1News Pacific correspondent Barbara Dreaver has opened up on the “awful” night she spent in a Fijian detention centre 14 years ago, revealing she had mentally prepared to be tortured by authorities.
Dreaver was taken into custody in December 2008, having flown into Nadi to cover an escalating diplomatic dispute that had culminated in threats to expel New Zealand’s acting High Commissioner Caroline McDonald.
She spoke candidly about the ordeal in a wide-ranging interview with re_covering, a Media Chaplaincy New Zealand podcast produced for RNZ featuring top Kiwi journalists discussing the stories that have most shaped their careers.
Speaking to re_covering host and media chaplain Rev Frank Ritchie, Dreaver said she spent an entire night locked in a room by herself, fearing the worst.
“During the night I got a call from a [journalist] friend and he said, ‘We've been having a meeting, and we don’t whether to tell you this or not.’ And I was like, ‘Tell me what?’
“And he said, ‘We've been talking to the military and they've made some pretty big threats against you, that you might not be able to get back on the plane tomorrow and you deserve everything that's coming to you tonight.’”
Knowing that fellow journalists and human rights advocates had been tortured under then-Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama’s regime, Dreaver said it was “a very real threat” that she would face the same fate.
“Every time I heard the gate open outside, I'd run to the window and look out to see if it was a military car coming to get me,” she said.
“There'd been a bit of torture that had been happening – people being taken to the barracks and tortured… so I spent the night mentally preparing myself for what could be horrific.”
Dreaver says while nothing untoward ended up happening, she was never given any reassurance by her captors, nor told why she had been detained. New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade had also been denied access to her, in breach of the Geneva Convention.
The following morning, when a car pulled in to take her away, she wasn’t told where she was being taken. She was grateful to discover it was to the airport, and that she was being allowed to catch a flight back to New Zealand.
“I was like, ‘Oh, thank goodness’. It was a relief.”
Though she didn’t know it at the time, it would be eight years before Dreaver would be able to return to Fiji.
The Fijian government, upset with coverage from Dreaver and other foreign journalists, blacklisted her, which had the knock-on effect of making it difficult for her to travel to Kiribati to visit family.
Dreaver says while the incident was frightening, it reinforced that she was “doing a good job”.
“I was challenging Bainimarama’s military regime. There were some horrendous things going on there, and I was privileged to have that platform to be able to expose these things – so I was fine with being taken in.
“You take me in, I'm not gonna stop doing my job.”
Elsewhere in the re_covering interview released on Wednesday morning, Dreaver discussed being detained in the Pacific a second time, the harrowing experience of reporting on Samoa’s measles outbreak, and why it’s so important Pasifika people have a voice in news media.
Re_covering sees Rev Frank Ritchie sit down with some of New Zealand's top journalists to unpack the one story from their career that has most impacted them, personally and professionally. Listen to the rest of the series here.
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