A coup was staged by George Speight, a mixed race businessman,...

A coup was staged by George Speight, a mixed race businessman, and eight members of the army's Counter Revolutionary Warfare Unit (CRWU), who stormed the Fijian Parliament and captured Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry, holding him and about 30 other members of parliament as hostages. Fiji would face sanctions if the government were overthrown and could be expelled from the Commonwealth for breaches of its own constitution. The coup leaders wanted the abrogation of the 1997 constitution, which revised a system that gave indigenous Fijians a more powerful political foothold than ethnic Indians. The coup leaders risk execution for treason.