Wellington did not reach any conclusions, but added: “We made substantial progress on the request and demands from the military.”
Alexander Downer, the Australian Foreign Minister, said that the situation in Fiji remained “very worrying”. Earlier this week he believed that a coup was imminent.
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The prospect of another coup had created fear and anxiety among Fiji’s roughly equal Indian and indigenous Fijian populations, he said.
Previous coups have ousted governments in Fiji that have been dominated by Fijians of Indian descent, whose ancestors were brought into the country to work on sugar plantations. Indians now dominate commerce in Fiji -- a source of resentment for many indigenous Fijians.
Fijian troops have long served in international peace-keeping missions, a role which Kofi Annan, the United Nations Secretary-General, said today might be jeopardised in the event of another coup.
The United States, Britain, the European Union and the UN have all warned the military not to interfere with Fiji’s elected government.