Wellington - New Zealand and Australia on Wednesday ordered Fiji's top diplomats to leave in a tit-for-tat response to the expulsions of their envoys by the island nation's military strongman Voreqe Bainimarama the previous day. The senior diplomats of both nations in Fiji's capital Suva were given 24 hours to pack and go home on Tuesday evening with Bainimarama accusing them of waging a negative campaign against his government, which has ruled since he ousted the elected government nearly three years ago.
New Zealand Foreign Minister Murray McCully said Fiji's acting head of mission in Wellington, Kuliniasi Seru Savou, had been declared persona non grata and instructed to leave the country.
In Canberra, Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said Suva's senior diplomat, Kamlesh Kumar Arya, had been given similar marching orders, and dismissed as "baseless" Bainimarama's allegations that Australian foreign officials had meddled in Fiji's internal affairs.
Smith said the expulsions were regrettable but he was still open to talks with Fiji.
But it was a dialogue "that can only proceed on the basis of Fiji showing some return to democratic processes."
"A military dictatorship effectively appointing at its own whim members of the judiciary is not a trapping of democracy."
Todd Cleaver is the third head of New Zealand's mission in Suva to be thrown out by the Bainimarama regime and McCully said the office would be closed while its ability to continue to operate was assessed.
McCully said he absolutely refuted allegations from Suva that Fiji High Court Judge Anjala Wati had been victimized when she requested a visa to bring her sick infant son to New Zealand for surgery.
He said she was exempted from New Zealand's ban on visits by members and officials of the Bainimarama regime on humanitarian grounds and they were in New Zealand receiving medical treatment.
Ordering the diplomats out, Bainimarama accused his South Pacific neighbours of being "engaged in a dishonest and untruthful strategy to undermine our judiciary, our independent institutions and our economy."
He said Australia had refused to allow judges Fiji recruited from Sri Lanka to visit Australia, citing this an example of interference in his country's internal affairs.
He told Radio Tarana, an Auckland-based Indian station, Wednesday that he had acted to protect the sovereignty of his nation and the integrity of the judiciary.
"We need to protect our judiciary, not the interests of Australia and New Zealand, here in Fiji," he said. The Sri Lankan judges were to fill vacancies in the courts left by Bainimarama's decision in April to scrap Fiji's constitution and sack all the judges.
Commentators said this comment was ironic given that Bainimarama had sacked the judges and revoked the 1997 constitution after the Court of Appeal ruled his government illegal.
Bainimarama, who launched his military coup in December 2006 and appointed himself Prime Minister, declared a state of emergency, including censorship of the media and a ban on opposition political meetings.
Fiji's membership of the British Commonwealth and the 16-member Pacific Islands Forum has been suspended.
He has rejected calls by international bodies, including the United Nations and European Union - a major aid donor to the island nation of 840,000 people - to restore democracy and hold new polls this year, saying he will not do so before September 2014.
