KEY POINTS:
What a fiasco. With or without Punch, the show was set to go on. At least it was until late yesterday.
Commodore Frank Bainimarama was boycotting what was to have been a special meeting in Papua New Guinea of Pacific Island Forum leaders next Tuesday dealing with Fiji's
recalcitrance about marking a return to democracy.
The apparent snub simply offered added reason for the leaders of the 15 other member states to take long-overdue disciplinary action and suspend Fiji from the forum in his absence.
Then everything suddenly changed. With some Pacific leaders already in transit to Port Moresby, the meeting's host, PNG premier Sir Michael Somare, summarily decided the summit should be deferred for two weeks. The reason? His behind-the-scenes diplomacy had secured Bainimarama's agreement to attend if the meeting was postponed.
Somare was retrospectively seeking other leaders' approval for the deferral. That was being resisted by New Zealand, Australia and the forum secretariat, who all wanted the meeting to go ahead as originally scheduled.
As host, however, Somare would seem to hold the whip hand. The big question is whether his intervention and Bainimarama's turning up to face the music makes any real difference to the eventual outcome.
It must increase Fiji's chances of escaping suspension - or at least delaying the date it comes into force.
Somare's influence brought the change of heart from Bainimarama.
Just as well on the latter's part.
No one was treating his reason for not going to Port Moresby - that the death and devastation caused by recent floods required he stay at home - at face value. In PNG, the no-show was being treated as a slap in the face for Somare, who had done his utmost to mediate between his country's
Melanesian ally and New Zealand and Australia.
The slight to Somare might have tipped the balance in favour of suspension. For the stakes are high: Bainimarama's continued trifling with the forum has ratcheted things up to the point where what remains of the forum's credibility is now very much on the line.
Whether suspension, which would apply only to leaders' and ministerial meetings, would make make a blind bit of difference to what is going on in Fiji is highly debatable. Bainimarama's truculence, however, was simply forcing the forum's hand in that direction.
Or, at least, it should have been doing so. Despite the imperatives on the forum to act, no one will be betting serious money on the leaders not fudging things and giving Fiji one last chance, especially now Bainimarama is turning up.
With New Zealand, and Australia, in the vanguard of countries seeking immediate action, PNG's summit will test John Key's persuasive powers in a foreign policy context.
Since Bainimarama marched out of the Suva military barracks in December 2006 and mounted Fiji's fourth coup in the space of just two decades, he has made promises (including one to the forum in person) of a return to democracy and free elections.
Every time he has subsequently gone on to bluster, prevaricate, delay, postpone and ultimately go back on his word.
He has exploited internal forum politics, doing his best to provoke a split between smaller island states and Australia and New Zealand.
But Fiji's interim prime minister - he has been "interim" for two years - miscalculated this time in ruling out going to the PNG capital and opting
to send a special envoy in his place.
On that score, he has now come to his senses. He must have been told by Somare that suspension was inevitable if he did not show. Bainimarama,
however, will still have to account personally for why he cancelled elections which he promised the forum two years ago would be held in
March this year.
Had forum leaders failed to reach agreement on Tuesday, Bainimarama would have racked up a huge victory.
Unless Bainimarama relents and makes fresh assurances, failure to discipline Fiji at the deferred meeting will still render the forum's Biketawa Declaration on good governance as worthless. That will leave Key and Kevin Rudd, his Australian counterpart, looking weak and ineffective.
However, if the pair complain too profusely in public about such an outcome, they will be playing into Bainimarama's hands. The forum will be split. He will have made the organisation essentially irrelevant.
That cannot be allowed to happen. But this is the first time in its history
that the forum, which shuns conflict, has had to discipline a member - and a highly influential one at that.
But what price Bainimarama's assurances? If forum leaders now stop short of immediate suspension and give Bainimarama one last chance to redeem himself, then any compromise must set a deadline for him to start a dialogue with Fiji's political players and parties which leads inexorably to agreement on how elections will be run and a fixed date by when they should have taken place. Failure to meet the deadline would invoke suspension.
Such a compromise would allow forum leaders to save some face and leave Bainimarama having to choose between a return to democracy or pariah status.
The current stalemate has prompted growing calls - notably from academics and even former diplomats - for a fresh approach to Fiji.
There has been a growing feeling in such quarters that the so-called "smart" sanctions - particularly the travel bans on those close to the
regime - have been applied too indiscriminately, catching innocent relatives.
This was taken on board by the new National Government in Wellington, with Foreign Minister Murray McCully holding out a small olive branch to Suva soon after taking office.
A deliberate gesture was made to grant transit visas for players in Fiji's under-20 soccer team to travel through Auckland to Tahiti in early December - a departure from Labour's practice of blocking such requests under the sports sanctions applied post-coup.
McCully subsequently wrote to Bainimarama saying National was intent on improving relations with Fiji and looked forward to progressively relaxing sanctions, contingent on Suva putting forward a credible timetable towards elections.
The conciliatory moves were ignored, however. Instead, McCully found himself on the receiving end of ultimatums from Suva that a visa be granted to George Nacewa, the son of a senior official in Suva, so he could finish his studies at Massey University. Those demands were accompanied by threats to expel New Zealand's Acting High Commissioner.
When Wellington refused to grant a visa, the threat was carried out, prompting the necessary retaliatory ejection of Fiji's diplomatic representative from New Zealand.
This illustrates the difficulties in dealing with Bainimarama. Any flagging of a more conciliatory stance towards his regime gets rebuffed.
Fronting up to the forum offers him one last chance to recant.
But will Bainimarama take up the unexpected opportunity to open constructive dialogue with Fiji's neighbours? Or will the Port Moresby meeting be just another platform from which to castigate New Zealand and Australia as the "bully boys" of the Pacific?
The answer is straightforward. Until Bainimarama is willing to return to the barracks - something he has so far shown no inclination of doing - the diplomacy will likely all come to nothing.
