Why Ratu Mara’s our top choice

Man Of The Year

In the past few decades the Island nations have moved from colonialism to independence, developing a new sense of identity as individual nations and as a unified regional player in today’s modern, complex world. There were a small band of Island leaders who could be said to have been active engineers of this transition. Pacific Islands Monthly has chosen Fiji’s Prime Minister Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara as this year’s Man of the Year because of the role he has played in this transition.

Although his critics may see him as a master manipulator managing a post-coup, non-democratically elected govern ment, his supporters say he acted out of a sense of duty, to guide the country peacefully back to economic and political health.

In any case, there is no doubt he has been the region’s most influential leader in the past 25 years.

Ratu Mara is a university graduate and a traditional leader who was groomed to become an administrator and political

leader. He began influencing the region in 1964 when he was allocated a portfolio, and began to influence the wider region when he attended his first South Pacific Commission (SPC) meeting in 1965 and called for greater self-determination for the Islands in directing the policies which would affect them.

Ratu Mara’s criticism of the exclusion of politics from the SPC also led to establishment of the South Pacific Forum, of which he is hailed as the father. He was influential in the economic development of the region when he used personal diplomacy and contacts to break a deadlock in Lome Convention negotiations on sugar price increases.

Pacific Islands Monthly has chosen Sir Leonard Usher, who also has a long association with the region as former publisher of The Fiji Times and a journalist who covered the constitutional crisis and the early South Pacific Commission meetings, to trace the path of our Man of the Year. □