Britain announced new sanctions against Fiji on Friday in response to the political crisis in the Pacific island nation that threatens to strip the large Indian minority of most of its representation.
Rebel leader George Speight led a May 19 coup with the goal of guaranteeing political superiority and affirmative action for indigenous Fijians and promising redistribution of resources to benefit them.The last 18 of dozens of legislators taken hostage in Parliament were freed last week as part of a deal that Speight said would disenfranchise ethnic Indians, who make up 44 percent of the population.Britain recalled its envoy to Fiji on Tuesday, and the country has already been suspended from the councils of the Commonwealth.Saying Britain wanted to see an early return to full democracy, Foreign Office minister John Battle on Friday announced cancellation of Foreign Office assistance programs and planned military visits.”We are determined to pursue a commitment by the Fijian authorities to a timetable for return to democratic government based on a fair constitution,” he said. “We will follow this up bilaterally, through the European Union and through the Commonwealth.”He said Britain was pressing its EU partners to impose restrictions on travel by Speight and his associates.”We are canceling all foreign office funded assistance to Fiji’s government.”All Royal Navy visits and joint military exercises have been canceled All other future U.K. defense cooperation has been reviewed,” he said.”We will not issue licenses for any arms or security equipment for export to Fiji where there is a clear risk that it will be used for internal repression.”Battle’s statement said the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group had agreed to meet in September to review the progress the Fijian authorities are making in returning the country to democracy.. When Tony Blair sat down with the leaders of the Group of Seven nations in Okinawa yesterday – it becomes the G8 with the inclusion of Russia today – to discuss the troubled subject of debt relief, there were several ways in which he could have broached the matter. When Tony Blair sat down with the leaders of the Group of Seven nations in Okinawa yesterday – it becomes the G8 with the inclusion of Russia today – to discuss the troubled subject of debt relief, there were several ways in which he could have broached the matter.
He could have made a moral appeal to the consciences of the world’s richest governments – leaching away scarce resources from the poorest countries at the rate of $60m every day. He could have made the long-term practical argument that, in an already conflict-ridden and unstable world, chronic and hopeless insolvency only breeds further instability.Instead, as a master of political presentation, he appealed to their instincts for survival – for, in the last few years, since the subject first came onto the international agenda, the unpromising subject of poor nations’ debt has become a subject of urgent public concern.Some 150,000 postcards and 100,000 e-mails on the subject have been delivered to Downing Street in the last three months alone, the Prime Minister told his fellow leaders.

Four out of five of the hits on Japan’s official website on the Okinawa summit have been related to the debt issue. As Mr Blair’s official spokesman, Alastair Campbell – who knows a thing or two about the importance of public opinion – put it: “We simply cannot afford not to respond to the level of concern on this issue.”Indeed the ironies of the summit arrangement were starkly visible at the working dinner last night – seven well-fed men and their advisers dining on the finest foods while talking earnestly about poverty relief. But these days they seem more than ever aware that the windows are open and that, as they eat and talk, the world is looking in.Whether the G8 will meet the expectations of the debt relief lobby, and of leaders like President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, who pressed them on the issue on Thursday, is another question.Yesterday, the signs were that no stunning new announcement was on its way, and that the final summit communiqué tomorrow will do little more than restate the good intentions outlined in last year’s meeting in Cologne. But Mr Blair’s words, in opening the discussion, made it clear that this is a matter of embarrassment for the G8 – and of frustration for the British Prime Minister. “He does feel,” Mr Campbell acknowledged, “that we could, and should, have made further progress.”That such public pressure should be felt at this, of all G8meetings, is surprising – for the Okinawa summit was supposed to bypass it altogether. Campaign organisations have remarked sarcastically on how convenient the choice of Okinawa – a subtropical island two and a half hours’ flight from Tokyo – has been for the world leaders.

The distance and expense have put it out of the reach of all but the most wealthy and committed international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) – no chance here of the riotous demonstrations that marked the World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle and the gathering of international finance ministers in Washington (where the anti-globalisation movement took flight).But the power of the internet means that, even without the physical presence of thousands of angry people, the pressure is still there on poor countries’ debt and on a range of emerging global issues.In yesterday’s meeting, and in a bilateral meeting with President Putin of Russia, Mr Blair also raised the issue of conflict – or ‘blood’ – diamonds, bought and sold from countries like Sierra Leone to the profit of brutal local warlords. Today, the G8 will discuss the battle against diseases like Aids, tuberculosis and malaria. In the developed world, the drugs to treat them are scarce only because of their high cost, a consequence of the patents taken out on them by multinational pharmaceutical companies.Hovering in the background in Okinawa are NGOs, like Médicins Sans Frontiÿres, intent on making this the next focus of the anti-capitalism and anti-globalisation coalition.But the issue dominating yesterday’s deliberations was debt, and the G8’s stark failure to deliver on the promises made at Cologne last year.Then, the world’s leaders set themselves the target of writing off $100bn of debt to 24 of the world’s highly indebted poor countries (HIPCs) by the end of 2000. Seven months in they have managed to agree on $15bn to just nine of them. The goal has now slipped to 20 HIPCs by the end of the year, but even that is looking unlikely.”The G7 claim they are speeding up the programme they agreed a year ago in Cologne,” said Ann Pettifor, the British director of the debt relief campaign, Jubilee 2000 “They are not speeding up, they are only catching up.