Wrong Side of Paradise

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The call to Semiti Qalowasa was brief. The anonymous male said: "Stop working with the squatters and exposing corruption, otherwise you are forcing us to come and rape your wife, and kill your kids and you as well."

"I didn't take it seriously," says the Fijian social worker. "I thought it was just someone who disliked the government. It didn't stop me moving about the community." That was until he turned up for work and found the office of his NGO, the Ecumenical Centre for Research, Education and Advocacy, smeared with excrement. "Then I started to realize I was putting my family in danger with this kind of work."

Qalowasa is not the only one to receive such threats, a product of the tensions created by Fiji's vast squatter settlements. Out of sight of the tiny Pacific nation's internationally famous resorts with their manicured grounds, picture-postcard beaches and beaming staff, a swathe of desperate humanity resides in flimsy and illegally built shanties, without sewerage, running water, electricity or garbage disposal. This mainly Indo-Fijian underclass represents more than 10 per cent of the country's 900,000 population. A third of them have no income at all; four out of five lack the means to provide three meals a day for their families.

And they have no opportunity to purchase a house, says Dharam Lingham, the country's former senior bureaucrat in charge of squatters. "It's one of the main social problems facing Fijians today," he says. "These are very poor people who are already in a cycle of poverty. Whole families are suffering." Lingham, who resigned his post six months ago, says the government's response is hopelessly inadequate. "If something is not done, half of Fiji will be living in these settlements in 20 years' time."

In a soon to be released research paper, Lingham has found that since 2003 the number of squatters has risen from just over 80,000 to the current 100,000, spread across about 125 settlements. He estimates that in the 30-km corridor between the nation's capital Suva and its satellite town of Nausori, 9,000 new homes are required now to cope with the 2,500 people currently facing eviction from existing settlements.

The drift of rural families into cities in search of better jobs and improved living conditions is part of a global trend, but in Fiji the country's land-ownership policies have exacerbated the problem. Laws passed in the 1970s obliged non-indigenous farmers to take 30-year leases on the land they worked. As the leases expired, the Government encouraged indigenous Fijian landowners not to renew them, but instead to farm the land themselves. The non-indigenous farmers were given cash payouts to leave, but their workers received nothing.

Farming families like the Kumars, from the Nanuku squatter settlement on the coast near Suva, were among those who lost their farms and were driven into the city in the late 1990s. "My father and I went twice to the landowners to ask them to renew the lease," says Rohit Kumar. "But both times they refused. I was crying when I left. I was looking around seeing this place I had grown up farming, seeing the place where I used to play as a little boy." Today Kumar, his wife and four children are crammed into an 8 m by 5 m shack located in the middle of a mosquito-infested mangrove swamp. Around them is a garbage tip of old tyres, tins and broken-up asbestos sheeting; human waste fills a network of stinking open drains that regularly overflow during high tide. Kumar and his wife bring in about $80 a week; a relative cares for the children, who do their homework by candlelight. "We only eat meat once a week," he says, while cooking on a smoky outdoor hearth. "Sometimes all we have to eat is rice."

In 2005, Fiji's government pledged $3.5 million to provide housing for the squatters, but Lingham says what's needed is at least $10 million a year for the next ten years. Between 1992 and 2000, the government developed only 1,572 lots to house 7,500 people. According to his research, by 2028 approximately 13,100 leases will have expired, forcing at least 3,500 farming families to seek resettlement. Last month, Fiji's new government, installed in a coup last year by Commodore Voreqe "Frank" Bainimarama, announced it had set aside $1 million for Squatter Upgrading and Resettlement in the 2007 revised budget. The Minister for Women, Social Welfare and Housing, Adi Laufitu Malani, has promised more will be done to provide "social housing for squatters," once the administrative details have been decided. "This is an ongoing program," she said in a statement. "And once all the necessary data and information is collected and discerned, only then can the ministry carry on with its resettlement program." Bainimarama says the problem is poverty, and the answer is jobs. "We need to sort out the lease problem, and we need to sort out the housing problem," he told Time. "But more than anything else we need to find employment and a minimum wage scale for everyone who works in the country."

These statements offer little comfort, though, to squatters facing imminent eviction. In theory, the government prohibits the destruction of squatter settlements on Crown land where residents have no alternative housing. But owners won't back down. Local businessman and Rotarian Peter Drysdale leads a campaign to build 700 homes for squatters. He says landowners take advantage of the squatters' lack of rights, citing the case of a woman who organized an unofficial rental agreement with one family of indigenous Fijians. The woman had electricity connected to her shack, but then the chief plugged the freezer of his fish shop into her supply. "She was looking paler and paler when I saw her," he says. "I thought she was getting sick, but it was that she could not pay these electricity bills. I moved her out. But when I went back to dismantle her house the landowners were standing there with cane knives. They said the structure did not belong to them, but I had to come across their land to get it back. I could have taken them on in court to get the house back. But the moment we won the case would be the moment they would burn it down."

One court decision earlier this year appears to offer the squatters some hope. The Seventh Day Adventist church sought to remove residents from one of Fiji's oldest squatter settlements, on a steep hill and riverside land at Tamavua in Suva's northern suburbs. The church alleged it had legally purchased the squatters' home sites from local chiefs. But the squatters, known locally as "blackbirders" (Solomon Islanders brought to Fiji to work on plantations in the 1930s), argued that more than 40 years ago they were given permission by the chiefs to live on the land. Fiji High Court Justice Roger Coventry ruled the squatters could remain for the time being. Lingham says the decision may prompt thousands of squatters to refuse to move off private and government land. But landowners say they will not retreat. The Bhindi Brothers property company owns dozens of hectares in the Kumars' settlement. While they have tolerated squatters for years, a $20 million development is now planned for the area and Bhindi Brothers have issued eviction notices. General manager Sashi Dhanji says the company had negotiated with the government and had obtained a promise that all the genuine squatters on the block would be rehoused. "We have allowed them to stay on the land because we were not using it," he says. "And we have relocated some internally. They are understanding of the situation. But we will evict them if we have to." Dhanji claims the Seventh Day Adventist decision does not apply to squatters on the company's land, because they had no original agreement to settle there, and had not improved the properties. He notes that it usually costs about $1,000 in legal fees to evict one squatter. "It is a mockery. The problem is that, in the past many years, the government has not done anything to deal with the issue."

Back in Nanuku, Dharmendra Prasad's three-year-old son is sick. Prasad can't tell if the skinny toddler's illness came from the faecal scum in the open drain next to the family's tin shanty, or from the clouds of mosquitoes swarming among the surrounding mangroves. He just hopes it doesn't worsen because he hasn't enough money to feed his family, let alone pay doctors' bills. For the past three weeks, the father of three has failed to obtain his regular $2 an hour construction work; a messenger has just dropped by to tell him the family are soon to be evicted and their home is to be bulldozed. "I couldn't believe it. It was like something hit me here," he says, tapping his heart and slowly rocking his ailing son. When the eviction is enforced, Prasad and his family will have to squat elsewhere—in a place where living conditions are even worse. In Fiji, the Prasads won't be the only ones.