Fiji Week (2004)

Fiji Week is a week of prayer meetings and multicultural programmes planned for the week of the fourth through the eleventh of October, 2004. Organized by a multiracial national committee chaired by the Prime Minister, Laisenia Qarase, Fiji Week is intended to foster reconciliation among Fiji's diverse ethnic communities, especially native Fijians and Indo-Fijians, whose mutual rivalry for political power has dominated Fijian politics for the last generation, and whose relationship has been especially strained since the overthrow of the Indo-Fijian-led government of Mahendra Chaudhry by ethnic Fijian nationalists in the Fiji coup of 2000. Organizers of Fiji Week hope that it will help to bring about a sense of closure to those events.

On 15 September 2004, a source close to the government told the Australian Associated Press that George Speight, the chief instigator of the 2000 coup, who is currently serving life-sentence for treason, had had a change of heart towards the Indo-Fijian community following a religious conversion experience in jail, and that he wished to take part in the Fiji Week activities as a gesture of reconciliation. It was not immediately clear whether he would be allowed out of his Nukulau Island prison to participate in the observances.