EARLIER this month in Fiji’s capital, Suva, a convoy of lorries, carrying 25 sealed shipping containers and under a heavy military guard, dodged the potholes along Mead Road and snaked into the Queen Elizabeth Barracks. In the containers were Russian weapons, ammunition and vehicles supposed to be destined for use by Fiji’s international peacekeepers in the Sinai desert in Egypt and along the Israel-Syria frontier on the Golan Heights. The opposition cried foul, claiming that the arms had entered the country illegally, without proper police authorisation. Some dared suggest the weapons might even be for the purpose of threatening the opposition.

The opposition politicians seem not to have appreciated how firmly the police have been under the control of the army since the (South African) chief of police, Ben Groenewald, resigned in November. He left in protest, accusing the armed forces of undermining his investigation into police brutality—they had even recruited the suspects into the army’s own ranks, despite the allegations hanging over them. Mr Groenewald’s successor is a soldier with a murky human-rights record, Brigadier-General Sitiveni Qiliho. He has set about clearing out the constabulary’s senior officers.

Fiji appears much more stable than it was in the troubled years after a coup in December 2006. FijiFirst, the party of the coup leader turned prime minister, Frank Bainimarama, obtained a thumping 59% majority in elections in September 2014 and holds 32 of Parliament’s 50 seats. While the opposition is in disarray, the government benefits from an economy growing at 4% a year, as hordes of Australians flock to Fiji’s magnificent beaches. A lively reform programme has won Mr Bainimarama many admirers among his country’s 890,000 citizens. It involves building roads and bridges, delivering free education and legal aid, and providing cash handouts to small businesses.

Abroad, the prime minister walks taller these days, having once been widely seen as a pariah. In some places he was always welcome. In 2013 in Moscow, Mr Bainimarama brokered a deal with the Russian prime minister, Dimitry Medvedev, for the supply of equipment for Fijian peacekeepers. The next year Fiji abstained in the UN vote on Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

Beneath the surface, the place looks less happy. The islands’ indigenous people, known as i-Taukei, make up three-fifths of the population and communally own most of the land. Many of them despise the FijiFirst government. That is partly because they particularly hate the 2013 constitution, which describes all the country’s citizens as “Fijians” where before only the indigenes earned that title. A third of the population are ethnic Indians. Some indigenes claim to be suffering the kind of cultural annihilation that befell Australia’s Aborigines and New Zealand’s Maoris. Others dislike Mr Bainimarama’s reliance on his attorney-general, a Muslim, who also serves as finance minister. They divine an Islamic conspiracy to control the country. Paranoia runs rife in Mr Bainimarama’s Fiji.

Efforts to forge breakaway “Christian states” in the provinces of Nadroga-Navosa and Ra last year echoed indigenous fears. At the time Mr Groenewald said that the movements resembled harmless cults. Mr Bainimarama took the perceived threat more seriously, ordering an army clampdown.

Though he stepped down as military commander in 2014, he keeps his grip on the armed forces. Last August Brigadier-General Mosese Tikoitoga was pushed aside as armed-forces chief. He showed too much independence by promoting his choice of officers to the senior command and by barring Mr Bainimarama’s personal bodyguards from the officer’s mess at the Queen Elizabeth Barracks. He will now be exiled to Ethiopia, as ambassador.

Meanwhile, the UN remains hungry for Fiji’s blue helmets. They are a nice little earner for the government, too, but dispatching all those soldiers has repercussions back home. The first peacekeepers set off, for Lebanon, in 1978. Since then Fiji’s armed forces have overthrown the government three times: first in 1987, unleashing the coup genie; then late in May 2000; and then Mr Bainimarama’s coup. You have to give them something to do on home leave.

In 2014 the Nusra Front in Syria, linked to al-Qaeda, briefly captured 45 of Fiji’s peacekeepers. The incident triggered a call for more modern military equipment—leading to the Russian weapons. Hence the worries that their arrival in Suva may only increase the odds of Fiji’s fragile democracy being overthrown again.