In the run-up to the 1975 New Zealand election, the Labour, National, Social Credit, and Values parties all committed to the target of spending 1 percent of gross national product on foreign aid, with 70 percent of that coming from the government.

If we had met that target, the government would have spent $3 billion this year rather than the $1.2 billion — or 0.27 percent of GNP — allocated to foreign aid.

That 0.7 percent figure was not plucked out of thin air. In 1970, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling on wealthy nations to commit that amount annually to Official Development Assistance (ODA).

• READ MORE: NZ government’s climate strategy: Let it burn
• Other Jeremy Rose articles

Three years later, Prime Minister Norman Kirk committed the country to the 0.7 percent target with the aim of reaching it by 1976. By the time Labour was voted out of office in 1975, it had reached 0.524 percent.

Kirk was clear: wealthy countries had an obligation to help poorer ones, and they needed to get on with it.

In the run-up to the last election, the National, Labour, and Green parties all committed to meeting the country’s climate change commitments under the Paris Agreement — an international treaty aimed at keeping global temperature rise well below 2 degrees.

No surprises there. The Paris Agreement was signed by the John Key National government in 2015, and Jacinda Ardern had been elected on making climate change her generation’s “nuclear-free moment”.

Stressed importance
The then leader of the opposition, Christopher Luxon, had stressed the importance of climate change action in his maiden speech in March 2021.

Luxon said he was proud that Air New Zealand had become a foundation member of the Climate Leaders Coalition during his tenure as CEO of the company.

“I understand, of course, that a country is not a company,” he said. “However, New Zealanders look to the government to get things done. It’s not good enough saying you’re going to lower greenhouse gas emissions, but not do it.”

Coming up to the end of Prime Minister Luxon’s first term in office, emissions reductions are falling at less than half the rate required to meet our Paris targets, according to the Climate Change Commission’s latest report.

The economy has stalled, petrol prices are at record highs, manufacturing is in crisis, consumption levels are well down, renewable electricity generation levels are at record highs, and yet the dial on carbon emissions has barely moved.

The reason for that can be summed up in a word: “zero.” Not as in the net zero carbon emissions by 2050 promised by the Paris Agreement, but zero action or commitment to reducing carbon emissions.

As Newsroom’s Marc Daalder has argued, the coalition government’s strategy amounts to: “Let it burn“.

Mitigation spend ruled out
And in the run-up to October’s election, Prime Minister Luxon has ruled out spending the $5 billion Treasury has estimated it would cost to meet the country’s Paris Agreement with offshore mitigation.

That $5 billion shortfall — or about 84 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent — covers the decade from 2021 to 2030. So, about $500 million a year.

Add that figure to New Zealand’s current spend on ODA and it comes to close to 0.4 percent of GNP — significantly less than was being spent in 1975 and well below the 0.7 percent target.

Climate change mitigation under the Paris Agreement and overseas aid are not the same thing. Countries that miss their Paris targets domestically can simply purchase certified carbon credits in other countries to make up their shortfalls.

But as Switzerland, the first country to enter into bilateral mitigation agreements under Article 6 of the agreement, has shown, they can be.

To date, Switzerland has signed 17 bilateral agreements with countries in South America, Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Pacific.

In Vanuatu, it has funded off-grid solar power projects; in Thailand, electric buses; in Chile, battery storage and electric transit; and, in Senegal, biogas digesters to prevent deforestation by reducing reliance on firewood.

Switzerland meeting obligations
Switzerland is meeting its Paris obligations and improving the lives of tens of thousands of people in the process.

We can choose climate justice over preparing for war

The great Māori statesman Sir Apirana Ngata argued that the Māori contribution in the two world wars was the “price of citizenship”.

It was surely one of the saddest sentences spoken in the history of Aotearoa. The idea that young Māori men who were shipped to Europe in the First World War to kill and be killed for “God, King and Empire” — as the memorials have it — had a debt to pay to a settler colonial state that had brutally dispossessed their parents and grandparents is tragic.

But it’s not surprising that, faced with the reality of building a liveable future in that state, the Māori world divided between those like Ngata who sought accommodation and acceptance with those in power and those like Princess Te Puea Herangi who rejected the war and actively opposed conscription.

A generous interpretation of the coalition government’s decision to increase the country’s military spend by $1.58 billion — to $5.9 billion — this year is that they think it is the price of international citizenship.

More likely, they know it’s the cost of being accepted by the powerful. It is nearly 60 years since Martin Luther King described the USA as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”.

Hard to reconcile
And it is as true now as it was then. It’s hard to reconcile a commitment to a “rules-based order” with cosying up to a US regime that is not only trashing the rules but committed to destroying the courts that adjudicate them.

Their lack of public condemnation of the US’s attacks on sovereign states, the murder of school children, assassinations and kidnapping of world leaders, extrajudicial killings of alleged drug runners, and the funding of a genocide suggests our government is more interested in being close to power than supporting those attempting to uphold international law.

And no doubt the government hopes that it will be a boon for the country’s fledgling arms industry. Rocket Lab — now a supplier to the Pentagon — has shown the stratosphere is the limit when it comes to the military-industrial complex, and New Zealand’s anti-nuclear legislation is no obstacle.

The one type of stimulus right-of-centre governments approve of is military Keynesianism.

There was no real public debate over whether prioritising spending on the likes of MH-60R Seahawk helicopters, at a cost of more than $2 billion, over the existential threat of climate change — to not only New Zealand and its Pacific neighbours but the world — is the right thing, or most cost-efficient thing, to do.

That increase in the military budget alone is close to what New Zealand spent on ODA for 2026 plus the $500 million Paris annual shortfall.

The $5.49 billion being spent on the military — with the aim of making New Zealand’s military interoperable with the US and its allies — is money not being spent on transitioning New Zealand and its Pacific neighbours to renewable energy and climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Ecological catastrophe and nuclear war are the two existential threats facing the world.

Choosing to prioritise military spending over international aid and climate change mitigation brings us closer to both.

Jeremy Rose is a Wellington-based journalist and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. This article was first published by his Substack Towards Democracy.

The people won. The environment won. The Lyttelton port remains in public hands. For now.

Please join the protest tomorrow. There is more on the table. And the battle for the port is far from over.

The DP World deal being dropped can be attributed to rousing support and brilliant speakers who moved hearts and minds at a public meeting in Lyttelton two weeks ago. Thanks to these people and organisations the proposed deal with DP World (yes, that predator company with a shocking track record) has been turned down.

• READ MORE: Christchurch City Holdings rejects DP World-backed proposal to take over Lyttelton Port
• Capitalism. Colonialism. Why the DP World money trail leads to destruction — Saige England
• A tale of power being taken from the people and handed to predator companies
• Other Lyttelton Port reports

The people united and they were not defeated!

One of the public meeting speakers, environmental campaigner Sara Campbell, says: “While this is a win in the fight for public control of public assets … the fight is far from over.”

A protest outside CCHL offices tomorrow will go ahead as planned. At those offices, the CCHL will be deciding on LPC’s $800 million proposal to expand the port, which includes further land reclamation.

“We are demanding that LPC-CCHL does not proceed without full public scrutiny, consultation and partnership with mana whenua,” says Campbell.

The official ‘back down’
This is the official press release from the Christchurch City Holdings Limited (CCHL) backing down from the proposed DP World deal:

“Christchurch City Holdings Limited (CCHL) have declined to proceed with a proposal to lease operations at the port.

“The unsolicited proposal from Tōnui Consortium, representing DP World and three Runanga: Ngāti Wheke, Ngāi Tūāhuriri, and Te Taumutu, was received by CCHL in June.

“The consortium proposed acquiring a majority interest in a long-term lease of the operating entity of LPC.

“CCHL Chair, Bryan Pearson, acknowledged the effort by the Tōnui Consortium in considering the future of Lyttelton Port and preparing the proposal. ‘Lyttelton Port is a strategic asset for the city and region, and there are diverse groups within our community with interests in its future,’ says Bryan Pearson.

“’Our assessment of the proposal, as presented, is it does not meet the threshold for ongoing consideration and is not sufficiently compelling to warrant further detailed investigation by CCHL, or additional consultation with Council given its Letter of Expectation.’

“CCHL is mindful of the LPC workforce and the breadth of community interest in the port’s operation.Christchurch City Council’s 2026/2027 Letter of Expectation to CCHL is explicit in its direction, which does not support leasing the port and encourages retention of a directly employed workforce.

“CCHL reached its conclusion specifically considering LPC’s improving operational and financial performance, as well as input provided by LPC on the resilience of its infrastructure and the leadership required to maintain a culture of safety and efficiency.

“Bryan Pearson says ‘CCHL maintains full confidence in the LPC board and management and their operation of the port, and continues to work closely with LPC in considering the port’s long-term development and associated investment.'”

My view on this is that this is one victory and full credit goes those who spoke against this deal, who rallied and organised and spoke against the devious bid: NZDE — New Zealanders for a Democratic Economy; the Maritime Union of New Zealand (MUNZ) Lyttelton branch secretary Gerard Loader; the Rail and Maritime Transport Union (RMTU) Lyttelton Port branch secretary Mark Wilson; environmental campaigner Sara Campbell; human rights and Keep Our Assets campaigner John Minto; Marney Ainsworth and the Māori people who spoke up — and all the people who signed the petition against this potential travesty.

In these times when there seems to be few gains — when so much is taken out of public hands — it is great to see people move change.

The change came because the people spoke out. They used their hearts and minds.
The people won but it is a temporary win.

This was a close call. Too close. Predator companies still loom large and secret meetings are still being held behind closed doors.

It’s not the end. The battle continues. We need to keep our port clean and safe for the people and the environment.

KOA welcomes ‘victory’
Keep Our Assets convenor Murray Horton said KOA was pleased that Christchurch City Holdings Ltd (CCHL) had rejected the unsolicited proposal from the Tōnui Consortium (comprising DP World and three runanga) to acquire a long term lease of Lyttelton Port Company’s (LPC) operations.

“This is a victory for common sense. Lyttelton Port is a vital strategic asset for Christchurch, Canterbury, the South Island and, indeed, the whole country. So, it is vital that it remains in public ownership and control, subject to democratic accountability through the elected Christchurch City Council,” he said.

”KOA congratulates the port unions and grassroots community groups who have successfully campaigned to keep our port public.

“It would have been particularly egregious if DP World, 100 percent state-owned by the United Arab Emirates, had got its sticky fingers on Lyttelton’s revenue stream. The UAE is a highly dodgy state indeed.

“We savour the victory but know that we can’t relax our vigilance. Lyttelton is an attractive target for transnational corporations and their local allies. This is not the first time a move has been made on our port. Twenty years ago a similar unsuccessful bid was made, involving a Hong Kong corporation. There well be another ‘unsolicited offer’ in the future.”

And KOA was fully aware that, behind closed doors, CCHL was conducting a review of Enable, the broadband company, and another of CCHL’s portfolio of publicly-owned companies. There remained a threat to sell that, said Horton.

“Time and again the people of Christchurch have made it very clear that they want the city’s publicly-owned assets to remain exactly that. This decision by CCHL recognises that reality.”

And the last word goes to MUNZ’s Gerard Loader: “We thank the people of Lyttelton and greater Christchurch getting in behind this campaign as it was all for our next generations and what we leave for them.

“From the bottom of our hearts.

“Now we have crossed the DP World hurdle our focus now turns to keeping ‘Enable’ in the hands of future generations, so the fight continues.’

“See you all at the march tomorrow.”

In solidarity.

Saige England is a humanitarian journalist and activist for community and the environment. She was present at the Lyttelton public meeting last week in support of community action. She is also a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

• Tomorrow’s protest rally outside the CCHL offices 8-10am

Christchurch City Holdings Limited (CCHL) has declined to proceed with a controversial proposal to lease operations at the port, the company announced today after recent public meetings denounced the proposal.

The unsolicited proposal from Tōnui Consortium, representing DP World and three Runanga: Ngāti Wheke, Ngāi Tūāhuriri, and Te Taumutu, was received by CCHL in June, said CCHL in a statement.

The consortium proposed acquiring a majority interest in a long-term lease of the operating entity of LPC.

• READ MORE: Capitalism. Colonialism. Why the DP World money trail leads to destruction — Saige England
• A tale of power being taken from the people and handed to predator companies
• Other Lyttelton Port reports

CCHL chair Bryan Pearson acknowledged the effort by the Tōnui Consortium in considering the future of Lyttelton Port and preparing the proposal.

“Lyttelton Port is a strategic asset for the city and region, and there are diverse groups within our community with interests in its future,” said Pearson in the statement.

“Our assessment of the proposal, as presented, is it does not meet the threshold for ongoing consideration and is not sufficiently compelling to warrant further detailed investigation by CCHL, or additional consultation with council given its Letter of Expectation.”

CCHL was mindful of the LPC workforce and the breadth of community interest in the port’s operation, the statement said.

Explicit direction
Christchurch City Council’s 2026/2027 Letter of Expectation to CCHL was explicit in its direction, which did not support leasing the port and encouraged retention of a directly employed workforce.

CCHL reached its conclusion specifically considering LPC’s improving operational and financial performance, as well as input provided by LPC on the resilience of its infrastructure and the leadership required to maintain a culture of safety and efficiency.

Pearson said: “CCHL maintains full confidence in the LPC board and management and their operation of the port, and continues to work closely with LPC in considering the port’s long-term development and associated investment.”

A packed public meeting in Lyttelton earlier this month opposed the takeover attempt by DP World of Lyttelton Port.

The meeting was organised by New Zealanders for A Democratic Economy.

Wednesday: The United States signs a civil nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia. A “decades-long, multi-billion-dollar partnership,” Washington calls it.

Thursday: The President Trump logs onto social media and reneges — unilaterally slapping on a new condition that was never part of the deal he just signed.

The condition is that Saudi Arabia must sign on to the Abraham Accords and recognise Israel.

• READ MORE: Is the US-Saudi nuclear deal on, or in limbo?
• Other Lim Tean articles

No phone call to Riyadh first. No consultation. Just a Truth Social post, blindsiding the very partner he’d shaken hands with 24 hours earlier.

And here’s the part Washington seems not to grasp: this precondition is dead on arrival.

MBS has said it again and again, most recently as an official rejection just weeks ago — no normalisation with Israel without an independent Palestinian state, East Jerusalem as its capital, full stop.

The Saudi Foreign Ministry has called it “non-negotiable”. Trump is demanding surrender to a position Riyadh has never once wavered from.

Not statecraft
This is not statecraft. This is not deterrence. This is a superpower treating a sovereign signature as a rough draft — and then attaching a condition it knows, or should know, will never be met.

Ask Kyiv. Ask Tehran. Ask now Riyadh: what is an American signature actually worth?

The Legitimacy Principle is simple — power without consistency is not strength, it is liability.

A state that cannot honour its own agreements within a day, and cannot read its own partner’s red lines, cannot lead a rules-based order. It can only bully one, until the world stops showing up to sign.

Washington is agreement incapable.

Trump’s undercutting of the nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia shortly after it was signed by adding the requirement that the Saudis recognize Israel (they won’t) signals everyone including the Iranians that you can’t trust a deal with Trump. https://t.co/8QoDnZdBNF

— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) July 26, 2026

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.

A New Zealand national solidarity group for Palestine has condemned plans by Nauru to open an embassy in Jerusalem as an “alarming indication” of Israel diplomacy consolidating illegal occupation of Palestinian Territory and “buying Pacific votes” at the United Nations.

“Nearly half of the countries with embassies in Jerusalem are from the Pacific and this clearly shows the effort and dollars Israel is putting into the region,” said Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) spokesperson Rinad Tamimi.

She said in a statement Israel was “unashamedly” using Pacific countries to undermine the international consensus that Israel’s claims over all of Jerusalem were not legally valid.

• READ MORE: Nauru’s government announces plans for embassy in Israel
• Pro-Palestinian activists plan protest against ‘Israeli pond’ diplomacy push in Pacific
• Fiji opens embassy in Jerusalem
• Let peace govern security – A pastoral message from the Pacific Conference of Churches
• Other Pacific and Israeli diplomacy reports

Israel and the government of Nauru announced this week that Nauru would open an embassy in Jerusalem, following news in January that Samoa would locate its embassy there.

Papua New Guinea and Fiji have already established their embassies in Jerusalem, along with the US, Paraguay, Honduras, Guatemala and Kosovo.

All other countries have their embassies in Tel Aviv to avoid inferring approval of Israeli sovereignty claims over Jerusalem.

“Tuvalu, with a population of 12,000, has only five diplomatic posts in the entire world — and suddenly its government finds a need to have another one in Jerusalem,” Tamimi said.

Pacific votes at UN
“The other concerning aspect is the Pacific votes in the United Nations.

“In 2024, there was a landmark vote in the United Nations to instruct Israel that it had 12 months to get out of the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

“New Zealand voted in favour, along with 123 other countries. But seven Pacific nations voted against upholding this statement of international law. That was half of the 14 countries who voted against,” Tamimi said.

“Obviously we are in favour of Pacific countries being independent and making their own choices. But PSNA is speaking out to support of indigenous groups in those countries who see Israel as a highly aggressive modern colonial venture which should not be permitted by their governments to manipulate the Pacific for its interests against international law.

“New Zealand’s government is critical when it believes other countries are increasing their interests in the Pacific. It’s time Wellington made the same statements about Israel.”

Vanuatu’s government has issued a stinging rebuke to the country’s customary leaders who have reportedly called for revoking the appointment of the first woman to lead the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) Secretariat.

Dr Anna Naupa, a Pacific politics expert and ni-Vanuatu woman, was appointed MSG Secretariat Director-General last month, with Vanuatu Prime Minister Jotham Napat describing her as “one of the nation’s top minds”.

“Vanuatu believes the success of the MSG under Dr Naupa’s leadership will depend on never losing sight of that founding spirit — solidarity, justice, and self-determination for our peoples,” Napat said.

• READ MORE: Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre blasts ‘misogynistic attack’ over MSG leadership
• Malvatumauri demands revocation of Dr Naupa’s MSG DG appointment by July 30

However, the Malvatumauri National Council of Chiefs, which is a constitutionally mandated body, has reportedly “issued an ultimatum” to Napat, “demanding the immediate revocation of Dr Anna Naupa’s appointment,” according to the Vanuatu Daily Post.

The traditional leaders want a man to head the organisation “to align with customary traditions”, according to the front page of Thursday’s edition of the newspaper.

“The council warned that if the government fails to rescind the appointment by 30 July 2026, traditional leaders across the country will initiate customary actions to challenge the decision,” the report said.

In a statement on Thursday, the Vanuatu government called the council’s stance “regressive, divisive, and an embarrassment”.

Based on merit
The government said Naupa’s appointment was based on merit and she was selected after “a rigorous, independent MSG panel process involving all MSG member countries”, adding it fully backed Naupa’s appointment.

“By dragging the entire nation into this stance, the Malvatumauri has done a disservice to Vanuatu.

“At a time when Vanuatu is being recognised internationally for leadership on climate justice, and on regional solidarity, this act seeks to drag our country backward.”

The government also condemned the Vanuatu Daily Post for publishing the council’s views.

“To platform and amplify misogyny without context or challenge is to normalise it. Our media must lift the standard of national discourse, not lower it.”

The Vanuatu Prime Minister’s Office is demanding a public apology from the Malvatumauri National Council of Chiefs to Naupa, to the women of Vanuatu, and to the people of the MSG region.

“Vanuatu’s future depends on unity, on merit, and on respect. We will not allow outdated and discriminatory attitudes to define us on the regional or world stage.”

COMMENTARY: By Saige England

Auckland rejected DP World.

Environmental campaigners and campaigners for protecting assets, and campaigners for workers rights, believe Christchurch needs to do the same.

This updated commentary on an important local, regional, national and international issue, includes environmental campaigner, Sara Campbell’s full speech. It also gives more background to the company toying with the port of Lyttelton.

• READ MORE: A tale of power being taken from the people and handed to predator companies — Saige England
• DP World back story: From ports to proxy armies – tracing the UAE’s regional footprint in Sudan, Yemen and the Horn
• ‘He is one of us’: Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged conversations with Emirati billionaire
• Epstein flipped Israel’s Gaza-tested biometric scanners into Nigeria ports deal for UAE
• Dubai-based DP World replaces chief named in Epstein files
• Sultan took peep at Auckland Ports

Back in 2009 (a year after Jeffrey Epstein was convicted), when he was still mates with the convicted sexual abuser and human trafficker, DP World’s head, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, was nosying around the port of Auckland.

A few years later, the former DP World Group chairman and CEO, Sultan Bin Sulayem, and by then, convicted sex offender Epstein, got down to some buddy boy business with the Zionist state of Israel.

“I am in Berlin with the Israeli defence minister, I have told him about you and Sheik Mohamed,” Bin Sulayem wrote to Epstein in March 2012. “He would like to meet you both.”

And in another email Epstein told Sultan bin Sulayem (DP World chairman and chief executive up until February this year) that he “loved the torture videos”.

Parasitic corporations
Corporations like this are parasites. These sharks circle and you don’t see their fins until it is too late.

Let their comms people and lawyers (on their mega pay scale) argue as much as they like, removing one person does not clean up this corporation’s reputation.

DP World has a poor history in Africa, and Queensland, so while it might make the right initial noises it will not in the long-term pay heed to Te Tiriti O Waitangi.

The Sultan resigned from the company in February 2026. But if this was a clean company it would not have a dirty history.

All these deals to take over public assets are dirty aren’t they? Deals to take over public assets take from the people, they don’t give to the people.

They represent short-term gain (for those at the top) for long-term pain.

Who will benefit in the long run? Not the people. Not the port. Not the whenua. Not the moana.

Spin propaganda
Big corporations pay huge salaries to communications people to spin propaganda. I could have worked in that field myself, could have earned a big salary spinning dirty stories and making them seem good.

I refuse to be bought because I believe that the only way to save our environment is to keep our assets in public ownership — owned by the people for the people.

We need legislation that removes the ability of any company to take control of the port.

We need legislation that removes the ability of any company to own our public assets.

Capitalism. Colonialism. The money trail leads to destruction.

This takeover bid by DP World for the Lyttelton Port was engineered when one of the worst players in the world, Epstein’s torture-loving mate, was at the company’s helm.

And the company promoted that man all the way to the top. It can’t possibly claim it did not have a clue.

Exploiting people
The company, like colonial companies of the past, controls ports, takes resources. This international company will argue that it does not, but it does exploit people.

Not the people at the top — of course not — it exploits the people on the ground. It pushes them out.

If this company comes to town people will be replaced by AI. It will claim that will make the workplace safer, because of automation. Goodbye jobs.

And as it avoids taxes by investing offshore in tax havens the public carries the burden of costs . . . hello rate hikes.

This is a local, regional, national, and international issue.

Here is Lyttelton local and environmental campaigner Sara Campbell speaking about the environmental risks of privatising our port.

“I don’t think I have a lot to add; the fundamentals of private ownership and DP World’s track record have already been covered . . . and the same system that treats workers as disposable — with low wages, unsafe conditions, and no say — is the same system that treats our water, our forests, and our air as disposable,” she says.

Aggressive profit-seeking
“It’s a system that puts aggressive profit-seeking ahead of the wellbeing of communities, workers, and the environment.”

Saige England: A tale of power being taken from the people and handed to predator companies

DP World has an appalling environmental record.

“For example, according to reports by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime, the UAE — specifically the emirate of Dubai, the home base of DP World — acts as a major global transit corridor and hotspot for environmental crimes. It serves as a massive hub for illegal wildlife and flora trafficking.”

She points out that the drive to maximise shareholder profit strips away the ability of the public to lead healthy lives.

“The cost of living keeps climbing while oil companies, power companies, supermarkets, and banks make record profits. Often price-gouging in a crisis.”

Most of the profits are sent offshore to shareholders, she says.

”We spend a lot of time in politics asking how we break up duopolies and oligopolies that take so much from us.

Monopoly asset
“Well, our port is a monopoly asset. There’s no other port in our region this size. It’s not feasible to build another just to keep freight prices down.

“So if DP World takes over operations, their first priority will be shareholder profit.

”That means our freight prices go up. And when freight goes up, the price of almost everything goes up too.”

Campbell says easing the port isn’t just about one contract. It’s a gateway to even more privatisation.

“DP World’s own strategy is to acquire the whole supply chain. They call it ‘an end-to-end service’.”

But the reality is a privately owned foreign company seizing profit and control across our entire logistics network.

“By the time the lease is up, they’ll be so entrenched it’ll be almost impossible to operate without them. And that gives them even more power to lobby for the next contract.

Promises mean little
“Whatever promises DP World puts in the first contract don’t mean much to me,’ says Campbell.

“They’re far better resourced than we are to fight in court and once given a foothold their lobbying power increases over time.”

There will never be an easier time to stop DP World becoming entrenched in our country than now, Campbell says.

Like other speakers at the public meeting in Lyttelton organised by New Zealanders for a Democratic Economy, she expressed anger at the port management LPC and CCHL, saying: “who the hell do they think they are?”

“Can someone please remind them we own the port, not them. How dare they proceed with a seven-hectare land reclamation without our consent. A decision that has significant, negative impacts on the ecological health of our harbour. We couldn’t even hold our elected councillors accountable, because the decision didn’t cross the council table.

“Now, LPC is proposing a $800 million expansion with further land reclamation and I fear we will shut out of that decision too.”

She pointed out that the world is rapidly warming, that the last 11 years have been the hottest on record, and Aotearoa now has the highest proportion of threatened species in the world.

Immense pressure
“And right here in Whakaraupō, the ecology is under immense pressure. This harbour is home to our nationally vulnerable Hector’s dolphins.”

The people need to have the right to demonstrate their priorities.

“Priorities for our community, for our workers, and for the ecosystem — not for a corporate balance sheet.”

Campbell says she believes the Lyttelton deal can be stopped but it does not stop there.

“I believe we can change how the port is run. To a model where we’re actually at the table.

“Where mana whenua and the unions are strategic partners in decision making.”

Saige England is a humanitarian journalist and activist for community and the environment. She was present at the Lyttelton public meeting last week in support of community action. She is also a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

Yesterday Marnie Ainsworth (from Keep Our Assets) and others made submissions to the Christchurch City Council.

• More action is being organised by New Zealanders for a Democratic Economy and Keep Our Assets

The Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre has strongly condemned a reported “ultimatum” from the Malvatumauri National Council of Chiefs demanding that the appointment of a woman as Secretary-General of the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) be revoked.

The Vanuatu Daily Post reports that the council has warned that if the government fails to rescind the appointment by 30 July 2026, traditional leaders across the country will initiate customary action to challenge the decision.

“This is a clear misogynistic attack on women’s leadership,” the Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre said today in a statement.

• READ MORE: Malvatumauri demands revocation of Dr Naupa’s MSG DG appointment by July 30

“Dr Anna Naupa‘s appointment is path-breaking for women and girls in Vanuatu and the region, marking the first time a ni-Vanuatu and a Pacific woman has been appointed to lead the MSG Secretariat,” the statement said.

“Her appointment represents an important milestone for women’s leadership and participation in regional decision-making across Melanesia and the Pacific.

“We support the statement by the Office of the Prime Minister in Vanuatu,” which pointed out that the Vanuatu government had nothing to do with the appointment as the MSG has its own recruitment process.

“Women’s leadership across the Pacific is not up for negotiation,” added the Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre.

CEDAW signatory
Vanuatu is a signatory to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). The country also has a National Gender Equality Policy 2020-2030.

According to the Daily Post, the controversy stems from the recent appointment of Dr Naupa, who is currently based in Australia for six months, while MSG Acting DG Ilan Kiloe oversees daily operations in Port Vila.

A formal letter of concern was addressed to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) on 6 January 2026, in which then acting president of the Malvatumauri National Council of Chiefs, Chief George Bumseng, outlined four key reasons why he believed the post should be held by a male officer.

Chief Bumseng, who is also chairman of the Malmemeli Ambrym Council of Chiefs, said that according to Vanuatu customs and traditional beliefs, only men were entitled to perform certain types of customary ceremonies.

He said these ceremonies were fundamental to the process of becoming chiefs and customary leaders who represented their tribes.

Chief Bumseng said in his letter that as MSG shortlisted candidates for interviews for the position of MSG director-general, the appointment should align with the nation’s traditions.

He encouraged the appointment of a male candidate to the position.

While acknowledging Dr Naupa’s qualifications, the Ambrym chief said the appointment of a female candidate to the position could risk undermining the respect accorded to customs and traditional values.

In a statement released yesterday, Chief Bumseng said the letter was issued before the appointment of Dr Naupa and he accused Prime Minister Jotham Napat of “turning a blind eye to the chiefs’ concerns”.

Chief Bumseng said that by setting a deadline of July 30, the chiefs had placed pressure on the government to reconcile regional diplomatic commitments with customary principles.

The Public Relations Officer in the Prime Minister’s Office, Kiery Manassah, said the appointment was not a decision made by PM Napat because it was separate from the Vanuatu government.

“The government has never had any say in these appointments. It is a Melanesian institution with its own process,” Manassah said.

The MSG does not specify any gender requirement for the position of director-general of the organisation.

Fiji’s universities have been criticised for failing to study the long-term effects of the country’s repeated political upheavals on the public service and governance, with the Fiji Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearing that a major gap in research has left important national lessons undocumented.

Academic Professor Vijay Naidu told the commission it was “a great shame” that higher education institutions had not examined how cycles of political instability had affected the quality and performance of Fiji’s public sector.

“It’s a great shame that the universities in Fiji have failed to look at the impacts of these cycles of political instability on the nature, the quality and the function of the public sector.”

• READ MORE: Fiji Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings
• Fiji coup reports

Dr Naidu drew particular attention to the University of the South Pacific, saying its once-prominent governance programme had disappeared despite the country’s history of political crises.

“The governance programme was a flagship programme of the university in the early 2000s … Well, the governance programme is gone. It’s finished.”

He questioned what that said about the role of universities in serving Fiji and the wider Pacific.

“What does it tell you about universities serving Fiji and the region when governance is such an important issue?”

Strengthening democracy
Dr Naidu said strengthening democratic institutions required sustained effort and could not be achieved overnight.

“The general democratic institutions and the checks and balances associated with them, together with a supportive democratic culture, have to be built incrementally.”

He warned that every military coup had reversed progress made in democratic governance and institution building. Fiji has suffered four coups — two in 1987, and also in 2000 and 2006.

“The analogy of switching the light on and off doesn’t work. Democracy doesn’t work that way. Each time we have had a military coup, it’s actually taken us backwards.”

Referring to earlier evidence presented by Professor Graham Hassall, Dr Naidu said the damage extended beyond the public service to the broader confidence people had in national institutions.

“The wider implication is that there is a loss of confidence.”

He said understanding the long-term consequences of political instability was essential if Fiji was to rebuild stronger democratic institutions and avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

Republished from The Fiji Times with permission.

Last night I attended a packed meeting in Lyttelton against the takeover attempt by DP World of the Lyttelton Port. This is a local, regional, national, and international issue.

The meeting was organised by New Zealanders for A Democratic Economy. It was chaired by John Minto, a long time campaigner for human rights.

Think evil predator company with a track record in taking over international ports — sackings, enviro hazards and links to Epstein…  and you have DP World in a nutshell.

• READ MORE:  Community, unions meet over Lyttelton Port takeover bid, as decision looms
• Dubai-based DP World replaces chief named in Epstein files
• Top Canadian pension fund halts deals with UAE firm over Epstein ties
• Bribery allegations threaten DP World’s expansion plans in India
• Major multinational port operator paid zero tax in Australia while raking in billions
• Other DP World reports

I have researched the history of DP World and it is accused of being corrupt — and good at keeping the corruption out of sight — but that’s the way with these tax-evading companies.

Who pays for their profits? The people, the taxpayers through rate-hikes and workers, through redundancies. DP World loves replacing people with AI.

Predator companies like this start on the port and move into other areas because ports are a gateway to transport and other industries.

This is a local, regional, national and international issue about power and control.

It is about power being taken out of the hands of people and placed in the hands of predator companies.

Workers made redundant
Last night heard from workers who have been made redundant water side. Men who cared about community.

We heard from Gerard Loader, secretary at the Lyttelton branch of the Maritime Union of New Zealand and who is also the national vice-president of the union.

Loader presented as a union official, and also as a boy who grew up, married, had children and works in Lyttelton. He recalled the days when Lyttelton was a hive of activity, a harbour full of ships, trucks, trains, seafarers and “wharfies”.

He gave relevant background to the development of the takeover.

In 2023, the Lyttelton Port Company (LPC) appointed a new CEO in Graeme Sumner and chair of the board Barry Bragg.

“Not long after that we started hearing rumours of plans to privatise city assets, with DP world being mentioned more than once,” said Loader.

“So with the support of the greater community we lobbied council and demonstrated at the CCHL AGM achieving our goal of keeping our assets in public control, albeit with a lot of contorted right-leaning faces looking on in disappointment.”

Battle won, but war continues
That battle was won, but the war is far from over, he said.

“Since early 2024 we have been challenging or asking all LPC management, board members, councillors etc about the persistent rumours of DP World wanting to lease the port operations as a way to get around the mandate of keeping the port in public ownership, and to a man they have all denied or deflected the issue saying they know nothing or it is out of their hands, or we cannot interupt the process as we have to follow due diligence etcetera.

“Then to hear the announcement in June of Tonui (3 runanga and DP World) putting in an unsolicited bid to CCHL for the leasing out of port operations for a 30-year contract was a slap in the face to not only the employees at LPC but the people and ratepayers of Christchurch who have basically been lied to for the last two years by everyone, as DP World and Tonui have been negotiating behind closed doors on this, and in the words of LPC CEO Graeme Sumner, the worst kept secret in Canterbury.”

Barry Bragg is chair of LPC board, was on the Ngāi Tahu Property board for seven years, and is the deputy chair of Stevensons Limited who specialise in concrete and construction.”

Loader said the fact that Bragg claimed he “knew nothing about it”, when asked directly at the Christchurch City Council meeting on June 3, raises more questions than it answers.

Whether the powers that be had full knowledge, or they truly knew nothing while a deal of this magnitude was being discussed, as a ratepayer was “deeply concerning”, Loader said.

“Whose interests do they have at heart?”

End of people’s control
He added that if this “deal” proceeds it would be the end of the port being controlled by the people in the interests of Christchurch city and all profits going back to the Canterbury region.

Rather, the port would be controlled by a huge foreign monopoly which would only have their profit margin at the heart of the operation.

His words were sobering. There is no illusion that control has already slipped and deals are being made behind the scenes.

That is typical of Dubai-based DP World.

The broligarchy is alive and kicking and it does not care about the Tangata or the Whenua or the Moana.

We heard from researcher Edward Miller, of the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability (CICTAR) who has investigated DP World’s control of Australian ports.

This company evades tax and so rates rise. Rise and rise. The burden on tax payers is massive because the company is all about profit and not about sharing or caring for community.

The port is the first point of take over and not the last.

Need to stop this
We need to stop this. We need to stop this asset sale and others.

We need to ensure our community is heard and heeded, and not made redundant.
Councils and the government work for us. It is not the other way around.

We heard from poet Gary McCormick who said we, the people, have power. We have the power to stop this. We are the voice.

We heard from Māori women who talked about the generations to come. We heard form Māori women who talked about the terrible effect this would have on the environment. A greedy parasite controlling the port.

We heard from Sara Campbell who spoke eloquently and passionately about the toll this will take on our environment.

“We’re living in a rapidly warming world. The last 11 years have been the hottest on record.

“Aotearoa now has the highest proportion of threatened species in the world.

“And right here in Whakaraupō, the ecology is under immense pressure. This harbour is home to our nationally vulnerable Hector’s dolphins.”

And yet:

“I truly believe we can stop DP World,” she said.

And the crowd cheered.

“And I believe we can change how the port is run. To a model where we’re actually at the table. Where mana whenua and the unions are strategic partners in decision making.”

No media present
As for me, I will try to publish articles in the media on this but the news media was not there. The newspapers were not present. Radio was not present.

Once the port mattered to media. Now, where is it?

We need to notice this. We need to draw attention to it, we need to join the protest against it. Or it will be too late. And what then?

As Gerard Loader said: “When my grandson asks what I did to stop it, I want to be able to tell him I did everything I could.”

Community for community. Rise people, rise.

Saige England is a humanitarian journalist and activist for community and the environment. She was present in support of community action. She is also a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

• Sign the petition Keep Our Port Public to show there is no public mandate for privatisation
• More information on Our Port Public website

Following the passing of Qatar’s Father Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani at 74 on Sunday, his solidarity with the Palestinian people remains one of the defining legacies of his leadership.

He is being remembered not only as a regional statesman, but also as a steadfast ally of the Palestinian people and the only Arab leader to physically break the crippling siege on the Gaza Strip.

In October 2012, Sheikh Hamad visited the embattled Gaza Strip, six years after Israel imposed its crippling international blockade on the territory, following the 2006 Palestinian elections.

• READ MORE: How Sheikh Hamad revolutionised Arab media through Al Jazeera

Accompanied by his wife, Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, and a high-level delegation, the emir bypassed the political isolation imposed on the enclave by Western powers and regional actors, leading to a massive official and popular reception.

The head of Hamas’s diaspora office, Khaled Meshaal, told Al Jazeera that the visit to the Strip meant that “Jerusalem, Gaza and Palestine mourn him”.

“He was the first Arab and Muslim leader to visit Gaza, standing by its side with chivalry and magnanimity, as if officially announcing the breaking of the siege in its darkest circumstances,” Meshaal told Al Jazeera.

“He was intelligent, brave and a man of principles.”

‘Special love for Palestine’
Ahmed al-Sheikh, a senior journalist, Arab affairs commentator and former news director at Al Jazeera Arabic Channel, said the Father Emir had ”a special kind of love for Palestine”.

“Has any other leader in the Arab world done that [visit to Gaza], except Hamad bin Khalifa?” al-Sheikh reflected in a recent interview.

”Why did he go to Gaza? It’s because he saw that everyone around Gaza is neglecting it”, he added.

During that landmark visit, Sheikh Hamad announced an increase in Qatar’s reconstruction grant to the enclave from $254 million to $400 million, laying the foundation for vital housing, infrastructure and healthcare projects that benefited thousands of Palestinians.

His commitment to the Palestinian cause predated the blockade on Gaza. In 1999, Sheikh Hamad became the first Gulf leader to visit the Palestinian territories since 1967, meeting with the late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat during a critical political impasse.

According to al-Sheikh, the emir viewed the Palestinian struggle through a deeply personal lens. When former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon besieged Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah, the emir was profoundly pained. He told his aides that when Sharon attacked the Muqata’a, it felt as though he was attacking Qatar itself.

His connection to Palestine was coupled with a regret that he had never visited Jerusalem before its occupation in 1967, According to al-Sheikh, that prompted him to commission an extensive three-hour documentary on the holy city to capture its history and identity.

Rather than relying solely on international intervention, he believed in the agency of the Palestinian people and that they were the essential spearhead of their movement.

“You will do the primary action and without this action there can be no liberation,” the emir once told al-Sheikh.

Defying regional consensus
This stance put him frequently at odds with the regional consensus. During Israel’s devastating 2008–2009 war on Gaza, deep divisions emerged among Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members over how to respond to the crisis.

Sheikh Hamad called for an emergency Arab summit in Doha, proposing a $250 million reconstruction fund and a maritime corridor to bypass the blockade. He famously expressed his disappointment on live television about the lack of an Arab quorum for the emergency meeting.

“God is sufficient for us and he is the best disposer of affairs.”

Some of Gaza’s most vital infrastructure projects before the outbreak of Israel’s genocidal war in October 2023 were the result of financial pledges made by Sheikh Hamad.

Qatar funded the rehabilitation of vital highways and the flagship Sheikh Hamad City in Khan Younis — a $58 million  public housing project with 53 modern apartment buildings for thousands of low-income families.

Additionally, the Sheikh Hamad Hospital for Rehabilitation and Prosthetics, which officially opened in April 2019, became the territory’s premier facility for amputees and children with hearing impairments.

Israel erased infrastructure
Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has systematically erased much of the infrastructure Qatar helped finance during Sheikh Hamad’s leadership. Satellite imagery from May this year confirmed that Hamad City and other areas in southern Gaza have been wiped from the map.

The Sheikh Hamad Hospital managed to resume its vital services last December, despite suffering direct attacks, severe shortages and the broader collapse of Gaza’s healthcare system. Operating the only CT scanner in northern Gaza, the hospital has even opened a new branch in the south to cope with a 225 percent increase in amputation cases.

Sheikh Hamad Hospital’s continued operations during the ongoing genocide in Gaza remain a tangible remnant of the late emir’s unprecedented efforts in the besieged enclave. His support for Gaza will remain for generations to come.

Mohammad Mansour is a senior journalist of Al Jazeera with a particular focus on Gaza, Palestine and Israel. Before joining Al Jazeera, he held editorial positions at A News in Istanbul, Turkey; TRT World; and TRT Arabic in Gaza. Mansour won the 2016 Media Freedom Award for Best TV Report in Gaza, Palestine.

Forty-eight hours ago, I wrote: “Iran doesn’t need to close the strait. It needs only to demonstrate, periodically, that it can.”

Today, Iran did.

On Saturday night, the IRGC Navy struck a vessel it says was running an unauthorised route with its tracking systems switched off — “struck and brought to a halt,” in Tehran’s words.

• READ MORE: Iran attacks Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar after US bombings
• Lim Tean: The Hormuz bone – why Iran will not let go
• Other Lim Tean articles

Hours later came the declaration: the Strait of Hormuz is closed “until further notice,” and until “the end of US interference in this region.”

Washington’s response was immediate — a THIRD round of strikes in a week, hitting radars, missile stores, drone launch sites. And still the declaration stands.

Understand what you are watching. This is not a wall going up. This is the tollbooth demanding recognition.

This is Iran’s third closure declaration since February. Each one follows the same grammar: a strike on a “non-compliant” vessel, a proclamation, a spike in oil prices and war risk premiums — and then, underneath the thunder, negotiation.

Safe passage ‘mechanisms’
Even as the IRGC announced the closure, Iranian and Omani ministers were meeting in Muscat to discuss “mechanisms for the safe passage of ships.”

Qatar and Pakistan are working the phones. Oman has floated a draft: free navigation through a southern corridor in Omani waters, while the northern corridor — through Iranian waters — requires Tehran’s prior approval.

Now, your instinct will be to say: fine — then every ship simply takes the free Omani route, and Iran’s leverage evaporates.

Look at the map before you believe that.

The strait is 21 nautical miles wide at its narrowest point. There is no southern corridor beyond the reach of Iranian shore batteries, drones and fast boats sitting minutes across the water.

And look at where this month’s strikes actually landed: off Limah. Off Khor Fakkan. Nine nautical miles east of Oman. Every one of them in or near the very waters the proposal calls “free”.

The corridor is not safe because a document says so. It is safe only for as long as Iran chooses not to fire — and Iran has just demonstrated, three times in a week, that it can choose otherwise whenever it likes.

Not freedom of navigation
A passage that exists by the coastal power’s forbearance is not freedom of navigation. It is a licence — revocable at will.

And here is what 30 years in marine insurance taught me: the underwriters in London know this. War risk premiums do not price the legal regime. They price Iranian CAPABILITY — and the capability survives every settlement, every corridor, every ceasefire.

The day Iran wants leverage in the nuclear talks, one projectile anywhere near that “free” corridor resets the entire insurance market overnight. No cover, no cargo, no voyage. The closure enforces itself.

So read the Omani proposal again, because it is the entire game in one sentence. One lane requiring Tehran’s prior approval — and one lane requiring Tehran’s continued restraint.

Either way, Iran’s supervisory role over the world’s most important energy chokepoint gets written into the architecture of the settlement itself: formalised, internationalised, permanent.

Three rounds of American strikes have destroyed boats, radars and launchers. They have not touched THAT.

Every escalation has followed the same sequence: demonstration, declaration, negotiation. The bombs fall, the boats burn, and Iran’s position at the table grows stronger — because its leverage was never the boats. It was the geography.

And geography, as I said, does not negotiate.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.

COMMENTARY: By Cathy Peters

In a move that’s been largely unreported in Australia and New Zealand, Hamas announced earlier this week that it would dissolve its governing Emergency Committee with the resignation of its acting leader.

This move has been recognised as an attempt to hasten the transfer of administrative authority to the Trump-appointed Board of Peace’s National Committee for the Management of Gaza (NCAG), a body of Palestinian technocrats, assembled and waiting in Cairo to manage public administration, security, recovery and transition throughout the Gaza Strip as part of the agreed ceasefire plan.

However, despite being established in January this year, the NCAG has not yet been given access to enter Gaza by the Board of Peace or Israel.

• READ MORE: Antisemitism Envoy Segal slams ABC, SBS Israel bias, wants to vet media
• Other Gaza “ceasefire” reports

Trump’s controversial Board of Peace predictably dismissed the Hamas move, stating that the NCAG is not yet in a position to take on this role while Hamas retains control of weapons. Hamas maintains that while Israel is still killing Palestinians, it will not disarm.

Nine months since the Gaza ceasefire and Trump’s 20-point peace plan of October 2025, conditions throughout the Strip have remained unlivable and deadly for Palestinians, with more than 1000 killed by Israeli forces and more than 3500 wounded.

Parents stay awake all night in their tents to stop rats feeding on their children.

The amount of humanitarian aid is far short of what is required, and there is a trickle of medical evacuations despite some 16,500 Palestinians needing urgent medical transfer out of Gaza.

A Board of Inaction
The UN Security Council supported the establishment of the Board of Peace in November last year, noting that it would be temporary and transitional, although Trump subsequently declared it would address other world conflicts beyond Gaza.

The composition of the Board of Peace Executive and the Gaza Executive Board includes a number of Trump’s leadership team, plus other Republican operatives, wealthy US businessmen and real estate magnates, as well as Tony Blair.

• Donald Trump – Chairman for life
• Marco Rubio – US Secretary of State
• Jared Kushner – US presidential advisor and son-in-law
• Steve Witkoff – US Special Envoy to the Middle East
• Tony Blair – Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
• Marc Rowan – CEO of Apollo Global Management
• Ajay Banga – President of the World Bank Group
  

The Gaza Executive Board includes all of the above plus various international diplomats and intelligence officials and representatives from Egypt, Turkey, Qatar and the UAE and more Republican government appointees, Susie Wiles, White House Chief of Staff and former Trump campaign adviser, and Robert Gabriel, US Deputy National Security Advisor.

According to the UN Security Council Resolution 2803, this body has UN support to “set the framework and coordinate funding for the redevelopment of Gaza” until the Palestinian Authority has “satisfactorily reformed”. It also authorised the Board to deploy a temporary International Stabilisation Force (ISF) in Gaza; however, this has not occurred.

Israel has moved some of the anti-Hamas Palestinian militias it’s been arming and funding for three years now into the area it has occupied behind the yellow line. These various militias, led by factional gangs, drug lords and criminals, pose additional threats to Hamas disarming and the transition of power to a Palestinian-led reconstruction committee and the ultimate withdrawal of the IDF.

Yellow and Orange Lines

The Israeli-defined ceasefire Yellow Line, according to Israel’s legal NGO Gisha, pushes more than two million people into less than half of the Strip’s territory, exacerbating unbearable overcrowding that is harming public health, including outbreaks of disease and infestation of rats and other pests.

Israel’s seizure of such vast areas also prevents Gaza residents from returning to their homes and lands. Most of Gaza’s agricultural lands lie east of the Yellow Line, meaning they are within areas controlled by Israel. Continued denial of access for farmers to their lands prevents the rehabilitation of vital food sources.

From March 2025, Israel instituted the Orange Line, a line that delineates almost 48 percent of Gaza’s land mass where any international organisations are prohibited from moving without prior coordination with Israeli authorities. Gisha reports that this orange line is now a new border that has expanded the area that Israel now directly controls.

While negotiations have stalled for 9 months on the initial implementation of the ceasefire agreement, the IDF, following on from Netanyahu’s call in May, has now occupied almost 70 percent of Gaza, with the yellow cement perimeter markers defining an ever-shrinking area where 2.1 million war-wounded and dispossessed Palestinians are helplessly surviving.

Remote-controlled machine guns
Everyone in Gaza is constantly monitored by drones, and now occupying the eastern perimeter of this dystopian landscape are 23 massive military cranes equipped with remote-controlled machine guns and high-tech surveillance cameras inside the Israeli IDF-defined Yellow Line.

Gaza journalist Tamar Nahed posted this description of Israel’s latest killing apparatus,

“These cranes have turned the entire city into an open field. The latest military technologies are directed at civilians. We have become an open testing ground for their new weapons. The horror is not just in the sound … it is the constant feeling of being an exposed target at all times.”

In the first week of July, the Board of Peace declared that there was no role for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in Gaza, which is a continuation of the Israeli ban on this aid organisation, which has supported Palestinians with essential humanitarian and educational aid in Gaza since 1948.

This announcement negates the Charter of the United Nations, international law principles and fundamental human rights standards.

Shelters or camps?
Despite the Board’s apparent refusal to allow the Palestinian committee of bureaucrats (NCAG) into Gaza, the Israeli news outlet Israel Hayom just reported on plans aimed at relocating Palestinian residents into barbed wire fenced designated areas. This will allow the IDF to “deepen its grip on areas outside of the yellow line”.

“Surviving Palestinians will be herded into fenced ‘humanitarian shelters’ policed by foreign forces,” as reported by Israel Hayom on July 2.

Images of a camp that’s been described as a concentration camp have emerged in Tel Al-Sultan, an area near Rafah where a pilot project of “humanitarian shelters” will be established. Civilians will be channelled into Tel Al-Sultan, which was a densely populated area of Rafah from which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were ordered to flee in April last year.

This image of stark, freshly flattened land surrounded by barbed wire fences and covered with masses of metal box shelters and no evidence of any permanent cement structures (as directed by Israel) appears to be a horrific precursor to

a very grim future for Palestinians in Gaza.

It recalls Israel Defence Minister Katz’s plan of a year ago of a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of Rafah, where the goal was to screen people before they were allowed to enter to ensure they were not Hamas and then refuse any exits except to third countries.

Legal immunity
The Board of Peace convened in Cyprus at the end of June for 3 days to “reset” after “the Iran war has completely shifted the attention in the last several months,” according to an official source. It sought to address the funding shortfalls, logistical delays and security challenges.

One of the more controversial draft resolutions was the Board’s plan to grant legal immunity to its members, contractors, and security forces; therefore

shielding the whole enterprise from potential legal proceedings.

As reported widely, human rights lawyers are highly critical of this proposal, including Palestinian American lawyer and academic, Noura Erakat: “They are basically saying there’s no external oversight, including applicable international law regarding occupation. It’s creating a legal system unto itself.”

At the same time, the IDF has reportedly called for fighting to resume as senior officers in the IDF claim that Hamas’ military wing is rebuilding.

Hamas has maintained that it will only disarm under the auspices of the Palestinian NCAG and when Phase 1 of the ceasefire agreement is achieved, which includes the withdrawal of Israeli forces to agreed positions, full implementation of humanitarian measures and a complete end to Israel’s military attacks.

The nightmare on the ground in Gaza for Palestinians continues. The machinations of Trump’s Board of Peace appear to be

stymying any chance for genuine reconstruction of Gaza

led by Palestinians for Palestinians. The available evidence at this point is that the 1000-day-plus Israeli genocide in Gaza continues apace behind the veneer of Trump’s “peace” plan and the continuing indifference of world powers

George Speight — a former coup frontman in Fiji — is calling on the perpetrators of the country’s past political upheavals to confess.

The ex-convict also described the idea of a common identity for the country’s citizens as “flawed” and said iTaukei (Indigenous) views must not be ignored.

Speight made the comments in a submission to Fiji’s Constitutional Review Commission this week, after spending 24 years in a maximum-security jail for treason following the racist 2000 coup.

• READ MORE:  Fiji 2000 coup leader George Speight granted presidential pardon
• Fiji’s Jo Nata reflects on the 2000 coup: ‘We let the racism genie out of the bottle’
• Coup coup land: the press and the putsch in Fiji — David Robie
• FIJI: I was just PR consultant — Jo Nata
• USP 2000 coup student journalism archive
• Other George Speight coup reports

During his submission to the government-backed panel on Thursday, he slammed the 2013 Constitution and said the immunity provision should be removed.

“The clause is unfair… If you want redemption, you have to confess,” he said, adding that Fiji could not achieve genuine reconciliation without first acknowledging past wrongdoing.

Quoting from Proverbs, he said those who admitted their crimes would find mercy, while those who tried to hide would never prosper.

“I have served my time and I don’t feel any malice towards anyone,” he said.

Sweeping immunity
The sweeping immunity provisions have protected those involved in past military and political coups from criminal prosecution and civil liability.

Fiji has been rocked by four coups since gaining independence in 1970. The first two, in May and September 1987, were led by then-military lieutenant-colonel Sitiveni Rabuka, who is the current prime minister.

In 1999, Mahendra Chaudhry was sworn in as the country’s first Indo-Fijian prime minister, but the Labour Party leader’s election stoked racial tension in Fiji.

A year later, Speight led rebel soldiers from the military’s Counter-Revolutionary Warfare (CRW) Unit in an armed takeover of the then-coalition government. Chaudhry and his government were held hostage for 56 days.

The failed businessman pleaded guilty to treason after the unsuccessful coup and received the death penalty, which was later commuted to life imprisonment.

However, he was granted a presidential pardon and released from prison on 19 September 2024.

Indigenous views
Speight condemned the concept of a common name for the people, an issue that has sparked widespread debate in Fiji.

In April, the Great Council of Chiefs (GCC), the apex indigenous body in Fiji, told the Commission that the term “Fijian” should be exclusively reserved for the iTaukei (indigenous) population.

The GCC’s proposal prompted a backlash from political parties, civil society groups and human rights organisations across the country.

Chaudhry, still the Fiji Labour Party leader, told RNZ Pacific Waves at the time that the GCC’s call was “racially divisive”.

“We [the Labour Party] are opposed to that idea and we’ve made it very clear that there can be only one nationality in the nation,” the veteran politician said.

However, Speight told the commission the idea was fundamentally wrong.

“I understand the principle behind it, I understand the reasoning behind it, but it’s flawed. It makes people second-guess something so special and so unique and God-given, their ethnic identity, unless we fix the justice element,” he said.

“All of the different ethnic groups in our country can’t live together very long, because it’s an unfair society.”

‘Uniqueness encouraged’
“The Bill of Rights is great, it covers everybody, no problem. But each ethnic group has its desire to continue with its uniqueness, and it must be encouraged, but not at the expense of the greater good,” he said.

Speight also told the CRC that iTaukei views, including those of the iTaukei Land Trust Board, should not be ignored.

“Those voices have to be heard, the process of hearing those voices and accommodating the issues brought up must never and forever going forward be labelled as racist anymore because they’re not, with respect.”

“Because iTaukei, when they get up and speak, it has been a common practice to label it all as racist, and that’s not the case. No one should feel threatened, no one should feel edited, no one should feel uncertain, because level heads will prevail,” Speight said.

“Those that push the agenda that iTaukei issues are not good for the future of this country and should not be addressed specifically, I ask that they reconsider and work together with the iTaukei community.”

Speight also told the Commission that although the government-appointed Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was a “necessary arm of the process of moving forward”, he had chosen not to appear before it.

‘Doesn’t have teeth’
“I just feel that it doesn’t have the teeth or the mandate to go all the way to actually fix things… until [the immunity clause is removed], truth and reconciliation in my mind is premature,” he said.

“I’m grateful to be here, grateful for the opportunity of the good lord in heaven, and I’m grateful to the government today, that saw fit to release me.”

The Rabuka-led coalition government wants to amend the 2013 Constitution before the upcoming general elections, having set up the independent commission in March to consult widely on the issue.

This story was first published on

Last night, America bombed Iran. Again.

Dozens of strikes — four to five times heavier than the last round — against radar sites, anti-ship missile batteries, and the Revolutionary Guard’s swarm boats. Explosions lit up Bandar Abbas, Sirik, and Qeshm Island.

And what will it change? Nothing.

• READ MORE: Trump says MoU to end Iran war is over, ‘waste of time’ dealing with Tehran
  
• Other Lim Tean articles

Because the strikes were a response to something far more revealing: in the space of 24 hours, three tankers — a Qatari LNG carrier, a Saudi supertanker, and a third vessel hit by drone — were struck in the Strait of Hormuz.

Look at where they were hit. All three were transiting the southern corridor hugging the Omani coast — the route Washington has designated, patrolled, and blessed with the protection of the US Navy.

That is the whole story in one map. The Strait of Hormuz today is not one waterway. It is two rival corridors.

A northern route, designated by Tehran, where ships must register with Iran and sail under Iranian rules. And a southern route, sponsored by America, where the Gulf states send their oil under the shadow of the Fifth Fleet.

‘No American route’
Iran’s message this week could not be clearer: there is no American route through “their” strait.

Tehran did not even claim the attacks. It didn’t need to. State television simply noted that a vessel had “ignored warnings”. After the American bombs fell, Iran’s military declared it would deliver a “crushing response” and that the only safe passage through Hormuz “is one set by Iran”.

Understand what is actually being contested here. This is not about tankers. It is about governance. For 80 years, freedom of navigation in the Gulf has meant navigation on Washington’s terms.

Iran is now asserting something revolutionary: that the power which sits astride the strait — geographically, permanently, immovably — will write the rules of passage. Not the US Navy. Not the Joint Maritime Information Center in Bahrain.

And here is what Washington refuses to grasp: Iran has already priced in the bombs. It absorbed strikes 10 days ago. It absorbed heavier strikes last night. It will absorb the next round too.

Every strike costs America political capital, splits it further from European allies who have barred their bases from offensive operations, and pushes oil and bond yields higher. Every strike costs Iran some radar stations and speedboats — assets it regards as expendable ammunition in a war of endurance.

Iran is the dog that has the Hormuz bone between its teeth. You can beat the dog. You can bomb the dog. The dog will yelp, bleed — and bite down harder.

Not bargaining chip
For Tehran, control of Hormuz is not a bargaining chip. It is the last and greatest source of leverage it possesses, the one card through which the rising regional hegemon dictates the terms of 20 percent of the world’s energy.

The rules-based order said the strait belonged to everyone. The emerging order says the strait belongs to those with the legitimacy — and the will — to hold it. Iran is betting it can outlast American patience.

History suggests the dog usually keeps the bone.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.

Since President Donald Trump’s self-congratulatory tour for “ending” the Israeli war on Gaza last October, followed by a UN Security Council endorsement of his Gaza plan, negotiations over Gaza’s future have been stuck in a diplomatic netherworld.

While Hamas handed over all of its captives and ceased its military operations, Israel has repeatedly violated the deal, killing more than 1000 Palestinians, restricting aid and movement, and expanding the areas it occupies in Gaza.

With media attention focused on Iran and Lebanon, Trump’s so-called “Board of Peace” continues pushing a 15-point “roadmap,” first presented in April, that appears aimed at transforming a limited ceasefire into a broader political settlement based on the disarming of the Palestinian resistance and the abandoning of the struggle for Palestinian national liberation.

• READ MORE: Internal documents show Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ moving to crush Palestinian self-determination
• Trump’s Board of Peace plans to grant itself sweeping immunity, documents show
• Other Board of Peace reports

Drop Site News has obtained two documents from the recent round of negotiations over Gaza’s future:

• Palestinian negotiators’ amendments to the Board of Peace’s proposed roadmap, submitted on June 13; and
• Response delivered late last month by the Board’s “High Representative,” Nickolay Mladenov.

Jeremy Scahill and Jawa Ahmad have reported on the documents here and a summary from their X post is below:

Nickolay Mladenov, Bulgaria’s former defence and foreign minister, who served as a visiting fellow at a pro-Israel think tank founded by AIPAC veterans, has generally avoided identifying Israel when discussing ceasefire violations.

Although the October 2025 agreement obliges both Hamas and Israel to halt “all military operations,” and despite Israel’s daily violations in Gaza, Mladenov’s revised roadmap states that “Hamas and the Palestinian factions shall immediately cease all military activities.”

‘Not to assign blame’
A Board of Peace official defended the approach, telling Drop Site News that the body’s role was “not to assign blame” but to ensure commitments were implemented.

One senior Hamas official, however, told Drop Site that Mladenov’s roadmap sought to impose under the threat of renewed war, ongoing killings, and humanitarian catastrophe, “the surrender that Netanyahu failed to achieve through war”.

Hamas spokesperson Hazem Qassem added that while Palestinian amendments were welcomed by mediators from Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey, Mladenov “continues to approach the file from a perspective close to the Israeli position”.

In their June 13 response, Hamas and other Palestinian factions proposed a gradual process for the registration and storage of heavy weapons to proceed in parallel with Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and be contingent on the implementation of key steps: the entry of the National Committee for Gaza Administration (NCAG), deployment of the International Stabilisation Force (ISF), and dismantling of Israel-backed armed militias in the Strip.

The Palestinian proposal is limited to “heavy weapons” and would be under the joint supervision of the NCAG and Palestinian factions.

In his response, however, Mladenov expanded the framework into a process to “store and decommission” weapons, broadening the scope beyond heavy weapons to include weapons depots, tunnels, military production facilities, and all weapons stored within them.

Crucially, his version adds a condition stating that once the process was complete, Palestinian resistance factions would no longer “hold, store, control or have access to any weapons”.

Buffer force separating Israelis
Hamas’s draft envisioned the ISF primarily as a buffer force separating Israeli troops from areas administered by the National Committee for Gaza Administration (NCAG), monitoring ceasefire compliance, and protecting the delivery of essential humanitarian supplies.

While Mladenov retained these functions, he also assigned the ISF a role in training Palestinian police and “support[ing] the decommissioning process.”

On withdrawal, Hamas proposed a phased Israeli pullout “until Israeli forces are outside the borders of the Gaza Strip”, with the ISF taking positions in vacated areas, and said weapons steps would proceed in parallel with verified withdrawal stages.

Mladenov’s response instead limited Israeli withdrawal to “Gaza’s perimeter” and made it conditional on “verified progress” in the weapons decommissioning process.

Hamas has formally agreed to relinquish governing authority in Gaza to the NCAG, a technocratic body composed of non-partisan Palestinian experts. However, Israel has continued to block the committee from entering Gaza and has demanded Hamas’s disarmament as a precondition.

In Mladenov’s revised document, the NCAG’s entry and assumption of duties are made conditional on Palestinian acceptance of the broader “roadmap” and completion of the second phase’s timeline and implementation mechanisms, particularly on disarmament.

Palestinian negotiators have emphasised that the NCAG should function as a transitional governing authority, stating that it would have “full independence” and be empowered to “fulfill all legal obligations and commitments arising from the current administration of the Gaza Strip”.

Reframed as ‘administration’
Mladenov’s draft removes that language, limiting the NCAG instead to financial liabilities incurred only on or after it assumes control, and reframing it as an administrative body under the Board of Peace.

In their draft, Palestinian negotiators have argued that any resolution of the weapons issue must be embedded in a broader process guaranteeing the Palestinian people’s right to establish a state and exercise self-determination.

But the Board’s draft, by contrast, states only that disarmament “shall create conditions for a credible pathway.”

On governance, Palestinian negotiators have proposed reunifying Gaza and the West Bank, with the Board overseeing an orderly transfer of governance to the NCAG, which would ultimately hand power to the Palestinian Authority as part of a process “leading to the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

They also set a 2027 end date for the Board’s mandate.

Mladenov’s draft omits these elements entirely, makes no reference to the Palestinian Authority, and instead limits the arrangement to Hamas and other factions handing over authority to the NCAG.

Republished from the Drop Site News X feed.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has issued a stark warning in its annual report.

The central bank for central banks warned that the current AI investment boom is unsustainable.

The five largest “hyperscaler” tech firms plan to spend more than a trillion dollars on AI-related capital expenditure from 2025 through 2026. This spending is outpacing their earnings and free cash flow, forcing some to issue debt.

“Disappointment in returns could trigger a sudden pullback in financing and turn the capex boom into a protracted investment bust… should hyperscalers slow or halt the aggressive pace of capex deployment, many borrowers across the supply chain could struggle to replace lost revenue and service their debt.”

• READ MORE: ‘We are in a bubble’: Experts warn of historic AI bust risk
• Other financial bubble reports

When the BIS — the only central bank to warn before the 2008 crash — sounds the alarm, we should listen. The Bank of England, European Central Bank, and Monetary Authority of Singapore have since echoed similar concerns.

Financial bubbles have become the norm since the late 1970s, when the US dollar left the gold standard and financialisation took hold. Household net worth began expanding faster than GDP, creating cycles of bubbles and busts.

Yet the current bubble dwarfs all previous ones in history, as illustrated in this graphic from the US Federal Reserve.

First came the Dot-com bubble, then the housing bubble of 2008. A credit crunch in 2019 was poised to trigger another recession, but was submerged by the covid-19 crisis and the unprecedented monetary response.

The result is what can only be described as the “bubble of everything”.

• Equities: US stock market capitalisation is now 230 percent of GDP — twice the long-term average. In early June, stocks were selling at about 40 times average corporate earnings over the previous decade, a level seen only at the peak of the Dot-com bubble.
• Private credit: The $3 trillion non-bank private credit “shadow market,” which exploded over the last decade, is under severe stress.
• AI mania: A trillion-dollar spending wave on AI, chips, and data centers is a real buildout wrapped in a speculative frenzy. This circular spending by tech giants props up the bubble, a risk mainstream media has begun to highlight.

The associated wealth accumulation is historically unprecedented. A new billionaire oligarchy has emerged, deeply reactionary, racist, and anti-democratic. It is fully merged with the military-industrial complex, dependent on permanent war and genocide for survival.

The tech wing of this class seeks to surveil, control, and monetise every facet of human life.

Fraud is standard operating procedure, from the Trump family’s alleged looting of state resources to the SpaceX listing.

For the SpaceX IPO, Nasdaq and FTSE Russell rewrote their rules to fast-track the company into major indexes after just days of trading. This forced retirement funds to buy a tiny 4 percent float of available shares, artificially inflating the price and creating a trillionaire in Elon Musk overnight — exposing workers’ pensions to immense risk.

This concentrated power is staggering: the “Magnificent Seven” (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla) now account for over 30 percent of the S&P 500, double their weight a decade ago. Tech makes up over 50 percent of the entire Nasdaq.

As the market saw through the SpaceX scheme, its shares fell 24 percent, and Musk lost his trillionaire status — temporarily. When the broader crash hits, pension funds globally will suffer. The longer the mania continues, the more savings will be sucked into these overvalued indexes.

As Marxist economist Gary Wilson explained, Wall Street has priced in profits that may never materialise. The bosses’ response is familiar: cut jobs, attack unions, demand subsidies, and chase war contracts.

The real AI buildout is buried inside a speculative mania. The technology may survive the bubble; these stock prices will not.

“The losses will come as layoffs, frozen hiring and closed factories… and through the 401(k)s and pension funds workers were pushed into… a forced ticket to a casino they neither own nor control.

“The workers who never shared in the boom will be told to sacrifice when the bubble breaks.”

This financial bubble is just one facet of a broader polycrisis. Capitalism has no road forward to solve these interconnected failures.

1. Grotesque inequality: Billionaire wealth jumped 16 percent in 2025 alone, reaching a historic $18.3 trillion. In New Zealand, four people now hold more wealth than 1.8 million citizens combined, while over 900,000 face food insecurity. oxfam.org.nz
2. Permanent war: The ongoing war against Iran has devastated global energy markets, spiking fuel and fertiliser prices. Over 50 percent of the profits from recent oil shocks went to the top 1 percent of Americans; the bottom half received just 1 percent.
3. Looming famine: The closure of the Strait of Hormuz threatens cascading food shocks. As fertiliser prices spike 20-60 percent, the greatest risk is not immediate shortage but collapsing future harvests, leading to higher prices and starvation months later.
4. Debt vortex:
   • Advanced economies: Government debt (100-130 percent of GDP in the US/Europe, 200 percent in Japan) is becoming unmanageable as interest rates rise from historic lows.
   • Developing world: External debt exceeds $11 trillion, with more than 50 nations in distress. Many now spend more on debt servicing than on healthcare or education, trapped in a neocolonial debt cycle.
5. Climate collapse: Global warming is killing thousands in heatwaves, closing schools, and destroying crops. Political “adaptation” plans are a surrender, substituting leadership with fantasy to avoid the emergency-scale mobilisation actually required.

A major capitalist crisis is nearly certain. As always, the heaviest price will be paid by the working class through escalating unemployment and austerity.

This will radicalise people. Our duty as socialists is to offer solutions that point toward the ruling class — our real enemy — and resist the ruling class’s strategy to divide us by scapegoating racial, religious, or sexual minorities.

As Rosa Luxemburg stated, the historical choice under capitalism is “socialism or barbarism.” That choice is re-emerging as socialism or modern-day fascism.

It is no accident that these are the poles of politics globally today. Far-right parties flirting with fascism are mass movements again across Europe.

Yet, hearteningly, popular support for socialism is the majority opinion among young people in the US and UK. The Democratic Socialists of America are becoming a mass party inside the belly of the beast.

The road forks ahead. One path leads to division, austerity, and barbarism. The other, built by a united working class, leads to socialism.

Mike Treen is a retired trade unionist and political commentator. This article was first published at his Substack @miketreen860764 and is republished with the author’s permission.

The US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has told the world that Iran’s foreign policy is driven by “pure theology” and that “no one has ever been able to do a successful deal with Iran”.

Both claims are demonstrably false. Both reveal a man profoundly unqualified for the White House office he holds.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi is one of the finest diplomatic minds operating in the world today. A career diplomat of 30 years, he was the technical architect of the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) — mastering every clause, every verification mechanism, every sanctions schedule across 18 months of gruelling negotiation with the world’s major powers.

• READ MORE: Iranians cautiously optimistic about thorny deal with US
• Other US-Iran peace deal reports

He doesn’t need briefing notes. He is the briefing note.

Rubio:

Doing a deal with Iran is not easy. I said it yesterday, I’ll repeat it again today.

We have to understand that Iran ultimately is governed, and its decisions are governed, by Shia clerics, radical Shia clerics.

These people make policy decisions on the basis of pure… pic.twitter.com/2Xz26wbzui

— Clash Report (@clashreport) February 16, 2026

When Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner sit across the table from him to negotiate, the contrast is almost painful to witness. Here is a man who has spent three decades studying the granular architecture of nuclear nonproliferation, sanctions law, and regional security arrangements facing two real estate developers from New York who cannot tell a centrifuge from a footnote.

Detail at his fingertips
Araghchi has every detail at his fingertips: the technical specifications, the legal precedents, the diplomatic history, the red lines and their rationale. His American counterparts are essentially improvising.

This is not negotiation. This is a doctoral examiner sitting down with students who have not read the syllabus.

Iran has concluded deals — repeatedly. The 2015 JCPOA was negotiated with five permanent Security Council members plus Germany. It was verified by the IAEA. It worked. It was America that tore it up.

And then there is Rubio himself. Anyone who has watched him testify before Congress will know exactly what I mean. What you witness is not statecraft. It is a man who has made a career of spouting propaganda and ideological talking points — recycling neoconservative slogans in place of analysis, substituting bluster for knowledge, and confusing belligerence with strength.

He has never demonstrated a serious understanding of Iran’s political structure, its factional dynamics, its strategic doctrine, or its negotiating history.

The words in that image are not merely wrong — they are terrifying in what they reveal about the man now simultaneously occupying the offices of Secretary of State and National Security Adviser. That such extraordinary concentration of foreign policy power should rest in hands this ignorant is one of the most alarming facts about American governance today.

Revealing Washington’s incapacity
What Rubio is actually revealing is not Iranian irrationality. He is revealing Washington’s own incapacity — its inability to honour commitments, sustain agreements, or treat adversaries as strategic actors deserving of serious engagement.

The most dangerous diplomats are not the radical ones. They are the ignorant ones — those who mistake their own ideological blinkers for geopolitical insight.

In my assessment, Rubio is the most ignorant and incompetent Secretary of State the United States has produced since the Second World War.

That is not hyperbole. It is a considered judgment from someone who has studied American foreign policy across eight decades.

The world deserves better. So, frankly, does America.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform.

Papua New Guinea’s ruling PANGU Party says it would support a 15-year transition process for Bougainville, regardless of whether Parliament votes for or against independence.

Prime Minister James Marape outlined the proposal in a statement defending PNG’s constitutional process for deciding Bougainville’s political future.

Bougainville, which is an autonomous region within PNG, voted overwhelmingly for independence in a non-binding referendum in 2019, but the final decision rests with PNG’s national Parliament, as provided for under the Bougainville Peace Agreement.

• READ MORE: Bougainville’s Toroama accuses PNG of breaching Melanesian Agreement
• Other Bougainville independence reports

Marape said if parliament voted in favour of independence, the constitution allowed for a negotiated transition period of up to 15 years, during which powers would be progressively transferred from Port Moresby to Bougainville.

He said the process would be conditional on Bougainville demonstrating financial self-sufficiency, maintaining peace and stability, and eliminating armed violence and factionalism.

The prime minister said Bougainville would need to generate enough internal revenue to fund at least 70 percent of its annual budget over a five-year period.

But Marape also said that if Parliament rejected independence, under PANGU’s plan, the referendum result should remain “alive” rather than being extinguished.

Under that scenario, Bougainville would still be given the same 15-year period to meet agreed benchmarks before Parliament reconsidered the issue.

“What I meant was that the issue will not be finally resolved by a single vote alone,” Marape said, in reference to his comments in Parliament recently that “a yes can become a no and a no can become a yes”.

“The parliamentary vote simply begins the next stage of our collective journey as a nation.”

Constitutional path
Marape repeatedly stressed that Bougainville’s future could only be decided through constitutional processes established under the 2001 Bougainville Peace Agreement and incorporated into Papua New Guinea’s constitution.

He said Parliament, not the national government, had the final authority to decide the referendum outcome.

“Breaking up a country is the most serious decision any Parliament can make,” he said.

“It is only proper that a super-majority befitting a constitutional change should determine such a matter.”

Marape also defended Parliament Speaker Job Pomat’s position that a three-quarter parliamentary majority should be required in order to ratify the result to approve independence. Bougainville’s leaders have voiced frustration over this high majority threshold.

The prime minister said he would continue discussions with Bougainville leaders and wanted Parliament to consider the referendum outcome on August 30, subject to agreement from the Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG).

Bougainville’s referendum saw 97.7 percent of voters support independence from PNG after decades of conflict and the Peace Agreement brokered in 2001.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: The United States and Iran have officially signed a memorandum of understanding aimed at ending the war in Iran. The signing came a day ahead of schedule. President Trump signed the agreement at a dinner at the Palace of Versailles hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signed the agreement in Tehran.

The 14-point agreement calls for an immediate end to fighting on all fronts, including Lebanon; the full resumption of maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz; the lifting of the US blockade; the easing of sanctions on Iran; the unfreezing of Iranian assets; and a $300 billion investment fund to rebuild Iran.

AMY GOODMAN: But the deal also leaves many major questions unresolved about Iran’s nuclear programme. Iran’s lead negotiator, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, said, “Everything we sought to achieve through military action, we obtained several times over through negotiation; it ​was not even comparable,” he said.

Just hours before signing the deal, President Trump spoke at the G7 summit and issued a new threat to Iran.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It’s a memorandum of understanding. And if I don’t like it, we’ll go back to shooting at them, dropping bombs on their head. If I don’t like it, if they don’t behave, we’ll go right back to dropping bombs right smack in the middle of their head.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by Vali Nasr, an Iranian American professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He recently co-authored an article in Foreign Affairs headlined “Iran’s New Grand Strategy: How a Remade Islamic Republic Will Reshape the Middle East.”

He is also author of the book Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History.

Professor Nasr, it’s great to have you back. If you can start off by responding to this memorandum of understanding that President Trump signed in Versailles, obviously meant to bring us back to the end of World War I? The Iranian President, of course, signed remotely.

But talk about the significance of what we have finally learned are the 14 points.

VALI NASR: Thank you very much for having me back.

I think, first of all, the most important part is that President Trump decided to sign this himself rather than have Vice-President JD Vance do it, which then now means that he basically owns this document. I think it’s important in the sense that it ends this war. It closes the parenthesis on a hundred days of both hot war and economic war that has devastated the global economy.

At face value, and the way in which the political commentary, particularly in the West and the United States, is interpreting it, is that this is a major strategic setback for the United States. The US started this war with the belief that it would destroy the Islamic Republic within days. President Trump demanded the utter surrender for Iran.

And now he has to settle for an agreement.

And the way this agreement reads, it looks like that the United States is more eager for this war to end than Iran is. The United States has given Iran a great deal of economic incentive in order to agree to sign this agreement, end the war, and then agree to negotiate over the larger issues which supposedly caused the war in the first place.

And also, it’s very clear that in Iran, they’re very triumphant. They think this is a big victory for them, not only that they survived the war, but that they forced the President to sign this agreement.

And more importantly, everything the President said yesterday was breaking taboos: Iran can have enrichment; Iran can have missiles; Israel cannot destroy buildings in Lebanon at will, or should not; and that Iran is entitled to have its own frozen assets taken back — given back to the country.

Trump’s war on Iran ends with a triumphant Tehran      Video: Democracy Now

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And if you could comment, Professor Nasr, on the fact that Lebanon figures in the very first point of this memorandum, and the fact you’ve called this agreement a success for Iran because it’s created, as you said, a fissure between the US and Israel? If you could elaborate on that, and what you see as the risks, given that Israel had — was not consulted on this agreement, and it’s very unclear that it will go along with it?

VALI NASR: Well, first of all, the war was a moment of triumph for Israel, because it convinced the United States to basically go to war to realise what is essentially, and at its core, Israel’s strategic aims, which was the destruction of the Islamic Republic through military means.

The war did not pan out the way that President Trump understood it would, and that already was a fissure. Now, the president trying to get out of this war the best he can has led him down a path that accepts the continued existence of the Islamic Republic, giving money to the Islamic Republic, talking to the Islamic Republic, all of which are basically strategic setbacks for Israel, and particularly for Prime Minister Netanyahu.

And Iran is actually asking for a price for accommodating President Trump, and the price that Iran is asking is deliberately trying to expand that fissure between the US and Israel. But Iran, by insisting that Israel needs to back away from its maximal position on Lebanon and settle for a ceasefire now, and perhaps, as Iran is demanding, even leave south Lebanon, essentially, first of all, asserts the fact that Iran is coming out of this war believing that it has more leverage than before it went into this war.

It also creates greater tension between Washington and Tel Aviv. And so, the Iranians are playing this in a very important way for them.

But also, we have to think that one outcome of this war is friction between Israel and the United States, period, because the Israeli strategy of deploying the US to destroy Iran has backfired, and ultimately there will be a reckoning in the US as to why did we go into this war, what were the premises of thinking that it would be successful, and who is responsible.

And even though it’s not said loudly, it’s very clear, in the undertone of what President Trump says, that he’s lost trust in what Prime Minister Netanyahu tells him, and that he’s somewhat angry because he’s receiving blowback for a war that was, essentially, an Israeli strategic agenda, and now he has to carry the political cost of it.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Professor Nasr, I want to ask about this piece that you co-wrote with Narges Bajoghli, “Iran’s New Grand Strategy,” in which you detail the changes that have taken place within Iran from last year, the first US-Israeli attack on Iran in June 2025, to now, when this invasion took place, February 26. You say the Iranian state underwent something of a transformation. You write, “More institutional change took place in those eight months than in the previous ten years combined.” If you could elaborate?

VALI NASR: Well, in Évian [France], President Trump kept saying multiple times that there has been regime change in Iran and a more pragmatic leadership has taken over. Setting aside the second part of his statement, that whether it’s pragmatic or not, there definitely has been regime change. I mean, Israel and the United States, between the June 2025 war and this recent war, have killed more than 130 Iranian leaders.

And by doing so, they’ve eliminated a whole class of the country’s leadership, which has been replaced by a new generation that has come up through the ranks, generation that has been born in Iran after the revolution, the generation that was born not as revolutionaries that were fighting against a state, but actually as children of that state and in a bureaucracy, in a system that took place.

They have a different attitude towards statecraft, towards how to manage the country, and particularly how to manage the war. I mean, one of the things that surprised the United States in this war is the aggressiveness of the new Iranian leadership. The President, as he referred yesterday multiple times, killed General Soleimani, put maximum-pressure sanctions on Iran, bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities in June.

And what he got from the previous leadership in Iran was a tepid, conservative, restrained answer. Now he’s facing a leadership that doesn’t answer the same way. It answers very, very aggressively, and, therefore, was able to turn the tables on the United States by closing the Strait of Hormuz, by attacking American bases.

In addition, one of the big surprises of this war is how quickly Iran reorganised itself between finding itself on the defensive in June, and then facing a massive social uprising in Iran in January, that it was compelled to suppress very bloodily and brutally, and led to the conclusion around the world that the Iranian regime was really, really weak.

How is it that this really, really weak regime, at war with its own people, and having just suffered massive bombardment in June, was able to reorganise itself to survive a very direct, massive attack by the world’s premier military superpower and the Middle East’s most powerful military. And not only survive it, but actually come out of the war with strategic wins, like the control of the Strait of Hormuz, like a chokehold on the global economy, and force the American President into retreat to settle for far less than what he had thought?

So, if we take stock of this, regardless of whether you like the Islamic Republic or not, or how heinous they’ve been with their own people, you have to account for the fact that Iran, Iran’s new leadership, achieved the feat of reorganising the state, reorganising their military, managing their economy in a way to be able to achieve what they did in the eight months between the two wars and then during the course of the hundred-day war.

AMY GOODMAN: You write that the view now from Tehran is that, “the United States’ decade-long containment of Iran has come to an end. The new regional order will be defined less by American primacy than by multipolarity, with China an increasingly central player and Iran an integral rather than a marginal actor.”

As we begin to wrap up, Professor Nasr, if you can explain that shifting geopolitics and how exactly what Trump has achieved, what is the difference between February 27, before Israel and the US attacked, and now?

VALI NASR: What Trump has achieved is to end Iran’s containment. First of all, Iran destroyed about 16 to 17 US bases, some of them completely. So, it ended, if you would, the military encirclement of Iran. It created doubt in the mind of the Gulf countries about the wisdom of partnering with the United States in containing Iran.

I think yesterday in Évian the President made clear that even the sanctions regime against Iran is going to come down. So, economic and military containment of Iran is gone.

During this war, both in the Middle East and globally, the United States’ standing has been diminished. It has lost strategic ground. This was very evident in the president’s visit to China. So, multipolarity is a big winner against the President, who asserted American domination around the world but tried to show it in a war with what he thought was a second-rate, third-rate military and a country on the verge of collapse, has come up short.

So, he has been cut at the knees, if you would. And what will come, obviously, is a greater assertion of power by various regions of the world, by China and Russia, and the United States that will find it more and more difficult to compel the rest of the world to basically follow the US lead.

The original content of this programme is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence. Republished under Creative Commons.

The UN Special Committee on Decolonisation has heard renewed calls for action on Kanaky New Caledonia, French Polynesia, Guam and Tokelau.

Pacnews reports that the committee has heard from Pacific representatives, petitioners and administering powers debating the pace of self-determination and decolonisation in the territories.

The committee approved three draft resolutions aimed at strengthening UN support for the world’s remaining Non-Self-Governing Territories.

• READ MORE: Other Pacific decolonisation reports
• ‘Is it NZ First, or Israel First?’ Ormsby challenges NZ foreign minister Peters

These include measures promoting information-sharing, reporting obligations and visiting missions.

Kanaky New Caledonia dominated much of the debate, with petitioners urging the UN to take a more active role in addressing the French territory’s political crisis and advancing its self-determination process.

Both Kanaky New Caledonia and French Polynesia are French territories, Guam is American, and Tokelau is NZ-administered.

New Zealand’s Pacific diplomacy
Meanwhile, New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters says his country’s commitment to the region remains a top priority.

He made the comment in a Parliamentary Select committee scrutiny hearing.

The recent budget saw a big boost in funding to his ministry, with an extra $100 million for foreign aid to the Pacific over three years.

Peters said small countries matter, and New Zealand took the approach to treat Pacific countries as equals.

He noted the gap in the Pacific created by the US since it had rapidly pulled back its international aid.

The minister said he had spoken to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio about revisiting this position.

This story was first published on

What is happening right now is [the] erasure of humans, trees and stones, and anything that is Palestinian, by settlers under the support of the military.

— Muntasir al-Maliki, a resident of Kufr Malik

Palestinian Bedouins lived for generations in the occupied West Bank village of Khirbet Zanuta (Zanuta), sustaining themselves through herding, farming and dairy production.

The village was designated as part of Area C under the 1995 Oslo II Accords, placing it under full Israeli military and administrative control.

Today, Zanuta is being eaten away by Israeli outposts and settlements and destroyed by  state-sponsored violence and terror.

• READ MORE: Amnesty International accuses Israel of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank
• Erasing anything Palestinian: Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the West Bank Bedouin amd herding communities
• Other Gaza genocide, West Bank reports

Just 1km from Zanuta, Israeli settlers established an illegal outpost known as Meitarim Farm in 2021.

The settlers soon began a sustained campaign of violent attacks and threats against Zanuta’s residents.

They set fire to the villagers’ tents and classrooms, broke into their homes, beat them with rifles, threw stones at them, smashed their solar panels and windows, emptied their water tanks and pumped sewage onto their farmland.

The story of Zanuta reflects the fate of dozens of Palestinian Bedouin and herding communities already displaced or at imminent risk of displacement in Area C.

This report lays bare the scale and severity of the ethnic cleansing campaign targeting these communities, carried out in a context of apartheid and unlawful occupation and against the backdrop of an ongoing genocide in the occupied Gaza Strip.

The report also demonstrates — contrary to what too many in the international community suggest — that the campaign is not the product of “rogue” settlers, settlers’ organisations or “extremist” government ministers.

In other words, settler violence is not an aberration but an integral part of an organised state policy.

The escalating violence in Zanuta followed decades of systematic discrimination by the Israeli authorities, including constant threats of home demolitions to force them to leave, a common practice adopted by Israel to enforce its system of apartheid.

Zanuta’s residents repeatedly reported settler attacks to the Israeli police, seeking protection, but no action was ever taken.

When the settlers from Meitarim Farm again raided the village on 21 October 2023, this time accompanied by Israeli forces, and threatened to harm residents if they did not leave, the community knew they had no choice but to flee.

In a rare move, in July 2024 and February 2025, Israel’s Supreme Court ordered the police and military to facilitate the community’s return and protect residents from attacks.

The Israeli police and military ignored both rulings. Every attempt by residents to return was met with continued settler violence and the acquiescence of Israeli forces.

Digital evidence, interviews and satellite imagery from 30 March 2025 confirm the outcome: Zanuta no longer exists — it has been forcibly depopulated and extensively destroyed.

Meanwhile, the settlers received state backing to intensify their violent campaign. In April 2025, two Israeli ministers — Bezalel Smotrich and Orit Strock — held an event at Meitarim Farm where they distributed 19 state-funded all-terrain vehicles (ATVs), cameras and night-vision equipment to settlers living in outposts in the Hebron area.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich explained why:

“The heroic and pioneering settlers who live here are doing Zionism, and they need security… We are here to build with them and to settle the land…”

… while praising settler land seizures and emphasising the role of ATVs in taking over Palestinian grazing land.

The report demonstrates that the ethnic cleansing campaign in Area C is state-sanctioned, state-driven and state-implemented; it seeks to accelerate the Israeli government’s annexation agenda and settlement expansion through war crimes and crimes against humanity.

As such, the report’s conclusions demand that the international community fully confront and name the Israeli state-driven project, and act decisively to prevent the destruction of Palestinian communities and the annexation of the West Bank.

Amnesty International’s legal analysis
Zanuta is one of 117 predominantly Bedouin and herding Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank that have faced either full or partial displacement due to settler attacks and related access restrictions between January 2023 and April 2026, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

In total, approximately 5910 people were forced to leave their homes, leaving behind them vast, depopulated areas. Most of the affected communities lie in Area C, which comprises over 60 percent of the West Bank, and has been central to Israel’s territorial and demographic quest for domination for decades because of its natural resources, vital grazing and agricultural land and small Palestinian population.

In late December 2022, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party formed Israel’s 37th government in coalition with two ultra nationalist and religious political parties.

While state-supported settler violence has been a growing concern over the past three decades for Palestinian communities in the West Bank, there has been an unprecedented surge in the scale and intensity of attacks since then.

Tactics became particularly aggressive after 7 October 2023 when Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups attacked southern Israel, killing approximately 1200 people, mostly civilians, and forcibly taking 251 others to the Gaza Strip where they were held as hostages and subjected to abuses.

Amnesty International found that these acts constituted war crimes and crimes against humanity.

In response, Israel launched a military offensive on the occupied Gaza Strip of unparalleled magnitude, scale and duration and inflicted catastrophic levels of destruction, displacement and starvation on Gaza’s civilian population, committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

While most global attention focused on Gaza, Israel intensified its abusive policies and practices against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, with government officials openly encouraging and supporting settler attacks.

Displacement and dispossession: war crimes and crimes against humanity
Ideologically motivated Israeli settlers have terrorised Palestinian communities through repeated raids on their homes and villages, beatings, death threats demanding they leave, persistent harassment, the destruction of property and village infrastructure, cutting off access to water and electricity, and theft of their livestock and belongings.

These practices deliberately intensified an already coercive environment aimed at forcibly displacing and dispossessing Palestinians, manifested in state policies of access restrictions, home demolitions and settlement expansion. Palestinians who have attempted to return have found their villages fenced off or destroyed, or have faced renewed settler attacks, harassment and intimidation, forcing them to flee again.

These settler attacks are the direct result of a state policy that integrated and enabled the settler movement’s vision of “Greater Israel”, an ideology that treats the area extending from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, including the entirety of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), as an integral part of Israel.

Senior Israeli officials in the 37th government have fully embraced this vision and explicitly encouraged, facilitated and condoned settler violence against Bedouin and herding communities as a deliberate tool of displacement with greater openness and force than their predecessors, as they pursued their goal of formally annexing the West Bank under Israeli law.

Since 1967, Israel has been enforcing its occupation through military orders and regulations.

The situation in the OPT, including in Area C of the West Bank, is therefore primarily governed by international humanitarian law (including the rules of the law of occupation); and international human rights law. The same international norms apply to occupied East Jerusalem, illegally annexed by Israel since 1967, despite Israel’s attempts to separate it from the rest of the West Bank through a regime of fragmentation and legal segregation.

In this report, Amnesty International presents conclusive evidence that these violations, perpetrated between January 2023 and December 2025, amount to the war crime of unlawful deportation and transfer and the crime against humanity of forcible transfer or deportation, committed as part of a policy to ethnically cleanse Area C of the occupied West Bank by forcibly displacing Palestinian Bedouin and herding communities and expanding illegal settlements at their expense.

Amnesty International uses the term ethnic cleansing in this report to describe a deliberate pattern of conduct aimed at permanently removing Palestinian Bedouin and herding communities from specific areas of the occupied West Bank, in particular Area C.

While ethnic cleansing is not recognised as an independent crime under international law, Amnesty International uses the term in line with the UN Commission of Experts on Former Yugoslavia’s definition, which describes it as “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas”.

While this report covers the period between December 2022 and December 2025, these egregious crimes are ongoing and are part and parcel of Israel’s system of apartheid, as shown by Amnesty International’s continuous documentation and reporting of the situation on the ground.

• Read the full Amnesty International report

SPECIAL REPORT: By Ben Bohane

South of Vanuatu, in deep ocean teeming with fish and birdlife, lie two contested islands being fought over by Vanuatu (population 350,000) and France, which has the largest EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone) in the world, totalling 11 million square kilometres.

Little wonder Vanuatu is framing this as a “David versus Goliath” fight. Vanuatu calls these islands by their ancient kastom names: Umaenupne and Umaeneg.

On most maps, however, they are called by what British sea captains named them: Matthew and Hunter islands. France has controlled them since 1965.

• READ MORE: France in the Pacific and decolonisation
  
• Other Ben Bohane articles at Asia Pacific Report

France derives much prestige, wealth and a permanent UN Security Council seat thanks to its overseas territories and vast maritime domain, spread across multiple oceans. Now some politicians and security analysts in France are worried these two islands taken from Vanuatu before its independence in 1980 could prompt sovereignty claims in other jurisdictions, from Mexico to Madagascar, if Matthew and Hunter are returned to Vanuatu.

Responding to a story in Le Figaro newspaper that discussed the possibility of French President Emmanuel Macron ceding these islands as a “major symbolic turning point”, French far-right politician Marie Le Pen tweeted in December last year:

“Let’s be clear: national sovereignty is not negotiable and cannot be surrendered. The French people do not expect Macron’s government to carve up our overseas territories, which are real levers of power, influence and economic development, behind their backs, but to give itself the means to protect and defend them.”

Rising in Parliament in late May, Vanuatu’s Prime Minister Jotham Napat issued a response of sorts. He thundered that France was “dragging its feet” on negotiations following two postponements and was withholding relevant historical documents relating to France’s claim.

A commitment, but no resolution
French President Macron agreed to formal negotiations to resolve the issue when he visited Vanuatu in 2023, saying it could be “resolved by Christmas”. He renewed this commitment in a meeting with Prime Minister Napat in July 2025.

Years later, there is still no resolution. PM Napat warned:

“We will not take a passive approach. And we will not abandon our claim. We will defend our sovereignty with determination…
“We have carefully evaluated all of the legal options that are available to us. We are trying the diplomatic pathway, but we are also ready to change strategy as soon as is necessary.”

The escalating rhetoric comes after diplomatic confrontations embroiling France, Vanuatu and Kanaky New Caledonia. A trade delegation from New Caledonia arrived in Port Vila in May to boost economic ties but was quickly overshadowed by a diplomatic spat when one of the delegation, the new president of New Caledonia’s pro-independence FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front) movement, Christian Téin, met with Vanuatu’s PM Napat.

Vanuatu has long supported independence for its indigenous “Kanaky” neighbours and meetings between Vanuatu and the FLNKS are quite routine. But when Téin affirmed to the local Daily Post newspaper in a front page splash that “Matthew and Hunter islands belong to Vanuatu” then France’s ambassador weighed in on social media and the New Caledonia government suspended all trade ties with Vanuatu.

Again, this is nothing new — indigenous Kanak chiefs have long recognised Vanuatu’s claims to Matthew and Hunter islands, declaring they had no kastom links to them and France should not have included them as part of New Caledonia, which France did in 1965.

Chiefs signed Keamu Accord
In 2009 Vanuatu and Kanak chiefs signed the Keamu Accord acknowledging that Matthew and Hunter belonged to Vanuatu.

France finds itself battling on three fronts in the Pacific at the moment — rising independence movements in New Caledonia, Tahiti (French Polynesia), and now an increasingly heated dispute with Vanuatu over Matthew and Hunter islands.

Vanuatu claims its southern islanders from Tanna, Aneityum and Futuna were regularly visiting these two disputed islands long before the first European got wet in the Pacific Ocean. These islands weren’t of much interest to British and French ships navigating the seas of the 18th and 19th century due to their small size and remoteness.

Both are volcanic but only Matthew remains an active volcano. Matthew (Umaenupne) was first named by British sea captain Thomas Gilbert in 1788 who named it after the owner of his ship. Gilbert would later bequeath his name to the Gilbert and Ellice islands which today form the nation of Kiribati.

Hunter (Umaeneg) island was named by British captain Thomas Fearn aboard his trading ship Hunter in 1798. It is thought he also named it Hunter to honour Vice-Admiral John Hunter who was then the Governor of NSW in Australia, the second after Arthur Phillip.

Hunter Street in Sydney and the Hunter Valley are similarly named after him.

The dispute over the islands primarily has its origins in the actions of another Australian named Bob Paul, who was a planter and aviation pioneer living on Tanna Island in the 1950s and 1960s, back when Vanuatu was known as the “Condominium of the New Hebrides” and jointly administered by Britain and France.

‘He did a lot for our island’
Today Bob Paul is well remembered by chiefs on Tanna, including Peter Marcel, president of the Nikolaten Council of Chiefs. He told me that “Bob Paul was the first to show us how to run a business, how to run trade stores and bring in tourists. He did a lot for our island”.

In 1962, Paul flew over Matthew and Hunter islands and assessing from his map the two islands had not been claimed by anyone, he decided to claim them for himself and his flying friend Henri Martinet.

“It was a bit of a lark when he claimed them” says Paul’s son Brett from his home in Queensland, who remembers an idyllic childhood growing up on Tanna. “But my father always believed the islands ultimately belong to Vanuatu.”

Paul and Martinet’s claim in 1962 prompted the British and French Resident Commissioners to make inquiries about who the islands belonged to.

The British consulted their Foreign Office, Colonial Office and Admiralty. They also asked France and Australia.

The French then made internal inquiries and concluded that, based on its own internal investigation, France considered the islands to be part of New Caledonia. Britain was content with that view, and together they wrote to the Joint Court to advise that the islands belonged to New Caledonia.

Paul and Martinet’s claim was struck off.

Ni-Vanuatu never consulted
At no stage in the process were any Ni-Vanuatu consulted, so the decision was made by European colonial powers before Vanuatu’s independence. France’s claim to sovereignty over Matthew and Hunter islands has been recognised internationally ever since they were handed to them in 1965.

Vanuatu’s claim is rooted in kastom (culture) and its ancient connections to the islands, long before the first French sailor turned up on their shores. Vanuatu enshrined their own sovereignty over the islands in legislation upon the declaration of their independence.

Many would also argue that any deal done by Britain and France in the colonial period, with no consultation of the Indigenous population, is legally null and void today.

While a European mindset focuses on the strategic and resource value of such islands, what they ignore is the kastom value of these islands to Vanuatu. Matthew and Hunter islands play a crucial role in the kastom and spiritual life of Vanuatu’s southern islanders.

Indeed these islands aren’t just “rocks in the sea” but the home of their god Matjajiki. Chiefs from Vanuatu’s southern islands claim the two islands also contain ancient cemeteries where their ancestors had elected to be buried close to their god Matjajiki and were tabu for any visitors.

More importantly, chiefs say they need Matjajiki as the spirit who brings their food and fish.

“Matjajiki works to bring life to our gardens for six months every year — he is our gardening spirit. After the annual yam harvest he eats the first yam, drinks some kava and goes to rest for the rest of the year on Umaenupne and Umaeneg,” says chief Peter Marcel on Tanna. “Without the power of Matjajiki, nothing would grow.”

Veneration of ancestral spirits
While the islanders all identify as Christian, their veneration of ancestral spirits and the benevolent work of Matjajiki is at the heart of their identity. Magic stones can still be found in their gardens and rituals of thanks still performed through the cycle of yam planting and harvesting.

Matthew and Hunter are important places in the cosmology and some even say survival of southern Vanuatu.

France’s possession of these islands has cut the ability of Ni-Vanuatu from visiting and paying respect to their god. When a boat carrying chiefs in 1983 to plant the Vanuatu flag and perform kastom rituals arrived at the two islands, they were intercepted by a French navy ship and forced to turn around. No chiefs or ships from Vanuatu have been allowed since.

According to Tony Tevi, a geologist who is Vanuatu’s Director of Oceans and Marine Resources, geology and tectonic plates affirm Vanuatu’s ownership since “Matthew and Hunter sit on the Pacific plate, not the Australian plate which New Caledonia is on. Also there are no volcanoes in New Caledonia but plenty here in Vanuatu”.

For him, a further “insult” comes from France conducting military exercises on the islands every year, using a place reserved for the gods as target practice.

“The French military visit every year with their patrol boats to claim ‘effective occupation’ and do their live firing exercises on the very place — the very place! — that for us in Vanuatu is one of the most sacred and important places. That is very unacceptable”.

Vanuatu and France are expected to resume their next round of negotiations, in Paris, at the end of this month.

Ben Bohane is a Vanuatu-based photojournalist, producer and policy analyst who has reported the Asia-Pacific region for nearly 30 years. He has contributed articles to Asia Pacific Report. This article was first published by The Sydney Morning Herald and is republished with the author’s permission.

A New Zealand policy research and advocacy group released a detailed blueprint today for a fresh “independent” Te Tiriti and Pacific-based approach to foreign policy, and called for greater transparency in election year.

The current coalition government has “radically shifted New Zealand’s longstanding foreign policy traditions” — including by moving the country away from a principled defence of its independent values to “unquestioning support” for the actions of the Trump administration, said Te Kuaka spokesperson Dr Marco de Jong.

“New Zealand’s slide under this government towards a tightly aligned, militaristic foreign policy is not inevitable,” he added.

• READ MORE: Other Aotearoa New Zealand foreign policy reports
• Other Te Kuaka reports

Te Kuaka — a group made up of academics such as Dr de Jong and Dr Arama Rata, and lawyers with expertise in international and constitutional law like Fuimaono Dylan Asafo and Gabriella Brayne — released a policy brief, “A Foreign Policy Alternative for the 2026 New Zealand Election”.

The group refers to the need to revitalise “an independent, Te Tiriti-based, Pacific-centred, internationalist foreign policy”.

Last year has witnessed “tumultuous developments in world affairs” such as Israel’s genocide in Gaza, US aggression in Venezuela, and US and Israel waging war on Iran.

Independent values
Te Kuaka’s policy brief says the current government “has radically shifted New Zealand’s longstanding foreign policy traditions”, including by moving NZ away from a principled defence of its independent values and interests towards total, unquestioning support for the actions of the Trump administration.

The brief calls for:

• greater transparency around trade agreements;
• a War Powers Act to ensure parliamentary authorisation for going to war,;
• shifts in New Zealand’s approach to the Pacific towards non-militarisation;
• NZ intervention in support of South Africa’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) genocide case against Israel; and
• other changes.

“How New Zealand acts in the world has always mattered,” said Dr de Jong. “And we need our political parties speaking more openly about their plans on how to maintain and strengthen our independent foreign policy.”

The policy brief also calls for New Zealand to take more strident steps in relation to Indigenous self-determination in Kanaky New Caledonia and to support a human rights visit to West Papua.

The coalition government did not have a mandate for this “dramatic repositioning” in support of the Trump administration, Dr de Jong said.

Call for ‘greater clarity’
“Before the coming election we are calling for greater clarity from political parties about what the public can expect to see from them in relation to New Zealand’s position in the world.”

The policy brief notes that Te Tiriti o Waitangi has not been sufficiently honoured in foreign policy, and also proposes formalising requirements for Māori representation alongside official New Zealand delegations to international forums.

“We are in a rupturing world,” said Dr de Jong. “We need to ensure we’re not unthinkingly caught in the riptide of major powers’ priorities, and that instead we chart our own course, appropriate to our histories and our location in the Pacific.”

• Te Kuaka has previously published reports on conflict prevention and peace mediation, New Zealand’s positioning on AUKUS, and civilian casualties and the NZ Defence Force.

In 1904, a British geographer named Halford Mackinder stood before the Royal Geographical Society in London and delivered what would become the most prophetic warning in the history of geopolitics:

“Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island. Who rules the World Island commands the World.”

Mackinder’s insight was deceptively simple. The world’s greatest landmass — Eurasia and Africa combined, what he called the World Island — contained resources, populations and industrial potential that dwarfed anything that maritime powers could master.

• READ MORE: China built the railway Iran needed — America’s strategy is obsolete
• How the US naval blockade has bled Iran of nearly $6bn in oil revenues — but rail may change this
• Other war on Iran/ceasefire reports

The only thing preventing a land-based power from dominating was geography. The Heartland — that vast Central Asian interior was inaccessible to navies. No fleet could project power into the steppe.

But railways could unlock it.

Mackinder was watching Tsarist Russia’s railways push southward through Central Asia and issuing a warning to Britain: if any single power ever consolidated the Heartland by rail, British naval supremacy would become irrelevant.

The world’s oceans, which made Britain great, would become a moat around a fortress someone else owned.

Britain took the warning seriously.

Keeping Eurasia divided
America, inheriting Britain’s role as the guardian of the maritime order, built its entire grand strategy around preventing exactly this — keeping Eurasia divided — contested, and dependent on American-controlled sea lanes.

For 70 years, it worked.

Xian. The ancient capital of China. The city where the original Silk Road began 2000 years ago, where camel caravans loaded with silk, spices, and porcelain departed westward into the vast Central Asian steppe, threading through kingdoms and deserts toward Isfahan in Persia.

Today, freight trains depart from Xian’s modern logistics terminals heading in the same direction. Not on camels. Not in weeks. In 14 days — 10,400 km threading through Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan before arriving in Tehran.

History doesn’t repeat. But it rhymes with astonishing precision.

Since the outbreak of the US-Israel war on Iran, something remarkable has happened on that Xian-Tehran rail corridor.

Train schedules have increased by 300 percent weekly.

Bypassing the US and its Strait if Hormuz blockade         Video: BeyondTheBuild

China is simply ‘going around’
Think about what that means. America’s naval assets — the most powerful maritime force in human history — are positioned around the Strait of Hormuz, squeezing Iran’s maritime trade. The blockade is real. The pressure is real.

And China is simply going around it.

Not through diplomatic protest. Not through UN resolutions. Through railways threading through the Heartland — through exactly the geography that Mackinder identified as impervious to naval power 120 years ago.

Every freight train that departs Xian is a Mackinderian argument made in steel and diesel. American carrier groups cannot follow it. American sanctions cannot easily interdict it.

American naval supremacy, the foundation of the post-war international order, is geographically irrelevant to a train crossing Kazakhstan.

This isn’t improvisation. China didn’t build this corridor in response to the current crisis. It built it years in advance — patiently, methodically, as part of the Belt and Road initiative — precisely because Chinese strategists understood that America’s ultimate weapon was control of sea lanes.

The answer to sea lane control is to not need the sea lanes.

Belt and Road strategy
The Xian-Tehran railway passes through four Central Asian republics — all former Soviet states that Russia once controlled, that America tried to court after 1991, and that China has now quietly bound into its infrastructure network through investment, loans and railway agreements.

The April 2024 four-party tariff agreement between China, Iran, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan established unified tariffs and guaranteed transit times. The corridor was operationalised before the crisis that would make it indispensable.

That is strategic foresight of a very high order.

What China has done with Belt and Road is achieve what Mackinder feared most — Heartland consolidation — not through military conquest but through commerce.

The Central Asian republics are now threaded into China’s logistics networks. Iran is bound to China through a 25 year comprehensive cooperation agreement.

Russia, weakened by Ukraine, watches Chinese influence expand into its former backyard with limited ability to resist. The Heartland — from Xian to Tehran, from the Caspian to the Pamirs, is quietly reorganising around Chinese economic gravity.

Shift in world power balance
Mackinder warned that this moment, if it ever came, would represent a fundamental shift in the balance of world power. He wasn’t wrong about much.

America’s blockade of Hormuz operates on a 20th century assumption — that controlling the maritime chokepoint controls the relationship. That assumption holds when there is no alternative. It weakens precisely as alternatives are built.

Iran’s trade with China — its economic lifeline — is increasingly flowing overland. The railway that cannot be blockaded is running at 300 percent of its pre-war schedule. China and Iran are simultaneously accelerating the electrification of Iranian rail infrastructure, deepening the corridor’s capacity further.

Russia completed its first freight run to Tehran through Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan in November 2025. The overland architecture is not just surviving the blockade — it is being reinforced by it.

This is what strategic infrastructure looks long when it was designed with exactly this contingency in mind.

Mackinder died in 1947, just as America was assuming Britain’s mantle as the world’s pre-eminent maritime power. He spent his final years anxious that the lesson of the Heartland had not been properly absorbed.

Standing in Xian today, watching freight trains loaded with Chinese goods depart for Tehran through four Central Asian republics, along a route that American naval power cannot touch — one suspects that he would feel a complicated mixture of vindication and dread.

The railway is 10,400 km long.

It is also in a very real sense, the distance between the world America built and the world that is coming.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform.

Today the US and/or Israel have been attacking Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen and Venezuela.

The US is also strangling Cuba with an illegal economic blockade, threatening Greenland and preparing for war against China.

History shows that US invasions kill, injure and destroy ordinary people’s lives, homes, essential infrastructure — and they usually leave repressive regimes to rule.

• READ MORE: Israel kills 4 in Lebanon strikes after Trump warned Netanyahu to stop
• Te Kuaka advocacy group calls for NZ transparent, independent ‘Pacific foreign policy’
• Stop Wars Aotearoa coalition
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

The ordinary people of the US pay the price of these wars with their lives, taxes, poverty and are dependent on jobs that manufacture weapons.

US and Israel knew their attack on Iran would trigger an international oil crisis.

The result has been massively increasing oil and food prices and profiteering here in Aotearoa New Zealand, causing the greatest suffering for working class people especially the poorest in the country and world wide.

Why have the US and israel attacked Iran?

• To enforce US and Israeli domination and control of the Middle East region and the world’s oil resources; and
• To control world central trade routes and oil supplies to the main US economic rival — China.

Waiting on oil companies
Shamefully, the current NZ government refuses to oppose the illegal US and Israeli attacks on Iran, and fails to oppose the genocide still happening in Gaza. They just wait for oil companies to determine NZ’s supply, and help mega corporations to profit.

This government has no plan for making Aotearoa New Zealand more food and energy secure. But it is increasingly integrating the NZ military with the Australian and US war machines and preparing for the US-promoted “War with China”.

We are already in a cost-of living crisis, and rising fuel prices are adding to the price of food and other essentials. Kiwi families are struggling. Many people in town and country are facing huge price increases.

Some families have been getting the government’s limited support package. But 92 percent of households don’t get anything.

Don’t let this government drag us into war. Demand an independent foreign policy for Aotearoa/NZ.

• Stop Wars Aotearoa coalition rally and march to US embassy: 2pm, Saturday 13 June 2026, Aotea Square, CBD, Auckland

Germany learnt to its huge cost and embarrassment last week that supporting Israel’s genocidal operations in Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East leads only to opprobrium from the international community.

A country which had been a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council for decades lost in its bid for re-election to Portugal and Austria.

It is a great setback for Germany which aspires one day to be a permanent member.

• READ MORE: Did Germany lose its UNSC seat because of support for Israel?
• Germany’s UN defeat: What went wrong?
• Why Germany wants a seat at the UN Security Council
• Other Palestine at UN reports

Germany may not want to admit it, but the defeat was in every way tied to its unstinting support for Israeli genocidal operations and policies in Gaza.

If America is Israel’s staunchest supporter, then Germany comes second.

A “universal morality” has enveloped the world. It is a morality that does not condone genocide or the stealing of other peoples’ lands, as Israel has done for decades.

It is a morality which demands the creation of a Palestinian State so that the Palestinians are not refugees in their homeland.

Lesson to Israel supporters
Let Germany’s defeat be a lesson to all those nations who support Israel. Don’t be foolish and stand on the wrong side of history.

Germany built its postwar identity on Never Again. It atoned. It paid reparations. It taught its children the truth. For that, it deserves credit.

But atonement is not a blank cheque.

The Holocaust was more than 80 years ago. The sins of fathers cannot be visited upon their children forever — and acknowledging past wrongs cannot become the excuse for ignoring present ones.

That isn’t moral courage. That is moral cowardice in a noble disguise.

Gaza is burning. Lebanon was devastated. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has spoken. And Germany looks away.

Did support for Israel cost Germany a UN Security Council seat?   Video: DW News

Routine rotating seat
For decades, Germany secured its rotating seat on the UN Security Council as a matter of routine.

Last Thursday, for the first time ever, it lost — humiliated at the UN General Assembly by nations that saw through the pretence.

France, United Kingdom, Spain, Norway, Canada and Australia have found their backbone and recognised Palestinian statehood. Germany could not.

Never again was supposed to mean never again — for anyone.

• In addition to the five permanent members — the US, China, Russia, France and the United Kingdom — there are 10 non-permanent members who rotate every two years. Since 1987, Germany, one of the world’s most economically powerful countries, had been elected to the body every eight years. That streak is now over.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform.

COMMENTARY: By Maher Nazzal

Walking into Palestine is not just a journey across geography, it is a confrontation with memory, identity, and everything you were told, and everything you discover for yourself.

The first thing that stays with you is the wall. It does not feel like a distant structure you read about in reports; it rises suddenly into your view, stretching across the landscape like a scar that refuses to fade. Concrete slabs stacked high, covered in layers of paint, messages, names, grief, humour, and resistance. It divides not only land, but daily life.

On one side, movement feels controlled, measured, observed. On the other, life continues stubbornly, beautifully, and painfully.

The borders are not just lines on a map. They are checkpoints, gates, pauses in time. You wait. You are asked. You move forward or you don’t. People pass through them with a kind of practised patience that comes only from living a life where waiting is normal. And yet, even there, you see dignity in the eyes, in the silence, in the quiet determination to continue.

But Palestine is not defined by its restrictions.

It is defined by its people.

People who greet you as if you have always belonged there. People who carry history in their voices without needing to announce it. People who laugh in ways that refuse to be diminished. There is warmth that does not depend on comfort — it exists even in hardship.

You hear stories in taxis, in shops, at doorways, in fields. Stories of loss, yes, but also of endurance, education, love, and return.

And then there are the trees.

Olive trees are older than nations. Their trunks twisted like they have been holding secrets for centuries. Some stand alone on rocky hillsides, others form quiet groves that feel almost sacred. They do not move quickly. They do not need to. They belong in a way that cannot be negotiated. Each tree feels like a witness.

The rocks are everywhere grey, pale, sharp, ancient. They shape the hills, the terraces, the pathways. They feel like the bones of the land itself, exposed and unhidden. And between them, the soil dry in some places, fertile in others holds both struggle and promise.

And the sand… especially when the wind carries it. It softens everything. It moves across roads, settles on stone, touches skin without asking permission. It reminds you that land is never still. It remembers everything that passes over it.

To visit Palestine is to realise that it is not a place that can be reduced to headlines or borders or walls. It is a living presence, layered, wounded, resilient, and deeply human. It stays with you long after you leave, not as a memory you can place neatly in the past, but as something that continues to speak inside you.

Maher Nazzal is an activist, advocate and digital creator for a Free Palestine. He is a spokesperson for Palestine Forum of New Zealand and former co-chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA). This article was first published on Nazzal’s Facebook page and is republished with permission.

Fiji will not be “militarily involved” in any of the conflicts currently involving the State of Israel, says the country’s prime minister.

Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka made this reassurance yesterday, saying Fiji’s relationship with Israel would remain focused on development co-operation and strengthening bilateral ties, not military engagement.

Israel’s new embassy in Fiji — the first opened in Oceania — was officially opened yesterday with protesters against the diplomatic mission just across the street in the Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre (FWCC).

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“We don’t want Israel in our country,” declared Shamima Ali, chair of the Fiji NGO Coalition on Human Rights and an organiser of the Fijians For Palestine protest, reports Mai TV.

Protesters in New Zealand also picketed the Fiji High Commission in Wellington and the Fiji Consulate in Auckland.

Rabuka said Fiji’s interest in the partnership was based on development opportunities and the long-standing relationship between the two countries.

“We are looking at our own development and they are capable of giving us the development we need,” he said.

Training opportunities
He said Fijians had benefited from training opportunities in Israel over the years, including young people currently undergoing training there.

“Right now we have some young people undergoing training in Israel.

“Our own president did some training in his career path with the Native Land Trust Board at the time in Israel.”

 

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Rabuka said Fiji’s engagement with Israel had also been shaped by its long history of peacekeeping in the Middle East.

He said many Fijians had experienced the hospitality of the people and State of Israel through Fiji’s involvement in peacekeeping operations in the region.

Rabuka said the government would not allow the relationship to “become militarised”, as this would contradict Fiji’s wider regional position, including the “Ocean of Peace” concept for the Pacific.

Israel’s Foreign Affairs Minister Gideon Sa’ar also stated that Israel would not ask Fiji for military support, saying Israel was capable of “fighting its own wars”.

Republished from The Fiji Times with permission.

New Zealand protests against Israel
Pacific Media Watch reports that Rabuka staged two military coups in Fiji in 1987 and became known as the father of Fiji’s “coup culture” — four coups in two decades.

In New Zealand, protest pickets were organised by the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) with about 20 people in a picket at the Fijian Consulate in Auckland’s suburb of Mt Roskill, and a dozen stood in pouring rain at the Fiji High Commission in Wellington’s CBD.

The Auckland protest featured a striking tropical banner warning “PM Rabuka don’t vote for genocide” in reference to Fiji’s persistent record of voting in support of Israel and the US in defiance of the overwhelming global condemnation of the Zionist state’s genocidal actions with impunity.

The Wellington protest featured scores of pairs of children’s shoes in recognition of killing more than 75,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them women and children.

“High Commission staff complained to protesters about a Palestinian flag ‘invading’ high commission airspace over the brick fence at the front of the high commission,” said Don Carson, a PSNA organiser.

“Protesters got their message though with megaphones calling Fiji openly complicit with Israeli genocide in Gaza.

“They also left a collection of old shoes — throwing shoes is a gesture of contempt in the Arab World — in the rain outside the High Commission for the staff to have to clean up.”

• Israel is on trial for genocide before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in a case brought by South Africa and supported by dozens of countries, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant are wanted on arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Indonesia has kidnapped and threatened Mama Yasinta Moiwend (Mama Sinta), one of the Marind tribe women featured in the controversial documentary Pesta Babi (Pig Feast), into denying the film and its message, claims a West Papuan advocacy group.

Pesta Babi, which focuses on the Merauke sugarcane megaproject and was premiered in New Zealand in March, exposes how Indonesia is destroying West Papua’s ancestral forest for profit.

“It is a moderate film, which does not show the real truth — that all West Papuans want freedom and independence instead of colonial ‘development’,” said the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) president Benny Wenda.

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“Despite this, Indonesia has done everything they can to destroy it.”

Since the screenings of the film in New Zealand and Australia, the documentary has been widely shown in Indonesia and stirred a military crackdown with attempts to block it.

Partners in the production of the film include the Papuan media group Jubi, Greenpeace  and Pusaka, a group committed to “fostering and advancing a just and equitable life” for Indigenous peoples and marginalised communities.

In a series of social media videos, Mama Sinta has publicly distanced herself from Pesta Babi, stating that she was “exploited by the filmmakers”.

She was later presented to a police station in Jakarta, where she filed charges against LBH Papua Merauke, an organisation involved in producing the film. Her family have stated they have not been able to contact her for the past week.

‘Why change her views suddenly?’
“Mama Sinta has clearly been kidnapped by the colonial TNI. Why else would she be in Jakarta, away from the community she has spent her life fighting to protect? Why else would she change her views so suddenly?” asked Wenda.

Against her will, the Indonesian state had forced Mama Sinta to issue a statement retracting her involvement in the film, he said.

“For West Papuans, this is not a new phenomenon. Indonesia has always used any means they can to divide our spirit: bribery, threats, arbitrary arrests, beatings and torture.

“Those who they cannot silence they simply kill.

“Mama Sinta is just like the elders who were forced at gunpoint to vote against West Papuan independence during the Act of ‘No Choice’ [in 1969]. Merdeka remained in their hearts, even if they raised their hands against it.”

Wenda said Mama Sinta would have been afraid of “what would happen to her” if she did not agree to the TNI’s demands.

At a time when violence had ramped up across West Papua, with nearly 40 civilians “massacred in the past two months”, Papuans were aware of the dangers of speaking out.

“This is why she recanted.”

‘Terrified’ of public
“The Indonesian state response to Pesta Babi — from kidnapping its star to violently shutting down screenings of the film — clearly demonstrates their overwhelming fear of being found out.

“Indonesia is terrified that their own people, their youth and students, will discover what their government is doing to West Papua.

“The filmmakers deserve thanks for exposing Indonesia’s ecocide in Merauke. I call on them, and all Indonesian solidarity groups to stay strong: deepen your support for West Papua, oppose your country’s ongoing occupation, genocide and crimes against humanity.”

In an interview with RNZ Pacific last week, the film’s director, Dandhy Laksono, criticised the military crackdown over the documentary.

He said that Pesta Babi had been showing at about 1700 cinemas around Indonesia.

“We have recorded more than 30 incidents of the state apparatus stopping the screening — mostly by military, and then they are also using the civil servants — in the name of public order,” he said.

No public disorder
Laksono said there had been no public disorder from the film in parts where it had shown.

“It’s ridiculous, and thanks to the audience they defend the film quite hard, and they defend their rights to to watch and to absorb the information, about what has actually happened in West Papua.”

Wenda said the crackdown on the documentary was just one small example of Indonesia’s policy of repression in West Papua.

“They are only able to get away with their crimes because they have transformed West Papua into the Pacific North Korea: journalists are banned from entering, along with NGOs like Amnesty and the Red Cross.”

Six years had passed since Indonesia vowed to allow the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to visit West Papua — “and still they refuse access”.

Twelve Pasifika people in New Zealand received awards in this year’s King’s Birthday Honours.

The New Zealand Royal Honours acknowledges people who have served their communities and recognises their achievements.

The honors system includes three Orders: The Order of New Zealand; The New Zealand Order of Merit; and The King’s Service Order.

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Various other medals are also awarded: including the King’s Service Medal, the New Zealand Antarctic Medal, and New Zealand Distinguished Service Decoration.

A total of 178 recipients were congratulated across New Zealand on Monday — six percent were Pacific Islanders.

Olympian Beatrice Roini Liua Faumuinā was named a Companion of the Order of New Zealand for her services to sport and governance.

“It’s a real good reflection of all the work that’s happened in the last 20 years, transitioning from being an athlete into the governance world, and wanting to be able to contribute in spaces where you can make real impacts and transition for many people,” the former New Zealand Trade Commissioner and Consul-General in New York said.

Total surprise
For some of the newly inducted Members of the Order, the awards have come as a total surprise.

Tofa Robertina O’Halloran, who was named a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit (MNZM), was at a loss for words.

“I’m just flabbergasted, and I had never expected anything like this. It was just a surprise,” she said.

“My son called me and said, ‘Mum, look at your email’, and I said, ‘I’ll read it later’. He said, ‘Look at it now’. I don’t know, I’m just short of words to say to him.”

O’Halloran was acknowledged for services to education and the Niuean community.

As one of the first Niuean primary teachers in New Zealand and a volunteer Vagahau Niue (Niuean language) educator, she attributed her award to those that inspired her to follow this path.

“I can thank the old folks who encouraged us to maintain the language, that’s who I acknowledge first, because they’re the ones who kept us going.”

Testament to success
For the founder of Samoan fashion brand Mena Designs, the recognition feels like a testament to their success.

Talaleomalie Filomena Loheni (MNZM) taught herself to sew dresses for her family, she never expected to one day be the first Pacific business invited to showcase at the New Zealand Fashion Week.

“I did not expect anything, you know. I was so surprised when I got the email, oh my goodness … We knew the business was very successful, because we sell worldwide… I feel honoured, and I feel humbled, I feel proud to be recognised.”

Loheni has seen her brand become a household name in Oceania fashion, and has showcased globally in Fiji, Japan, Canada, and the United States of America.

Okesene Seanoa Faraimo was named MNZM for services to the community, Tokelau language and culture.

The long-time social worker has played a key role in the development of multiple Tokelau focused strategies, reports and programs, and has been a strong advocate for the revitalisation of Te Gagana Tokelau (the Tokelau language).

Faraimo said it is an honour to be acknowledged for his work.

‘Very humbled’
“When I was told that I am nominated for this award I thought of the many others doing great work supporting whanau and the community, so I am very humbled to receive this award.”

For Lemalu Freddie Ah Kuoi (MNZM), being honoured for services to rugby league and the community has made him reflect on his long career.

“What it does show to me is that God’s hand is on my life, he’s given us to act on and to use wisely while we’re here, and so it gives me great confidence, and knowing that yes, I’m on the right track. Thank you, Lord.”

At 18 years old, Ah Kuoi made his debut in the international rugby scene in 1975, before becoming the youngest Pasifika player to captain the New Zealand Kiwis at the age of 23.

Now he runs the ‘WAI – Who Am I’ course, helping mentor young offenders through physical training and life coaching.

He says his many achievements are thanks to the many hands that have helped along the way.

“The medal represents most of the fact of all the things in my life that I’ve done, and the people that were involved with it, because you know, you can’t do it on your own, you know, it’s something that’s usually required teamwork.”

New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon congratulated the Honours recipients for their “outstanding efforts”.

“The achievements and service of every New Zealander honoured on this list have helped make our country a stronger, better place, and I would like to thank them for their contributions,” he said.

“Congratulations to all the King’s Birthday 2026 Honours recipients. New Zealand is incredibly proud of you and stands alongside each of you in celebration.”

The full list of Pasifika inductees/awardees

To be Companions of the said Order (CNZM)
Beatrice Roini Liua Faumuinā (ONZM) — for services to sport and governance

To be Members of the said Order (MNZM)
Freddie (Lemalu Freddie) Ah Kuoi for services to rugby league and the community

Okesene Seanoa Faraimo for services to the community, Tokelau language and culture

Fane Fusipongi Ketu’u, JP for services to Tongan language education

Inspector Neru Grant Leifi for services to the New Zealand Police and the community

Filomena Loheni – for services to Pacific fashion

Tofa Robertina O’Halloran for services to education and the Niuean community

Esitone (Leota Pauga Esitone) Pauga for services to Fire and Emergency New Zealand

Kathleen Tuai for services to the Pacific community

Vania Nive Hannah Wolfgramm for services to rugby

The King’s Service Medal (KSM)

Reverend Tapita Taia Ching for services to the Pacific community and education

Vaitoelau Kumitau for services to the Niuean community

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