MELBOURNE, July 16 (UPI) -- Australia's foreign affairs minister is confident that the Pacific Islands Forum will maintain the suspension of Fiji at next month's annual meeting in Cairns.
Stephen Smith told Australian media that he believes all 16 members of the forum will remain firm in the face of expected pressure from several countries that recently held talks with Fiji's military regime.
"Fiji needs to return to democracy," Smith said. "But I also continue to make the point that at some stage we need to find a method and a way of engaging Fiji in a dialogue to bring it back to democracy."
Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama, who took power in Fiji in 2006, met the leaders of Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu in Port Vila, the capital of Vanuatu, for talks last week. The four countries make up the trade body Melanesian Spearhead Group and are also members of the Pacific Islands Forum.
Australia and New Zealand were at the forefront of the ban that took effect in May because Fiji would not adhere to an election later this year. Prior to the ban Smith had visited Fiji and warned the military leaders that by not sticking to the scheduled election in 2009 they face being ousted from the forum, an intergovernmental organization to enhance cooperation between the independent countries of the Pacific Ocean.
Fiji's expulsion marked the first time a country had been suspended in the organization's 38-year history.
A Fiji government Web site said discussions between the military and the heads of government of the other three members were "enlightened."
The leaders acknowledged that Bainimarama's five-year Strategic Framework plan announced on July 1 would help set the island nation on the road to democracy and elections in 2014.
A spokesperson in Bainimarama's office told the news Web site FijiLive that the Melanesian Spearhead Group nations had agreed to help the Pacific Islands Forum to lift the suspension.
But Usaia Waqatairewa, head of the Australian-based Fiji Democracy Movement, condemned the move by the Melanesian Spearhead Group.
"The people of Fiji feel betrayed by the leaders of our Melanesian brothers every time they re-engage and dialogue with a man that has brought nothing but death in custody, injury, humiliation, torture, misery and poverty upon them for the last two and a half years," he wrote on the movement's Web site.
The 40th annual meeting of the Pacific Islands Forum takes place Aug. 5-6 in Cairns, Australia.
The Melanesian Spearhead Group also said they would support Fiji in its offer to host the 2010 meeting of the Pacific Islands Forum, noted the Fiji government's Web site.
