The Tale of Fiji Live: “I Think I’m Going to Die Here”

By Jim Benning
Online Journalism Review

SUVA, FIJI – The call came in at 10:45 a.m. as Fijian magazine editor Yashwant Gaunder was settling into a meeting in his office in Fiji’s capital city of Suva: Less than two miles away, in a brazen coup attempt, masked gunmen armed with AK-47 rifles had just stormed the country’s Parliament building and taken Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry and seven cabinet ministers hostage.

Gaunder put the phone down and ran into the editorial room. His tiny staff, which published a glossy political monthly and contributed occasionally to his money-draining fijilive news Web site, had also heard the news and sat frozen at their desks.

“A lot of people were in shock,” he recalls.

Angry mobs would soon be torching and looting businesses just outside his doors, but Gaunder didn’t flinch. The 36-year-old former newspaperman sat down at a computer, pounded out a bare-bones story and loaded it onto fijilive.com, never stopping to consider that only 9,000 of Fiji’s 775,000 citizens can even access the Web.

“I don’t know why,” the tall, mustached editor recalls recently as he takes a break from the coverage in Fiji’s tense capital city, “but my first thought was simply to get the news on the Net.”

Gaunder pauses, leans back in his chair and cracks a smile.

“Amazing, huh?”

What’s most amazing is how Gaunder and his staff, including one reporter who “hardly ever” logs on to the Web and hadn’t checked her e-mail in months, instantly harnessed all their modest resources amid the May 19 chaos and transformed fijilive from an obscure South Pacific Web address into the must-read destination site for everyone in the world seeking up-to-the-minute news of the Fiji coup.

At first, they didn’t even know whether anyone was reading their reports. After all, before the coup, fijilive averaged only 5,000 visits a day. But, late that first night in their office, while filing updates and monitoring the BBC News coverage of the rebellion, Gaunder and his team were surprised to see their Web site’s front page beaming back at him from the television screen.

“That was their graphic because the BBC had no photos,” Gaunder recalls. “After that, everything just went crazy.”

In fact, with most phone lines down or jammed and the country’s only other news Web site, Fiji Village News, not updating for two days, fijilive was at key times the island nation’s only news link to the outside world. And the world desperately wanted in. After the initial BBC report, calls and e-mail interview requests poured in from the BBC, ABC News and journalists the world over.

“All of the reporters were telling us they were getting the news from us and no one else,” Gaunder says.

Indeed, not even Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald maintains a bureau in Fiji. When news broke of the coup, online news editor Richard Woolveridge went straight to fijilive.

“Everybody was patching into their site,” he says. “Until we got our own people on the ground, they were critical.”

Not bad for a Web site that, hours earlier, as Gaunder puts it, “wasn’t a fully dedicated news service.”

Gaunder, a Fijian Indian, usually devotes nearly all of his editorial resources, including his half a dozen reporters and editors, to The Review, a monthly political magazine he launched in 1992 after quitting his editing job at the Fiji Times. The magazine, chock full of ads, is Gaunder’s “bread and butter,” he says.

But last year he built seven Web sites, including a dating site, a humor site, an e-commerce site and fijilive. The small news site, run by a lone editor in The Review offices, published the contents of the printed Fiji Post each day and occasionally featured an original story.

The Coup

Reporter Tamirisi Digitaki, who had been covering a protest march in Suva led by ethnic Fijians, heard an announcement that gunmen had taken over Parliament. She hailed a cab, raced to the building and dialed Gaunder on a cell phone, describing the scene.

Fijilive Managing Director Yashwant Gaunder.

News was sketchy. Inside, Fijian rebels held hostages. Police had blocked all entrances to the building. A mob, it was said, was running toward Parliament.

Back at the office, Gaunder took down notes as fast as Digitaki could deliver the news. As many of his employees raced home for safety, he wrote the story and immediately placed it on the Web site.

“I was worried that the Internet link would go down,” he says.

Then he quickly assembled a team to cover the unfolding drama.

Digitaki would stay at Parliament. Reporters Avin Rahish, Shailendra Singh, Nalinesh Arun and Verleshwar Singh would remain at the office, monitoring radio reports and television coverage and helping to field calls from Digitaki. Driver Rudra Nand would stay, too, and shuttle reporters around the city.

Whether he could hang onto his Web programmer, however, was another story.

At first, programmer Nitesh Chandra, 23, handled the duties without question. But that afternoon, the situation grew increasingly dangerous, and Chandra began having second thoughts.

A mob of ethnic Fijians ran from Parliament through the streets of downtown Suva. From fijilive’s second story window, Chandra and the fijilive staff watched as men and women torched and looted businesses below. Flames and smoke rose from nearby buildings and cries echoed through the streets.

That’s when Chandra received a telephone call from his aunt, demanding that he return home for safety.

Chandra had good reason to worry. The rebel gunmen and violent mob, comprising ethnic Fijians, were targeting Fiji Indians, who make up 44 percent of the country’s population and are mostly descendants of farm laborers imported from India in the late 1800s. Most of The Review’s staff is Fiji Indian, including Chandra. He knew the mob might try to enter the office building.

“If they come in, there’s no escape route for us,” he thought to himself. “There’s only one door.”

Chandra considered calling it quits. Then Gaunder sat him down for a talk.

“A chance like this comes once in a lifetime when we can tell the whole world about the coup in Fiji,” Gaunder told him. “We’ll be a part of history.”

Chandra stayed.

The staff did everything they could to secure their office, drawing the blinds, cutting almost all the lights in the room and locking the building elevator. Meanwhile, at Parliament, Digitaki battled her own fears. As an ethnic Fijian, she wouldn’t be targeted by the rebels for racial reasons, but the situation was volatile, and she knew anything could happen.

“Should I stay or leave?” she asked Gaunder over her cell phone. “I’m worried.”

“If you think it’s getting dangerous,” he told her, “then leave.”

Digitaki stayed and, along with about five other journalists, was allowed to enter Parliament, where she had access to coup leader George Speight and the rebels. She dialed in more reports.

Gaunder, meanwhile, wanted to join her in Parliament. He called Jo Nata, one of Speight’s key advisors and a former Review editor, and asked whether he could be let into the building.

No way, Nata said.

“These guys hate Indians,” he told Gaunder. “They’ll kill you.”

Through the night, Gaunder and his reporters hunkered down in front of their IBM computers, taking calls from Digitaki and monitoring broadcast media.

They broke key stories: Among them, that the Fijian president’s daughter was among the hostages, and that Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry, also one of the hostages, had been beaten.

As they finished each story, they saved it on a disk and handed it to Chandra, who popped it into his computer and coded the articles.

“I was nervous,” Chandra recalls. “Everyone was looking at me. I was the only person doing html.”

Still, he calmly finished coding each story, dialed their server on a 33K modem and loaded each piece onto the site.

As the night wore on, the staff battled fatigue, munched on crackers — their sole food source — and continued to write.

Then, at 4 a.m., the server crashed.

The staff stopped typing and slumped back in their chairs.

“Now what?” they asked.

Chandra shakes his head as he recalls the moment.

“We had momentum,” he says, “and it just stopped.”

By then, fijilive had logged an unprecedented 50,000 visits that day, simply more than its server could handle.

Chandra spent the next hour trying to load fijilive’s content onto Gaunder’s businessnews.com.fj. The plan worked.

The staff sent hundreds of e-mails to reporters and readers around the globe, alerting them to the change. (Over the following days, as their Web infrastructure strained under even more visits — 175,000, at one point — Chandra would transfer the content to each of Gaunder’s seven sites, including pacificjoke.com. “People thought it was a joke,” he recalls, chuckling.)

The staff continued to work into Saturday night, operating on no sleep.

The situation inside Parliament changed, and Digitaki grew nervous.

“Some of Speight’s supporters started running around telling us we had to hide because the soldiers would be moving in and turning off the lights,” she recalls. “They moved five of us (journalists) into a small room and told us we couldn’t use the mobile phones.

“It was very very tense. There was one photographer inside. He was so frightened his hands were shaking. He couldn’t’ take any photos.”

Fijilive reporter Avin Rahish worked day and night for weeks covering the coup, often sleeping on the office floor with a pillow and blanket he stored in his desk.

The journalists sat quietly, but when a guard turned away, they huddled together and pretended to talk. Digitaki quietly dialed Gaunder on her cell phone and whispered a report.

Hours later, the group was ushered out of the building, unharmed.

Digitaki, however, was in for more danger. At one point, as she camped out in front of Parliament, shots were fired into the building that put her directly in the line of fire. She knew that a Reuters staffer had been injured earlier. She crouched down to avoid getting hit and dialed Gaunder.

“Tell my parents I love them,” she told him as bullets flew over her head. “I think I’m going to die here.”

But she stayed put and continued dialing Gaunder with reports.

Fijilive, as a result, broke more key stories.

The Aftermath

These days, with the drama now a month old, Digitaki is back in the office, and fijilive is featuring fewer updates.

Gaunder and his team are again devoting most of their time to The Review. The new issue is due out soon, and because revenue from the magazine subsidizes fijilive, it takes priority.

Readers have noticed the downturn in coverage. Some have complained. Gaunder, relaxing in his office, shrugs. Commerce has come to a halt in the country since the coup started, he explains, and he has to make money. Fijilive carries no advertising, so it’s bound to suffer.

He’s worried about the future. His small publishing company is already taking big hits. The staff agreed to a substantial pay cut a few weeks ago, he says, and morale is low.

“Initially, you’re working on raw energy covering the coup,” he says.

“Once the initial euphoria is gone, it’s difficult to keep going. I’ve seen a lot of people around here depressed. [They're] worried about their future.”

Gaunder shakes his head.

“I’m struggling as the managing director. I’m writing stories. I’m talking to the banks to ensure our business survives.”

Even if it does, he says, he may lose many of his writers.

“They’ll go to Australia, New Zealand and the U.S.,” he says. “They have to go where they feel comfortable.”

Indeed, reporter Avin Rahish, 25, has already applied to the Australian government for residency.

He worked day and night for weeks covering the coup, often sleeping on the office floor with a pillow and blanket he stored in his desk.

He is proud of his work, he says, but he doesn’t foresee a future for himself and his wife in Fiji.

“I don’t see life for me getting back to normal in the next year,” he says, his eyes downcast. “I don’t want to waste another year in Fiji.”

All this political and economic turmoil has taken a toll on Gaunder.

“I’m probably the oldest 36-year-old in Fiji,” he says.

Over the years, he has endured countless threats on his life, he says.

With the situation in Suva as tense as it is, he has worried about the safety of his wife, and the security of his home.

“I’ve got a wooden home,” he says, alluding to the recent torching of buildings in Suva. “If you’ve got a wooden home in Fiji, you’ve got to be worried.”

He too could leave his native country, he says, but he has no desire to go.

Years ago, “I could have taken a job in New Zealand,” he says. “I didn’t leave. My heart is here. I’ve never thought of leaving Fiji.”

Besides, he adds, fijilive has achieved great acclaim lately, and that could open new doors.

“Now we’ve got to figure out a way to make it pay,” he says.

It hasn’t paid yet. For the time being, Gaunder’s staff is settling for the sort of rewards that money can’t buy.

Gaunder leans back in his chair and peers into the editorial office, where his staff is busy at work.

“I have to give it to our team,” he says.

Gaunder pauses, then cracks a broad smile.

“We didn’t make any money, but it’s nice to know we made history.”