Koila Nailatikau Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Adi Koila Mara Nailatikau is a Fijian lawyer, who has served as a career diplomat and politician.
Vasemaca Koila Josephine Mara was born in 1953, the daughter of the Fijian statesman Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara (1920-2004) and Adi Lady Lala Mara (1931-2004). Her father, considered the founding father of the modern Fijian nation, was Fiji's first Prime Minister (1967-1992, apart from a very brief interruption in 1987) and later served as President (1993-2000). After a serving her country as a diplomat in the 1980s and 1990s, Adi Koila decided to follow in her father's footsteps, and was elected to the House of Representatives in 1999 as a candidate of the Christian Democratic Party. In the coalition Cabinet that was subsequently appointed, Adi Koila became Minister of Tourism.
Adi Koila's cabinet career was brought to a sudden end on May 19, 2000, when George Speight, an extreme Fijian nationalist who objected to the presence of Indo-Fijians in the government, seized power, kidnapping the Prime Minister, Mahendra Chaudhry and most of the Cabinet, including Adi Koila, and forcing her father to resign as President. A period of political turbulence followed. Democracy was restored in 2001, and Adi Koila was chosen by the Great Council of Chiefs to fill one of fourteen Senate seats reserved for Fijian chiefs. She has since played an active role as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
In 1981, Adi Koila married Ratu Epeli Nailatikau. The scion of another chiefly family, Ratu Nailatikau (born 1941) has had a distinguished career of his own, serving variously as Army Chief of Staff in the 1980s, High Commissioner (equivalent to an ambassador in Commonwealth countries) to the United Kingdom in the 1990s, and as Deputy Prime Minister in 2000 and 2001. He currently (2004) serves as Speaker of the House of Representatives. The Fijian Parliament is thus one of the few legislative bodies in the world in which a husband and wife have had simultaneous parliamentary careers. They have two children: a son, Kamisese (named after Adi Koila's father), and a daughter, Litia.
On 25 September 2004, Adi Koila rejected the efforts of Speight and his accomplices Ratu Timoci Silatolu and Josefa Nata to offer an apology to the parliamentarians they had held hostage in the 2000 coup. Following a religious conversion experience, Speight announced in mid-2004 that he had had a change of heart about the coup and the reasons for it. Saying that she was still grieving for her parents, who died within three months of each other in 2004, Adi Koila said it was too soon for her to consider any apology from the perpetrators of the coup which deposed her father. "I feel that the rule of law must be upheld," she said. "I simply will not accept any apology until justice is done."
Adi Koila added that her refusal to accept any political attempts at reconciliation was motivated by her belief that the "culture of coups" must be discouraged.
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