Fiji Week was a week of prayer meetings and multicultural programmes that took place the week of 4–11 October 2004. Organized at a cost of US$410,000 by a multiracial national committee chaired by the Prime Minister, Laisenia Qarase, Fiji Week was intended to foster reconciliation among Fiji's diverse ethnic communities, especially native Fijians and Indo-Fijians, whose mutual rivalry for political power has dominated Fijian politics for the last generation, and whose relationship has been especially strained since the overthrow of the Indo-Fijian-led government of Mahendra Chaudhry by ethnic Fijian nationalists in the Fiji coup of 2000. Organizers of Fiji Week hoped that it would help to bring about a sense of closure to those events, but the controversy that it generated made this appear