A royal family is grabbing attention with love affairs, rebellious children and financial scandals - right here in the South Pacific, writes PAUL RAFFAELE.
If the king of Tonga is dying it is news to Ma'afu, his private secretary. "Go to the gym, see for yourself," he tells me, and points me in the direction of the public gym.
The rumours had been inspired by the fact that for many years King Taufa'ahau Tupou IV was more interested in Tongan feasts than his health. This won him a place in the 1976 Guinness Book of Records as the world's heftiest ruler, buckling the scales at 209.5kg. It also left him with diabetes and a heart problem.
The gym is five minutes' drive from the palace. There, Kala'uta Kupu, the instructor, opens a thick ledger that has meticulously listed the King's thrice-weekly workouts since he began in 1993. "His Majesty dying? Hah!" he snorts.
Kupu snaps to attention as a black car pulls up at the gym and the 83-year-old King emerges clad in green shorts, white T-shirt, red socks and gym boots. Although more than 1.8m (6ft), his massive frame is doubled over by arthritis, and he hobbles silently into the gym, gripping metal walking sticks without a flicker of emotion.
He settles into a leg-press machine and is immediately surrounded by the royal guard. One soldier sets the weights at 144lb; another cradles a small fan and directs it at the Monarch as he begins to exercise. There is a soldier to count each repetition; a soldier to catch the King if he slips; and two more manning a throne-sized chair in case the King needs to rest. For 45 minutes he moves along the line of exercise machines with his praetorian guard. Then his physician, the silver-haired Dr Taniale Palu, takes his blood pressure. "A healthy 120 over 80," the doctor murmurs, saying he expects his patient to live for many more years.
Tonga, one of the smallest and poorest nations, suffers under the world's most scandal-ridden monarchy. The playboy Crown Prince and his sister, both multimillionaires, benefit significantly from what little wealth the country earns. At 53, the Prince still refuses to marry and give the kingdom an heir.
The King rules with near-absolute power and travels the globe, raking in hundreds of millions of dollars of aid from wealthy nations while Tonga squanders money on projects that have been comically disastrous.
Recently, the King approved a contract for a group of South Korean religious fanatics, calling themselves the World Peace Corps, who descended on Tonga claiming that a matchbox-sized generator they had invented would, combined with prayer, convert seawater into gas. Tonga's 700,000 sq km of territory is 99.8 per cent open ocean, and the King saw the invention as a big money-spinner.
He attended a World Peace Corps service in the capital, Nuku'alofa, and leased the group land at no cost on which to build a church, but their invention was revealed as nonsense.
In 1990, in another attempt to generate power, the King decided to import 30 million used tyres from America to burn to produce energy. Happily, Greenpeace managed to put a halt to this potential environmental disaster.
He once showed interest in an American businessman's plan to dump four million litres of toxic waste a year in Tonga. This time it was the country's doctors who threatened to leave the kingdom en masse if it happened.
He also sought Mexican backing to drain a lagoon on a volcanic island, cover it with concrete and install a depot for Iranian crude oil. He claimed "earnings would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars" but Tonga was unable to find a backer to fund the multimillion-dollar costs.
King Taufa'ahau did have one genuine money-making idea: selling Tongan passports abroad. More than 5000 passports were sold at upwards of $US20,000 ($47,400) each by Tonga's honorary consul in Hong Kong, George Chen. Hong Kong Chinese, wanting an insurance policy before Britain handed the colony back to China, were eager buyers, as were President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, his wife Imelda and their family.
The trade, however unsavoury, netted about $30 million, a considerable sum for a country whose annual government budget is $45 million, but inevitably things started going wrong.
The King did not want the money kept in Tonga, saying "the Government would only spend it on roads". So the money was invested safely in a trust fund in the Bank of America until 1999, when an American investment specialist, Jesse Bogdonoff, persuaded the King to let him transfer $20 million of it into a higher-yielding new company in Nevada, called Millennium Asset Management.
Bogdonoff, a Buddhist from North Carolina, once sold magnets to cure back pain. He tickled the King's fancy by designing a peace monument, a 5m-high sundial that stands by the palace - a gift from his Buddhist sect that honoured the King's dedication to "world peace".
Three years ago a royal decree was issued proclaiming Bogdonoff a court jester. "He told me that in medieval times a king always had a jester to amuse him, and so I appointed him mine," the King tells me in a later interview.
If anyone enjoyed the joke it was Bogdonoff. Last September the Tongan press revealed that the $20 million had been lost in the purchase of obscure life-insurance policies that gambled on the early deaths of elderly Americans.
Millennium Asset Management lasted only four months into the millennium before being dissolved. Two cabinet ministers, trustees of the fund, were ousted. The court jester has not been seen since he came to Tonga in September to explain the loss.
Until the mid-19th century Tonga's rulers were warlords who constantly fought each other. The nation was unified by the King's ancestor, Taufa'ahau, an admirer of the British monarchy, who renamed himself King George I. His closest adviser was the Rev Shirley Baker, a Wesleyan missionary, who nudged the pagan nation into Christianity. In 1875 he framed Tonga's constitution, which entrenched the King's unchallenged power with a rubber-stamp Parliament that he can dissolve at any time.
King George turned Tonga's most powerful chieftains into titled nobles, 33 hereditary landed gentry who occupy the second rank of a feudal three-class society still segregated by blood. At the feet of the royals and the nobles squat about 100,000 commoners, legally forbidden to marry anyone from the King's extended family.
Although Tonga was never colonised it was until 1970 a British protectorate, with the King ruling the country and Britain handling its foreign affairs.
The gym is not the best place to talk to the king so I am invited to his graceful 19th-century palace by the sea, its faded red roof topped with a steeple flying the royal standard. The King sits in his ground-floor study, surrounded by holy pictures on the weatherboard walls. One shows a white-robed Jesus hovering over the King with protective hands placed on his bulky shoulders.
The King is clad in tunic and tupenu huluhulu (the traditional Tongan skirt), looking more like a statue than a living man; immense, monolithic and detached. His dark impassive eyes barely register as I slide on to a seat.
"Kabul has just been liberated," he says, launching into a run-down of Afghanistan's troubles. His sharp wit, impressive memory and analytical skill mock recent reports that he is slipping into senility.
The King grimaces at the word "democracy". "Politicians only ever care about themselves, but a king is devoted to the well-being of his people," he growls. "Look at Fiji with its democracy. The people end up suffering one coup after another. That's why Tongans do not want to change our system of government."
I ask if he thinks Crown Prince Tupouto'a will make a good king. He lifts his massive arms in an eloquent shrug, twisting his face with distaste at the thought. "Maybe," he murmurs.
Others share his doubts about the Crown Prince and his lifestyle. His multimillion-dollar mansion, perched on the hill near the road from the airport, is a lightning-rod for the anger.
"In such a poor country, it's obscene," says Zita Sefo Martel, a Samoan high chief, distantly related to the Tongan royal family, who has visited the mansion several times. "All the furnishings are the best you can buy. The finest Italian marble is everywhere. Even the taps are gold. It is full of his toys, his model aeroplanes, his computer games, and hundreds of toy soldiers that he loves to play war games with. He has a large swimming-pool where he plays with his radio-controlled toy boats."
Tupouto'a, nicknamed "Tippytoes", graduated from Sandhurst and enjoys a good parade, when he can dress up in military uniform.
Although the Tongan Navy is not extensive - three patrol boats and a royal yacht - he flaunts a full-dress naval commander's uniform awash with gold braid, gold buttons, service medals and a sword buckled to a gold-striped belt. He looks a decade older than his 53 years, and has trouble walking, suffering from gout earned by decades of hard living.
He refuses an interview, but one steamy evening I encounter him at the bar of the exclusive, all-male Royal Nuku'alofa Club, across from the palace. For several hours I join him in downing the local Royal beer with a quartet of businessmen, who chortle at all his jokes and agree with his every opinion.
His answer to Tonga's drug problem (marijuana is widely grown and cocaine easily available) is typical. "If a dealer is caught with drugs, you put a 9mm pistol between his eyes and pull the trigger," Tupouto'a says. His friends nod eagerly. "As for the addicts, what they need is a good thumping. Let the police thrash the habit out of them."
The one quality most Tongans admire in their Crown Prince is his refusal, so far, to marry. "The King demands that he marry a noblewoman, to keep the royal line pure, but he's angered his father by turning down all the candidates, scorning them as inbred," says a friend. "His taste runs to commoners."
Tupouto'a used to be Foreign Minister but he resigned several years ago, preferring a lucrative business career. He is the major shareholder of both Royal beer and Shoreline, a company granted the exclusive right to provide the power to the government electricity company. "Every time a Tongan turns on a light or the TV, he puts money in the pocket of the Crown Prince," says one of his friends.
The King also granted Tupouto'a the right to start up Tonga's second phone company, Tonfon, in competition with the Government-owned telecom. He owns the waterside complex housing the Chinese embassy and charges a hefty rent. He is also major shareholder in Tonga's top-level internet domain suffix, .to, which is sold to allcomers from a San Francisco office. Critics ask why the Crown Prince uses his country's domain to generate money for a company rather than for all Tongans.
But if the Crown Prince has profited handsomely from Tonga, his sister, the King's cherished only daughter, Princess Pilolevu Tuita, has done even better. Her father granted her the sole duty-free franchise in Tonga, and she controls a travel company, an import business and Tonga's largest insurance company.
But her big money-spinner is her control of Tongasat, a company that has a 50-year exclusive contract, granted by the King, to lease Tonga's geostationary orbital satellite slots positioned over Asia. Tongasat and the Government each take 50 per cent of the multimillion-dollar profits. The business is so lucrative that in October Tongasat launched its own communications satellite, a Comstar-5, over the Indian Ocean.
Pilolevu owns 80 per cent of Tongasat.
In 1995 business magazine Forbes calculated she had already pulled in $US25 million, a figure the Princess denied. But she refuses to reveal how much her company earns.
"I know there are certain politicians who will take advantage of it," she says in explanation.
She is right. Akilisi Pohiva, Tonga's most popular politician, who has spent time in prison for defying the King, says: "Those slots belong to Tonga, and so Pilolevu has grabbed millions of dollars from our people and stashed them in banks offshore."
Even the Crown Prince was forced by the King to back down when he tried to end this deal.
Like her elder brother, she refuses me an interview, but I spy her at a reception for her 50th birthday at my hotel. About 80 broad-beamed ladies, aristocrats and the moneyed elite are present. Obeying royal protocol, they crawl on their hands and knees across a straw mat for a few private words with Pilolevu.
A chunky young woman takes a microphone and praises the Princess for being the paragon of Christian virtue, giving life to the Bible's teaching that a husband and wife share a blessed love. The Princess throws her a fond glance as well she might, being the star of Tonga's most infamous love affair.
In 1969 Josh Liava'a, a handsome, rugby-playing commoner, married the King's niece in Auckland. The King was furious and lured the princess back to Tonga, where she was kept under palace arrest. A royal decree annulled the marriage, but Liava'a's royal conquest made him a magnet to Tonga's high-born ladies. Sixteen years later, on a trip to Auckland, Pilolevu, aware of Liava'a's reputation, met him at the hotel where he ran security. "We fell madly in love," he says.
The affair lasted 14 years, with Liava'a flying to London and San Francisco for secret trysts. It ended only when the Princess' love letters were leaked to the New Zealand media in 1999. They have never been published in Tonga, but copies are still eagerly passed around.
It is difficult to predict quite how all this will end when the King dies. The most likely course of events is that the Princess will spend her time in luxurious exile and the king's youngest son, Prince Lavaka Ata, who holds two masters degrees and is already Prime Minister, will do most of the governing. Thus, as one palace watcher observes, it will be left to Tupouto'a "to enjoy state visits abroad, military parades on his birthday, and other kingly occasions".
Indeed, he has already started to plan his coronation, detailing to his friends his plans to marshal foreign camera crews filming the historic moment. With his love of pageantry and costume, he is not going to pass up the chance to strut such a colourful stage. "Of course I'm going to become the King, and I'm going to enjoy it."
* Paul Raffaele visited Tonga before Cyclone Waka struck the country.
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