Commodore Bainimarama restored order after this coup, paving the way for Mr Qarase to become prime minister.
Military commander Frank Bainimarama was forced to flee the barracks during the fighting.
The absence of Mr Bainimarama was a relief to Australia and New Zealand.
Mr Mara's flight from Fiji is a further sign of the growing breach between Commodore Bainimarama and the Mara dynasty.
In late September Mr Bainimarama openly condemned both bills and suggested that, in pursuing them, the government was motivated only by self-interest.
The government responded by turning to the Supreme Court to see whether Mr Bainimarama was within his rights to have spoken out in such a way.
In a television address, Commodore Bainimarama, who doubles as prime minister, responded by condemning the Tongan navy's role in extracting Mr Mara from Fiji's territorial waters.
Mr Bainimarama then called for the prime minister and his cabinet to resign over a corruption scandal and later openly threatened to remove the government by military force.
More likely, Mr Bainimarama stayed at home to avoid rebukes for reneging on the commitment he made at last year's PIF summit in Tonga to hold elections by March 2009.
Commodore Bainimarama says the army will stay in power until it has formed an interim government, but there will be no place in it for Mr Speight or members of his group.
Mr Bainimarama blames his no-show on New Zealand's refusal to give him more than a transit visa to pass through Auckland airport (enforcing a travel ban imposed after the coup in December 2006).
It also happens that Tonga's chief justice, Michael Scott, a former Fiji high-court judge and himself a refugee from Fiji's coup, is an arch-opponent of Fiji's chief justice, Anthony Gates, controversially appointed in the wake of the Bainimarama takeover.
However, Commodore Bainimarama came up with a new list of demands (including the removal of the police commissioner, Andrew Hughes, who has been investigating Commodore Bainimarama on charges of sedition), and set a deadline of December 1st for the prime minister either to acquiesce to these demands or resign.
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