Thirty five years ago today the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior was bombed in Auckland’s Waitematā Harbour by French secret agents in a blatant act of state terrorism, killing a photojournalist.

People’s campaigns have moved on since then from nuclear tests and refugees to climate justice – and future Pacific refugees.

The environmental campaign flagship was bombed on 10 July 1985 just weeks after it had been in the Marshall Islands carrying out four humanitarian voyages to rescue more than 320 Rongelap atoll villagers from the ravages of US nuclear tests and take them to a new home, Mejato island on Kwajalein atoll.

READ MORE: Eyes of Fire – Thirty Years On
LISTEN: David Robie reflects on the Rainbow Warrior on RNZ’s Crimes NZ programme

They were nuclear refugees seeking justice, relief and a healthy life far from the dangerous legacy left from 105 tests on Bikini and nearby atolls.

Ironically, the bombing in Auckland and mounting Pacific opposition led to a massive wave of New Zealand and Pacific anti-nuclear solidarity and ultimately to the halt of French nuclear testing at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls in 1996 after 193 blasts.

The bombed ship’s pioneering environmental work has since been carried on by Rainbow Warrior II and the state-of-the-art eco campaign ship Rainbow Warrior III.

Today the focus is on climate refugees, the lack of adequate health compensation for the Polynesians who suffered radiation and failure to provide proper clean-up of the French nuclear testing zones that are still off-limits after almost a quarter century. Tests were carried out by balloon, derrick, in the lagoon and in a series of underground shafts which have threatened the stability of the 60 km long atoll, leaving it fractured “like Swiss cheese”.

Landmark ruling
In January this year, in a landmark United Nations ruling, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, governments have been told not to return people to countries where their lives might be threatened by climate change.

Climate action activists have greeted this ruling as a potential game changer for both climate refugees, or migrants, and for advocates for global climate action.

The UN Human Rights Committee ruled in the covenant that “without robust national and international efforts, the effects of climate change in receiving states may expose individuals to violations of their rights”.

The ruling applied to a humble New Zealand vegetable farm foreman, Ioane Teitiota, from the island nation of Kiribati, who had become a poster boy for climate refugee legal advocates even though he had little understanding of this concept.

Five years earlier, his lawyers had applied for protection for him in New Zealand after presenting a legal argument that he and his family’s lives were at risk from the impact of climate change and rising Pacific Ocean level in Kiribati as one of the “frontline states” facing global warming.

Although Teitiota and his lawyers lost the case because the threat to Kiribati was not deemed to be an imminent risk, the ruling opened the door to recognition of the existence of climate refugees and the possibility of legal refugee protection.

Climate change will force tens of millions of people to leave their homes in the next decade, according to a report by the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF). And this would include many on low-lying atolls in the South Pacific.

‘Humanitarian visa’
In October 2017, New Zealand’s Climate Minister James Shaw announced that the incoming government was planning an “experimental humanitarian visa” category for Pacific Islanders forced to leave their homes. Partially inspired by the Teitiota case, it was envisaged that up to 100 people a year might settle in New Zealand under this scheme.

However, this humanitarian plan was quietly shelved because Pacific Islanders generally do not want to leave their homes. They prefer support for adaptation and mitigation for their continuing lives on ancestral land with refugee status as merely a last resort.

The Rainbow Warrior had visited Kiribati and Vanuatu on the voyage to New Zealand after the Marshall Islands mission. Crew members saw at first hand some of the climate pressures already apparent back then.

Cancer sufferers seeking nuclear compensation from the French government under the controversial Morin law received a boost last month when a man who had developed bladder cancer as a result of the nuclear tests was awarded almost US$180,000 by the administrative court.

This news was welcomed by both health advocates and activists.

According to the local news service Tahiti-Infos,  an earlier application for compensation had been turned down by the authority dealing with the case.

The compensation law has been tightened up again after being earlier relaxed with most claims being rejected between 2010 and 2017.

Uproar in Tahiti
In May, there was an uproar in Tahiti when the French National Assembly attempted to include a clause about compensation over nuclear weapons testing into generic covid-19 legislation while the French Polynesian representatives were absent from the chamber because of the pandemic travel bans.

Tahiti’s Moetai Brotherson, one of the two French Polynesian representatives, described this move as a “scandal” and two nuclear test veteran advocacy groups, Moruroa e Tatou and Association 193, were also angry, reports RNZ Pacific.

During the three decades of French tests, the early atmospheric explosions had dusted atolls and islets with radioactive fallout.

Brotherson expressed disappointment that the French state had demonstrated yet again that it “detested” the Tahitian people. Moruroa e Tatou’s Hiro Tefaarere said he was “outraged” but not surprised because all French presidents from de Gaulle to Macron “couldn’t care less” about Polynesians.

During 2019, the French Polynesian social security agency CPS reported that it had spent US$770 million on health care costs for radiation-induced illnesses. The CPS, responsible for medical expenses and pension payments, has struggled with its budgets and wants France to take responsibility for compensation.

However, French authorities do not accept liability for test-related illnesses, claiming the nuclear blasts were “clean” unlike the earlier US and British tests in the Pacific.

The nuclear tests have rarely been an issue outside French Polynesia and independent Pacific nations. But some consciences are occasionally pricked.

A French Watergate?
Five years ago, the unmasked French bomber who sank the Rainbow Warrior in 1985 made some revealing comments during his interviews with the investigative website Mediapart and TVNZ’s Sunday programme, none more telling than that “the first bomb was too powerful, it should have ended as a Watergate” for French President François Mitterrand.

Mitterrand stayed in office for 14 years – a decade after the bombing and before he finally stepped down when his second presidential term ended in May 1995, the year before nuclear tests ended.

The bomber, retired colonel Jean-Luc Kister, added that had Operation Satanique – the sabotage plot – involved the United States, “more heads would have rolled”.

However, while the “innocent death” of Portuguese-born Dutch photographer Fernando Pereira has clearly played on his conscience for all these years, Kister’s sincere apology wasn’t without a hint of trying to rewrite history.

The claim that the secret sabotage operation never meant to kill anybody is unconvincing for anybody on board the Rainbow Warrior on that tragic night when New Zealand lost its political innocence and the crew lost a dear friend.

In 2005, two decades after the bombing and nine years after Mitterrand’s death, Le Monde published a leaked document revealing that the late president had personally approved the sinking of the ship.

The newspaper obtained a handwritten account of the operation, written in 1986 by Pierre Lacoste, who was sacked as head of the secret services.

The Democracy Now! report – Rainbow Warrior and President François Mitterrand. Video: Democracy Now!

‘Neutralise’ the Warrior
He had testified that he had asked President Mitterrand for permission to “neutralise” the Rainbow Warrior at a meeting two months before the attack and would never have gone ahead without the president’s authorisation. 

The so-called nuclear “war” in the Pacific dates back to the US bombing of Hiroshima and

Nagasaki in 1945. The bombing was followed by  atmospheric nuclear testing by the United States in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958, arguably the “dirtiest” nuclear testing.

The first so-called nuclear refugees in the Pacific were the Bikini atoll islanders who were relocated into “exile” for the first US weapons tests in 1946.

Then came the British tests at Christmas Island (now Kiribati) and in the Australian outback; the start of the French testing at Moruroa in 1966; more US tests at Johnston Atoll in the early 1960s; flight testing of ICBMs, anti-satellite weapons; and more recently “Star Wars” technology at the Kwajalein Missile Range in the Marshall Islands.

As the late Steve Sawyer, Greenpeace campaign coordinator on board the Rainbow Warrior and whose birthday was being celebrated on board the night of the bombing, noted, “the displacement of local populations and adverse health effects as a result of these programmes has not been without opposition.

“But that opposition has been so scattered and unorganised until recently that it has been little felt in Washington and Paris.”

And the Rainbow Warrior Pacific voyage was planned to make a global difference. It did, but one that shook the world and ended in tragedy.

Alert level two looked like alert level “zero” today after more than a month of lockdown in Auckland when I caught a local bus into downtown.

There were people in every facet of business smiling and frowning just like Auckland in the old pre-covid days.

The barber shops, coffee shops, takeaways were busy as people returned to their normal routines of keeping their businesses open.

What was disappointing, however, was there was no social distancing on the bus – or elsewhere, even though the bus signs said a maximum of 39 people.

Was I taking a risk? I suppose I was but that is the price you pay when you’re a journalist.

Did anyone on the bus feel threatened? No, a few had face masks on … even fewer people were wearing gloves.

Scent of a hairdo
I could smell the scent of the woman in front of me with her hairdo, which was fragrant and pleasant – so much for keeping your distance.

There were others on the bus, like a woman who sat across from me looking really busy as she answered her phone.

The others looked busy too as we picked up passengers on the way to Newmarket where young men and women would alight. And again there was no social distancing.

Whether they were girlfriends and boyfriends, I wouldn’t know but the sheer joy of seeing each other was something to behold after such a long time of being locked away.

Westfields at Newmarket was open, and it seemed that nothing new had happened. Again I was aghast at the no social distancing.

It was appalling to say the least. It was like the shackles had been taken off and people had come out to play on a sunny day.

Onehunga was busy as the mall returned to business, you couldn’t get a place to park your car, which was a far cry from level 4 or even level 3.

Thai pie and coffee
The joy of having a chicken and mushroom pie and a coffee made by the Thai couple down the road before I caught the bus was palpable. Finally, I could return to something normal – even though it was bad for me.

As were the kids at the playground in Onehunga, I saw from the bus. They were going down the slide after lockdown, and their joy was unbridled.

I stopped off at AUT University – where I study. It was closed with a QR barcode on the door which I didn’t bother to try.

Next was a trip to High Street, it seemed nothing had changed, just as busy as ever.

Auckland, had returned to normal it seemed. Covid-19 has been banished …or has it?

Story and pictures by Sri Krishnamurthi

Covid L2 ... or L zero?

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The headlines were chilling as we flew into Turkey and then Iran. “All out war”, trumpeted The New Zealand Herald, as being an imminent response to last month’s surprise drone attack knocking out almost 50 percent of Saudi Arabia’s oil production, blaming the attack on the Islamic Republic without convincing evidence.

President Donald Trump warned that the US was “locked and loaded” if Iran was found to be behind the attacks, and then later apparently backed off and relied on even heavier sanctions.

The next day the Herald belatedly ran the other side of the story, quoting Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s response denying the allegations and warning that Iran would defend itself in the case of a US-Saudi attack while offering the “hand of friendship and brotherhood” for overseeing security in the Persian Gulf.

WATCH: Iran’s Rouhani – US sanctions have failed

President Hassan Rouhani says US sanctions have failed to bring Iran’s economy to its knees. Al Jazeera video

Houthi forces in neighbouring Yemen, invaded by a Saudi-led coalition in 2015 that led to widely condemned four-year civil war, claimed to have carried out the drone and rocket attack on the two oil installations at Abaiq and Khurais.

Given the rising geopolitical tensions, as I was about to visit the country for several weeks as a visitor on sabbatical, I was keen to see the realities on the ground in Iran behind the sabre-rattling.

Haven’t we seen this sort of situation before, attempts at regime change by Washington on the flimsiest of evidence? The unjustified invasion of Iraq in 2003, for example, based on the fictitious claims of Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction. And look at the chaos and destruction of a nation that resulted from that overwhelming military attack.

Vietnam pretext
And then there was the 1964 manufactured Bay of Tonkin incident that was used as a pretext for US escalation of the war on North Vietnam. What a disaster with the eventual humiliating airlift withdrawal of US combat troops in 1975.

Just a few weeks before the Saudi oil installations attack, Al Jazeera UpFront interviewer and columnist Mehdi Hasan wrote in The Intercept in response to a Washington assessment blaming Iran for an earlier attack on two Saudi oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz:

“Why would you trust the word of a single official on such a sensitive and contentious issue? And why, oh why, would you rely on the testimony of a member of the Trump administration, known globally, of course, for its stringent and unbending adherence to the truth?”

Hasan added this qualification:

“If you’re going to trust the word of a single anonymous official, in this administration of fanatical hawks and shameless dissemblers, why not trust this particular official who was quoted in The New York Times?

One American official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential internal planning, said the new intelligence of an increased Iranian threat was “small stuff” and did not merit the military planning being driven by Mr Bolton [then still National Security Adviser before being sacked by Trump]. The official also said the ultimate goal of the year-long economic sanctions campaign by the Trump administration was to draw Iran into an armed conflict with the United States.

Hasan added a rather stinging rebuke about the performance of Western journalists generally.

Lessons for journalists

“Plenty of journalists say they want to learn the lessons of Iraq. But the sad reality is that many of my colleagues in the media are, wittingly or unwittingly, becoming complicit in this administration’s cynical and dangerous attempt ‘to draw Iran into an armed conflict with the United States’.”

Confronted with the tensions and about to arrive in Iran for my first visit – and hopefully not last to this fascinating, friendly and vibrant country with a proud history of ancient civilisations – I consulted our MFAT’s “Travel Safe” website.

Sadly, our government’s advice to travellers is just as flawed as media reports.

Under a large red exclamation icon, the site warns “do not travel within 100km of the border with Afghanistan, within 10km of the Iraqi border or east of the line running from Bam to Jask close to the Pakistan border due to the threat of terrorism and violent crime”.

I won’t quibble about the Iraqi or Pakistan borders – as I did not personally visit those areas, but I suspect the warning is exaggerated, especially when you consider that a record 3.5 million Iranian pilgrims have just been crossing the border into Iraq peacefully, as usual, for the annual Arba’een pilgrimage to Karbala.

However, the Afghan border warning is way off the mark. I have just come back from a week-long visit to Mashhad, Iran’s second city – a beautiful and peaceful metropolis that hosts the world’s third-largest mosque, the Haram-e Razavi shrine. This is only a three-hour drive from the border.

For the next section, “Exercise increased caution”, the NZ government advisory warns: “Elsewhere in Iran exercise increased caution due to the potential for civil unrest and the regional threat of terrorism”.

Laughable advisory
Frankly, this is laughable when you consider what New Zealand suffered on March 15 with a terrorist gunman killing a total of 51 peaceful worshippers at two Christchurch mosques being a far worse attack that either of the Iranian incidents mentioned on Travel Safe – in Ahvaz on 22 September 2018 and the capital Tehran on 7 June 2017.

This does not mean no caution is needed given that the repressive rule under the Shah deposed in 1979 has been continued by the revolutionary regime. But for travellers like us, Iran is an astoundingly friendly country that welcomes tourists with genuine enthusiasm and with few overt signs of the restrictions that rile many (such as the hijab rules that have led to widespread White Wednesday protests and agitation over the tragic death of the so-called “Blue Girl” football stadium protester that gained an interim victory last week).

On September 2, 29-year-old Sahar Khodayari, set herself on fire in front of the Tehran revolutionary courthouse after learning she could face a prison sentence for up to two years following her protest attempt to enter the capital’s Azadi Stadium dressed as a boy.

She was dubbed the Blue Girl because this was the colour of her favourite team, Esteghial FC.

Although attendance by women at football matches has been banned since 1981, sometimes exceptions have been made for matches played by the national Iranian team and some women have posed as men to attend.

After Khodayari’s tragic self-immolation, a ban on women at Azadi Stadium was lifted, but it is unclear whether this is permanent or applies elsewhere in the country.

The White Wednesdays campaign was launched by US-based Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad to oppose compulsory hijab wearing.

No hijab photos
The campaign persuades women to post photos or videos of themselves without headscarves and the journalist publishes them on her social media sites. News reports have cited authorities as saying protesters face up to 10 years, but scores of women have protested anyway and been arrested.

Alinejad is followed on Instagram by almost three million people, an important influence given that other major social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Telegram are banned in Iran.

In recent weeks, the detention of two Australian social media “influencers” for allegedly taking photographs with a drone without a permit – and now set free – and the arrest of a British-Iranian social anthropologist without charge have also contributed to negative headlines. (Another dual citizen academic has been detained since 2016).

No Family Visits or Lawyer Allowed for Detained Anthropologist Kameel Ahmady Two Weeks Into Detention

Media freedom organisations such as Paris-based Reporters Without Borders have monitored human rights violations against journalists for years. Iran is cited as the biggest jailer of women journalists.

“We reject these authoritarian rules and I would say 90 percent of Iranians don’t accept them. But we Iranians have become very good at pretending, we are very adaptable people,” says an Esfahan manufacturer, who spent time in New Zealand as a student.

Another Iranian, from Mashhad, who also studied in New Zealand, says, “Our future has been destroyed. For young people like us, we have limited choices.”

However, the country has far more nuanced realities than Western media generally give credit. Back to columnist Mehdi Hasan – what is his advice for journalists in order to provide a more balanced account of the country?

He has four suggestions: “stop the stenography”; get the facts straight; context, context, context; and get better sources.

Under his stenography heading, he condemns “passing along the claims of US officials to readers of viewers, without checking whether they are true or not”.

Getting facts right
Getting facts right – “Iran does not have nuclear weapons. Iran does not have a nuclear weapons programme. Iran has complied with the terms of the nuclear deal.”

It is the US that scuttled the nuclear deal – known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – last year while Europe and the UN were satisfied it was working. Trump imposed the punitive sanctions that have rightly been branded by both Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif as “economic terrorism”, especially Washington’s efforts to cut off Iranian revenue from the sale of its oil (a policy currently being defiantly thwarted by China).

Clearly this blunt “maximum pressure” attempt at “regime change” has failed and now the US policy has been exposed as “maximum deceit”, according to the Iranian leadership.

Hasan says journalists ought to provide context by reporting more historical background to the issues. For example, how often do stories report that the US “Eisenhower administration toppled the democratically elected government of Iranian Prime Minister Dr Mohammad Mossadegh in a CIA coup in 1953?” He had nationalised the British-owned Anglo-Iranian oil company (later rebranded as British Petroleum).

“Or that the Carter administration offered safe haven to the repressive dictator, the Shah of Iran, after he fled from the Iranian Revolution in 1979?”

And the Reagan administration encouraged Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to launch a surprise invasion of Iran in 1981, a bitter protracted war that lasted eight years with unprepared Iranian conscripts – young and old – suffering most of the estimated one million casualties.

Hasan also urges the use of better sources. Do not simply rely on administration officials, whether in Washington or Wellington. Look to a wider range of sceptical voices and analysts. And Al Jazeera, Turkey’s TRT News and Iran’s Press TV channels are good for more balanced and background perspectives.

Among academics I have talked to, media management social scientist Professor Reza Ebrahimzadeh of the Islamic Azad University at Esfahan, argues that foreign news organisations need to do a far better job in providing “context and history” about Iran to promote global understanding.

More journalists from New Zealand need to go to Iran to see for themselves.

Dr David Robie travelled independently and with no political “minders”.

• Part 1: Iran a hugely ‘friendly’ country behind the sabre-rattling
• Part 2: 10 reasons why tourists must visit Iran
• Part 3: Iran’s great global adventurers
• Feel Iran – a project promoting Iran tourism

The Pacific Media Centre’s Del Abcede joined the Ihumātao “protectors” protest at the weekend to soak up the atmosphere of guardianship over the future of the sacred indigenous Māori site.

Fletcher Building plans to build 480 homes on the site but work has been suspended by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern while talks continue between various stakeholders.

The SOUL (Save Our Unique Landscape) protectors group says the land has historical, cultural and archaeological significance and should be left an open space or returned to mana whenua.

The block of land was confiscated in 1863 by British colonial authorities, acquired by the Crown and sold to the Wallace family. In 2016, the 32ha block was bought by the Fletcher group for housing development.

Here is a portfolio of Del’s images.

• The Ihumātao land rights struggle – a timeline
• Iwi against Ihumātao protest social media pages shutdown
• More Ihumātao stories

Ihumātao - protecting the future

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A creative “grab bag” of projects has been unveiled by the Pacific Media Centre in a showcase of collaboration across academic and communication communities.

Held at Auckland University of Technology on Friday and hosted by PMC advisory board chair Associate Professor Camille Nakhid, the PMC “Midwinter Showcase” celebrated the launch of a double edition of Pacific Journalism Review, the 2018 Bearing Witness documentary Banabans of Rabi, the Pacific Media Watch Project – The Genesis video and the new PMC Online website.

Doctoral candidate and journalist Atakohu Middleton opened the night with a karakia before pro-vice chancellor and faculty dean Professor Guy Littlefair officially launched PJR – which focuses heavily on the New Zealand mosque massacre and media dilemmas of democracy – with a powerful and poignant speech.

READ MORE: NZ mosque massacre, New Caledonia referendum and Fiji elections top PJR

Describing universities as the “critic and conscience of society”, Professor Littlefair lauded the value of the new PJR research in light of the media response to the March 15 atrocity.

He said how the privileged Pākehā narrative of New Zealand history made the violence of the attack all the more affronting for a media community consisting of mostly young, white journalists.

“This double issue of PJR that I have the privilege to launch tonight picks up on the narrative at precisely this point,” he said.

“’Dilemmas for journalists and democracy [PJR title]’ – these five words encapsulate for me the critic and conscience role of universities.

“This journal provides once again a magnificent example of the best, most relevant, most meaningful research that I as a dean could hope to see come from this wonderful faculty of ours.

“David and the team, I could not be more proud.”

The trailer for Banabans of Rabi.

Banabans of Rabi
Banabans of Rabi was then screened after an introduction by AUT screen production senior lecturer Jim Marbrook.

Marbrook, who helped produce the film, described it as a successful product of collaboration between journalism and screen production students.

He explained that film creators Blessen Tom and Hele Ikimotu had to overcome particular challenges to get to the remote Fijian island of Rabi and make the documentary.

“The philosophy of the Bearing Witness project is to go to areas that are under reported, that are quite difficult to get to; with that comes risks and complications.

“It’s kind of a pressure cooker situation to drop two students into.

“There is not a lot of power on the island, it’s isolated. Complicating that is the mix of languages; Fijian, Gilbertese and Banaban as well.

Blessen Tom then described filming on Rabi where scarcity of electricity meant that he had to be very selective with his choice of shots to conserve battery power.

Sri Krishnamuthi and Blessen Tom’s documentary about Pacific Media Watch.

PMW Project – The Genesis
Postgraduate communications student and former NZ Press Association journalist Sri Krishnamurthi introduced the Pacific Media Watch Project – The Genesis documentary which pays homage to the origins of the PMW media freedom project.

Through making the film with Blessen Tom, Krishnamurthi described learning about the project, from its creation in response to the wrongful arrest of three Tongans in the famous “contempt of Parliament” case in 1996, to its two decades since as a “watchdog of Pacific journalism.”

He stressed the value of the project and its role in the development of student journalists.

“The beauty of it is the use of student contributing editors – all of them will echo my sentiments; that this little gem which is invaluable as a guardian of Pacific journalism must be kept going for years to come.”

PMC Online
Finally, Tony Murrow of Little Island Press unveiled the new mobile friendly and robust PMC Online website, the product of almost two years of his team’s work in collaboration with the PMC.

He said the bold and colourful design reflected the vibrancy and diversity of the Pacific Media Centre.

The website is due to go live on www.pmc.aut.ac.nz in the coming days.

Pacific Media Centre director Professor David Robie acknowledged all those who had contributed and collaborated on the assortment of projects – including Pacific Journalism Review co-editors and collaborators Khairiah Rahman, Dr Philip Cass, Del Abcede, Nicole Gooch and Professor Wendy Bacon, whom he described as one of the best investigative journalists in Australia.

An allegedly “enslaved” Indonesian fisherman on board Yu Shun 88, a Taiwanese flagged tuna longliner, has now been repatriated from Fiji to his homeland, says an Auckland lawyer.

Barrister and solicitor Karen Harding alleged in a social media video message addressed to the skipper that the fishing boat was holding her client against his will in “abject” working conditions.

But with the help of an Indonesian government representative and a charity group known as Pacific Dialogue, the fisherman was repatriated to Indonesia last weekend.

READ MORE: From traffic law to human rights – how an Auckland woman is fighting for justice for 30 fishermen

Harding, a lawyer with a high profile in acting on drink and driving cases who has branched into human rights lawsuits, said the unnamed fisherman’s bed was infested with fleas, food was spoiled, and there was no fresh soap or water for showers.

The fishermen on the boat, which carries up to 17 people, were also forced to work for 18-20 hours a day, she claimed.

Harding said the captain had taken the passport, the seaman’s book and withheld pay as a security bond.

The fisherman wanted to go home due to “horrible working conditions” and many injuries.

Wages withheld
One fisherman was so injured, he was “not even able to hold a chop stick,” Harding said.

“You are holding him against his will and your company is not paying him his wages and holding the wages back as security,” she alleged in the video message.

Her client got a job to work on a Taiwanese fishing vessel in Suva and “was promised, he was going to get US$450 (NZ$672) in wages and commission of US$400 (NZ$589) per month per docking,” Harding said.

Not paying them and holding wages as security was “creating forced labour”, Harding said.

“I liaised with the Indonesian government on Sunday … and liaised with the charity group known as Pacific Dialogue,” and the latter reported the matter to the embassy, Harding said.

The Indonesian government had been helpful in a timely dealing with this matter.

The Indonesian government had arranged for the representative of the Indonesian government to go to the agent’s office on the Suva wharf,” Harding said.

Seeking wages
Now that the fisherman was home, the problem was getting his wages for the time he had worked on the ship.

Out of NZ$1261 allegedly owed to him, he had only received $141 for four months of work. His contract had said that “if he didn’t complete the contract they weren’t going to pay his wages,” said Harding.

There are other fishermen on board the same ship, but because Harding was only dealing with one fisherman, the status of the others is unknown.

The same fisherman had also allegedly been subject to similar harsh conditions in New Zealand waters on board a Korean vessel.

The fisherman still had not been paid by the Oyang 77, for the period of 2009 January 22 to 2010 December 6.

“He effectively only got paid only one hour a day at the NZ minimum pay rate,” Harding said.

“And he worked 18 hours a day on average.”

No comment was available from the company’s involved.

The Yu Shun 88 is now headed towards Solomon Islands and is expected to spend another 12 months at sea with other fishermen on board.

• Indonesia cracks down on brutal conditions on foreign ‘slavery’ fishing boats
• Former Oyang crew in legal battle

The content of the Boe Declaration, signed at the Pacific Islands Forum in Nauru earlier this month, is not widely known. However, a statement from NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern suggests that it declares climate change as a security issue.

“The Boe Declaration acknowledges additional collective actions are required to address new and non-traditional challenges. Modern-day regional security challenges include climate change,” she said in a statement.

Both the leaders communique and the declaration itself affirm the fact that climate change is a real issue. However, it is discussion of gender in light of that is lacking.

READ MORE: Nauru 2018 and the new Boe on the block

According to a report by Oxfam, men survived women 3 to 1 in the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) suggests that this was because women were trapped in their homes at the time of the disaster “while men were out in the open”.

The agency also suggest that a cultural or religious custom can restrict a woman’s ability to survive a natural disaster.

“. . . the clothes they wear and/or their responsibilities in caring for children could hamper their mobility in times of emergency,” a UNDP report says.

Caregivers and providers
Figures from the United Nations show that 80 percent of those displaced by climate change were women. This, they argue, is caused primarily by their roles as caregivers and providers of food.

London School of Economics research indicates that women and girls are definitively more vulnerable to the effects of climate change than their male counterparts.

In societies where women are considered to be lower on the metaphorical food chain, “natural disasters will kill . . . more women than men,” the report says.

The two researchers could find no biological reason why women would be at more risk than men.

Based on this research, and other research like it, many public figures have called for attention to be paid to the issue.

“More extreme weather events. . . will all result in less food. Less food will mean that women and children get less,” dystopian author Margaret Atwood told a London conference in June.

The author of books like The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake said that climate change “. . . will also mean social unrest, which can lead to wars and civil wars . . . Women do badly in wars”.

Primarily burdened
When asked about the issue at an event at Georgetown University in February, former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that “. . . women. . . will be . . . primarily burdened with the problems of climate change”.

Earlier this month, former NZ Prime Minister Helen Clark told a crowd of about 200 people at the National Council of Women (NCW) conference that the world was close to missing the opportunity to tend to the issue of climate change and women were most likely to be affected by it.

“Everything we know tells us that women are the most vulnerable in this,” she said. “If you look at the natural disasters caused by weather. . . more women die”.

According to Marshall Islands President Hilda Heine, President of the Marshall Islands, women are more affected by climate change than their male counterparts but are also “less likely to be empowered to cope”.

“Women aren’t making enough of the decisions, and the decisions aren’t yet doing enough for women,” she wrote in The Guardian.

The UNDP argues it is because of a woman’s place in the household that she is in prime position to affect change when it comes to this issue.

“. . . knowledge and capabilities [regarding reproduction, household and community roles] can and should be deployed for/in climate change mitigation, disaster relief and adaptation strategies,” the report says..

Feminist solution
“A feminist solution” is what former Irish President and UN Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson argued for in June.

She explained that “feminism doesn’t mean excluding men, it’s about being more inclusive of women and – in this case – acknowledging the role they can play in tackling climate change”.

She’s not the only, nor the first, to make such a suggestion.

A whole feminist environmental movement, known as ecofeminism, has sprung up over the decades since the 1970s.

At its most basic level, ecofeminism is exactly what it sounds like: It argues that there is a relationship between environmental damage – such as that done by climate change – and the oppression of women and their rights.

For example, in her 2014 book This Changes Everything, journalist Naomi Klein argues that it is hypocritical that the self-same lawmakers who claim to be “pro-life” are also the ones who push for whole industries surrounding drilling, fracking and mining to not only survive but thrive.

Business confidence
“If the Earth is indeed our mother, then far from the bountiful goddess of mythology, she is a mother facing many great fertility challenges,” she writes.

In New Zealand, leader of the opposition National Party Simon Bridges, who is opposed to the idea of removing abortion from the Crimes Act, is also vehemently opposed to the idea of stopping oil and gas exploration in the Taranaki region.

His concern is that “It will have an effect on business confidence,” he said back in April.

The truth of climate change, as with most global issues, is that there can be no one-size fits all solution.

For some, like Helen Clark, it requires long-term mass movements. For others, it requires being invited to the conversation.

Time will tell as to which one wins out.

• Pacific leaders endorse new security deal
• NZ must help Solomon Islands tackle unemployment ‘time bomb’, says Clark
• The ‘unscrubbed’ version of the new Boe Agreement on Pacific security

With the date for this year’s second Fiji general election since the 2006 coup yet to be announced, one of the questions is will there be a free media for the campaign? Sri Krishnamurthi in Suva talks to some media commentators who are not optimistic.

The frenzy of the forthcoming elections is just starting to hit Fiji, even though the date has yet to be announced, but the elephant in the room is whether the media is going to be free of government interference.

“No, definitely not. The combination of threats [such as those faced by Hank Art – who as publisher of The Fiji Times recently beat sedition charges] and self-censorship have become
severe,” says New Zealand journalist Michael Field, a veteran of 30 years reporting on the Pacific.

“I believe the Fiji media is fearful of the [Voreqe] Bainimarama government and its ability to hit at media in ways that are expensive and worrying. This ranges from the simple banning of government ads in The Fiji Times to the various sedition issues.

READ MORE: Coups, globalisation and Fiji’s reset structures of ‘democracy’

“Being free and independent is too expensive for what are small companies compared with the size of the state.”

Dr Shailendra Singh, coordinator of journalism at the University of the South Pacific, questions whether Fiji is ready for a free media.

“Whether Western notions of free, unrestrained media are suitable for a developing, fragile, ethnically-tense country is a moot point,” he says.

“Media have been known to inflame situations, just as governments have been known to use stability and security as pretexts to curtail media scrutiny and criticism. Finding the right balance can be elusive,“ Dr Singh says.

‘Power of the pen’
When Sitiveni Rabuka staged the first two coups in 1987, he admittedly was unaware of the “power of the pen”.

“Personally, I had nothing to hide from the media” he said on reflection in 2005 about his coups.

However, subsequent governments did not see the media as a poodle to be toyed with; instead the perception of the industry was that of a rottweiler itching to bite.

“I think it is more likely that the media regulations arose from those who saw the influence of the media, particularly in the [Mahendra] Chaudhry government [overthrown in the third coup in 2000] – and earlier in the lively free-ranging days when the media really was free and independent,” says Field, who was banned from Fiji in 2007.

“The Bainimarama government is clever enough to realise that they might not last with a free media.”

Fiji has flirted with having both a regulated media and self-censorship since the first of its four coups in 1987.

“True. But the government baulked, fearful of the public reaction and international fallout,” says Dr Singh.

‘Media always fragile’
“What that tells us is that media freedom in Fiji has always been fragile. It was only a matter of time.

“Media in Fiji are free to report as they see fit but serious mistakes are punishable by various existing laws such as defamation and contempt which are sufficient, so journalists are quite cautious.

“No one wants to be dragged through the courts like in the recent Fiji Times sedition case. The three-year lawsuit would have been financially, physically, psychologically draining. The Fiji Times escaped by the skin of its teeth.

“Free media is in the beholder’s eyes in some respects. Government feels media is free enough. Media, on the other hand, feel caged. Finding the right balance can be elusive.”

Ricardo Morris, a former journalist and current affairs magazine editor in Fiji, explains the impact of the Media Industry Development Decree (MIDD) which was imposed in 2010 and five years later became law.

“The decree became an act in 2015. The Media Authority (MIDA) doesn’t have to do much anymore because [chairman – Ashwin] Raj simply has to make comment or criticise a media company for some perceived slight and everyone retreats,” says Morris.

Morris researched and authored a 2017 report on self-censorship in Fiji on a Reuters Foundation scholarship.

“There is talk regionally and internationally about how the media Act is hanging over the media’s head. However, Raj usually says, ‘we have never brought prosecution against a media company under the media decree’ and he is right.

‘Always that danger’
“But there is always that danger.

“They’ll usually issue statements, and in the past there has been public shaming, so now you don’t really need to bring cases against the media because they are too afraid to do something that might jeopardise their position or if they do get charged they will get charged under some other criminal law as in the case of The Fiji Times now – they are charged under the Crimes Act, a case that has now gone to appeal. That’s a distinction.”

Dr Singh says it is for that reason he does not see a relaxation of the media laws.

“The media situation is not going to change – that I can say with some confidence. The laws are going to remain the same for some time yet.

“Government, which has the power to change the legislation, has not said anything. One assumes the government is happy with the way things are, so why change? If this government is returned with a strong mandate, it may feel confident enough to change the laws.

“Or it may see a stronger mandate as a vindication of its media law. The opposition National Federation Party (NFP) has said it will abolish the decree if it forms government. “

Which provisions of MIDD do those involved find most objectionable and would like to see removed?

‘Protect their own backs’
“Fines and jail terms against reporters/journalists were removed but this is meaningless unless the same is done for publishers/editors, obviously because the latter have control over journalists and will censor them to protect their own backs.

“Clear definition of what constitutes inciting communal antagonism,” says Dr Singh.

As Field says, it is simple case of economies of scale when it come to the media.

“This ranges from the simple banning of government ads in The Fiji Times, to the various sedition issues. Being free and independent is too expensive for what are small companies compared with the size of the state,” he says.

Hence the media has become a cowered and beaten animal in Fiji.

“It has become tame and fearful, it is under the control of the government and its handlers. Many journalists in Fiji, with an eye to junkets and scholarships, prefer to follow the Information Ministry line and just write up press statements,” says Field.

“I don’t think there has been a true debate in Fiji over what a free media should be … the debate has always been defined by the men with the guns.”

Sedition charges
Sedition charges were filed against The Fiji Times, three of its executives, and one opinion columnist. The columnist (Josaia Waqabaca) accused Muslims of historic crimes including invading foreign lands, rape, and murder.

“Sedition is not a crime in most countries, it’s called free speech. The content of the letter with its anti-Muslim sentiment is widely held by many. By suppressing it you do not make it go away,” says Field.

“I believe the final verdict was reached because the open absurdity of the charge, and its contents, could not be sustained, and even the imported judge did not want to be seen signing on to it.”

As Morris puts it: “We haven’t really heard the debate about the sedition law, a lot of the countries with similar histories have abandoned the sedition law because there is a fine line between freedom of expression and sedition.

“But now because of The Fiji Times, my perception is the general public err on the side of caution and will not say anything that will be deemed seditious.”

MIDD sits above the media like an axe waiting to fall, and the threat of it falling is why the media cannot expect freedom in the 2018 general elections or anytime soon.

• Fiji is ranked 57th on the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders world press freedom index with an RSF verdict: “Little desire to restore media freedom”.

Sri Krishnamurthi is a journalist and Postgraduate Diploma in Communication Studies at Auckland University of Technology student contributing to the Pacific Media Centre‘s Asia Pacific Report.

• Relief that the Fiji sedition case is over
• David Robie’s verdict on the media in the 2014 election

Sri Krishnamurthi’s interview with former MIDA chief executive Matai Akaoula, now a FijiFirst MP.

Participants at the Pacific Media Centre’s 10th anniversary celebration last Thursday held a silent vigil calling for justice for the victims of the 2009 Ampatuan massacre and in protest against the spate of extrajudicial killings in the Philippines.

Calling for “Justice Now!”, “Never again to martial law” and “Stop the killings”, the participants made the emphatic statement at the end of a compelling address by Malou Mangahas, executive director of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ), during the “Journalism Under Duress” seminar.

Associate Professor (Pasifika) Laumanuvao Winnie Laban of Victoria University, who launched the centre as a cabinet minister a decade ago, praised the progress, and AUT’s School of Communication Studies head Professor Berrin Yanıkkaya launched a new photojournalism book.

Images by Del Abcede and Kendall Hutt of the Pacific Media Centre | Video slides

PMC turns 10 in images

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West Papuan parliamentarian in exile and human rights advocate Benny Wenda spoke to about 80 students, staff and activists at Auckland University of Technology last night.

He spoke under the Papuan Morning Star flag, banned in Indonesia where protesters showing this can face up to 15 years in jail.

The colourful event was organised by the Global Peace and Justice Auckland (GPJA), West Papua Action Auckland (WPAA), Asia Pacific Human Rights Coalition (APHRC) and Oceania Interrupted theatre and cultural group in partnership with AUT’s Pacific Media Centre.

Meeting and greeting Benny Wenda

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The World Press Freedom Day organisers, UNESCO and the Indonesian Press Council, marginalised the highly sensitive issue of West Papuan media and human rights violations in Jakarta last week.

But they failed to silence West Papuan media freedom advocates.

This seminar, at one of the other WPFD cluster of hotels, was a resounding success at raising the issues.

• Southern Cross report on WPFD2017

Free Press in West Papua

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The future of Tonga’s Democracy Coalition remains uncertain as next year’s election looms, a Nuku’alofa-based educator has concluded in a public seminar in Auckland last night.

Dr Michael Horowitz, academic dean of Tonga’s ‘Atenisi Institute, told the audience at his seminar titled Can the Democracy Coalition retain power in Tonga? the fate of the party – and with it the election due late next year — was impossible to predict.

This is largely due to the fact no survey research is conducted, continuing Tonga’s “big surprise” election-day tradition, Dr Horowitz said.

Dr Horowitz, also a visiting research scholar with Auckland University of Technology’s Pacific Media Centre, said the Democracy Coalition may just hold on to power despite a bumpy term littered with controversy.

These controversies included a petition in 2015 for Prime Minister ‘Akilisi Pōhiva to surrender his education portfolio over the so-called “raw marks” policy controversy and the “cloudy issue” of state-owned Tongan Broadcasting Commission head of news Viola Ulakai’s suspension over alleged false representation, which prompted questions about Tonga’s media freedom status across the Pacific.

‘Dragging feet’
Pōhiva stepped down as Education Minister last week following months of international condemnation by global media freedom groups, although the pressure was primarily over the educational marks controversy.

Pōhiva’s administration is the first democratic government led by a commoner in Tonga’s history and came to power by a narrow margin in the 2014 election.

Dr Horowitz also highlighted the fact that Pōhiva’s government had failed — like those before it — to address Tonga’s poor economic situation, noting it was “dragging one’s feet to change the situation”.

A host of figures cited from the Ministry of Finance attest to the situation highlighted by Dr Horowitz, revealing much of Tonga’s gross domestic product (GDP) is comprised of remittances from family members living overseas (22 percent to be exact), and foreign donations to the tune of US $116 million in the fiscal year 2015 to 2016, meaning Tonga remained “dependent on the people’s generosity”, Dr Horowitz said.

‘Sense of some hope’
Dr Horowitz did, however, note the Democracy Coalition’s term had not entirely been clouded by scandals and economic downturn.

“People have a sense of some hope, some improvement.”

The “change of style” introduced by the Democracy Coalition to Tonga’s politics was something the people could still support despite the “hiccups”, Dr Horowitz noted.

Dr Horowitz also speculated that if the Democracy Coalition should fall, he would not be surprised if another prime minister emerged from the ranks of the nobles, although he did contend highly qualified Finance Minister Dr ‘Aisake Eke and Deputy Prime Minister Siaosi Sovaleni could be in the running.

Lecturer and filmmaker Paul Janman, present in the audience and the man behind the popular 2012 education documentary Tongan Ark, shared Dr Horowitz’s views, noting “2018, no one can tell”.

Janman, who also teaches screen production at AUT, reflected following Dr Horowitz’s talk that it had been “quite a revelation”, with much of the information Dr Horowitz shared having been only anticipated by the filmmaker after Tonga’s transition to democracy.

‘Democracy gaining traction’
“It’s been very enlightening to see the latest.”

Janman also said “the idea of democracy that has been aired and advocated for by schools such as ‘Atenisi is gaining traction”, despite persistence by what he described as “reactionary elements” present “in all kinds of different areas”.

A massive question mark looms over the Democracy Coalition’s future and its outcome in the November 2018 election.

Dr Horowitz said “one doesn’t know” how the votes would go.

• Tonga’s ‘transparency’ prime minister violates media freedom over questions
• Condemning harassment of Tongan journalist Viola Ulakai
• Fifita new education minister in Tongan cabinet shake-up
• Vote of no-confidence a possibility in Tonga

Celebrating 100 years of oil shale mining may represent a proud moment for Estonia, but this doesn’t compare to what the country has lost, many environmentalists say.

The backbone of Estonia’s electricity production may have allowed the Baltic nation to escape from beneath the Soviet yoke and become energy self-sufficient post-independence in 1991, but most observers remember that this has come at a cost: the environment.

“In terms of ecology it’s a total disaster. From the point of view of state economy this is something to be proud of,” says Professor Mait Sepp, research fellow in physical geography at the University of Tartu.

“We have lost our wetlands, we have lost our streams.”

Many of Estonia’s environmental organisations agree, with more than 15 percent (504.6 km²) of the country’s Ida-Virumaa region severely damaged by the oil shale industry.

Mihkel Annus of the Estonian Green Movement says the sector still stamps the largest ecological footprint on the nation, despite European Union (EU) regulations.

’40 years like a volcano’
Perhaps the greatest reminder of this footprint will be the country’s ash mountains, huge piles of solid hazardous waste that mar Estonia’s relatively flat landscape.

“These will probably stay as the remnants of our fossil-fuel dependent past for centuries from now, as well as the land that has been excavated and already been exhausted,” says Annus.

Harmful to the environment due to the poisonous gases and various contaminants they emit into surface and groundwater, these mountains are not only viewed as an ecological disaster.

They have also dealt a blow to the country’s pockets.

It cost the government more than 36 million euros (about NZ$44.4 million) to close the infamous ash mountain in Kohtla-Järve, which stood approximately 170m above sea level before it was closed and made environmentally safe in 2015.

Estonia’s current environmental headache is the Kukruse ash mountain, which one official from the Ida-Viru County government describes as a 40-year-old “volcano”.

Hardi Murula, head of development and planning for the county government, says they have been engaged in ongoing talks for the past three to four years on how best to “neutralise” the mountain, but that no consensus has been reached.

“No one can guarantee during the restoration process that the pollution can be stopped.”

The closure of ash mountains throughout Ida-Virumaa is largely seen as positive despite the challenges, with one of the mountains in the former oil shale town of Kiviõli converted into an adventure centre in a joint industry-government project.

Piret Väinsalu of the Estonian Fund for Nature says the restoration of land is rather impossible, however.

“You can try to restore it into something, but it will always be there as a ‘heritage of oil shale age’.”

Legacy pollution
But government, industry and environmentalists do not see eye-to-eye on the source of this environmental damage.

Minister of Environment Marko Pomerants says much of the environmental impact is related to “legacy pollution” of the Soviet-era.

“Fortunately, most of the major negative effects are a thing of the past and the current oil shale sector has remarkably reduced its harmful practices for the environment.”

He says environmental concerns today largely involve emissions, although these have decreased since 2002.

Timo Tatar, head of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communication’s energy department, agrees.

“Talking about environmental damage, one can say, that oil shale environmental impact has significantly decreased due to heavy investments into new combustion technologies as well as emission control.”

Official 2014 data by the European Commission shows Estonia currently stands as the second highest emitter, per capita, of greenhouse gases in Europe, however, and its far from carbon-free history occupies a blight on their climate change record.

Although the EU’s Emissions Trading System allows the country to sell-off its emissions because they are lower than the country’s massive levels at 1990, things are far from rosy, especially in the wake of the 2015 Paris climate change agreement.

In light of this, environmentalists Annus, Väinsalu, and their colleague Aleksei Lotman, a marine conservation expert with the Estonian Fund for Nature, do not share officials’ view.

Although they agree the oil shale industry is “very much less polluting” than it was 30 years ago, they say making oil shale “environmentally friendly” is not enough.

To call current improvements by the oil shale industry so is “over-optimistic to say the least”, Lotman says.

A question of commitment
They are therefore critical of industry and government and feel both have failed to act effectively.

Väinsalu, who serves as the Estonian coordinator for the international non-profit network EKOenergia in her role with the Estonian Fund for Nature, says the government does “just enough” to be on a good list for Estonia’s European partners, while it simultaneously supports oil shale interests by lobbying for greater industry exemptions.

“Instead of understanding the need to find an alternative route and exit the oil shale era our government just supports the industry in every way possible.”

Eesti Energia, Estonia’s state-owned energy enterprise, refutes such claims and says it has taken several steps to reduce the environmental impacts of its operations.

“Today we can produce more energy from oil shale than in the past with less environmental impact,” says Eesti Energia.

Eesti Energia says introductions in new technology have been responsible, although physical changes have also occurred.

Among these was the 2008 closure of the ash field at their Balti power plant near Narva, in Estonia’s east.

The project took three years to complete and resulted in 570ha being made safe for the environment.

In 2013, Eesti Energia’s sister company, Enefit, opened a 17-turbine wind park on the former ash field.

“Our main focus lies in replacing fossil fuels with cleaner fuels,” Eesti Energia says.

The company adds it already does so through its use of water, wind, and biomass.

Annus, however, as a member of one of Estonia’s most influential environmental organisations, feels industry may not have been as cooperative as it makes out.

“Whether they would make their processes more environment-friendly voluntarily, is questionable.”

He says this is because the oil shale industry has been put under increasing pressure by tightening EU regulations.

“They have been forced to take action to meet the set concentration values of emissions, changing the technology of landfilling of solid and hazardous waste, limiting water pollution, and so on.”

Annus adds much of Estonia’s oil shale industry happens behind closed doors, which further calls into question their transparency.

“A lot of the region has also been blocked off from the public eye.”

Kaja Peterson, director of the Stockholm Environment Institute Tallinn Centre’s (SEI Tallinn) climate and energy programme, says Eesti Energia has, in fact, been rather open.

“I think Eesti Energia has been very flexible because they reformed and created a new sister company, Enefit Renewable Energy.”

She points out, however, that Eesti Energia is gradually transitioning to renewables and oil shale, unfortunately, still forms the majority of their operations.

Fossil free future?
This seeming unwillingness on the part of officials to divest from oil shale has led to serious doubts about Estonia’s renewable future.

While the government and oil shale industry remain positive, environmentalists and researchers are sceptical.

They claim there is no direct investment or clear political will in renewables by the government, only some will to diversify.

“There have been measures to promote sustainable energy, but the indirect subsidies for fossil fuels have still been greater,” Annus emphasises.

Annus feels Estonia is lagging behind a large portion of their EU counterparts and trendsetters, while Tatar and Pomerants celebrate Estonia reaching its Renewable Energy Directive target – 25 percent of renewables in final energy consumption – well before the 2020 deadline.

“Since the political target has been achieved there is no political motivation to increase that,” Peterson says.

Peterson’s colleague, Lauri Tammiste, SEI Tallinn’s director, says the shift to a low-carbon economy remains on the official agenda.

He highlights plans by the government to reach 50 percent of renewables and lower CO₂ emissions by 2030, although there will be a challenge.

“The main issue is, how to actually deliver these goals and ensure successful transformation with biggest possible environmental, economic and social benefits.”

When asked whether Estonia would have a fossil free future, Sepp was adamant he would not see change in his lifetime.

“No. Not in the near future.

It’s very convenient to use this old system. You have one system which works and to build a new one …. takes a lot of money and a lot of effort. Some very critical changes must happen to change this system.”

It seems clear, for the time being at least, that Estonia’s energy future remains far more carbon intensive than environmentalists would like.

Feature article by Kendall Hutt; photos by Essi Lehto and Lukas Rusk. The assignment was part of the Inclusive Journalism Project collaboration between journalism schools in New Zealand and Scandinavia.

More than a million people have poured into the United States capital to march in opposition to President Donald Trump, a day after the Republican took office, as sister demonstrations took place in cities across Africa, Asia-Pacific and Europe.

Women and men of all ages took to the streets of Washington, DC, rallying around issues like women’s rights, reproductive rights and immigration to mark International Women’s Day, reports Al Jazeera.

The march was supposed to be along the National Mall, the stretch of parkland that runs from Congress to the White House.

But it spilled onto Pennsylvania Avenue, the street where the new president and property tycoon now lives, and where his Washington-based hotel is.

The global protests began in Auckland as more than 2000 people turned out to march for global women’s rights in New Zealand’s largest city just hours after incoming President Donald Trump’s inauguration in Washington.

Many carried banners and placards as they marched from the US Consulate, near Britomart central railway station, up Queen Street to Myers Park in the heart of the city.

Some placards read “Women of the world unite”, “Our Planet Our Future”, “Girl Power”, “Human Rights are Women’s Rights”, “My Body, My Rights”, “Men of Quality Respect Women’s Equality” and “No Hate Mongering”.

Many marches took place in other cities across New Zealand.

In Auckland and many of the global marches, women protesters wore knitted pink cat-eared “pussy” hats, a reference to Trump’s admission to having committed sexual assault in a video that was made public weeks before the election, sparking outrage.

Video: Del Abcede

ANALYSIS: By David Robie

Just having missed the shootings by a US veteran at Florida’s Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport last Friday by less than a couple of hours after returning from a Caribbean vacation, I have been following the aftermath with intense interest.

From the safety of Little Havana in Miami, I have monitored the Spanish and English-language press (almost 60 percent of the population are Hispanic speakers) and live local television reports on the Fort Lauderdale massacre.

What has struck me most is that several key issues have barely been covered in the media soul-searching, topmost being the bizarre gun culture itself.

A professor commenting on CNN about another issue – the fate of the so-called Obamacare “universal” health law after Donald Trump is inaugurated next week – compared the US culture unflatteringly with the European citizens’ sense of “commonwealth” described his countryfolk as “still cowboys”.

This sentiment was reflected in at least one letter in the press. Writing in a letter to the editor in the Los Angeles Times, Barbara Rosen noted with irony:

Once again, there’s carnage.

I travel the world to countries where people have no guns but have universal health coverage. How do I explain to them that in my country we let people have semiautomatic weapons but we take away their health coverage?

So proud.

Key issues
Key issues barely covered in US media reportage include:

·       What is it about the militarist culture that leads young soldiers to fundamentally question the morality of their actions in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere and drive them to carry our vengeful acts against their fellow citizens?

·       Why was there hardly any public social mourning for the airport victims (5 killed, several of them bound for holiday cruises at Port Everglades; 8 wounded)? Are Americans so used to these senseless killings that it has become something of a “norm”?

·       Is there a serious flaw in basic security design at US airports?

I’ll start with the last question first. Having just personally experienced massive airport security getting into the United States for a start (beginning with first seeking a visa waiver first a couple of months earlier, a tedious process that still lead to family fellow travellers missing the first connecting flight from Los Angeles because “Homeland Security” couldn’t find passport numbers in their system) just before Christmas, this is worth a closer look.

As another traveller noted in the LA Times: “What is striking, and unreported, is that this relatively small and contained crime scene (the shooter did not even try to move around or escape), located in the open public [baggage] area outside of the security area for the terminal at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, morphed into an airport-wide shutdown because of a serious flaw in basic security checkpoint design.

Traveller Mike Post added that the exit lanes from the terminal gates that led to the baggage claim areas had no physical barriers and only limited unarmed security:

Terrified passengers fleeing the baggage area can simply turn around and run back through the exit corridor, ignoring all those ominous warnings, and in seconds destroy hours’ worth of security screening as they surge back into the gate area, rendering the entire terminal and airfield unsecure and at risk.

This type of event was foreseeable. Such a lack of foresight and imagination by our airport security professionals is inexcusable.

When we left Florida, after travelling four hours by bus to Orlando International Airport to start our homeward journey (we had connecting flights to Fort Dallas, Texas, and Los Angeles to Auckland with American Airlines — Qantas flag booking), two of our five suitcases for four people had their padlocks cut open by Homeland Security. A notice from Transport Security Administration was deposited inside the bags by the time we left LA for Auckland. It said:

To protect you and your fellow passengers, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is required by law to inspect all checked baggage. As part of this process, some bags are opened and physically inspected. Your bag was among those selected for physical inspection.

During the inspection, your bag and its contents may have been searched for prohibited items. At the completion of the inspection, the contents were returned to your bag.

If the TSA security officer was unable to open your bag for inspection because it was locked, the officer may have been forced to break the logs on your bag.

TSA ‘apology’
The TSA notice apologised for the action but said the agency was “not liable” for damage.

The lack of public mourning over the Fort Lauderdale deaths was quite extraordinary for us, having recently visited Nice’s Promenade des Anglais Rotunda where on public display is “the outpouring of community love” for the victims of Tunisian truck driver who went on a shooting rampage on Bastille Day last year.

USA Today reported that four days after the 26-year-old accused Alaska-based gunman Esteban Santiago – decorated for his combat service in Iraq — opened fire inside Fort Lauderdale Airport, no vigils or public memorials had been held for victims.

Previous mass shootings have stirred emotions from people in the communities in which the tragedies took place…

While people hurt in the shooting are being supported by their families and friends, there has been a lack of visible response from the general Broward County community.

In addition to a lack of memorials, no official GoFundMe accounts have been created. A single bouquet of pink flowers was left on a bench outside the baggage claim area of Terminal 2. Less than an hour later, it was gone.

‘Routine part of life’
The newspaper also quoted the head of the department of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, Dr Charles B. Nemeroff, saying US citizens had become “inert” to this sort of tragedy, “as if it is almost a routine part of life” in America.

Rarely did I see reports raising the basic issue about the US gun culture and how urgent it is to change the Second Amendment about the American citizens’ constitutional right to “bear arms”.

According to The Guardian, no other developed country in the world has “anywhere near the same rate of gun violence as the USA. The US has nearly six times the gun homicide rate of Canada, more than seven times that of Sweden, and nearly 16 times German’s rate, according to United Nations data compiled by The Guardian.

The gun deaths are also a major reason why the United States has a far higher suicide rate (including non-gun deaths) than other developed nations.

There are more than 310 million civilian guns in the United States, almost equivalent to one for every man, woman and child in the country with a population of 324 million.

• Accused airport shooter Esteban Santiago is told his maximum sentence is death

Professor David Robie is editor of Asia Pacific Report. This article was first published on his Café Pacific blog.

Homeland Security official website

This festival brings people together through music, food and art and allows young creatives to showcase their work.

Emma Olphert was one of the featured artists who displayed her work at the All Goods Gallery in Avondale during the festival.

Olphert’s artworks depict musa leaves (banana leaves) in different colours.

Also studying creative technologies at the Auckland University of Technology (AUT), Olphert said she has digitally edited her paintings to evoke texture and add more depth to her images.

Also at the festival was artist Curly Elias Ismail. Originally from Zimbabwe, Ismail has been living in Auckland for five-years and said he paints women which he sees in his day to day life.

“Women are not treated equally in many cultures and I believe they should be given equal rights. I like to share that same message through my paintings,” he added.

Young creative Neishun Lopati shared the wisdoms of her nana with everyone at the event through her collection titled ‘From my nana to you’.

The collection displayed her artwork which she has made into postcards. Printed on them are her favourite quotes said to her by her nana.

“One can write a small message on that postcard and give it to their loved ones.”

Celebrating diversity

Organised by Deahne Lakatani and her partner Malcom Lakatani, from the Creative Souls Project, it was the first year this festival was held.

‘Various music sessions were held, there was a craft session where the elders taught 10-year-olds how to weave and various cooking sessions of Pacific dishes were enjoyed by people from various communities,’ Deahne Lakatani said.

“We live in a diverse society and we are celebrating that through this festival,” she said.

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But police and hospital authorities denied anybody had been killed as stated in earlier news reports while saying eight students had been treated at Port Moresby General Hospital for gunshot wounds.

These graphic images capture scenes from today at Waigani campus – from peaceful protest to bloodied bodies. The students have been protesting against Prime Minister Peter O’Neill for several weeks.

Mayhem at University of PNG

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A petition calling on O’Neill to stand down and face an investigation into corruption allegations was finally delivered to the prime minister yesterday.

The students gave an ultimatum that he must stand aside or there would be a mass withdrawal of students from the tail-end of UPNG’s semester.

“Citizen Journalist” has been on the ground at UPNG as the saga unfolded, filing for Asia Pacific Report. Here are some of his pictures:

UPNG students protest

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Do changes to climate change reporting need to happen? Does the media itself need structural change to face the new challenge? Kendall Hutt seeks some answers to the debate for Asia Pacific Report.

A worldwide call has gone out by academics and journalists for news media to change its approach on reporting climate change.

Current coverage of climate change leaves the public ill-informed on the issue and largely cynical, say some academics.

Also of concern is a tendency for media to frame climate change as an international rather than local issue, which leads it to be defined as a problem for others and not one of national sovereignty.

The need for improvement was highlighted at a public talk delivered at Auckland University of Technology last month, in which Professor Robert Hackett of Simon Fraser University discussed whether certain “touchstones” of journalism, such as objectivity and the public sphere, apply in covering what he dubbed a “climate crisis”.

The topic of a forthcoming book with several colleagues titled Journalisms for Climate Crisis, Hackett proposes several alternative reporting models that could potentially allow greater, more in-depth coverage of the climate change issue.

However, Dr Hackett concluded his talk by stating structured media reform was needed for climate crisis journalism to flourish. He stressed that the industry needs space to discuss such reform in order to foster change in defiance of a lack of political will.

Speaking with Asia Pacific Report, Dr Hackett has expanded on this conclusion, saying such structural media reform would “encourage and expand better journalism practices and coverage to the scale that is needed in a situation of global crisis”.

He added media reform would also reduce commercial pressures on journalists to generate clickbait and reduce concentrated corporate ownership.

But this is not a view shared by others.

Oxfam New Zealand’s senior campaigns and communications specialist Jason Garman rejects the idea of media reform.

“I think passing the buck that media should be solving this problem by doing better is not the way to go,” he says.

I think everyone needs to come to the reality that climate change is affecting all of us and we all should be playing a constructive part in making sure we have a world that’s liveable for everyone.”

Garman believes improvements to the way climate change is reported needs to come from – and return to – journalism’s fundamental role in educating and informing the public.

This is a view shared by science communication specialist and former journalist, Dr Jan Sinclair.

Dr Sinclair says it is mainly the media’s responsibility to inform the public of the extent and reality of the risks of climate change.

“It’s the journalist’s responsibility to tell people whether their lives or property are at risk.”

Like Garman, Dr Sinclair rejects Dr Hackett’s idea of media reform being the way for media to improve its climate change coverage moving forward.

Dr Sinclair is wary of reform due to the vested interests of fossil fuel industries and “sceptical lobby” which have plagued, and continue to plague, coverage of climate change.

She says such well-funded and powerful lobbying has promoted a culture of climate change being framed as “uncertain”, both within the media and social world.

Evidence of such lobbying can be seen by looking at ExxonMobil, one of the leading opponents of climate change science, which also once happened to be one of its leading proponents.

A video by AJ+ recently revealed that ExxonMobil spent US$61 million between 1998 and 2005 challenging scientific consensus surrounding climate change.

ExxonMobil has also been largely responsible for creating the uncertainty Dr Sinclair describes, with the oil company spending US$30 million on a network of think tanks and researchers who have challenged climate change science.

Dr Sinclair says any improvements to current reportage are a question of ethics and should be seen as a matter of integrity for journalists.

Question of ethics
“If journalists could perhaps have a discussion on which ethics are important, and then link speaking truth to power to the problem of interpreting scientific results… I think that might be beneficial.”

The journalistic adage of “speak truth to power” does not do climate change reporting any favours, she adds, as this “political” focus is detrimental.

This is something Dr Sinclair has also noted in her research into comparisons of what information the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported and what The New York Times reported across a 17-year period from 1990 to 2007.

Dr Sinclair noted: “Journalists are encouraged to privilege political discourses over scientific advice”, in direct correlation with the adage.

In contrast, Taberannang Korauaba, a doctoral candidate with the Pacific Media Centre and editor of the Kiribati Independent, believes stories on climate change need to focus more on the positive and calls attention to the Pacific.

Positivity needed
“The same message is repeated, sea is rising, people will be displaced, sea encroaching land, temperature is getting hotter these days on the islands.”

Yes, Pacific people are victims of climate change, he says, but stories should focus on adaptation and media attention shift to investigate the distribution of adaptation funding.

“What is happening now on the ground, I think the focus should be there. How much money given to these islands to help build their resilience, how it is spent, who is getting what?”

Korauaba says the media needs to adopt strategies to better report climate change and one of those is deliberative journalism, journalism that is acknowledged as empowering local people and leading to greater, popular decision-making.

In his research, he regards deliberative journalism – what he terms in the i-Kiribati-language as Te Karoronga – as allowing the community to be part of climate change adaptation and raising understanding and awareness of actions, so the people themselves can take action to help save their islands.

Despite such varied calls for the media to reframe its coverage of climate change, such as by Pacific Journalism Review in a special edition in 2014 on “failed states” and the environment, not all coverage is, or has been, inherently bad, Garman and Hackett stress.

Not inherently bad
Professor Hackett says some media organisations have been doing “remarkably good work” and “exercising a sense of agency”.

One such organisation is the Desert Sun, he adds, Palm Spring’s daily in southern California due to the host of feature articles it has produced.

Garman, however, highlights the media’s growth and acknowledgement in framing climate change as a human rights issue.

“If you’d asked me that question [growth] ten years ago I would have said, ‘No, absolutely, people see climate change as an environmental issue only, something that’s happening to polar bears and may affect humans at a long-off point in the future’.

“Whereas now I do think people understand that climate change is happening now, it’s affecting people now, it’s a human rights issue.”

Although no consensus exists as to what form reframing should take, Korauaba has noted it will take time for any changes to come into effect.

“The world can’t change overnight, at least we do something, and keep doing it regularly in our coverage.”

Kendall Hutt is a graduate journalist from AUT University, currently completing her Honours year in Communication Studies. She is on the Pacific Media Centre’s Asia Pacific Journalism course.

By TJ Aumua in Daku, Fiji Islands

Rising sea levels are a major threat to coastal villages in the Pacific.

Daku village in the Rewa delta area in Tailevu, Fiji, is one village that faces the challenge every day.

Biu Naitasi, Daku’s headman, says that despite the village receiving a floodgate funded by USAid to help drain water, the sea level is still rising and the strength of waves is increasing.

Naitasi told Asia Pacific Report that sea water flooding in their village can reach up to their ankles, forcing some children in the village to relocate to another school.

The salt water has damaged their food plantations and eroded the wooden and concrete support beams on their homes.

While they wait for another floodgate to stop seawater flowing into their crops, they continue to be proactive, using people power to build higher seawalls and filling the flooded land with soil.

• Thanks to the people of Daku village and the University of the South Pacific’s Pacific Centre for the Environment and Sustainable Development (PaCE-SD), USAid and the Pacific Community in Fiji for support in making this video.

The summit was organised to create a platform for better understanding and engagement, and celebrate the role of many cultural groups in New Zealand society; build a sense of unity among other ethnic people; and to explore how they can contribute and add value to the community and the nation.

Asia Pacific Report was at the summit and this photogallery by the Pacific Media Centre’s Del Abcede features the diverse nature of the summit.

• Mainstream NZ media takes a pasting at multicultural summit

Do you know who I am?

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A 50-minute drive out of Suva city is Daku village, a community of 332 people nestled close to the sea and surrounded by mangroves.

As peaceful as it seems here, the village is one of many in Fiji where the people are working hard to adapt their daily lives to the burdens of climate change.

Village headman Biu Naitasi says he has noticed the sea-level rising around the village within the last 40 years.

But it wasn’t until five years ago, with the assistance of the Pacific Centre for Environment and Sustainable Development (PaCE-SD) at the University of the South Pacific, first through an AUSAID project and then through the United States Agency for International Development’s Coastal Community Adaptation Project (USAID/C-CAP), that they understood the terminology and its link with climate change.

‘New term’

“[The term] climate change is something new for us. We haven’t heard about it before,” says Naitasi.

Arriving at the village, Asia Pacific Report bore witness to flood waters lapping on the door steps of village homes.

Remnants of the tropical cyclone Winston that savaged Fiji two months ago, and other tropical depressions which have left parts of the nation drenched in heavy rainfall, have left their mark.

Waterlogged land leaves the village vulnerable to water-borne infections, like dengue, filariasis, and diarrhoea, and in the worst case scenario, cholera and typhoid.

Floodgate system
In 2015, USAIDs’ C-CAP initiative implemented a floodgate system, built into the river wall which allows water to flow out of the village while blocking out sea water in high tides or floods.

But relief is still needed when king tides surge onto the land.

“Sometimes it’s up to our ankles,” Naitasi says. “We need another floodgate near our plantations as salt water has damaged our crops, but we’re waiting for funds.

“The plantation area of the village gets flooded every rainy season and during high tides.”

Sea water is also rusting and eroding the wooden and metal homes in the village.

The extreme weather in Fiji in the past month has seen the community having to rebuild and repair their homes.

“Some houses were blown off partly, and some completely, by the cyclone.”

Took shelter
Headman Biu Naitasi says villagers were unable to use electricity and because of flooding many were forced to take shelter in the community hall.

Asia Pacific Report was told the strong winds completely destroyed a family home, forcing all eight members living inside to relocate.

Like Daku, many villages and communities in Fiji are facing similar problems. They are doing the best they can; using traditional methods and human power to heighten coastal walls and eliminate flood water from their homes.

But climate change is escalating, leaving coastal villagers living with the burden of its effects daily.

“Tell them to believe it, climate change is happening,” says Naitasi, sending a message to the world.

“We can’t stop climate change, but we can reduce its effect.”

• More “Bearing Witness” project photos of Daku
• VIDEO: Climate change adaptation in a Fiji village

The low-lying village, with a population of just over 300, is completely surrounded by mangroves.

Villagers are vulnerable to water-borne diseases because of the standing water.

A USAid project is helping the villagers adapt with the installation of a floodgate system.

Pictures by Asia Pacific Report’s Ami Dhabuwala and TJ Aumua.

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Abunimah, editor of The Electronic Intifada, made an inspiring call for action to build the international movement for Palestine – focusing on effective boycott and divestment campaigns.

“The tide has turned,” Ali said, reported Kia Ora Gaza as support for the Palestinian human rights struggle, and condemnation of apartheid Israel grew around the world.

He spoke in Wellington last night and his Christchurch and Dunedin programme is here. Photo gallery by PMC’s Del Abcede who was at the Palestine conference.

• Electronic Intifada videos

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