this feudal system finally ended in 1916, forty thousand Indians opted
to stay on. Today Indo-Fijians make up almost half of Fiji’s population
of 750,000. They are part of what the tourist brochures call a “vibrant,
multicultural society,” but one I quickly come to recognize as yet
another society fractured along racial, ethnic, or religious lines.
I share a ride into town with an American named Steve, who says
he is with the State Department but reminds me of some of the CIA
types I used to know in Central America. He has just visited Somoa,
Palau, Tuvalu, and the Marshalls. “It’s damn scary,” he says. “Some of
those places are only a few meters above the water. You drive down the
main road and you’re looking at ocean to the right and left. If a storm
comes you find a big palm tree to hang onto and hope you don’t get
washed away. The State Department’s really not paying enough atten-
tion to these environmental threats.”
Suva itself is a typical ramshackle Third World capital, with a cen-
tral market and bus depot, a university, Japanese fishing vessels tied up
at its docks, and foreign-owned clothing plants on its outskirts. It has
little charm and few of the resort amenities that attract tourists to Nadi
and the outer islands.
“The political climate is heating up and heading towards a real
frenzy,” a local reporter tells me after I have settled in at the Centra, the
harbor-front hotel on Victoria Parade where foreign business types and
journalists stay. This week it is also hosting a meeting of the Fiji
Human Rights Commission.
The day I arrive, Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry overrules
his secretary of home affairs and decides to permit a protest march by
Fijian nationalists opposed to Indians holding political power. Steve
later tells me the U.S. ambassador helped convince the prime minister
that this was the right and democratic thing to do. Chaudhry is the
country’s first elected Indian head of state since a Fijian nationalist
coup in 1987. But while ethnic tensions seethe, it is climate change
that represents the greatest threat to Fiji’s future.
Native Fijians tend to work in the tourism industry, while Indians
make up most of the 23,000 families raising sugar. Both of these pri-
mary industries are threatened by global warming.
Fiji’s director of environment, Epeli Nasome, is dressed conserva-
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