Fiji rulers extend free-speech ban

WELLLINGTON, New Zealand, June 30 (UPI) -- Fiji's military rulers have gone one step further than banning speakers at a UNESCO youth conference. They have banned any announcement of the ban.

Jacque Koroi, the organizer of the Pacific Youth Festival, backed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to take place July 13-18, told local media outlets that the Ministry of Information has vetted all the speakers.

Koroi is also quoted as saying that "several people who will be unable to make their presentations" are being investigated and will not be able to speak.

Around 600 people from 30 countries in the Pacific region are expected in Suva for the second annual youth festival to discuss youth educational, social and development issues. The first Pacific Youth Festival was in Tahiti in July 2006 and attended by around 900 people ages 16 to 30, according to a UNESCO report.

Koroi would not name those who the authorities have banned, but media speculation is that one is the associate editor of the Fiji Times newspaper, Sophie Foster.

Foster has been an outright critic of the regime that took control in a coup in December 2006, the latest of four military takeovers in the past 20 years.

She has spoken out against government censors now present in newsrooms to vet copy as it is produced. At a recent meeting of the Fiji Women's Rights Movement in Suva, the capital, she said that "silence has been so obviously seen, read, and heard across the pages, screens and airwaves of the mainstream media in Fiji."

Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, a former military commodore, announced the latest clampdown ahead of a major speech he will give later this week on the future of the island nation, media said.

Last month the Pacific Islands Forum, an intergovernmental organization to enhance cooperation between the independent countries of the Pacific Ocean, kicked Fiji out over delayed elections. Bainimarama cancelled elections earlier in the year in the face of an exclusion threat from the Pacific Islands Forum.

The exclusion of Fiji is the first time a country has been suspended in the organization's 38-year history. It was founded in 1971 as the South Pacific Forum, changing its name in 2000.

Member states are Australia, the Cook Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, New Zealand, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.

Tensions have been growing in the past decade between native Fijian and Indian-origin Fijians. Both Hindi and Christian organizations including churches have complained of censorship in the past.

More than 300 islands -- only 105 of them permanently inhabited -- make up the Republic of Fiji. The islands of Viti Levu and Vanua Levu have nearly 90 percent of the republic's population.

Suva and its greater urban area, on the main Fijian island of Viti Levu, have around 175,000 inhabitants including many Europeans and Chinese, a large ethnic minority.