KEY POINTS:
Sharon Bhagwan Rolls' hopes for peace in Fiji lie in a black suitcase. Under the lid is a machine bearing knobs, dials and monitors, two CD players, two tape decks, and a microphone.
This is the country's only suitcase radio station and one of only a few in
the Pacific. The high-profile gender and peace activist sees it as a channel to help her country rebuild democracy after last December's military coup.
It is, says the former radio copywriter and TV host, a way for those without clout to "speak truth to power. The point is to infiltrate the airwaves with the voices of communities".
Bhagwan Rolls, an energetic 41-year-old who attended Baradene College and the University of Auckland, carts the portable radio station, which has a 10km range, into rural Fiji.
She and a team of volunteers broadcast voices and opinions on social, racial and political issues rarely heard on Suva's music-mad commercial stations. Women's opinions predominate, she says, because they are too often excluded from discussion of politics and peace.
Since 2004, femTALK 89.2FM has told the stories of, mostly, Fiji's rural poor. They are the 20 per cent of the 919,000 population who live below the official poverty line, the 10 per cent who live in tin-shack squatter settlements, and the thousands of young people who quit school every year but can't find work.
These people tell of unemployment, collapsing infrastructure, family violence and soaring crime. They worry about the future as the coup affects tourism and the leases expire on sugar cane farms - land owned by indigenous Fijians but worked by Indo-Fijians. These, says Bhagwan Rolls, are all issues which feed discontent.
"Those kinds of concerns make people vulnerable to supporting a coup cycle - when you don't like something, overthrow it," she says. "Community media like this can create spaces for a divided society to come together in a safe space at the local level. It's about finding solutions at local level, rather than in all the national macro-discussions that just isolate people - isolate the women, the young people, minority groups, people with disabilities."
The Canadian-made suitcase radio, which cost $11,300 and is licensed like any other in Fiji, is the centrepiece of the gender equality and peace-promoting non-governmental organisation, femLINKPACIFIC, which Bhagwan Rolls and friend Peter Sipeli, 32, created in 2000.
It was born from the coup of May that year, in which George Speight held 36 Parliamentarians hostage for 56 days. Methodist Bhagwan Rolls, then the secretary of the National Council of Women, became a national face for staging inter-faith prayer vigils until the hostages were freed. The vigils, she says, showed people coming together across socio-economic and ethnic lines in common purpose.
FemLINKPACIFIC now has four paid staff, three part-time rural correspondents, and a pool of 11 young volunteers.
They are trained in media skills, producing educational videos and an array of magazines and resources, some in Fijian and Hindustani. Bhagwan translates the grassroots commentaries into her policy advocacy nationally and overseas.
She is no stranger to high-powered negotiation. She has been summoned to a United Nations working group on gender and also the United Kingdom's Foreign and Commonwealth Office, as well as attending various think-tanks closer to home.
Among her supporters are the New Zealand and Australian governments, Oxfam New Zealand, Unesco, Unifem Pacific and the British and Australian high commissions in Suva.
But collecting stories isn't a case of just sticking a microphone in someone's face - the subjects are rarely media-savvy. Invited in through contacts in women's networks, femLINKPACIFIC runs several days of preparatory discussion before anything goes to air.
"It's building a trust with them that when they share their story, I'm not going to take it out there and distort it, and that we are showing respect for who they are and what they do," says Bhagwan Rolls. "We explain that by hearing what their issues are, we can go back to the capital city and be advocates on their behalf."
The broadcasts run live at a time that suits the locals and last up to five hours.
Bhagwan Rolls gets a great deal of pleasure out of people's enthusiasm for the suitcase radio. "The first time I did a rural broadcast, I cried," she says. "The women were the age of my grandmother, and they thanked me for bringing radio to them.
"Another lady came running in from town because the shops had tuned in, and she had heard some of her friends. It's very empowering for the community - we are placing value on their voices and their opinions."
This is not necessarily the case, she says, with Fiji's state radio. "It is divided according to ethnicity, and there is no English public service broadcasting which could provide this documentary-type discussion."
But in January a planned femTALK broadcast was called off because the hosts felt "too scared". Although it seems to be business as usual in Suva's streets, the armed soldier outside Government House and people's caution tell otherwise.
Bhagwan Rolls is being careful too, as her anti-coup statements and profile make her a possible target. Last Christmas Eve, three high-profile women - Virisila Buadromo, a former journalist who heads Fiji Women's Rights Movement, youth activist Jacque Koroi and businesswoman Laisa Digitaki - were taken to the army barracks, intimidated with guns and beaten up.
Bhagwan Rolls is mindful of the needs of her two children, Sian, 15, and Albert, 18, who recently lost their father. The three have an emergency plan in case of trouble.
"Do I want to jump up and down and get detained? I have a responsibility to my children and my family and my organisation," she says, "but I also have a belief in the vigil process. It's a silent protest.
"If we can be silent for a moment and reflect on what our common issues are, isn't that better than having loud conversations and not finding a sense of common purpose and direction? Sometimes silence is the hardest thing."
She hasn't always reacted so. At the time of the 1987 coup, she says, "I was an angry young woman about the very fact that the military had taken over, about the violation of my human rights - and angry because I hadn't even had a chance to vote."
Then 21, she was arrested by soldiers as she was leaving the country for an international meeting, carrying newsletters describing life under the military.
Soldiers confiscated the newsletters and, temporarily, her passport. She wasn't harmed, but had to sign a confession that she was working against the Government and was left shaken. She got to the meeting, but received threatening, anonymous phone calls after she returned to Fiji.
The repair of Fiji rests on three things, she says.
First is a return to Parliamentary democracy, with Fiji Military Forces Commodore Frank Bainimarama, sticking to his promise of March 2009 elections.
Second is that the 1997 constitution, which encourages multiculturalism and makes multi-party government mandatory, is upheld. Third, there needs to be a "serious look" at the role of the military.
A country of 919,800 people, says Bhagwan Rolls, "does not need a 3000-strong army with a taste for seizing power at gunpoint".
"It's not just about 3000 soldiers," she says, "it's about 3000 households." And thousands of Fijians who want to be heard.
