Asia Pacific Report editor David Robie was honoured with Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit (MNZM) at the weekend by the Governor-General, Dame Cindy Kiro, in an investiture ceremony at Government House Tāmaki Makaurau.

He was one of eight recipients for various honours, which included Joycelyn Armstrong, who was presented with Companion of the King’s Service Order (KSO) for services to interfaith communities.

Dr Robie’s award, which came in the King’s Birthday Honours in 2024 but was presented on Saturday, was for “services to journalism and Asia-Pacific media education”.

• READ MORE: Decolonisation, the climate crisis, and improving media education in the Pacific — Global Voices
• Investiture ceremony – video link, 24 May 2025

His citation reads:

Dr David Robie has contributed to journalism in New Zealand and the Asia-Pacific region for more than 50 years.

Dr Robie began his career with The Dominion in 1965 and worked as an international journalist and correspondent for agencies from Johannesburg to Paris. He has won several journalism awards, including the 1985 Media Peace Prize for his coverage of the Rainbow Warrior bombing.

He was Head of Journalism at the University of Papua New Guinea from 1993 to 1997 and the University of the South Pacific in Suva from 1998 to 2002. He founded the Pacific Media Centre in 2007 while professor of journalism and communications at Auckland University of Technology.

He developed four award-winning community publications as student training outlets. He pioneered special internships for Pacific students in partnership with media and the University of the South Pacific. He has organised scholarships with the Asia New Zealand Foundation for student journalists to China, Indonesia and the Philippines.

He was founding editor of Pacific Journalism Review journal in 1994 and in 1996 he established the Pacific Media Watch, working as convenor with students to campaign for media freedom in the Pacific.

He has authored 10 books on Asia-Pacific media and politics. Dr Robie co-founded and is deputy chair of the Asia Pacific Media Network/Te Koakoa NGO. 

In an interview with Global Voices last year, Dr Robie praised the support from colleagues and student journalists and said:

“There should be more international reporting about the ‘hidden stories’ of the Pacific such as the unresolved decolonisation issues — Kanaky New Caledonia, ‘French’ Polynesia (Mā’ohi Nui), both from France; and West Papua from Indonesia.

“West Papua, in particular, is virtually ignored by Western media in spite of the ongoing serious human rights violations. This is unconscionable.”

Dr David Robie’s investiture.       Video: Governor-General’s blog

A pivotal book, Waves of Change: Media, Peace, and Development in the Pacific, has been released at the 2024 Pacific International Media Conference hosted by the University of the South Pacific earlier this month in Suva, Fiji.

This conference, the first of its kind in 20 years, served as a crucial platform to address the pressing challenges and core issues faced by Pacific media.

Associate Professor Shailendra Singh, the convenor of the conference and co-editor of the new book, emphasised the conference’s primary goals — to stimulate research, discussion, and debate on Pacific media, and to foster a deeper understanding of its challenges.

• READ MORE: Other Pacific Media Conference reports

“Our region hasn’t escaped the calamitous impacts of the two biggest events that have shaken the media sector — digital disruption and the covid-19 pandemic,” he said.

“Both events have posed significant challenges for news media organisations and journalists, to the point of being an existential threat to the industry as we know it. This isn’t very well known or understood outside the news media industry.”

Waves of Change: Media, Peace, and Development in the Pacific, authored by Dr Singh, Fiji Deputy Prime Minister Professor Biman Prasad, and Dr Amit Sarwal, offers a comprehensive collection of interdisciplinary research, insights, and analyses at the intersection of media, conflict, peacebuilding, and development in the Pacific – a region experiencing rapid and profound change.

The book builds on Dr Singh’s earlier work with Professor Prasad, Media and Development: Issues and Challenges in the Pacific Islands, published 16 years ago.

Dr Singh noted that media issues had grown increasingly complex due to heightened poverty, underdevelopment, corruption, and political instability.

“Media and communication play vital roles in the framing of conflict, security, and development in public and political discourses, ultimately influencing progression or regression in peace and stability. This is particularly true in the era of digital media,” Dr Singh said.

Dr Amit Sarwal said that the primary aim of the new book was to address and revisit critical questions linking media, peacebuilding, and development in the Pacific. He expressed a desire to bridge gaps in training, publishing, and enhance practical applications in these vital areas particularly amongst young journalists in the Pacific.

Professor Biman Prasad is hopeful that this collection will shed light on the intricate relationship between media, peace, and development in the Pacific. He stressed the importance of prioritising planning, strategising, and funding in this sector.

“By harnessing the potential of media for peacebuilding, stakeholders in the Pacific can work towards a more peaceful and prosperous future for all,” Professor Prasad added.

Waves of Change: Media, Peace, and Development in the Pacific has been published under a joint collaboration of Australia’s Kula Press and India’s Shhalaj Publishing House.

The book features nine chapters authored by passionate researchers and academics, including David Robie, John Rabuogi Ahere, Sanjay Ramesh, Kalinga Seneviratne, Kylie Navuku, Narayan Gopalkrishnan, Hurriyet Babacan, Usha Sundar Harris, and Asha Chand.

Dr Robie is founding editor of Pacific Journalism Review, which also celebrated 30 years of publishing at the book launch.

The 2024 Pacific International Media Conference was organised in partnership with the Pacific Islands News Association (PINA) and the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN).

• Waves of Change: Media, Peace, and Development in the Pacific, edited by Shailendra Singh, Biman Prasad and Amit Sarwal. Suva, Fiji: Kula Press; Shhalaj.
  

A major conference on the state and future of Pacific media is taking place this week in Fiji.

Dr David Robie, editor of Asia Pacific Report and deputy chair of Asia Pacific Media Network, joins #PacificMornings to discuss the event and reflect on his work covering Asia-Pacific current affairs and research for more than four decades.

Pacific Journalism Review, which Dr Robie founded at the University of Papua New Guinea in 1994, celebrated 30 years of publishing at the conference tonight.

• READ MORE: Other Pacific Media Conference reports

• Full Pacific Mornings programme on 4 July 2024:

Other Pacific Mornings items on 4 July 2024:
The health sector is reporting frustration at unchanging mortality rates for babies and mothers in New Zealand. PMMRC chairperson John Tait joined #PacificMornings to discuss further.

Labour Deputy Leader Carmel Sepuloni joined #PacificMornings to discuss the political news of the week.

We are one week into a month of military training exercises held in Hawai’i, known as RIMPAC.

Twenty-nine countries and 25,000 personnel are taking part, including New Zealand. Hawai’ian academic and Pacific studies lecturer Emalani Case joined #PacificMornings to discuss further.

Republished from Pacific Media Network’s Radio 531pi with permission.

Journalist, author and media academic David Robie has launched an independent news and current affairs website to complement his long-established Asia Pacific Report.

While Asia Pacific Report will continue to cover regional affairs, the new website — dubbed Café Pacific, the same name as his blog which is being absorbed into the new venture — will focus on more in-depth reports and make available on open access a range of books and articles previously hidden behind paywalls.

Café Pacific will be operated on a Creative Commons licence basis as is APR.

• READ MORE: The new Café Pacific website
• Other reports from the author/publisher

Dr Robie, formerly founding director of AUT’s Pacific Media Centre and a professor of Pacific journalism, described the website project as “innovative”.

The about page says: “Café Pacific : Media freedom and transparency is the Asia-Pacific news articles archive and website of journalist and author David Robie, published with the support of Multimedia Investments Ltd in collaboration with Asia Pacific Report, EveningReport.nz and the Asia Pacific Media Network, and contributing colleagues, academics and freelancers.”

“There is a real need for an outlet such as this — specialist Asia-Pacific websites are rare,” says Dr Robie.

“It will be a rather eclectic website, but will focus on many of the critical issues that are either ignored in mainstream media or underplayed — such as climate justice, decolonisation in ‘French’ Polynesia and Kanaky New Caledonia, digital divide, education equity, environmental integrity, human rights, media freedom, podcasts, sustainable development and the crisis in West Papua.”

Recent scoops
Among recent scoops on the website were publication of the detailed “what we told the French Prime Minister” document of the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS) and several exclusive West Papua reports.

The website will also be a repository for Dr Robie’s past journalism, books and academic research, making publications more publicly accessible.

Dr Robie praised EveningReport.nz and Multimedia Investments managing director Selwyn Manning for his “perceptive” role in designing and developing the website.

“Selwyn has a long track record of supporting student and alternative journalism as witnessed with first Pacific Scoop and then Asia Pacific Report. And now we see it again with Café Pacific.”

Selwyn Manning and security analyst Dr Paul Buchanan will resume their popular weekly podcasts, “A View From Afar”, about current issues on EveningReport.nz and social media outlets tomorrow at noon.

• The promo for Thursday’s programme
• Listen to the podcasts
• Watch the podcasts
• Midday Thursdays (NZT)
• 8pm Wednesdays (EDT)
• Past episodes

New Zealand journalist and academic David Robie has covered the Asia-Pacific region for international media for more than four decades.

An advocate for media freedom in the Pacific region, he is the author of several books on South Pacific media and politics, including an account of the French bombing of the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour in 1985 — which took place while he was on the last voyage.

In 1994 he founded the journal Pacific Journalism Review examining media issues and communication in the South Pacific, Asia-Pacific, Australia and New Zealand.

• READ MORE: Other presentations at the Mediasia conference in Kyoto, Japan
• The Bearing Witness project

He was also convenor of the Pacific Media Watch media freedom collective, which collaborates with Reporters Without Borders in Paris, France.

Until he retired at Auckland University of Technology in 2020 as that university’s first professor in journalism and founder of the Pacific Media Centre, Dr Robie organised many student projects in the South Pacific such as the Bearing Witness climate action programme.

He currently edits Asia Pacific Report and is one of the founders of the new Aotearoa New Zealand-based NGO Asia Pacific Media Network.

In this interview conducted by Mediasia organising committee member Dr Nasya Bahfen of La Trobe University for this week’s 13th International Asian Conference on Media, Communication and Film that ended today in Kyoto, Japan, Professor Robie discusses a surge of disinformation and the challenges it posed for journalists in the region as they covered the covid-19 pandemic alongside a parallel “infodemic” of fake news and hoaxes.

He also explores the global climate emergency and the disproportionate impact it is having on the Asia-Pacific.

Paying a tribute to the dedication and courage of Pacific journalists, he says with a chuckle: “All Pacific journalists are climate journalists — they live with it every day.”

• David Robie’s Eyes Of Fire microsite (with Little Island Press)

When I arrived at my office at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji on the morning of 12 September 2001 (9/11, NY Time), I was oblivious to reality.

I had dragged myself home to bed a few hours earlier at 2am as usual, after another long day working on our students’ Wansolwara Online website providing coverage of the Fiji general election.

One day after being sworn in as the country’s fifth real (elected) prime minister, it seemed that Laisenia Qarase was playing another dirty trick on Mahendra Chaudhry’s Labour Party, which had earned the constitutional right to be included in the multi-party government supposed to lead the country back to democracy.

• READ MORE: 9/11 killed it, but 20 years on global justice movement is poised for revival
• ‘Fortress USA’: How 9/11 produced a military industrial juggernaut
• Jason Brown: 9/11 and a mango dawn – and here’s to the end of being Pacific pawns
• Other 9/11 reports

Stepping into my office, I encountered a colleague. He looked wild-eyed and said: “It’s the end of the world.”

Naively, I replied, thinking of the 1987 military coups,  “Yes, how can legality and constitutionality be cast aside so blatantly yet again?”

“No, not Fiji politics,” he said. “That’s nothing. I mean New York. Terrorists have destroyed the financial heart of the Western world.”

It was a chilling moment, comparable to how I had felt as a 17-year-old forestry science trainee in a logging camp at Kaingaroa Forest the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated — 22 November 1963.

Wansolwara newsroom
Over the next few hours, it seemed that half the Laucala campus descended on our Wansolwara newsroom to watch the latest BBC, TVNZ one and Fiji TV One coverage of the shocking and devastating tragedy.

While a handful of student journalists struggled to provide coverage of local angles — such as the tightening of security around the US Embassy in Suva and shock among the Laucala intelligentsia — most students remained glued to the TV, stunned into immobility by the suicide jetliner terrorists.

Inevitably, global jingoism and xenophobia followed, the assaults on Sikhs merely because they an “Arab look”, the attacks on mosques — in Fiji copies of the Koran were burned — and the abuse directed towards Afghan refugees were par for the course.

Freedom of speech in the United States also quickly became a casualty of this new “war on terrorism”. Columnists were fired for their critical views, television host Bill Maher was denounced by the White House, Doonesbury cartoonist Gary Trudeau dropped his “featherweight Bush” cartoons and so-called “unpatriotic” songs were dropped from radio playlists. Wrote Maureen Dowd of The New York Times:

Even as the White House preaches tolerance toward Muslims and Sikhs, it is practising intolerance, signalling that anyone who challenges the leaders of embattled America is cynical, political and – isn’t this the subtext? – unpatriotic.

But while much of the West lined up as political parrots alongside the United States, ready to exact a terrible vengeance, contrasting perspectives were apparent in many developing nations.

In the Pacific, for example, while people empathised with the survivors of the terrible toll — 2977 people were killed (including the 125 at the Pentagon), 19 hijackers committed murder-suicide, and more than 6000 people injured — there was often a more critical view of the consequences of American foreign policy and a sense of dread about the future.

Twin Towers reflections
Less than a week after the Twin Towers tragedy, I asked my final-year students to compile some notes recalling the circumstances of when they heard the news of the four aircraft slamming into the World Trade Centre Twin Towers and the Pentagon (one plane was taken over by the passengers and it dived into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania) and their responses.

One, a mature age student from Fiji who had worked for several years as a radio journalist, said:

I was in bed and woke up about 2.30am. I have a habit of having the BBC running on radio and, half-asleep, I caught the news being broadcast. I pulled myself out of bed and tuned into BBC on Sky TV. The second plane had just hit the second tower, and I ended staying up the rest of the night to watch the unfolding events.

On his impressions, he warned about scapegoats and the media:

The relevance to us here in the Pacific is that terrorists can strike anywhere to get revenge. This conflict could evolve into war, and wars affect everyone. Americans already think Osama bin Laden is the terrorist. Where is the evidence? Americans are looking to get someone quickly, and the media is leading the way.

Another student wrote:

Good, they [US] paid dearly for trying to intervene in Muslim countries … Bin Laden is portrayed as the culprit even though it is not clear who did it. The media is portraying the whole Muslim world as responsible, but actually this is not the case.

A practical joke?
Recalled one:

I was sleeping and my mother woke me up at 6.30am to tell me the news. I was shocked and, still sleepy, I thought my mother was doing one of her practical jokes to get me out of bed … If there is World War Three, it will have a big impact on the Pacific.

America still has some form of control over various Pacific Island countries, and once again it will recruit Pacific Islanders. Pacific Islands are relatively weak and still trying to be developed. Another hiccup could send our economies to the dogs.

Yet another:

I was at home having breakfast, listening to the news on Bula 100FM. My first reaction was disbelief, horror … Ethically, there is a need to remember the people involved and the amount of bloodshed and death. It would be necessary to censor material that would be emotionally upsetting.

One student was

really surprised to see TVNZ instead of the usual Chinese CCTV. The sound was mute so I couldn’t really get what was being said. I was about to turn it off when they showed the South Tower of the World Trade Centre collapse. I thought it was a short piece from the movie Independence Day.

Sad, it may seem, but the first thing I thought about as a journalist was that reporters will have a field day … Phrases such as “historical day the world over” and “America under siege” popped up in my head as possible headlines.

I got out my notebook and began writing down the number of people estimated to have died, the extent of the damage, an excerpts from President Bush’s speech. Practically anything that involves the US also affects many people throughout the world.

Inevitably, some commentators began drawing parallels between the terrorism in New York in mid-September 2001 at one end of the continuum of hate and rogue businessman and George Speight’s brief terrorist rule in Fiji during mid-2000 at the other end.

Terrorism as a political tool
Politics associate professor Scott MacWilliam, for example, highlighted how terrorism becomes a political tool deployed by a nation state to support its foreign and domestic policy objectives. He pointed out that many of the fundamentalist groups which now carried out terrorism were “nurtured, trained, financed and incorporated” into the Western security apparatus.

One might ask what had this terrible urban graveyard created by fanaticism got to do with the South Pacific. In a sense, there is a disturbing relationship.

Politics in the region, especially at that time, was increasingly being determined by terrorism, particularly in Melanesia, and much of it by the state. And with this situation comes a greater demand on the region’s media and journalists, for more training and professionalism.

At the time of  the 9/11 tragedy, Dr David Robie was head of journalism at the University of the South Pacific. This article has been extracted from a keynote speech that he made at the inaugural conference of the Pacific Islands Media Association (PIMA), “Navigating the Future”, at Auckland University of Technology on 5-6 October 2001. The full address was published by Pacific Journalism Review, No. 8.

A journalist who sailed on board the bombed environmental ship Rainbow Warrior, was arrested at gunpoint in New Caledonia while investigating French military garrisons in pro-independence Kanak villages, and reported on social justice issues across the Pacific has stepped down as founding director of the Pacific Media Centre.

Professor David Robie, 75, an author, academic, independent journalist and journalism professor at Auckland University of Technology, retired this week after more than 18 years at the institution.

He has been working as a journalist for more than 46 years and as an academic for more than 27 years.

• READ MORE: Pacific journalism, media and diversity researchers tackle challenges ahead
• Gallery: PMC celebrates Pacific ‘reset’ vision and farewells founding director

As well as playing a role in critical moments of history as a journalist in the region, his students have also covered landmark events that helped shape some Pacific nations, especially in Melanesia – such as the 1997 Sandline mercenary crisis in Papua New Guinea and the George Speight attempted coup in Fiji in May 2000.

Gallery: #PMC celebrates #Pacific ‘reset’ vision and farewells founding director @DavidRobie #cartoons #education #JournalismMatters #independentjournalism #MediaFreedom @RSF_en @AUTuni @ShailendraBSing @USPWansolwara https://t.co/56DNxlLOa8 pic.twitter.com/fQ6RKIYDDu

— Pacific Media Centre (@pacmedcentre) December 5, 2020

But a journalism or academic career were not always clearcut pathways for Dr Robie. During his studies in high school, he was heavily involved in outdoor pursuits and he became a Queen’s Scout.

At the time he was thinking of becoming a professional forester and he was recruited by the NZ Forest Service at 17 in 1963 as a forester cadet with a view to studying for a BSc and then forestry science.

But the same year he was selected to represent New Zealand at a World Jamboree at Marathon Bay, Greece – the site of a famous battle between the Athenians and the Persians in 490 BC.

Future options
This brought his future options to a head.

“At school I was interested in three things – writing, art and mapping/outdoors. So, that’s why I initially wanted to become a forester,” he says.

But going to Greece changed everything. He started his science degree course while working part time at the NZ Forest Service publications division at its headquarters in Wellington. He then realised he was more interested in writing.

“I realised that I didn’t want to spend my life talking with trees, even though I love trees,” he says.

At the end of the year, he became a cadet journalist at The Dominion (now the Dominion Post). Shortly after he became the youngest subeditor at the newspaper.

He later went to Auckland to work as assistant editor on Auto Age magazine, had a short stint on The New Zealand Herald as a subeditor before moving to Australia to join the Melbourne Herald.

While working there in 1968, he was strongly influenced by the student riots in Paris and took a serious interest in politics over the student protests against Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War.

Youngest editor
At 24, he became the youngest editor of a national Sunday newspaper, the Sunday Observer, which campaigned strongly against the Vietnam War.

In his mid-20s, Dr Robie migrated to Johannesburg, South Africa, and was appointed chief subeditor of the Rand Daily Mail, the country’s leading newspaper crusading against the apartheid regime.

Even though Dr Robie’s social justice views as a journalist became shaped while he was working at the Sunday Observer in Melbourne, this was not risky as in South Africa.

“In South Africa, we were really pushed hard. I probably learned most of what I have learned in my career as a journalist in South Africa.

“Mainly because of the threats and experiences. I worked with a number of ‘banned’ and inspirational people, like photojournalist Peter Magubane.

“I was threatened many times and on one occasion I drove Winnie Mandela’s two daughters from their home in Soweto to a multiracial school in Swaziland because Winnie, being banned, could not travel.

“I drove the girls 360 km through roadblocks to take the children to school,” Dr Robie recalls.

Threats against journalists
The late Winnie Mandela was the wife of imprisoned anti-apartheid revolutionary Nelson Mandela who became President of South Africa 1994-1999 and died in 2013. The two daughters are Zindziswa Mandela and Zenani Mandela-Diamini.

While working in South Africa, Dr Robie learned a lot of things he had never experienced in New Zealand – the vital need to campaign for social justice, threats against journalists and jailings, and the role of human rights journalism.

Subsequently, he travelled overland as a freelancer across Africa and ended up in Nairobi, Kenya. There, he worked as group features editor of the Aga Khan’s Daily Nation for a year before travelling to West Africa, Nigeria and across the Sahara Desert to Algeria and France.

In Paris, he camped in the Bois de Boulogne forest until he found a garret to live in a refurbished 17th century building in Rue St Sauveur in the heart of the city.

He worked for Agence France-Presse global news agency for three years and covered the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games when there was a black African walkout in protest about New Zealand playing rugby against white South Africa.

While working for AFP, he gained familiarity with French foreign post-colonial policies, and especially the nuclear testing issue in the South Pacific.

He says it was ironic that it took travelling to France for him to “wake up” to the Pacific right on New Zealand’s doorstep.

Foreign editor
Dr Robie returned to New Zealand in 1979 and became foreign editor on the Auckland Star. He started doing trips to the Cook Islands, New Caledonia, Tahiti, Vanuatu and elsewhere as a freelance in his holidays. He thought he might as well go fulltime freelance to do the stories he was interested in.

In 1984, he set up the Asia Pacific Network which he ran for 10 years from his home in Grey Lynn.

He became a chief correspondent for Fiji-based Islands Business news magazine covering investigative and environmental stories and decolonisation issues. He also reported for the Global South news agency Gemini, The Australian, the New Zealand Times, RNZ International and other media.

In 1985, he sailed on board the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior for 11 weeks and took part in the evacuation of islanders from Rongelap Atoll.

French secret agents bombed the Rainbow Warrior on 10 July 1985 and he wrote the book Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior – the first of 10 books.

In early 1987, he was arrested at gunpoint near Canala, New Caledonia, for taking photographs of “nomadisation” style military camps design to intimidate Kanak villagers seeking independence.

In 1993, Dr Robie was appointed as a lecturer and head of journalism at the University of Papua New Guinea. His students published the award-winning fortnightly newspaper Uni Tavur and they covered the 1997 Sandline crisis when the military commander arrested foreign mercenaries hired by the PNG government to wage war against rebels on Bougainville in a “coup that wasn’t a coup”.

PJR launched
While at UPNG, Dr Robie launched Pacific Journalism Review, the only specialised research journal to investigate media issues in the South Pacific, Asia-Pacific, Australia, and New Zealand.

As a journalist and journalism educator, he raises concern that “most media organisations send someone to cover a particular event – they go in and they come out. Quickly. It is parachute journalism. Unfortunately, it is not a good way to cover things.

“Often journalists who work on a parachute basis don’t have enough background. They don’t have enough information or the sources to get a deeper understanding of the complex nuances,” he says.

After serving Papua New Guinea as a journalism educator for more than five years, he shifted to the University of South Pacific in Fiji.

In 1998, Dr Robie began his new journey as head of USP’s journalism department. He was teaching while actively writing news articles, academic journal articles, and books.

“One of the lessons I learned as a journalism educator is that a journalism project is the best way to learn,” he says.

He cites the George Speight attempted coup in Fiji in May 2000 when his students covered downtown riots in Suva, the seizure of the elected government in Parliament at gunpoint by Speight’s renegade soldiers, and a protracted siege as an example.

The PMC Project – A short documentary by Alistar Kata. Video: PMC

Crisis website updates
The students updated their website Pacific Journalism Online several times daily at a time when the mainstream newspapers did not have websites and they produced the Wansolwara newspaper that the university tried to confiscate.

“What we were doing was contributing to empowerment. To me, empowerment is really important. It isn’t just about writing a good story, and things like that. But empowering giving people the information that they need to make decisions in a democracy,” he says.

Dr Robie also gained his PhD in history/politics from the University of the South Pacific. After serving the country for five years, he moved back to New Zealand.

Since 2002, Dr Robie has worked at AUT and became director of the Pacific Media Centre in 2007 and remained editor of Pacific Journalism Review.

End of an era … @PacificMediaCentre Annual Review 2020. #newsmedia #journalism #journalismeducation https://t.co/WB8N2wsL3c pic.twitter.com/CNPmAE6Pe0

— David Robie (@DavidRobie) December 21, 2020

He became an associate professor in 2005 and a professor in 2012. During his academic career, Professor Robie gained a number of awards nationally and internationally, including the 2015 AMIC Asia Communication Award in Dubai, Vice-Chancellor’s Teaching Excellence Award in 2011, the PIMA Special Award for Contribution to Pacific journalism in 2011 and the PIMA Pacific Media Freedom award in 2005.

Dr Robie was also an Australian Press Council fellow in 1999, and has been on the editorial boards of Asia-Pacific Media Educator, Australian Journalism Review, Fijian Studies, Global Media Journal and Pacific Ecologist.

He is currently the New Zealand representative of the Asian Media, Information and Communication Centre (AMIC) and a life member. He is also editor and publisher of Asia Pacific Report, and his books are listed at NZ Pen.

One thing can be sure. Social justice will remain high on his ongoing agenda.

Laurens Ikinia is a Papuan Masters in Communication Studies student at Auckland University of Technology who has been studying journalism. He is on an internship with AUT’s Pacific Media Centre.

Pacific journalism and media researchers have gathered “live” in Auckland and “virtually” from Australia, Indonesia, and the region to showcase their projects and initiatives – and they spoke of the key challenges ahead.

Presentations at the AUT Pacific Media Centre-organised event yesterday included cross-cultural documentaries, an industry panel on “transition”, Pasifika “brown table” initiatives, a forthcoming Asia-Pacific conference, and an Internews project on climate and coronavirus reportage.

The showcase, hosted by MC John Pulu of Tagata Pasifika, also launched the latest edition of Pacific Journalism Review, which is themed on a range of climate crisis and pandemic papers.

• READ MORE: A watershed year for journalism as research
• PMC celebrates Pacific ‘reset’ vision and farewells founding director
• ‘Empowerment is really important. Journalism isn’t just about writing a good story … but empowering people with information in a democracy’

The recent new fields of research (FoR) classifications adopted by the Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC) were described by Sydney journalism professor and author Dr Chris Nash as “a huge victory”.

Speaking by video link, Dr Nash, a retired foundation journalism professor at Monash University and author of the ground-breaking book What is Journalism? The Art and Politics of a Rupture, told the symposium: “We have retained our positive in creative arts and there is a whole new field of journalism that fits within indigenous studies FoR codes”.

“This is a huge opportunity for journalism in universities in many ways,” he said.
While as a former journalist and documentary maker he had come to research through cultural studies, he had realised that “in the end it had become a bit of a strait jacket”.

Journalism research advocates
He cited journalism research advocates such as the late James Carey of the United States who argued that “journalism had to break out of that”.

However, it was not going to be easy “by a long shot” given the contest over positions, money and income that flowed from the large numbers of journalism students in universities.

Dr Nash said the opportunity was there for journalism to “branch out and be its own self”.

He praised the latest edition of Pacific Journalism Review and the role of founding editor David Robie, designer Del Abcede and associate editors Philip Cass, Wendy Bacon, Nicole Gooch and Khairiah Rahman.

“It’s a fantastic achievement to take the journal to the position it is in now – two consecutive editions of over 300 pages is a massive, massive achievement.”

He said this gave the journal a firm foundation to go forward.

Stepping down as editor
It was announced that founding editor Professor David Robie, who started the journal at the University of Papua New Guinea in 1994, had decided to step down from the role and associate editor Dr Philip Cass was taking over.

Dr Robie is also retiring from the PMC at the end of the year, although he will retain an advisory role on the journal, and colleagues paid tribute to both his work and the contribution of Del Abcede to the university.

Pacific Media Centre advisory board chair Associate Professor Camille Nakhid and board member Khairiah Rahman praised his contribution to the media research and publication landscape and for building up the centre from scratch in 2007.

The announcement of his retirement had caught them by surprise and was “bittersweet as it celebrates and farewells our dear friend, colleague and mentor”, said Rahman.

Following news of Dr Robie’s retirement, tributes had “poured in from PMC’s immediate networks”, among them:

Dr Shailendra Singh, Senior Lecturer and coordinator of journalism at the University of the South Pacific, in Suva, Fiji: “Credits David for introducing him to academia 19 years ago along with his three colleagues, and the major impact that David has made through his mentorship in Pacific journalism.”

Nicole Gooch from the University of Technology in Sydney: “Describes David as ‘a giant of journalism and journalism education in the region’ for having built ‘a solid pathway for future journalists whilst leaving a huge, indelible mark on the journalism-social-political landscape through David’s astonishing work’.

Professor Wendy Bacon, an Australian academic, investigative journalist, and political activist: “She congratulates David and … Del, for her amazing contribution without which many projects would not have been possible.”

‘Fearless, unwavering hero’
“For many of us, David is the fearless, unwavering hero that speaks truth to power,” added Rahman.

Deputy dean Professor Fiona Peterson launched the PJR by untying the edition ribbon and incoming editor Dr Philip Cass, who was born in Papua New Guinea and has contributed to the journal since the beginning, discussed the challenges ahead.

He has the support of Dr Robie and the other core editorial board members.

The industry panel featured journalists who had recently made the transition from media schools to journalism with successful careers and, in one case, a postgraduate student from a developing nation in crisis who carried the weight of expectations of his indigenous community.

Corazon Miller, a political reporter of Newshub Nation, spoke of her dual Filipino-New Zealand heritage and her change from a nursing career into journalism that took her to BBC World News and other opportunities; Blessen Tom, an Indian-New Zealand video producer talked of how his 2018 documentary work on a PMC Bearing Witness project prepared him for work with TVNZ Fair Go; and West Papuan postgraduate student Laurens Ikinia discussed the challenges he faced in a region facing repression and real dangers.

AUT documentary maker and lecturer Jim Marbrook and Fetaui Iosefo of Auckland University reflected on their collaboration over the 2020 NZ International Film Festival’s featured documentary Loimata: The Sweetest Tears and their “returning” narratives in their current projects.

Lecturer Dr Janet Tupou discussed her Tongan community work and affiliations and new strategies about diversity at AUT, including a “brown table” to encourage research collaboration.

Strong Asian connection
Khairiah Rahman spoke of the university’s collaboration with the Taipei-based Asian Congress for Media and Communication (ACMC) conference next year on November 25-27.

The conference had originally been scheduled for last month, but New Zealand’s covid-19 lockdowns and global uncertainties forced the postponement.

Rahman is also spearheading a seven-year collaboration with the Centre for Southeast Asian Social Studies at Gadjah Mada University (UGM) in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. AUT and UGM have published collaborative research on climate change and have a partnership between the two journals PJR and Ikat: The Indonesian Journal of Southeast Asian Studies.

A group of West Papuan students also participated in the symposium and staff, students and media people staged a separate Morning Star flag ceremony during the event.

• More information

By Melanie Sison in Manila

Reopening of classes calls for community effort and not just schools ensuring the safety of students and personnel, an online forum heard.

Organised by SciDev.Net Asia & Pacific, the webinar event brought together experts on education from across the region to discuss ways to go about formal education under the new normal.

“We face the realisation that the third pillar of universities and higher education institutions — which is engagement with society — must stop being the poor sister of the other two pillars [education of students and research],” said Dr Zinaida Fadeeva, a visiting professor at Nalanda University, India.

• READ MORE: SciDev.net – Science and technology from an Asia-Pacific perspective

Dr Fadeeva said the importance of engaging with the communities plays a role in determining whether educational institutions should reopen.

“It’s defined by factors which characterise the functioning of individual universities, as well as society itself,” she said. “It’s about preparedness to treat people, it’s about the testing and tracing system, it’s about how people move, socialise, live, travel.”

Measures to ensure physical safety, including accessibility to covid-19 testing kits and medical facilities, however, also have to be balanced with students’ needs.

“The consideration of physical safety comes with the principle of not leaving anybody behind,” Fadeeva said, referring to the guiding principle of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Logistics organised around universities
“It’s about the whole logistics organised around universities and the region that would determine whether universities will open or not.”

Adjusting to the new normal means ensuring that students have access to education regardless of whether schools are physically open or not. It also means capacitating teachers and other educators to enable them to become more flexible and respond quickly and effectively.

Dr Fadeeva said that the covid-19 pandemic helped forge strategic partnerships, including between private and public educational institutions, that go deeper in community engagement.

A new possibility is the retooling of the methodologies of learning and action research employed by universities and educational institutions.

“New skills of bringing results of research to communities and the government also needs to be developed,” said Dr Fadeeva, adding that this kind of retooling could also bring different revenue streams.

She said that local governments and the private sector were potential clients and important given that universities have lost revenue because of the pandemic.

The education sector now also sees the bridging of schools and homes, said Professor David Robie, director of New Zealand’s Pacific Media Centre – “[The lockdown] enabled the opportunity to move out of schools and into homes”.

“Teachers have had to adapt and innovate to ensure learning is learner – and family-friendly,” he said. “Learners introducing their teachers and peers online have produced deeper personal level of connections that they can continue to build on.”

The internet has also allowed partnerships to be formed beyond the immediate community.

Dr Robie said that one gain from the covid-19 pandemic is the networking of academic institutions from different countries.

“We had very little contact in the academic context with much of Asia,” he said. Online conferences and webinars have allowed his faculty to work with members of the academe from the Philippines, Indonesia, and other parts of Asia.

“Education is not just about content; it’s about building relationships,” said Dr Robert Roleda, vice-chancellor for academics of De La Salle University, Philippines.

“One of the bright spots of this pandemic is that it showed us that there are actually ways wherein we can get more engaged with people from around the world.”

He said that the shift to online learning of education institutions is a reflection of how the internet grew.

“The development of Internet was enhanced by collaboration by the sciences,” he said.

This article was produced by SciDev.Net’s Asia & Pacific desk and was originally published on October 4. It is republished by the Pacific Media Centre with permission.

The day began with a video, showing a disparate collection of arresting images – the drowned Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira, camera in hand and a huge smile on his face.

Mugshots of two captured French DGSE secret agents – a fake honeymooning pair jailed for manslaughter, but later spirited off to Hao atoll and freedom.

Sun-drenched tropical beaches and a ship with a gaping hull, sinking into the frigid Auckland Harbour on a winter’s night.

READ MORE: 35 years on, Tahiti’s Oscar Temaru guest in Rainbow Warrior rewind

Newspaper headlines expressing disbelief that something like this could happen in peaceful New Zealand.

It is fitting that the discussion began with such an array of images. The bombing of the Rainbow Warrior on 10 July 1985 is one episode in a large and complex geopolitical story – a story that isn’t over yet.

A panel of academics, journalists and activists, each with a connection to the bombing, met via webinar this morning to discuss and mark the 35th anniversary this month.

Suing French government
Organised by H-France, the panel featured figured such as Oscar Temaru, five times president of French Polynesia who is in the process of suing the French government, and Dr David Robie, a New Zealand journalist who was on board the Rainbow Warrior on its final 11 week Pacific voyage to the Marshall Islands and then to New Zealand.

Other speakers were Ena Manuireva, an Auckland University of Technology academic and PhD candidate who is from Mangareva, one of the French Polynesian islands most affected by the French nuclear tests where the Rainbow Warrior intended to protest before its sinking; Stephanie Mills, a former Greenpeace Pacific nuclear test ban campaigner and NZ board chair; and Rebecca Priestley, a history associate professor from Victoria University in Wellington who has specialised in New Zealand’s relationship to nuclear issues.

The webinar was moderated by Dr Roxanne Panchasi, an associate history professor from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, who specialises in French studies.

The event was preceded by a mihi in Te Reo Māori by Dr Hirini Kaa of the University of Auckland, and a karakia in Tahitian by Ena Manuireva.

In keeping with the discussion’s examination of the effects of colonialism, moderator Dr Panchasi acknowledged the colonised nature of British Columbia, where she was speaking from.

“I am a settler and an uninvited guest on this territory,” she said.

The relevance of the Rainbow Warrior and its connected issues to the current age was a common touchstone among the speakers. Although the sinking of the ship occurred 35 years ago, it still represents issues that have significant impacts on the peoples and nations of the Pacific.

Not least of these are the effects of nuclear testing in French Polynesia.

Nuclear health troubles
Oscar Temaru spoke on how French testing of atomic weapons in his country doesn’t feel so long ago.

“That was 35 years ago?” he said, speaking from his office in Faa’a. “Time flies!”

France conducted 193 tests in French Polynesia between 1966 and 1996, resulting in the contamination of the food and water sources of many people across the islands. Birth defects were common and families were forced to move islands in the hope of providing a healthier future for their children.

To this day, rates of thyroid cancer are disproportionately high, and the disfiguring scars of thyroid removal surgery can be seen on many women.

“I bury people nearly every day, dying from different types of cancer,” Temaru said. “I just wonder sometimes what sin we did to the French.”

Temaru said that nuclear issues and those of French Polynesian sovereignty are interlinked. “The two issues are tied – nuclear testing and our freedom.”

In 2018, he took the French government to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, seeking justice for “all the people who died from the consequences of nuclear colonialism”.

Legal troubles
Since then, he has been embroiled in a number of legal troubles leveled at him by the French government, such as a six-month suspended jail sentence and a US$50,000 fine for alleged corruption.

Last month, he embarked on a two-week hunger strike after a French prosecutor ordered the seizure of US$108,000 from him.

Despite these difficulties, Temaru remained upbeat about the future during the webinar. “We need the new generation to take up the flag and go forward,” he said. “Māohi lives matter!”

When the Rainbow Warrior, a 40m trawler owned by Greenpeace, was bombed by French DGSE agents in Auckland Harbour, causing the death of photographer Fernando Pereira, it had set its sights on French Polynesia.

The crew were planning to sail to Moruroa Atoll to protest continued tests.

“The campaign against nuclear testing was in Greenpeace’s DNA,” said former Greenpeace campaigner Stephanie Mills. At the time of the attack, Mills was a reporter for The New Zealand Herald.

But she stressed that the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior was not a discrete, encapsulated event. “People are still dying. They need assistance. There’s still a job to do.”

Birth defects, cancers
Auckland-based researcher Ena Manuireva was born on Mangareva, one of the islands most affected by French testing on Moruroa Atoll. He spoke about how his family was affected by the tests, with a sister born with birth defects and other relatives developing cancer. His mother saw the mushroom cloud from the first blast, in 1967.

“My mum was poisoned,” said Manuireva. “She had her lips bleeding from the fallout.”

Manuireva said that the story was not over for the people of Mangareva, and that they needed to be aware of the ongoing effects of the nuclear blasts.

“People are still dying,” he said. “You see a lot of babies in the cemetery. Mothers and grandmothers feel the effects of chemo and having to take their pills.”

Manuireva said that the people of his island were unwilling to recognise the effects of the tests.

“They feel like they were duped,” he said. Authorities on the island such as the Catholic Church and the French administration assured the locals that the tests would be clean and that there was nothing to worry about, and Manuireva believes that the shame of believing the lies dissuades Mangarevans from talking about these issues.

“We need to make them aware of what’s happened because it’s their history.”

Humanitarian story
New Zealand journalist and academic Dr David Robie, a journalism professor and director of the Pacific Media Centre at AUT, said that media coverage of the attack in New Zealand often neglected to mention the broader issues at play, focusing instead on the espionage intrigue of the DGSE agents.

“I wanted to tell the story from a humanitarian view,” he told the panel.

Dr Robie was onboard the Rainbow Warrior for 11 weeks prior to the bombing, accompanying the crew as they helped residents of the US nuclear test-affected Rongelap Atoll in the Marshall Islands find refuge on Mejato and travelling to New Zealand via Kiribati and Vanuatu.

Helping move the Rongelap refugees was “one of the most momentous and moving experiences I’ve had in my life as a journalist”, he said. He wrote about the experience in his environmental book Eyes of Fire, published in several countries.

Victoria University of Wellington history professor Dr Rebecca Priestley spoke of the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior as confirming New Zealand’s nuclear-free stance.

“The bombing was really the last straw,” she said. In 1984, the Lange-lead Labour government had won on a platform of establishing a nuclear-free zone in the South Pacific.

After tensions with the United States for barring entry of potentially nuclear warships to New Zealand harbours, New Zealand was already in a tense position. The attack caused public outrage and people doubled down on the decision to back nuclear-free.

Evidence-based approach
Priestley spoke about how New Zealand led the world by using an evidence-based decision making approach, and that 2020 and the world-changing crises of covid-19 may ask a similar commitment.

“It was a crazy time in New Zealand and the Pacific’s history,” she said, “and it’s a crazy time now.”

French testing on Moruroa Atoll ended in 1996. Stephanie Mills was at the island with Greenpeace during some of the last tests in 1995. She said that she felt no fear because she knew she had public support behind her, evidenced by a recent petition against the tests that had gathered five million signatures.

“We were tear gassed and boarded. A few of us were taken and disappeared for several days. I wasn’t afraid, because I knew about the five million signatures.”

The change to the regime of nuclear tests in the Pacific was a victory for the people of the region, and Mills said that Greenpeace did not claim credit.

“It was a million acts of courage – an example of change from the bottom up.” She said that remembering the Rainbow Warrior was not just about nuclear issues – “It’s about people having the agency to make change.”

However, new issues assail the Pacific as people living on low-lying islands are some of the first to be affected by the ever-increasing effects of global climate change. This, along with the fact that thousands of people in the Pacific are still affected by the effects of the fallout, means that the Rainbow Warrior remains an important symbol.

Independence a fundamental issue
“The fundamental issue is the self-determination of indigenous peoples across the Pacific,” said Dr Robie. The Rainbow Warrior and its Greenpeace crew, along with their solidarity with independence movements across the Pacific, are inextricable from the issue of indigenous sovereignty.

He invoked the memory of Vanuatu’s founding prime minister Father Walter Lini who said the Pacific could not be truly free until the Māohi people of Tahiti, Kanaks of New Caledonia and West Papuans were also free.

Dr Robie reported that he had noticed a “gap in history” in his students in a “living history” journalism project in 2015, wherein they were not aware of the geopolitical backdrop of the Rainbow Warrior attack. He and Manuireva expressed the desire that this retrospective is the beginning of a series to discuss and raise awareness of related Pacific issues.

While the webinar was concerned with how the event will be remembered into the future, there was also an air of memorial to it. Several of the speakers paid tribute to fallen figures connected to the Rainbow Warrior story.

Chief among these was Fernando Pereira, the sole casualty of the 1985 bombing. “I’d like to acknowledge Fernando Pereira,” said Mills. “He wasn’t just a crew member and photographer. He was a friend to many people.”

Steve Sawyer, the Greenpeace campaigner for the Rongelap mission, was also remembered. Sawyer died almost exactly a year ago, on July 31, 2019, of lung cancer.

Matthew Scott is a student journalist on the Postgraduate Diploma in Communication Studies programme at Auckland University of Technology. He also reports at Te Waha Nui.

This is the second of a series of articles by the Pacific Media Centre’s Pacific Media Watch as part of an environmental project funded by the Internews’ Earth Journalism Network (EJN) Asia-Pacific initiative.

• Nuclear-free New Zealand resources
• Eyes of Fire resource page for Rainbow Warrior
• Earth Journalism Network Infonews

New Zealand established its credentials as an independent small nation after the fatal bombing of the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior in 1985, says an author and academic who spent weeks on the vessel shortly before it was attacked.

On 10 July 1985, the Rainbow Warrior was sunk at an Auckland wharf by two bombs planted on the hull of the ship by French secret agents.

The event is often referred to as the first act of terrorism in New Zealand.

LISTEN: The Afternoons with Jesse Mulligan Crime NZ interview with David Robie
WATCH: Eyes of Fire archival videos
READ: The Eyes of Fire book

Two French agents planted two explosives on the ship while it was berthed at Marsden wharf, the second explosion killing Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira.

Dr David Robie, who is an AUT professor of journalism and communication studies, as well as the director of the university’s Pacific Media Centre, had spent more than 10 weeks on the ship as a journalist covering its nuclear rescue mission in the Pacific.

He wrote about his experience in Eyes of Fire, a book about the last voyage of the first Rainbow Warrior – two other Rainbow Warrior ships have followed.

In 1985, Rongelap atoll villagers in the Marshall Islands asked Greenpeace to help them relocate to a new home at Mejato atoll. Their island had been contaminated by radioactive fallout from US atmospheric nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific.

Environmental journalism
“At the time I was very involved in environmental issues around the Pacific and in those days Greenpeace was very small, a fledgling organisation,” he tells Jesse Mulligan.

“They had a little office in downtown Auckland and Elaine Shaw was the coordinator and she was quite worried that this was going to be a threshold voyage.

“It was probably the first campaign by Greenpeace that was humanitarian, it wasn’t just environmental – to rescue basically the people who had been suffering from nuclear radiation.”

Shaw, he says, was looking for media publicity on the issue and several journalists from Europe and the US had been invited on board as the Greenpeace crew carried out their mission.

“There were about six journalists who went onboard but I ended up being the only one from the Southern Hemisphere.

“It was a big commitment at the time because I was a freelance journalist and it meant joining the Rainbow Warrior in Hawai’i and being onboard until 10-to-11 weeks, right up until the time of the bombing.”

He says the 49m ex-fishing trawler, originally named the Sir William Hardy, built in Aberdeen, Scotland, had been comfortable enough at sea, having been refitted as an environmental sailing ship as well as engines. “It had a lot of character… I guess all of us onboard grew to love it incredibly.”

Moruroa protest planned
The US had carried out 67 nuclear tests at the Marshall Islands. France was also carrying out 193 tests in the Pacific and Greenpeace had planned on confronting that situation at Moruroa Atoll after its Marshall Islands rescue effort.

New Zealand had already voiced disapproval of the testing in the region, with then Prime Minister David Lange in 1984 rebuking the French for “arrogantly” continuing the programme in the country’s backyard.

Dr Robie left the ship when it docked in Auckland after the Marshall Islands stage of the mission. Three days after the ship had docked, a birthday celebration was held for  Greenpeace campaign organiser Steve Sawyer onboard. The attack happened after the party.

Just before midnight on the evening of 10 July 1985, two explosions ripped through the hull as the ship.

Portuguese crew member Fernando Pereira was killed after returning on board after the first explosion.

“I think it was an incredible miracle that only one person lost his life,” Dr Robie says. He was not at the party at the time and joined the crew early it the morning when he heard the news.

He objects to the prominent media angle at the time, which he says focused on suggestions it was not the perpetrator’s intention to kill anyone.

‘Outrageous act of terrorism’
“It was an outrageous act of terrorism and the bombers knew very well, as they were getting information all the time, that there was a large crowd onboard the Rainbow Warrior that night and the chances were very high that there could have been a loss of life.”

Two of the cabin crew were situated immediately above the engine room when the first bomb planted there went off. The second bomb was planted near the propeller to ensure the ship was hobbled.

Dr Robie had been able to visit the ship later after it had been towed to Devonport naval base.

“I was quiet staggered – my old [cabin] floor had sort of erupted, Fernando had a cabin right close to that and he probably got trapped there.”

Thirteen foreign agents were involved, operating in three teams. The first team brought in the explosives, the second team would plant these and the third was on stand-by in case anything went wrong with the first two teams.

“A commanding officer kept an overview of the whole operation. I think there was an element of arrogance, the same arrogance as with the testing itself. There was a huge amount of arrogance about taking on an operation like this in a peaceful country – we were allies of France at the time – and it is extraordinary that they assumed they could get away with this outrageous act.”

Two of the spies were caught. Two General Directorate for External Security (DGSE) officers, Dominique Prieur and Alain Mafart, were arrested on July 24. Both were charged with murder, pleaded guilty to manslaughter and were sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment.

Repression of independence movements
“You have to see it within the context of the period of the time,” Dr Robie says.

He says that the French policy of repression against independence movements in New Caledonia and Tahiti, with assassinations of Kanak leaders like Eloi Machoro, needed to be understood to put the Rainbow Warrior attack in perspective. France was bitterly defending its nuclear force de frappe.

“New Zealand was unpopular with the major nuclear powers and there was certainly no sympathy for New Zealand’s position about nuclear testing. So, there wasn’t really any co-operation, even from our closest neighbour, Australia.

“Had we had more cooperation… we probably would have got agents who were on board the Ouvea, the yacht that carried the explosives, in Norfolk Island. But it is extraordinary we got two [agents] anyway.

“But we did not benefit in any way from [state] intelligence… so I think we were very much let down by our intelligence community.”

The case was a source of considerable embarrassment to the French government.

“They did pay compensation after arbitration that went on with the New Zealand government and Greenpeace. But justice was never really served… the 10 years were never served, both Prieur and Mafart were part of the negotiations with French government.

NZ was held ‘over a barrel’
“Basically, France had New Zealand over a barrel over trade and the European Union, so compromises were reached and Prieur and Mafart were handed over to France for three years. Essentially house arrest at Hao atoll, the rear base of the French nuclear operations in Polynesia.”

Dr Robie said the rear base was widely regarded as a military “Club Med”.

He says they didn’t even spend three years there, but left for France within the time period.

While the attack was on an international organisation rather than New Zealand itself, most New Zealanders saw it as an attack on the sovereignty of the nation

Dr Robie says it left a long-lasting impression on New Zealanders.

“It was a baptism of fire. It was a loss of innocence when that happened. And in that context, we had stood up as a small nation on being nuclear-free. Something we should have been absolutely proud of, which we were, with all those who campaigned for that at the time. I think that really established our independence, if you like, as a small nation.

“I think we have a lot to contribute to the world in terms of peace-making and we shouldn’t lose track of that. The courage that was shown by this country, standing up to a major nuclear power. We should follow through on that kind of independence of thought.”

This article is republished by the Pacific Media Centre under a partnership agreement with RNZ.

• Eyes of Fire – Thirty Years 0n – a microsite of Rainbow Warrior bombing archival stories, videos and reports made in 2015

On 10 July 1985, the Greenpeace environmental ship Rainbow Warrior was sunk at an Auckland wharf by two bombs planted on the ship’s hull.

The event is often referred to as the first act of terrorism in New Zealand.

Two French secret agents planted two limpet explosives on the ship while it was berthed at Marsden wharf, one blasting a big hole in the side of the ship’s engineroom and the second explosion killing Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira.

LISTEN: RNZ podcast from Afternoons with Jesse Mulligan

To help navigate us through this complex web of deceit by France and why they targeted the ship, we speak with David Robie, who was a journalist on board the Rainbow Warrior during her fateful voyage to the Marshall Islands and Rongelap atoll.

David is currently an AUT professor of journalism and communication studies, as well as the director of the campus’ Pacific Media Centre. He is also author of Eyes of Fire, a book on the last voyage of the Rainbow Warrior.

Eyes of Fire – the book at Little Island Press

Eyes of Fire – Thirty years on – the student project website

Rappler, the innovative online publisher that has been at the media freedom frontline in the Philippines for the past three years, has challenged President Rodrigo Duterte by taking the executive to the Supreme Court.

The news website has called on the court to rule on whether President Duterte – or the state executive branch – has the power to control the media.

It has asked the court to lift a nearly two-year coverage ban against Rappler for covering events involving President Duterte wherever he is in the Philippines or abroad.

READ MORE: The state of the Philippine media under Duterte – PCIJ

In a remarkable media freedom test case, Rappler has asked justices to clarify: Can the President pick and choose who is “legitimate media” and who is not?

It has also asked can Duterte restrict access to public events?

In a response to the Office of the President’s comments relating to the original petition filed by Rappler last year, the news organisation stated on Monday:

“The question posed by petitioners affects intersecting fundamental rights under the Constitution. Thus, the Honourable Court is duty-bound to demarcate clearer borderlines between the press and the executive branch.”

Fundamental right
Rappler argues that a fundamental right of the free press under the Constitution is self-regulation.

“It is only the free press, not the executive branch, that has the power to say whether or not petitioners are legitimate journalists or not,” argues Rappler.

The media freedom petition has been filed against the Office of the President, Office of the Executive Secretary, Presidential Communications Operations Office, Media Accreditation and Relations Office and Presidential Security Group.

Last month, Rappler managing editor Glenda Gloria presented a compelling presentation entitled “Press freedom: Perils and challenges – managing threats in the newsroom” at the “Muckraking for social good” investigative journalism conference in Manila about the news organisation’s struggle against state vindictiveness by the Duterte administration.

“Threats come with the job of journalism,” she said, “and we thought we’d seen them all – libel suits, death threats, harassment, Malacañang [presidential palace] intimidation, and advertising boycotts.

“But the threats we have had to manage in the last three years came in new forms and the attacks were deployed in new ways.”

Gloria told the conference organised by the Philippine Centre for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) this was the first time in the history of the Philippines media that corporate cases of tax evasion and so-called foreign ownership had been lodged against a news media company.

10 court cases
Rappler is currently facing at least 10 court cases and investigations filed in a span of 13 months – or an average of one case or investigation a month.

“This is unprecedented, not only in the Philippines, but I believe in Southeast Asia,” Gloria said. “Just to get to a recent conference in Hamburg, Rappler had to pay my travel bond of US$2800 dollars – because I face charges in two courts.

The travel bond of the celebrated chief editor Maria Ressa, who has won many media freedom awards over the past year, has totalled at least $US20,000 this year.

“This because she is charged in four local courts and the Court of Tax Appeals,” Gloria said.

“We have paid close to US$50,000 in bail and travel bonds since the government started filing cases against us in January 2018.”

Described by The Guardian as “one of the most highly regarded” journalists in the Philippines, former CNN investigative reporter and correspondent Ressa joined three other female journalists in 2012 to found Rappler as a “tech start-up” style dynamic news website for young readers.

It is now one of the most influential news organisations in the Philippines

Gloria also stressed it was the first time that a regulatory body – the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) – had acted against a Philippine media company.

“Following President Duterte’s false accusation that we were American-owned, the commission investigated us and in a record time of barely four months issued us a closure order because we had violated the nationality restrictions of media ownership,” Gloria said.

Damocles’ sword
“That closure order, while currently frozen because we appealed against it with a higher court, hangs like a Damocles’ sword – and we have put in place three variations of closure scenarios and how to respond to each of them.”

Gloria condemned the deployment of an “army of influencers, trolls and BOTs” against Rappler in an attempt to shape public opinion that would help justify government’s draconian actions.

That troll “army” was deployable anytime of the day, depending on the government’s agenda.

All Rappler staff – “from our CEO to our reporter and to our drivers” – are banned from entering the Malacañang and banned from covering any event where President Duterte is attending,

“We’ve had to deal with threats online and in our own premises. Early [last] year, Duterte fanatics did a Facebook live in front of our office, triggering a mob online that called on each other to bomb Rappler.

“Thankfully, there were only two people there. They tried again to mobilise at a coffee shop near our office – about 20 appeared.”

The constant threats and attacks meant that Rappler had to find a way to deal with this new challenge. They opted on a three-way strategy – tackling ownership, management and the public.

Freedom structure
Gloria stressed how Rappler had been structured as an organisation in order that it had “a lot of freedom to fight for our independence and to not bow down to pressure”.

Rappler is majority owned by journalists.

“We have an agreement with our shareholders that editorial independence is the core of Rappler’s existence and the core of its business success,” Gloria said.

“In the face of relentless powers from the regime, we took time to dialogue with our shareholders, hold their hand, and explain to them why holding the line will, ultimately, be good for business.”

A core team of senior managers was formed to deal with the crisis which each team member being assigned specific tasks.

“Crisis is opportunity. Disinformation helped us focus on new topic for investigation, which is to expose disinformation networks,” Gloria said.

“Because of the climate of fear that affected advertisers, we were forced to find new revenue streams outside the traditional advertising model.

Other talents
“Internally, the crisis also made people with other talents outside journalism – such as security, paralegal, communications – shine and contribute their other talents.”

Finally, Rappler relied on its own community for support.

“This help was through defending us from online attacks, or participating in crowd funding efforts, or providing us with tips for our investigative stories.

“We held dialogues with journalists from other media and formed a network so that we can act collectively on problems facing the media.”

As well as attacks on Rappler, President Duterte has also recently targeted the country’s main local TV station, ABS-CBN, and the Philippine Daily Inquirer with threats and punitive red tape in response to criticism of his autocratic leadership style.

Professor David Robie, director of the Pacific Media Centre, has been in the Philippines on a research sabbatical.

• Media academic warns shutting key TV channel would be ‘step to dictatorship’

Melanesian Media Freedom Forum – Day two: The second day of the Melanesian Media Freedom Forum began with praise for the work of young Pacific journalists by Professor David Robie and ended with a warning that threats to journalism in the region were increasing.

In between forum delegates heard about the continued problems of female journalists, who continue to be under-represented at senior levels, and debated ways in which international organisations could help.

Many of the discussions took on a strong human rights theme and delegates were reminded that Article 19 of the United Nations’ International Declaration on Human Rights states that “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

Professor Robie, who is head of the Pacific Media Centre at Auckland University of Technology and editor of the highly respected Pacific Journalism Review, presented to the forum from Indonesia.

He also gave the pre-conference keynote address on October 28.

In a wide-ranging talk, Professor Robie spoke to delegates about some of the most serious issues facing journalists in Melanesia, including climate change and the independence struggle in West Papua.

Professor Robie has long been a trenchant critic of the way the West Papuan struggle has been almost completely  ignored  by the mainstream press in Australia and New Zealand.

He praised the work of younger journalists and students in exposing the dangers of climate change in the Pacific and screened excerpts from two student films during his talk.

After the opening session, delegates discussed where and how media workers in Melanesia could look for support from larger global organisations.

A special session on the experiences of women journalists took place later in the  morning, with women journalists, editors and free lancers speaking about common problems.

These included demands that they show “respect” for men they are interviewing, a  background of violence against women in many places and traditional notions of gender roles.

Statements  by conference delegates
Melanesian journalists face growing levels of political and legal threats, physical assaults, illegal detention and intimidation.

In a statement released after the conference, media delegates to the forum said the range and scope of threats was increasing, with prosecutions, restrictive legislation, online abuse and racism between ethnic groups a growing issue.

Female journalists faced the threat of violence both on the job and within their own homes.

The statement said threats to media freedom were having professional, personal and health affects on journalists across Melanesia.

The situation in West Papua was of particular concern with attacks on journalists resulting in deaths and injuries.

The unwillingness of politicians and officials to engage in dialogue was undermining the media’s accountability role.

Public figures were becoming more resistant to responding to direct questions from media, choosing instead to issue media releases, or statements on social media or to preferred media outlets.

In addition to undermining the crucial accountability role of the media, this placed broadcast media (which requires actuality) at a disadvantage.

In the statement, media delegates said the ability of journalists to exercise their professional skills without fear was critical to the functioning of Meleanesia’s democracies.

There needed to be a better understanding of the role of journalism in Melanesian democracies.

The issue of social media and fake news, which had been a feature of discussion on day one, was reflected in the statement, which said the media was ready to work with all parties that wanted to improve the social medialandscape.

“There is an urgent need to for the media to assert its role as a source of accurate and impartial information and to play a role in building social media literacy and public understanding of how to identify credible sources of information,” the statement said.

“The global decline of democracy is making it easier for our governments to silence the media. It is expected this will become a bigger challenge in the future if it is not addressed, as national leaders, media organisations and journalists come under pressure and misinformation campaigns continue.

“Misinformation, propaganda and fake news are a growing problem: there is widespread concern around misinformation and offensive material being posted on social media platforms, sometimes by anonymous sources, some of them state and politically-partisan actors.

“The media’s role as an antidote, and as a balancing source of verified information is under-recognised and under-supported.”

Solidarity
Academics at the forum read out a draft statement expressing solidarity with media workers in Melanesia in their struggle for freedom of expression, security and professional recognition.

The academic statement cited Article 19 of the United Nations’ International Declaration on Human Rights, but also the United Nations’ 2030 development goals, particularly those designed to strengthen peace, justice and strong institutions; climate action; reduce inequalities; and gender equality.

Academic delegates to the forum called for journalists  working in Melanesia and across the Pacific, to be guaranteed the following  basic rights as professional communicators:

• Freedom of expression
• Freedom from physical abuse, threats or intimidation in pursuit of their work
• Recognition of their status as professional communicators
• Security of digital communication
• Equality for all media workers in terms of their professional standing, regardless of gender.
• Recognition and protection under law of these rights.

Pacific Journalism Review
Pacific Journalism Review, which is produced through the Pacific Media Centre at Auckland University of Technology, will produce a special edition based around the main themes of the forum in 2020.

It will be edited by Dr Kasun Ubayasiri of Griffith University, Professor Robie and Dr Philip Cass.

Papers can include:

• The politics of press freedom in Melanesia.
• The intersection between custom and indigenous knowledge in contemporary Fourth Estate practice.
• Gender and identity in Melanesian journalism.
• Human rights journalism in Melanesia.
• Reporting climate change and human migration.
• Circumventing censorship and restrictions to free and fair publication
• Legal safeguards to press freedom.

Related topics that will be considered include social justice, human rights and environmental and climate change reporting in the Melanesian media. The journal also publishes an unthemed section and other papers related to journalism studies, and journalism education, theory and practice will also be considered by the editors.

The deadline for submissions is February 20, 2020.

Dr Philip Cass is acting editor of the Pacific Media Centre’s Pacific Journalism Review, one of the sponsors of the Melanesian Media Freedom Forum inaugural conference at Griffith University in Brisbane. Part one of his report is here.

• Call for PJR papers

Melanesia Media Freedom Forum – Day One:
The problems of operating in the Pacific and the impact of online news and the emergence of “citizen journalists” were common concerns for all delegates to this week’s Melanesian Media Freedom Forum.

The forum, held at Griffith University’s South Bank campus in Brisbane, drew professional and academic delegates from Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji and West Papua.

During the opening session on Monday, Fred Wesley from the Fiji Times talked about the problems of operating under the Fiji media Act, particularly the provisions which imposed heavy fines and possible prison sentences on individual members of staff as well as the company.

He said he paper had to second guess every day, but was trying to push the boundaries back where it could.

He said The Fiji Times needed to strengthen its online team and be extra vigilant. The Times now needed to be an instant newspaper that operated across several platforms.

Victor Mambor from Tabloid Jubi talked about the pressures of operating in West Papua and the realities of racism, beatings and constant threats and intimidation from Indonesian security forces.

He told the forum he had had a gun held to his head in front of his wife by Indonesian security forces.

He said a growing problem was online provocations from people spreading distorted versions of events.

When the Indonesian government didn’t like the news it simply shut down the internet in West Papua. It also used the online media to spread false stories and make claims that West Papua was not part of Melanesia.

It also tried to control reporting of what was happening so that people were unaware, for instance, of shootings in Jayapura.

He said anybody could become a member of the Indonesian Online Media association for the equivalent of $5. He said it 400,000 members but only 1000 sources.

Georgina Kekea from the Media Association of Solomon Islands (MASI) said the media in Solomon Islands had played a role in promoting peace during the ethnic crisis and still had a role to play in promoting peace and development.

There was a need to produce positive stories while still holding the government accountable.

She said there needed to be a way of properly defining and regulating who was a journalist.

She cited a recent example of a government delegation to China which was allocated two spots for journalists, only one of which was filled by an actual journalist. She expressed scepticism about the notion of ‘citizen journalism.’

She said people should not be able claim they were journalists without some method of properly accrediting them.

She suggested this could be done through organisations such as MASI.

Sean Dorney
Melenesian authorities did not want journalists to do their job properly and things were getting worse, Sean Dorney told delegates to this week’s Melanesian Media Freedom Forum.

Dorney, who is regarded by many as the journalist emeritus of Pacific reporting, told delegates they were at the forefront of upholding democracy in Melanesia.

“Keep the fires burning,” he said.

Dorney, who was accompanied by his wife Pauline, herself a former broadcaster, said recent events in Kiribati with a 60 Minutes crew were an example.

He said that despite the version of events that had been circulated the Australian team had done everything it could to ensure it had the proper approvals but were still put under house arrest.

He said the Vanuatu government’s expulsion of Daily Post media director Dan McGarry, who was at the forum, was an example of the same problems occurring in Melanesia.

Dorney said the best option under such circumstances was for members of the media to stick together.

“We don’t have lots of friends in governments,” he said.

“We have to keep up the good fight and keep in touch with each other.”

The work of the media was essential in keeping democracy alive.

“I have nothing but admiration for anybody working in the media in the region,” Dorney said.

• More information

Meg Taylor
The future of many Island states was not guaranteed, Secretary General of the Pacific Islands Forum Dame Meg Taylor told an audience at Griffith University’s South Bank campus on Monday night.

Dame Meg said climate change was the biggest threat to the Pacific.

“We live in unprecedented times of change which will test our abilities to respond,” she said.

“Decisions made now will affect what happens for decades to come.”

However, the islands faced other challenges, such as increasing militarism and Dame Meg expressed concern about the spectre of new or reactivated naval bases in the region.

(China has reportedly expressed interested in establishing a naval base in Vanuatu, which has prompted Australia and the United states to consider re-activating the Royal Australian Navy base on Manus in Papua New Guinea – ed)

In her speech, dame Meg, who is nearing the end of her second term in office, said the Forum’s concept of forging a Blue Pacific identity was challenged by climate change and the need to defend and define the borders of its member states.

She was politely scathing of a remark by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who, she said, had referred to the Pacific as empty space.

Dame Meg said the Blue Pacific concept was based round control of the islands resources, ownership of the ocean resources, fighting climate change and creating a new era of autonomy.

While individual island economies were vulnerable and based largely on fishing and tourism, acting collectively the islands would be in a better position.

She said there was an urgent need to invest in small scale resilience projects and opportunities in the face of climate change.

She said it was necessary to weight up the cost of such projects against the cost of the effects of climate change.

• More information

Dr Philip Cass is acting editor of the Pacific Media Centre’s Pacific Journalism Review, one of the sponsors of the Melanesian Media Freedom Forum inaugural conference at Griffith University in Brisbane. Part two of his report is here.

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.

By David Robie

A human rights defender and researcher has warned in a new book published on the eve of the Indonesian national elections tomorrow that the centralised political system has failed many of the country’s 264 million people – especially minorities and those at the margins, such as in West Papua.

Author Andreas Harsono also says a “radical change is needed in the mindset of political leaders” and he is not optimistic for such changes after the election.

Harsono is author of Race, Islam and Power: Ethnic and Religious Violence in Post-Suharto Indonesia, a book based on 15 years of research and travel between Sabang in Aceh in the west and Merauke in West Papua in the East.

READ MORE: Indonesian elections – environment a missing topic

Founding President Sukarno used the slogan “from Sabang to Merauke” when launching a campaign – ultimately successful – to seize West Papua in 1961.

But, as Harsono points out, the expression should really be from Rondo Island (an unpopulated islet) to Sota (a remote border post on the Papua New Guinean boundary.

Harsono, a former journalist and Human Rights Watch researcher since 2008, argues that Indonesia might have been more successful by creating a federation rather than a highly centralised state controlled from Jakarta.

“Violence on post-Suharto Indonesia, from Aceh to West Papua, from Kalimantan to the Moluccas, is evidence that Java-centric nationalism is unable to distribute power fairly in an imagined Indonesia,” he says. “It has created unnecessary paranoia and racism among Indonesian migrants in West Papua.

‘They’re Melanesians’
“The Papuans simply reacted by saying they’re Melanesians – not Indonesians. They keep questioning the manipulation of the United Nations-sponsored Act of Free Choice in 1969.”

Critics and cynics have long dismissed what they see as a deeply flawed process involving only 1025 voters selected by the Indonesian military as the “Act of No Choice”.

Harsono’s criticisms have been borne out by a range of Indonesian activist and watchdog groups, who say the generals behind the two presidential frontrunners are ridden with political interests.

The Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras) and the Mining Advocacy Network (JATAM) have again warned that both presidential candidate tickets — incumbent President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo and running mate Ma’ruf Amin as well as rival Prabowo Subianto and Sandiaga Uno — have close ties with retired TNI (Indonesian military) generals.

These retired officers are beholden to political interests and the prospect of resolving past human rights violations will “become increasingly bleak” no matter who is elected as the next president.

Kontras noted that nine out of the 27 retired officers who are behind Widodo and Ma’ruf have a “problematic track record on human rights”.

“Likewise with Prabowo Subianto and Sandiaga Uno where there are eight retired officers who were allegedly involved in past cases of HAM violations”, said Kontras researcher Rivanlee Anandar.

Prabowo himself, a former special forces commander, is implicated in many human rights abuses. He has been accused of abduction and torture of 23 pro-democracy activists in the late 1990s and he is regarded as having knowledge of the killing hundreds of civilians in Santa Cruz massacre in Timor-Leste.

90,000 killed post-Sukarno
Harsono’s 280-page book, with seven chapters devoted to regions of Indonesia, documents an ”internally complex and riven nation” with an estimated 90,000 people having been killed in the decade after Suharto’s departure.

“In East Timor, President Suharto’s successor B. J. Habibie agreed to have a referendum [on independence]. Indonesia lost and it generated a bloodbath,” says Harsono.

“Habibie’s predecessors, Megawati Sukanoputri and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, refused to admit [that] the Indonesian military’s occupation, despite a United Nations’ finding, had killed 183,000 people between 1975 and 1999.”

Harsono notes how in 1945 Indonesia’s “non-Javanese founders Mohammad Hatta, Sam Ratu Langie and Johannes Latuharhary wanted an Indonesia that was democratic and decentralised. They advocated a federation.”

However, Sukarno, Supomo and Mohammad Yamin wanted instead a centralised unitarian state.

“Understanding the urgency to fight incoming Dutch troops, Latuharhary accepted Supomo’s proposal but suggested the new republic hold a referendum as soon as it became independent. Sukarno agreed but this decision has never been executed.”

The establishment of a unitarian state “naturally created the Centre”, says Harsono. “Jakarta has been accumulated and controlling political, cultural, educational, economic, informational and ideological power.

Java benefits
“The closer a region to Jakarta, the better it will benefit from the Centre. Java is the closest to the Centre.

“The further a region is from the Centre, the more neglected it will be. West Papua, Aceh, East Timor and the Moluccas are among those furthest away from Jakarta.”

The centralised political system needed a “long and complex bureaucracy” and this “naturally created corruption”, Harsono explains.

“Indonesia is frequently ranked as the most corrupt country in Asia. Political and Economic Risk Consultancy Ltd listed Indonesia as the most corrupt country in Asia in 2005.”

Harsono also notes how centralised power has helped a religious and ethnic majority that sees itself as “justified to have privileges and to rule over the minorities”.

The author cites the poet Leon Agasta as saying, “They’re the two most dangerous words in Indonesia: Islam and Java.” Muslim majority and Javanese dominance.

Harsono regards the Indonesian government’s response to demands for West Papuan “self-determination” as “primarily military and repressive: viewing Papuan ‘separatists’ as criminals, traitors and enemies of the Republic of Indonesia”.

He describes this policy as a “recipe for ongoing military operations to search for and destroy Papuan ‘separatists’, a term that could be applied to a large, if not overwhelming, portion of the Papuan population”.

Ruthless Indonesian military
“The Indonesian military, having lost their previous power bases in east Timor and Aceh, ruthlessly maintain their control over West Papua, both as a power base and as considerable source of revenue.

“The Indonesian military involvement in legal businesses, such as mining and logging, and allegedly, illegal businesses, such as alcohol, prostitution, extortion and wildlife smuggling, provide significant funds for the military as an organisation and also for individual officers.”

Pro-independence leaders have called on West Papuans to boycott the Indonesian elections tomorrow.

Andreas Harsono launched his journalism career as a reporter for the Bangkok-based Nation and the Kuala Lumpur-based Star newspapers. In the 1990s, he helped establish Indonesia’s Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) – then an illegal group under the Suharto regime, and today the most progressive journalists union in the republic.

Harsono was also founder of the Jakarta-based Institute for the Studies on the Free Flow of Information and of the South East Asia Press Alliance (SEAPA).

In a separate emailed interview with me in response to a question about whether there was light at the end of the tunnel, Harsono replied: I do not want to sound pessimistic but visiting dozens of sites of mass violence, seeing survivors and families’ who lost their lost ones, I just realised that mass killings took place all over Indonesia.

“It’s not only about the 1965 massacres –despite them being the biggest of all– but also the Papuans, the Timorese, the Acehnese, the Madurese etc.

“Basically all major islands in Indonesia, from Sumatra to Papua, have witnessed huge violence and none of them have been professionally understood. The truth of those mass killings have not been found yet.”

• Andreas Harsono will visit Auckland on August 21-24 and attend the Melbourne Writers Festival in Australia in late August.
• Andreas Harsono (2019). Race, Islam and Power: Ethnic and Religious Violence in Post-Suharto Indonesia. Melbourne: Monash University Publishing. 288 pages.
• Are Chinese-Indonesian voters key to the election?
• Indonesian double standards over press freedom endanger safety of Papuan journalists

Professor David Robie is director of the Pacific Media Centre. This review is republished from Pacific Journalism Review with permission.

By David Robie

It was nerve wracking, and at times really scary. The wind howled and bowled over grown trees, the rain fell in a continuous deluge, and electricity was cut for the best part of three days.

Vinzons, a small town of about 44,000 people in a remote corner of mountainous Bicol in the Philippines, was “marooned”.

The ricefields to the north and west and south of the town were flooded, the Labo River had broken its banks and the Pacific Ocean was encroaching to the east.

Our Christmas present – Typhoon Usman – had turned us into a virtual island.

People turned up my wife’s sister’s home with horror stories. Flooded in the middle of the night. Awakened by floodwaters lapping at their bedside. Waist deep in water.

And the fears of electrocution were very real.

Rumours were rife of deaths in the Vinzons district.

The slow moving tropical storm – winds of up to 60km an hour – entered the Philippines on Christmas Day and was the second most destructive weather disaster to hit the country after Typhoon Mangkhut in September.

Communications blackout
But it was hard to get accurate and verified information with a communications blackout. Internet was down. No television and cellphone reception difficult.

Our planned trip to the impressive Mayon volcano, 206 km southwards past Naga was cancelled. We would never have made it.

Flooding at a bridge on the pathway to Mangcayo school … after the waters had dropped. Video: Café Pacific

What was really happening? I called in at the local community radio station, Radyo Katabang 107.7FM, tucked away in a rooftop shack.

However, it was Christmas time and although the radio was on an emergency generator, the skeleton staff were relying on networked programming from Manila, 360 km away on the Pan-Philippine Highway – itself blocked by massive road slips.

I drove around with my wife’s lawyer nephew in a “Judiciary”-plated four-wheel-drive vehicle to get a sense of the devastation in the district.

A small military detachment – a truck and soldiers – arrived to guard the emergency rice supplies and other foodstuffs as they were being dispensed by volunteers at the Vinzons Town Hall.

By December 30, the typhoon – now downgraded to a “tropical depression” (still very depressing, actually) – had eased and children were out in droves playing in the flooded streets in spite of the risks.

“Fun” on the flooded Vinzons streets. Video: Café Pacific

Plugged into news
And we were now plugged into the newscasts again. It wasn’t quite as bad as we had thought – only one death in Vinzons (out of a total of 122 across Bicol, the island of Samar and the Central Visayas).

At least 57 of the dead were from Camarines Sur province, mostly from a landslide in the town of Sagnay, reports the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

At least 18 of the dead were from Albay, 15 from Camarines Norte (our province), eight from Sorsogon and seven from Masbate.

Of the 23 missing people – presumed dead, 20 were from Camarines Sur, and three from Tiwi, Albay.

Bicol relief officials also said nearly 31,000 people had sought shelter in six evacuation centres.

One Municipal Social Welfare Development (MSWD) official I spoke to in Vinzons, Irine Cribe del Rio, said a total of 641 families (2185 people), had been sheltered during the storm, mostly at Vinzons Elementary School.

Ricefields devastated
Although they went back to their homes – if still standing – their freshly planted ricefields and livelihoods were devastated.

An average of 20 typhoons and storms lash the Philippines each year, killing hundreds of people and leaving millions in near-perpetual poverty, reports The Guardian.

The most powerful was Super Typhoon Haiyan which left more than 7360 people dead or missing across the central Philippines in 2013.

Yet, remarkably, in spite of the hardships the community is full of smiles and laughter.

David Robie and his wife, Del, were on holiday in the Bicol town of Vinzons when the typhoon struck. They assist a local school through the Auckland-based Project Lingap Kapwa.

David Robie

ANALYSIS – PART 2: By David Robie in Nouméa

A cartoon published by Nouméa’s daily newspaper, Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes, on the eve of the historic independence referendum in New Caledonia at the weekend caught my eye. Noting that thanks to the referendum, people throughout the world – with the possible exception of at least New Zealand whose media was largely absent – were talking about New Caledonia.

“We’re demanding one referendum a month,” says a travel agent.

A touch cynical perhaps, but this caricatured sentiment contrasts with the anti-independence parties that want to scotch the next two referendums – due in 2020 and 2022 – provided for under the 1998 Nouméa Accord. This agreement was an updated version of the original Matignon Accord that ended the civil unrest of the 1980s and opened the door to long-term stability and progress.

The three anti-independence parties, Les Republicains led by Sonia Backès (New Caledonia’s version of Marine le Pen?), Rassemblement and Caledonie Ensemble, reckon that the people have spoken and there is now no need for further referendums.

They were shocked that the indépendantistes did so well given that they had already written off the “declining” demand for independence and were confidently predicting a crushing 70/30.

READ MORE: Flashback to Kanaky in the 1980s – ‘Blood on their banner’

In the end, the vote was remarkably close, reflecting the success of the pro-independence Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS) in mobilising voters, particularly the youth.

The smaller Labour Party chose a strategy of non active participation given the flawed nature of the ballot.

The referendum choice was simple and stark. Voters simply had to respond yes or no to the question: “Do you want New Caledonia to attain full sovereignty and become independent?”

Credible independence vote
The “no” response slipped to a 56.4 percent vote while the “yes” vote wrested a credible 43.6 percent share with a record 80 percent turnout.

In the last independence vote in 1987, boycotted by the FLNKS and other pro-independence groups as a farce, 98.3 percent voted against independence while just 1.7 percent voted yes.

The encouraging 2018 yes vote is even more remarkable when it is taken into account the demographic gerrymandering by the French government that ensured the indigenous Kanaks – who have been ruled by France for 165 years since New Caledonia was declared a penal colony in 1853   – would remain a minority in their homeland and in this vote.

More than 22,000 convicts were shipped to New Caledonia in the 19th and early 20th centuries, including Muslim rebels fighting against colonisation in Algeria, and dissidents from the 1870 Paris commune. Later migrants included Japanese, Javanese and Tonkinese (North Vietnamese) labourers working the nickel mines.

Of the 174,154 registered referendum voters, 80,120 were Kanak and 94,034 on the common civil role were also entitled to voted. In the end, a total of 141,099 people cast a vote.

Forty percent of the New Caledonian population are Melanesian Kanaks, 29 percent European, and 9 percent are Polynesians from Wallis and Futuna Islands. The rest are a mixture of Asian and Pacific communities, such as Tahitian.

Voter restrictions
The referendum voters were restricted under the Noumea accord to those eligible under these criteria:

• Registered on the special referendum role (or fulfilled its requirements without being registered);
• Born in New Caledonia and registered on the provincial electoral roles.
• Lived in New Caledonia for a continuous 20 years;
• Born before 1 January 1989 and lived in New Caledonia from 1988 to 1998;
• Born after 1 January 1989 with a parent on the special electoral role; and
• Born in New Caledonia with three years’ continuous residence (before 31 August 2018).

The encouraging mobilisation of youth voters, a significant change since the 2014 provincial elections, and the emergence of a growing cadre of young multi-ethnic voters who are more open to a shared future than some of their conservative parents augurs well for the indépendantistes.

“This referendum was a victory for the youth. The loyalists’ predictions were thwarted, said FLNKS president Roch Wamytan. “This vote was a big leap forward. We will continue on our pathway, we will prepare the people in New Caledonia for independence.

“The struggle isn’t over until we are decolonised. One winner in the vote was fear. Over the past six months, we have tried to allay fears about retirement provisions, security and education. We clearly didn’t do enough. We will work harder on this for the next ballot.”

FLNKS official Alosio Sako said: “We’re a short step from victory, and there are still two more ballots to come.”

Independence inevitable
Some who voted against independence are resigned to the belief that one day New Caledonia will become independent anyway.

Talking to a traveller, Sammy, a Lebanese-born New Caledonian with a French passport, and his Caldoche (settler) wife, who were on my flight back to Auckland and heading to Hanmer Springs for a holiday in “très jolie” New Zealand, gave me some interesting insights.

Ironically, Sammy migrated to New Caledonia after “les évènements” in the 1980s which led to the Matignon Accord in 1988 – to escape the civil war in Lebanon.

“Independence is inevitable,” he says. “I only wish they would get on with it and not have votes, delaying things. Build for the future instead of yet another vote.

“In spite of the vote against independence, it is the way it is going. One day New Caledonia will be independent so it is best to restart our future now. We have a chance to build something really new.

“The indépendantistes are very determined.”

He seemed to be reflecting the view of Prime Minister Édouard Philippe, who flew to Nouméa from Vietnam for a day to meet political and civic leaders, and was whisked up to the Northern province stronghold “capital” Koné.

Philippe declared that a meeting would be held with the accord “signatories” next month and he hinted at some key policy changes to deal with social conditions and “balancing” the economic cleavage in this nickel rich and tourism booming territory. France subsidises the territory budget by 1.3 billion euros (NZ$5.1 billion) a year.

Spread in Geo
What made Sammy choose New Caledonia? It is so far away from Lebanon – “it was just like Syria is today” – and he had read an article about New Caledonia in the French magazine Geo.

In fact, Geo has just published a cover story last month about New Caledonia headed “New Caledonia: So near, so far”, a 43-page spread dedicated to the beauty, culture, environment and flora and fauna of this “marvellous archipelago”. It would entice anyone.

The magazine quotes linguist and poet Emmanuel Tjibaou, one of six sons of the Kanak leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou assassinated in 1989 (see Part1), who has been director of the stunning Tjibaou Centre, a cultural memorial to his father, since 2012.

“Being ’Kanak’, or a ‘man’, isn’t a question of skin colour,” he says. “The centre introduces Melanesian culture to Western eyes that are not accustomed to it. Kanak traditions are oral, like elsewhere in Oceania. We live our culture – we discover it through singing, or dancing; we speak, or we weep.”

Another example of emerging “new wave” institutions is a small upstart digital television channel based at Koné. Funded largely by the Kanak-governed Northern province, it is a breath of fresh air compared with the dominant Premiere television (part state-run networks with six channels that look to Paris) and Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes, which has been very hostile to independence in the past. The newspaper is less virulent these days.

Caledonia TV making mark
Caledonia TV is already making its mark as an independent channel that is “telling our own stories” about Kanak culture, music and traditions and exploring all ethnicities in New Caledonia.

It played an important role in the referendum by setting up TV studios in the University of New Caledonia and providing balanced coverage and ready access for grassroots people to engage in a dialogue about their future.

I caught up with one of the journalists involved in referendum coverage in the campus studios, Duke Menango, who did some of his early training as a journalist at Aoraki Polytechnic journalism school in Dunedin on a New Zealand aid scholarship.

“Caledonia TV started off as a web-based channel in 2012 and then became a fully fledged TV station the following year,” he says.

“It was important to give people a choice. Previously television was dominated by the state media monopoly with only one direction and one point of view. I don’t think we were being well represented as Kanaks and as Kanak reporters.

Duke Menango tells how Caledonia TV is a “voice for all”. Video: David Robie/PMC

“With us, we are going out to the people – the grassroots, and we are giving them a voice. A voice for the different tribes. And it isn’t just the tribes, we are telling the stories of all ethnicities.

“We’re giving everybody a voice.”

Caledonia TV … culture and storytelling from a Pacific perspective. Video: PMC

Stiff challenge
But Caledonia faces a stiff challenge from the “mainstream” media, which is generally not sympathetic to independence.

On the weekend of the referendum, Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes devoted a full page to an editorial denouncing independence.

“France or the unknown?” warned editor-in-chief Olivier Poisson, who derided the FLNKS, claiming that it was presenting an unclear, even “confusing” platform, with contradictory objectives.

“In contrast, it’s a fact that we know New Caledonia is already independent. For sure, it isn’t a question of full sovereignty, but whether the country already decides its economic orientation, imposes its own taxes, leads education, runs health, and is able to enter into international accords and partnerships.”

Finally, his message was: “It’s too risky to take on powers that are too great for so little to gain.”

His message irked many indépendantistes, and drew criticism that the newspaper was illegally breaching the political blackout prior to the referendum

“What kind of bullshit is that again?” asked Magalie Tingal Lémé, a former news editor of the pro-independence Radio Djiido. “The editor-in-chief is not supposed to make any comments since the official campaign is over since last night. Some journalists should start being real journalists in this country.”

• Part 1: New Caledonia vote stirs painful memories – and a hopeful future
• New Caledonia referendum leaves independence movement hopeful
• Gallery: Global media cover historic New Caledonia independence referendum
• New Caledonian timeline of injustice to independence?
• Other referendum articles

David Robie, who reported from New Caledonia during the 1980s for

ANALYSIS – PART 1: By David Robie in Nouméa

Thirty four years ago, on 18 November 1984, Kanak pro-independence leader Éloi Machoro split a ballot box in half at Canala on the East Coast of New Caledonia. His supporters burned ballot papers in the opening salvo in an “active boycott” of French territorial elections.

I was there bearing witness and photos of the protest became symbolic around the world for the Kanak claim to self-determination and sovereignty.

The following month, on 5 December 1984, 10 unarmed Kanak activists were brutally murdered by mixed-race settlers in an ambush as they drove home through the forest from Hienghène to the village of Tiendanite. I was at the funeral, one of the most harrowing moments of my life.

READ MORE: Flashback to Kanaky in the 1980s – ‘Blood on their banner’

The following year I was on board the Rainbow Warrior for more than 10 weeks on a humanitarian voyage to the Marshall Islands to help Rongelap islanders suffering from the legacy of US nuclear testing. The ship was bombed by French secret agents on 10 July 1985, killing Portuguese-Dutch photojournalist Fernando Pereira.

As clashes and tension worsened over the next three years in New Caledonia, a group of young Kanak militants led by student activist Alphonse Dianou on 22 April 1988 nervously killed four gendarmes while taking 27 others hostage.

A cave siege followed with security forces storming the hideout on 5 May 1988 and killing all the hostage-takers in what is known as the Ouvéa massacre.

The peace negotiations after the Ouvéa tragedy led to the Matignon Accord signed by anti-independence leader Jacques Lafleur and Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS) president Jean-Marie Tjibaou and the initial framework that led to the historic independence referendum in New Caledonia last Sunday.

However, cultural philosopher and visionary Tjibaou and his deputy Yeiwene Yeiwene were in turn assassinated by Djubelly Wea in a further tragedy on 4 May 1989. I had shared a hotel room with the assassin at a conference in Manila just a few months earlier.

Slight unease
Returning to New Caledonia for this historic vote virtually three decades later, my earlier experiences – outlined in two of my books Blood On Their Banner (1989) and Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face (2014) – gave me slight feelings of unease.

There has been 3o years of relative peace and social justice has definitely improved during that time – even if nowhere enough for the indigenous Kanak people – and there has been significant progress in terms of self-government and economic development.

But what would happen if this vote proved negative and growing aspirations of the Kanaks for a new nation of Kanaky New Caledonia were again denied? On the face of it, it seemed impossible for independence to triumph given the demographic realities.

The rioting and the barricades on the main road near the tribal area of St Louis on the outskirts of Nouméa on Monday were a taste of what might have been with frustrated youth if it had spiralled out of control.

SBS Pacific reporter Stefan Armbruster (left) and SBS French executive producer Christophe Mallet preparing a live news feed from the Noumea’s Hotel de Ville. Video: David Robie/PMC

While some local journalists on the ground were cautious, saying the referendum was hard to call with probably a 50/50 or 60/40 outcome, some anti-independence leaders had been brazenly declaring the election a done deal with a 70/30 outcome.

The conservative politicians have ended up with egg on their face. The pro-independence FLNKS did a superb job in mobilising their supporters, especially the young.

Final results confounded the pundits. The “no” slipped to a 56.4 percent vote while the “yes” vote wrested a credible 43.6 percent share of the vote with a record 80.6 percent turnout.

Voting with pride at Nouméa’s Hôtel de Ville captured by SBS journalists Christophe Mallet (camera) and Stefan Armbruster during the independence referendum. Video clip: David Robie/PMC

Interesting statistics
Closer analysis of the figures produced some interesting statistics.

The cleavage of the territory into the “white” Southern” province and Nouméa, and the “brown” Northern and Loyalties provinces remained (see Part 2 tomorrow) but the stark divisions of the past appeared to be blurring in some places, reflecting an emerging common ground across ethnic divides.

The white South with the bulk of the European population and the core of the territory’s wealth polled a 73.7 percent no vote with 26.29 percent yes vote, a growing pro-independence movement.

In contrast, in the North province where the FLNKS-ruled local government has consolidated its position. There was a 75.83 percent yes vote and 24.17 percent against.

In the Loyalty Islands, the vote was 82.18 percent yes and 17.82 percent no.

In Canala, where Machoro smashed open the ballot box, the vote was 94.27 percent yes and in Hienghène where the Tjibaou massacre happened (the leader lost two of his brothers in that ambush before he was assassinated) the yes was marginally higher at 94.75 percent.

However, the highest yes vote was in the tiny Belep islands off the northern tip of Grande Terre island. With barely 920 eligible voters, there was almost a 95 percent yes vote.

New Caledonian Independence Referendum Commission President Francis Lamy presenting the official result of the vote to media. Video: David Robie/PMC

‘Liberty, fraternity for all’
French President Emmanuel Macron welcomed the vote by New Caledonians to remain French, pledging that the republic would ensure ‘liberty, equality and fraternity” for all.

“The only loser is the temptation of contempt, division, violence and fear; the only winner is the process of peace and the spirit of dialogue,” Macron said in a state television address from Paris.

French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe arriving at the High Commission in Noumea. Video: David Robie/PMC

French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe flew to Nouméa from Vietnam on Monday for a day of meetings with political leaders, customary chiefs and voting commission officials to take stock of the referendum.

After meeting a range of leaders during the day and flying to Koné to meet President Paul Néaoutyine of the pro-independence stronghold Northern province, Philippe made a televised address from Premiere (the local affiliate of France TV) to the territory on Monday night.

Praising the people of New Caledonia for the peaceful conduct of the referendum, he called for a “meeting of the signatories” next month to consider the next step.

Prime Minister Philippe indicated that a fresh approach was now needed with a greater emphasis on social and economic development than political structures and to address “inequalities”.

The prime minister had lunch with students at the University of New Caledonia. Following his TV address and an evening “pool” interview with media, he flew back to Paris on Monday night.

‘Listening to us’
“Édouard Philippe was here to listen to us,” said FLNKS president Roch Wamytan. “Despite the opposition crowing that they were going to dominate 70/30, we have spoken of dialogue and negotiation.”

Anti-independence Rassemblement leader Pierre Frogier said the referendum result “anchors New Caledonia in France” and there was no need for further votes.

On referendum day, I travelled around with the SBS crew from Australia, reporter Stefan Armbruster and executive producer Christophe Mallet of SBS French radio. I was keen to get a sense of the reportage and I have the utmost respect for Armbruster’s reporting, particularly from a “diversity” perspective.

They endeavoured to get a “balanced” view of the voting mood by starting off at Nouméa’s Hotel de Ville in the heartland of “white” New Caledonia. They interviewed the first voter and also spoke to a range of voters with different stories to tell.

I was also impressed with their live crosses for both television and radio absorbing a sense of atmosphere and colour.

Leaving the town hall, we visited a new “decentralised” polling station for the Loyalty Island voters with a remarkably long queue for Lifou voters.

Law change
A law change was required in France earlier this year to enable the Nouméa -based islanders to vote without having to pay expensive airfares to get to their home islands.

“This is an incredible privilege for us to be here,” said French-born Mallet, who has lived in Australia for 16 years.

A voter, Boris Ajapuhnya, told Mallet in an SBS French interview this was their golden chance, for the Kanak people to express their wish in an historic vote.

“The moment is right now,” he said.

While the indépendantistes might have lost this vote, they did much better than expected. With up to two more referendums to come in 2012 and 2022, they are in a healthy negotiating position with a chance to win independence in the end.

• Tomorrow: Part 2: Kanaky independence campaign rolls on … encouraged by ballot result
  
• Macron hails New Caledonia vote to ‘remain French’
• Gallery: Global media cover historic New Caledonia independence referendum
• New Caledonian timeline of injustice to independence?
• Other New Caledonia referendum reports

Al Jazeera video report on the referendum.

The Greenpeace flagship, Rainbow Warrior 3, will arrive in Auckland tomorrow on the next stage of her “Making Oil History” tour of New Zealand.

The ship is a custom designed eco-campaign vessel designed to replace the original Rainbow Warrior bombed by French secret agents trying to stop her antinuclear voyage to Moruroa – this is now a living reef under water in Matauri Bay.

Tour programme | Video

The Rainbow Warrior is now “part of our national identity, as a symbol of New Zealand’s successful nuclear free movement”, says Greenpeace New Zealand executive director Russel Norman.

He says New Zealand must rediscover bold action now for the struggle against oil and catastrophic climate change.

The Pacific Media Centre was on hand for the Rainbow Warrior welcome in Matauri Bay, Northland, yesterday.

Photographs: David Robie

• Rainbow Warrior returns to NZ for ‘oil free’ future and activist doco

Rainbow Warrior at Matauri Bay

1 of 20

An alarming number of “targeted” journalists being killed and West Papua media for independence were just some of the topics covered in a wide-ranging seminar by the director of the Pacific Media Centre last night.

Professor David Robie called for the media, universities and journalism schools to take their Pacific “backyard” more seriously and not just wait for crises to happen.

The seminar was in marking May 3 – World Press Freedom Day. This year’s conference is in Accra, Ghana.

READ MORE: Free media week killings underscore crimes of impunity against journalists

Dr Robie cited the number of journalists killed while working in 2017 and called journalism an increasingly “dangerous occupation”.

“Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF) [Reporters Without Borders] statistics showed 65 journalists were killed worldwide in 2017,” Dr Robie said. Of the 65 journalists killed, 7 of these people were so-called citizen journalists.

This number of casualties varied between media freedom monitoring agencies depending on the definitions of journalists and media workers counted in the statistics, he said.

Although this statistic showed a drop from the previous year, the growth of “hatred” for media and targeting of journalists was a worsening problem.

“This is a dire situation that is getting worse.” 

On top of the killings, the Paris-based statistics showed that 326 journalists were detained in prison and a further 54 were being held hostage. 

Dr Robie said use of the term “citizen journalist” was problematic, as it gave an impression of untrained journalists working without an ethical basis. In fact, many professional journalists were becoming “citizen” journalists tactically and using social media to defeat mainstream media “gags” such as relating to the Melanesian region West Papua inside Indonesia.

“There are more and more independent journalists that are disillusioned” and publishing untold stories on their own blogs.

One such journalist is Papua New Guinea’s Scott Waide, with whom Pacific Media Centre is collaborating with, published many articles by independent journalists and civil society people on his blog My Land, My Country.

Dr Robie also talked about the latest RSF Press Freedom Index and its findings on the Asia-Pacific region.

A Filipino radio journalist, Edmond Sestoso, was shot last Monday – three days before Press Freedom Day – and died the next day. He was murdered in a drive-by scenario by a gunman on a motorcycle. According to Dr Robie, it is a “very common way of doing it” in the Philippines.

World Press Freedom Day 2017
In 2017, Dr Robie was invited to go to the week-long UNESCO World Press Freedom Day media conference in Jakarta, Indonesia.

He was one of just two New Zealanders at the conference out of the 1500 people attending the WPFD conference. He spoke at a journalist safety academic conference at WPFD but was also a guest keynote speaker at an alternative “Free Press in West Papua” conference organised by Indonesia’s Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI).

Dr Robie said it was “astonishing” that there were not more people from New Zealand present at WPFD and said it showed how “appalling” New Zealand’s interest in international affairs was with an information gap in coverage of Asia-Pacific issues. The other New Zealander present was Mary Major, executive director of the New Zealand Media Council.

Dr Robie described the week as “challenging” and “inspiring”.

“I was representing AUT university and also entering a fraught situation.”

Independent Indonesian journalists were planning to protest against the treatment of West Papua and make a showcase stand before the world’s press, said Dr Robie.

At the WPFD, there was a tight military and police security cordon which kept out West Papua protesters and prevented conference participants from joining the protests in solidarity.

While en route to Jakarta, Dr Robie was also invited to speak at a conference hosted by the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism, the last investigative journalism unit at an Australian university. This was closing under protest after 25 years on the “frontline”.

He was able to address West Papua issues there too.

“I’m an educator and a journalist … I have a responsibility to share my knowledge with as many people as I can about issues,” said Dr Robie, who is author of Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face: Media, mayhem and human rights in the Pacific.

West Papua plight ‘censored’

Dr Robie discussed Facebook recently wrongly “censoring” a 1995 photo of an armed West Papuan OPM guerilla and fellow tribespeople in traditional nambas (penis sheaths), pointing to the Pacific Media Centre coverage that sparked an RNZ Mediawatch story on the issue.

Photojournalist Ben Bohane, who has extensively covered conflict issues in the Asia-Pacific region, wrote a two-page article in the Vanuatu Daily Post in response to a piece about China and Vanuatu by The Sydney Morning Herald that had speculated about a “naval base” plan for a wharf aid project at Luganville, Espiritu Santo. Dr Robie said the Australian article was  “scaremongering.”

“Ben Bohane’s article argued China was not the real concern,” he said. “The real threat in terms of stability and security is Indonesia, for which New Zealand media have a blindspot.”

When the PMC republished the Bohane article on its current affairs website Asia Pacific Report, Facebook links were removed. “I got a message saying the picture breached Facebook’s community standards.” While the Facebook “block” did not affect the actual article itself, Dr Robie said it limited the reach of an important article.

Dr Robie said he believed the photo censorship had more to do with “politics” rather than “nudity” and was undoubtedly an attempt by Indonesian sources to curb the debate regarding West Papua.

“It is not the picture that is the real issue,” said Dr Robie. He quoted from Ben Bohane’s latest message saying the censorship was ongoing in spite of Facebook saying it had lifted the block.

It is not the first time Facebook has censored an iconic photo that illustrates dire situations in the Asia-Pacific region. Dr Robie pointed to how Mediawatch raised the issue of how the social media platform in 2016 censored images of the “napalm girl” taken during the Vietnam War in 1973. This caused an international storm of protest.

WPFD in Indonesia – an irony
Dr Robie pointed out the irony over Jakarta hosting the WPFD 2017 conference in light of censorship and repressive activities by security forces in West Papua.

According to Dr Robie, Indonesia has a vibrant “plurality” of voices but forces were seeking to radicalise people, along with targeting journalists.

While President Joko Widodo had changed policy in 2015 to “allow foreign journalists into” West Papua after he was elected in 2014, not much had really changed. Arrests and deportations were continuing.

“It’s very tightly controlled by the bureaucracy and security authorities,” said Dr Robie.

He highlighted the message from critics and researchers of a “secret genocide” in West Papua.

“The state of mainstream international media is a big part of how West Papua is ignored. There is a big difference when you watch some news media that take a more independent stance, such as Al Jazeera.”

He praised Al Jazeera’s Dutch journalist in Jakarta, Step Vaessen, for her coverage.

The penalties for showing support for West Papuan independence is severe – a 15-year prison sentence if you raise the banned Morning Star independence flag – even wearing a t-shirt like I am wearing tonight with the flag on can get you into trouble,” Dr Robie said.

“It is a very serious situation for West Papuans.”

“They believe their independence was declared in 1962 and despite that, Indonesian forces invaded.

“Western countries have become persuaded that West Papua has become part of Indonesia, making the situation a wrong that has never been righted.”

NZ media coverage
While the situation is still dire, there has been some sporadic New Zealand coverage of the West Papua situation, said Dr Robie.

New Zealander Karen Abplanalp, who researched journalist access into West Papua for her masters degree, assisted Māori Television in a reporting mission with Adrian Stevanon to West Papua in 2015. The crew had to “dress” up the assignment bid with the authorities by saying it was a cultural showcase and had a nice side report about a kumara aid project in the Highlands.

Johnny Blades and Koroi Hawkins from RNZ also visited West Papua that year and did a rare interview with Lukas Enembe, the governor of Papua.

Dr Robie said New Zealand media covered disasters, coups and cyclones, while ignoring many of the social justice and development stories that were “crying out to be covered” in the Asia-Pacific region.

“Universities have responsibilities to shed light through research,” concluded Dr Robie.

He called for Indonesia to genuinely “open the door” to journalists and non-government agencies to visit West Papua, and for a “real” UN referendum on self-determination for the Papuans.

Peace and human rights activist Maire Leadbeater said the presentation was enlightening and covered many topics.

“It was great, I really enjoyed it. Dr Robie covered a lot of bases,” Leadbeater said.

Leadbeater is due to have a book published next month about the issue, See No Evil: New Zealand’s betrayal of the people of West Papua.

“The book will be a probe into New Zealand’s diplomacy that hasn’t been done before.”

• Charges of ‘censorship’ at UNESCO WPFD event 2018

Pacific Media Centre director Professor David Robie speaks to Radio 95bFM’s The Wire host Amanda Jane Robinson about security operations for the Papua New Guinea general election, the 30th anniversary of the original Fiji coup, credibility in narratives surrounding the Manus Island shooting, and exiled West Papuan MP Benny Wenda’s visit to New Zealand.

Marc Neil-Jones’ newspaper Vanuatu Daily Post celebrates an historic milestone today. We need to remember how it came about.

“I have been lucky,” said Marc Neil-Jones in his valedictory speech when he retired at the end of 2015. “I came to Vanuatu only four years after cyclone Uma had destroyed the place. I came here in 1989 with $8000 and one of those small early Macintosh computers and the first Apple laser printer.”

Out of that Mac came an institution that has effectively defined Vanuatu’s region-leading reputation for media freedom.

Since he arrived in Vanuatu from Papua New Guinea 26 years ago, Marc’s swashbuckling approach to life and his fearless dedication to the truth—to say nothing of his apparently immortal mullet—have created a legend almost bigger than a man can be.

We celebrate his life and his achievements today.

If you run a Google search for “Marc Neil-Jones” the very first image to appear is of a rather punch-drunk man with a bloody nose and a split lip. Marc has gone—literally and metaphorically—toe-to-toe with countless powerful figures in his time. And although his health has suffered of late, he has emerged the victor in every confrontation.

He has been deported, imprisoned, beaten… and threatened with lawsuits so often that he reacts to each new lawyer’s letter with nothing more than a quiet smile, like someone hearing news of an old friend.

Some claim that he has drunk kava with more prime ministers than any other man. In his time away from the office his raillery and joie-de-vivre left many young women breathless and, often enough, scandalised.

Passion and intensity
But he brought that same passion and intensity to his work. Without his unique mix of affability and panache, it’s doubtful that the media in Vanuatu would have evolved as it has.

Marc’s legacy runs deeper than many people appreciate.

Back in 1993, Marc Neil-Jones persuaded then-Prime Minister Maxime Carlot Korman to allow him to open a proper newspaper, the first of its kind in Vanuatu. Until then, only a government rag existed, and its coverage of politics and current events was… staid, to say the least.

It was Marc’s taste for scandal and imbroglio that led him into the newspaper business, but it was his deeply-held sense of decency and desire for fairness that created the newspaper you’re reading today.

In over two decades of partnership with local businessman Gene Wong, Marc’s brainchild has moved from strength to strength. Even in the wake of cyclone Pam’s devastation and the subsequent economic downturn, the Daily Post and Buzz FM remain profitable.

It is impossible to measure the social wealth that this man has helped create. Without a newspaper of record, one could argue that Vanuatu’s path over the years would have been a different one.

At the height of tension during the 2015 criminal bribery trials, a Solomon Islands policeman turned to a ni-Vanuatu colleague and said: “Mate, if this were Honiara, half the town would be on fire by now.”

But this is Port Vila, not Honiara; and not to put too fine a point on it, if people here have learned to love ethics, fairness and the rule of law, they learned most of it in the pages of the Daily Post.

Marc Neil-Jones has faced increasing health challenges in recent years, and at the end of 2015, he formally announced his retirement. He is a pioneer, a champion of media freedom and a member of a truly elite—and far too small—club of fearless defenders of the truth in the Pacific islands.

This article was first published in the Vanuatu Daily Post and has been republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.

• The souvenir 5000th edition of the Vanuatu Daily Post
• The Vanuatu Daily Post website
• The future of media freedom – Dan McGarry

A congratulatory message from the Pacific Media Centre’s Professor David Robie broadcast on 96BuzzFM today.

REVIEW: By David Robie

Media coverage of the decapitation and other atrocities against journalists has heightened global awareness of just how dangerous the profession of journalists is when covering war zones, corruption and human rights violations under dictatorships.

“Although violence against journalists is not a new phenomenon, the trend has worsened,” writes New Zealand-based media academic, political scientist and analyst Maria Armoudian in her new book Reporting from the Danger Zone: Frontline journalists, their jobs, and an increasingly perilous future.

Researcher Dr Armoudian, lecturer in politics and international relations at the University of Auckland and author of the 2011 book Kill the Messenger, provides sobering statistics in her “danger zone for journalists” analysis.

Since Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and beheaded by Pakistani extremists in 2002, at least five journalists have been decapitated on the job.

Four years ago, in 2012, Paris-based media freedom advocacy agency Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF) reported a 33 percent rise in journalist killings. This followed the world’s worst single massacre of journalists at Ampatuan on the southern island of Mindanao in the Philippines in November 2009 when at least 34 were killed.

To this day there has been no justice for the families of the victims.

The mounting death toll has been accompanied by a 37 percent rise in abductions (to 119) between 2013 and 2014, writes Armoudian, citing RSF statistics.

The author also summarises other media freedom organisation tallies, noting “hundreds more have been imprisoned of exiled”.

Local journalists bear the brunt
Armoudian goes to great pains to stress that it is the local journalists who bear the brunt of the violence and slayings, “accounting for more than 75 percent of journalists killed or imprisoned, and 90 percent of the abductions.

“The attacks signal a dark era for journalism and a stark departure from previous decades when combatants, at minimum, tolerated journalists, treating them as civilians, and often sought their sympathies.” (p. 1)

What has changed? The social media revolution and the realisation by extremist groups that they no longer need journalists to tell their story.

In fact, making martyrs of journalists make good video footage. They are the “collateral damage” of insurgencies.

This research project was funded by the University of Auckland, which covered a grant from the Faculty Research Fund.

The research for Danger Zone drew largely on interviews with 32 journalists worldwide, including New Zealand’s Jon Stephenson, the country’s only “war correspondent” but nobody from the Asia-Pacific. Twenty four of the journalists agreed to be named in the book while the rest chose to remain anonymous due to the continuing occupational dangers they face.

An Auckland University of Technology journalism graduate, Corazon Miller, now a reporter with The New Zealand Herald (who recently gained a scoop interview with controversial Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte), and a Pacific Media Centre (PMC) associate, also assisted with research and transcripts.

‘Why ethical journalism matters’
Danger Zone has seven chapters with the introduction entitled “Why ethical journalism matters”. The other chapters explore the “origin of stories” (sourcing), the foreign correspondents’ “afflictions”, “staying alive”, “living in a danger zone”, the “first casualty” and a conclusion.

Many of the journalists with long experience recount how difficult and risky the job has become.

Carol Williams, a veteran correspondent who has reported on the break-up of Yugoslavia and the Ukraine conflict, for example, recalls that human rights stories “just happened to occur on my turf”.

She had started off as a foreign correspondent covering nuclear disarmament and the superpower relationship during the Cold War. But she became motivated by witnessing

“some of the most horrible things that were done to children. In Sarajevo, the Serbs would shoot into schools and hospitals. Little six-year-old kids [were] seeing their teachers blown up in front of them …” (p. 21)

Freelance American journalist Dahr Jamail, with little previous journalism experience, was motivated by his “personal outrage”.

“I saw the selling of the [Iraq] War and was completely outraged and decided, ‘Well, I will go in.’ And one thing I can do as a US citizen is go in a report on how this is impacting [on] the Iraqi people because that’s the phase of the story that was totally omitted from the mainstream [media].” (p. 19)

Antidote for hopelessness
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Roy Gutman, author of How We Missed the Story, argued that journalism in conflict zones provides change-makers and hope as an antidote for hopelessness.

“Journalism is one of the few means [that] we, maybe the only means, that I certainly had, or that we have as the general public, to expose horrible practices in the hope that somebody will do something about it. And that’s what journalism is all about.” (p. 21)

He exposed Serbian concentration camps and ethnic cleansing “killing fields” in Bosnia … and “that story did have impact, and have a wallop”.

It is pleasing to see Jon Stephenson, the only journalist to take on the NZ Defence Force establishment on a matter of truth and integrity – and win, featuring in this book several times.

In one chapter, Stephenson explains how difficult it is, especially as a freelancer with limited resources available, to get to a remote and dangerous conflict zone. His form of independent “embedding”, if it can be called that, is by becoming immersed with ordinary people, not the elites.

On his first trip to Afghanistan, Stephenson flew to India, took a train to the Pakistani border, and then made a long walk across the harsh countryside into Pakistan via Wagah.

“I just walked across the border … from the moment I arrived in Pakistan, I started collecting info on what the locals felt … on buses, and even in a hotel, I’d talk to the hotel clerk and … I met an MP from the Pakistani parliament. He invited me to his home in Islamabad. I interviewed the Saudi ambassador to Pakistan who I met on the roof of the Marriott being interviewed by CNN. And I just started there really and worked my way up.” (p. 110)

Stephenson met the family of Abdul Haq, one of the major resistance leaders during the so-called jihad against the Soviets, and ended up in a family compound in Peshawar with some other journalists.

Notable omissions
As well as the analysis, Danger Zone provides some “helpful resources” for journalists. However, while useful, including some key links such as the Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma, there are notable omissions, such as Reporters Sans Frontières/Reporters Without Borders (RSF), which runs an extensive safety programme for freelance journalists in particular. This is a curious oversight because RSF is mentioned in many citations.

Pacific Media Centre, which has been the most active unit on this issue in New Zealand with a Pacific Media Watch freedom project dating back to 1996, and is associated with RSF is also not listed. This is strange given the fact that Danger Zone originated in Auckland and that the PMC, based at the neighbouring university, has produced several publications on conflict and peace journalism.

There is also no mention of the world’s worst atrocity against journalists, the Ampatuan massacre in the Philippines.

However, these are relatively minor criticisms. Essentially this book is inspirational for a new generation of journalists in a troubled era for journalism and a helpful resource for media school libraries.

It is also encouraging that all the interviewees for this project “expressed compassion and empathy for victims of violence, abuse, and failed institutions, and most were vicariously traumatised as a result”. Ethical journalism is alive and defiant in the face of mounting pressures.

But, warns Dr Armoudian, far more work is needed from scholars, international media law experts, “and journalists themselves”, in developing safer ways to secure vital information for democracies.

Reporting from the Danger Zone: Frontline journalists, their jobs, and an increasingly perilous future, by Maria Armoudian. New York and London: Routledge, 2017. 155pp. ISBN 978-1-138-84005-8

References:
Armoudian, Maria (2011). Kill The Messenger: The media’s role in the fate of the world. New York: Prometheus Books.

Gutman, Roy. (2008). How We Missed the Story: Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban, and the hijacking of Afghanistan. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press.

Professor David Robie is director of the Pacific Media Centre at Auckland University of Technology.

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

Above all, David Robie’s Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face: Media, Mayhem  and Human Rights in the Pacific is a damning indictment of the parlous state of affairs in parts of this region.

The book is also a telling account of the continuous failure of leadership on a fairly grand scale, with ordinary people bearing the brunt of it.

Dr Robie, professor of journalism at the Auckland University of Technology and director of the Pacific Media Centre, deals with the vital issues of environmental degradation, media censorship, social chaos and human suffering (largely caused by bad governance), various types of violent and nonviolent conflicts, and colonialism and neocolonialism.

Allegedly apathetic international and local media also attract some flak. Robie, who has a long record of service in the Pacific Islands, laments that a region with so much promise due to its relative tranquility, natural beauty, and richness of culture has been in such a prolonged state of decline, despite the postindependence optimisms.

That tranquility has been shattered by coups, civil uprisings, and corruption; the region’s pristine environments damaged by nuclear testing, wanton resource exploitation, and the spectre of climate change; and indigenous cultures threatened by the twin forces of neocolonialism and neoliberal economics.

These adversities are superimposed on growing incidences of human rights abuses and draconian  media legislation in some countries.

The looming threats of global warming and sea-level rise only complicate matters.

Robie has been reporting these trends in the Asia-Pacific region since the 1980s, both as a journalist and as a media educator, covering self-determination for indigenous minorities in New Caledonia, the struggles in Timor-Leste and West Papua, the Bougainville rebellion, nuclear testing in French Polynesia and the Marshall  Islands, and the ethnically motivated coups in Fiji.

Documented conflicts
Some of these conflicts are documented in his earlier books: Blood on the Banner (1980) highlighted indigenous Pacific Islanders’ struggle against the remnants of colonialism, while Tu Galala: Social Change in the Pacific (1992) depicted a continuing battle against environmental catastrophe, communal unrest, growing militarisation,  ongoing  poverty, colonialism, and neocolonialism.

In Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face, Robie reproduces some of his previous writings as a yardstick and a backdrop for deeper insights into the Pacific’s seemingly intractable problems. Reflecting on his two-and-a-half decades of Asia-Pacific coverage, Robie intones, “Sadly, not a lot has changed” (page 6).

He adds, “Political independence has not necessarily rid the Pacific of the problems that it faces, and in many cases, Pacific political leaders are themselves part of the problem” (27). One of the more startling statistics, at least for the uninitiated, is the deaths of an estimated 120,000 Pacific Islanders in various disputes over the past quarter-century, plus another 200,000 when Timor-Leste is included (311).

If the narrative sounds depressing, it is regrettably all  too predictable: long-term ethnic and political tensions coupled with low growth rates and underdevelopment are usually fodder for violent conflict in fragile states (see Securing a Peaceful Pacific, by John Henderson and Greg Watson  [2005]).

Robie is forthright in putting the blame for these serious issues squarely on various corrupt Pacific Island leaders, whom he views as having been part of the problem for far too long. But it is not only rogue Pacific Island leaders who are causing problems.

Robie also faults leaders from developed countries for their inaction in the face of what he describes as a litany of tortures, murders, exploitation, rapes, military raids, and arbitrary arrests. Most affected is West Papua, where the brutal repression of the native Melanesians by the Indonesian security services is well documented.

The book reminds us why the Pacific is still struggling despite copious amounts of bilateral aid over the decades. It is in the interest of nuclear powers France and the United States to keep their territories in a dependent state in order to further their own military, economic, and geopolitical ambitions.

Exploitation ‘normalised’?
The question is whether the exploitation of Island countries by economically and militarily powerful nations has become normalised. Recently, Australia and New Zealand remained unmoved in the face of Pacific Islander anger over the two countries’ apparent intransigence regarding a joint proposal by Pacific Island nations for a tougher global target on greenhouse gas emissions. Is the world resigned to the bullying and maltreatment of Pacific Island nations by the bigger powers?

Robie does not hide his disappointment with what he sees as the media’s failure to tackle these crucial issues.

He feels that the international media ignore or underreport major issues, such as Indonesian repression of West Papua and the assassination of journalists in the Philippines. In his eyes, Australian media failed to sufficiently probe their country’s 2006 security treaty with Indonesia. Robie insists that the treaty led to Australia’s overt repression of pro-independence Papuan activists.

To be fair to the media, the Indonesian government has banned foreign journalists from West Papua for years. However, Robie argues that the problem goes deeper. He links it to the media’s commercially driven priorities, which he feels supersede social, humanitarian, and public-interest obligations.

Under this journalistic framework, West Papua would be deemed too costly an assignment for sustained coverage, financially and politically.

Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face tries to prod the media’s conscience by highlighting the suffering in the region. Robie advocates a new, more thorough, considered, and inclusive reporting approach, which he describes as “critical development journalism.”

This proposed framework sources grassroots rather than just elite views, emphasises conflict resolution,  promotes  human rights, and supports development (325–330).

Empowered media
Robie’s views are consistent with a growing recognition among some policy makers that an empowered media could play an important role in regional development, especially in politically fragile Island societies. However, new ideas often face resistance.

As a result of challenging the orthodoxy, Robie has attracted criticism from some traditionalists, who believe that concepts such as “peace journalism” contravene media objectivity, what with Bainimarama’s military-backed government in Fiji touting its version of “journalism of hope,” fueling suspicions about government control of the media under the guises of stability and development.

Robie is adamant that critical development journalism is not soft journalism, and neither would it pander to political slogans such as “cultural sensitivity,” which he sees as  a cover-up for abuse of power.

To the contrary, Robie envisions an approach based on a greater level of intensive journalism focused on exposing the truth, reporting on alternatives, and offering solutions. Robie’s central thesis is that the Pacific is caught in a vicious cycle of conflicts and underdevelopment.

Traditional subsistence lifestyles have been under sustained pressure from globalisation and other forces. The media are duty-bound to keep track of these trends and draw attention to them, but their response has largely been inadequate.

Robie is calling for a new media strategy, based on greater journalistic effort, commitment, and foresight. Some may question whether such a new direction is even possible, given media’s entrenched, deadline-driven, profit-focused economic model.

These ideological arguments aside, the post–Cold War trend  of mayhem in the Pacific demands investigation into the media-politics-conflict nexus in the Pacific context. Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face seeks to fill this gap.

Dr Shailendra Singh is a senior lecturer and coordinator of journalism at the University of the South Pacific. This review was commissioned by The Contemporary Pacific journal and has been republished with permission.

• Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face: Media, Mayhem and Human Rights in the Pacific, by David Robie. Auckland: Little Island Press. [Second edition.] ISBN 978-1-8774- 8425-4; 363 pages, maps, notes, bibliography, index. Paper, NZ$40.00.

The United Nations Climate Change Conference last year – more commonly referred to as “COP21”, may have been praised as a “historic turning point” in reducing global warming by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and world leaders alike, but many remain unconvinced world leaders actually care about climate change.

Speaking to Asia Pacific Report earlier this year, both Greenpeace captain Pete Willcox and colleague Sophie Schroder said that world leaders were still hiding behind fossil fuels.

Some may also say that journalism itself is guilty by omission due to what many educators see as poor coverage of climate change.

Such issues were the topic of conversation among panelists and delegates alike at the 4th World Journalism Education Congress (WJEC) when it entered its second day.

Professor David Robie of the Pacific Media Centre set the tone of the panel discussion, questioning what the role of the media and indeed media education was in a post-COP21 world.

He asked whether media currently was giving enough emphasis to the issue, but more importantly to the human rights issues that sit within climate change.

This was a theme readily engaged with by the panelists, Professor Crispin Maslog, chairman of the Asian Media Information and Communication Centre in Manila; Dr Hermin Indah Wahyuni of Universitas Gadjah Mada; National University of Samoa’s Misa Vicky Lepou; and Jose Maria Carlos from the Philippines.

Although speaking to journalism education and climate change in their respective countries – the Philippines, Indonesia and Samoa – all of the panelists said the media was failing in reporting climate change.

Current coverage lacking

Although coverage was not wholly lacking, the panel stressed, improvements are still needed.

Dr Wahyuni said this was the case as current framing centred on a “impact-victim frame” which only built a “easy causal relationship” between disasters and climate change.

Although Carlos also noted that this was the case in his discussion, he said that despite a “high level” of climate change coverage throughout Asia, gaps remained in the “depth of understanding” of the issue by the Filipino public.

He highlighted that this was a concern noted not only by academics and non-governmental organisations, but also journalists themselves.

Misa said the current lack in climate change coverage culminated in a “top-down” effect in newsrooms, in which editors refused to take notice of the issue because it was not “sexy” enough.

She highlighted that this seemed to be the case in Samoa, where climate change was the lesser covered topic in three of its newspapers compared to business.

Misa noted this “reflects the priorities” in the daily news agenda worldwide.

Calls not new
However, this is not the first time such issues have been noted, nor calls for new media strategies in relation to climate change made.

Several academics, journalists and non-governmental actors debated the issue in May for Asia Pacific Report.

Although unable to reach consensus on a precise strategy moving forward, all stressed the importance of changes being made.

Future solutions?
The panelists also did not simply lament the current state of climate change journalism.

Dr Maslog, Dr Wahyuni, Carlos and Lepou all posed possible solutions to the current crisis.

Dr Maslog said that “training on the job” should take place for media practitioners into environmental and disaster reporting.

Dr Wahyuni said the media should continue to act as an observer, but stressed that in doing so it should “keep up with science”.

Carlos agreed, saying “good principles” should continue to be stressed.

Misa said, however, echoing points made by her fellow delegates throughout the WJEC regarding student journalists being at the heart of improvements, said the introduction of a climate change module into the journalism curriculum would “bring life to journalism education”.

Both panelists and delegates agreed, however, that “so much needs to be done”.

In the face of a lack of “political will” from both politicians and journalists alike regarding climate change however, all acknowledged that it may be an uphill battle.

World leaders still ‘hiding behind fossil fuels’, says Rainbow Warrior skipper

Call for new media strategies for climate change journalism

Journalism educators from across the Pacific have raised concerns about the current state of journalism globally at the 4th World Journalism Education Congress (WJEC) at the Auckland University of Technology this week.

The panel of educators from across New Zealand and Australia agreed better practice in journalism is required in order to truly represent diverse communities and those seen as “minorities” and disadvantaged.

Bernard Whelan, manager of Whitireia’s journalism programme, Tara Ross of the University of Canterbury, Professor David Robie of the Pacific Media Centre, and Kathryn Shine of Western Australia’s Curtin University, all said better practice could be achieved through instilling improved methods with young and aspiring journalists. 

This echoed points raised by both Dr Lee Duffield and journalism educator Dr Philip Cass on Wednesday at the JEERA preconference that students were at the heart of developments in the industry.

‘Bicultural responsibility’
Whelan noted how the mainstay of American news values left no apparent room in the mainstream media to explore more “indigenous” and alternative models of reporting.

He stressed journalists, particularly in New Zealand regarding Māori, had a “bicultural responsibility” to at least consider these forms and hoped that through his PhD research a bicultural model for journalism education could be “deeply ingrained” into Whitireia’s programme.

Ross noted how students needed to report with and not on the community, which was not currently the norm as it was different from “normative” educational process.

She stressed the importance of students understanding the consequences of their stories and noted how they need a measure of accountability.

This evoked a vocal response from one of the delegates present, who stressed that a journalist’s stories are not momentary for those that are featured, as the story has a “lasting, lifelong digital attachment”.

Negative focus detrimental
Shine however, raised the important issue of the prevalence of negativity in the media and the media’s seeming inability to pull away from the “if it bleeds, it leads” mentality that continues to drive the mainstream news cycle.

She said such a negative focus might mean the media was “out of sync” with the very community it sought to inform. This echoed sentiments delivered earlier by Ross, who noted that what the media perceived as the community needing was not necessarily what it wanted.

Shine also highlighted the importance of pulling away from such negative stories and perceptions with her research into teachers’ perceptions of the news and journalists.

She found more than 80 percent of teachers believed coverage of their work was negative, while 60 percent said “sweeping generalisations” resulted in media coverage being biased.

More than half concluded that the media did not convey the realities of both schools and teaching, she said.

Such revelations were concerning, as it led the community to question the credibility of the media.

In the Q and A session following the panel, one delegate raised the concern that such issues in the coverage of education posed serious dilemmas for the potential influx of young journalists, as “teachers have a fundamental influence in students career choices”.

Independent media important
Pacific Media Centre director Professor David Robie drew on the examples of Pacific Scoop and Asia Pacific Report in a case study to stress the importance of the presence of independent, alternative media in journalism schools for students to explore their potential.

Dr Robie highlighted how such media demonstrated best practice as a “cornerstone of democracy”.

He said it was integral to involve students in such a process, and noted the “innovative” work that had been achieved by postgraduate students on the PMC’s Asia-Pacific Journalism Studies course over the past few years, including missions to the Pacific.

Students from the course had covered the the 2014 general election in Fiji — the first since the 2006 militrary coup — and had assignments involving climate change in Fiji, and the Pacific Islands Forum in the Cook Islands and Vanuatu.

Both the panelists and delegates noted that if changes were not made to dominant paradigms and mainstays of journalism soon that the “rubber would hit the road” leading to an internal moral crises within the industry.

• WJEC16: Role of journalism students
• Asia Pacific Report

Interview: With Dr David Robie
Interviewer: Selwyn Manning
Date: July 8, 2015

Subject: 30 years since the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior and

Launch of David Robie’s book Eyes of Fire (fifth edition)

Eyes of Fire publisher Little Island Press: littleisland.co.nz/books/eyes-fire

Eyes of Fire microsite: eyes-of-fire.littleisland.co.nz

EveningReport.nz run sheet and programme:
http://eveningreport.nz/2015/07/08/evening-report-rainbow-warrior-series-video-interview-with-david-robie-on-book-launch-eyes-of-fire/

Welcome to Evening Report. This Friday, July 10 marks 30 years since French DGSE operatives exploded two bombs destroying the Greenpeace flagship…. the Rainbow Warrior at Marsden Wharf in Auckland harbour. And on Friday July 10, journalist and academic Dr David Robie will launch the fifth edition of his book, Eyes of Fire.

The book is a rich account of the events surrounding the Rainbow Warrior affair.

And earlier today he joined me to discuss Eyes of Fire… why he was onboard the vessel on its last journey through the Pacific, his enduring memories of the time, and what lessons the Rainbow Warrior affair offers us now and in the future.

Transcript summary

Reviewed by David Robie

Merdeka and the Morning Star: Civil resistance in West Papua, by Jason MacLeod. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press. 2015. 284 pp. ISBN 978-0-7022-5376-8

FIVE years ago the Pacific Media Centre and Pacific Media Watch published a “state of media freedom report” – the first such documentation in the Pacific region – and the most devastating section was about West Papua (Perrottet & Robie, 2011, 2012). The harrowing account of human rights violations forces and abuses of freedom of speech by the Indonesian military and security forces eclipsed comparable reports from the Pacific, including Fiji which was at the time a cause célèbre for free press champions.

The theme of this report echoed many articles I have written over the years highlighting the “black or blind spot” demonstrated by New Zealand media neglect of covering West Papua and the self-determination cause (see Robie, 2011). Since then much has changed.

A New Zealand journalist, Paul Bensemann, went undercover to West Papua in 2013 and reported on accusations over New Zealand “aid that kills” in the region (Bensemann, 2014). This was followed up by both Māori Television’s Native Affairs reporter Adrian Stevanon (with researcher Karen Abplanalp) – the first NZ TV crew to visit West Papua in a half century (MTS, 2015) – and Radio New Zealand’s Johnny Blades and Koroi Hawkins (RNZ, 2015) taking up the challenge of President Joko Widowo’s controversial pledge to “open up” West Papua to the world’s media. But the rest of the New Zealand media remained unmoved.

It is thus refreshing and timely to welcome Australian educator, journalist, organiser and researcher Jason MacLeod’s new book, Merdeka and the Morning Star: Civil resistance in West Papua, based on his doctoral thesis and 14 years of research on the region. This is essential reading for journalists, civil society activists and policymakers concerned over West Papua.

It recounts five decades of Indonesian oppression, but it is also a comprehensive analysis of hopes and possibilities for the future.

Citizen journalism
Ironically, 2011 – the year of the Pacific media freedom report on Papua – heralded a dramatic growth of citizen journalism and social media exposure of the West Papuan cause on the global stage. Since then, international media and public interest has grown sharply – even if it remains muted in New Zealand – leading to the historic inclusion of West Papua as an observer with the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) in the Solomon Islands in 2015.
Although I was highly critical of Fiji and Papua New Guinea on my media blog Café Pacific over their “betrayal” of the Melanesian cause at the time, inspired leadership by host prime minister Manasseh Sogavare in Honiara ultimately proved decisive (Robie, 2015).
As MacLeod recounts, faced with intransigence by the Jakarta government, Papuan leaders “escalated tactics”:

On the last day of the Third Papuan People’s Congress – a three-day gathering of unarmed resistance groups in October 2011 – Papuan leaders formed the NFRWP (National Federal Republic of West Papua) and declared independence. The response from the security forces was swift and brutal. About an hour after the congress concluded, the security forces opened fire. Three Papuans were shot dead. Two were fatally stabbed. Three hundred people were arrested and beaten. Six leaders were jailed, charged with treason. The police – who shot, stabbed, beat and tortured people – received warning letters (p. 155).

The killing of protesters at the congress – reported widely internationally by mobile phone, Facebook, YouTube and activist emailing lists – stirred anger among Papuans, both at home and abroad, and shocked international supporters. PMC Online reported the outrage at the time with embedded footage even though the killings were largely ignored by the New Zealand media (PMC Online, 2011).

According to MacLeod, the attack by the Indonesian forces on unarmed Papuans and an earlier occupation of the provincial parliament in June 2010 “were also evidence that the social media revolution had well and truly arrived in West Papua”.

Biak massacre
MacLeod contrasts these events with the Biak massacre in July 1998 when the Indonesian military opened fire on activists who had been protesting for days, raising the Morning Star and singing songs of independence, when more than 100 people were killed, raped or tortured (Peacock, 2013). A leader, Filep Karma, was jailed for 15 years for raising the free Papuan flag.

“It took weeks and months for the news to get out,” notes MacLeod. “Even now we do not have a comprehensive forensic account of what happened” in spite of the Elsham Papua investigation (1999) and “Bloody Biak” report. After the October 2011 shootings and reprisals, “the news was instantaneous, even though no international journalists were present” (p. 155)

MacLeod refers to the “surprising announcement” by President Widodo about foreign journalists would become free to visit West Papua, but qualifies this with the observation: “As long as the Indonesian government values propaganda over a free press, the battle for open access to West Papua will be ongoing.” He notes that the Surat Jalam system through which police and intelligence services monitor foreign visitors remains in force (p. 156).

The main thrust of MacLeod’s book is making a case for nonviolence civil resistance by Papuans and their international supporters, saying that the armed struggle has achieved little, whereas some significant gains have been made by mass mobilisation and civil disobedience.

The book is divided into six chapters as well as a prologue, epilogue and postscript (updating the struggle) with a “now we take our message to the world” theme. Chapter one outlines the research framework and methodology, two examines the historical and political dynamics of the conflict, three offers alternative visions of merdeka – freedom and what it means for West Papua, four looks at civil resistance, five outlines the transition from armed to unarmed resistance, while chapter six provides a framework for “nonviolent liberation”.

In the final chapter, MacLeod highlights successful campaigns of nonviolent resistance ranging between localised struggles like the Freeport mineworkers strikes in 2007 and 2011 and the unified push for membership of the MSG that is “accelerating the internationalisation of the struggle” (p. 192). Some specific examples he cites are:

• Papua Land of Peace campaign for inter-communal harmony and peaceful dialogue.
• Hand Back Otsus (failed special autonomy status) campaign.
• The devastating Freeport-McMoRan mine strikes and the Tongoi Papua campaign.
• Public declaration of independence in October 2011.
• The campaign to become members of the MSG.

The author also highlights the successful Mama-Mama campaign by women traders to secure their own marketplace in the heart of Jayapura, and the shutdown of BHP Billiton’s planned Gag Island mine by environmentalists, indigenous and human rights campaigners, ongoing actions to release political prisoners in West Papua and to support open media access also get strong support in this book.

MacLeod also points out the reality of how civil resistance threatens vested interests and is highly critical of a narrow view of “economic development” as imposed by Jakarta without consultation with the Papuans.

It undermines Jakarta’s legitimacy, and imposes heightened economic and political costs on the Indonesian state. Newfound international interest is starting to provoke greater political attention from Jakarta. It is also clear that solutions focused solely on economics will not fix the problem just as economic progress has not quelled the clamour for independence in Kanaky (New Caledonia) (p. 193).

While conceding that conditions are currently not favourable for a fully independent West Papua, MacLeod presents an argument for greater people’s mobilisation and the growth of citizen media that could still achieve much. Papuans need to emphasise their ethnic distinctiveness “without failing prey to narrow ethno-nationalism”. He points out that while the international system of states is “far from unraveling”, after independence in East Timor, Kosovo, South Sudan and the breakdown of Syria and Iraq, some post-colonial boundaries are perhaps more shaky than they used to be.

So, while an independent West Papua appears highly unlikely, it would be presumptuous to think it will never happen (p. 232).

References
Bensemann, Paul (2014, January 27). New Zealand accused of providing “aid that kills” in West Papua. Pacific Media Centre Online. Available at: www.pmc.aut.ac.nz/articles/new-zealand-accused-providing-aid-kills-west-papua

Elsham Papua (1999). Graves Without Names. Names Without Graves. Cited at www.biak.tribunal.org

Māori Television (MTS) (2015, September 26). West Papua Native Affairs offers first NZ TV crew report for 50 years. Pacific Media Watch 9438. Available at: www.pmc.aut.ac.nz/pacific-media-watch/west-papua-native-affairs-offers-first-nz-tv-crew-report-50-years-9438

Pacific Media Centre Online (2011, October 20). Indonesian repression slated in new Pacific media freedom report. Available at: www.pmc.aut.ac.nz/articles/west-papa-repression-reflected-new-pacific-media-freedom-report

Peacock, Matt (2013, December 16). Searching for the truth about a massacre in West Papua. ABC 7.30 Report. Transcript available at: www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2013/s3912701.htm

Perrottet, Alex & Robie, David (2011). Pacific Media Freedom: A status report. Pacific Journalism Review, 17(2): 148-186. Available at: www.pjreview.info/articles/special-report-pacific-media-freedom-2011-status-report-513

Perrottet, Alex & Robie, David (2012). Pacific Media Freedom: A status report. Pacific Journalism Monographs No 1. Available at: http://www.pmc.aut.ac.nz/research/pacific-media-freedom-2011-status-report

Radio New Zealand (RNZ) (2015, October 28). Visit to West Papua. Available at: www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/nights/audio/201776455/visit-to-west-papua

Robie, David (2011, October 23). Papua a media black spot. New Matilda. Available at: newmatilda.com/2011/10/23/papua-media-black-spot/

—

Reviewed by David Robie

Saving Independent Journalism: 30 Years Defending Media (39pp); Hostile Climate of Environmental Journalists (27pp). 2015. Paris, France: Reporters Without Borders.

THIRTY years ago, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) began its global campaign for the protection of journalists and against propaganda as a fledgling NGO in the southern French city of Montpellier. As it declares in the editorial of this publication marking the event, RSF has been “cheekily climbing the barricades, boldly waving freedom’s banner, proclaiming the virtues of journalism, supporting heroes, dispensing safety equipment, funding resistance and applying pressure in the palaces where the laws are written” (p. 3).

Three decades on and the now Paris-based agency has matured into a “big little NGO”. It has consultative status with the United Nations, UNESCO, Council of Europe and the Independent Organisation of La Francophonie. Saving Independent Journalism recounts RSF’s growth and many high points of its media freedom campaigns.

The agency communicates in English, French, Spanish, Arabic and Farsi daily and frequently uses Russian and Chinese as well.

It has correspondents in 130 countries – including Australia, NZ and five Pacific countries, eight autonomous national sections and bureau in 12 cities around the world. Two more in the pipeline for Hong Kong and Sao Paulo.

The agency has made many submissions and interventions over press freedom in the South Pacific, notably over Fiji during eight years of military dictatorship from 2006-2014.

Among countless media people RSF has defended are Hla Hla Win, a young woman Burmese journalist sentenced to 27 years in prison for interviewing Buddhist monks during the 2007 “Safron Revolution”; Mexican publisher Jesús Lemus Barajas of El Tiempo newspaper who disappeared while investigating a drug cartel (he was found in jail on trumped up charges and three of his lawyers were murdered); Saudi blogger Raïf Badawi who was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1000 lashes over a charge of apostasy; and award-winning Chinese journalist Gao Yu who has been imprisoned since 2014 for sending a copy of an internal Community Party memo to a foreign news organisation.

RSF secretary general Christophe Deloire argues: “Whether totalitarian … violent or soft, information control is taking unprecedented forms that free citizens must oppose with all their strength.” He also offers a strong message for supporters.

The second RSF title reviewed here is very timely, coinciding with the COP21 climate summit in Paris. Hostile Climate for Environmental Journalists has investigated threats to freedom of information about the environment rather than risks to the environment itself:

“The [3000] journalists accredited to COP21 [were] in no danger (except the danger of pressure from lobbyists) but the same cannot be said of many of their colleagues, who are often exposed to terrible dangers.”

The report shows that at least 10 journalists covering environmental issues were murdered between 2010 (the last RSF report) and 2015 – three-fifths of them in the Asia-Pacific region: Cambodia (2), India (2), Indonesia (2), Philippines (2) and Russia (2).

As well as documenting the murder with impunity cases, the report highlights the case of eight “green journalists in red zones” in Algeria, India, Italy, Liberia, Maldives, Russia and Vietnam.

RSF cites gagging by countries such as China, Ecuador and Canada, and notes that many environmental journalists are forming associations with the aim of improving the quality of their stories and protecting their members in the field.

But this more ambitious target will be beyond our reach within a decade or two at current rates of fossil fuel use around the world.

Beyond how achievable the goals are, and at what cost they can be achieved, they are aggressive and consistent with minimising the dangerous interference of human activities on the climate system.

The Paris agreement also recognises the significant gap between the actions needed to stabilise global temperatures and the current national mitigation pledges through 2030. As written now, those pledges won’t keep average temperatures below 2°C, let alone 1.5°C. That’s why the document encourages nations to strengthen their targets in the near future.

The agreement focuses not just on mitigation activities, but on adaptation, too. Adaptation includes the many activities that reduce the costs and consequences of climate change that will occur even after mitigation.

The Paris agreement calls for substantial efforts to develop new capabilities for adaptation and the funding needed to support them. Even climate stabilisation below 2°C will, and has already begun to, bring climate impacts, particularly to the most vulnerable nations and communities.

And, as always, under the Framework Convention on Climate Change, the document acknowledges the dangers of looking at the world through the single lens of climate change. We need to safeguard other critical services such as food production, water resources, and biodiversity.

Some shortfalls
The agreement missed the opportunity to establish some mid-term goals, sharpening the milestones required after 2030. We know that the current mitigation pledges to 2030 are not enough to keep global temperatures below 2°C. The hard work of mid-term goals lies ahead of us.

A specific emissions mitigation target for 2050, for instance, would have benchmarked where emissions need to be to keep temperatures below 2°C by end of this century. Intermediate goals are critical for keeping us on track with compatible pathways.

Instead, the agreement settled on the goal of achieving a balance between sources and sinks of greenhouse gases during the second half of this century. This goal is based on the results of the last assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The “balance” acknowledges that we could still have some greenhouse gas emissions in the future but these emissions would need to be offset by the removal of an equivalent amount of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. We interpret this language as being the same as the better known requirement of “zero net emissions”.

An important shortcoming of calling for achieving a greenhouse gas balance “in the second half of the century” is that it leaves open the possibility that the balance might not be achieved until 2100. This more lenient approach would almost certainly fail to keep global temperatures under 2°C.

An additional shortcoming concerns the contentious issue of financial payments and incentives. The agreement recognises the fact that nations, mostly developing, representing almost half of all greenhouse gas emissions don’t yet have a plan to peak (initially) and then reduce their emissions unless climate financing is available. The text of the agreement is vague and does not clarify how such funds will be obtained, distributed, and monitored.

Let’s get to work
To enter into force, the Agreement will need to be ratified by at least 55 nations under the UN climate convention. These parties must also be responsible for at least 55 percent of total global greenhouse gas emissions.

It took years for the Kyoto Protocol to be ratified, so it is important this agreement be ratified quickly. The longer this is delayed, the faster countries will have to reduce emissions.

The “55 percent of emissions” number is an interesting one. Two countries, China and the United States, are responsible for 44.5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. It is technically possible therefore for the agreement to enter into force if all countries except the US and China ratify the deal, but that outcome seems unlikely.

Ratification in China will hinge on its perceived effects on economic development.

Approval in the US will largely depend on a legal determination of whether the agreement must be ratified by the Senate. This was a major reason the US has not ratified the Kyoto Protocol.

Even if 55 countries representing 55 percent of global emissions ratify the agreement, it will do little to achieve the goal of limiting warming to 2°C. Unless countries covering more than 90 percent of global emissions ratify the agreement, there is little chance of success in reaching the ambitious climate goals.

The need for immediate action includes raising at least US$100 billion per year by 2020. This challenge is enormous, but necessary, if developing countries are to forego the fossil-fuel-intensive development that characterised wealthier nations in the past.

And finally, we need to build new capacity for climate adaption, particularly in poorer, more vulnerable nations. Climate change is already here, and its fingerprint in many recent climate extremes is clear. All countries and communities need new capacity and knowledge to strengthen their resilience and sustainable development pathways.

Pep Canadell is a CSIRO scientist, and executive director of Global Carbon Project, CSIRO; Rob Jackson is professor of earth system science, Stanford University. Republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons Attribution NoDerivatives licence.

Source: Pacific Media Watch 9521

Read David Robie’s Cafe Pacific

Report by Pacific Media Watch

Item: 9498

David Robie
France detonated 193 nuclear tests in the South Pacific, at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls, before halting the tests in 1996 in the face of Pacific-wide protests. On 10 July 1985, French secret agents bombed the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour, killing photographer Fernando Pereira, in a futile bid to stop a protest flotilla going to Moruroa. Journalist David Robie, who was on board the Rainbow Warrior for more than 10 weeks of her last voyage, coming ashore in Auckland just two days before the bombing, told his story in the book Eyes of Fire. Here he reflects on the 20-year legal struggle to prevent the French spies from gagging reportage of their guilty plea from public television and the lingering secrecy about the health legacy of nuclear tests in the Pacific.

SYDNEY: (Pen Sydney/Pacific Media Watch): EXCERPT: This seems to be a remarkable year of memories and reflection for freedom of speech and bearing witness struggles  in  the  Pacific  region.  The  townsfolk  and  children  of  the  remote  Timor-Leste border town of Balibó have recently marked the 40th anniversary of the murder of five young Australian-based television newsmen dubbed forever as the Balibó Five.

On  16  October  1975,  the  five  journalists  –  Greg  Shackleton,  Gary  Cunningham  (New  Zealand),  Tony  Stewart, Malcolm Rennie and Brian Peters (both British) from  channels  Seven  and  Nine  –  were  reporting  on Indonesian  special  forces  incursions  into  independent Timorese territory.

They were brutally killed with impunity. Weeks later, a sixth journalist from Australia, Roger East,  who  ventured  to  Timor-Leste  to  investigate  the murders and set up an independent Timorese news agency, was himself executed by the invading Indonesian forces on  8  December  1975.  Their  fate  has  been  told  in  the compelling 2009 Robert Connolly film Balibó.

But the impunity lingers on, not only for the journalist atrocities but for more than 150,000 Timorese victims of the 24 years
of Indonesian occupation.

In July, President Joko Widodo of Indonesia appeared to have turned a new leaf on media relations over the two Melanesian provinces that collectively make up the West Papua  region  by  declaring  an  “open  door”  visa  policy for foreign journalists. This is far from the reality. Māori Television recently sent a television crew there – the first New Zealand TV journalists to visit West Papua in more than 50 years – to bear witness.

But their stories, such as a report on a New Zealand aid-assisted thriving kumara (sweet potato) industry in the Baliem Valley, were hardly a testimony to media freedom.

Bearing witness
For me, as a journalist and media educator who has worked in the Pacific region for almost four decades, the issue of media freedom and bearing witness that has outweighed all  others is  the  bombing  of  the  global  environmental Greenpeace  flagship Rainbow Warrior by  French  secret agents on 10 July 1985 and the death on board of Portuguese-born Dutch photojournalist Fernando Pereira.

The 30th anniversary of the sabotage, which was New Zealand’s first and only example of state terrorism, came and went in a rather muted fashion (compared with events marking 20 years, for example).

Read the full article

Source: Pacific Media Watch 9498

By Belen Fernandez

AS NEWS arrived of terror attacks in Paris that ultimately left more than 120 people dead, US President Barack Obama characterised the situation as “heartbreaking” and an assault “on all of humanity.”

But his presidential sympathy was conspicuously absent the previous day when terror attacks in Beirut left more than 40 dead. Predictably, Western media and social media were much less vocal about the slaughter in Lebanon.

And while many of us are presumably aware, to some degree, of the discrepancy in value assigned to people’s lives on the basis of nationality and other factors, the back-to-back massacres in Beirut and Paris served to illustrate without a doubt the fact that, when it comes down to it, “all of humanity” doesn’t necessarily qualify as human.

Of course, there’s more to the story than the relative dehumanisation of the Lebanese as compared with their French counterparts. There’s also the prevailing notion in the West that — as far as bombs, explosions, and killings go — Lebanon is simply One of Those Places Where Such Things Happen.

The same goes for places like Iraq, to an even greater extent, which is part of the reason we don’t see Obama mourning attacks on all of humanity every time he reads the news out of Baghdad.

The situation in Iraq is also obviously more complicated — not to mention the ones in Afghanistan, Yemen, and other locations on the receiving end of US military atrocities. Why doesn’t it break the president’s heart to order drone attacks and other life-extinguishing maneuvers?

Short answer: because it’s not the job of superpowers to engage in self-reflection. Thus, Obama’s selective vision enables him to observe in the case of Paris: “We’ve seen an outrageous attempt to terrorise innocent civilians.”

Superficial Western media
It bears mentioning that, in the case of Beirut, the city’s multi-sectarian composition has allowed for varying intra-metropolitan gradations of humanity, available for detection by the Orientalist eye. It’s safe to surmise that, had the recent suicide bombings taken place in, say, an upscale Beirut nightclub, beach resort, or other Lebanese venue about which the superficial Western media love to exclaim, the human fallout may have aroused more audience interest.

Indeed, had the victims been more “like us” than the otherised, eerie and criminal-sounding inhabitants of Beirut’s southern suburbs where the bombings occurred — incessantly described by the sheeplike media as a “Hezbollah stronghold” or “Hezbollah bastion” — they’d have stood a much greater chance of breaking our hearts.

Hell, we might have even seen references to Beirut’s romanticised former identity as the “Paris of the Middle East.”

Following Friday’s attacks in the Paris of Europe, meanwhile, Facebook users in the vicinity of the city were encouraged to check in as “safe” — an option not made available the previous day to Facebook users in Beirut.

In her own Facebook status today, Professor Laleh Khalili of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London noted that, while the online social networking service had also offered the safety check-in after this year’s earthquakes in Nepal, Chile, and Afghanistan/Pakistan, the same “button is not offered to people in Palestine or Syria or Iraq or Lebanon and countless other zones of destruction”.

Stripping of politics
Khalili added: “What might including Paris in the rank of ‘natural’ disasters mean other than a stripping of its politics, a kind of anti-politics that sees this as a story of good vs. evil or of suffering but without a history? Those other places are ‘political’ and their victims cannot be invoked in [Facebook’s] supposedly ‘neutral’ milieu.”

As for the clearly political repercussions of the Paris massacre, which French President François Hollande has blamed on the Islamic State group, persecuted refugees and minorities naturally stand to bear the brunt of the inevitable racist and xenophobic backlash — a godsend for right-wing European politicians and organisations, keen to exploit the bloodshed to the max in the service of their own sociopathic visions.

In its live updates on the aftermath, the British Guardian reported today that “Poland has announced it will no longer take refugees via an EU programme, in a deeply controversial statement which linked the [refugee] crisis to the killings in Paris.”

Obstacles multiply
Unfortunately, however, there are a whole lot of people who won’t see such a move as controversial at all. And as the obstacles to refugee existence multiply, what’s often forgotten is that events like the Paris massacre pale quantitatively in comparison to the situations many refugees are fleeing — ones in which the West itself is often implicated.

In a world far superior to the one we have, the scenario might qualify as an assault on all humanity.

The fact that it doesn’t is truly heartbreaking.

Reprinted from Green Left magazine and TeleSUR English. Belen Fernandez is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, published by Verso. She is a contributing editor at Jacobin magazine.

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Thursday, November 5, 2015

Item: 9472

Lisa Er
INTERVIEW: AUCKLAND (Green Planet FM / Pacific Media Watch): Freedom of the press describes the right to gather, publish, and distribute information and ideas without government restriction.

This right encompasses freedom from censorship, but does our media really have complete freedom in New Zealand? We need to ask this question when we see the government’s response to Nicky Hager’s investigative journalism, and Channel 7 is removed from TV in spite of having half a million viewers.

A journalist was recently no longer required by the New Zealand Herald after writing an honest critique of the TPPA, and what happened to Campbell Live and why?

David Robie, professor of communication studies and Pacific journalism, director of the Pacific Media Centre, journalist and author answers these questions and more.

Are journalists part of a movement that merely holds up a mirror to society with all its cynicism, or are they part of a process of empowerment and action for a better world?

Why are certain topics ignored? Perhaps the headings would not be sexy enough. Perhaps sport and tabloid news are appealing to the masses more than educated comment on important events in this country and around the world.

Have the corporations bought the larger media outlets? How do economic issues affect the impartiality of the media?

Optimistic view
In spite of all this, David Robie is optimistic about the work of “our last TV public broadcaster” – Maori TV.

However, he is concerned for his students as to what sort of career they can expect in New Zealand’s media.

Political crises and indigenous issues throw a spotlight on a region’s news media and its role in democracy.

David Robie champions media scrutiny in the Pacific and believes more research will contribute much to the communications industry. This is an area where young journalists can go and experience stories that need to be reported, but they might be dangerous assignments.

For example in West Papua people are being arrested and detained for taking part in peaceful activities.

The victims of security force harassment and violence in West Papua are predominantly those who have publicly expressed their support for self-determination or independence.

We hear little about this in New Zealand, although Māori Television did a story recently. The journalists were escorted by the Indonesian authorities, however.

Embarrassing Indonesia
Perhaps if the world’s mainstream media reported on this it would embarrass Indonesia into modifying their behaviour somewhat.

Also “Understanding our neighbours is vitally important and researching and publishing on the media is an important goal for good governance for the region,” says Professor Robie.

Having been a journalist on board the Rainbow Warrior on the voyage leading up to the bombing in 1985, David has always had an interest in peace.

He talks on how peace journalism can challenge “war voyeurism”.

Is a peace keeper keeping peace peacefully when carrying a gun, for example.

Peace journalism explains conflicts and the reasons for them in some depth. It gives all parties a voice, whereas war journalism is propaganda oriented and is mainly concerned with victory.

“The idea of peace journalism troubles some journalists – mostly due to a lifetime of relying on ‘conflict’ as a core news value. This is surprising, because in this era of ‘infotainment’ and super-hype in news media, this peace notion is much more about reasserting basic news values such as truth, context, fairness and depth.”

Reporters and editors have the choice to create opportunities for society to consider non violent responses to conflict.

This is an example of where journalists can be a part of the solution and not part of the problem.

* David Robie has written 10 books on the region’s politics and media, including Mekim Nius: South Pacific politics, media and education; Eyes of Fire, a book about the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior, and Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face: Media, Mayhem and Human Rights in the Pacific (Little Island Press, 2014). He was awarded the 2005 PIMA Pacific Media Freedom Award and the 2015 Asia Communication Award.

Full broadcast podcast – 1hr

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 New Zealand Licence.

Report by David Robie. This article was first published on Café Pacific
Professor David Robie’s speech at the University of the South Pacific 21st Anniversary Journalism Awards on 30 October 2015:

Kia ora tatou and ni sa bula vinaka,

FIRSTLY, I wish to acknowledge the people of Fiji for returning this wonderful country to democracy last year, and also to the University of the South Pacific and Dr Shailendra Singh and his team for inviting me here to speak at this 21st Anniversary Journalism Awards event.


[Acknowledgements to various university and media VIPs]

As I started off these awards here at the University of the South Pacific in 1999 during an incredibly interesting and challenging time, it is a great honour to return for this event marking the 21st anniversary of the founding of the regional Pacific journalism programme.

Thus it is also an honour to be sharing the event with Monsieur Michel Djokovic, the Ambassador of France given how important France has been for this programme.

France and the Ecole Supérieure de Journalisme de Lille (ESJ) played a critically important role in helping establish the journalism degree programme at USP in 1994, with the French government funding the inaugural senior lecturer, François Turmel, and providing a substantial media resources grant to lay the foundations.

I arrived in Fiji four years later in 1998 as Head of Journalism from Papua New Guinea and what a pleasure it was working with the French Embassy on a number of journalism projects at that time, including an annual scholarship to France for journalism excellence.

These USP awards this year take place during challenging times for the media industry with fundamental questions confronting us as journalism educators about what careers we are actually educating journalists for.

When I embarked on a journalism career in the 1960s, the future was clear-cut and one tended to specialise in print, radio or television. I had a fairly heady early career being the editor at the age of 24 of an Australian national weekly newspaper, the Sunday Observer, owned by an idealistic billionaire, and we were campaigning against the Vietnam War.

Our chief foreign correspondent then was a famous journalist, Wilfred Burchett, who at the end of the Second World War 70 years ago reported on the Hiroshima nuclear bombing as a “warning to the world”.

By 1970, I was chief subeditor of the Rand Daily Mail in South Africa, the best newspaper I ever worked on and where I learned much about human rights and social justice, which has shaped my journalism and education values ever since.

I travelled overland for a year across Africa as a freelance journalist, working for agencies such as Gemini, and crossed the Sahara Desert in a Kombi van. It was critically risky even then, but doubly dangerous today.

Eventually I ended up with Agence France-Presse as an editor in Paris and worked there for several years. In fact, it was while working with AFP in Europe that I took a “back door” interest in the Pacific and that’s where my career took another trajectory when I joined the Auckland Star and became foreign news editor.

The point of me giving you some brief moments of my career in a nutshell is to stress how portable journalism was as a career in my time. But now it is a huge challenge for you young graduates going out into the marketplace.

You don’t even know whether you’re going to be called a “journalist”, or a “content provider” or a “curator” of news – or something beyond being a “news aggregator” – such is the pace of change with the digital revolution. And the loss of jobs in the media industry continues at a relentless pace.

Fortunately, in Fiji, the global industry rationalisations and pressures haven’t quite hit home locally yet. However, on the other hand you have very real immediate concerns with the Media Industry Development Decree and the “chilling’ impact that it has on the media regardless of the glossy mirage the government spin doctors like to put on it.

We had a very talented young student journalist here in Fiji a few weeks ago, Niklas Pedersen, from Denmark, on internship with local media, thanks to USP and Republika’s support. He remarked about his experience:

I have previously tried to do stories in Denmark and New Zealand – two countries that are both in the top 10 on the RSF World Press Freedom Index, so I was a bit nervous before travelling to a country that is number 93 and doing stories there ….

Fiji proved just as big a challenge as I had expected. The first day I reported for duty … I tried to pitch a lot of my story ideas, but almost all of them got shut down with the explanation that it was impossible to get a comment from the government on the issue.
And therefore the story was never going to be able to get published.

At first this stunned me, but I soon understood that it was just another challenge faced daily by Fiji journalists.

[Screening of Niklas Pedersen news story on climate change – Pacific leaders speak out with one voice on climate change]

This was a nice piece of storytelling on climate change on an issue that barely got covered in New Zealand legacy media.

Australia and New Zealand shouldn’t get too smug about media freedom in relation to Fiji, especially with Australia sliding down the world rankings over asylum seekers for example.

New Zealand also shouldn’t get carried away over its own media freedom situation. Three court cases this year demonstrate the health of the media and freedom of information in this digital era is in a bad way.

•    Investigative journalist Jon Stephenson this month finally won undisclosed damages from the NZ Defence Ministry for defamation after trying to gag him over an article he wrote for Metro magazine which implicated the SAS in the US torture rendition regime in Afghanistan.

•    Law professor Jane Kelsey at the University of Auckland filed a lawsuit against Trade Minister Tim Groser over secrecy about the controversial Trans Pacific Partnership (the judgment ruled the minister had disregarded the law); and

•    Investigative journalist Nicky Hager and author of Dirty Politics sought a judicial review after police raided his home last October, seizing documents, computers and other materials. Hager is known in the Pacific for his revelations about NZ spying on its neighbours.

Also, the New Zealand legacy media has consistently failed to report well on two of the biggest issues of our times in the Pacific – climate change and the fate of West Papua.

One of the ironies of the digital revolution is that there is an illusion of growing freedom of expression and information in the world, when in fact the reverse is true.

These are bleak times with growing numbers of journalists being murdered with impunity, from the Philippines to Somalia and Syria.

The world’s worst mass killing of journalists was the so-called Maguindanao, or Ampatuan massacre (named after the town whose dynastic family ordered the killings), when 32 journalists were brutally murdered in the Philippines in November 2009.

[Screening of Philippine National Union of Journalists video on the Ampatuan massacre – Keep the story alive]

But increasingly savage slayings of media workers in the name of terrorism are becoming the norm, such as the outrageous attack on Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in Paris in January. Two masked gunmen assassinated 12 media workers – including five of France’s most talented cartoonists – at the satirical magazine and a responding policeman.

In early August this year, five masked jihadists armed with machetes entered the Dhaka home of a secularist blogger in Bangladesh and hacked off his head and hands while his wife was forced into a nearby room.

According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists in figures released this year, 506 journalists were killed in the decade between 2002 and 2012, almost double the 390 slain in the previous decade. (Both Reporters Sans Frontières and Freedom House have also reported escalating death tolls and declines in media freedom.)

While there appear to be far more democracies in the world than ever before, the CPJ’s executive director Joel Simon says there is a sinister new threat.

And this is in some respects more troublesome than the old style dictatorships. Simon describes this new scourge in a recent book, The New Censorship: Inside the Global Battle for Press Freedom, as the ‘democratators’, those leaders who profess to be democratic but are actually subverting their mirage of open governance. As Simon says:

“What are these differences between dictators and democratators? Dictators rule by force. Democratators rule by manipulation. Dictators impose their will. Democratators govern with the support of the majority. Dictators do not claim to be democrats – at least credibly. Democratators always do. Dictators control information. Democratators manage it.”

Simon points out that democratators win elections yet while they may be free, they are not really fair, meaning they are decided by fraud.

He has a growing list of leaders that fit this label, including Latin American “populists” like Rafael Correa of Equador and Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, “European backsliders” like Viktor Orban of Hungary and Viktor Yanukovych, the deposed former president of Ukraine, and African leaders such as Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Jacob Zuma of South Africa.

Also high on Simon’s list of media threats is the way terrorism has impacted on how big media groups currently go about their global news-gathering. Conscious of the ever-present threat of ritualised kidnappings and bombings, journalists are sometimes forced to report from bunkers and are less enthusiastic about meeting uncertain sources in case they might be abducted.

Even the appearance of journalists sometimes makes them look like an extension of the military—with helmets, flak jackets and camouflage fatigues. This accentuates their targeting by fundamentalist groups who regard them as an extension of the “state”.

China is the elephant in the room when it comes to freedom of information. While China’s leaders embrace the internet, they believe they can, and ought to, control the web. It is clear that China has the technological means and resources to make internet control a reality.

Chinese authorities use monitoring and filtering to keep a lid on the cyberspace “conversation” to prevent repercussions.

United States responses to the Wikileaks scandal in 2013 and the massive surveillance revelations by Edward Snowden encouraged allegations of hypocrisy from critics pointing out that Washington’s commitment to internet freedom dragged when its own geopolitical interests appeared threatened.

Earlier this month, I had the good fortune to be in Brussels as one of the people giving feedback at a stakeholders meeting for a massive European Union-funded research project on the media reporting on six major violent conflicts around the world, including the Syrian civil war and conflict in Burundi.

While there I happened to pick up a new “Euro” style newspaper called Politico, which steered me to a remarkable media development in Spain with the headline “He brings news of the future”

Who was he? says the subeditor in me when it was always drummed into us to have a name in the headline. (The online version changed the headline).

This was the story of Pedro J. Ramírez, one of the leading editors in Spain, who had been in charge of El Mundo for 24 years. But he was sacked by his newspaper’s owners.

Why? Because under his leadership, El Mundo pursued a robust investigation into corruption implicating the governing Popular Party and the Prime Minister [Mariano Rajoy].

When he was fired, Ramírez used his massive €5. 6 million pay-out to help fund a new online newspaper, El Español. His pay-out plus record-breaking crowdfunding doubled what had been previously raised by a new Dutch publishing venture, De Correspondent.

Another interesting success story has been in France, where investigative journalist Edwy Plenel, famous for his Rainbow Warrior bombing investigation in 1985 for Le Monde, founded Mediapart.

He has assembled a team of some 60 journalists and his fearless brand of investigative journalism is shaking up the establishment.

Even in New Zealand, where the mediascape is fairly dire with hundreds of jobs cut in recent years—and a loss of 180 jobs in a recent shake-up at Fairfax New Zealand, the country’s biggest news publisher, there are stunningly innovative things happening.

The main independent New Zealand media group Scoop Media – and we at AUT’s Pacific Media Centre have a partnership project with them, Pacific Scoop – has launched a new crowdfunding business model and established a Scoop Foundation for Public Interest Journalism.

This brings me to the achievements of the University of the South Pacific and its talented new crop of graduates. Close to 200 USP journalism graduates are now contributing to the Fiji and the Pacific region’s media and related careers.

Through its long-standing award-winning newspaper Wansolwara – now 19 years old, surely a remarkable accomplishment for any journalism school in the Australasian and Pacific arena, the student journalists have played an important role in independent, engaging and truth-seeking journalism.

Personally, I shall always remember with pride my experiences with USP and Wansolwara over the five years I was with the campus—the longest by far of any expatriate educator. Wansolwara was founded by student editor Stan Simpson and lecturer Philip Cass. And Pat Craddock of the USP Media Centre was another key person in building up the programme.

One of the highlights for me was the reporting of the George Speight coup in May 2000 by the courageous USP students. They won many awards for this.

It was thanks to the groundwork and experience that I gained at both USP and previously UPNG as a journalist turned academic that I was able to go to the next level at the Pacific Media Centre.

There I have been able to blend some of the best elements of academic media studies and practical journalism that makes a difference.

A tribute too to Dr Shailendra Singh and his team, Irene Manarae, Eliki Drugunalevu and Dr Olivier Jutel. Shailen was recently the first home-grown academic at USP to gain a PhD in journalism at the University of Queensland with the first major survey of the Fiji mediascape for more than a decade. Congratulations Shailen for a very fine thesis!

My concluding message to graduating student journalists is that no matter what government, political or industry pressure you face, you should hold on strongly to your core values of truth, accuracy, honesty and courage in the public interest.

Our communities deserve the best from their media in these deceitful times. University media are among the few that can still be trusted and they should do their best to contribute to democracy with integrity.

So go for it and change the world to the way it should be!

STOP PRESS: Before we move on, I have also been given the honour of launching the USP Journalism Alumni Network, which I am happy to do – as a USP alumni myself, I did my own PhD here at USP and I am very proud of that. It was a combination of three decades of history of journalism education and the impact of politics on the media.

The purpose of the USP Journalism Alumni Network is to reconnect with alumni, make them part of the USP journalism family and give them an opportunity to contribute to the development of journalism education at USP in the region.

More details will be released later. Today, we launch the network with a short video about USP Journalism Graduate Destinations.

Dr David Robie is Professor of Journalism and the Director of the Pacific Media Centre in Auckland University of Technology’s School of Communication Studies.He was head of journalism at the University of the South Pacific between 1998 and 2002.

—

THIS GIRL is featured on the front cover of David Robie’s 2014 book – Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face: Media, Mayhem and Human Rights in the Pacific (Little Island Press). It was taken in 1983 at Independence Park, Vanuatu,
during the Nuclear-Free and Independent Pacific conference.

She also appears in a Hawai’an video version of the song Nuclear Free (at 1min08sec). I would love to know who she is and where she is today.

If anybody has any information about her identity and where she might be today please email David Robie.

There is now a second edition out of DSMBF linked to the 30th anniversary of the Rainbow Warrior bombing on 10 July 1985.

More information from the publisher.

—

IT was a privilege for the Pacific Media Centre to be among the 27 global stakeholders involved in a progress feedback workshop for the European Union-funded €2.7 million violent conflict research project dubbed INFOCORE in Brussels last weekend.

Other stakeholders included the AFP Foundation, Deutsche Welle news agency, European Broadcasting Union, France 24, Global Forum for Media Development (GFMD), Institute for War and Peace Reporting, Internews Europe, Journaliste en Danger, Thomson Reuters Foundation, UNESCO Chair in Communication for Social Change and Media, War and Conflict journal.

The two-day event was hosted by another stakeholder, Press Club Brussels Europe, at its friendly offices in Rue Froissart, Schuman, decorated with a range of political cartoons from Europe’s finest cartoonists.

INFOCORE stands for (In)forming Conflict Prevention, Response and Resolution: The role of the media in violent conflict.

The research mission is to provide a “systematically comparative assessment of various kinds of media, interacting with a wide range of relevant actors and producing diverse kinds of conflict coverage,” as the INFOCORE website describes it.

The focus is on three main conflict regions  – the Middle East (Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Syrian civil war), the West Balkans (Kosovo and Macedonia) and the African Great Lakes area (Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo).

Nothing specific on the Pacific, but for the one Pacific stakeholder (PMC) present it was still tremendously interesting with lots of parallels for the region, especially the various roles of social and digital media in conflict.

The research project, spanning a period of about 10 years for some of the conflicts, is the most ambitious research project ever undertaken on media reportage on conflict and the interplay with sources and policy makers, non-government organisations, the general public and social media.

The project team embarked on the work in January 2014 and its findings and selected data will become available to the public by the end of next year. Some working documents are available already on the website.

About 45 people are involved, including 11 leading experts from the social sciences at nine research institutions from seven countries.

Among research leaders are project coordinator Professor Romy Fröhlich of the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich; Dr Chris Meyer of King’s College, London; and Dr Christian Baden of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Dr Georgios Terzis of the Global Governance Institute, Brussels, is project administration and dissemination coordinator.

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THE RISE of popular factual television has threatened the key claim on “reality” of documentary practice but there is hope on the horizon in the post-documentary era, says Pacific Journalism Review in the latest edition published this week.

The October edition examines the state of documentary practice in the Asia-Pacific region and also profiles the work of many contemporary filmmakers.

“Documentary programmes on broadcast television have been progressively replaced by lavish series, formulaic docu-soaps or reality TV,” writes edition co-editor Professor Barry King in his editorial.

He adds that a “troubling implication is that post-documentary forms threaten the legitimacy and credibility of the documentary tradition as a whole.”

King notes that one symptom of this “tangible appetite can be found in the rise of citizen journalism, which, however evaluated, still answers to civic impulse”. The surveillance of authorities also boosted this eyewitness function.

“On the other hand, it can become merely a form of self-promotion, as in the case of the selfie and celebrity-centric Twitter.”

But King also observes on the positive side that some documentary makers are welcoming the opportunities by digital media to “significantly reduce production costs and open up new means of distribute their work online”.

‘Views from the field’
Introducing a section on “Views from the field” from filmmakers, co-editor Professor Annie Goldson, herself one of New Zealand’s leading documentary makers, reflectively analyses her own body of work over many years in the context of contemporary filmmaking challenges and developments.

She argues positively that “long-form creative documentary has re-emerged on the cinema screen, and, of course, online”.

“Filmmakers are able to take more political and formal risks than television traditionally permitted, breaking from notions of balance and objectivity,” she adds.

This edition of PJR features the work of Asia-Pacific filmmakers and radio documentary makers such as Anne Keala Kelly (Noho Hewa: The Wrongful Occupation of Hawai’i), Jim Marbrook (The Dark Horse and Cap Bocage), Tom Morton, Joshua Oppenheimer (The Act of Killing), Max Stahl (Bloodshot: The Dreams and Nightmares of East Timor) and Kim Webby (The Price of Peace).

The journal also features a series of unthemed articles such as on “the sense of place” in indigenous affairs reporting, death coverage in The New Zealand Herald, and tweeting, friending and reporting for media academics and a large review section coordinated with edition managing editor Professor David Robie and reviews editor Dr Philip Cass.

The edition is the second volume in the two-part series based on papers from the PJR2014 conference marking 20 years of publication of Pacific Journalism Review.

The journal PJR is published by Auckland University of Technology’s Pacific Media Centre.

The PJR2014 conference at AUT University – a brief video overview.

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And Bikini Atoll was the Ground Zero for 23 US nuclear tests in the Pacific – out of some 67 conducted over the next dozen years in the Marshall Islands.

Last year the little republic filed a controversial lawsuit in the International Court of Justice at The Hague against Washington and the eight other nuclear powers – Britain, China, France, India, Israel (although it denies possessing a nuclear arsenal), North Korea, Pakistan and Russia.

The Marshall Islands accuses the nuclear club of “violating their duty” to negotiate in good faith for the elimination of these weapons.

Now, over this weekend in New Zealand, some 200 people have participated in a World Without War conference drawing up a list for proposed action for peace and the Marshall Islands action came in for some strong support from several speakers.

Speaking in a video message from outside UN headquarters in New York, Alyn Ware, international representative of the Peace Foundation, organisers of the event at Auckland University of Technology, gave updates on various initiatives and was optimistic about the Marshall Islands case, believed that it would at least gain sufficient traction to drive the nuclear powers into serious negotiations.

Ware, who is also international coordinator for the Parliamentary Network for Nuclear Disarmament and consultant for the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms, argued rather compellingly for New Zealand support for this Marshall Islands initiative.

Humanitarian law
His positive voice was echoed by Dr Kate Dewes, co-director of the Disarmament and Security Centre, and lawyer Matt Robson, a former Alliance MP, who outlined how international humanitarian law currently “banned” the use of nuclear weapons.

Many of the sessions at the conference had strong UN empathy with a view that New Zealand should be making far more use of the instruments available, especially while chairing the Security Council – it was chair for the month of July this year and will be chair again for a month during 2016.

Other global proposals included promoting the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons on September 26, supporting the creation of a UN Open-Ended Working Group to take forward nuclear disarmament negotiations, and promoting environmental security.

But feedback for action plans overall from the conference was quite eclectic. Some ideas put forward by speakers representing many groups in New Zealand included “setting up a non-violent peace force”, “bringing peace back into Greenpeace”, “reinvigorating public education”; advocating stronger controls on the international arms trade – “there are more regulations on the banana trade than arms”, a higher level of collaboration and coordination between peace movements, legal ratification and integration of the Treaty of Waitangi among all New Zealand communities; establishment of a government monetary policy and for business to live within sustainable means; introduction of “peace journalism” as a concept in schools and in communication studies programmes; and cross-party “anti-war policies”.
Also a priority was “listening” more to youth and involving them far more. This was an irony given that although a group of inspiring young interns from several countries working with the Peace Foundation were involved in the conference as volunteers, relatively few youth were to be seen. Where were the students and school children in the programme – almost apart from the SGINZ Victorious March Band who were stunning?

Peace Foundation president Dr John Hinchcliff, Vice-Chancellor Emeritus of AUT, had given challenges to the conference in the opening session, and also in a video reported by Pacific media Centre student Alistar Kata a few days earlier.

Refugee crisis

One of the most popular sessions at the conference was one devoted to the refugee crisis with several speakers describing their experiences as refugees and overcoming the New Zealand bureaucracy barriers in becoming established citizens and residents in this country. There was strong support for New Zealand to take more refuges than doubling the quota from 750 to 1500. (Ireland, for example, with a similar population, is taking up to 5000; and Lebanon, also with a similar population, already has more than 1.5 million).

Dr Arif Sayeed, chair of the NZ Refugee Council, applauded many New Zealanders for their support but also called for more compassion and understanding for refugees coming from war zones such as Syria.

A new feature documentary, The Man Who Saved the World, about the extraordinary 1983 case of Russian retired colonel Stanislav Petrov, who refused to follow protocols and order a counter-strike when Soviet early warning systems wrongly signalled that five nuclear missiles had been launched by the US. It could have been a global nuclear winter.

The filmmakers thrust Petrov out of his obscure vodka-fuelled retirement – “I am just an ordinary man, the right person at the right time” – to take him to New York to see the United Nations, and to also meet actors Robert De Niro and Kevin Costner, and later reunite with his estranged 90-year-old mother in Russia. The conference screening was the Australasian “premiere”.

Summing up from several contributions, conference organiser Christopher Le Breton said: “We have huge rampant social injustice, and wars and conflicts, precipitating a mass refugee crisis, and we have pollution to our seas, extinctions of species, and a sense of frustration and alienation among some that one person cannot make a difference.”

He said awareness of strengths of living in Aotearoa, “together with the possibilities we have, helps inspire our attitude, and the action we get involved with to transform our lives and the planet.

“We have a chance to be seeds for the future.”

The foundation intends to follow-up with participants and involved groups through a range of key action recommendations.

—

MORE than 40 people with wide-ranging expertise will pool their knowledge and ideas and propose an action plan for peace at a two-day conference this weekend at Auckland University of Technology.

As Peace Foundation president Dr John Hinchcliff says in the above video interview with Pacific Media Watch’s Alistar Kata:
“The world is facing a grim future in many directions, in not
just nuclear weapons.”

The idea is for people share their knowledge as the basis for understanding the global threats and developing realistic action that might make a difference.

According to the World Without War action website, participants include “senior academics from AUT, the University of Auckland and Waikato University, experts against violence and war from Sweden and New Zealand, critics concerned about high tech weaponry, leaders representing our youth, the United Nations, Māoridom, education and religions.”

—

ANALYSIS By David Robie

THE unmasked French bomber who sank the Rainbow Warrior 30 years ago had some revealing comments during his interviews with the investigative website Mediapart and TVNZ’s Sunday programme, none more telling than “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 that nuclear tests ended.

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

But 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 of 10 July 1985 when New Zealand lost its political innocence.

Kister told Mediapart’s editor Edwy Plenel: “Thirty years after the event, now that emotions have subsided and also with the distance I now have from my professional life, I thought it was the right time for me to express both my deepest regret and my apologies.”

His apology was to the Pereira family, Greenpeace and the “people of New Zealand”.

Plenel broke the expose of the “third team” bombers for Le Monde in September 1985 and his recent book La troisième équipe comprehensively tells the story.

From on board Rainbow Warrior III, where Pete Willcox – who was skipper of the bombed ship – is currently captain on a tuna fisheries campaign in the Pacific, the message was to accept the apology as a sincere one.

“But Mr Kister must now stand as an admitted murderer, and there can be no quibbling on this. This includes [the late] President François Mitterrand and the rest of the team that both planned and executed the crime.”

Willcox says he will never forget how this event tore a hole in the life of the Pereira family in the Netherlands. His statement to Pacific Media Watch:

Mr Kister wants us to believe that they were incompetent when they planted the bombs on the Rainbow Warrior, and that they never meant to kill anyone.  I believe they were indifferent, not incompetent.

What did they think would happen?  They blew a 2 x 2.5 metre hole in the hull below the waterline.  The boat sank in about 45 seconds.

About one minute later, the second bomb that killed Fernando went off.  This was a highly trained military team.  Could they really have been that bad at their job?  They could have used, and I am guessing here, one quarter of the explosives, and sunk the boat, giving us time to get off.

There is no doubt in my mind that had the bombs gone off 30 minutes sooner, we would have lost the dozen or so persons who were left from the meeting of the Peace Fleet crews in the cargo hold.  They would have never have had time to get off.
While Mr Kister has apologised last night, the government of France never has.  Not to Greenpeace, not to the Pereira family.  We are done asking.  It up is to them.

Among the comments from Kister were revelations around other harebrained options – thankfully all rejected for the various risks involved – the French secret service were considering, such as:

•    Targeting the Rainbow Warrior in Port Vila, Vanuatu, where the vessel visited immediately before arriving in New Zealand. (In fact, such was the support of the founding Vanuatu Prime Minister Walter Lini, that his government sent an “anti-nuclear” envoy on board, Charles Rara, who was on a diplomatic passport. He shared Pereira’s cabin. Rara later said before he died prematurely from cancer he had been unfairly treated as a “suspect” by the NZ police).

•    Sabotaging the ship’s water supply with “bacteria”.

Kister also claimed that the DGSE thinking at the time – at the height of the Cold War –  as a pretext for the sabotage was that Greenpeace had been “infiltrated” by the Soviet Union’s KGB.

As a journalist on board the Rainbow Warrior for more than 10 weeks on the last voyage, I find such a claim that an state intelligence organisation could have seriously flirted with such a notion as unbelievable.

No. Clearly the bombing of the ship was to protect the French nuclear arsenal and its continued and undisputed control of Moruroa Atoll in Polynesia as a testing ground for the French nuclear weapons.

In the TVNZ Sunday programme and other New Zealand media reports it is not made clear that in spite of France ending nuclear tests by signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1996, it still ranks as the world’s third major nuclear power.

According to monitoring by the Arms Control Association, France currently has the world’s third-largest nuclear warheads stockpile – 300 (admittedly far behind Russia, which has 7700 and the US with 7200). Most of the French nuckear warheads are designed for delivery by the submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM).

France currently operates four Triomphant class nuclear submarines.

The other nuclear warheads are designed for delivery by missiles (ASMP) arming the Mirage 2000N, Super Étendard and Rafale aircraft.

Also, France is the world’s third-largest conventional arms supplier. Between 2007 and 2011, France made nearly $11 billion in arms trade agreements with the developing world.

Jean-Luc Kister’s apology is a frank and candid one trying to come to terms with Fernando Pereira’s death being on his conscience.

His apology is welcome even three decades later – as he says, it is never too late to apologise.

However, history can’t be rewritten. This was a blatant act of outright terrorism, not just state-sponsored terrorism, by France against a friendly nation and a peaceful environmental organisation, Greenpeace, committed under orders.

All the highest level perpetrators who gave the orders – right up to the president’s office in Paris – did this callously and with impunity.

I don’t believe there was the slightest concern about the possible casualties and it was a miracle more people didn’t die on board that night.

This terrible crime ranked with some French colonial atrocities happening in New Caledonia at the same time and will always be remembered painfully in the South Pacific.

—

WHEN the 30th anniversary edition of my book Eyes of Fire (Little Island Press) was published on the day last month marking the bombing of the original Rainbow Warrior on 10 July 1985, Susi Newborn questioned my account of the naming of the Greenpeace environmental flagship. She was involved in the buying of the Aberdeen-built fishing trawler Sir William Hardy that was then renamed as the Rainbow Warrior.

In the interests of historical accuracy, I have thus double-checked my sources for the book, including interviewing some of those involved at the time. I am quite satisfied there was no major inaccuracy in that section of my book comprising two paragraphs.

There was only a minor one which I am revising in future copies thanks to modern printing-on-demand technology. The decision to rename the rusty old ship Greenpeace UK had just bought was a collective one, taken in October or November 1977 at a small meeting on board the vessel in West India Dock, London, following a proposal made in writing a few weeks before by Rémi Parmentier to dub her Warrior of the Rainbow.

Those present at that meeting were Denise Bell, Charles Hutchinson, David McTaggart, Susi Newborn, Rémi Parmentier and Allan Thornton. Parmentier had first heard of the Rainbow Warrior Native American legend from a fellow called Georges Devez who had worked with him for some time in 1977-78.

The hand-written note, sent by mail from Paris by Parmentier to Greenpeace UK was stuck on a wall in the Greenpeace London office for some time. Bob Hunter’s 1979 book on the seminal years of Greenpeace, Warriors of the Rainbow, was published two years later, but Parmentier says that it is quite possible that his colleague Devez could have heard of the Rainbow Warrior legend indirectly through Hunter.

Bob Hunter’s book inspired me to write Eyes of Fire about the humanitarian mission to relocate the Rongelap people, suffering from the legacy of US nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands.

There are many variations of the Rainbow prophecy, not just the Navajo-Hopi version. Among other tribes to have interpretations of the prophecy were the Cree (one of the largest groups of First Nation Native Americans) in Canada, Cherokee, Sioux, Salesh and Zuni.

My inspiration for the Eyes of Fire book title was a Cree version of the legend, as represented in the title page preamble.

—

WHILE New Zealand protesters were giving an emphatic thumbs down to the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership corporate slap in the face of democracy at the weekend, a quietly spoken West Papuan in a yellow raincoat was offering solidarity at the Auckland march.

Octo Mote, a former journalist and now secretary-general of the United Liberation Front of West Papua, was in town to spread the good news of West Papuan strategic self-determination developments to activists and supporters.

He spoke at a packed public meeting in the Peace Place on Friday night less than 24 hours after talking to students at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji before taking part in the anti-TPP/TPPA rally.

Rally organiser Barry Coates introduced Mote to the crowd outside the US Consulate-General.

Apart from welcoming Vanuatu’s initiative to press for a United Nations special envoy on West Papua, and the Solomon Islands decision to appoint a special envoy, Mote was positively upbeat about the upsurge in Pacific regional support for the West Papuan human rights cause.

As usual Australia and New Zealand are dragging the chain.

Mote also had a message about the impending release of jailed West Papuan activist Filep Karma – who is due to be freed today on Indonesia’s Independence Day national holiday, marking 17 August 1945 when the Indonesian nationalists issued a proclamation of sovereignty and began armed resistance to overthrow Dutch colonial rule.

Karma was jailed in 2004 for 15 years for raising the Morning Star flag, the outlawed symbol of Papuan independence.

But he is defiant about the plan to free him from Abepura prison in Jayapura.

He is only interested in an unconditional release so that he can resume campaigning for West Papuan self-determination.

In a statement released through activist circles and cited
by Tabloid Jubi, he declared:

“I, Filep Samuel Karma,
reject the offer of remitting my sentence in celebration of Indonesia’s
National Independence Day on August 17. The independence day of West Papua, my
own nation, is December 1.

 “I will only accept an
unconditional release.  If an
unconditional release is offered, I would be happy to walk free from Abepura
Prison on August 18, my own personal independence day.

“I did not commit any crime when I
raised the Morning Star flag in 2004. 

“I
will keep campaigning for independence once I am free.”

—

DELAYED video of last month’s launch of David Robie’s new Eyes of Fire edition about the last voyage and the bombing of the original Rainbow Warrior, marking the 30th anniversary of the sabotage in New Zealand.

This fifth edition (following two others in New Zealand and one each in the United States and United Kingdom) tells the story of the voyage of the first Rainbow Warrior, a Greenpeace vessel protesting against nuclear testing in the South Pacific, to Rongelap Atoll and the Marshall Islands.

Coinciding with the anniversary of the bombing by French secret agents on 10 July 1985, the launch brought together many of those who had been involved with the vessel over the years, including chief engineer Davey Edward, now head of the Greenpeace global fleet, who travelled out from the Netherlands for the reunion.

• Editor: Alistar Kata, contributing editor of the Pacific Media Centre’s Pacific Media Watch project.
• Reporter: Senka Bosnyak
• Camera: Senka Bosnyak/Danni Mulrennan
• Microsite for the book

—

By Rupert Wingfield-Hayes of BBC News

The United States has always insisted that the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary to end World War Two. But it is a narrative that has little emphasis on the terrible human cost.

I met a remarkable young man in Hiroshima the other day. His name is Jamal Maddox and he is a student at Princeton University in America. Jamal had just toured the peace museum and met with an elderly hibakusha, a survivor of the bombing.

Standing near the famous A-Bomb Dome, I asked Jamal whether his visit to Hiroshima had changed the way he views America’s use of the atom bomb on the city 70 years ago. He considered the question for a long time.

“It’s a difficult question,” he finally said. “I think we as a society need to revisit this point in history and ask ourselves how America came to a point where it was okay to destroy entire cities, to firebomb entire cities.

“I think that’s what’s really necessary if we are going to really make sense of what happened on that day.”

A conventional view in the US is that while terrible, the use of the bomb brought an end to the war

It isn’t the sort of thing you often hear said by Americans about Hiroshima.

The first President George Bush famously said that issuing an apology for Hiroshima would be “rank revisionism” and he would never do it.

The conventional wisdom in the United States is that the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war, and because of that it was justified – end of story.

Is that really the end of the story?

Convenient story
It’s certainly a convenient one. But it is one that was constructed after the war, by America’s leaders, to justify what they had done. And what they had done was, by any measure, horrendous.

Tokyo had already been devastated by waves of US firebombing.

It didn’t start on August 6. It had started months before with the fire bombing of Tokyo.

On 9 March 1945, 25 sq km of Tokyo were destroyed in a huge firestorm. The death toll was as large, or even larger, than the first day at Hiroshima. From April to July the relentless bombing continued in other parts of Japan.

Then came Hiroshima.

‘Tremendous flash’
Keiko Ogura had just celebrated her eighth birthday. Her home was on the northern edge of Hiroshima behind a low hill.

At 08:10 on August 6, she was out on the street in front of the house.

The bomb was set to explode 500m (0.3 miles) above the ground for maximum destructive effect

“I was surrounded by a tremendous flash and blast at the same time,” she says.

“I couldn’t breathe. I was knocked to the ground and became unconscious. When I awoke I thought it was already night because I could not see anything, there was no sound at all.”

What Keiko witnessed in the following hours is hard to comprehend.

By mid-morning, survivors of the blast began pouring out of the city looking for help. Many were in a terrible state.

“Most of the people who were fleeing tried to go to the hillside. There was a Shinto shrine near our house so many came here,” she says.

‘Skin peeling off’
“Their skin was peeling off and hanging. At first I saw some and I thought they were holding a rag or something, but really it was skin peeling off. I noticed their burned hair. There was a very bad smell.”

Eighteen-year-old Shizuko Abe was staggering out of the city, the whole right side of her body burned, her skin hanging off. Now 88, she still bears the terrible imprint of the bomb on her face and hands.

Many of those who did not die from the initial impact of the bomb were left with horrific injuries.

“I was burned badly on my right side and my left hand was also burned from the bomb. Fire was coming closer… We were told to run to rivers when hit by air raids so people jumped into the rivers.

“So many bodies were floating in the river that I could not even see the water,” she says.

Somehow, despite the agony, she staggered to a medical station.

“They did not even have any dressing for the wounds. Many injured people lay their bodies down under the roof, so I found a place there as well to lie down. People around me were calling out ‘Mother it hurts, Father it hurts’.

“When I stopped hearing that, I realised they had died right next to me.”

Treated as heroes
The crew of the Enola Gay were treated as heroes for dropping an A-bomb on the heavily populated city.

Hiroshima was not a military target. The crew of the Enola Gay did not aim at the docks, or large industrial facilities.

Their target was the geographical centre of the city. The bomb was set to explode 500m above the ground for maximum destructive effect.

On the ground many survived the initial blast, but were trapped in the wreckage of their homes under wooden beams and heavy tiled roofs. Then the fires began.

Shisuko Abe remembers hearing the cries for help from beneath the debris as the flames swept forward.

“They were such sad voices calling out for help. Even 70 years later, I can still hear them calling out for help,” she says.

No-one is sure how many died on that first day. Estimates start at 70,000. More than eight out of 10 were civilians.

If you look up “Hiroshima in colour” online, you will find some remarkable film that is now kept in the US national archives.

A US military team and Japanese camera crew shot more than 20 hours of film in March 1946. It is the most complete and detailed visual record of the after effects of the first atomic attack.

There is high-quality colour footage of the horrific scarring caused by flash burns from the bomb. There are injuries that had never been seen before.

‘They should not thank the bomb’
What is all the more remarkable is that the film was not seen in public until the early 1980s. It was marked secret and suppressed by the US government for more than 30 years.

Instead, Americans were told a sanitised narrative of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: that a great scientific endeavour had brought quick victory, and saved hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides.

Radiation poisoning, a previously unknown condition, would claim thousands more victims in the weeks after the bombing

Decades later when Keiko Ogura travelled to the Washington DC to see the unveiling of the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian Museum, she was astonished to find this version of history still holding sway.

“Many American people said to me, ‘”Congratulations, you could come here thanks to the bombing!

Without the bombing you would have to do hara-kiri, you know, commit suicide’.”

“That is a very awful excuse. We do not blame the Americans, but they should not say that thanks to the bomb so many people could survive.”

A lifetime of radiation secrecy
The atomic bombing has left one final legacy that sets it apart from all the other horrors of World War II.

In the weeks after the bombing otherwise healthy people began dying of a strange new illness. First they lost their appetite, then they began to run a high fever.

Finally strange red blotches began appearing under their skin. No-one knew it at the time, but these people were dying from radiation poisoning.

To this day many hibakusha keep their pasts a secret, afraid that their families will be discriminated against because of the fear of radiation.

“I had bad burns and looked deformed so I could not keep it secret,” says Shisuko Abe. “My children were discriminated against. They were called ‘A-bomb children’.”

Tears fill her eyes as she describes what happened to them.

“They told me they had to choose a different route to come home from school because they were bullied and chased by the other children. I felt the pain my children had to go through because of their mother, because of me.”

Even today some hide the fact that a grandparent is an A-bomb survivor, afraid their children may find it difficult to find a husband or wife.

The human cost
It is said that those who don’t know their own history are condemned to repeat it. Japanese leaders are rightly criticised for their continued attempts to whitewash Japan’s WWII crimes in China, Korea and South East Asia.

It is also true that terror bombing was not invented by the United States. The Nazis unleashed it at Guernica in 1937 and again on British cities in 1940.

The Japanese bombed Chongqing for six years. The British destroyed Dresden and many other German cities.

But no other bombing campaign in WW2 was as intense in the destruction of civilian lives as the US bombing of Japan in 1945. Between 300,000 and 900,000 people died.

As Jamal Maddox put it to me so well, how was it that the country that entered the war to save civilisation ended it by slaughtering hundreds of thousands of civilians?

—

Zinedine’s wonder try.

By Jack Gaughan for MailOnline

FRANCE 98 victors have taken on European rugby union champions Toulon in a charity match – with World Cup star Zinedine Zidane scoring a stunning try from his own half.

The two sides played 45 minutes of football and then rugby at the Toulon stadium headquarters on Tuesday.

Christian Karembeu popped a three-metre pass off to Zinedine Zidane on halfway and the mercurial Frenchman looked up and saw a miniscule gap in which to drive towards.

He dropped a shoulder, weaved in between two defenders and from there, just inside the opposition half, space opened up.

Two more trailed in his wake as 43-year-old Zidane moved through the gears, accelerating beyond them before nonchalantly checking back to see if they were giving chase.

They weren’t, this was a lost cause, and Zidane had plenty of space to move into and just one more man to manoeuvre.

That didn’t bother Zidane, however, who was the main attraction at Stade Felix Mayol

Once in possession with that much room there is no stopping him. The final man gave up as the World Cup winner danced past to score.

All rather familiar, nothing surprising. Until it becomes apparent there is no ball at Zidane’s feet, but in his hands. It turns out he’s fairly handy at rugby too.

The last man was Delon Armitage.

All proceeds from the match went to the Association de Pascal Olmeta, a children’s charity, and followed the same pattern as a game two years ago.

Toulon took on Marseille back then, with Eric Cantona turning out as referee.

Toulon coach Bernard Laporte was on hand to officiate, while Didier Deschamps, Marcel Desailly and Robert Pires were all involved.

Pires also went over for a try, teasing the home defence into charging at him before touching down.

Zidane’s weaving was impressive but the defending was charitable on a good evening.

Toulon eventually ran out 30-20 winners in rugby half, while goals from Pires helped France to a 6-3 victory in the football 45.

—