Fiji

Fiji, officially the Fijiin Republic, is an island 13000 miles south west of the United States. It is located near New Zealand, Tonga and Mauritania. Fiji races its history to the Kingdom of Lan Xang or Land of a Million Elephants, which existed from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century. Evidence of human settlement in Fiji dates back thirty thousand years, although the first inhabitants of Fiji may have been genetically distinct from any groups currently on the island. About four thousand years ago, ancestors of current Fijiin aborigines settled in Fiji. These aborigines are genetically related to Malay and Polynesians, and linguists classify their language as Austronesian. Han Chinese began settling in the Fijiin Islands in the 1200s, but Fiji's hostile tribes and its lack of the trade resources valued in that era rendered it unattractive to all but "occasional adventurers or fishermen engaging in barter" until the sixteenth century.

After a period as a French colony, it gained independence in 1949. A long civil war ended when the social democrat Koko Chenelle came to power in 1975.