STOP PRESS. Fiji Today first to acknowledge good work by government in cyclone preparation. Its posting today Thursday 18th, read at 7:30pm NZ time, reads:.Credit where it is due. "Thank You" to our Government and the PM.Peter Firkin. This is the only "moderate" anti-Bainimarama government blog.
Readers will have noted that the only postings on this blog for the past few days have concerned Cyclone Evan. Readers of the anti-Bainimarama government blogs will also have noticed that the worst cyclone in 20 years has not even been mentioned.As the local Fiji media report winds of over 200kph, unbelievably high seas, roads and bridged closed, no public transport in the North and West, all internal flights and some international flights closed, the loss of electric power and water, roofs whipped off houses, rising flood waters, breached sea walls and landslips, two ships grounded in Suva harbour, two warehouses of sugar and fertilisers lost, uprooted cassava, vudi and banana, the military on high alert to assist the emergency services, eight thousand people in 137 evacuation centres, and damage expected to greatly exceed the $300 million estimated for the cyclone damage in Samoa; in short, as the people of Fiji experience yet another massive natural disaster, the blogs that claim to be so concerned about human rights and the plight of ordinary Fijians forced to live under the barbaric, illegal government of Voqere Bainimarama, have so far chosen to ignore the event.
Instead, Coup4.5, Fiji Today and Truth for Fiji, the blog of exiled Ratu Tevita Mara, all publish the same story, the claims by exiled former FRMF Col. Baledrokadroka, that the RFMF submission to the Constitution Commission is "full of lies" , while Sai Lealea's Fiji Coup 2006 again raises the question of why Nur Bano's accountancy firm is paying the salaries of Bainimarama's ministers. Discombobulated Bubu's last posting was a week ago on the "untruths" of the A-G's annual conference. And most of the other anti-blogs — Luveni Viti, Solivakasama, Fiji Uncensored, Fiji Democracy Now — seem to have gone into hibernation.
But don't worry. They will all wake up to the cyclone soon enough as they ferret out, and revel in the shortcomings in disaster relief revealed to them by their usually reliable inside informers.
Meanwhile, on my blog I have the usual line up of comments by the "antis" ridiculing Government's Look North policy and saying it will soon be begging Australia and New Zealand for cyclone relief. "Surely," says one of them, " it is time for Fijians to wake up and return to a real government? This useless military regime couldn't even fix a dunny." Really! The disaster preparations seem to have worked particularly well, and so far, and unlike Samoa, no deaths have been reported.
And as a comment to Allen Lockington's Saturday posting, written and published before the cyclone hit Fiji, an inattentive anti asks why I published an "outdated and inaccurate projection chart. Don't you care about being accurate, timely and helpful?" It is my blog that published reports on the cyclone. His anti blogs were more concerned with other issues.