Dictator Frank is lying his face off

fijidemocracynow2009

As we’ve pointed out before, dictators are prone to tell lies because it’s so easy for them to get away with it.

They know they are not accountable to anyone and they know that big, bold lies are the best and quickest way to gloss over inconvenient truths.

And our very own dictator, Frank Bainimarama, is proving that when it comes to telling whopping big lies he’s in a league of his own.

The most recent example was his address to the ACP Council of Ministers meeting Brussels where he further fine-tuned his big lie about Fiji under military control.

The main truth he wanted to gloss over was his central role in the illegal overthrow of a democratically elected government and his refusal to accept the ruling of a court of law.

So what does he do? He makes it sound as if all responsibility for establishing his dictatorship was down to the puppet president.

The dictator side-stepped the central issue, which was the ruling of a properly constituted court of appeal that his overthrow of the government in December 2006 and his setting up an interim government were completely illegal.

Instead, he referred to “a difficult legal situation” as if that was all
the justification a president needed for abrogating a Constitution. Then he prattled on about political reform, but failed to mention the current situation and his spectacular trampling of human rights, such as freedom of speech.

And had questions been allowed in Brussels (if anyone had bothered to listen, that is) you can bet the first one would have been something like this:

“Er, excuse me, Mr Dictator, but can you explain how political reform can ever happen in Fiji if no one is allowed to say what they think, except you?”