Word: fijis
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...months before he appointed himself President and put Fiji's elected leaders under house arrest, military commander Frank Bainimarama had been threatening to stage a coup unless Laisenia Qarase's government abandoned plans to pardon those behind the abortive coup and mutiny of 2000. But some in Fiji say Bainimarama, who during the mutiny narrowly escaped assassination by rebel troops, has another motive: ending a police probe into the killings of four soldiers from the mutinous special-forces unit...
...weeks before the coup Bainimarama was under increasing pressure over the murders. Police probes and court actions by victims' families and surviving soldiers could have seen him suspended, forced to give evidence about the killings, and potentially facing charges and a six-figure compensation claim against the Fiji Military Force...
...Among Bainimarama's increasingly peremptory demands to the Qarase government were the shutting down of the police investigation into the murders and the removal of Fiji's Police Commissioner, Andrew Hughes. The day after the coup, Dec. 7, Bainimarama sacked Hughes, who had already left the country after death threats to his family, and appointed Army intelligence chief Jim Koroi as acting Police Commissioner. Next day his soldiers took in for questioning six former CRW soldiers, alleging that they could foment civil unrest...
...Bainimarama has become a coup leader himself. This week he overthrew the South Pacific nation's lawfully elected government of Laisenia Qarase. It is Fiji's fourth coup in two decades. Before he took the final step, declaring himself president, the military man had thundered for months against the government's move to grant amnesty to the 2000 coup plotters. Bainimarama's talk became more strident in recent days, as the military tightened its grip on security personnel, the bureaucracy and the country's media...
...Bainimarama declared a state of emergency on Wednesday in Fiji. Without a shot being fired, he dissolved Parliament, dismissed the acting police chief, appointed a new prime minister and made himself president. "We have reasonable grounds to believe that the life of the state is being threatened," Bainimarama said. "Should we be pushed to use force, let me state that we will do so very quickly...