Reviews – Asia Pacific Report

UN puts media giants on notice over Gaza as journalists’ death toll spirals

Pacific Media Watch — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 22:48:11 +0000

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has released a blistering report on media complicity in war crimes as Israelis headed to the polls. Michael West Media reports.

REVIEW: By Aleta Moriarty

Israeli forces have killed between 209 and nearly 300 journalists and media workers in Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territories since October 2023, depending on when data was collected, and Western outlets routinely omitted or downplayed Israel’s responsibility in their headlines, according to the latest United Nations Special Rapporteur report.

The report, Truth under the rubble: media in the time of genocide, by Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, was presented to the General Assembly recently and publicly launched yesterday.

It finds Israel’s failure to stop incitement on its airwaves is a continuing breach of the Genocide Convention and defies the International Court of Justice’s January 2024 order to prevent and punish it.

It also puts broadcasters and social media companies on notice: since that order, saying no platform can claim ignorance of the risk, and where a company knowingly provides practical assistance that has a substantial effect on international crimes, “questions of complicity arise”.

Massive toll on Palestinian journalists and their families
The Committee to Protect Journalists calls Gaza the deadliest war for journalists ever recorded. Israeli forces have wounded more than 400 journalists, and the report finds around

70 of those killed were killed as reprisal for their work.

More than 150 journalists’ homes and media offices and institutions have been destroyed, and Israel has completely destroyed 81 percent of Gaza’s information and communications infrastructure.

This devastation has not just been focused on the journalists, with around 710 journalists’ relatives also killed, 436 of them in the first four months alone.

Deliberate targetting
Photojournalist Fatma Hassouna was killed with five family members when precision-guided munitions struck their apartment in April 2025, a day after her documentary about life during the genocide was selected for Cannes.

In August 2025 a “double-tap” strike on Nasser Hospital killed 22 people. The first strike killed Reuters cameraman Hussam Al-Masri, and the second killed four more journalists who had rushed to the scene.

“Truth Under The Rubble” . . . UN Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese has released a blistering report on media complicity in war crimes in Gaza. Image: UN

Israel said it had hit a “Hamas camera” — it belonged to Reuters.

Israel’s military says it does not intentionally target journalists. In October 2023 the Israeli military reportedly set up a “legitimisation cell” that has systematically recast Gaza-based journalists as “Hamas operatives”, the report says, creating a pretext before attacks and a justification after them.

More than 100 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been detained since October 2023, and around 30 are still held. Those released describe physical assaults, sexual violence including rape, forced stress positions, sensory deprivation and medical neglect.

Dehumanisation and incitement to genocide
Under Article III of the Genocide Convention, direct and public incitement to commit genocide is a crime in its own right, the report explains, “complete upon utterance or publication and applicable to officials, broadcasters and private media actors”.

No one has to act on it. Albanese finds that some statements broadcast in Israel meet that threshold.

Most people picture arms manufacturers when they think of business entities complicit in genocide. However, according to a 2024 Israel Law Review paper on Ben & Jerry’s exit from Israeli settlements, only two cases before international criminal tribunals since Nuremberg have held individual corporate defendants accountable, and both arose from Rwanda’s 1994 genocide.

The best known is the Media Case. In December 2003 the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convicted RTLM executives Ferdinand Nahimana and Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, whose station became known as “Radio Machete”, along with Kangura owner and editor Hassan Ngeze.

A third case, against RTLM founder Félicien Kabuga, collapsed when he was found unfit to stand trial.

Broadcasters culpable
Albanese leans on the Nahimana judgment to argue that when presenters’ calls for genocide go unchallenged and unrepudiated by the broadcaster, the people who control the outlet carry the responsibility.

There are several worrying examples cited in the report. Channel 14 aired singer Eyal Golan’s call to “erase Gaza, don’t leave a single person there”, along with statements calling for a “Holocaust”, including “gas chambers”, and urging viewers to “destroy, kill, and obliterate”.

Three Israeli civil society groups listed hundreds of instances of incitement on the channel in a May 2025 High Court petition, yet the broadcasts continue unchecked. Channel 12 journalist Yehuda Schlesinger, who argued sexual violence against Palestinian detainees should become state policy, was temporarily suspended, then joined Channel 14.

Mainstream and pro-government Israeli media have described Palestinians as “Amalek”, “monsters”, “a cancerous growth” and

even “cannibals” who “must be eradicated”.

The report says this rhetoric comes with a denial of civilian status, with Israeli media asserting that “there are no innocents” in Gaza, that Palestinians are “not civilians” and that Gaza is inhabited by “two and a half million terrorists”.

Mediacide: “Whoever writes an article or works on a laptop is like someone carrying a Kalishnikov and attacking us.” – Israeli soldier quoted in UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s media report. Image: Visualizing Palestine

Double standards and censorship
The report highlights how Western outlets widely reported unverified claims, including that Hamas beheaded babies on October 7 and that Palestinian journalists killed by Israel were “terrorists”, the report says, while corrections received far less prominence.

German broadcaster ARD’s editorial guidance presents civilian casualties as primarily a consequence of Hamas’s alleged use of “human shields”. Much of the media reproduced what Albanese calls “humanitarian camouflage”, presenting so-called safe zones and evacuation orders as civilian protection.

Content analysis cited in the report found the BBC downplayed or omitted Israeli responsibility in 83 percent of relevant headlines, and The New York Times in 65 percent. The BBC still runs its story on six-year-old Hind Rajab, killed by Israeli forces, under the headline

“Hind Rajab, 6, found dead in Gaza days after phone calls for help“.

Between October 2023 and August 2025, The Times invoked Hamas “human shields” 176 times and the BBC 81 times. The Times mentioned sexual violence against Israelis 76 times and against Palestinians four times across two sample periods.

At Germany’s ZDF, 90.7 percent of uses of “barbaric” referred to Israeli victims, and the word was never applied to attacks on Palestinians. Palestinian children made up about 99.7 percent of child deaths, yet appeared in just over half of CNN’s personalised stories about child victims.

Israel’s most important ‘weapon’
Alongside propaganda, high levels of censorship are also reported. Israel’s military censor banned 1635 articles in 2024 and redacted another 6265, 21 interventions a day. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described social media to US-based influencers as Israel’s most important “weapon” in what he calls the “battle for truth”.

The report also explicitly names Antoinette Lattouf,

unlawfully dismissed by the ABC after reposting a Human Rights Watch report on starvation in Gaza.

The report saves some of its sharpest findings for tech companies.

With Palestinian journalists killed and foreign media shut out of Gaza, Meta, X and Alphabet Inc. (Google) became the principal gatekeepers of information on Palestine, and the report finds recurring patterns of discriminatory moderation, censorship and amplification of Israeli government narratives.

Leaked Meta data shows about 38.8 million Facebook and Instagram posts have been removed, banned or suppressed since late 2023, and engagement with major Palestinian news outlets has fallen 77 percent. TikTok and Meta reported compliance rates of 99.2 and 94 percent with Israel’s takedown requests.

Meta had been warned before.

In 2018 the UN fact-finding mission on Myanmar found Facebook had been “a useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate,” a conclusion Meta’s own commissioned assessment accepted.

Israel signed contracts worth roughly US$50 million, including with Google and X, for ads dismissing famine reports, among them a message telling viewers “There is food in Gaza. Any other claim is a lie“.

Platforms kept taking that money after famine had been confirmed and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) had ordered aid let in. Google reportedly concluded the famine-denial ads didn’t breach its policies, and it carried paid ads calling the ICJ genocide case a “blood libel”, discouraging donations to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) and attacking Albanese’s previous report.

Platforms also left up campaigns smearing Palestinian journalists before they were killed, including claims that Reuters and AP reporters had advance knowledge of October 7, which both agencies refuted.

What the report demands
Albanese wants the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor to investigate direct and public incitement to genocide by government officials and media figures, and the UN General Assembly to set up an independent mechanism to preserve evidence of crimes against journalists, secure the release of detained journalists and open Gaza to international media and human rights monitors.

Governments are urged to prosecute attacks on Palestinian journalists, treat their footage and archives as evidence, and review public funding and partnerships with media organisations and platforms that spread incitement or help conceal atrocity crimes.

Media organisations and platforms are told to stop “laundering propaganda through the journalistic form”, verify belligerents’ claims before publishing, run corrections as prominently as the original story and stop retaliating against journalists.

“Accountability depends on the survival of the record,” the report concludes. “Without it, neither justice nor the prevention of future atrocities remains possible.”

Aleta Moriarty is a practitioner researcher in human rights, disability inclusion and gender. She is completing a PhD at the University of Melbourne and has 20 years of experience working across agencies including the United Nations, UN Women, World Bank, and the University of Melbourne. She is currently standing as an independent candidate for Western Victoria. Her website is www.aletamoriarty.com Republished from Michael West Media.

De Gaulle: Résistance and the subjective history of anti-Nazi struggle during Second World War

Pacific Media Watch — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 04:52:07 +0000

“Whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must not and shall not die,” proclaimed Charles De Gaulle in a speech broadcast on BBC radio in London, 18 June 1940, as France surrendered to Nazi Germany.

De Gaulle, a French army officer, had refused to capitulate to the Nazis and Marshall Petain’s collaborationist Vichy government, instead escaping to London and proclaiming himself the head of the France Libre (Free France, FL) government in exile.

De Gaulle: Résistance is the first of a two-part biopic, La Bataille de Gaulle, depicting De Gaulle’s rise to leadership of the French Resistance during the Second World War.

READ MORE: De Gaulle: Résistance review – a galloping bromance for Churchill and France’s wartime hero

The diptych was directed by Antonin Baudry (Wolf’s Call) and is based on the book, A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles De Gaulle, by Julian Jackson.

De Gaulle’s story is intertwined with that of Fernand Bonnier de la Chapelle (played by Florian Lesieur), a young French patriot who, along with Jewish resistance fighter Livia (a fictional character played by Anamaria Vartolomei), struggles inside occupied France to organise resistance to the Nazis and the collaborationist Vichy regime.

Set between June 1940 and December 1942, De Gaulle stakes his claim as head of the FL government to be sole leader of the French resistance struggling against the British government led by Winston Churchill (played by Russell Beale) and the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration in the United States.

The Free French Forces (FFI) managed to establish an operational base in France’s African colonies, with allied weapons, money, supply lines and intelligence. Most importantly, African soldiers played a key role in the anti-fascist resistance and an estimated 21,000 served in different theatres of war from 1941–44, including the Battle of Bir Hakeim.

At Bir Hakeim, 3700 FFI troops held off 30,000–45,000 soldiers who were part of the German Afrika Corps — an expeditionary force led by Erwin Rommel — between May 26 and June 11, 1942. This enabled trapped British forces to escape German encirclement in Libya and inflict a crucial defeat on Rommel’s forces at the Second Battle of El Alamein, in late 1942.

Since having been released, the biopic has been a huge hit at the French box office, drawing 5 million people since its June release. It has especially been a hit among young people for whom, according to French historian Alya Aglan, “There is emotion, there is information they didn’t know and it resonates with today’s youth, particularly in the run-up to a presidential election in which we will find ourselves in a very divisive situation.”

Costing £80 million (NZ$189 million) to make, the two-part film was initially a box office flop, but the film’s distribution company Pathé organised watch parties hosted by social media influencers, such as Inoxtag (Inès Benazzouz). Local councils also offered free tickets for students to see the film and eventually news of the film spread by word of mouth.

According to US public historian Tad Stoermer, the film’s popularity among young people is a response to fear about the rise of Marine Le Pen’s far-right party, Rassemblement National (National Rally), which is seen as the inheritor of the Vichy regime, and is full of fascists and Nazi sympathisers.

De Gaulle has been cast as the “embodiment of resistance” as well as the “providential man or woman” who can save France. In reality, none of the resistance groups formed in 1940 and the years following, spanning the political spectrum — from communists on the far left to monarchists on the far right — were waiting for a saviour such as De Gaulle to rescue them.

It wasn’t until 1943 that Jean Moulin (played by Felix Kysal) was able to organise all the different scattered resistance groups into one national organisation, the National Council of the Resistance. In De Gaulle: Résistance, while you see some of the dangers facing the resistance, there is a lot that is left out of the story.

Noticeably absent from the film is the presence of the communist-led resistance groups, such as Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP), which formed in 1942 and which, by 1944, had grown to 100,000 men and women. The FTP was one of the most effective resistance groups in occupied France.

The Soviet Union, which played a huge in defeating Nazi Germany in the Second World War, is barely mentioned in the film.

Another absence is that of the Special Operations Executive, an intelligence organisation formed by the British government in 1940, whose agents, intelligence, weapons, cash and supplies were essential to resistance operations within France and the rest of Nazi-occupied Europe.

As a former diplomat and advisor to Dominique de Villepin, perhaps it’s not surprising that Baudry has presented us with the dominant Gaullist version of history that centres De Gaulle as the “great providential man of history”.

Despite not showing nearly enough of the complicated realities of the French resistance, I still enjoyed De Gaulle: Résistance and hope that part two, De Gaulle: Liberté (showing in Australian cinemas from October 19 and in New Zealand from mid-August), will not reduce the role of the resistance in liberating France from Nazi occupation.

De Gaulle: Résistance, directed by Antonin Baudry (2026). Starring Simon Abkarian as Charles de Gaulle, Florian Lesieur, Anamaria Vartolomei and Simon Russell Beale.
Screening in New Zealand cinemas, and the second part of the biopic Liberté is also now showing. Alex Salmon is a longtime Socialist Alliance member and Green Left contributor based in Boorloo (Perth), Western Australia. Republished from Green Left Weekly with permission from the author and GJW.

Gaza mass killing documentary a warning of global dystopian future

APR editor — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 01:10:25 +0000

REVIEW: By David Robie, editor of Asia Pacific Report

I have watched the most disturbing film in my lifetime — a warning to the world of a horrendous dystopian future when human life and death is being decided by remote AI-assisted control warfare weapons. The problem is that this dystopian future is already with us now and has been unfolding for three years — with genocide in the Israeli besieged Palestinian enclave of Gaza.

Unlike the Venice film festival premiere last month when the audience gave an unprecedented 25-minute standing ovation for The Guardian-produced NAZA: A Window into Systems of Mass Killing, the New Zealand preview audience at Auckland’s Rialto Cinemas sat in shocked silence for minutes at the end, unsure how to respond to this harrowing documentary by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. NAZA won the Venice Special Jury Prize.

So stunned was the Auckland audience that there was not a single clap.

This is a chilling visual testimony (surely likely evidence for future war crimes trials of Benjamin Netanyahu and others?) of what Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein wrote about in his landmark 2023 global book The Palestine Laboratory. At least 75,000 Palestinians have now been slaughtered (the real total is bound to be far, far higher) in the more than 1000 days since the genocide began — mostly women and children (some 25,000 of the latter).

And a Republican congressman, David Valadao, has just been reported as gloating about the US “benefits” of the war on Gaza in that weapons “are tested there; we are able to learn from that”. “We”? Sickening!

Ironically, the standing ovation in Venice eclipsed by a couple of minutes another Gaza film last year, Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab, a dramatised feature film about the cold-blooded murder of a five-year-old girl by an Israeli tank crew, who also ambushed and assassinated the two ambulance responders sent to rescue her.

The Hind Rajab film was heart-rending and tragic, whereas NAZA is so deeply disturbing because of the sheer callousness and remoteness of the killing carried out by 24 intelligence agents and soldiers at the push of a button through their AI applications known by Orwellian labels such as “Lavender”and “Where’s Daddy?” Yet to their credit, perhaps, they must have at least had tugs at their conscience to agree to being interviewed for this film (anonymous and with disguised voices) in secret to expose the industrial level killing.

Acceptable kill ratios
One of the interviewees tells of approval to kill 500 civilians as acceptable to target one Hamas resistance fighter. Others spoke of 200 killings at a time for one target as “acceptable” – or even “expected”. The gloves of revenge were cruelly off.

The official Naza documentary trailer. Video: Madman Films

The location is eerie, even ghostly, as the narratives explore remote killings during the interviews on (presumably) Tel Aviv rooftops. In the background, are the lights from Israeli apartments as people go about their mundane lives — a far cry from the terror experienced by Gazan families as they are targeted, often during the night, by quadcopters, missiles or bombs — or “Whoops”, mini drones designed especially for attacking inside homes.

“It’s so insanely fun. . . ” “It’s like a video game . . . ” “You understand that your goal is to destroy . . . ” are some of the reflections of the death dealers under the cover of darkness. The “whistleblowers”, if we can call them that, spoke to co-director Abraham under the expectation of complete anonymity for fear of retribution from the system they were once — or possibly still are — embedded in.

Venice Special Jury Award winning directors Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham . . . a dystopian documentary. Image: WikiMedia

The film title NAZA is an acronym standing for the Hebrew term Nezek Agavi, which means “collateral damage”.

This documentary has provoked an immediate and savage response by the extreme rightwing Netanyahu regime. Responses began with Culture Minister Miki Zohar calling the film “despicable” and saying he would “act immediately to revoke the Israeli citizenship of these despicable creators on the grounds of treason against the state”.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself, who is wanted on an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, was the next to attack the filmmakers. He declared he would introduce two legislative bills targeting those who “defame” the Israeli military. According to him, the first bill would enable revoking the citizenship of “anyone who defames soldiers”. The second would boost “twentyfold” the amount in damages in lawsuits for defamation.

The military itself has also threatened action. Chief-of-staff Eyal Zamir ordered punitive legal steps against the filmmakers with the help of the internal intelligence agency Shin Bet.

Punishing the filmmakers
The documentary is not an outlier in the allegations it makes, and it is revealing that the Israeli establishment should seek to punish the filmmakers rather than examine the abhorrent rules of engagement that have blighted this war on Gaza (in response to the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 – a “breakout” from their 23-year prison enclave).

Just this week, the German news magazine Der Siegel has published accounts from 10 Israeli soldiers describing how troops killed Palestinian civilians in Gaza and branded them as “terrorists”. The soldiers recounted war crimes in their testimonies, including slaughtering unarmed Palestinians and destroying entire neighbourhoods to prevent families returning. One infantry reservist described how he was encouraged to kill unarmed civilians, saying: “The Arabs must be punished.” Collective punishment is a war crime.

The Israeli authorities are so desperate to minimise the political damage from this documentary that a hurriedly produced “counter” film as part of the $1 billion hasbara propaganda programme has been released — but this is littered with lies and disinformation and is unlikely to have the desired impact.

For an accurate exposé of the Gaza breakout itself that triggered the genocide following more than seven decades of occupation and repression since 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their own land during the 1948 Nakba (“the Catastrophe”), it is hard to match the Al Jazeera investigation October 7.

• NAZA: A Window into Systems of Mass Killing, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor (Madman Entertainment). The film has been released in 55 countries, including New Zealand, but is banned from screening in Israel. It will be streamed for free on The Guardian’s website in late November.

The ghostly Tel Aviv rooftops are a far cry from the terror experienced by Gazan families as they are targeted, often during the night, by quadcopters, missiles or bombs — or “Whoops”, mini drones designed especially for attacking inside homes. Image: Madman Films

A reminder of what is possible in community empowerment – ‘survival pending revolution’

APR editor — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 10:07:19 +0000

This book launch speech was delivered today for Ponsonby People’s Union: At the Frontline of Community Activism in the 1970s, by Roger Fowler, whānau and fellow activists, at the Whare Wānanga, Tāmaki Pātaka Kōrero — Auckland Central Library.

COMMENTARY: By Nick Bollinger

I have to confess to a degree of imposter syndrome.

I was the wrong age and in the wrong place to be any part of this visionary organisation.

When the small group first gathered in the 1970s to plan what would be the foundations of the Ponsonby People’s Union (PPU), I would have been 12 or 13 and just starting secondary school at Onslow College in Johnsonville, near Wellington.

READ MORE: From Resistance to the Ponsonby People’s Union, a courageous tale of struggle for justice — David Robie
Honouring the people’s fight against hardship, repression and racism — Tony Fala
Other Ponsonby People’s Union reports

But even then, it would have been hard not to notice that there were things going on, out in the world beyond our school walls, that were challenging the way society was being run; that sought fairness and justice and peace.

For the past five or six years New Zealand had been involved in a war, waged by America against the Vietnamese, and it didn’t take much to see that this was completely wrong. There were marches through town on Friday nights, organised by people just a few years older than me; some who our government were trying to force into military training, perhaps even to fight in this unjust war.

And these were some of the first activities that me and my Onslow friends would join in on, that could be seen as part of the challenge to the powers that governed our society.

There were other things happening too that I wanted to be part of. Some were deadly serious, like the movement against nuclear weapons or apartheid in South Africa. And there were others that just looked like more fun than the mainstream version of life in New Zealand that was being offered – rock concerts and festivals, communes, sex, drugs and rock’n’roll.

Hope, ideas, action
It was a time of hope, ideas, and action.

It felt, however loosely, like a movement.

It looked to me like an attempt to change the world.

And in many ways I think it did.

The Roger Fowler whānau singers prepare to share a song at the book launch. Image: Asia Pacific Report

Sometimes that things that changed would change back again, as the forces of the establishment regrouped. Some things may have had destructive side-effects that no one really questioned enough at the time.

But there were also lives that were meaningfully improved, perhaps even saved, because of the ideals and the efforts of people who, in different ways, made up this movement.

It would take me a good few decades to get around to it, but a few years ago I set out to write a history of all of this, which I loosely termed the counterculture (because that is how other historians around the world had defined it — and versions of this movement did take place all over the world.)

Community activist Desmond Abrahams reflects on the South African antiapartheid struggle and racism in Aotearoa New Zealand. Image: Asia Pacific Report

Just too young
As I had been just too young to really be more than an observer, I wanted to fill in some gaps in my experience. I wanted to know more about the people who had driven the movement in this country, where their ideas had come from, how they had developed them and put them into action and, ultimately, what had happened as a result.

I began interviewing people who had been involved – whether it had been in the protest activities, or the early bookshops, or the music festivals.

And I would always ask these people who they thought I should talk to; who else had been involved and might have valuable stories to share?

A name that would come up with amazing frequency was that of Roger Fowler.

Ponsonby People’s Union book cover – designed by Kahu Fowler.

Now as I’ve said in the introduction to this book, Roger would no doubt have been embarrassed to find his name in the first sentence because – as I discovered when I met him – his ethos was always one of co-operation, the power of people working together to achieve a common goal rather that the celebration of the individual.

As I worked on my project I began to see that sometimes a shared energy and sense of purpose can help unite a group of likeminded people who might not otherwise have found a focus for their own energies.

And I’m sure that for many people that is what Roger provided, and that was one of his great gifts.

Roger was involved in many, many causes and projects, both before and after the PPU, but it’s the PPU that we’re celebrating here today and it is a great example of something he achieved and how it was achieved.

Jumping Sundays
When I completed my book about the counterculture in Aotearoa, I named it after something else Roger was involved with, something perhaps more frivolous but which seemed to me to be a symbol of those times: I called it Jumping Sundays, which was the name by which people referred to the Sunday afternoon people’s festivals that took place in Albert Park, and where Roger would often perform with his band, the Frank E. Evans Memorial Lunchtime Entertainment Band.

In Jumping Sundays, I attempted, perhaps over-ambitiously, to look at all the aspects of this movement and show some of the connections and even contradictions between its different facets. So there’s a chapter on the Vietnam War but also one on communes; a chapter about alternative media – the underground newspapers and the Resistance Bookshop (something else Roger was involved with) – but there are also chapters on drugs and sex and rock’n’roll.

To fit it all in, I had to compress an awful lot of information. I believe that in the index to Jumping Sundays there are four entries for the People’s Union, but really it adds up to just a couple of pages in which I couldn’t do much more than outline how this organisation came about, who was involved and a few of the things that they did.

So I’m very glad that this new book has been put together from the memories and stories and writings and photographs of the people who were actually there. It’s like zooming in on those few paragraphs I wrote and expanding it to show us all the detail and colour that I could only hint at.

I’m hoping other people today will talk about some of the specific things the Ponsonby People’s Union achieved – whether it was providing cheap food for hungry families or staging occupations of substandard housing when landlords needed an extra nudge; the bus visits to prisons, or the way they worked with other groups like the Polynesian Panthers to fight racism on this city’s streets.

But the final thing I’d like to say is that, looking back on the counterculture era, in all its different dimensions, which ranged from the revolutionary to the ridiculous, the PPU for Survival and Freedom stands out as perhaps the most practical, principled, and inspiring example of countercultural ideals put into action.

This book is a reminder of what is possible. I believe that back then they used to call it “survival pending revolution”.

And we’ve never needed that more than now.

Nick Bollinger is a Wellington-based writer, historian, broadcaster and critic. He was a music columnist for The Listener for more than 20 years, has written for Mojo and been the voice of Radio New Zealand’s music review programme The Sampler.

Ponsonby People’s Union: At the Frontline of Community Activism in the 1970s, overview by Roger Fowler, and contributors (Steele Roberts), 2026, 102 pages.

Activist and research Barry Lee shares memories on the Progressive Youth Movement (PYM) and Ponsonby People’s Union (PPU) in the 1860s-70s. Image: Asia Pacific Report

From Resistance to the Ponsonby People’s Union, a courageous tale of struggle for justice

APR editor — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 07:24:41 +0000

REVIEW: By David Robie

The seeds of resistance and later community empowerment began in Tāmaki Makaurau in a humble but lively bookshop in a rundown two-storeyed shop at 436 Queen Street. Called the Resistance Bookshop, it became the headquarters for protesters in 1969 for three years as anti-Vietnam War action grew and grew.

This was where many students, workers and radicals gathered — including the young Roger Fowler — to plan their protest action. Many of them lived in dilapidated inner-city flats within a stone’s throw of the bookshop.

As the anti-war movement gained momentum, many young men faced conscription into the New Zealand army and there were fears that conscripts would be drafted to fight in Vietnam — as was their fate in the United States and Australia.

READ MORE: Other Roger Fowler reports

Fowler, an icon of Aotearoa protest and community empowerment, recalled how those men whose “number came up” in the archaic Compulsory Military Training (CMT) “lottery law” were ordered to report to a special train at Auckland Railway Station.

They were “transported to the Waiouru army camp to endure a harsh, three-month course of military training plus follow-up camps,” wrote Fowler.

“My number was drawn and I refused to go; instead burning my draft card at a demonstration at the US Consul’s Paritai Drive mansion.

“I organised a protest at the railway station, where fellow Resistance supporters and I handed out leaflets, encouraging the young conscripts on the train to disembark and refuse to go.

“I was later arrested for refusing to attend the army call-up, then locked up in Mt Eden prison for about three weeks for refusing the pay the fine.”

Fowler recalled that this period of “defiant non-compliance” by conscripts led to the founding of the Organisation to Halt Military Service (OHMS). Eventually, the pressure paid off when the Norman Kirk-led Labour government was elected in November 1972 — and it immediately scrapped CMT.

This saga is one of many stories of the people’s resistance that are recounted in a new book being launched next Saturday, Ponsonby People’s Union: At the Frontline of Community Activism in the 1970s, with an overview written by Roger Fowler in the months before he died earlier this year. Many activists from the era, including his wife and fellow campaigner, Dr Lyn Doherty (Ngati Porou and Ngāpuhi), have also contributed.

Arrested 20 times
He was arrested or charged more than 20 times “during those turbulent years”, and was imprisoned four times for refusing to pay fines — a political prisoner.

A report of PU’s Roger Fowler – pictured here working on food co-op orders – being jailed for opposing militarism. Image: Earwig Magazine

Reading about this period was particularly poignant for me because in 1969 I was living in Melbourne as the young activist editor of the independent Sunday Observer and being threatened with prosecution for writing an editorial urging young Australians to burn their draft cards.

The Ponsonby People’s Union book cover – designed by Kahu Fowler.

I didn’t know Roger, Lyn and their whānau then. This came many years later, especially when we crossed paths over our Palestine activism with Roger founding and campaigning with the Kia Ora Gaza project in a sustained effort to break the cruel Israeli siege of the Gaza enclave to deliver humanitarian aid.

Veteran activist Roger Fowler, co-founder of the Ponsonby People’s Union and a founding member of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign, died on 21 February 2026, aged 77. His whānau have put in tremendous mahi in their effort to try to complete this remarkable book before his death, and it is a compelling testament to his life, and to the comrades and activist supporters.

Fowler’s “vision, energy and guitar helped sustain a remarkable initiative in collective action” for a fairer and better community.

The Auckland Resistance Bookshop . . . a centre for political and social justice activism. Image: Ans Westra/Ponsonby People’s Union

Back to the Resistance Bookshop.

In fact, there were three of them – one each in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. They were at the “forefront of this vibrant groundswell of protest and rebellion”. Young people, including many students, spearheaded new forms of activism such as “sit-ins, street theatre, graffiti, leaflets, protest songs and pickets”.

‘Bowels of the underground’
Countless leaflets and screen-printed posters were produced from what was dubbed “the bowels of the underground”.

Auckland’s Resistance Bookshop was also a popular rendezvous for Australian and US draft dodgers who had fled to New Zealand to escape the Vietnam War.

An Auckland Resistance Bookshop flyer. Image: Roger Fowler Collection

The Progressive Youth Movement (PYM) was at the forefront of street protests venting outrage at the pointless slaughter in Vietnam and the “brutal oppression in apartheid South Africa”.

Within walking distance of the Resistance Bookshop — few protesters had cars back then — were two popular hangouts: the Babel restaurant in Victoria Street, and the Kiwi Tavern pub in Symonds Street.

The Vietnam War protests peaked with about 35,000 taking part but eased off as NZ troops were gradually withdrawn from 1971 onwards. Committed activists began looking for a fresh “meaningful direction”.

Many of the serious radicals who had left the bookshop formed an inner city Marxist study group exploring works by Mao Zedong and Lenin, and other more modern authors analysing class struggles against capitalism.

“PMY activist and secretary Cliff Kelsall and I became friends and workmates as labourers on various building sites,” wrote Fowler. ”We started exploring ideas about urban activism, especially inspired by the appeal of Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale and George Jackson to ‘bring the war back home’, by Newton’s concept of grassroots community organising, building a global network of ‘revolutionary intercommunalism’, and by Seale’s clarion call to ‘Seize the time’.”

North Vietnamese meeting
In 1972, a group of the “young radicals” were invited to meet a visiting North Vietnamese delegation, including the mayor of Hanoi, at the Auckland University Student Union building.

“Among issues discussed,” recalled Fowler, “I asked about the idea that had been quietly floating about, of organising an international militia to support the Vietnamese struggle — similar to the International Brigades that about a dozen young Kiwis had joined up with in the 1930s to fight Franco’s fascists during the Spanish Civil War.”

Several New Zealand medics had volunteered then too, explained Fowler, including the activist and late Invercargill Mayor Tim Shadbolt’s aunt, Rene Shadbolt.

“The startled visitors politely responded: “Thanks, but no thanks.” The Vietnamese suggested that the New Zealanders should instead support their struggle by building a “homegrown revolutionary movement”.

“Advice some of us took to heart,” noted Fowler.

This led to the foundation of an urban movement to organise around “real life struggles and developing survival skills” — useful for the then working class neighbourhoods of Ponsonby, Grey Lynn, Freeman’s Bay and Newton.

The Ponsonby People’s Union . . . headquarters for the food co-op and activism against landlord abuses. Image: Roger Fowler collection

From the Resistance Bookshop, the movement had now graduated to become the Ponsonby People’s Union for Survival and Freedom (PU, for short), with its headquarters at 15 Ponsonby Road in a rundown block of shops skirting Western Park, a block long since demolished to provide more space in the reserve.

‘Clear sense of purpose’
“We decided we needed to start with a clear unified sense of purpose,” wrote Fowler. “A Ten Point Statement of Direction evolved, inspired by the Ten Point Programme adopted earlier by the US Black Panther Party.

“This statement was to become our set of guiding principles for positive practical actions and for addressing the key issues facing our community – such as substandard housing, police harassment, poor education and health services, racism, women’s rights, costly food, arbitrary evictions, and the isolation of prisoners, often in faraway prisons, from their families and loved ones, and advancing social cohesion.”

Part of the People’s Union 10 Point Statement of Direction. Image: Roger Fowler Collection

As Fowler summed up the problem-solving objective, “we aimed to advance the wellbeing, resilience, social cohesion and survival of our community and to strive for civil liberties and freedom from oppression”.

Although clearly influenced by Newton and the Black Panthers — but never a “copycat” movement, PU often operated as a “sister organisation” cooperating with the Polynesian Panthers — of anti-Dawn Raids fame — the Communist Party of New Zealand (CPNZ), PYM, Ngā Tamatoa, ACORD and “other left activist groups of the day”.

Co-founder Roger Fowler doing the mahi in the Ponsonby People’s Union office in Ponsonby Road. Image: Roger Fowler Collection

While deciding on PU’s programmes, Cliff Kelsall and Fowler met Polynesian Panthers leaders at their office in Three Lamps, Ponsonby (honoured today with a pavement panther tile), and forged a warm rapport and community partnership that lasted for the seven-year life of the union and beyond. First up for collaboration was a community food co-op.

“We wanted the co-op to engage with people and encourage them to work together as volunteers around the common goal of sustaining our households with fresh, low-cost food,” wrote Fowler.

And the movement introduced itself in 1972 through leaflets as “a community-based group of people getting together to try to solve common problems and build a real community with control over its own destiny”.

Borrowed old trucks
The Ponsonby headquarters had four upstairs bedrooms and a meeting room (plus garage space and a courtyard), so Kelsall and Fowler immediately moved in with others to help pay the rent — at $15 a week!

Activists Murray Lee and Susan Wilson sorting market produce for the PU food co-op. Image: John Miller

To get the food co-op underway, the collective borrowed old trucks from their networks, collated food orders and bought fresh vegetables and fruit in bulk from the downtown Turners & Growers markets each Monday morning.

“By cutting out the middlemen, up to half of the retail prices were slashed. And we knew the goods were fresh,” Fowler wrote.

“We would choose to buy – at rock bottom prices – spotted apples and misshapen pumpkins that no retailer wanted on their display shelves.”

The co-op was an ideal platform for supporting other struggles, especially during the 1977 Timber Workers’ Union dispute — “when we dispatched our truck packed to the roof with donated food to support workers on the picket line at Kawerau”.

The PU also helped about 300 locked out workers at the NZMC Honda car assembly plant and set up a co-op distribution depot at the Panmure Town Hall.

Jo Bruce-Smith’s posters for the People’s Union food co-op. Image: Roger Fowler Collection

People’s Union activists carried on taking part in anti-Vietnam War protests and over “other issues of the day”. One of the memorable banners read: “Learn from the Vietnamese — unite to defeat our common enemies”.

China ‘educational tour’
In 1975, the NZ China Friendship Society facilitated a “workers’ educational tour” of China, which included six People’s Union activists — including Roger Fowler, his wife Lyn Doherty, and the late mayor Tim Shadbolt of Invercargill: “We visited communal farms, big worksites, and met renowned NZ author Rewi Alley.”

This was six years before I also — now living back in Aotearoa after several years in Paris, France, following the 1968 student riots — went on a Friendship Society visit to China and wrote a series of articles for The Auckland Star.

Now as a semi-retired journalist with also strong beliefs about community-owned and independent media, I was heartened to read Roger Fowler’s chapter on the PU’s independent information efforts.

Fowler wrote about this PU initiative saying: “The People’s Union started to attract the interest of some established media, though unlike other left organisations, we never courted the media. We believed it was more important for people to develop our own independent ‘people’s media’.

“However, a journalist from the Women’s Weekly followed the food co-op for her scoop one day and wrote a sympathetic article.”

Polynesian Panther Tigilau Ness and Roger Fowler at the launch of his “Songs of Struggle and Solidarity” album in September 2025. Ness recorded his version of Fowler’s signature song “We Are All Palestinians” here. Image: Asia Pacific Report

In 2016, Roger Fowler and former Polynesian Panther Party members Tigilau Ness and Tuu’ulenana Iluli attended the 50th anniversary of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California.

In 2025, Fowler and Ness collaborated with a vinyl album, “Songs of Struggle and Solidarity”.

Prison whānau bus trips
Among the many projects of the PU was in 1972 starting a visitors’ weekly free bus run to Pāremoremo maximum security prison near Albany, and a monthly bus trip to Waikēria Borstal near Te Awamutu.

“These services were very popular, as both prisons were purposely located far away from any viable public transport, making family or community relationships difficult for many,” Fowler wrote.

Passengers on the free People’s Union weekly bus for visitors to Pāremoremo Prison. Image: John Miller

“We once crowded about 80 people into a 55-seater bus to Waikēria. Polynesian Panther Party leader Tigilau Ness brought along his guitar and would get a big singalong going from the back seat – his ‘American Pie’ got everyone joining in the chorus, ‘Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie . . . “

The People’s Union food co-op became a key organising tool and platform, recalled Fowler, for another important “problem solving” programme – defending tenants. The PU centre became the “go-to place for local people facing issues inflicted by rapacious landlords, a major problem that plagued the area”.

“Fight for community control” . . . a cartoon in the People’s Union newspaper. Cartoon: Roger Fowler Collection

Fowler pays tribute to community activist Betty Wark and her 1976 Tole Street “tent city” occupation of a public park in Ponsonby in protest for “decent housing”.

In a page devoted to her campaigning, Helene Connor is quoted saying; “Housing the homeless and utilising the buildings to their full extent became a passion for Betty. The Tole Street tent ‘village’ kept going for several months while Betty continued to look for suitable accommodation to house the group.”

Vasau family eviction
Fowler recalled “one of our most high-profile housing cases was the eviction of the Vasau family from their home in Norfolk Street, Ponsonby, in 1974”.

“A new owner had told the family to leave their family home of five years, so he could bang the rent up. They had nowhere to go, so had no choice but to stay and fight.

“One day when nobody was home the landlord seized the chance to break in and toss the family’s furniture and belongings outside.”

The People’s Union was called and activists along with neighbours moved the family’s belongings back inside and barricaded the house. Eventually, six months later the landlord returned along with a senior police officer and a court order.

The good news was that the court order along with community support actually helped the family gain a new state house in South Auckland for their home.

Police harassment “was often a problem for some of the people we worked with,” recalled Fowler. A police “task force” would parade through the streets and stop outside local pubs.

“They would intimidate people, usually in an arrogant, racist manner. They called this ‘team policing’, but the People’s Union newspaper compared them to an invading army.”

Ōkaihau College student Scotty Alexander, with his bagpipes, took the morning off school to support the Māori Land March in 1975 when it passed his family farm in the Waihou Valley. Lyn Doherty of the Ponsonby People’s Union is front right. Tama Poata is at left, then Ngā Tamatoa members Tiata Witehira and Vern Winitana (checked jacket, holding Kahn’s leash). Image: Christian Heinegg/Ponsonby People’s Union

Defining historical event
The Māori Land March in 1975 “was a defining event in the history of Aotearoa — People’s Union members supported the march in many ways, whether joining with the marchers on the road, feeding them, or supplying the bus so that kaumatua could rest when they needed to”.

Fowler devoted an inspired chapter to the struggle of Takaparawhau–Bastion Point. On 6 January 1977, Ngāti Whātua’s Ōrākei Action Committee “put out an urgent call for supporters to join a tent protest” at Takaparawhau, Bastion Point.

“The vast area of open fields was under direct threat by the Muldoon government, which intended to develop the land as elite real estate for upmarket housing.”

Fowler quoted Sharon Hawke, one of the protest occupiers and the daughter of Joe Hawke, one of the leaders, declaring in Takaparawhau, the people’s story: “This was to become one of the greatest shows of strength in modern [NZ] history.”

Doc Ngaheu and Roger Fowler (top left) on the lookout on the roof of Arohanui, the whare nui at Bastion Point, during the eviction on 25 May 1978. They set off orange flares as the police convoy arrived (below). Police remove Roger Fowler (top right). Images: Roger Fowler Collection

“The protest camp evolved into a formidable village occupation that stood firm on the disputed land, until evicted by 600 police 506 days later. The uniting catchcry was: ‘Bastion Point is Māori Land’.”

People’s Union activists were there in the protest from the beginning. The land was “unprotected, windswept terrain exposed to the elements which can be very harsh”. The PU advocated the need to build shelters and huts rather than relying on tents. Some people were able to bring on caravans.

Activists from the PU hired a large rotary hoe to help dig vegetable gardens and the protest community rapidly grew into a “living village” — it was “transformed into a vibrant marae”.

Lyn Doherty and Roger Fowler lived in the protest village “in a little tin shack at the rear of Arohanui [the wharenui] — cooking toasted sandwiches for breakfast on a small methylated spirits burner each morning”.

Shameful Bastion Point raid
On 25 May 1978, a massive police operation moved to evict and demolish the village. On that fateful morning, 222 Ngāti Whātua and supporters were arrested and all the buildings were demolished and removed in a shameful repressive action by the state.

“But although we lost the battle,” recalled Fowler, “we won the war — the land remains as public space under Ngāti Whātua control.”

The Ponsonby food co-op grew until about 600 local households were taking part by the end of the 1970s. But the inner Auckland suburbs of Ponsonby and Grey Lynn and their demographics were rapidly changing. Old houses were being sold and renovated as the suburbs were being “gentrified” and rundown shops were being converted into cafes, restaurants and fashion boutiques.

The special final edition in April 1979 of the People’s Union Community Information Service – and of the demise of the PU itself. Roger Fowler Collection

Sadly, the final edition of People’s Union community newspaper in April 1979 announced the closure of the Ponsonby People’s Union, saying “the need for an ‘umbrella’ organisation to coordinate a wide range of community action (from prison visiting to food co-ops) is no longer necessary”.

However, Roger Fowler and whānau expanded their community activism to their new home in Māngere East, where Roger drove buses and was an Engineers Union delegate before managing the Mangere East Community Learning Centre.

In 1999, he was awarded the Queens Service Medal for community service.

Roger and Lyn have four children — Tawera, Hone, Maia and Kahutia — and 11 mokopuna.

Besides the book’s overview by Roger Fowler, there are 22 contributed chapters by activists in an 18-page section titled “Other activists’ voices”. This includes essays by Sir Bob Harvey, David Williams, Dr Lyn Doherty (“The shooting of Daniel Houpapa – a gross miscarriage of justice”), Vivian Hutchinson, Wayne Toleafoa, Rod Davis, Reverend Mua Strickson-Pua, Anna and Barry Lee, Catherine Manning (a profile on her mother Pat Hammond), Joris de Bres, Fuimaono Norman Tuiasau, and Tigilau Ness (“A legacy to pass onto our children”).

As well as the historical record of a remarkable era in the 1970s, the book is adorned with a superb gallery of photographs and graphic art. The Fowler whānau have worked extraordinarily hard to bring this publication to fruition after Roger’s death. A labour of love.

Roger Fowler and his wife, Dr Lyn Doherty, with whānau and friends at an East Mangere community concert in his honour in November 2025. Image: Hone Fowler

Something new that I learned from reading the book is that along with being such an influential activist and strategic organiser, protest entertainer and singer, Roger Fowler was also a gifted political cartoonist. Such extraordinary talent.

In the foreword, Nick Bollinger sums up: “Even though Roger writes in this book that ‘we never considered ourselves as part of a “youth culture” or so-called “alternative counterculture”, when I look back the People’s Union for Survival and Freedom stands out as perhaps the most inspiring application of countercultural ideals. I am very glad its story — and Roger’s — is at last being told in these pages.”

And so am I.

Ponsonby People’s Union: At the Frontline of Community Activism in the 1970s, overview by Roger Fowler, and contributors (Steele Roberts), 2026, 102 pages.
Two book launch events: Saturday, 3 October 2026, 1pm-3.30pm, The Ponsonby Community Centre, 20 Ponsonby Terrace, Auckland.
Sunday, 11 October 2026, 1-4pm, Whare Wānanga, Level 2, Tāmaki Pātaka Kōrero – Auckland Central Library, 44/46 Lorne St, CBD.

Dirty Work – shining a light on the machinery of NZ’s conservative politics

Pacific Media Watch — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 04:51:29 +0000

The strength of Dirty Work is that it pulls back the curtain to reveal those who prefer to operate in the shadows. And now they’re scrambling to turn off the lights again.

AGAINST THE CURRENT: By Steven Cowan

The ferocity with which sections of the New Zealand right have moved to discredit Nicky Hager’s new book Dirty Work before even turning a page tells its own story.

It is the same reflexive hostility that has greeted every major investigation Hager has produced over the past three decades: a rush to delegitimise, to sneer, to dismiss, all before the evidence has been examined.

But this time the haste has been almost comical. Within hours of the book’s release, Newstalk ZB’s Tim Beveridge — who could not possibly have read it — declared it “junk” and banned callers from discussing it on his overnight show.

READ MORE: Other Nicky Hager reports

Dirty Work . . . It shows how consent is manufactured, how outrage is cultivated, how media ecosystems are manipulated. Image: Potton & Burton

Beveridge’s contempt was not grounded in analysis; it was a strike against uncomfortable truths. His close association with Jordan Williams of the Taxpayers’ Union, a regular guest on Beveridge’s Saturday afternoon show, only underscores how tightly woven these networks of mutual reinforcement have become. When a book threatens the legitimacy of that ecosystem, the ecosystem responds like a single organism.

National Party MP and former minister Chris Penk, too, performed the same ritual denunciation. In a column for Stuff, he admitted he had not read Dirty Work — then proceeded to attack it anyway.

Penk reduced Hager’s investigation to a caricature: “a person with left-wing views disagrees with people with right-wing views.”

Penk’s dismissal was not an argument; it was another conservative signal that the book should be treated as illegitimate and unworthy of engagement.

But more revealing still was the intervention of Dane Giraud, a member of the Free Speech Union (FSU) and a committed Zionist defender of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. According to Giraud, those who take Hager seriously belong to an “elite intelligentsia” suffering from something he calls “Free Speech Union derangement”. This “elite (liberal) intelligentsia” is apparently inherently hostile to an organisation like the FSU because it is an authentic grassroots movement representing everyday working-class people.

FSU’s dishonest portrayal
This is a thoroughly dishonest portrayal of the FSU. It is not a working-class organisation that has emerged organically from within the workplace. It is a rebranded conservative lobby group, born out of the Taxpayers’ Union in 2018 and co-founded by corporate and political operatives including Jordan Williams. Its board includes several committed Zionists, and its campaigns consistently align with the interests of the political right.

To describe such an organisation as “grassroots” is not merely dishonest; it is an appropriation of working-class language for elite political ends. Traditional unions are democratic institutions funded and governed by workers themselves. They exist to bargain collectively, to protect wages, to improve safety, to build solidarity.

The FSU, by contrast, operates as a top-down lobby group focused on legal interventions, media pressure campaigns, and cultural warfare. It is structurally indistinguishable from the constellation of conservative advocacy outfits that have proliferated over the past decade — groups that claim to defend “free speech” while consistently mobilising against progressive movements, academic institutions, and public broadcasters.

Giraud’s rhetorical manoeuvre — painting critics as elitist while presenting the FSU as authentically proletarian — is a classic deflection. It shifts attention away from the organisation’s funding sources, political alliances, and ideological commitments. It reframes scrutiny as snobbery.

But Hager’s work has never been about cultural disdain; it has been about mapping the hidden architecture of influence. Dirty Politics exposed how attack blogs, political strategists, and wealthy donors coordinated smear campaigns. Dirty Work continues that tradition by tracing how lobby groups like the Taxpayers’ Union and their offshoots shape public debate while presenting themselves as neutral civic actors. To investigate such structures is not “derangement”. It is democratic hygiene.

The right’s panic over Dirty Work is therefore unsurprising. Hager’s investigations threaten the mythology that groups like the FSU and the Taxpayers Union depend on: the myth of independence, the myth of grassroots authenticity, the myth of representing “ordinary New Zealanders” rather than well-connected political networks.

When those myths are punctured, the public can see these organisations for what they are — professionalised advocacy machines that weaponise culture-war grievances to advance conservative interests.

A shadow infrastructure
From a left-wing perspective, Dirty Work is invaluable precisely because it illuminates the machinery of contemporary conservative politics. It shows how consent is manufactured, how outrage is cultivated, how media ecosystems are manipulated, and how lobby groups coordinate narratives across platforms. It reveals the connective tissue linking talkback hosts, political operatives, advocacy groups, and sympathetic MPs.

Furthermore, it does not claim that these actors are engaged in a grand conspiracy; rather, it shows how shared interests, ideological alignment, and personal networks create a shadow infrastructure of influence that operates largely out of public view.

If the book has a limitation, it is that it stops short of connecting these dynamics to the deeper failures of capitalism itself — the structural incentives that reward polarisation, the economic interests that benefit from deregulation and austerity, the corporate funding streams that sustain lobby groups committed to shrinking the public sphere.

But even without that broader analysis, Dirty Work arms progressives with the factual ammunition needed to challenge the narratives that dominate New Zealand’s political discourse. It exposes the machinery behind the manufactured outrage, the faux-populism, and the relentless attacks on public institutions.

The right’s rush to bury the book before reading it is not a sign of confidence. It is a sign of fear. Hager has once again pulled back the curtain, and those who prefer to operate in the shadows are scrambling to turn off the lights.

Republished from Steven Cowan’s blog Against The Current with permission.

Dirty Work: The Taxpayers’ Union and New Zealand’s Hard Right, by Nicky Hager, 2026 (Potton & Burton).

Abby Martin’s documentary takes on the ‘Earth’s Greatest Enemy’ ecocide

APR editor — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 09:50:27 +0000

REVIEW: By Olivia Rosane

It’s a commonly repeated statistic that the US military is the world’s largest institutional polluter, but what exactly does that mean?

The quest to find a real answer to that question led journalist and documentary filmmaker Abby Martin and her husband and co-director Mike Prysner on a five-year journey from defence contractor conferences and international climate gatherings to the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) military training exercises and the fight against the construction of a military base in Okinawa that would fill in its iconic Oura Bay.

The result is Earth’s Greatest Enemy, released last year — but just screened in Australia and New Zealand over the past month — independently through Martin and Prysner’s own Empire Files, with editing by Taylor Gill and an original score by Anahedron.

READ MORE: The Pentagon is the biggest polluter on the planet — ABC Late Night Live

The film uses personal narrative, research, investigative reporting, interviews, and live footage to detail all the ways in which the Pentagon poisons the planet, including greenhouse gas emissions, the ecocide of war, and the toxins left behind long after the fighting has stopped.

“When you combine all of this, it is completely undeniable that this force that is upheld by extreme violence is the greatest threat to all living things on Earth,” Martin told Common Dreams.

Hectares and hectares of US military equipment shown in a still from the film Earth’s Greatest Enemy.
Image: Empire Files

World’s largest polluter?
Toward the beginning of the film, Martin sets out to explain how the Pentagon can count as the world’s largest institutional polluter, and why the numbers behind that fact actually undersell its impact.

It turns out, Martin told Common Dreams, that this statement is only based on the amount of oil the US military purchases on paper, which comes to 270,000 barrels per day. This puts its emissions at 55 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, more than 150 countries.

This itself is a staggering amount of carbon pollution.

As Martin explains in the film: “It would take the average American driver over 40 years to burn as much fuel as a single flight of a Boeing Pegasus. The US flies more than 600 of these tankers.”

But it’s also only the tip of the melting iceberg. Through an interview with scientist Stuart Parkinson, Martin reveals how that 55 million keeps ballooning when considering life cycle emissions from military equipment and from the equipment purchased by NATO allies, projected to reach 295 million metric tons by 2028, or more than half of all countries. And that figure excludes the use of military equipment in war, or the emissions from reconstructing cities leveled by US-made bombs.

RIMPAC training exercises shown in a still from Earth’s Greatest Enemy. Image: Empire Files

In one particularly candid interview, a major-general tells Martin that it’s great to develop alternative energy sources, “but let’s not walk away from what fuels today’s national security, which is oil. You have to have it.”

And until something is developed that can completely replace oil, “I think you need to keep the alternatives in check,” he says.

Statements like these give the lie to the idea that the US can have a “green military empire,” Martin said.

They also show how difficult it is to separate the US military’s carbon footprint from that of the fossil fuel industry itself.

“Everything has really been wrapped up into securing the fossil fuel, building the infrastructure for fossil fuel, and maintaining that infrastructure empire in order to maintain a fossil fuel economy,” she told Common Dreams.

“So you have to look at the military as actually the institution that’s actually keeping the fossil fuel infrastructure in place through brutality and violence.”

‘Human detritus’

A helmet and dog tag as seen in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, in a still from the film Earth’s Greatest Enemy. Image: Empire Files

The film also makes clear that carbon pollution isn’t the only kind of pollution the military generates.

“Once you get into the research, you realise every stone unturned is an entire other documentary because it’s not just emissions, it’s the totality of pollution that the military is emitting on a daily basis, the dumping of toxic waste, the legacy contamination, that alone is still killing people every day,” Martin said.

The film spends much of its run time digging into the landfill of military waste, from melted down pucks of plastic dumped off Navy boats and unused munitions exploded in the desert to decades of water contamination at Camp Lejeune, the 26 million marine mammals the US Navy is permitted to harm or kill over five years of training, and the more than 250,000 bullets left behind in Iraq and Afghanistan for every person killed.

Martin said that almost every fact or anecdote she unearthed surprised her.

“No matter what you think you know, it’s worse. It’s actually worse because of how big it is and how every face is a story, every victim is a story,” she said.

One of the most devastating stories comes at the film’s beginning, as viewers spend time with Lavon Johnson, an Iraq War veteran who once starred in a US Army commercial and is now living on Veterans Row, a stretch of tents bearing American flags lined up outside the Veterans Affairs hospital in Brentwood, Los Angeles.

“My life is so fucked!” he declares as he lifts his hands from the piano he furiously plays despite the nerve damage caused by exposure to hydraulic fluid while in the Army.

In the next scene, viewers see the camp being demolished by police, juxtaposed with images of war, pollution, and environmental destruction, such as soldiers breaking down doors or dumping trash off of boats, oil pump jacks working, and beachside homes collapsing into a rising tide.

Martin said she was inspired to open the film with Johnson because of a letter that late Iraq War veteran Tomas Young wrote to former President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney before he died, referring to himself and other victims of the invasion as “human detritus your war has left behind”.

“That always stuck with me, that line, ‘the human detritus,’” Martin told Common Dreams. “And that is exactly what they do to veterans. That is exactly what they do to veterans… they’re churned up and spit out. They’re the cannon fodder of the system. And for what?”

Prysner is an Iraq veteran who spoke out against the war, and Martin is very clear that veterans are not the target of the pairs’ critique.

“This isn’t about service members,” she said. “This isn’t about hating the military. This is about accountability and justice for them. We’re fighting for service members and every living person on Earth, because we are all victims of this.”

The demolition of Johnson’s camp cut through with clips of war and weather disaster illustrates this point, and could serve as a sort of thesis for the film, showing that the US military ultimately turns everything it touches into detritus, including, if it’s not stopped, the planet itself.

“Everything on Earth is in Lavon’s tent,” Martin said.

Protesters marching against US militarism at COP26 in Glasgow in a still from Earth’s Greatest Enemy documentary. Image: Empire Files

A movie and a movement
This sense of connection is ultimately why Martin decided to keep Earth’s Greatest Enemy as a two-hour feature documentary rather than pivoting to a documentary series, despite the fact that, the more she dug, the more she realised “it could be 10 documentaries.”

She also ran into roadblocks when seeking Hollywood distribution. While environmentalist distributors would praise the film and compare it to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, they also said frankly, “You’re never going to be able to get anyone to buy this stuff.”

But, Martin said, “I was so committed to making a movie because movies were what radicalised me,” citing inspiration from films like The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, War Made Easy, and Michael Moore’s filmography.

Ultimately, her stubbornness paid off.

“It shows that everything from ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] to Gaza to the climate, that everything is connected,” she said. “Veterans, soldiers, the Indigenous people on the receiving end of this.

“If you care about cold water and good air, you can’t walk away from this not being impacted. And that was the goal. The goal is to lock people in and explain the totality and to bring you down to the depths of hell.”

She added: “We have to understand those depths, and you can’t get that with a 20-minute segment. You just can’t. You have to go through the pain of all the victims in this community and come out the other side empowered with the truth and the resolve that we have to change this.”

Change is a large part of Martin’s motivation for making the film, by educating people about the scope of the military’s destructive force and connecting them into a broader coalition.

Martin speaks in the film about coming to political consciousness and beginning her career as a journalist during the Iraq War, meeting Prysner through their shared opposition to war and empire, and developing “profound climate anxiety” following the birth of the pair’s first child.

She lamented that the climate and anti-imperialist movements have been largely siloed over the past two decades, though that is beginning to change.

Through local screenings, she said she wanted to “try to build the environmental movement with the anti-war movement together because… even though the consciousness is expanding, it’s not happening fast enough. And we are simply out of the luxury of time.”

The sense of urgency has only increased with US President Donald Trump’s second term. While the film does not cover this period, it points to many developments that have shaped the past 12 months, including Trump’s claim that he attacked Venezuela for oil, his imperialist push to control Greenland, and his deployment of ICE to terrorise US cities.

‘Big plan for climate crisis’
Toward the end of the movie, Martin includes a segment on the militarisation of US policing and warns that “this is our system’s big plan for the climate crisis.” She also films a panel on “Domain Awareness and Air Superiority in the Arctic” in which the generals speaking tell US companies they have an “open invitation” to experiment in Alaska.

“We know what they want the Arctic for, and it’s to pillage every last drop,” Martin said. “So if environmental organisations are not thinking this together, we have to do it for them. We have to do it for them quickly.”

So far, she has seen encouraging signs, with several Sierra Club chapters stepping up to host screenings and enthusiasm from the mainstream environmental groups, parks departments, and other city officials she has invited to attend.

But education is not her only goal.

“After we educate everyone, I hope to decommission the military empire,” Martin said.

For Martin, that doesn’t mean not having a military for self-defence, but rather decommissioning the 800 or so bases the US military maintains around the world and transforming the infrastructure into something that could help local communities in a climate-friendly way.

It also means accountability for harm caused and redirecting military spending toward basic needs like housing and healthcare, and certainly not giving the Pentagon another $600 billion as Trump desires.

While that may seem like an impossible task given the current political climate, Martin maintains a sense of revolutionary optimism, encouraged by the global mobilisation against the genocide in Gaza and the way that people are increasingly seeing the links between the multiple crises and struggles around the globe.

“There’s so many of us,” Martin told Common Dreams. “We care about the planet. We have a vested stake in life. And that’s our vision.”

“It’s like they have a vision of death and destruction for profit,” she continued. “Our vision is life, and we have to fight for it with every fibre of our being. And let this movie assist you however you can do that.”

Earth’s Greatest Enemy, directed by Abby Martin and Mike Prysner, The Empire Files, 120min.

Olivia Rosane is the opinion editor and a staff writer for Common Dreams. This article is republished under a Creative Commons licence.

For more information about Abby Martin’s documentary Earth’s Greatest Enemy go to earthsgreatestenemy.com or email theempirefiles@gmail.com

If your activist group wants to organise a community screening of this documentary in Aotearoa New Zealand, contact World Beyond War’s Liz Remmerswaal: lizrem@gmail.com

Thom Beanal – saluting a human rights legacy for Papua’s ‘father’

APR editor — Mon, 18 May 2026 00:09:40 +0000

ANALYSIS: By Laurens Ikinia in Jakarta

The eighth floor of the Tempo building in Jakarta became the setting for a gathering rich with meaning.

What brought together community leaders, politicians, academics, religious figures, journalists, and the family of the late Thom Beanal was not merely a book launch. It was an earnest attempt to revisit the essence of struggle, leadership, and hope for the land of Papua.

The event, which took the form of a discussion and review of a three-volume book series on Thom Beanal, opened with greetings in multiple traditions — from an Amungme war cry to salutations representing all major tribes in Papua.

That gesture alone reflected the very spirit of the man being honoured: a leader who embraced diversity and respected every single man and woman.

The gathering coincided with three historic moments, making it even more significant.

First, it marked exactly 27 years since Thom Beanal, standing before President B. J. Habibie, boldly expressed the heartfelt desire of his people. With courage and clarity, he called for recognition as a nation that wanted to cooperate honestly, peacefully, and democratically.

Second, the event served as a memorial, three years after Beanal’s passing — a man who left a deep imprint on the struggle of Indigenous Papuans.

Third, it celebrated the culmination of two years of work by a writing team, resulting in a trilogy that chronicles the journey of a lay pastor, a tribal chief, and what many now call a “father” to the indigenous Papuan.

From lay pastor to Indigenous defender
Thom Beanal was no ordinary leader. Born on 11 July 1947 into the Amungme tribe in Timika, he completed his education from primary school to a Catholic theological academy, then served as a catechist teacher in Wamena and Paniai and as a lay pastor in several parishes.

Yet behind his calming smile and disciplined demeanour lay a profoundly thoughtful mind.

Witnessing firsthand the human rights abuses and ecological destruction caused by PT Freeport Indonesia, Beanal resigned from his pastoral duties. He felt a more urgent calling: to defend indigenous communities whose lands and lives were being uprooted.

In 1994, he founded LEMASA, the Amungme Traditional Deliberative Council, as a vehicle for indigenous advocacy. Two years later, he took an audacious step — suing Freeport in a New Orleans court. That legal action set a precedent: for the first time, a Papuan had dared to take on a multinational giant on foreign soil.

His fight did not stop there. Beanal went on to push for a one percent allocation of mining revenue for affected communities. Although limited in scope, that achievement brought a measure of justice to people who, for decades, had borne the negative impacts of mining without enjoying the wealth of their own land.

Reform era and a unique role
Entering the reform era, Beanal’s role expanded. Together with other Papuan figures and students, he helped establish FORERI, a forum that channelled Papuan aspirations during the early wave of reform.

When the Papuan Council (Dewan Papua) was formed in 2000, he served as its vice chairman. He later became chairman of the Papuan Traditional Council from 2002 to 2007. Remarkably, President Abdurrahman Wahid — known as Gus Dur, a leader with genuine concern for justice in Papua — appointed Beanal as a commissioner of PT Freeport Indonesia.

Serving until 2018, Beanal found himself in a unique position: an indigenous rights fighter sitting on the board of the very company he had long opposed.

Yet despite those strategic roles, speakers at the book launch event described Thom Beanal as a humble man, disciplined and rich in metaphor. He never offered instant answers.

Instead, he opened spaces for collective reason to search for truth. In every balance of history, he arrived precisely when the Papuan people were not in a good state. And sadly, three years after his passing, the reality facing Papua remains far from encouraging.

A grim reality for Papua today
The presentations at the Tempo building painted a grim picture. Terms like genocide, ecocide, and ethnocide were mentioned as ongoing threats to Indigenous life. Papua’s gold and other natural resources, it was argued, remain mortgaged until 2061 under a contract deemed uncivilised because it ignores the basic rights of the customary landowners.

Suffering, the speakers said, is still the daily bread of Papuans. It is against this backdrop that the three books on Thom Beanal were written — not to lament the past, but to read the present clearly and to weave solutions for the future.

The 47 contributors to the third volume, divided into six sections, provided reflections and testimonies that enrich the books. They came from diverse backgrounds: family members, prominent figures of the Amungme tribe, academics, activists, and religious leaders.

The head of the writing team, Markus Haluk, expressed his highest appreciation to everyone who supported the two year process. Moral support and advice from religious, traditional, and political leaders were cited as a key source of strength.

Special thanks were directed to the book’s reviewers, including Dr Budi Hernawan, Dr Suraya Afiff, Yorrys Raweyai, Inayah Wahid, and Emanuel Gobay, for their critical engagement with the content.

A celebration of Thom Beanal’s human rights legacy in Jayapura in February. Image: Jubi

Six strategic demands for the future
More than a launch, the event became a platform for six strategic recommendations and hopes. First, the books should serve as historical source material and references for young Papuans and the wider public. The concern that the struggles of national figures might vanish with time underscores why documentation and dissemination are so urgent.

Without conscious efforts to write and spread the stories of past heroes, dark chapters could repeat, and the sacrifices of predecessors might become meaningless.

Second, the book launch was not meant to be a time for complaining or blaming one another. Instead, it is time to speak honestly about Papua’s current realities and then collectively formulate comprehensive, strategic solutions.

This constructive mindset is a legacy of Beanal’s way of thinking — seeing problems as challenges to be solved, not excuses for despair.

Third, participants were called to continue the prophetic voice exemplified by several great figures. Mentioned were bishops such as Monsignor Staverman, Monsignor Monninghoff, Monsignor Laba Ladjar, Monsignor John Philip Saklil, Father Neles Tebay, Monsignor Yanuarius You, and Monsignor Bernardus Baru OSA.

Among executive leaders, two presidents known for their deep concern for Papua — B. J. Habibie and Gus Dur — were hailed as models of dignified, peaceful struggle. The goal is noble: to save the people, culture, and natural world of Papua, which remains the last remaining lung of the Asia Pacific region. Achieving this requires genuine solidarity across sectors and religions.

Fourth, a firm call was directed at the Indonesian government, especially President Prabowo Subianto and relevant ministers: stop the mortgaging of Papua’s natural wealth, stop the gold theft, and stop the destruction of the universe that is the Papuan people’s home.

The contract binding Papua until 2061 is seen as a form of structural injustice that must be corrected. Rejection of all forms of natural resource pledging for the benefit of a few — especially to foreign parties — was voiced loudly before dozens of attendees.

Fifth, recognition of and respect for the rights of the Papuan people over politics, land, natural resources, and human dignity are non negotiable demands. The threats of genocide, ethnocide, and structural violence must be halted immediately. The absence of genuine recognition of these basic rights has been the root of decades of conflict and suffering in the land of Papua.

Sixth, and perhaps most fundamental, is the call to build honest, peaceful, and democratic negotiations between the Papuan people and the Indonesian government. This is not a new idea. It is precisely what Thom Beanal himself voiced when he stood at the State Palace on 26 February 1999.

He laid before the president the sincere desire of his people, offering equal dialogue based on honesty and peace. Twenty seven years later, the same call must be repeated — proof that a massive homework assignment still lies before the Indonesian government.

Continuing the struggle, not grieving
The subsequent discussion session opened the floor for strategic ideas from participants. The emphasis was that this gathering was not for grieving or lamenting fate, but for continuing the struggle. Attendees were encouraged to step out of their comfort zones and contribute according to their capacities.

An academic might contribute through critical research, a journalist through balanced and in-depth reporting, a politician through pro-people policy advocacy, a religious leader through moral and spiritual reinforcement, and an artist through works that raise awareness.

The event closed with a beautiful, touching metaphor drawn from Thom Beanal himself. He once reflected on the rain that welcomed his funeral in Timika. In his poetic logic, he hoped that the words spoken by those who continue his struggle would water the still thirsty soil of the fight.

The land of Papua, with all its natural wealth and cultural diversity, has long been like an arid field waiting for the rain of justice, recognition, and respect from the wider Indonesians.

A test of national commitment
The gathering at the Tempo building ultimately served as a test of Indonesia’s national commitment. Do we truly want to learn from a figure like Thom Beanal? Can we draw wisdom from the journey of a lay pastor who left his religious duties to pursue social justice? Do we have the courage to admit that for decades, systematic structural injustice has occurred in Papua?

And most importantly, do we possess the political will to stop all forms of exploitation and violence, and to build equal, dignified dialogue?

The trilogy on Thom Beanal, launched that day, is not merely a collection of stories from the past. It is a mirror for understanding today’s reality, and a compass for stepping into the future. It is a document of courage from a child of the nation who chose not to remain silent, despite great risks.

It is a legacy for young Papuans so they do not lose their historical roots, and for young Indonesians outside Papua, so they do not lose empathy and a sense of justice.

In the end, the gathering affirmed that Thom Beanal’s struggle is unfinished. His legacy still needs many hands to carry it forward. Amid threats of genocide, ecocide, and various forms of structural violence, prophetic voices like those modelled by the bishops, priests, and presidents who dared to side with justice are still desperately needed.

Will the Indonesian government listen? Will today’s leaders — including President Prabowo Subianto and his ministers — respond to the call to stop mortgaging natural wealth and to start honest, democratic negotiations? These questions still hang in Jakarta’s hot air, while in Timika, the rain may continue to fall, waiting for the words that can water the still thirsty land.

Laurens Ikinia is a Papuan lecturer and researcher at the Institute of Pacific Studies, Indonesian Christian University, Jakarta. He is also an honorary member of the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN) in Aotearoa New Zealand, and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

Girmitiya ancestry the inspiration behind Fiji writer’s debut novel

APR editor — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 11:49:03 +0000

By Christina Persico, RNZ Pacific bulletin editor

A woman whose great-grandparents — all eight of them — were Girmitiya labourers has put their stories into her debut novel.

The result is Banjara, a novel partly based on what she found, which is told through the eyes of two women more than 100 years apart.

Author, Shana Chandra told RNZ Nine to Noon she knew her grandparents were Girmitiya, but nothing of their origin stories.

READ MORE: Other Fiji literature reports

“I knew that they were part of this larger geopolitical movement under colonialism, but I didn’t have their personal stories,” she said.

“I didn’t know where they came from in India. I didn’t know what made them vulnerable to coercion. I didn’t even know their names. So really, writing the story was a way for me to write their origin story not only for me, but for them.”

Chandra said the former head of New Zealand’s Girmitiya Foundation told her that Indo-Fijians were prohibited from writing about indenture.

“It felt very important for me to write this origin story, because there was so much silence – I think, because there was so much shame over what happened.

‘Angry about the silence’
“And it was my way of saying to my ancestors, they no longer need to be silenced, and… thank you, in a way, because I used to be quite angry about the silence, but then I realized it was their gift to me, and their gift to all of us — they didn’t want us to be burdened with what they endured.”

Chandra said a lot of research went into the book, but historical records only tell so much.

“When I saw my great-grandmother’s immigration pass, she boarded the Hereford, which is actually the same boat that Avani, my character, boards in the book.

“She was only eight when she boarded, and she boarded the boat with her younger brother, her older sister and her father, and there was actually no record of her mother being on board. So because of the way indentureships were partitioned with men on one side and women and children on the other, I know that those women on board would have helped my great-grandmother and her siblings survive in a myriad of ways.

“One day, I just had this compulsion to wake up and say all of those women’s names because I knew that they would have helped them survive.”

There were shocking discoveries, too. One immigration pass was that of a 15-day-old baby who had died.

“And on the left-hand side, written in cursive writing by a colonial official, was that her mother had suffocated her. And though I know that could be true, there was something about that intuitively that just didn’t sit right in my body.”

Real oral histories
Chandra later came across a post from a site called Cutlass Magazine, featuring real oral histories.

“One about a woman who said that when her grandmother was indentured, the women on board had to hide the children because crew members would find them a nuisance and want to throw them overboard.

“And there was an actual story from an indentured man who kept on repeating the same story, how on his ship that had a particularly rough passage, the captain came, took a newborn baby and fed it to the sea as a sacrifice.

“Even just me writing the names of those women afterwards, just burst into tears… It was important to weave those other stories, those oral histories, into the book to show that other side of history.”

Chandra believes a lot of labourers were duped into signing the labour agreements, and many were promised a “paradisical island full of abundant opportunity”.

“But what they actually faced …was hard labour up to 14 hours a day or over six days a week. And a lot of them were subjected to brutal physical and sexual abuse.

“At one point, Fiji had the highest suicide rate in the world due to indenture.”

The ‘women’s gang’
Chandra said there was “amazing forms of resistance” from the women.

“There’s something known as the women’s gang.

“These women would form these gangs, and they would go to known abusers and use the only thing, only weapons they had, which was their bodies, and retaliate and beat their abusers. So my book really showcases that female solidarity.”

She said it was tough to navigate all the cultural practices and language of the time to be accurate. But what also became important was the “emotional truth”.

“That emotional honesty was almost just as important, because that’s what it’s really trying to capture, but I was lucky. When I was writing this novel, it did feel like something larger was guiding my hand. So I do partly dedicate this novel to my ancestors, who felt like they were conspiring with me from the heavens.

“I think what’s so amazing to me is that, and this is what I hoped the book would do — it would provide an emotional landscape for other Indo-Fijians to rebound off and to start talking about these stories.”

Shana Chandra will be appearing as part of the Auckland Writers’ Festival next month.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Nuclear – now climate change: New book on how great powers have plagued the Pacific

Pacific Media Watch — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 08:00:55 +0000

Updated research has shown up lingering headaches over the impacts of decades-long nuclear testing in the Pacific islands and interventions of outside powers, amid growing threats from climate change, writes Dr Lee Duffield for the Independent Australia.

REVIEW: By Lee Duffield

The journalist, professor and peace activist Dr David Robie, was one of a media party on the ill-fated voyage of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in 1985, before its sinking by French security operatives in Auckland Harbour.

He wrote a definitive book about the lead-up in the region to the fatal sinking of the ship with limpet mines; unmasking of the plot made in Paris; attempts to obtain justice and a long aftermath with demands for empowerment by former “colonial” people to prevent such outrages in their island homelands.

The book is Eyes of Fire, first published in 1986, then successively updated as the story unfolded, with new facts and consequences of the outrage coming to light.

It ran to three revised editions, the latest out now to commemorate 40 years since the attack took place. It therefore marked 40 years since the death of the Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira, a Portuguese-born Dutch national, aged 35, father of two children, Marelle and Paul, drowned on board after the second of two blasts that hit the ship.

Eyes of Fire is a highly professional work of journalism, built out of investigation and documentation of facts, then fashioned into an accessible read; illustrated also with easy-to-comprehend maps and diagrams, showing where the ship travelled and where the bombs were planted against its hull, plus photographs from a copious accumulation built up as the Greenpeace movement generated publicity for its actions worldwide.

New Zealand author David Robie . . . His book identifies same-old patterns of resistance in latter-day moves, successful, to get better recognition of the impacts of nuclear contamination and in moves through international forums. Image: The Australia Today montage

Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior
One section describes the Rainbow Warrior, appreciatively and affectionately: a former fisheries research vessel, a trawler type, 50-metres in length, with some difficulty converted for sail as well as power, made into a “proud campaign ship”, painted a strong green with a long rainbow-emblem along the sides.

“The wheelhouse was rather lumpy and unattractive but the rest of the ship was appealing. She had a high North Sea prow, graceful sheerline and round-the-corner stern.”

For the record…
The Rainbow Warrior sailed from Hawai’i on the Pacific Voyage — taking on board seven journalists and some leading figures from the Pacific communities, to the Marshall Islands — where it evacuated the inhabitants of a nuclear afflicted island, Rongelap, to an uninhabited island Mejatto on Kwajalein Atoll.

Pacific distances are great. They transported 350 people — with house lumber and belongings — in four trips, 250 km there and back.

Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior. Image: David Robie/Little Island Press

The islanders were suffering from contamination by the infamous upwind explosion of the experimental thermonuclear weapon, Castle Bravo, in 1954 — causing thyroid disorders, cancers and constant miscarriages and birthing disorders.

Dissatisfied that health officials sent by the United States administration were more interested in research than care, they decided to leave. The key instigator was the late Marshall Islands legislator Senator Jeton Anjain. He was one of two Pacific Islands leaders with prominent roles in Robie’s narrative.

The other was Oscar Temaru, a nuclear-free town mayor in Tahiti, also elected as the territory’s President on five occasions.

Temaru, now 81, spoke for many when he said:

“The sad truth is that the only ones who tried to help us are the Greenpeace ecologists…”

According to folklore among Greenpeace founders, a native American woman named “Eyes of Fire” told of a legend that where there was dispossession and despoilation of the land and culture, in time mythical warriors — deliverers — would come, who would mend and restore both. So the peaceship offering aid would be a “Rainbow Warrior”.

The author, Robie, in his news despatches for Radio New Zealand and other media (for which he was awarded the 1985 NZ Media Peace Prize, judged the evacuation project a change for Greenpeace towards humanitarian work connected with environmental destruction:

“This isn’t a game or the sort of action publicity stunt that Greenpeace would do so successfully.”

But the next part of the journey was another dramatic action, in Marshall Islands, at the US missile testing base on Kwajalein Atoll. A party from the ship went ashore, got through perimeter wires and hoisted a banner inscribed “Stop Star Wars” onto a space tracking dome, escaping before the arrival of security guards.

The banner was a reference to the American Strategic Defence Initiative, “Star Wars”, testing for which had increased the heavy traffic of missiles of different levels at the Kwajalein range (dubbed by the empire as the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Site).

The scene was then being set for the tragedy as the vessel made its way 5000 km to Auckland through friendly territory, calling in at Kiribati, the country hosting the former Christmas Island base for British nuclear tests (1957-58), and Vanuatu, where the leader of the then five year-old Republic, Father Walter Lini, a champion for a nuclear free Pacific, organised a big public welcome.

The strike
Celebration fitted the mood of the “Warrior” crew a lot of the time, in this account; a group of 11 skilled and idealistic younger people, sharing a mission they considered important to the world, and enjoying it as an adventure. They wanted to protect nature and promote peace, never violent, but charismatic, given to direct action, often enough dangerous.

They had others on board — in the case of David Robie, for an extended time, 11 days, time enough to get to know the characters and introduce them to readers in his book.

A further leg of the voyage was intended, to take them to Moruroa Atoll — where France was continuing with underground nuclear testing — as flagship for a flotilla of protest boats. In the event, the flotilla sailed, led by another Greepeace ship, Greenpeace III. One boat was arrested penetrating the 12-kilometre territorial limit around the atoll, where a series of tests was about to begin.

The planned disruption of activities on Moruroa may have been the death warrant for Rainbow Warrior — a solution to the riddle of what purposes its destruction was supposed to serve.

As the ship made its way towards Auckland, two French infiltrators got to work in that City, penetrating the Greenpeace operation. A group of military divers from a training base in Corsica was en route to New Zealand on a charter boat and two officers of France’s security service, DGSE, Dominique Prieur and Alain Mafart, flew in under cover as a honeymoon couple.

Rainbow Warrior came in on Sunday, 7 July 1985, surrounded by an escort of small boats and was sunk at the dock in shallow water just before midnight on 10 July.

Divers using an inflatable boat set off the two explosions. Prieur and Mafart were spotted picking up one of the divers on a beach by men doing night watch at their boat club, who got the number of their vehicle, enabling the police to apprehend them, and begin a tortured process to try and secure justice.

Photographer Fernando Pereira pictured at Rongelap Atoll … killed in the 1985 attack on the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior by French secret agents. Image: © David Robie

Aftermath
Updating of the book takes in the negotiations over holding Prieur and Mafart, their eventual transfer to France and subsequent early release; the fate of other conspirators spirited home, promoted, decorated, “looked after” in early retirement; intensive and large scale work by the New Zealand police to find out about the charter boat carrying some of the divers, said to have transferred them onto a submarine, the Rubis; and investigative work by the French press to sheet home responsibility for the attack.

Very soon after Rainbow Warrior was sunk, the Defence Minister, Charles Hernu, was sacked and the head of the DGSE Admiral Pierre Lacoste resigned. The book has a positive impression of the replacement Minister, Paul Quiles and the Prime Minister, Laurent Fabius, who admitted the obvious — that it had been done by French agents and was apologetic.

Subsequent negotiations between New Zealand and France, under United Nations auspices were made very difficult; a formal apology was avoided for some time; eventually both New Zealand and Greenpeace received financial packages in compensation and exemplary damages.

After the 1996 death of François Mitterrand, French President at the time, an investigation by Le Monde turned up circumstantial evidence that he knew of the attack in advance and a statement by Lacoste that he had approved it. Fabius evidently had not known.

Mitterrand’s motive was said to have been realpolitik — to support nuclear deterrence against the Soviet Union in tandem with the US, which supplied France with highly strategic computer technology.

Reviewer intercession…
Mitterrand, as a highly equivocal and manipulative politician, walked a tightrope, always watching his soft electoral margins — in this case knowing there was 60 percent support for nuclear testing in France.

In office for four years in 1985, it may have been a new government still failing to face down entrenched security identities, undisciplined, considering themselves to be “deep state”, attached to violent solutions, with potential to go rogue.

Most of Robie’s work here is a narrative, a strong true story, but it has space for analysis, and in particular registers the correlation between devastation brought by the nuclear testing, and colonial management and manipulation of islands affairs.

The post-war wave of independence had come to the Pacific, though not to French Polynesia nor New Caledonia. In addition, the United States still held its Micronesian dependencies in trust or, for Sovereign states, via signed compacts of free association, accompanied by substantial aid payments.

France’s position against independence is incentivised by maintaining colonies of more than 200,000 settlers; and in New Caledonia, the nickel deposits, around 15 percent of world resources, as well as the 200 kilometre territorial zone off the long coast of Grande Terre island, opening onto as yet unsurveyed undersea resources.

For the Americans, the priority has been both weapons testing and maintaining a strategic barrier against Russia, then China.

Old problems, future challenges
These considerations help to address the always unanswered question of what the plotters thought they had to gain. The book suggests a clumsy and excessive attempt to stop the ship leading a flotilla to Moruroa Atoll as most likely.

It goes on to identify same-old patterns of resistance in latter-day moves, successful, to get better recognition of the impacts of nuclear contamination and in the moves through international forums — such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, South Pacific Forum, United Nations agencies, the international courts — to get recognition and action on the impacts of climate change.

Pacific communities mindful of the rising seas, and other problems like impacts on sea-life, have struggled to get a hearing, finding, again, that “great powers” outside the region which hold resources that can help hold off the crisis, hold back their response.

Nuclear testing in the atmosphere was made to stop in 1974; tests underground on the atolls continued to 1996, leaving a very brief interregnum before global warming reared its head.

The current edition of Eyes of Fire has a prologue by Helen Clark, New Zealand Prime Minister from 1999-2008, a staunch keeper of the faith in a nuclear-free Pacific. Saying, “storm clouds are gathering”, she warns against renewed militarisation especially with Australia and perhaps other Pacific states acquiring nuclear submarines under the 2021 AUKUS agreement.

It is time for “de-escalation, not for enthusiastic expansion of nuclear submarine fleets in the Pacific”, writes Clark in her contribution to the new edition. With its peace policy, New Zealand wanted to be “a force for diplomacy and for dialogue, not for warmongering”.

Clark warns withdrawal of funding from the United Nations, led by the US, is a new threat: “Its humanitarian, development, health, human rights, political and peacekeeping, scientific and cultural arms all face fiscal crises.”

David Robie reports on the 40th anniversary commemoration of the 1985 events by Greenpeace, sending the new purpose-built ship, the new Rainbow Warrior, sometimes known as Rainbow Warrior III, to carry out independent radiation research. He follows up the lives and careers of the crew members and the islanders they worked with, several of whom have passed away.

While the writer’s own message, as in much good journalism, emerges from true handling of the facts, Robie does privilege a quotation from the executive director of Greenpeace Aotearoa, Russel Norman, on the crew of Rainbow Warrior, to close the story:

“They faced down a nuclear threat to the habitability of the Pacific. Do we have the courage and wits to face down the biodiversity and climate crises facing humanity, crises that threaten the habitability of planet Earth?”

Dr Lee Duffield on board the Rainbow Warrior in Fremantle, WA. Image: Independent Australia

Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, by David Robie (Little Island Press), 2025, 225 pages.

Dr Lee Duffield reported on Australia’s dispute with France over atmospheric testing for ABC News in Sydney and then from Paris as the ABC European Correspondent. His work entailed monitoring police actions against Kanak activists in New Caledonia, including the killings on Ouvéa Island; confrontations with French Ministers over the test programme; and negotiations between France and New Zealand, in Paris, on Rainbow Warrior, especially the jailing then early release of Dominique Prieur and Alain Mafart. He later taught Journalism at QUT in Brisbane and was a contributor to Pacific Journalism Review. Dr Duffield is also one of the co-owners of Independent Australia, and the chair of its editorial board. This review is republished from the Independent Australia with permission.

Journalist Barbara Dreaver’s memoir on three decades reporting from the Pacific

APR editor — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 18:15:21 +0000

RNZ Pacific

The seventh narco sub in Pacific waters was discovered last week as the wave of methamphetamine becomes the latest crisis challenging the region.

1News Pacific correspondent Barbara Dreaver has spent decades reporting on the region from this country, including the drug battle and subsequent HIV epidemic in some countries.

Dreaver has released her memoir — Be Brave: The Life of a Pacific Correspondent — on covering the Pacific through natural disasters, military coups and criminal activity.

She was detained and deported from Fiji before being blacklisted and not allowed to return for many years during former Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama’s reign.

Bainimarama was recently charged with inciting mutiny over allegations they encouraged senior Fiji Military Forces officers to act against the military commander in 2023.

She is a well known face within in Aotearoa, and in much of the Pacific where 1News is screened.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Listen to her interview with RNZ Nine to Noon

Taking the wealth – the plunder and impoverishment of West Papua

APR editor — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 02:00:32 +0000

REVIEW: By Lee Duffield

Declining population in West Papua, and critical loss of life through clashes with the Indonesia military raise the question of genocide in a new book by Brisbane writer Dr Greg Poulgrain.

This work, Curse of Gold, published in English by Kompas, as the title indicates traces the roots of subjugation going on in West New Guinea (West Papua) to a cynical grabbing for resources.

The book is a history beginning with the discovery of huge deposits of gold in 1936, deposits more than twice the gold being mined at Witwatersrand, together with discovery of oil just off-shore.

READ MORE: Grifting Grasberg. The great Indonesian gold-mining ‘mismatch’

The Curse of Gold cover – the Indonesian language edition.

The principal mine now, with an Indonesian billionaire as main owner, has 560 km of tunnels and produces 50 tonnes of gold annually.

The existence of the gold was kept secret, awaiting investment and development opportunities, held up by war with the Japanese, known just to Dutch interests, the Japanese, and significant for the future, the Rockefeller petroleum company Standard Oil in the United States.

The writer details the operation of a “Third Force” in a chain of political intrigues and manipulation over a half century: the US company, sometimes officers of the US government, and at all times an early player since the first discovery, Allen Dulles, who came to head-up the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Dulles as the lawyer for Standard Oil had already got a petroleum concession in Netherlands New Guinea before 1936, through forming a joint US-Dutch company with majority US interest.

Heyday of CIA operations
In the 1950s heyday of CIA undercover operations across the “Third World”, Dulles is depicted here manipulating political events in Indonesia, whether spreading disinformation, concealing information from governments, even setting up mysterious, destabilising armed skirmishes.

The objective given is always the same, to secure ownership of resources and a free hand for American commercial interests. At one point covert government help would be provided through some disingenuous work by Henry Kissinger as Secretary of State to Richard Nixon, and the always interventionist US Ambassador Marshall Green.

For people of West New Guinea the intriguing saga has been a catastrophe, seeing their rights, interests, existence and even human identity denied and ignored in the struggles over wealth and power.

The story is in two phases:

In wartime the occupying Japanese encouraged the Indonesian independence movement, as a block against any return to influence by European colonial powers, and naturally wanted Papuan resources themselves.

A Japanese intelligence operative, Nishijima Shigetada, familiar with the region, is given a key role. He had found out about the gold, and persuaded the Indonesian nationalists to include West New Guinea in their demands for a republic — the better to get the trove out of the hands of “colonial monopolies”.

The second phase of developments saw an ugly turn of events with the 1965 military coup in Indonesia, marked by large scale massacre across the country and coming to power of Suharto as President in 1967.

The new regime determined to build on the campaign by its predecessor, President Sukarno, to take over West New Guinea. In the calculus of Cold War rivalries, President John Kennedy had sought to keep him “on side” and the Russians provided guns and aid, in part to best their Chinese rivals.

Dutch gave in
The outcome was that the Dutch who had stayed on in the territory gave in to pressure and pulled out by the end of 1963. It was nominally then put under United Nations trusteeship until an “act of free choice” on independence.

But Indonesian forces moved in, violently put down any Papuan resistance, promulgated theories of an Indonesia Raya, a lost island empire to which all of New Guinea had belonged, and declared the decision on independence would be an issue of “staying” with Indonesia. Neither Kennedy nor Sukarno, who had planned to meet in 1964, is believed to have known about the gold in Papua.

Dr Poulgrain recounts the narrative of bullying and deception, including the sidelining of senior UN representatives, whereby the “act of free choice” became notoriously a series of managed gatherings, no plebiscite of the people ever countenanced. He argues that the “Third Party”, having helped to remove the Dutch, then moved in favour of its own preferred candidate, Suharto, no nationalist from the independence movement, a self-declared friend of US commerce and advocate for untrammelled investment:

“It could be argued that the fiery nationalism so characteristic of Sukarno, the tool that won him the right to enter the harbour of Soekarnopura (Jayapura) on board the Soviet warship renamed Irian, proved to be his own undoing. Under the mantle of Sukarno’s presidency, Indonesia ousted the Dutch from New Guinea, the goal of both Nishijima and the ‘Third Party’, finally bringing an end to the European colonial presence there.

“Only 30 months later, Sukarno was facing his own political demise …”

In case the reader considers this might all be a well-worn path, it should be emphasised there is new material and insight into the origins and enactment of cruelty, appropriation and dishonesty that became the pattern in Suharto’s New Order Indonesia and its captive provinces in West New Guinea.

It is a work of thoroughness and industry, especially where covert activity and actual conspiracy appears; extensive documentation has been provided making the case strong. Much of it is original material, such as diplomatic messaging obtained through libraries, and records of interviews or correspondence with leading figures, viz Nishijima or the former US Secretary of State Dean Rusk.

Well defended
The thesis of the book is consistently propounded and well defended:

“This book is about the ownership of the immense wealth of natural resources in Western New Guinea”.

The colonised inhabitants did not get that ownership or any just share of it, with bad consequences for their culture and welfare. It was a bad beginning in 1963 with Indonesia in a dominating frame of mind:

“Papuan culture is the antithesis of life in Java.”

Where the Dutch colonisers are characterised as a very small population hardly penetrating the hinterland, the Indonesians who took over from them have been aggressive with their industry building, immigration and military occupation.

Papuans today make up barely half the population of 5.4-million, steadily outstripped by arrivals. Population growth in the comparable country, Papua New Guinea, since independence in 1975 has been much stronger, now pushing towards 11-million.

Curse of Gold, by Greg Poulgrain (Jakarta, Kompas, 2026). ISBN 978, ISBN 978 (PDF)

West Papuan doco Pig Feast exposes oligarchs, food security crisis and ecocide under noses of military

APR editor — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 09:41:04 +0000

REVIEW: Asia Pacific Report

West Papuan diaspora, academics, students and community activists warmly applauded the screening of the new investigative documentary, Pesta Babi (Pig Feast): Colonialism in our Time, in its pre-launch international premiere in New Zealand last night.

It was shown for the first time back in West Papua at the southeastern town of Merauke, which is centred in the vast denuded rainforest area featured in the film, and also in the capital Jayapura on Friday.

Dramatic footage of scenes of village resisters against the massive destruction of rainforest in one of the three largest “lungs of the world”, shipping of barge-loads of heavy machinery, vast swathes of forest scoured out for rice and palm oil plantations, and of a traditional “pig feast” — the first in a decade — gripped the audience from the opening minute.

This is the largest forest conversion project in modern history — turning 2.5 million ha of tropical forest into industrial plantations under the guise of “food security” and the “energy transition”.

“It is a powerful film, rich with data and stories drawn from the lived experiences of masyarakat adat [Indigenous people],” comments Dr Veronika Kanem, a New Zealand-based Papuan academic and researcher, who was at the premiere with a group of her students.

“The film is also grounded in research conducted by Yayasan Pusaka, along with other national and local organisations.” She is pleased that her home village Muyu is featured in the film.

The storytelling focuses on the experiences of five Papuans and their communities. Image: Stefan Armbruster

The audience was also treated to Q&A session with the film director, Dandhy Dwi Laksono and producer Victor Mambor, an award-winning investigative journalist and founder of Jubi Media, who first visited New Zealand 12 years ago.

Documented collusion
Investigative filmmaker Laksono gained a reputation for his 2019 documentary Sexy Killers, released just before the Indonesian general election year and documented the collusion between the political establishment and the destructive coal mining industry.

He was arrested later that year over tweets he posted about state violence in Papua.

Laksono and Mambor, along with co-director Cipri Dale, make up a formidable investigative team.

The storytelling focuses on the experiences of five Papuans and their communities:

Yasinta Moiwend was startled when, on a quiet morning, a massive ship docked at her village pier. The vessel carried hundreds of excavators and was escorted by military forces.

It was the first convoy of 2000 heavy machines to arrive in Papua under a National Strategic Project for food production, palm-based biodiesel, and sugarcane bioethanol.

Yasinta, a Marind Anim woman in Merauke, never realised that her village had been chosen as the ground zero for what would become the largest forest conversion project in modern history.

Vincen Kwipalo, from the Yei community, was likewise shocked when his clan’s land was suddenly marked with a sign reading: “Property of the Indonesian Army.” Only later did he learn that the land had been seized for the construction of a military battalion headquarters, at the very moment when a sugarcane plantation company was also encroaching on his ancestral forest.

Red Cross Movement
Threatened by the same project, Franky Woro and the Awyu community in Boven Digoel erected giant crosses and indigenous ritual markers on their land.

Known as the Red Cross Movement, this form of resistance has spread among Indigenous groups across South Papua.

More than 1800 red crosses have been planted to confront corporations and the military—both physically and spiritually. Though a Christian symbol is central to the movement, local Church pastors condemned it as not part of the church.

Film director Dandhy Dwi Laksono (right) and producer Victor Mambor talk to the audience at the Academy Cinema in Auckland last night. Image: Stefan Armbruster

Dr Kanem says the film could have explored why the Awyu and Marind people chose to use the red cross, a symbol strongly associated with Christian values?

“Why did they not use their own cultural attributes or symbols instead?” she adds.

Laksono says: “Pig Feast combines detailed field recordings with in-depth research to examine the power structures behind the operation.

“It exposes how government and corporate entities — collaborating with military and religious groups — advance international and national goals of ‘food security’ and ‘energy transition’ at the expense of Indigenous communities and landscapes.”

Multinational corporations
The documentary illustrates the networks of Indonesian elites, oligarchs, and multinational corporations that benefit from the project, providing a vivid depiction of the political ecology of Indonesian governance in Papua.

Pig Feast reveals how the system of colonialism remains intact today.

Asked at the screening how dangerous was the film making, Mambor described the hardships their small crew faced to “find the truth” under the noses of the Indonesian military.

He said they walked up to 17 km a day at times to get the exclusive footage obtained for the documentary.

International journalists are banned from West Papua and a 2019 resolution by the Pacific Islands Forum calling for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to visit West Papua to investigate allegations of human rights abuses has been ignored by Jakarta.

The film reveals how 10 companies — all owned by one family — gained the backing of three presidents.

The Jhonlin Group, owned by oligarch Andi Syamsuddin Arsyad (aka Haji Isam), ordered about 2000 excavators from Chinese company SANY, considered one of the largest orders of its kind in the world, to clear one million hectares.

Massive military involved in operations in West Papua — as shown in the film . . . Jakarta has second thoughts on Gaza “peacekeepers”. Image: Jubi Media screenshot APR

‘Second thoughts’ on Gaza
Q&A moderator Dr David Robie, deputy chair of the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN), notes the massive military involved in the operations in West Papua — as shown in the film — and how Israel has been counting on Indonesia forming “the backbone” of the planned “International Stabilisation Force” for the besieged Palestinian enclave of Gaza with about 8000 troops because of its experience in “suppressing rebellion”.

“However, since the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran it seems that Jakarta has now had second thoughts,” he said.

Indonesia has suspended all discussions on the so-called “Board of Peace” initiative launched by US President Donald Trump, citing the military escalation in the Middle East, reports Anadolu Ajansi.

Critics had argued that joining a council led by the Trump administration could undermine Indonesia’s longstanding support for the “free Palestinian” cause.

Indonesia’s Ulema Council, the country’s top Islamic scholar body, had also called for an immediate withdrawal from the Trump initiative.

West Papua youth leader and Pusaka environmental activist Dorthea Wabiser and international law researcher Kerry Tabuni. Image: Asia Pacific Report

The filmmakers and documentary will now go to Australia for screenings in Sydney, Melbourne and hopefully Brisbane.

West Papua updates
Earlier in the day, at a two-day West Papua Solidarity Forum at the University of Auckland, several speakers gave updates and an analysis on political and social developments in the repressed Melanesian region.

Among speakers were Papuan environmental campaigner for Pusaka Dorthea Wabiser, longtime Aotearoa and West Papua human rights campaigner Maire Leadbeater, Papuan cultural advocate Ronny Kareni , Hawai’ian academic Dr Emalani Case, Ngaruahine researcher Dr Arama Rata, PNG academic at Waikato University Nathan Rew, West Papuan scholar Kerry Tabuni, Green Party Pacific peoples and foreign affairs spokesperson Teanau Tuiono, and forum organiser Catherine Delahunty of the West Papua Action Tāmaki Makaurau and West Papua Action Aotearoa.

Catherine Delahunty introduces Viktor Yeimo in a video link message. Image: Asia Pacific Report

Viktor Yeimo, international spokesperson of the KNPB (National Committee for West Papua) and PRP (Papuan People’s Petition), and several Papuan community spokespeople shared messages by video link.

Yeimo spoke about how many students, activists, journalists, church leaders and communities of faith in West Papua faced risks when they spoke about justice and political rights.

“To ignite a large log, one must first find many small pieces [kindling],” he said. “Each piece alone cannot produce a great fire, but together they create enough heat to ignite something much larger.”

He said one pathway involved meaningful political reform within Indonesia, including stronger protection of Indigenous rights and genuine regional autonomy.

Another pathway involved inclusive political dialogue between the Indonesian government and legitimate representatives of Papuan society, like ULMWP (United Liberation Movement of West Papua).

A third pathway existed within international law, “it is the possibility of a self-determination process supervised by an international institution [such as the United Nations].”

He pointed to the progress of the self-determination processes of Bougainville and Kanak New Caledonia for example.

Yeimo said Papuans wanted to build a Pacific future “grounded in justice and solidarity”.

A Papuan rapper spoke on screen saying he wasn’t afraid of the repression of authorities, “but they seem to be afraid of me and my music.”

Pesta Babi (Pig Feast): Colonialism in our Time, directed by Dandhy Dwi Laksono and Cypri Dale; produced by Victor Mambor (Jubi Media, 2026, investigative documentary 90min).

West Papua Solidarity Forum organiser Catherine Delahunty and Green Party Pacific peoples and foreign affairs spokesperson Teanau Tuiono . . . only politician to front up, but he has long been a supporter of the West Papua cause. Image: Asia Pacific Report

Pesta Babi – ‘Pig Feast’ . . . a vivid new film exposing Papua’s political ecology

Pacific Media Watch — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 20:28:09 +0000

REVIEW: Jubi Media

Yasinta Moiwend was startled when, on a quiet morning, a massive ship docked at her village pier in West Papua.

The vessel carried hundreds of excavators and was escorted by military forces. It was the first convoy of 2000 heavy machines to arrive in Papua under a National Strategic Project for food production, palm-based biodiesel, and sugarcane bioethanol.

Yasinta, a Marind Anim woman in Merauke, never realised that her village had been chosen as the ground zero for what would become the largest forest conversion project in modern history — turning 2.5 million ha of tropical forest into industrial plantations under the guise of “food security” and the “energy transition”.

Vincen Kwipalo, from the Yei community, was also shocked when his clan’s land was suddenly marked with a sign reading: “Property of the Indonesian Army.”

Only later did he learn that the land had been seized for the construction of a military battalion headquarters, at the very moment when sugarcane, a plantation company, was also encroaching on his ancestral forest.

Threatened by the same project, Franky Woro and the Awyu community in Boven Digoel erected giant crosses and indigenous ritual markers on their land. Known as the Red Cross Movement, this form of resistance has spread among Indigenous groups across South Papua.

The Pesta Babi trailer. Video: Jubi Media at Café Pacific

Pesta Babi (“Pig Feast”) combines detailed field recordings with in-depth research to examine the power structures behind the operation.

It exposes how government and corporate entities — collaborating with military and religious groups — advance international and national goals of “food security” and “energy transition” at the expense of Indigenous communities and landscapes.

The documentary illustrates the networks of Indonesian elites, oligarchs, and multinational corporations that benefit from the project, providing a vivid depiction of the political ecology of Indonesian governance in Papua.

Pig Feast serves as a record of colonialism that remains intact today.

This film is co-produced by Jubi, Ekspedisi Indonesia Baru, Greenpeace, Yayasan Pusaka, and Watchdoc Documentary. It is being screened as part of a weekend of West Papua Solidarity Forum events organised by West Papua Action Tāmaki Makaurau.

Pesta Babi (“Pig Feast”) — Colonialism In Our Time, directed by Cypri Dale and Dandhy Laksono and produced by Jubi Media and collaborators. Investigative documentary (90min).
Book tickets for the “Sinéma Merdeka: Stories from West Papua” event here

“Pesta Babi” (The Pig Party) . . . the West Papuan documentary film being world premiered in New Zealand next month. Image: Jubi Media

David Robie’s Eyes of Fire rekindles the legacy of the Rainbow Warrior 40 years on

APR editor — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 18:34:29 +0000

A transition in global emphasis from “nuclear to climate crisis survivors”, plus new geopolitical exposés.

REVIEW: By Amit Sarwal of The Australia Today

Forty years after the bombing of the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour, award-winning journalist and author David Robie has revisited the ship’s fateful last mission — a journey that became a defining chapter in New Zealand’s identity as a nuclear-free nation.

Robie’s newly updated book, Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, is both a historical record and a contemporary warning.

It captures the courage of those who stood up to nuclear colonialism in the Pacific and draws striking parallels with the existential challenges the region now faces — from climate change to renewed geopolitical tensions.

“The new edition has a completely new 40-page section covering the last decade and the transition in global emphasis from ‘nuclear to climate crisis survivors’, plus new exposés about the French spy ‘blunderwatergate’. Ironically, the nuclear risks have also returned to the fore again,” Robie told The Australia Today.

“The book deals with a lot of critical issues impacting on the Pacific, and is expanded a lot and quite different from the last edition in 2015.”

In May 1985, the Rainbow Warrior embarked on a humanitarian mission unlike any before it. The crew helped 320 Rongelap Islanders relocate to a safer island after decades of radioactive contamination from US nuclear testing at Bikini and Enewetak atolls.

Robie, who joined the ship in Hawai’i as a journalist, recalls the deep humanity of that voyage.

Back in 1985: Journalist David Robie (centre) pictured with two Rainbow Warrior crew members, Henk Haazen (left) and the late Davey Edward, the chief engineer. Robie spent 11 weeks on the ship, covering the evacuation of the Rongelap Islanders. Image: Inner City News

Humanitarian voyage
“The fact that this was a humanitarian voyage . . . helping the people of Rongelap in the Marshall Islands, it was going to be quite momentous,” he told Pacific Media Network News.

“It’s incredible for an island community where the land is so much part of their existence, their spirituality and their ethos.”

The Rainbow Warrior sailing in the Marshall Islands in May 1985 before the Rongelap relocation mission. Image: David Robie/Café Pacific Media

The relocation was both heartbreaking and historic. Islanders dismantled their homes over three days, leaving behind everything except their white-stone church.

“I remember one older woman sitting on the deck among the remnants of their homes,” Robie recalls.

“That image has never left me.”

A Rongelap islander with her entire home and belongings on board the Rainbow Warrior in May 1985. Image: © David Robie/Eyes Of Fire

Their ship’s banner, Nuclear Free Pacific, fluttered as both a declaration and a demand. The Rainbow Warrior became a symbol of Pacific solidarity, linking environmentalism with human rights in a region scarred by the atomic age.

On 10 July 1985, the Rainbow Warrior was docked at Auckland’s Marsden Wharf when two underwater bombs tore through its hull. The explosions, planted by French secret agents, sank the vessel and killed Portuguese-Dutch photographer Fernando Pereira.

The front page of The New Zealand Herald on 12 July 1985 — two days after the bombing. Image: NZH screenshot

Bombing shockwaves
The bombing sent shockwaves through New Zealand and the world. When French Prime Minister Laurent Fabius finally admitted that his country’s intelligence service had carried out the attack, outrage turned to defiance. New Zealand’s resolve to remain nuclear-free only strengthened.

Former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark. Image: Kate Flanagan /www.helenclarknz.com

Former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark contributes a new prologue to the 40th anniversary edition, reflecting on the meaning of the bombing and the enduring relevance of the country’s nuclear-free stance.

“The bombing of the Rainbow Warrior and the death of Fernando Pereira was both a tragic and a seminal moment in the long campaign for a nuclear-free Pacific,” she writes.

“It was so startling that many of us still remember where we were when the news came through.”

Clark warns that history’s lessons are being forgotten. “Australia’s decision to enter a nuclear submarine purchase programme with the United States is one of those storm clouds gathering,” she writes.

“New Zealand should be a voice for de-escalation, not for enthusiastic expansion of nuclear submarine fleets in the Pacific.”

Clark’s message in the prologue is clear: the values that shaped New Zealand’s independent foreign policy in the 1980s — diplomacy, peace and disarmament — must not be abandoned in the face of modern power politics.

Author David Robie and the Rainbow Warrior III. Image: Facebook/David Robie

Geopolitical threats
Robie adds that the book also explores “the geopolitical threats to the region with unresolved independence issues, such as the West Papuan self-determination struggle in Melanesia.”

Clark’s call to action, Robie told The Australia Today, resonates with the Pacific’s broader fight for justice.

“She warns against AUKUS and calls for the country to ‘link with the many small and middle powers across regions who have a vision for a world characterised by solidarity and peace, which can rise to the occasion to combat the existential challenges it faces — including of nuclear weapons, climate change, and artificial intelligence.’”

Author David Robie with a copy of Eyes of Fire during a recent interview with RNZ Pacific. Image: Facebook/David Robie

When Eyes of Fire was first published, it instantly became a rallying point for young activists and journalists across the Pacific. Robie’s reporting — which earned him New Zealand’s Media Peace Prize 40 years ago — revealed the human toll of nuclear testing and state-sponsored secrecy.

Today, his new edition reframes that struggle within the context of climate change, which he describes as “the new existential crisis for Pacific peoples.” He sees the same forces of denial, delay, and power imbalance at play.

“This whole renewal of climate denialism, refusal by major states to realise that the solutions are incredibly urgent, and the United States up until recently was an important part of that whole process about facing up to the climate crisis,” Robie says.

“It’s even more important now for activism, and also for the smaller countries that are reasonably progressive, to take the lead.”

For Robie, Eyes of Fire is not just a history book — it’s a call to conscience.

“I hope it helps to inspire others, especially younger people, to get out there and really take action,” he says.

“The future is in your hands.”

“You can’t sink a rainbow” slogan on board the Rainbow Warrior III. Image: David Robie 2025

The Rainbow Warrior returned to Aotearoa in July to mark the 40th anniversary of the bombing. Forty years on, the story of the Rainbow Warrior continues to burn — not as a relic of the past, but as a beacon for the Pacific’s future through Robie’s Eyes of Fire.

Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, by David Robie. (Little Island Press, 2025, 245 pages).

Gaza’s Plestia Alaqad to star in Palestinian horror film The Visitor

Pacific Media Watch — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 09:38:01 +0000

The New Arab

A Palestinian horror film inspired by folklore is moving forward, with journalist and author Plestia Alaqad joining the cast alongside American-born Kuwaiti-Palestinian journalist and media personality Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Titled The Visitor, the feature is written and directed by Palestinian-American filmmaker Rolla Selbak and produced by Black Poppy Productions.

The story follows a young Palestinian man in Jerusalem who must protect his family after a “Ghouleh” — a female demon from local folktales — emerges in his town.

Production is scheduled for a 25-day shoot in Jordan in 2026, with US-based Watermelon Pictures joining as executive producer and financier. The company, which supported From Ground Zero, Palestine’s first Oscars submission, will collaborate with Jordan’s Imaginarium on the production.

Watermelon Pictures’ head of production, Munir Atalla, told The Hollywood Reporter that Selbak’s vision “marks a bold new foray into genre films for Palestinian cinema“.

Alaqad, a Palestinian author, journalist, and poet, gained international attention for her daily social media coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Her memoir, The Eyes of Gaza: A Diary of Resilience, was published earlier this year by Pan Macmillan and was released in the United States in September.

Human rights, Arab identity
Shihab-Eldin, an Emmy-nominated journalist and actor of Palestinian descent, is best known for his work on Al Jazeera’s The Stream and various independent media projects focusing on human rights and Arab identity.

Selbak told The Hollywood Reporter that The Visitor “is about erasure, and the deep human need to be seen”, adding that “living under occupation can be scarier than the monsters in our folktales”.

Atalla told The New Arab in June that Watermelon Pictures was founded in response to censorship and the lack of representation facing Palestinian storytellers in global cinema.

“The [Gaza] genocide put into stark relief the extent to which the existing systems we have will never serve us,” he said. “We have to build our own cultural power and financial power to compete and fight in this ideological battle that we’re in.”

He added that the company’s new streaming platform, Watermelon+, was designed as “a living archive of Palestinian cinema”, protecting films from being erased or deplatformed.

Alaqad also told The New Arab earlier this year that her work had sought to preserve Palestinian life and memory beyond the violence.

“The media only shows Gaza when it’s being bombed,” she said. “We’re seeing how Palestinians are getting killed, but we don’t see how Palestinians lived.

“That’s where the dehumanisation comes in.”

Republished from The New Arab.

Eyes of Fire is an updated Rainbow Warrior classic and must read for activism

APR editor — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 12:56:50 +0000

REVIEW: By Jenny Nicholls

Author David Robie left his cabin on the Rainbow Warrior three days before it was blown up by the Directorate General for External Security (DGSE), France’s foreign intelligence agency

The ship was destroyed at Marsden Wharf on 10 July 1985 by two limpet mines attached
below the waterline.

As New Zealand soon learned to its shock, the second explosion killed crew member and photographer Fernando Pereira as he tried to retrieve his cameras.

READ MORE: Other Eyes of Fire reports

“I had planned to spend the night of the bombing onboard with my two young sons, to give them a brief taste of shipboard life,” Dr Robie writes. “At the last moment I decided to leave it to another night.”

He left the ship after 11 weeks documenting what turned out to be the last of her humanitarian missions — a voyage which highlighted the exploitation of Pacific nations
by countries who used them to test nuclear weapons.

Dr Robie was the only journalist on board to cover both the evacuation of the people
of Rongelap Atoll after their land, fishing grounds and bodies were ravaged by US nuclear fallout, and the continued voyage to nuclear-free Vanuatu and New Zealand.

Eyes of Fire is not only the authoritative biography of the Rainbow Warrior and her
missions, but a gripping account of the infiltration of Greenpeace by a French spy, the bombing, its planning, the capture of the French agents, the political fallout, and ongoing
challenges for Pacific nations.

Dr Robie corrects the widely held belief that the first explosion on the Rainbow Warrior
was intended as a warning, to avoid loss of life. No, it turns out, the French state really
did mean to kill people.

“It was remarkable,” he writes, “that Fernando Pereira was the only person who
died.”

The explosives were set to detonate shortly before midnight, when members of the
crew would be asleep. (One of them was the ship’s relief cook, Waihekean Margaret Mills. She awoke in the nick of time. The next explosion blew in the wall of her cabin).

“Two cabins on the main deck had their floors ruptured by pieces of steel flying from
the [first] engine room blast,” writes Dr Robie.

“By chance, the four crew who slept in those rooms were not on board. If they had been,
they almost certainly would have been killed.”

Eyes of Fire author David Robie with Rainbow Warrior III . . . not only an account of the Rongelap humanitarian voyage, but also a gripping account of the infiltration of Greenpeace and the bombing. Image: Asia Pacific Report

Eyes of Fire was first published in 1986 — and also in the UK and USA, and has been reissued in 2005, 2015 and again this year to coincide with the 40th anniversary
of the bombing.

If you are lucky enough to own the first edition, you will find plenty that is new here; updated text, an index, new photographs, a prologue by former NZ prime minister Helen Clark and a searing preface by Waihekean Bunny McDiarmid, former executive director
of Greenpeace International.

As you would expect from the former head of journalism schools at the University
of Papua New Guinea and University of the South Pacific, and founder of AUT’s Pacific Media Centre, Eyes of Fire is not only a brilliant piece of research, it is an absolutely
fascinating read, filled with human detail.

The bombing and its aftermath make up a couple of chapters in a book which covers an enormous amount of ground.

Professor David Robie is a photographer, journalist and teacher who was awarded an MNZM in 2024 for his services to journalism and Asia-Pacific media education. He is founding editor of the Pacific Journalism Review, also well worth seeking out.

Eyes of Fire is an updated classic and required reading for anyone interested in activism
or the contemporary history of the Pacific.

Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, by David Robie; prologue by former NZ prime minister Helen Clark (Little Island Press). There is a linked microsite Eyes of Fire: 40 Years On. Reviewer Jenny Nicholls is subeditor of the Waiheke Weekender, where this review was first published.
Available at Baka Books in Fiji
The Legends of the Pacific: Stories of a Nuclear-Free Moana exhibition curated by the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN) is currently on at the Waiheke Library until September 11.

The Rainbow Warrior saga: 1. French state terrorism and NZ’s end of innocence

APR editor — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 06:09:09 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

Immediately after killing Fernando Pereira and blowing up Greenpeace’s flagship the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour, several of the French agents went on a ski holiday in New Zealand’s South Island to celebrate.

Such was the contempt the French had for the Kiwis and the abilities of our police to pursue them. How wrong they were.

To mark the 40th anniversary of the French terrorist attack Little Island Press has published a revised and updated edition of Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, first released in 1986.

A new prologue by former prime minister Helen Clark and a preface by Greenpeace’s Bunny McDiarmid, along with an extensive postscript which bring us up to the present day, underline why the past is not dead; it’s with us right now.

Written by David Robie, editor of Asia Pacific Report, who spent 11 weeks on the final voyage of the Warrior, the book is the most remarkable piece of history I have read this year and one of those rare books that has the power to expand your mind and make your blood boil at the same time. I thought I knew a fair bit about the momentous events surrounding the attack — until I read Eyes of Fire.

Heroes of our age
The book covers the history of Greenpeace action — from fighting the dumping of nuclear and other toxic waste in European waters, the Arctic and the Pacific, voyages to link besieged communities across the oceans, through to their epic struggles to halt whaling and save endangered marine colonies from predators.

The Rainbow Warrior’s very last voyage before the bombing was to evacuate the entire population of Rongelap atoll (about 320 people) in the Marshall Islands who had been exposed to US nuclear radiation for decades.

This article is the first of two in which I will explore themes that the book triggered for me.

Neither secret nor intelligent – the French secret intelligence service

Jean-Luc Kister was the DGSE (Direction-générale de la Sécurité extérieure) agent who placed the two bombs that ripped a massive hole in the hull of the Warrior on 10 July 1985. The ship quickly sank, trapping Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira inside.

Former colonel Kister was a member of a large team of elite agents sent to New Zealand. One had also infiltrated Greenpeace months before, some travelled through the country prior to the attack, drinking, rooting New Zealand women and leaving a trail of breadcrumbs that led all the way to the Palais de l’Élysée where François Mitterrand, Socialist President of France, had personally given the order to bomb the famous peace vessel.

Robie aptly calls the French mission “Blundergate”. The stupidity, howling incompetence and moronic lack of a sound strategic rationale behind the attack were only matched by the mendacity, the imperial hauteur and the racist contempt that lies at the heart of French policy in the Pacific to this very day.

Thinking the Kiwi police would be no match for their élan, their savoir-faire and their panache, some of the killers hit the ski slopes to celebrate “Mission Accompli”. Others fled to Norfolk Island aboard a yacht, the Ouvéa.

Tracked there by the New Zealand police it was only with the assistance of our friends and allies, the Australians, that the agents were able to escape. Within days they sank their yacht at sea during a rendezvous with a French nuclear submarine and were evenually able to return to France for medals and promotions.

Two of the agents, however, were not so lucky. As everyone my age will recall, Dominique Prieur and Alain Mafart, were nabbed after a lightning fast operation by New Zealand police.

With friends and allies like these, who needs enemies?
We should recall that the French were our allies at the time. They decided, however, to stop the Rainbow Warrior from leading a flotilla of ships up to Moruroa Atoll in French Polynesia where yet another round of nuclear tests were scheduled. In other words: they bombed a peace ship to keep testing bombs.

By 1995, France had detonated 193 nuclear bombs in the South Pacific.

David Robie sees the bombing as “a desperate attempt by one of the last colonial powers in the Paciﬁc to hang on to the vestiges of empire by blowing up a peace ship so it could continue despoiling Paciﬁc islands for the sake of an independent nuclear force”.

The US, UK and Australia cold-shouldered New Zealand through this period and uttered not a word of condemnation against the French. Within two years we were frog-marched out of the ANZUS alliance with Australia and the US because of our ground-breaking nuclear-free legislation.

It was a blessing and the dawn of a period in which New Zealanders had an intense sense of national pride — a far cry from today when New Zealand politicians are being referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague for war crimes associated with the Gaza genocide.

Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior . . . publication next week. Image: © David Robie/Eyes Of Fire/Little Island Press

The French State invented the term ‘terrorism’
I studied French History at university in France and did a paper called “La France à la veille de révolution” (France on the eve of revolution). One of the chilling cultural memories is of the period from September 1793 to July 1794, which was known as La Terreur.

At the time the French state literally coined the term “terrorisme” — with the blade of the guillotine dropping on neck after neck as the state tried to consolidate power through terror. But, as Robie points out, quoting law professor Roger S. Clark, we tend to use the term today to refer almost exclusively to non-state actors.

With the US and Israel gunning down starving civilians in Gaza every day, with wave after wave of terror attacks being committed inside Iran and across the Middle East by Mossad, the CIA and MI6, we should amend this erroneous habit.

The DGSE team who attached limpet mines to the Rainbow Warrior did so as psychopathic servants of the French State. Eyes of Fire: “At the time, Prime Minister David Lange described the Rainbow Warrior attack as ‘nothing more than a sordid act of international state-backed terrorism’.”

Don’t get me wrong. I am not “anti-French”. I lived for years in France, had a French girlfriend, studied French history, language and literature. I even had friends in Wellington who worked at the French Embassy.

Curiously when I lived next to Premier House, the official residence of the prime minister, my other next door neighbour was a French agent who specialised in surveillance. Our houses backed onto Premier House. Quelle coïncidence. To his mild consternation I’d greet him with “Salut, mon espion favori.” (Hello, my favourite spy).

What I despise is French colonialism, French racism, and what the French call magouillage. I don’t know a good English word for it . . . it is a mix of shenanigans, duplicity, artful deception to achieve unscrupulous outcomes that can’t be publicly avowed. In brief: what the French attempted in Auckland in 1985.

Robie recounts in detail the lying, smokescreens and roadblocks that everyone from President Mitterrand through to junior officials put in the way of the New Zealand investigators. Mitterrand gave Prime Minister David Lange assurances that the culprits would be brought to justice. The French Embassy in Wellington claimed at the time: “In no way is France involved. The French government doesn’t deal with its opponents in such ways.”

It took years for the bombshell to explode that none other than Mitterrand himself had ordered the terrorist attack on New Zealand and Greenpeace!

Rainbow Warrior III . . . the current successor to the bombed ship. Photographed at Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands in April 2025. Image: © Bianca Vitale/Greenpeace

We the people of the Pacific
We, the people of the Pacific, owe a debt to Greenpeace and all those who were part of the Rainbow Warrior, including author David Robie. We must remember the crime and call it by its name: state terrorism.

The French attempted to escape justice, deny involvement and then welched on the terms of the agreement negotiated with the help of the United Nations secretary-general.

A great way to honour the sacrifice of those who stood up for justice, who stood for peace and a nuclear-free Pacific, and who honoured our own national identity would be to buy David Robie’s excellent book.

I’ll give the last word to former Prime Minister Helen Clark:

“This is the time for New Zealand to link with the many small and middle powers across regions who have a vision for a world characterised by solidarity and peace and which can rise to the occasion to combat the existential challenges it faces — including of nuclear weapons, climate change, and artificial intelligence. If our independent foreign policy is to mean anything in the mid-2020s, it must be based on concerted diplomacy for peace and sustainable development.”

You cannot sink a rainbow.

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He contributes to Asia Pacific Report and Café Pacific, and hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz

Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, by David Robie. This article was first published by Solidarity website and is the first part of a two-part series.

The West v China: Fight for the Pacific – Episode 1: The Battlefield

APR editor — Wed, 21 May 2025 10:46:16 +0000

Al Jazeera

How global power struggles are impacting in local communities, culture and sovereignty in Kanaky, New Caledonia, the Solomon Islands and Samoa.

In episode one, The Battlefield, broadcast today, tensions between the United States and China over the Pacific escalate, affecting the lives of Pacific Islanders.

Key figures like former Malaita Premier Daniel Suidani and tour guide Maria Loweyo reveal how global power struggles impact on local communities, culture and sovereignty in the Solomon Islands and Samoa.

WATCH: The first episode of this new series

The episode intertwines these personal stories with the broader geopolitical dynamics, setting the stage for a deeper exploration of the Pacific’s role in global diplomacy.

Fight for the Pacific, a four-part series by Tuki Laumea and Cleo Fraser, showcases the Pacific’s critical transformation into a battleground of global power.

This series captures the high-stakes rivalry between the US and China as they vie for dominance in a region pivotal to global stability.

The series frames the Pacific not just as a battleground for superpowers but also as a region with its own unique challenges and aspirations.

Republished from Al Jazeera.

The Encampments vs October 8 – a battle of narratives on Palestine plays out in cinema

Pacific Media Watch — Fri, 09 May 2025 15:05:15 +0000

This article was initially set out to focus on The Encampments, Kei Pritsker and Michael T Workman’s impassioned documentary that chronicles the Columbia University student movement that shook the United States and captured imaginations the world over.

But then it came to my attention that a sparring film has been released around the same time, offering a staunchly pro-Israeli counter-narrative that vehemently attempts to discredit the account offered by The Encampments.

October 8 charts the alleged rise of antisemitism in the US in the wake of the October 7 attacks on southern Israel by Hamas-led Palestinian fighters.

READ MORE: The Israeli war on Gaza in film narratives

A balanced record though, it is not. Wendy Sachs’s solo debut feature, which has the subhead, “The Fight for the Soul of America”, is essentially an unabashed defence of the silencing of pro-Palestinian voices.

Its omissions are predictable; its moral logic is fascinatingly disturbing; its manipulative arguments are the stuff of Steven Bannon.

It’s easily the most abhorrent piece of mainstream Israeli propaganda this writer has come across .

Ignoring October 8 would be injudicious, however. Selected only by a number of Jewish film festivals in the US, the film was released in mid-March by indie distribution outfit Briarcliff Entertainment in more than 125 theatres.

The film has amassed more than $1.3 million so far at the US box office, making it the second-highest grossing documentary of the year, ironically behind the self-distributed and Oscar-winning No Other Land about Palestine at $2.4 million.

October 8 has sold more than 90,000 tickets, an impressive achievement given the fact that at least 73 percent of the 7.5 million Jewish Americans still hold a favourable view of Israel.

“It would be great if we were getting a lot of crossover, but I don’t know that we are,” Sachs admitted to the Hollywood Reporter.

Zionist films have been largely absent from most local and international film festivals — curation, after all, is an ethical occupation — while Palestinian stories, by contrast, have seen an enormous rise in popularity since October 7.

The phenomenon culminated with the Oscar win for No Other Land.

October 8 . . . “easily the most abhorrent piece of mainstream Israeli propaganda this writer has come across.” Image: Briarcliff Entertainment

But the release of October 8 and the selection of several Israeli hostage dramas in February’s Berlin Film Festival indicates that the war has officially reached the big screen.

With the aforementioned hostage dramas due to be shown stateside later this year, and no less than four major Palestinian pictures set for theatrical release over the next 12 months, this Israeli-Palestinian film feud is just getting started.

Working for change
The Encampments, which raked in a highly impressive $423,000 in 50 theatres after a month of release, has been garnering more headlines, not only due to the fact that the recently detained Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil happens to be one of its protagonists, but because it is clearly the better film.

Pritsker and Workman, who were on the ground with the students for most of the six-week duration of the set-in, provide a keenly observed, intimate view of the action, capturing the inspiring highs and dispiriting lows of the passionate demonstrations and wayward negotiations with Columbia’s administrations.

The narrative is anchored from the point of views of four students: Grant Miner, a Jewish PhD student who was expelled in March for his involvement in the protests; Sueda Polat, a protest negotiator and spokesperson for the encampments; Naye Idriss, a Palestinian organiser and Columbia alumni; and the soft-spoken Khalil, the Palestinian student elected to lead the negotiations.

A desire for justice, for holding Israel accountable for its crimes in Gaza, permeated the group’s calling for divesting Columbia’s $13.6 billion endowment funds from weapons manufacturers and tech companies with business links to the Netanyahu’s administration.

Each of the four shares similar background stories, but Miner and Khalil stand out. As a Jew, Miner is an example of a young Jewish American generation that regard their Jewishness as a moral imperative for defending the Palestinian cause.

Khalil, meanwhile, carries the familiar burden of being a child of the camps: a descendant of a family that was forcibly displaced from their Tiberias home in 1948.

The personal histories provide ample opportunities for reflections around questions of identity, trauma, and the youthful desire for tangible change.

Each protester stresses that the encampment was a last and only resort after the Columbia hierarchy casually brushed aside their concerns.

These concerns transformed into demands when it became clear that only more strident action like sit-ins could push the Columbia administration to engage with them.

In an age when most people are content to sit idly behind their computers waiting for something to happen, these students took it upon themselves to actively work for change in a country where change, especially in the face of powerful lobbies, is arduous.

Only through protests, the viewers begin to realise, can these four lucidly deal with the senseless, numbing bloodshed and brutality in Gaza.

Crackdown on free speech
Through skilled placement of archival footage, Pritsker and Workman aptly link the encampments with other student movements in Columbia, including the earlier occupation of Hamilton Hall in 1968 that demonstrated the university’s historic ties with bodies that supported America’s involvement in the Vietnam War.

Both anti-war movements were countered by an identical measure: the university’s summoning of the New York City Police Department (NYPD) to violently dismantle the protests.

Neither the Columbia administration, represented by the disgraced ex-president Minouche Shafik, nor the NYPD are portrayed in a flattering fashion.

Shafik comes off as a wishy-washy figure, too protective of her position to take a concrete stance for or against the pro-Palestinian protesters.

The NYPD were a regular fixture outside universities in New York during the encampments during 2024 Image: MEE/Azad Essa

The NYPD’s employment of violence against the peaceful protests that they declared to have “devolved into antisemitic and anti-Israel rhetoric” is an admission that violence against words can be justified, undermining the First Amendment of the US constitution, which protects free speech.
The Encampments is not without flaws. By strictly adhering to the testimonials of its subjects, Pritsker and Workman leave out several imperative details.

These include the identity of the companies behind endowment allocations, the fact that several Congress senators who most prominently criticised the encampments “received over $100,000 more on average from pro-Israel donors during their last election” according to a Guardian finding, and the revelations that US police forces have received analysis of the Israel-Palestine conflict directly from the Israeli army and Israeli think tanks.

The suggested link between the 1968 protests and the present situation is not entirely accurate either.

The endowments industry was nowhere as big as it is now, and there’s an argument to be made about the deprioritisation of education by universities vis-a-vis their endowments.

A bias towards Israel or a determination to assert the management’s authority is not the real motive behind their position — it’s the money.

Lastly, avoiding October 7 and the moral and political issues ingrained within the attack, while refraining from confronting the pro-Israel voices that accused the protesters of aggression and antisemitism, is a major blind spot that allows conservatives and pro-Israel pundits to accuse the filmmakers of bias.

One could be asking too much from a film directed by first-time filmmakers that was rushed into theatres to enhance awareness about Mahmoud Khalil’s political persecution, but The Encampments, which was co-produced by rapper Macklemore, remains an important, urgent, and honest document of an event that has been repeatedly tarnished by the media and self-serving politicians.

The politics of victimhood
The imperfections of The Encampments are partially derived from lack of experience on its creators’ part.

Any accusations of malice are unfounded, especially since the directors do not waste time in arguing against Zionism or paint its subjects as victims. The same cannot be said of October 8.

Executive produced by actress Debra Messing of Will & Grace fame, who also appears in the film, October 8 adopts a shabby, scattershot structure vastly comprised of interviews with nearly every high-profile pro-Israel person in America.

The talking heads are interjected with dubious graphs and craftily edited footage culled from social media of alleged pro-Palestinian protesters in college campuses verbally attacking Jewish students and allegedly advocating the ideology of Hamas.

Needless to say, no context is given to these videos whose dates and locations are never identified.

The chief aim of October 8 is to retrieve the victimisation card by using the same language that informed the pro-Palestine discourse

Every imaginable falsification and shaky allegation regarding the righteousness of Zionism is paraded: anti-Zionism is the new form of antisemitism; pro-Palestinian protesters harassed pro-Israel Jewish students; the media is flooded with pro-Palestinian bias.

Other tropes include the claim that Hamas is conspiring to destabilise American democracy and unleash hell on the Western world.

Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a Hamas co-founder who defected to Israel in 1997, stresses that “my definition of Intifada is chaos”.

There is also the suggestion that the protests, if not contained, could spiral into Nazi era-like fascism.

Sachs goes as far as showing historical footage of the Third Reich to demonstrate her point.

The chief aim of October 8 is to retrieve Israel’s victimhood by using the same language that informs pro-Palestine discourse. “Gaza hijacked all underdog stories in the world,” one interviewee laments.

At one point, the attacks of October 7 are described as a “genocide”, while Zionism is referred to as a “civil rights movement”.

One interviewee explains that the framing of the Gaza war as David and Goliath is erroneous when considering that Hamas is backed by almighty Iran and that Israel is surrounded by numerous hostile countries, such as Lebanon and Syria.

In the most fanciful segment of the film, the interviewees claim that the Students for Justice in Palestine is affiliated and under the command of Hamas, while haphazardly linking random terrorist attacks, such as 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting to Hamas and by extension the Palestinian cause.

A simmering racist charge delineate the film’s pro-Israel discourse in its instance on pigeonholing all Palestinians as radical Muslim Hamas supporters.

There isn’t a single mention of the occupied West Bank or Palestinian religious minorities or even anti-Hamas sentiment in Gaza.

Depicting all Palestinians as a rigid monolith profoundly contrasts Pritsker and Workman’s nuanced treatment of their Jewish subjects.

The best means to counter films like October 8 is facts and good journalism

There’s a difference between subtraction and omission: the former affects logical form, while the latter affects logical content.

October 8 is built on a series of deliberate omissions and fear mongering, an unscrupulous if familiar tactic that betrays the subjects’ indignation and their weak conviction.

It is thus not surprising that there is no mention of the Nakba or the fact that the so-called “civil rights movement” is linked to a state founded on looted lands or the grand open prison Israel has turned Gaza into, or the endless humiliation of Palestinians in the West Bank.

There is also no mention of the racist and inciting statements by far-right ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.

Nor is there mention of the Palestinians who have been abducted and tortured and raped in Israeli prisons.

And definitely not of the more than 52,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza to date.

Sachs’ subjects naturally are too enveloped in their own conspiracies, in the tightly knotted narrative they concocted for themselves, to be aware of their privilege.

The problem is, these subjects want to have their cake and eat it. Throughout, they constantly complain of being silenced; that most institutions, be it the media or college hierarchies or human rights organisations, have not recognised the colossal loss of 7 October 7 and have focused instead on Palestinian suffering.

They theorise that the refusal of the authorities in taking firm and direct action against pro-Palestinian voices has fostered antisemitism.

At the same time, they have no qualms in flaunting their contribution to New York Times op-eds or the testimonies they were invited to present at the Congress.

All the while, Khalil and other Palestinian activists are arrested, deported and stripped of their residencies.

The value of good journalism
October 8, which portrays the IDF as a brave, truth-seeking institution, is not merely a pro-Israel propaganda, it’s a far-right propaganda.

The subjects adopt Trump rhetoric in similarly blaming the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies for the rise of antisemitism, while dismissing intersectionality and anti-colonialism for giving legitimacy to the Palestinian cause.

As repugnant as October 8 is, it is crucial to engage with work of its ilk and confront its hyperboles.

Last month, the Hollywood Reporter set up an unanticipated discussion between Pritsker, who is in fact Jewish, and pro-Israel influencer Hen Mazzig.

The heated exchange that followed demonstrated the difficulty of communication with the pro-Israeli lobby, yet nonetheless underlines the necessity of communication, at least in film.

Mazzig spends the larger part of the discussion spewing unfounded accusations that he provides no validations for: “Mahmoud Khalil has links to Hamas,” he says at one point.

When asked about the Palestinian prisoners, he confidently attests that “the 10,000 Palestinian prisoners” — hostages, as Pritsker calls them — they have committed crimes and are held in Israeli prisons, right?

“In fact, in the latest hostage release eight Palestinian prisoners refused to go back to Gaza because they’ve enjoyed their treatment in these prisons.”

Mazzig dismisses pro-Palestinian groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and the pro-Palestinian Jewish students who participated in the encampments.

“No one would make this argument but here we are able to tokenise a minority, a fringe community, and weaponise it against us,” he says.

“It’s not because they care about Jews and want Jews to be represented. It’s that they hate us so much that they’re doing this and gaslighting us.”

At this stage, attempting for the umpteenth time to stress that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are not one and the same — a reality that the far-right rejects — is frankly pointless.

Attempting, like Khalil, to continually emphasise our unequivocal rejection of antisemitism, to underscore that our Jewish colleagues and friends are partners in our struggle for equality and justice, is frankly demeaning.

For Mazzig and Messing and the October 8 subjects, every Arab, every pro-Palestinian, is automatically an antisemite until proven otherwise.

The best means to counter films like October 8 is facts and good journalism.

Emotionality has no place in this increasingly hostile landscape. The reason why The Bibi Files and Louis Theroux’s The Settlers work so well is due to their flawless journalism.

People may believe what they want to believe, but for the undecided and the uninformed, factuality and journalistic integrity — values that go over Sachs’ head — could prove to be the most potent weapon of all.

Joseph Fahim is an Egyptian film critic and programmer. He is the Arab delegate of the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, a former member of Berlin Critics’ Week and the ex director of programming of the Cairo International Film Festival. This article was first published by Middle East Eye.

The Encampments, directed by Kei Pritsker and Michael T Workman (Watermelon Pictures); October 8: The fight for the Soul of America, directed by Wendy Sachs (Briarcliff Entertainment).

An indictment of NZ’s settler colonial and ‘Five Eyes’ spy paranoia over political critics

APR editor — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 06:11:28 +0000

REVIEW: By David Robie

Four months ago, a group of lawyers in Aotearoa New Zealand called for a little reported inquiry into New Zealand spy agencies over whether there has been possible assistance for Israel’s war in Gaza.

In a letter to the chief of intelligence and security (IGIS) on 12 September 2024, three lawyers argued that the country was in danger of aiding international war crimes, reported RNZ News.

Inspector-General Brendan Horsley, who had previously indicated he would look into conflict-related spying this year, confirmed he would consider the request, according to the report.

At least one of the lawyers had been confident of a positive response, said the news report.

“I’m actually very optimistic,” noted University of Auckland associate professor Treasa Dunworth in the media interview about their argument that New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) and Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS) intelligence might be making its way to Israel via the US, “because our request is very, detailed, backed up with credible evidence, [and] is very careful.”

But she got a disappointing result. The following month, on October 9 — just seven weeks before the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Foreign Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity — Inspector-General Horsley ruled out an inquiry at this time.

He said in a statement he did not want to “stop the clock” and tie up his office’s “modest resources to a deeper review of activity I have already been monitoring” while armed conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine were currently “active and dynamic”.

Rapid deterioration
Yet rapidly the 15-month Israeli war has deteriorated since then with President-elect Donald Trump due to take office in Israel’s main backer the United States later this month on January 20.

As the humanitarian situation in Gaza worsens with intensified attacks on hospitals and civilians, a breakdown of law and order at the border, and more than 50 complaints filed against Israel soldiers for war crimes in multiple countries, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has urged medical professionals worldwide to sever all ties with the pariah state.

I urge medical professionals worldwide to pursue the severance of all ties with Israel as a concrete way to forcefully denounce Israel’s full destruction of the Palestinian healthcare system in Gaza, a critical tool of its ongoing genocide.#FreeDrHussanAbuSafiya https://t.co/qzZ7CqufI6

— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) December 30, 2024

Ironically, the New Zealand intelligence “debate” has coincided with the publication of a new book that has debunked the view that the SIS and GCSB have been working in the interests of New Zealand. The reality, argues social justice movement historian and activist Maire Leadbeater in The Enemy Within: The Human Cost of the State Surveillance in Aotearoa/New Zealand is that these agencies have been working in the interests of the so-called “Five Eyes” partners, including the United States.

Her essential argument in this robust and comprehensive 427-page book is that New Zealand’s state surveillance has been part of a structure of state control that “serves to undermine movements for social change and marginalise or punish those who challenge the established order. It had a deeply destructive impact on democracy.”

As she states, her primary focus is on the work of New Zealand’s main intelligence agencies, the SIS and the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) “and their forerunners, the political police”.

Activist author and historian Maire Leadbeater with retired trade unionist Robert Reid at the Auckland book launching last November . . . her latest work exposes state spying on issues of peace, anti-conscription, anti-nuclear, de-colonisation, unemployed workers and left trade unionism and socialist and communist thought in Aotearoa New Zealand. Image: David Robie/Asia Pacific Report

The author explains that she is not concerned with the “socially useful work of the contemporary police in the detection of criminal activity, including politically motivated crime”. She notes also that unlike the domestic spies, police detection work is subject to detailed warrants, there is due process over arrests, and the process is open to public scrutiny.

The Enemy Within, by Maire Leadbeater. Image: Potton & Burton

Leadbeater points out that while New Zealand experience with terrorism has been limited, neither of the country’s two main intelligence agencies were much help in investigating the three notorious examples — the unsolved 1984 Wellington Trades Hall bombing that killed one, the 1985 bombing of the Greenpeace environmental flagship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland that also killed one (but the casualties could easily have been higher), and the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings that murdered 51.

The regular police were the key investigators in all three cases.

Also, there is the failure of the SIS to discover Mossad agents operating in NZ on fake passports.

Working for ‘Five Eyes’ interests
Instead of working for the benefit of New Zealand, the intelligence agencies were set up to work closely with the country’s traditional allies and the so-called “Five Eyes” network — Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.

An example of this was Algerian professor and parliamentarian Ahmed Zaoui who arrived in New Zealand in 2002 as an asylum seeker after a military coup against the elected government in his home country. Within nine days of arriving, his confidentiality was breached and he was falsely branded by The New Zealand Herald as an “international terrorism suspect”.

A 24-hour vigil in support of Algerian asylum seeker Ahmed Zaoui outside Mt Eden Prison in October 2003 organised by the Free Ahmed Zaoui and Justice for Asylum Seekers groups. Image: Amnesty International/The Enemy Within

He was jailed for two years without charge (part of that time held in solitary confinement) because of an SIS-imposed National Security Risk certificate and this could have have led to “deportation of this honourable man” but for the tireless work of his lawyers and a well-informed public campaign, as told by Leadbeater in this book, and also by journalist Selwyn Manning in his 2004 book I Almost Forgot about the Moon: The Disinformation Campaign Against Ahmed Zaoui.

Set free and granted asylum, he later became a New Zealand citizen in 2014. (However, on a visit to Algeria in 2023 he was arrested at gunpoint in a house in Médéa and charged with “subversion”).

Leadbeater says a strong case could be made that New Zealand’s democracy “would be stronger and more viable without the repressive laws that currently support the secretive operations of the SIS and the GCSB”. The author laments that the resources and focus of the intelligence agencies have focused too much, and wastefully, on ordinary people who are perceived to be “dissenters”.

“Dissent is the lifeblood of democracy but SIS operations targeted many of our brightest and best, damaging their personal and professional lives in the process,” Leadbeater says.

Among those who have been targeted have been the author herself, and others in her “left-wing family milieu” — including her late brother longtime Green Party foreign affairs spokesperson Keith Locke, as well as her parents Elsie and Jack, originally Communist Party activists prior to 1956.

The core of the book is based on primary sources, including declassified police records held in the National Archives and the declassified records of the SIS which have been released to individual activists – including her and she discovered she had been spied on since the age of 10 due to state paranoia.

At the launch of her book in Auckland last November, guest speaker and retired First Union general secretary Robert Reid — whose file also features in the book — said what a fitting way the narrative begins by outlining the important role the Locke family have played in Aotearoa over the many years.

The final chapter is devoted to another “Person of interest: Keith Locke” – “Maire’s much-loved friend and comrade.”

“In between these pages is a treasure trove of commentary and stories of the development of the surveillance state in the settler colony of NZ and the impact that this has had on the lives of ordinary — no, extra-ordinary — people within this country,” Reid said.

“The book could almost be described as a political romp from the settler colonisation of New Zealand through the growth of the workers movement and socialist and communist ideology from the late 1800s until today.”

Surveillance stories and files
Among others whose surveillance stories and files have been featured are trade unionist and former Socialist Action League activist Mike Treen; Halt All Racist Tours founder Trevor Richards; economics lecturer Dr Wolfgang Rosenberg’s sons George and Bill; Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa (CAFCA) organiser Murray Horton; antiwar activist and Peace Movement research Owen Wilkes; investigative journalist Nicky Hager; Dr Bill Sutch, who was tried and acquitted on a charge laid under the Official Secrets Act in 1975; and internet entrepreneur and political activist Kim Dotcom.

State paranoia in New Zealand was driven by issues of peace, anti-conscription, anti-nuclear, decolonisation, unemployed workers and left trade unionism and socialist and communist thought.

Leadbeater reflects that she had never accepted that “anyone in my family ever threatened state security. Moreover, the solidarity, antinuclear and anti-apartheid organisations that I took part in should not have been spied on. Such groups were and are a vital part of a healthy democracy.”

At one stage when many activists were seeking copies of their surveillance files in the mid-2000s through OIA requests or later under the Privacy Act, I also applied due to my association with several of the protagonists in this book and my involvement as a writer on decolonisation and environmental justice issues.

I merely received a “neither confirm or deny” form letter on the existence of a file, and never bothered to reapply later when information became more readily available.

‘A subversive in Kanaky’: An article about David Robie’s surveilance and first arrest by the French military in January 1987. Published in the February edition of Islands Business (Fiji-based regional news magazine). Image: David Robie/RNZ Pacific/ Lydia Lewis

But I have had my own brushes with surveillance and threatened arrest as a journalist in global settings such as New Caledonia, including when I was detained by soldiers in January 1987 for taking photographs of French military camps for a planned report about the systematic intimidation of pro-independence Kanak villagers.

This was perfectly legal, of course, and the attempt by authorities to silence me did not work; my articles appeared on the front page of the New Zealand Sunday Times the following weekend and featured on the cover of Fiji’s Islands Business news magazine.

Watched become the watchers
The structure of The Enemy Within is in three parts. As the author explains, the first part focuses on the period from 920 to the end of the First World War, and the second on the impact of the Cold War and the Western anti-communist hysteria between 1945 and 1955.

The final part covers the period from 1955 to the present, when the intelligence and security services have been under greater public scrutiny and faced campaigns for their reform or abolition.

As Leadbeater notes, “the watched, to some extent, have become the watchers”.

Because of my Asia-Pacific and decolonisation interests, I found a chapter on “colonial repression in Samoa” and the Black Saturday massacre of the Mau resistance of particular interest and a shameful stain on NZ history.

As Leadbeater notes, it was an “unexpected find in the Archives New Zealand” to stumble across a record of the surveillance of the “citizens who mounted an opposition to the New Zealand government’s colonial rule in Samoa”.

She pays tribute to the “vibrant solidarity movement” in the late 1920s and early 1930s, inspired by the peaceful Mau movement and its motto “Samoa mo Samoa” — Samoa for the Samoans — in their resistance to New Zealand’s colonial project.

This solidarity movement was in the face of a “prevailing attitude of white settlement” and its leaders were influenced by the Parihaka resistance of the 1880s.

Leadbeater is critical of New Zealand media, such as The New Zealand Herald, for siding with the colonial establishment and becoming “positively hostile to the Mau movement”.

New Zealand administrators under the League of Mandate to govern Samoa following German rule were arrogant and regarded Samoans as “inferior” and were “aghast” at Samoan and European leaders collaborating in resistance.

The leaders of the women’s Mau in Samoa: Tuimaliifano (from left), Masiofo Tamasese, Rosabel Nelson and Faumuina. Image: Francis Joseph Gleeson/Alexander Turnbull Library/The Enemy Within

Black Saturday massacre
On 28 December 1929, what became dubbed the “Black Saturday massacre” happened in Apia. A peaceful Mau procession marches to the Apia wharf to welcome home exiled trader Alfred Smyth.

Police tried to arrest the Mau secretary, Mata’ūtia Karaunu, but the marchers protected him. More police were despatched to “assert colonial authority”, shots were fired at the crowd and in the upheaval a police constable was clubbed to death.

A police sergeant the fired a Lewis machine gun from the police station over the heads of the crowd, while other police fired directly into the crowd with their rifles.

Paramount chief Tupua Tamasese Lealofi III, dressed in white and calling for peace, was mortally wounded and at least eight other marchers were also killed. The massacre was chronicled in journalist Michael Field’s books Mau and later Black Saturday: New Zealand’s Tragic Blunders in Samoa.

Protests followed and the Mau Movement was declared a “seditious organisation” and the wearing of Mau outfits or badges became illegal.

A crackdown ensued on Mau activists with heavy surveillance and harassment and in New Zealand public figures and community leaders called for an “independent inquiry into Samoan affairs”.

Eventually, the Labour Party victory in the 1935 elections changed the dynamic and the following year the Mau was recognised as a legitimate political movement.

After the Second World War, New Zealand became committed to self-government in Western Samoa with indigenous custom and tradition “as an important foundation”. However, full independence did not come until 1962.

Four decades later, in 2002, Prime Minister Helen Clark formally apologised to the people of Samoa for the “inept and incompetent early administration of Samoa by New Zealand”.

She cited officials allowing the “influenza” ship Talune to dock in Apia in 1918, and the Black Saturday massacre as key examples of this incompetence.

However, Leadbeater notes that the “saga of surveillance and sedition charges” outlined in her book could well be added to the list. She adds that Samoans remember the Mau Movement and its martyrs with “pride and gratitude”.

“For New Zealanders, this chapter in our colonial history is one of shame that should be far better known and understood. The New Zealand Samoa Defence League was ahead of its time, and thankfully so.”

Behind settler colonial #NZ’s paranoia about dissident ‘persons of interest’ | #AsiaPacificReport #MaireLeadbeater #progressivebooks #RobertReid @miketreen #statesurveillance #dissidents #statespying @JohnJohnminto https://t.co/B9qws9s1La pic.twitter.com/5ELHTIDv4l

— David Robie (@DavidRobie) November 9, 2024

Looking for ‘subversives’ in wrong places
Leadbeater notes in her book that the SIS budget alone in 2021 was about $100 million with about 400 staff. Yet the intelligence services have been spending this sport of money for more than a century looking for “subversives and terrorists” — but in the wrong places.

This book is an excellent tribute to the many activists and dissidents who have had their lives disrupted and hounded by state spies, and is essential reading for all those committed to transparent democracy.

Following her section on more contemporary events and massive surveillance failures and wrongs, such as the 2007 Tūhoe raids, Leadbeater calls for a massive rethink on New Zealand’s approach to security.

“It is time to leave crime, including terrorist crime, to the country’s police and court system, with their built-in accountability procedures,” she concludes.

“It is time for the state to stop spying on society’s critics.”

• The Enemy Within: The Human Cost of State Surveillance in Aotearoa/New Zealand, by Maire Leadbeater. Potton & Burton, 2024. 427 pages.

How Jeton Anjain planned the Rongelap evacuation – new Rainbow Warrior podcast series

APR editor — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 09:53:40 +0000

REVIEW: By Giff Johnson in Majuro

As a prelude to the 40th anniversary of the evacuation of Rongelap Islanders to Mejatto Island in Kwajalein in 1985, Radio New Zealand and ABC Radio Australia have produced a six-part podcast series that details the Rongelap story — in the context of The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior, the name of the series.

It is narrated by journalist James Nokise, and includes story telling from Rongelap Islanders as well as those who know about what became the last voyage of Greenpeace’s flagship.

It features a good deal of narrative around the late Rongelap Nitijela Member Jeton Anjain, the architect of the evacuation in 1985. For those who know the story of the 1954 Bravo hydrogen bomb test at Bikini, some of the narrative will be repetitive.

READ MORE: New podcast: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior – ABC/RNZ
Podcast details Rongelap evacuation – Marshall Islands Journal
Crimes NZ: David Robie on the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior – RNZ

The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior podcast series logo. Image: ABC/RNZ

But the podcast offers some insight that may well be unknown to many. For example, the podcast lays to rest the unfounded US government criticism at the time that Greenpeace engineered the evacuation, manipulating unsuspecting islanders to leave Rongelap.

Through commentary of those in the room when the idea was hatched, this was Jeton’s vision and plan — the Rainbow Warrior was a vehicle that could assist in making it happen.

The narrator describes Jeton’s ongoing disbelief over repeated US government assurances of Rongelap’s safety. Indeed, though not a focus of the RNZ/ABC podcast, it was Rongelap’s self-evacuation that forced the US Congress to fund independent radiological studies of Rongelap Atoll that showed — surprise, surprise — that living on the atoll posed health risks and led to the US Congress establishing a $45 million Rongelap Resettlement Trust Fund.

Questions about the safety of the entirety of Rongelap Atoll linger today, bolstered by non-US government studies that have, over the past several years, pointed out a range of ongoing radiation contamination concerns.

The RNZ/ABC podcast dives into the 1954 Bravo hydrogen bomb test fallout exposure on Rongelap, their subsequent evacuation to Kwajalein, and later to Ejit Island for three years. It details their US-sponsored return in 1957 to Rongelap, one of the most radioactive locations in the world — by US government scientists’ own admission.

The narrative, that includes multiple interviews with people in the Marshall Islands, takes the listener through the experience Rongelap people have had since Bravo, including health problems and life in exile. It narrates possibly the first detailed piece of history about Jeton Anjain, the Rongelap leader who died of cancer in 1993, eight years after Rongelap people left their home atoll.

The podcast takes the listener into a room in Seattle, Washington, in 1984, where Greenpeace International leader Steve Sawyer met for the first time with Jeton and heard his plea for help to relocate Rongelap people using the Rainbow Warrior. The actual move from Rongelap to Mejatto in May 1985 — described in David Robie’s 1986 book Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior — is narrated through interviews and historical research.

The final episode of the podcast is heavily focused on the final leg of the Rainbow Warrior’s Pacific tour — a voyage cut short by French secret agents who bombed the Warrior while it was tied to the wharf in Auckland harbor, killing one crew member, Fernando Pereira.

It was Fernando’s photographs of the Rongelap evacuation that brought that chapter in the history of the Marshall Islands to life.

The Warrior was stopping to refuel and re-provision in Auckland prior to heading to the French nuclear testing zone in Moruroa Atoll. But that plan was quite literally bombed by the French government in one of the darkest moments of Pacific colonial history.

The six-part series is on YouTube and can be found by searching The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior.

Scientists conduct radiological surveys of nuclear test fallout
A related story in this week’s edition of the Marshall Islands Journal.

Columbia University scientists have conducted a series of radiological surveys of nuclear test fallout in the northern Marshall Islands over the past nearly 10 years.

“Considerable contamination remains,” wrote scientists Hart Rapaport and Ivana Nikolić Hughes in the Scientific American in 2022. “On islands such as Bikini, the average background gamma radiation is double the maximum value stipulated by an agreement between the governments of the Marshall Islands and the US, even without taking into account other exposure pathways.

“Our findings, based on gathered data, run contrary to the Department of Energy’s. One conclusion is clear: absent a renewed effort to clean radiation from Bikini, families forced from their homes may not be able to safely return until the radiation naturally diminishes over decades and centuries.”

They also raised concern about the level of strontium-90 present in various islands from which they have taken soil and other samples. They point out that US government studies do not address strontium-90.

This radionuclide “can cause leukemia and bone and bone marrow cancer and has long been a source of health concerns at nuclear disasters such as Chernobyl and Fukushima,” Rapaport and Hughes said.

“Despite this, the US government’s published data don’t speak to the presence of this dangerous nuclear isotope.”

Their studies have found “consistently high values” of strontium-90 in northern atolls.

“Although detecting this radioisotope in sediment does not neatly translate into contamination in soil or food, the finding suggests the possibility of danger to ecosystems and people,” they state. “More than that, cleaning up strontium 90 and other contaminants in the Marshall Islands is possible.”

The Columbia scientists’ recommendations for action are straightforward: “Congress should appropriate funds, and a research agency, such as the National Science Foundation, should initiate a call for proposals to fund independent research with three aims.

“We must first further understand the current radiological conditions across the Marshall Islands; second, explore new technologies and methods already in use for future cleanup activity; and, third, train Marshallese scientists, such as those working with the nation’s National Nuclear Commission, to rebuild trust on this issue.”

Giff Johnson is editor of the Marshall Islands Journal. His review of the Rainbow Warrior podcast series was first published by the Journal and is republished here with permission.

The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior, ABC/RNZ podcast series (2024), presented by James Nokise
Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior, by David Robie (1986, 2005 and 2015)
Eyes of Fire: Thirty Years On, curated by David Robie, Little Island Press and Greenpeace (microsite educational resource, 2015)

Moana 2: The magic is missing in this half-baked Pacific sequel

Pacific Media Watch — Sun, 01 Dec 2024 11:23:20 +0000

REVIEW: By Sam Rillstone, RNZ News

Disney has returned to Motunui with Moana 2, a sequel to the 2016 hit Moana. But have they been able to recapture the magic?

This time, the story sees Moana (voiced by Auli’i Cravalho) setting out from her home island once again to try reconnect with the lost people of the ocean.

With the help of an unlikely crew and demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson), she must reckon with an angry god and find a way to free a cursed island.

READ MORE: What Rotten Tomatoes reckons

The first film was co-directed by John Musker and Ron Clements, two legendary writer directors from such fame as The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Hercules, Treasure Planet and The Princess and the Frog.

They haven’t returned for the sequel, which is co-directed by David Derrick Jr, Jason Hand and Dana Ledoux Miller.

Moana 2 actually began as a Disney+ series before being retooled into a film earlier this year. While it moves the story of the world and the characters forward, the film feels like a slapstick and half-baked reworked TV show.

Moana 2. RNZ Reviews

Thankfully, Auli’i Cravalho is still great as Moana; the vibrance and expression of her voice is wonderful. And it really is a movie centred mostly around her, which is a strength.

Two-dimensional crew
However, that also means that Moana’s little crew of friends are two-dimensional and not needed other than for a little inspiration here and there. Even Dwayne Johnson’s Maui feels a little less colourful this time around and a bit more of a plot device than actual character.

There is also a half-baked villain plot, with the character not really present and another who feels undercooked. It’s not until a small mid-credits scene where we get something of a hint, as well as what’s to come in a potential sequel film or series.

While Cravalho’s singing is lovely, unfortunately the songs of Moana 2 are not as memorable or catchy. And it certainly doesn’t help that Dwayne Johnson cannot sing or rap to save himself.

It’s wonderful to have a Pacific Island-centric story, and it’s got some great cultural representation, but Moana 2 could have been so much better.

While I’m obviously not the target audience, I really enjoyed the first one and I believe kids deserve good, smart movies. If there’s going to be another one, I hope they make it worth it.

Moana 2 (PG) is playing now in NZ cinemas.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Behind settler colonial NZ’s paranoia about dissident ‘persons of interest’

APR editor — Sat, 09 Nov 2024 08:00:12 +0000

COMMENTARY: By Robert Reid

The Enemy Within, by Maire Leadbeater is many things. It is:

• A family history
• A social history
• A history of the left-wing in Aotearoa
• A chilling reminder of the origin and continuation of the surveillance state in New Zealand, and
• A damn good read.

The book is a great example of citizen or activist authorship. The author, Maire Leadbeater, and her family are front and centre of the dark cloud of the surveillance state that has hung and still hangs over New Zealand’s “democracy”.

What better place to begin the book than the author noting that she had been spied on by the security services from the age of 10. What better place to begin than describing the role of the Locke family — Elsie, Jack, Maire, Keith and their siblings — have played in Aotearoa society over the last few decades.

And what a fitting way to end the book than with the final chapter entitled, “Person of Interest: Keith Locke”; Maire’s much-loved brother and our much-loved friend and comrade.

In between these pages is a treasure trove of commentary and stories of the development of the surveillance state in the settler colony of NZ and the impact that this has had on the lives of ordinary — no, extra-ordinary — people within this country.

The book could almost be described as a political romp from the settler colonisation of New Zealand through the growth of the workers movement and socialist and communist ideology from the late 1800s until today.

I have often deprecatingly called myself a mere footnote of history as that is all I seem to appear as in many books written about recent progressive history in New Zealand. But it was without false modesty that when Maire gave me a copy of the book a couple of weeks back, I immediately went to the index, looked up my name and found that this time I was a bit more than a footnote, but had a section of a chapter written on my interaction with the spooks.

But it was after reading this, dipping into a couple of other “person of interest” stories of people I knew such as Keith, Mike Treen, the Rosenbergs, Murray Horton and then starting the book again from the beginning did it become clear on what issues the state was paranoid about that led it to build an apparatus to spy on its own citizens.

These were issues of peace, anti-conscription, anti-nuclear, decolonisation, unemployed workers and left trade unionism and socialist and communist thought. These are the issues that come up time and time again; essentially it was seditious or subversive to be part of any of these campaigns or ideologies.

Client state spying
The other common theme through the book is the role that the UK and more latterly the US has played in ensuring that their NZ client settler state plays by their rules, makes enemies of their enemies and spies on its own people for their “benefit”.

Trade unionist and activist Robert Reid . . . “The book could almost be described as a political romp from the settler colonisation of New Zealand through the growth of the workers movement and socialist and communist ideology from the late 1800s until today.” Image: David Robie/Asia Pacific Report

It was interesting to read how the “5 Eyes”, although not using that name, has been in operation as long as NZ has had a spying apparatus. In fact, the book shows that 3 of the 5 Eyes forced NZ to establish its surveillance apparatus in the first place.

Maire, and her editor have arranged this book in a very reader friendly way. It is mostly chronological showing the rise of the surveillance state from the beginning of the 19th century, in dispersed with a series of vignettes of “Persons of Interest”.

Maire would probably acknowledge that this book could not have been written without the decision of the SIS to start releasing files (all beit they were heavily redacted with many missing parts) of many of us who have been spied on by the SIS over the years. So, on behalf of Maire, thank you SIS.

Maire has painstakingly gone through pages and pages of these primary source files and incorporated them into the historical narrative of the book showing what was happening in society while this surveillance was taking place.

I was especially delighted to read the history of the anti-war and conscientious objectors movement. Two years ago, almost to the day, we held the 50th anniversary of the Organisation to Halt Military Service (OHMS); an organisation that I founded and was under heavy surveillance in 1972.

We knew a bit about previous anti-conscription struggles but Maire has provided much more context and information that we knew. It was good to read about people like John Charters, Ormand Burton and Archie Barrington as well more known resisters such as my great uncle Archibald Baxter.

Within living memory
Many of the events covered take place within my living memory. But it was wonderful to be reminded of some things I had forgotten about or to find some new gems of information about our past.

The Enemy Within, by Maire Leadbeater. Image: Potton & Burton

Stories around Bill Sutch, Shirley Smith, Ann and Wolfgang Rosenberg, Jack and Mary Woodward, Gerald O’Brien, Allan Brash (yes, Don’s dad), Cecil Holmes, Jack Lewin are documented as well as my contemporaries such as Don Carson, David Small, Aziz Choudry, Trevor Richards, Jane Kelsey, Nicky Hager, Owen Wilkes, Tame Iti in addition to Maire, Keith and Mike Treen.

The book finishes with a more recent history of NZ again aping the US’s so-called war on terror with the introduction of an anti and counter-terrorism mandate for the SIS and its sister agencies

The book traverses events such as the detention of Ahmed Zaoui, the raid on the Kim Dotcom mansion, the privatisation of spying to firms such as Thomson and Clark, the Urewera raids, “Hit and Run” in Afghanistan. Missing the cut was the recent police raid and removal of the computer of octogenarian, Peter Wilson for holding money earmarked for a development project in DPRK (North Korea).

When we come to the end of the book we are reminded of the horrific Christchurch mosque attack and massacre and prior to that of the bombing of Wellington Trades Hall and the Rainbow Warrior. Also, the failure of the SIS to discover Mossad agents operating in NZ on fake passports.

We cannot but ask the question of why multi-millions of dollars have been spent spying on, surveilling and monitoring peace activists, trade unionists, communists, Māori and more latterly Muslims, when the terrorism that NZ has faced has been that perpetrated on these people not by these people.

Maire notes in the book that the SIS budget for 2021 was around $100 million with around 400 FTEs employed. This does not include GCSB or other parts of the security apparatus.

Seeking subversives in wrong places
This level of money has been spent for well over 100 years looking for subversives and terrorists in the wrong place!

Finally, although dealing with the human cost of the surveillance state, the book touches on some of the lighter sides of the SIS spying. Those of us under surveillance in the 1970s and 1980s remember the amateurish phone tapping that went on at that time.

Also, the men in cars with cameras sitting outside our flats for days on end. Not in the book, but I have one memory of such a man with a camera in a car outside our flat in Wallace Street, Wellington.

After a few days some of my flatmates took pity on him and made him a batch of scones which they passed through the window of his car. He stayed for a bit longer that day but we never saw him or an alternate again.

Another issue the book picks up is the obsession that the SIS and its foreign counterparts had with counting communists in NZ. I remember that the CIA used to put out a Communist Yearbook that described and attempted to count how many members were in each of the communist parties all around the world.

In NZ, my party, the Workers Communist League, was smaller than the SUP, CPNZ and SAL, but one year near the end of our existence we were pleasantly surprised to see that the CIA had almost to a person, doubled our membership.

We could not work out why, until we realised that we all had code names as well as real names and we were getting more and more slack at using the correct one in the correct place. Anyone surveilling us, counting names, would have counted double the names that we had as members! We took the compliment.

Thank you, Maire, for this great book. Thank you and your family for your great contribution to Aotearoa society.

Hopefully the hardships and human cost that you have shown in this book will commit or recommit the rest of us to struggle for a decolonised and socialist Aotearoa within a peaceful and multi-polar world.

And as one of Jack Locke’s political guides said: “the road may be long and torturous, but the future is bright.”

Robert Reid has more than 40 years’ experience in trade unions and in community employment development in Aotearoa New Zealand. He is a former general secretary and president of FIRST Union. Much of his work has been with disadvantaged groups and this has included work with Māori, Pacific peoples and migrant communities. This was his address tonight for the launch of The Enemy Within: The Human Cost of State Surveillance in Aotearoa New Zealand, by Maire Leadbeater.

Groundbreaking book Waves of Change launched at Pacific Media Conference in Fiji

Pacific Media Watch — Sat, 13 Jul 2024 19:15:18 +0000

By Jai Bharadwaj of The Australia Today

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.

Launching the Waves of Change book . . . contributor Dr David Robie (from left), co-editor Fiji Deputy Prime Minister Professor Biman Prasad, PNG Minister of Information and Communication Technology Timothy Masiu, co-editor Associate Professor Shailendra Singh, and co-editor Dr Amit Sarwal. Image: The Australia Today

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.

Winds of Change . . . shedding light on the intricate relationship between media, peace, and development in the Pacific. Image: APMN

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.

Pacific Journalism Review turns 30 – and challenges media over Gaza

Pacific Journalism Review — Sat, 06 Jul 2024 12:02:32 +0000

Pacific Journalism Review

Pacific Journalism Review has challenged journalists to take a courageous and humanitarian stand over Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza in its latest edition with several articles about the state of news media credibility and the shocking death toll of Palestinian reporters.

It has also taken a stand in support of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange who was set free in a US federal court in Saipan and returned to Australia the day before copies of the journal arrived back from the printers.

The journal went online last week and it celebrated three decades of publishing at the 2024 Pacific International Media Conference hosted by The University of the South Pacific in Fiji in partnership with the Pacific islands News Association (PINA) and the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN).

In the editorial provocatively entitled “Will journalism survive?”, founding editor Dr David Robie writes: “Gaza has become not just a metaphor for a terrible state of dystopia in parts of the world, it has also become an existential test for journalists — do we stand up for peace and justice and the right of a people to survive under the threat of ethnic cleansing and against genocide, or do we do nothing and remain silent in the face of genocide being carried out with impunity in front of our very eyes?

“The answer is simple surely.”

Launching the 30th anniversary edition, adjunct USP professor Vijay Naidu paid tribute to the long-term “commitment of PJR to justice and human rights” and noted USP’s contribution through hosting the journal for five years and also continued support from conference convenor associate professor Shailendra Singh.

Papua New Guinea’s Communication Minister Timothy Masiu also launched at the PJR event a new book, Waves of Change: Media, Peace, and Development in the Pacific, edited by Professor Biman Prasad (who is also Deputy Prime Minister of Fiji), Dr Singh and Dr Amit Sarwal.

The PJR editors, Dr Philip Cass and Dr Robie, said the profession of journalism had since the covid pandemic been under grave threat and the journal outlined challenges facing the Pacific region.

The cover of the 30th anniversary edition of Pacific Journalism Review. Image: PJR

Among contributing writers, Jonathan Cook, examines the consequences of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) legal cases over Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories, and Assange’s last-ditch appeal to prevent the United States extraditing him so that he could be locked away for the rest of his life.

Both cases pose globe-spanning threats to basic freedoms, writes Cook.

New Zealand writer Jeremy Rose offers a “Kiwi journalist’s response” to Israel’s war on journalism, noting that while global reports have tended to focus on the “horrendous and rapid” climb of civilian casualties to more than 38,000 — especially women and children — Gaza has also claimed the “worst death rate of journalists” in any war.

The journalist death toll has topped 158.

Independent journalist Mick Hall offers a compelling research indictment of the role of Western legacy media institutions, arguing that they too are in the metaphorical dock along with Israel in South Africa’s genocide case in the ICC.

PJR designer Del Abcede (right) with Rosa Moiwend at the PJR celebrations. Image: David Robie/APMN

He also cites evidence of the wider credibility implications for mainstream media in the Oceania region.

Among other articles in this edition of PJR, a team led by RMIT’s Dr Alexandra Wake, president of the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia (Jeraa), has critiqued the use of fact check systems, arguing these are vital tool boxes for journalists.

The edition also includes articles about the Kanaky New Caledonia decolonisation crisis reportage, three USP Frontline case study reports on political journalism, the social media ecology of an influencer group in Fiji, and a photo essay by Del Abcede on Palestinian protests and media in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific.

Book reviews include the Reuters Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends and Predictions 2024, Journalists and Confidential Sources, The Palestine Laboratory and Return to Volcano Town.

The PJR began publication at the University of Papua New Guinea in 1994.

• Pacific Journalism Review – the 30th anniversary edition, edited by David Robie and Philip Cass. Auckland: Asia Pacific Media Network.

Celebrating the 30th anniversary of Pacific Journalism Review with a birthday cake . . . Professor Vijay Naidu (from left), Fiji Deputy Prime Minister Professor Biman Prasad, founding PJR editor Dr David Robie, PNG Communications Minister Timothy Masiu, conference convenor and PJR editorial board member Associate Professor Shailendra Singh, and current PJR editor Dr Philip Cass. Image: Joe Yaya/Islands Business

Malcolm Evans: A new low in NZ media’s record of bias over Palestine

Pacific Media Watch — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 01:29:13 +0000

REVIEW: By Malcolm Evans

Last week’s leaked New York Times staff directive, as to what words can and cannot be used to describe the carnage Israel is raining on Palestinians, is proof positive, since those reports are published verbatim here in New Zealand, that our understanding of the conflict is carefully managed to always reflect a pro-Israel bias.

Forget the humanity of 120,000 dead and wounded Palestinians and countless others facing famine and disease sheltering in tents or what’s left of destroyed buildings, even internationally recognised terms and phrases such as “genocide,” “occupied territory,” “ethnic cleansing” and even “refugee camps” are discouraged, along with “slaughter”, “massacre” and “carnage”.

Though such language restrictions are claimed to be in the interests of “fairness”, an earlier investigation showed that between October 7 and November 14, The Times used the word “massacre” 53 times when it referred to Israelis being killed by Palestinians and only once in reference to Palestinians being killed by Israel.

By that date, thousands of Palestinians had perished, the vast majority of whom were women and children, and most of them were killed inside their own homes, in hospitals, schools or United Nations shelters.

This carefully managed use of words is deliberate and insidious and, as Jack Tame’s interview with Israel’s ambassador on last Sunday’s Q&A programme showed, even our most experienced media people are not immune to its effects.

Here is our interview with Israel Ambassador, Ran Yaakoby. From this morning’s @NZQandA https://t.co/pSHdxpccre

— Jack Tame (@jacktame) April 20, 2024

From his introduction, “establishing” that the genocide taking place in Gaza had its genesis in the October 7 attack by Hamas, and not in the Nakba of 1948, Jack Tame and TVNZ facilitated an almost hour-long presentation of pro-Israel propaganda, justifying its atrocities.

For its appalling lack of balance, including Tame’s obsequious allowance and nodding agreement with the Israeli ambassador’s thoroughly discredited claims of Hamas atrocities; “beheadings” “necrophilia” and for describing Israelis’ as being “butchered” (five times he used the word) while Palestinians were merely “killed”, this was a new low in our media’s record of bias when it comes to the presentation of the facts about the Palestine/Israel conflict.

In the very week that we prepare to remember the horrific sacrifices made in previous wars and even as Israel‘s genocidal slaughter of Palestinians brings us closer to World War Three than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis, that TVNZ should have, pre-recorded and so had time to edit, such a disgraceful presentation is simply appalling — and heads should roll.

Republished from The Daily Blog with permission.

A montage of West Papuan everyday life from hip-hop to protest songs

Pacific Media Watch — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 11:32:34 +0000

I came to this evening of short films not sure what to expect.

I have a history with West Papua (here referring to the Indonesian part of the island of New Guinea, which comprises five provinces, one named “West Papua”) from my days fronting the legendary West Papuan band Black Brothers in the early 1990s.

During that time, I was exposed to stories of struggle and pride in the identity of the people of West Papua. From their declaration of self-determination and self-government and the raising of the Morning Star flag on 1 December 1961, to the so-called “Act of Free Choice” referendum in 1969 which saw the fledgling Melanesian state become part of the larger Indonesian state, to the next 40 years of struggle.

However, apart from the occasional ABC or SBS news story and the 1963 ethnographic film Dead Birds, I hadn’t seen much footage on West Papua until now.

The West Papua Mini Film Festival is a touring festival of short films organised by the West Papuan community and their allies and supporters in Australia to raise awareness of the situation in West Papua.

The four films I saw, at the first screening in Sydney, were:

My Name is Pengungsi (Refugee)
Pepera 1969, A Democratic Integration?
Papuan Hip-Hop: When the Microphone Talks
Black Pearl and General of the Field

The first two films were quite harrowing portrayals of internal displacement and coercion in West Papua. My Name is Pengungsi (Refugee) follows the lives and families of two children, both named “refugee”, born and currently being raised in parts of West Papua distant from their families’ places of origin.

Their displacement is clearly correlated with the increased presence of extractive corporate interests backed in and supported by a military presence.

In both children’s cases this has been enabled by the gradual breaking up of the region of West Papua into first two, and now five, separate provinces.

A scene from My Name is Pengungsi (Refugee)

My Name is Pengungsi (Refugee). Video trailer: Jubi TV

The second film, Pepera 1969, A Democratic Integration, deals with the history of oppression and coercion under Indonesian rule and the absurdity of the rubber-stamping process undertaken by Indonesia (the Act of Free Choice, the Indonesian acronym for which is Pepera) which enabled it to annex West Papua under the impotent gaze of the United Nations and the complicit support of countries including the US and Australia.

The film documents the process leading into decolonisation and West Papua’s short-lived period of self-rule.

The second two films were insightful celebrations of Papuan identity in the arts, through hip-hop artists like Ukam Maran and the earlier musical group Mambesak, and in sport, with the incredible story of the Persipura football club of Jayapura.

The latter’s achievements as a football team and subsequent discrimination and suppression in the racially charged Indonesian football league provide an allegory of West Papuan identity.

In both cases, the strength and resilience of West Papuan identity, and West Papuans’ pride in their ancient ties to land and culture, are palpable.

A scene from Papua Hip-Hop: When the microphone talks.

What I liked about the four films was that they presented a montage of West Papua from rural to urban, from the everyday life of internally displaced people to the exciting work of hip-hop artists with their songs of protest; from the big picture and history of West Papua to the smaller microcosm of the Persipura football team and supporters.

All in all, I was surprised how much I came out of the festival better informed about a place, its history and current developments. And this despite having the privilege of knowing more about West Papua than many Australians.

For those who don’t know much about West Papua and would like to know more, attending the West Papua Mini Film Festival is a must. It is on at various locations around Australia until 21 April 2024, with details here.

And to end on a happy note, my evening of film appreciation included meeting one of the festival’s organisers, Victor Mambor. Victor is the nephew of the late Steve Mambor, drummer for the Black Brothers!

West Papua Mini Film Festival 2024, 9-21 April 2024, Wollongong, Sydney, Canberra, Adelaide, Brisbane, Lismore, Hobart, Melbourne, and Darwin.
The films are also available to view with English and Indonesian subtitles on the Jubi TV Youtube channel.

‘Alopi Latukefu is the director of the Edmund Rice Centre. He previously worked for the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. This review was first published on ANU Development Policy Centre’s DevPolicyBlog and is republished here under Creative Commons.

A tribute to a Pacific visionary – remembering Epeli Hau’ofa

APR editor — Sun, 17 Mar 2024 23:52:01 +0000

By Aisha Azeemah in Suva

With the lights on one of his sneakers blinking as he ran through the gallery, a little boy looked up at several works of art. One of them was a sculpture of his grandfather: the man who changed how we see the Pacific — Epeli Hau’ofa, a name renowned across the Pacific as writer, as artist, as mentor, as friend.

The great Hau’ofa certainly wore many hats and made his mark on many lives, and his influence did not end the day his breath did in 2009.

The Tongan-Fijian writer and anthropologist was, among other things, the founder of the University of the South Pacific’s Oceania Centre for Arts, Culture and Pacific Studies.

READ MORE: Oceania Centre for Arts, Culture and Pacific Studies

‘Remembering Epeli Hau’ofa: His Life and Legacy’ – the cover. Image: USP

A man who recognised the need for a place where fellow creatives could create, he can be credited with nurturing several generations of Pacific writers and artists.

His own work, particularly his side-splitting short stories and his 1993 paper titled “Our Sea of Islands” which sought to destroy the notion that Pacific Islands were small and insignificant in the larger world around us, will live on forever in the hands of academics.

But now, those who knew and loved the man have gone the extra step to ensure his name lives on. On March 7, 2024, a book titled “Remembering Epeli Hau’ofa: His Life and Legacy” was launched at the University of the South Pacific’s Laucala Campus in Fiji.

The book, a compilation of the memories of and odes to Hau’ofa, was compiled and edited by Eric Waddell, Professor Vijay Naidu and Dr Claire Slatter.

Poetry opening
Current director of the Oceania Centre for Arts and a renowned artist himself, Larry Thomas, called the book launch to order. Professor Sudesh Mishra read out a poem he wrote about Hau’ofa that can be found in the opening of the book itself.

The book was officially launched by USP Deputy Vice-Chancellor Dr Giulio Masasso Tu’ikolongahau Paunga, sharing the tale of a younger Hau’ofa amused at Dr Paunga’s very formal tie to an otherwise informal event years ago, a look he recreated for the launch event.

“Remembering Epeli Hau’ofa is a book about a visionary,” the book’s foreword by Archbishop Emeritus of the Anglican Church, New Zealand and Polynesia, Winston Halapua says.

“Epeli was a leader who opened our eyes to the pulsing reality around us, the reality which sustains and connects us.

“This book, written in his memory, draws a portrait of a man with great mana who will continue to have wide influence on thinking and action throughout the region.”

Hau’ofa’s love for the Pacific and our oceans is legendary. As such, the book would have been incomplete without an excerpt of his own words expressing the feeling of belonging shared by all Pacific Islanders. Hau’ofa wrote:

“Wherever I am at any given moment, there is comfort in the knowledge stored at the back of my mind that somewhere in Oceania is a piece of earth to which I belong.

“In the turbulence of life, it is my anchor. No one can take it away from me. I may never return to it, not even as mortal remains, but it will always be homeland.

“We all have or should have homelands: family, community, national homelands. And to deny human beings the sense of homeland is to deny them a deep spot on earth to anchor their roots.”

Enlivened by humour
The book launch, a highly emotional event for some attendees but enlivened by humour in every speech and conversation in a very Hau’ofa style was an apt way to celebrate the comedic genius’ life.

His own family, community, and fellow nationals, it seems, will never forget him.

Several notable art pieces were displayed at the Oceania Centre for the book launch, including the piece by Lingikoni E. Vaka’uta that serves as the cover art for the book, an oil on canvas piece titled “The Legend of Maui slowing the sun”.

Another is “Boso”, a 1998 welded scrap metal sculpture of Epeli Hau’ofa himself, by artist Ben Fong.

The event was attended by noted academics, artists, friends, fans of the late Epeli Hau’ofa, and several members of the Hau’ofa family, including his son and aforementioned grandson.

Epeli Hau’ofa’s stories are sure to knock the wind out of you.

The book “Remembering Epeli Hau’ofa: His Life And Legacy” is free to download here.

Republished from The Fiji Times with permission.

Behind the war on Gaza – how Israel profits globally from repression

David Robie — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 10:30:51 +0000

REVIEW: By David Robie

Just months before the outbreak of the genocidal Israeli war on Gaza after the deadly assault on southern Israel by Hamas resistance fighters, Australian investigative journalist and researcher Antony Loewenstein published an extraordinarily timely book, The Palestine Laboratory.

In it he warned that a worst-case scenario — “long feared but never realised, is ethnic cleansing against occupied Palestinians or population transfer, forcible expulsion under the guise of national security”.

Or the claimed fig leaf of “self defence”, the obscene justification offered by beleaguered Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his two-month war of vengeance, death and destruction unleashed upon the people of Palestine, both in the Gaza Strip and the Occupied West Bank that has killed at least 14,850 Gazans — the majority of them women and children — and more than 218 West Bank Palestinians.

As Loewenstein had warned in his 265-page exposé on the Israeli armaments and surveillance industry and how the Zionist nation “exports the technology of occupation around the world”, a catastrophic war could trigger an overwhelming argument within Israel that Palestinians were “undermining the state’s integrity”.

That catastrophe has indeed arrived. But in the process as part of growing worldwide protests in support of an immediate ceasefire and calls for a “free Palestine” long-term solution, Israel has exposed itself as a cruel, ruthless and morally corrupt state prepared to slaughter women and children, attack hospital and medical workers, kill journalists and shun international norms of military conflict to achieve its goal of destroying Hamas, the elected government of Gaza.

Author Antony Loewenstein . . . Gaza is the most most devastating conflict in eight decades since the Second World War. Image: AJ screenshot APR

Interviewed by Al Jazeera today after a four-day temporary truce between Israel and Hamas took effect, author Loewenstein described the conflict as “apocalyptic” and the most devastating in almost 80 years since the Second World War.

He also blamed the death and destruction on Western countries that had allowed the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) to “get away with things that no other country could because of total global impunity”.

‘Genocide Joe’
The United States, led by a feeble and increasingly lame duck President Joe Biden – “genocide Joe”, as some US protesters have branded him — and several Western countries have lost credibility over any debate about global human rights.

As Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan says, the US and the West have enabled the ethnic cleansing and displayed a double standard by condemning Hamas for its atrocities on October 7 while giving Israel a blank cheque for its crimes against humanity and war crimes in both Gaza and the Occupied West Bank.

The Israeli-Palestinian captives exchange deal mediated by Qatar. Image: AJ screenshot APR

We are relieved to confirm the safe release of 24 hostages.
We have facilitated this release by transporting them from Gaza to the Rafah border, marking the real-life impact of our role as a neutral intermediary between the parties.

— ICRC in Israel & OT (@ICRC_ilot) November 24, 2023

In fact, as Erdoğan has increasingly condemned the Zionists, he has branded Israel as a “terror state” and says that Israeli leaders should be tried for war crimes at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

It has also been disturbing that President Biden has publicly repeated Israeli lies in the conflict and Western media has often disseminated these falsehoods.

Media analysts say there is systemic “bias in favour of Israel” which is “irreparably damaging” the credibility of some news agencies and outlets considered “mainstream” in the eyes of Arabs and others.

Loewenstein, who was awarded Australia’s 2023 Walkley Award in the journalism book category tonight, warned in The Palestine Laboratory that “an Israeli operation might be undertaken to ensure a mass exodus, with the prospect of Palestinians returning to their homes a remote possibility” (p. 211).

Many critics fear the bottom line for Israel’s war on Palestine, is not just the elimination of Hamas — which was elected the government of Gaza in 2006 — but the destruction of the enclave’s infrastructure, hence the savage assault on 25 of the Strip’s 32 hospitals (including the Indonesian Hospital) and bombing of 49 percent of the housing for 2.3 million people.

Loewenstein reports:

“In a 2016 poll conducted by [the] Pew Research Centre, nearly half of Israeli Jews supported the transfer or expulsion of Arabs. And some 60 percent of Israeli Jews backed complete separation from Arabs, according to a study in 2022 by the Israeli Democracy Institute. The majority of Israeli Jews polled online in 2022 supported the expulsion of people accused of disloyalty to the state, a policy advocated by popular far-right politician Itamar Ben-Gvir” (p. 211).

Dangerous escalation
Loewenstein saw the reelection in November 2022 of Netanyahu as Prime Minister and as head of the most right-wing coalition in the Israel’s history as ushering in a dangerous escalation of existential threats facing Palestinians.

The author, who is himself of Jewish origin, cites liberal Israeli columnist and journalist Gideon Levy in Haaretz reminding his readers of “an uncomfortable truth” after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Levy wrote that the long-held Israeli belief that military power “was all that matters to stay alive , was a lie” (p. 206). Levy wrote”

“The lesson Israel should be learning from Ukraine is the opposite. Military power is not enough, it is impossible to survive alone, we need true international support, which can’t be bought just be developing drones and drop bombs.”

Levy argued that the “age of the Jewish state paralysing the world when it cries “anti-semitism” was coming to a close.

The daily television scenes — especially on Al Jazeera and TRT World News, arguably offering the most balanced, comprehensive and nuanced coverage of the massacres (in contrast to such media as BBC and CNN with journalists embedded with the Israeli Defence Force — have borne witness to the rogue status of Israel.

Nizar Sadawi of Turkey’s TRT World News, one of the few Arabic speaking and courageous journalists working at great risk for a world news service. Image: TRT screenshot APR

Turkey’s President Erdoğan has been one of the strongest critics of Netanyahu’s war machine, warning that Israel’s leaders will be made accountable for their war crimes.

His condemnation has been paralleled by multiple petitions and actions seeking International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutions against Israeli leaders, including an arrest warrant for Netanyahu himself.

Toxic ideology
According to Loewenstein, Israel’s “Palestine laboratory” and its toxic ideology thrives on global disruption and violence. As he says:

“The worsening climate crisis will benefit Israel’s defence sector in a future where nation-states do not respond with active measures to reduce the impacts of surging temperatures but instead ghetto-ise themselves, Israeli-style. What this means in practice is higher walls and tighter borders, greater surveillance of refugees, facial recognition, drones, smart fences, and biometric databases (p. 207).”

By 2025, Loewenstein points out, the border surveillance industrial complex is estimated to become worth US$68 billion, and Israeli companies such as Elbeit Systems are “guaranteed to be among the main beneficiaries.”

Three years ago Israel spent $US22 billion on its military and was is 12th biggest military supplier in the world with sales of more than $US345 million.

The potency of Palestine as a laboratory for methods of controlling “unwanted people” and a separation of populations is the primary focus of Loewenstein’s book. The many case studies of Israeli apartheid with corporations showcasing and profiting from the suppression and persecution of Palestinians are featured.

The book is divided into seven chapters, with a conclusion, headed “Selling weapons to anybody who wants them,” “September 11 was good for business,” “Preventing an outbreak of peace,” “Selling Israeli occupation to the world,” “The enduring appeal of Israeli domination,” “Israel mass surveillance in the brain of your phone,” and “Social media companies don’t like Palestinians.”

How Israel has such influence over Silicon Valley — along with many Western governments — is “both obvious and ominous for the future of marginalised groups, because it is not just the Jewish state that has discovered the Achilles heel of big tech”.

‘Real harm’ against minorities
Examples cited by Loewenstein include India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi successfully demanding that Facebook remove posts critical of his government’s handling of the covid pandemic of 2020, and evidence of Facebook posts causing “real harm against minorities” in Myanmar and Russia as well as India and Palestine.

The company’s global policy team argued that they risked having the platform shutdown completely if they did not comply with government requests. Profits before human rights.

Loewenstein refers to social media calls for genocide against the Muslim minority having “moved from the fringes to the mainstream”. Condemning this, Loewenstein remarks: “Leaving these comments up, which routinely happens, is deeply irresponsible” (p. 197).

He argues that his book is a warning that “despotism has never been so easily shareable with compact technology”. He explains:

“The ethnonationalist ideas behind it are appealing to millions of people because democratic leaders have failed to deliver. A Pew Research Centre survey across 34 countries in 2020 found only 44 percent of those polled were content with democracy, while 52 percent were not. Ethnonationalist ideology grows when accountable democracy withers, Israel is the ultimate model and goal” (p. 16).

The September 11, 2001, terror attacks on New York and Washington “turbocharged Israel’s defence sector and internationalised the war on terror that the Jewish state had been fighting for decades” (p. 49).

Grief for one of the 48 journalists killed by Israel during the seven weeks of bombardment. Image: RSF screenshot

War against journalists
Along with health workers (200 killed and the total climbing), journalists have suffering a heavy price for reporting Israel’s relentless bombardment with at least 48 dead (including media workers in Lebanon, the death toll has topped 60).

The Paris-based media freedom watchdog Reporters without Borders has accused Israel of seeking to “eradicate journalism in Gaza” by refusing to heed calls to protect media workers.

“The situation is dire for Palestinian journalists trapped in the enclave, where ten have been killed in the past three days, bringing the total media death toll in Gaza since the start of the war to 48. The past weekend was the deadliest for the media since the war between Israel and Hamas began.”

RSF also said Gaza from north to south had “become a cemetery for journalists”.

Of the 10 journalists killed between November 18-20, at least three were killed in the course of their work or because of it. They were: Hassouna Sleem, director of the Palestinian online news agency Quds News, and freelance photo-journalist Sary Mansour who were killed during an Israeli assault on the Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on November 18.

According to RSF, they had received an online death threat in connection with their work 24 hours prior to them being killed.

Journalist Bilal Jadallah was killed by an Israeli strike that hit his car directly as he was trying to evacuate from Gaza City via the district of Zeitoun on the morning of November 19.

He was a prominent figure within the Palestinian media community and held several positions including chair of the board of Press House-Palestine, an organisation supporting independent media and journalists in Gaza.

Global protests have been growing with demands in many countries for a complete ceasefire to the attack on Gaza. Image: TRT screenshot APR

Killed with family members
Most of the journalists were killed with family members when Israeli strikes hit their homes, reports RSF.

It is offensive that British and US news media should refer to Hamas “terrorists” in their news bulletins, regardless of the fact that the US and UK governments have declared them as such.

As a former journalist with British and French news agencies for several years, I wonder what has happened to the maxim that had applied since the post-Second World War anticolonialism struggles — one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. Thus “neutral” descriptions were generally used.

As President Erdoğan, has already pointed out, Hamas are nationalists fighting against 75 years of Zionist Israeli colonialism and apartheid. Palestine is the occupied territory; Israel is the illegal occupier.

Loewenstein argues in his book that Israel has sold so much defence equipment and surveillance technologies, such as the phone-hacking tool Pegasus, that it had hoped to “insulate itself” from any political backlash to its endless occupation.

However, the tide has turned with several countries such as South Africa and Turkey closing Israeli embassies and recalling their diplomats and as demonstrated by the UN General Assembly’s overwhelming vote last month for an immediate humanitarian truce.

There is a shift in global opinion in response to the massive price that the Palestinian people have been paying for Israeli apartheid and repression for 75 years. While Iran has long been portrayed by the West as a threat to regional peace, the relentless and ruthless bombardment of the Gaza Strip for seven weeks has demonstrated to the world that Israel is actually the threat.

However, Israel is on the wrong side of history. Whatever it does, the Palestinians will remain defiant and resilient.

Palestine will become a free, sovereign state. It is essential that international community pressure ensures that this happens for a just and lasting peace.

• The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel exports the technology of occupation around the world, by Antony Loewenstein. Scribe Publications, Melbourne, 2023. Reviewer Dr David Robie is editor and publisher of Asia Pacific Report.

Fantasy like Moana? ‘No, I just wanted to tell my story,’ says Tongan pilot

Sri Krishnamurthi — Tue, 09 May 2023 22:02:52 +0000

REVIEW: By Sri Krishnamurthi

From Island girl to an airline pilot seems like the Disney fantasy Moana yet nothing could further from the truth when it comes to Silva McLeod who turned fantasy into reality with heartbreak along the way.

Born in the small Tongan village of Vava’u in the days when we watched and marvelled as jets few overhead, Mcleod never dreamed one day that she would be there in the sky flying jet planes to all manner of destinations.

In her recently released memoir,  Island Girl to Airline Pilot: A Story of Love, Sacrifice and Taking Flight, she tells her story.

The book details when and where she meets her Australian husband Ken who went to Tonga to work in building a hospital. She was working as a waitress in a bar when she first met him.

However, unlike other Palagi (white men) visiting the islands and making promises they never intended to keep, Ken — according to her autobiography that initially reads like a Mills & Boon novel — was a perfect gentleman as he slowly courted her.

“At first, it wasn’t the done thing to do… Unfortunately, the picture we have that white men come in — it’s not a very nice picture, but that’s how it was — they impregnate the Tongan girl and then nick off, and mum and dad, nan and pa will have to clean up the mess,” she writes.

“So, this is quite rare, a young handsome Pālagi came to our island, and we found a common attraction to each other. My family feared the worst … so it wasn’t very well received in the beginning.

Language ‘huge barrier’
“Language was a huge barrier at the beginning, because my family couldn’t speak a word of English and Ken couldn’t speak a word of Tongan.

“So how could Ken make a conversation that might help my family accept the situation? But it didn’t take long.”

Ken eventually whisked her away to Melbourne in 1980, and while her dreams were put on the backburner while the couple raised a family.

She did ultimately realise her dream to become Tonga and possibly the Pacific female airline pilot, beginning as a flying instructor, then flying for Royal Tonga Airlines, Australian Flying Doctor Service and eventually Virgin International Airlines.

And, at the time of doing this interview, she was waiting to hear about her health results to find out whether she could keep flying.

Becoming a pilot “was never really a dream, because I could never envision reaching it or getting there,” Mcleod  says.

“It was more like a fantasy because it was never going to happen.

Both ways to the beach
“Growing up in Vava’u, in a tiny little island of Pangaimotu, 200 people live there: you walk one way you reach the beach; you turn around 180 degrees you reach the beach.

“So, to dream of eventually becoming an airline pilot one day, or even just flying an aeroplane was unreachable — so I kept it as a fantasy.

“I can just visualise myself as a child running outside every time I hear a sound of an aircraft and I was there [looking] at the sky until the aircraft disappeared.

“The curiosity in me … was getting a little bit too much, running away with the thought of ‘oh wow, how clever is that, imagine the people that are flying that machine… wouldn’t it be amazing to operate such a machine, because it defies gravity?

“The fantasy was right from a young age, but it wasn’t a dream because I didn’t think that I’d get there.”

Mcleod’s world while growing up was limited, she says: “like wanting to reach for a piece of coconut but finding your arms are bound”.

At the time growing up in the 1970s in Vava’u, television and  newspapers weren’t easily accessible, so glimpses of the lives and places outside of the immediate community were limited, she says.

‘I can’t get out’
“It felt like, ‘I can’t get out’. It’s the same right across the Pacific Islands, it’s not just Tonga.

“We have such a rich culture and living in it … it’s just part of you and something I will treasure and value for the rest of my life.

“But then on the other hand, it’s restrictive because there’s nothing else to do.

“You go to school and then after that there was no university, there was no job. What could  you  do on an island? You couldn’t see a future.

“We are bound by culture, we bind by family, we bind by religion. It’s like you are free but you are bound to something.

“That’s just the way it is, and that’s just the island life, and you just grow up understanding it and it’s part of you.”

Now, with internet connectivity many Pasifika children view a more open world, she says.

Done her family duty
Settling in Melbourne and raising two daughters who are happily married with their own kids, she has done her family duty.

Then in a conversation with Ken, Mcleod spoke of her dream of becoming a pilot. However, instead of laughing, her husband told her that she could do it.

“Yes you have to be good at mathematics to be pilot and it takes hard work so no fantasy is ever easy,” she said.

Not long after, Ken became sick with cancer, and underwent chemotherapy. Mcleod focused on his recovery until her husband asked her about what it would take to get her started. He bought her a birthday present of vouchers for an introductory flight, and the rest is history.

Six years later, she earned her air transport pilot’s licence and became  the first Tongan woman to qualify as a pilot, and later a flight instructor.

The work brought Mcleod satisfaction, though she frequently faced both racism and sexism along the way, such as callers would say they wanted to speak to “Mr McLeod”.

Sexism, racism and misogynism, she has experienced it all, but as she said, “my book isn’t about that, I just wanted to tell my story through my eyes”.

An eye on Boeing 777s
As a pilot, Mcleod was “quite happy just flying 737s all around” but  followed with interest as Boeing 777s were developed and introduced, with automated fly-by-wire technology.

“I was based in New Zealand for nearly 12 months — loved my time there. That was on the 737s, so I did all of the domestic routes in New Zealand as well as all the South Pacific islands.

“At first I was based in Christchurch, then when moved Auckland a group of us pilots pooled our allowance and took an apartment at Auckland’s viaduct and we just loved it there, Ken came along and joined us,” she said.

Mcleod then  began working for the Virgin stable  and was trained to pilot 777s there — another thing ticked off her bucket list.

When she joined Royal Tongan Airlines and became  the first pilot  to speak fluent Tongan to the largely Tongan passengers over the intercom, it gave her such pride.

Defining her life
Mcleod underlines her story that flying aeroplanes does not define her life. Her journey, family, cultural identity and partnership with Ken determined her life.

Alas Ken died recently from cancer as the covid-19 pandemic swept through the world, and McLeod says that  until the end they remained both close and committed to breaking down barriers of skin colour and culture.

“I was a wife first, a mother, a grandmother, a carer, and I just call myself a worker … whatever field you have it’s no different. I just wanted to tell my story,” she says.

“And if my story inspires young Pacific women to be who they want to be, then so be it, but that was not my ambition. I just wanted to tell my story,” she says heading out the door to a nearby golf course.

 Island Girl to Airline Pilot: A Story of Love, Sacrifice and Taking Flight, by Silva Mcleod. Melbourne: Exisle Publishing. ISBN: 9781922539618

Lessons from peace activists – and action is up to the readers

APR editor — Mon, 20 Mar 2023 04:59:50 +0000

REVIEW: By Heather Devere

The aims of Peace Action: Struggles for a Decolonised and Demilitarised Oceania and East Asia as stated by the editor, Valerie Morse, are “to make visible interconnections between social struggles separated by the vast expanse of Te Moana Nui-A-Kiwi [the Pacific Ocean] … to inspire, to enrage and to educate, but most of all, to motivate people to action” (p. 11).

It is an opportunity to learn from the activists involved in these struggles. Published by the Left of the Equator Press, there are plenty of clues to the radical ideas presented. The frontispiece points out that the publisher is anti-copyright, and the book is “not able to be reproduced for the purpose of profit”, is printed on 100 percent “post consumer recycled paper”, and “bound with a hatred for the State and Capital infused in every page”.

By their nature, activists take action and do things rather than just speak or write about things, as is the academic tradition, so this is an important, unique, and rare opportunity to learn from their insights, knowledge, and experience.

READ MORE: Other Asia Pacific Report reviews

Twenty-three contributors representing some of the diverse Peoples of Aotearoa, Australia, China, Hawaii, Japan, New Caledonia, Samoa, Tahiti, Tokelau, Tonga, and West Papua offer 13 written chapters, plus poetry, artworks, and a photo essay. The range of topics is extensive too, including the history of the Crusades and the doctrine of discovery, anti-militarist and anti-imperialist movements, land reclamation movements, nuclear resistance and anti-racist movements, solidarity and allyship.

Both passion and ethics are evident in the stories about involvement in decolonised movements that are “situated in their relevant Indigenous practice” and anti-militarist movements that “actively practice peace making” (p. 11).

Peace Action … the new book. Image: Left of the Equator

While their activism is unquestioned, the contributors come with other impressive credentials. Not only do they actively put into practice their strong values, but many are also researchers and scholars. Dr Pounamu Jade Aikman (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Apakura, Ngāti Wairere, Tainui, Ngāti Awa, Ngāi Te Rangi, Te Arawa and Ngāti Tarāwhai) holds a Fulbright Scholarship from Harvard University. Mengzhu Fu (a 1.5 generation Tauiwi Chinese member of Asians Supporting Tino Rangatiratanga) is doing their PhD research on Indigenous struggles in Aotearoa and Canada-occupied Turtle Islands. Kyle Kajihiro lectures at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and is a board member of Hawai’i Peace and Justice. Yamin Kogoya is a West Papuan academic from the Yikwa-Kogoya clan of the Lani tribe in the Papuan Highlands. Ena Manuireva is an academic and writer who represents the Mā’ohi Nui people of Tahiti. Dr Jae-Eun Noh and Dr Joon-Shik Shin are Korean researchers in Australian universities. Dr Rebekah Jaung, a health researcher, is involved in Korean New Zealanders for a Better Future.

Several of the authors are working as investigators on the prestigious Marsden project entitled “Matiki Mai Te Hiaroa: #ProtectIhumātao”, a recent successful campaign to reclaim Māori land. These include Professor Jenny Bol Jun Lee-Morgan (Waikato, Ngāti Mahuta and Te Ahiwaru), Frances Hancock (Irish Pākehā), Carwyn Jones (Ngāti Kahungunu), Qiane Matata-Sipu (Te Waiohua ki te Ahiwaru me te Ākitai, Waikato Ngāpuhi and Ngāti Pikiao), and Pania Newton (Ngāpuhi, Waikato, Ngāti Mahuta and Ngāti Maniapoto) who is co-founder and spokesperson for the SOUL/#ProtectIhumātao campaign.

Others work for climate justice, peace, Indigenous, social justice organisations, and community groups. Jungmin Choi coordinates nonviolence training at World Without War, a South Korean antimilitarist organisation based in Seoul. Mizuki Nakamura, a member of One Love Takae coordinates alternative peace tours in Japan. Tuhi-Ao Bailey (Ngāti Mutunga, Te Ātiawa and Taranaki) is chair of the Parihaka Papakāinga Trust and co-founder of Climate Justice Taranaki.

Zelda Grimshaw, an artist and activist, helped coordinate the Disrupt Land Forces campaign at a major arts fair in Brisbane. Arama Rata (Ngāruhine, Taranaki and Ngāti Maniapoto) is a researcher for WERO (Working to End Racial Oppression) and Te Kaunoti Hikahika.

Some are independent writers and artists. Emalani Case is a writer, teacher and aloha ‘āina from Waimea Hawai’i. Tony Fala (who has Tokelauan, Palagi, Samoan, and Tongan ancestry) engages with urban Pacific communities in Tāmaki Makaurau. Marylou Mahe is a decolonial feminist artist from Haouaïlou in the Kanak country of Ajë-Arhö. Tina Ngata (Ngäti Porou) is a researcher, author and an advocate for environmental Indigenous and human rights.

Jos Wheeler is a director of photography for film and television in Aotearoa.

Background analysis for this focus on Te Moana Nui A Kiwi, provides information about the concepts of imperial masculinity, infection, ideas from European maritime law Mare Liberum, that saw the sea as belonging to everyone. These ideas steered colonisation and placed shackles, both figuratively and physically, on Indigenous Peoples around the world.

In the 17th century, Japan occupied the country of Okinawa, now also used as a training base by the US military. European “explorers” had been given “missions” in the 18th century that included converting the people to Christianity and locating useful and profitable resources in far-flung countries such as Aotearoa, Australia, New Caledonia and Tahiti.

In the 19th century, Hawai’i was subject to US imperialism and militarisation.

In the 20th century, Western countries were “liberating other nations” and dividing them up between them, such as the US “liberation” of South Korea from Japanese colonial rule. The Dutch prepared West Papua for independence 1960s after colonisation, but a subsequent Indonesian military invasion left the country in a worse predicament.

However, the resistance from the Indigenous Peoples has been evident from the beginnings of imperialist invasions and militarisation of the Pacific, despite the arbitrary violence that accompanied these. Resistance continues, as the contributors to Peace Action demonstrate, and the contributions reveal the very many faces and facets of non-violent resistance that works towards an eventual peace with justice.

Resistance has included education, support to help self-sufficiency, medical and legal support, conscientious objection, human rights advocacy, occupation of land, coordinating media coverage, visiting sites of significance, being the voice of the movement, petitions, research, writing, organising and joining peaceful marches, coordinating solidarity groups, making submissions, producing newsletter and community newspapers, relating stories, art exhibitions and installations, visiting churches, schools, universities, conferences, engaging with politicians, exploiting and creating digital platforms, fundraising, putting out calls for donations and hospitality, selling T-shirts and tote bags, awareness-raising events, hosting visitors, making and serving food, bearing witness, musical performances, photographic exhibitions, film screenings, songs on CDs.

In order to mobilise people, activists have been involved in political engagement, public education, multimedia engagement, legal action, protests, rallies, marches, land and military site occupations, disruption of events, producing food from the land, negotiating treaties and settlements, cultural revitalisation, community networking and voluntary work, local and international solidarity, talanoa, open discussions, radical history teaching, printmaking workshops, vigils, dance parties, mobile kitchens, parades, first aid, building governance capacity, sharing histories, increasing medical knowledge.

Activist have been prompted to act because of anger, disgust, and fear. The oppressors are likened to big waves, to large octopuses (interestingly also used in racist cartoons to depict Chinese immigrants to Aotearoa), to giants, to a virus, slavers, polluters, destroyers, exploiters, thieves, rapists, mass murderers, war criminals, war profiteers, white supremacists, racists, brutal genocide, ruthless killers, subjugators, fearmongers, demonisers, narcissistic sociopaths, and torturers.

The resisters often try to “find beauty in the struggle” (Case, p. 70), using imagery of flowers and trees, love, dancing, song, braiding fibers or leis, dolphins, shark deities, flourishing food baskets, fertile gardens, pristine forests, sacred valleys, mother earth, seashells, candlelight, rainbows, rays of the rising sun, friendship, alliance, partners, majestic lowland forests, ploughs, watering seeds, and harvesting crops.

Collaboration in resistance requires dignity, respect, integrity, providing safe spaces, honesty, openness, hard work without complaint, learning, cultural and spiritual awareness. The importance of coordination, cooperation and commitment are emphasised.

And readers are made aware of the sustained energy that is needed to follow through on actions.

The aim of Peace Action is to inspire, enrage, educate and motivate. These chapters will appeal mostly to those already convinced, and this is deliberately so.

In these narratives, images we have guidance as to what is needed to be an activist. We admire the courage and bravery, we are educated into the multitude of activities that can be undertaken, and the immense amount of work in planning and sustaining action.

This can serve as a handbook, providing plans of action to follow. Richness and creativity are provided in the fascinating and informative narratives, storytelling, and illustrations.

I find it difficult to criticise because its goal is clear, there is no pretence that it is something else, and it achieves what it sets out to do. It remains to be seen whether peace action will follow. But that will be up to the readers.

Peace Action: Struggles for a Decolonised and Demilitarised Oceania and East Asia, edited by Valerie Morse. Te Whanganui-A-Tara (Wellington): Left of the Equator Press, 2022, 178 pages. NZ$25.99. ISBN 9780473634452.

Dr Heather Devere is former director of practice, National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Otago, and chair of the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN). This review is published in collaboration with Pacific Journalism Review.

An important book exposing problems immigrants – especially Muslims – face in New Zealand

APR editor — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 18:14:38 +0000

REVIEW: By Adam Brown

How to be a Bad Muslim is a collection of 19 short essays by Mohamed Hassan, an award-winning poet and an international journalist. He was born in Cairo, but moved to Auckland at the age of eight.

This personal history underlies much of his writing: his fond memories of Egypt and its collectivist society and extended families, versus his adolescence as a migrant with a clearly identifiable Muslim name in individualist New Zealand. After 9/11, suspicions deepened and Muslims were subject to collective guilt and racial profiling, despite that fact that Muslims around the world condemned the attacks.

“To be granted citizenry and promised equality but to always be held at arm’s length. To be accused of plotting disharmony when all we have ever fought for was integration, acceptance, peace.” In other words, to be “welcome, but not welcome”.

This is all documented in chapter 11: “How to be a bad Muslim.”

Memories from his youth include spooky childhood memories from Cairo (chapter 2, “The witch of El Agouza”), followed by real-life memories and standing up to being bullied in school in New Zealand by someone who later became an All Black (chapter 3, “Showdown in the Kowhai Room”).

As a Muslim, the author’s refusal to enter the binge drinking culture of New Zealand, while entering the local poetry scene, shows that it is possible to enjoy oneself without alcohol (chapter 4, “The last sober driver”).

The author is well acquainted with IT, the internet, YouTube, social media, etc. An important chapter is the first, entitled “Subscribe to PewDiePie”, being the last words of the Christchurch shooter before entering Al-Noor Mosque. The chapter documents the seemingly innocent growth of YouTube and social media over a decade, all leading ultimately to the Christchurch massacre.

Many passages in the chapters touch on the misrepresentation of Muslims and Islam, as the author reports from first-hand experience. He was bullied at school, given the cold shoulder at work, passed over for promotion, regularly subjected to “random” searches at airports, etc. His brother no longer goes with his two young sons to Friday prayers in Manukau, because he does not feel they are safe.

How to be a Bad Muslim and other essays, by Mohamed Hassan.

“The growing mistrust was fuelled by grotesque and irresponsible media narratives that portrayed Muslim immigrants as an existential threat, and the public believed it” despite the fact that the public knew little about Islam and Muslims, and failed to find out about it.

“A Sikh man studying at a café outside his medical school had police called to interrogate him after a woman spotted wires hanging out of his bag. They were headphone cables.”

In chapter 10 “Ode to Elliott Alderson”, he catalogues the misrepresentation of Muslims in film, involving famous actors such as Rami Malek, Omid Djalili, Hank Azaria, Sacha Baron Cohen, Christian Bale, and Sigourney Weaver.

Throughout the chapters, the author reports his memories and experiences, but often with a sense of humour, and with a poet’s turn of phrase. He describes his baby sister sleeping “as only an infant can, her fingers curled into themselves and her breath like a moth dancing around a faint sun”.

As an Egyptian Muslim growing up in New Zealand, he was “a kid who wore the question of belonging like an ankle monitor everywhere I went.” As a keen observer of the effect of IT, the internet and social media, he wonders, “Will our greatest of grandchildren unearth our metadata and try and decipher what our selfies said about our civilisation?”

This is an important book for anyone wanting to understand the problems immigrants — especially Muslims — face in New Zealand.

How to be a Bad Muslim and other essays, by Mohamed Hassan. (Penguin/Random House, New Zealand, 2022, NZ$35). ISBN 9780143776215

Dr Adam Brown is an Auckland academic, author and the editor of a New Zealand Muslim publication. This review is published in collaboration with Pacific Journalism Review.

Tribute to a human comet who lit everything he touched

APR editor — Mon, 20 Feb 2023 18:17:22 +0000

REVIEW: By Jenny Nicholls

Peacemonger is a collection of essays about the much travelled Aotearoa peace activist and researcher Owen Wilkes, who died in May 2005. Wilkes was an extraordinary peace campaigner who discovered a foreign spy base at Tangimoana and was once charged with espionage in Norway and again while on a cycling holiday in Sweden.

After he took up beekeeping near Karamea on the West Coast in 1983, it was discovered that Customs was helping the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service to read his mail, apparently worried about his legendary ability to snuffle out secret installations by foreign powers in countries from New Zealand to Norway.

They were right to note his impact – this book explains just how enormously influential Wilkes was.

READ MORE: Other Owen Wilkes book reports

Many of these short essays are by big names in the Aotearoa peace firmament, such as Maire Leadbeater, Murray Horton, David Robie, Nicky Hager and Peter Wills. Each chapter contains gems; some hilarious, others sobering.

Wilkes was a rare beast, a man who could be, as Mark Derby writes, “unpretentious, fearless, indefatigable, at times insufferable”.

Hager, a phenomenal investigative journalist, has contributed the chapter “The Wilkes How-to Guide to Public Interest Researching’.

Coming from Hager, one of the greatest public interest researchers in the country, this should be catnip to a new generation of proto-Hagers, Thunbergs and Wilkeses.

The last chapter, “Memories of Owen”, was written by his partner, peace activist May Bass.

It is a heartfelt send-off to a human comet who lit up everything he touched, one who may never have realised in his arc across the sky what a void he left behind him, not just in the peace movement, but in the hearts of his friends and loved ones.

Peacemonger: Owen Wilkes: International Peace Researcher, edited by May Bass and Mark Derby (NZ$35.00, Raekaihau Press and Steele Roberts Aotearoa). ISBN 9781991153869

Jenny Nicholls writes reviews for The Listener and this review has been republished from the Waiheke Weekender with permission. She is also a graphic designer: designandtype.org

Peter Lusk: Reflections on my mahi with peace researcher Owen Wilkes

Pacific Media Watch — Mon, 13 Feb 2023 21:45:45 +0000

The Owen Wilkes book Peacemonger, edited by May Bass and Mark Derby, was due to be launched in Wellington today after earlier launches in Auckland and Christchurch. Here Buller conservationist Peter Lusk reflects on his mahi with Owen.

COMMENTARY: By Peter Lusk

I worked closely with peace researcher Owen Wilkes in 1973 and 1974, writing stories for the student newspaper Canta from files of newspaper clippings and hand written jottings that Owen had collected over a period of years.

These stories covered quite a range of subjects. For example, an American millionaire named Stockton Rush who purchased a beautiful valley near Te Anau from the Crown and built a luxury lodge. There was controversy over this. I can’t remember exactly why, probably the Crown selling the land when it shouldn’t.

Then a file on Ivan Watkins Dow who were making Agent Orange or similar at their plant in New Plymouth. They were releasing gases at night and the gases would drift over the city wiping out home vegetable gardens.

The company’s CEO described objectors as “eco-nuts”.

Owen’s biggest file was on Comalco. I went to the Bluff smelter and Manapouri power station and met activists in the area. Also interviewed Stockton Rush while in the area, namely Southland.

Peacemonger . . . the first full-length account of peace researcher Owen Wilkes’ life and work. Image: Raekaihau Press

Another file was on a self proclaimed millionaire who had been in the media over his proposed housing development in Governors Bay on Lyttelton Harbour, with a new tunnel to be built through Port Hills. This guy turned out to be a conman and we were able to expose him.

I wrote up the story, we printed it as a centrefold in Canta, then used the centrefold as a leaflet to assist the action group in Governors Bay. This was very successful at exposing the conman whose name I cannot recall.

There were a few other files of Owen’s that I turned into stories, and the sum of the stories were the basis of a 4 page leaflet we printed off for the South Island Resistance Ride held at end of 1974.

I never got to write up the files on Stockton Rush and Ivan Watkins Dow which was a personal disappointment. From memory it was due to Owen suddenly getting the peace research job in Norway [at SIPRI – Stockholm International Peace Research Institute].

“The only time in my life I’ve ever met, let alone worked with, a genius. He had a huge amount of energy.”

I found Owen very good to work with. It’s the only time in my life I’ve ever met, let alone worked with, a genius. He had a huge amount of energy. Far more than me, and I was a full-on activist along with others in our little group like Canta editor Murray Horton and graphics/layout man Ron Currie.

I worked alongside Owen at Boons bakery for a single night. It came about when one of my flatmates, who regularly worked there, needed a night off and convinced me to cover his shift.

So I turned up at Boons at 8pm or whenever it was. The foreman was none too pleased, but he showed me the ropes. I was taking cooked bread out of one oven, while Owen was doing the same from a bigger oven beside me.

The bread was coming out fast, in hot tins, and it was very easy to get burned on the tins, specially for a novice. I got several burns in the course of the shift. Looking over at Owen, I couldn’t help notice how he revelled in the job, he was like a well-oiled machine, banging the bread out of the tins, and oiling them up.

Very competent, no burns for him because he was a regular at Boons and had everything well worked out.

Something else. Owen was living at a commune at Oxford at the time. They had two pigs needing to be slaughtered. I’d killed and dressed a few sheep in my farm worker days, so offered to help.

Owen had never done such “home-kills”, but in typical Owen fashion had got hold of a book on butchering and he took it with him to the pig sty. He’d previously read-up on how to “stick” a pig, stabbing it between the ribs and slicing its heart, all in one motion.

He accomplished this very successfully. One pig, then two pigs, then haul them over to a bath full of hot water to scald, then scrape. After that we gutted them and hung up the tidy carcasses to cool.

Yes, I had great admiration for Owen.

Photo of Owen Wilkes
About the picture at the start of this article: This photo is from the 1974 Long March across Australia against US imperialism and the Vietnam War.

We overnighted in all sorts of places and this was the campground at Mildura in Victoria.

I like the photo because it typifies Owen with his steel box of files — so heavy and awkward to handle. But it was strong and, from memory, lockable.

Having the files with him, meant Owen could immediately provide evidence for media if they asked for verification on something he said. Even though the Long March was organised from Australia, Owen was still the onboard authority on what the US was doing over there.

Peacemonger: Owen Wilkes: International peace researcher, edited by May Bass and Mark Derby. Wellington: Raekaihau Press, 196 pages. $35. ISBN 978-1-99-115386-9
NOTE: The Wellington launch scheduled for today, 14 February 2023, at Minerva Handcraft Bookshop has been cancelled due to the weather National State of Emergency. It will be rescheduled. Guest speaker: Nicky Hager

Speaking to the world, but mirroring Australia’s off-again, on-again Pacific engagement

APR editor — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 01:21:51 +0000

REVIEW: By Rowan Callick

Radio Australia was conceived at the beginning of the Second World War out of Canberra’s desire to counter Japanese propaganda in the Pacific. More than 70 years later its rebirth is being driven by a similarly urgent need to counter propaganda, this time from China.

Set up within the towering framework of the ABC, Radio Australia was, and remains, an institution with a lively multilingual culture of its own. Sometimes it has thrived and sometimes, especially in recent decades, it has struggled as political priorities and media fashions waxed and waned within the ABC and the wider world.

Phil Kafcaloudes, an accomplished journalist, author and media educator who hosted Radio Australia’s popular breakfast show for nine years, was commissioned by the ABC to write the service’s story for the corporation’s 90th-anniversary celebrations. The result is a nicely illustrated and comprehensively footnoted new book, Australia Calling: The ABC Radio Australia Story, which uses the original name of the service for its title. (With appropriate good manners, Kafcaloudes acknowledges previous accounts of the Radio Australia story, by Peter Lucas in 1964 and Errol Hodge in 1995.)

The overseas service’s nadir came in 2014 after the election of the Abbott government. At the time, Inside Story’s Pacific correspondent Nic Maclellan described in devastating detail the impact in the region of the eighty redundancies brought on by the government’s decision to remove the Australia Network, a kind of TV counterpart to Radio Australia, from the ABC. The network had controversially been merged with key elements of Radio Australia to create ABC International.

Among the casualties was the legendary ABC broadcaster Sean Dorney, known and loved throughout the Pacific. Programmes for Asia were axed, as was much specialist Pacific reporting, with English-language coverage to be sourced from the ABC’s general news department.

The ABC’s full-time team in the Pacific was reduced to a journalist in Port Moresby and another (if it counts) in New Zealand. Australia’s newspapers had already withdrawn their correspondents from the region, and online-only media hadn’t filled the gap. Where once, in 1948, Radio Australia had helped beam a signal to the moon, the countries of our own region now seemed even more remote.

Australia Calling: The ABC Radio Australia Story

Despite the steady erosion of the service over decades, though, Kafcaloudes’s book has a happy ending of sorts. Its final chapter, titled “Rebirth: Pivoting to the Pacific,” tells how Radio Australia benefited from the Morrison government’s “Pacific Step-Up,” launched in response to China’s campaign to build regional connections. Steps to rebuild Radio Australia’s capacities have since been enhanced by substantial new funding from the Albanese government.

Placing listeners at scene
When current affairs radio is at its most effective, it places listeners at the scene. Kafcaloudes tells of being on air when a listener in Timor-Leste called to tell of an assassination attempt on José Ramos-Horta and Xanana Gusmão.

“Radio Australia instantly changed its scheduling to broadcast live for three hours so locals would know whether their leaders were still alive.”

But, as Kafcaloudes explains, “for all the good work, global connections and breaking news stories, the truth is, for many Australian politicians there was little electoral capacity in a service that a domestic audience did not hear.” Thus the abrupt funding reverses and the constant tinkering.

Former ABC journalist and manager Geoff Heriot describes how, during a challenging phase for the ABC about 25 years ago, managing director Brian Johns’s desire to defend the ABC meant that, “if necessary, you could cut off limbs.” And Radio Australia was the limb that often seemed most remote from the core.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Kafcaloudes says, the service “was often at or near the top of the polls as the world’s best.” Many listeners, especially in China and elsewhere in East Asia, testified to having learned English from listening to Radio Australia.

Its popularity in Asia and the Pacific was boosted by the fact that it broadcast from a similar time zone, which meant its morning shows, for instance, were heard during listeners’ mornings. In 1968 alone, the station received 250,000 letters from people tuning in around the region.

For decades, broadcasts were via shortwave, the only way of covering vast distances at the time. But the ABC turned off that medium for good in 2017, so Radio Australia now communicates via 24-hour FM stations across the Pacific and via satellite, live stream, on-demand audio, podcasts, the ABC Listen app, and Facebook and Twitter.

New audiences emerging
With new audiences emerging in different places, the geography of Radio Australia’s languages have changed too. As the use of French in the former colonies in Indochina declined, for instance, new French-speaking audiences developed in the Pacific colonies of New Caledonia and French Polynesia.

One of the continuities of Radio Australia is the quality and connectedness of its broadcasters. Most of them come from the countries to which they broadcast, and together they have evolved into a remarkable cadre who could and should be invited by policymakers and diplomats to help Australia steer and deepen its relations with our neighbours.

Kafcaloudes rightly stresses the importance of that first prewar step, when Robert Menzies, “a man who believed he was British to the bootstraps, despite being born and bred in country Victoria,” decided “Australians needed to speak to the world with their own voice.”

How best to do this has frequently been disputed. In a 1962 ministerial briefing, the Department of External Affairs argued that Radio Australia’s broadcasts “should not be noticeably at variance with the broad objectives of Australian foreign policy” — an instruction that John Gorton, the relevant minister, declined to issue publicly.

Tensions have inevitably resulted from the desire of the service’s funder, the federal government, to see its own policies and perceptions prioritised. Resisting such pressure has required greater stamina and skill at Radio Australia than at the ABC’s domestic services, which can count more readily on influential defenders.

Kafcaloudes says it was Mark Scott, who headed the ABC a dozen years ago, who linked Radio Australia with American academic/diplomat Joseph Nye’s idea of “soft power.” Then and now, this was a seductive phrase for politicians. It also became a familiar part of the case for restoring, consolidating or increasing funding, while underlining the familiar, nagging challenge for the station’s “content providers” of choosing between projecting that kind of power on Canberra’s behalf and dealing with stories that might well be perceived as “negative” for the Australian government.

Of course, the conventional public-interest answer to that dilemma is that fearless journalism is itself the ultimate expression of soft power by an open, democratic polity. But not everyone sees it that way.

Public broadcasting ethos
The public broadcasting ethos of the station’s internationally sourced staff has meanwhile stayed impressively intact. Kafcaloudes introduces one of them at the end of each chapter, letting them speak directly of how they came to arrive at Radio Australia and their experiences working there.

Running Radio Australia has been complicated for decades by its being bundled, unbundled and bundled again with television services that have sometimes been run by the ABC and sometimes by commercial stations. Technologies have of course become fluid in recent years, freeing content from former constraints. So too has the badging — the service is now “ABC Radio Australia,” which morphs online into “ABC Pacific.”

Radio Australia continues to broadcast in Mandarin, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Khmer, French, Burmese and Tok Pisin (the Melanesian pidgin language spoken widely in PNG and readily understood in Vanuatu and, slightly less so, in Solomon Islands), as well as in English.

Dedicated, high-quality journalism remains the core constant of an institution whose story, chronicled so well by Kafcaloudes, parallels in many ways Australia’s on-again, off-again, on-again engagement with our region.

Australia Calling: The ABC Radio Australia Story, By Phil Kafcaloudes, ABC Books, 224 pages. ISBN: 9780646852430. This review was first published by Inside Story and is republished on Asia Pacific Report with permission and in collaboration with Pacific Journalism Review.

Owen Wilkes, the intellect behind New Zealand’s anti-nuclear stance

APR editor — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 05:38:19 +0000

A new book about one of New Zealand’s foremost peace activists offers insight into Owen Wilkes, the man described as the intellect behind New Zealand’s anti-nuclear stance.

REVIEW: By Pat Baskett

In the days before mobile phones and emails, there were telephone trees. They grew and spread messages like leaves, thriving on the fertile ground of common beliefs and support for a particular cause.

It worked like this: one member of a group phoned 10 others who phoned another 10, each of whom phoned 10 more. On and on . . . The caller was never anonymous, relationships were established — or you simply said, “no thanks”.

The task of spreading information, before the internet, was time-consuming and labour intensive. Photocopiers, which became widely used only in the late 1970s, replaced an invaluable machine called a duplicator. You cranked the handle, one turn for each page, hoping the paper wouldn’t stick. How long did it take to do a thousand?

READ MORE: Other reports about Peacemonger Owen Wilkes

Next came the mail-out — folding, stuffing envelopes, sticking on stamps if funds allowed, or delivering them by hand into letterboxes.

The process was convivial, the days were busy but there was always time. There needed to be, because the issue was urgent.

The Cold War, that period of perilous mistrust between the communist Soviet Union and the “free” West, led by the United States, engulfed us in fear of a nuclear holocaust. Barely a generation separated us from the end of World War II when nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan.

The mutually assured destruction (MAD) these weapons promised was a fragile pseudo peace. In our neighbourhood peace groups, we understood the devastation a nuclear winter would bring and we worked out the radius of death and damage from a bomb dropped on our own cities.

An essential step

Yet more than nuclear weapons was, and still is, at stake. The movement was called the Peace Movement because banning nukes was considered the essential step in ensuring world peace.

The stockpile of nuclear weapons held by each side was more than enough to eradicate all, or most, life on earth — and it still is.

Those existential threats have a familiar ring, though the cause we face today adds another dimension. So far, the benefits of almost instant communication and dissemination of information haven’t enabled the world to devise for climate disruption what activists, uniquely in New Zealand, achieved — the 1986 nuclear weapons-free legislation.

Passed by the Labour government of David Lange, it prohibits not just weapons but nuclear-powered warships — including those of our former ANZUS allies, namely the United States.

There has never been any question of rescinding this act. It remains in safe obscurity — to such an extent that I wonder how many of our Gen X contemporaries are aware of its existence.

Yet more than nuclear weapons was, and still is, at stake. The movement was called the Peace Movement because banning nukes was considered the essential step in ensuring world peace.

In 1984, 61 percent of the population were living in 86 locally declared nuclear-weapons-free zones. Academic activists came together to form Scientists Against Nuclear Arms (SANA) and Engineers for Social Responsibility (ESR – this group now focuses on the climate disruption).

The medical fraternity formed a local branch of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW).

#PacificMediaWatch ‘Lots of information isn’t secret, it’s just hard to find’ – Nicky Hager on one of #NZ’s most famous #whistleblowers #AsiaPacificReport #Stuff #OwenWilkes #NickyHager #peaceresearch #investigations #militarism #opensource #newbooks https://t.co/7bvE7tR5Qo pic.twitter.com/eCGyH9BKjy

— David Robie (@DavidRobie) January 1, 2023

Extraordinary sleuthing talent
Much of the information which fuelled the work of all these groups was brought to light by the extraordinary sleuthing talent of one man. Owen Wilkes is described as ” . . . the intellect behind New Zealand’s anti-nuclear stance” in a recent book, Peacemonger: Owen Wilkes international peace researcher, published by Raekaihau Press in association with Steele Roberts Aotearoa.

The book consists of 12 essays by friends and collaborators, themselves experts in their individual fields and who leave their own legacies of contribution to the knowledge that led to the anti-nuclear legislation.

Peacemonger . . . the first full-length account of peace researcher Owen Wilkes’ life and work. Image: Raekaihau Press

They include physicist Dr Peter Wills who was instrumental in setting up SANA and Auckland University’s Centre for Peace Studies; investigative journalist and researcher Nicky Hager; and veteran peace and human rights activist Maire Leadbeater. Two contributions are by Wilkes’s colleagues at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo Norway, Dr Ingvar Botnen and Dr Nils Petter Gleditsch.

Wilkes spent six years from 1976 working in Oslo and also at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

The work is edited by Mark Derby and Wilkes’s partner May Bass. While a traditional biography with a single author may have avoided the repetition of information, the various personal anecdotes and responses result in the portrayal of an unconventional, highly talented individual.

In his introduction, Derby sums up Wilkes’s life: “Although invariably non-violent, politically non-aligned and generally law-abiding, Owen encountered official opposition, harassment and intimidation in various forms as he became internationally known for the quality and impact of his peace research.”

Wilkes was born in Christchurch in 1940 and died in Kawhia in 2005. In his early adult years he worked as an entomologist on various projects supported by the US military, including at McMurdo base in the Antarctic. These, he discovered, were connected with a US military germ warfare project.

Using official information laws
His gift was to see through, and behind, the information government made public about our relationship to our official allies, essentially the US. To do this he used our own official information laws and the American equivalent, plus any public reports to congress and US budget reports he could lay hands on.

Rubbish bags also feature in a couple of accounts.

What now may be stored as megabytes of information consists of boxes and folders of carefully catalogued material, the bulk of which is lodged at the Alexander Turnbull Library (with information also at the university libraries of Auckland and Canterbury).

The truth Wilkes was committed to appears, in retrospect, somehow simpler than that of the struggle towards a fossil-free future and a liveable planet for all. Peace is a part of this and the nukes are still there.

Wilkes documented how in many cases what was billed as civilian also had profound military implications. This was nowhere more clear than in the anti-bases campaign which Murray Horton chronicles — bases being sites in remote locations for monitoring or receiving satellite information, some of which new technology has rendered obsolete.

These include Mt St John near Lake Tekapo and Black Birch near Blenheim, and those still operating at Tangimoana in the Manawatu and at Waihopai, also near Blenheim.

Wilkes’s unconventional appearance and lifestyle — he famously wore shorts in sub-zero temperatures when skiing in Norway — made him a target for accusations of being a communist, a not uncommon slander of the peace movement.

Having sharp eyes
Maire Leadbeater, in her account of his long investigation by the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service, suggests his only “crime” was “to have sharp eyes and the ability to put two and two together”.

Yet there were more conventional sides to his interests. One was archaeology, beginning in his 1962 when he worked as a field archaeologist for the Canterbury Museum. This continued after he left the peace movement in the early 1990s and worked for the Waikato Department of Conservation in a variety of jobs including filing archaeological and historical records.

The truth Wilkes was committed to appears, in retrospect, somehow simpler than that of the struggle towards a fossil-free future and a liveable planet for all. Peace is a part of this and the nukes are still there.

Peacemonger – Owen Wilkes: International Peace Researcher, edited by May Bass and Mark Derby. Published by Raekaihau Press in association with Steele Roberts Aotearoa (2022). This article was first published by Newsroom is republished with the author’s and Newsroom’s permission. Asia Pacific Report editor David Robie is one of the contributing authors.

‘Lots of information isn’t secret, it’s just hard to find’ – Nicky Hager on one of NZ’s most famous whistleblowers

Pacific Media Watch — Sun, 01 Jan 2023 02:05:38 +0000

BOOK CHAPTER: By Nicky Hager

Whistleblower Owen Wilkes was a tireless and formidable researcher for the Pacific, peace and disarmament. Before the internet, he combed publicly available sources on weapons systems and defence strategy.

In 1968, he revealed the secretive military function of a proposed satellite tracking station in the South Island, and while working in Sweden he was charged with espionage and deported after photographing intriguing but publicly visible installations.

In a new book about his life, Peacemonger, edited by May Bass and Mark Derby, Nicky Hager writes about Wilkes’ research techniques:

Owen Wilkes was an outstanding researcher, a role model of how someone can make a difference in the world by good research. But how did he actually do it? Owen managed to study complex subjects such as Cold War communications systems, secret intelligence facilities and foreign military activities in the Pacific.

There are many important and useful lessons we can learn from how he did this work. The world needs more public interest researchers, on militarism and other subjects. Owen’s self-taught research techniques are like a masterclass in how it is done.

READ MORE: Other reports about Owen Wilkes and Peacemonger

Lots of information isn’t secret, just hard to find
Owen worked for many years, sitting at his large desk at the Peace Movement office in Wellington, researching the military communications systems set up to launch and fight nuclear war. How was this possible?

We are a bit conditioned currently to imagine the only option would be leaked documents from a whistleblower. The first secret of Owen’s success is that he had learned that large amounts of information on these subjects can be found and pieced together from obscure but publicly available sources.

The heart of his research method was long hours spent poring over US government records and military industry magazines, gathering the precious crumbs of detail like someone panning for gold.

Behind the large desk were shelves and shelves of open-topped file boxes, each with a cryptic title. These boxes were full of photocopied documents and handwritten notes from his researching. This may all sound very pre-internet; indeed it was largely pre-digital.

International peace researcher Owen Wilkes . . . an inspirational resource person for a nuclear-free Pacific and many other disarmament issues. Image: Peacemonger screenshot

But what Owen was doing would today be called “open source” research and his work is far superior to that carried out by many people with Google and other digital tools at their fingertips. Probably his favourite source of all was a publicly available US defence magazine called Aviation Week and Space Technology. The magazine (now online) is written for military staff and arms manufacturers, keeping them informed about developments in weapons, aircraft and “C3I” systems, which stands for Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence systems: one of Owen’s main areas of speciality.

The magazine also covered Owen’s speciality of “space based” military systems, such as military communication and surveillance satellites. In Owen’s files, which can be viewed at the National Library in Wellington, Aviation Week and Space Technology appears often. In a file box called USA Space Systems is a clipping from 1983 about the US Air Force awarding a contract for a ballistic missile early warning system (nuclear war-fighting equipment). The article revealed that the early warning system would be based at air force bases in Alaska, Greenland and Fylingdales, England — three clues about US foreign military activities.

By reading and storing away details from numerous such articles, spanning many years, Owen built up a more and more detailed understanding of military and intelligence systems.

The other endlessly useful source Owen used was US Congress and Senate hearings and reports about the US military budget. This is where each year the US military spells out its military construction plans, new weapons, technology programmes and the rest; often with figures broken down to the level of individual countries and military bases.

Senior military officials appear at hearings to explain the threats and strategies that justify the spending. As with the military magazines, Owen systematically mined these reports year after year for interesting detail.

He was especially keen on the US Congress’ Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on Military Construction Appropriations. His files on US antisatellite weapons, for instance, contain a document from this subcommittee about new Anti-Satellite System Facilities (project number 11610) based at Langley Air Force base, Virginia. It had been approved by the president in the renewed Cold War of the mid-1980s to target Soviet satellites. Details like this were pieces in a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle.

When he was based at the Peace Movement Aotearoa office in Wellington, from 1983 until about 1992, Owen spent long hours at the US Embassy library studying the Military Construction Appropriations and other US government documents. Each year the library received copies of the documents as microfiche (microphotos of each page on a film). Owen was a familiar visitor, hunched over the microfiche reader making notes and printing out interesting pages.

Many times this gave the first clue of construction somewhere in the world, pointing to that country hosting some new US military, nuclear or intelligence activity. The annual US military appropriation information is available to a researcher today. In fact it is now more easily accessed since it is online. But, if anything, Owen’s pre-digital techniques make it clearer how this research is done well. It’s a good reminder that the best sources of information are most often not in the first 10 or 20 hits of a Google search, the point where many people stop looking.

Experience and persistence
An important ingredient in all these methods is persistence. The methods usually work best if, like Owen, a researcher sticks at them over time. Sticking at a subject means you start to recognise names and places in an otherwise boring document, appreciate the significance of some fragment of information and understand the big picture into which each piece of information fits.

Someone who reads deeply and studies a subject over a number of years can in effect become, like Owen, an expert. They may, like him, have no formal university qualifications. But they can know more about their subject than nearly anyone else, which is a good definition of an expert. They recognise the names and places and appreciate the significance of new evidence.

A textbook example of this was when Owen returned to New Zealand in the early 1980s and went to see a recently discovered secret military site near the beach settlement of Tangimoana in the Manawatu.

Owen, who had spent years studying secret bases around the world, was the New Zealander most likely to know what he was looking at. There, on one side of the base, was a large circle of antenna poles: a CDAA circularly-disposed antenna array. It instantly told him the Tangimoana facility was a signals intelligence base. It had the same equipment and was part of the same networks as the bases he had studied in Norway and Sweden.

Ensuring his research was noticed
The purpose of Owen’s work was to make a difference to the issues he researched. A final and vital part of the work was getting attention for the findings of his research. Owen often spoke in the news and he wrote about the issues he was studying. Research, writing and speaking up are essential ingredients in political change. The part of this he probably enjoyed most was travelling and speaking in public to interested groups.

During the 1980s, he had major speaking tours to countries including Japan, the Philippines, Australia and Canada (and often around New Zealand). During these trips he would present information about military and intelligence activities in those countries. A 1985 trip to Canada, which he shared with prominent Palau leader Roman Bedor, was typical. He was in Canada for seven weeks, speaking in most parts of the country and numerous times on radio and television.

One of the things he emphasised was that Canadians, as residents of a Pacific country, should be thinking about what was going on in the Pacific. One of Owen’s recurrent themes was the importance of being aware of the Pacific.

The final ingredient of a good researcher is caring about the subjects they are working on. This can be heard clearly in everything Owen wrote about the Pacific. He described the Pacific being used for submarine-based nuclear weapons and facilities used to prepare for nuclear war. He talked about the big powers using the Pacific as the “backside of the globe”, epitomised by tiny Johnston Atoll west of Hawai’i where the US military does “anything too unpopular, too dangerous and too secret to do elsewhere”.

He talked about things that were getting better: French nuclear testing on the way out; chemical weapons being destroyed. But also the region being used as a site for great power rivalry; and, under multiple pressures, the small Pacific countries being at risk of becoming “more repressive, less democratic”. He cared, and that was at the heart of being a public-interest researcher for decades.

Many of the problems he described are still occurring today. More research, more good research, on these issues and many others is crying out to be done.

An extract from Peacemonger – Owen Wilkes: International Peace Researcher, edited by May Bass and Mark Derby. Published by Raekaihau Press in association with Steele Roberts Aotearoa. This article was first published by Stuff and is republished with the book authors’ permission. David Robie is one of the contributing authors.

Dame Valerie Adams sets record straight in a new documentary

Pacific Media Watch — Fri, 21 Oct 2022 18:57:00 +0000

REVIEW: By Susana Suisuiki, RNZ Pacific journalist

One of New Zealand’s most celebrated athletes is opening up her on life journey on the big screen.

Double Olympic shot put champion Dame Valerie Adams’ feature documentary, More Than Gold, is centred around the Tongan/Kiwi’s preparation for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

However, the film touches on Adams struggles with balancing her role as a mum as well as memories involving hardship, loss and relationships.

From penning an autobiography, to championing many causes, Adams said that the timing felt right to do a documentary, especially with how her sporting career had been in the media for years.

“It’s a way to tell your whole story,” she said.

“What the media tells or how they write your story is from their perspective or what you’ve told them but it’s not exactly what truly goes on behind closed doors or what’s happening in one’s life.”

“My documentary really brings people into that journey and takes people throughout that journey from the very start.”

Being a role model
Dame Valerie’s impressive sporting resume includes competing at five Olympic Games earning two golds, one silver and one bronze medal in the shot put.

She has won 17 New Zealand shot put titles and was awarded the Halberg Sportswoman of the Year for seven consecutive years from 2006.

The video trailer of the documentary. Video: Transmission Films

Of Tongan and English heritage, Dame Valerie was born in Rotorua but spent some of her childhood in her mother’s home country Tonga. Eventually, Adams and her family returned to New Zealand where she remained in South Auckland for the rest of her adolescent years.

When asked if she ever felt pressured to be a role model once she started succeeding as an athlete, she said it’s an automatic responsibility.

“Where I come from, my upbringing — all the stigma behind South Auckland — I think it was just a natural progression into that role, and I do take some type of responsibility to make sure I do set a good example and that I am a role model to the young women and also young men that have the same upbringing as I do.”

“At the end of the day it’s up to them to grasp whatever talent or passion they have and be prepared to work for it because the world is bigger than South Auckland — but you never forget where you come from.”

Two-time Olympic shot put champion Dame Valerie Adams announced her retirement on 1 March, 2022. Image: Marika Khabazi/RNZ

Be comfortable with the uncomfortable
It was important to Adams to be authentic in her film as she wanted audiences to understand the sacrifices she undertook to pursue her sporting dreams.

She said the film will resonate with all people whether they are athletes as there are many relatable themes, especially towards the youth.

“There’s a lot of challenges that people face in life and there’s a lot of challenges that youth face in life as well,” Adams said.

“Society is hard, society is mean sometimes and quite difficult, but I want them to know that they are loved but also to inspire them to set some goals and look for something bigger and better.”

“I really just want to share my life so that people can see the nitty-gritty parts of it, the raw parts of it, the trauma but also seeing you work through all of that.”

“Someone gave me some really good advice a few years ago and it was ‘you gotta be comfortable with being uncomfortable’ — and in life you’re going to be put in uncomfortable situations so you’ve gotta train your mind to say you’re cool being here even though you’re not, and work through those awkward situations because it’s going to you make you a more confident and stronger person.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

A publisher writes on ‘the terror’ of publishing Nicky Hager

Pacific Media Watch — Thu, 22 Sep 2022 01:42:17 +0000

BOOK EXTRACT: By Robbie Burton

In the mid-1990s I started working with New Zealand investigative writer Nicky Hager. I have had the most singular of all my authorial relationships with Nicky, the result of the potent, usually red-hot subject matter that is his stock-in-trade.

I knew Nicky from our early days in forest conservation — he had been a fellow campaigner — but he also had a long interest in security issues. In 1996 he came to us with a nearly completed book that, for the first time, revealed the existence of the highly secret ECHELON surveillance programme run between the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, now commonly known as the Five Eyes intelligence alliance.

This alliance effectively means that New Zealand does the bidding of its more powerful allies. It raises myriad moral and sovereignty issues about who we are spying on, and why.

READ MORE: Other Nicky Hager reports

Bushline: A memoir, by Robbie Burton. Image: P&B

We published what became Secret Power, with a great deal of trepidation — a prominent QC and expert on media law had expressly warned us off the project, making chillingly clear the potential for jail time if we published state secrets, which we obviously intended to do.

But in an early demonstration of Nicky’s strategic nous, no one came knocking. In this, and in all future publishing decisions with him, it became a careful weighing up of whether the subject of the book — in this case the government and its intelligence agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau — would want the scrutiny and public exposure of a court case, even if they were likely to win it.

The other issue that applied to Secret Power and, again, with all Nicky’s subsequent books, was both ethical and practical — is the exposure of secret or private information justified? It is, only if it is clearly in the public interest, which is also the primary legal defence should that be necessary.

In the process of publishing Secret Power we developed our own organic publishing model, used a number of times over the next 20 years to get Nicky’s risky books successfully into readers’ hands and to minimise the danger of being stifled by a High Court injunction, the most likely tool the subject of a book would use to prevent publication. This involved producing the books at breakneck speed to reduce the chance of being discovered.

Printed in absolute secrecy
After the book had been written, Nicky would work intensively alongside an editor over a week or two; I would lay out and proofread the book in two or three days, and then print in absolute secrecy.

When printed, we would drop them via overnight courier into bookshops nationwide without any prior warning, explaining to booksellers why we were doing this and offering to take back at our expense any they didn’t want. It meant that the book was already available to readers just as Nicky started to create a media firestorm thereby significantly reducing the window for legal action to be successfully launched: by the time an injunction could be drawn up and submitted to the court, widespread availability meant it would be pointless and therefore unlikely to be granted.

Secret Power proved to be an internationally significant book — it led to an enquiry in the European Parliament at which Nicky testified, and could be regarded as the forerunner to Edward Snowden’s revelations about the workings of the US National Security Agency in 2013 and the subsequent global debates about mass surveillance and information privacy.

Three years later Nicky came to me again with Secrets and Lies: The Anatomy of an Anti-environmental PR Campaign, which he co-authored with the Australian environmentalist Bob Burton. Based on a leak from a concerned whistleblower, the book exposed how the government-owned Timberlands was secretly using taxpayer money to run an undercover public relations campaign to justify its logging of native forest on the West Coast.

This greenwashing broke a fundamental public service rule — government departments and state-owned enterprises cannot secretly run campaigns to help further their own agendas — and the story blew up exactly as the authors and I hoped.

By complete coincidence, we happened to publish on the same day as the launch of the National Party’s 1999 election campaign. It completely destroyed their media splash, and they were furious — I know this because [co-publisher] Craig Potton happened to meet a National Cabinet minister, with close ties to our area, in Wellington airport the next morning. He lost it, and had to be physically restrained by his aides after he shoved Craig in the chest.

Then, when Helen Clark and her Labour government came to power later in the year, the logging of native forest on the West Coast was stopped. Timberlands had badly overreached.

Things didn’t go well
Nicky’s next book, Seeds of Distrust, published in 2002, which detailed how the then Labour government had covered up the illegal planting of GE corn in New Zealand after intense lobbying from big business; the controversy known as Corngate. Seeds of Distrust was essentially about accountability and transparent government, but while the book was accurate, things did not go well for us.

TV3’s John Campbell ambushed Prime Minister Helen Clark about the issue in a television interview, and she responded by calling Campbell a “sanctimonious little creep”. It was a lesson in the perils of crossing a furious Clark, and her government managed very effectively to cloud the issue with technical arguments.

The book was a distressing and sobering experience as we lost the PR battle, with the media uncertain about the veracity of Nicky’s work.

I went on to publish a number of other important books with Nicky, all of them focused on speaking truth to power. The Hollow Men, in 2006, was an inside look at then leader of the opposition, Don Brash, and the questionable tactics he and others in the National Party employed as they sought to gain power. Brash had heard rumours that someone was leaking his personal emails, so he successfully sought an over-arching injunction preventing publication of this material.

He had no idea, however, that only a few kilometres away in Kaiwharawhara, we were just finishing printing 5000 copies of The Hollow Men, based in large part on these leaked emails.

The injunction was a disaster for us, as it meant that we could not sell the books and would potentially have to pulp them, so with nothing to lose we decided to try to pressure Brash to lift the injunction. Nicky called a press conference, and he and I fronted the Wellington media.

With a small pile of printed copies of The Hollow Men on display, we explained that people were not able to read this book even if it was in the public interest that they should. The tactic worked spectacularly — the frenzied response by the media, and the pressure bought to bear on Brash, forced him not only to resign as leader of the National Party but also to lift the injunction.

We were then able to release the book, an instant bestseller, which revealed, among many other things, that Brash had misled the public about his relationship with the Exclusive Brethren, who had secretly given the National Party a substantial donation.

Exposing john Key’s ‘dark tactics’
Nicky’s next book, the equally explosive Dirty Politics, was published in the middle of the election campaign in 2014, and exposed the dark tactics of John Key’s National government. An anonymous hacker, Rawshark, had been so enraged by the behaviour of Cameron Slater, the right-wing blogger behind the Whale Oil blog, that he managed to hack into his Facebook account and extract a large tranche of Slater’s communications.

After a long process of winning Rawshark’s trust, Nicky was given this information, and it became the foundation of the book. Dirty Politics laid out in startling detail how unscrupulous Key and his operators were in feeding Slater with inside information and using him to attack their political enemies. It remains a shameful stain on the Key government.

It also led to another grubby incident when, in the wake of the book’s publication, the police, perhaps in an attempt to please their political masters, raided Nicky’s house and illegally obtained his personal financial records, all in a fruitless attempt to discover Rawshark’s identity. Nicky took action in the High Court, winning an apology and substantial damages from the police.

We have published two others of Nicky’s books on security issues: Other People’s Wars in 2011, a large, supremely well researched book on New Zealand’s unseen role in the so-called war on terror; and, with Jon Stephenson, Hit & Run in 2017, detailing a Defence Force cover-up of a New Zealand SAS operation that killed civilians in Afghanistan.

For me, this strand of publishing has frequently been terrifying, given the potential for legal action lurking behind every book that could destroy the company. It has always been ameliorated, however, by the privilege of being able to publish Nicky’s remarkable books. Having the freedom to take them on feels like the ultimate gift of being an independent publisher.

It says everything about Nicky’s extraordinary dedication and research skills, quite apart from his courage, that despite the endless vitriol from his detractors, we have never ended up in court over one of his books — the passage of time has always revealed the accuracy of his work. Consequently, my trust in him is absolute.

His most powerful weapon, and one that lies behind everything he does, is his integrity. His sole motivation is to make the world a better place, and money and power simply do not matter to him. In my view he is a national treasure.

An extract reprinted with permission from the newly published Bushline: A Memoir, by Robbie Burton (Potton & Burton, $39.99).

Martial law brutality in ‘educational’ musical drama Katips touches raw nerve in NZ

David Robie — Sun, 18 Sep 2022 11:21:02 +0000

REVIEW: By David Robie

Seven weeks ago the Philippines truth-telling martial law film Katips was basking in the limelight in the country’s national FAMAS academy movie awards, winning best picture and a total of six other awards.

Last week it began a four month “world tour” of 10 countries starting in the Middle East followed by Aotearoa New Zealand today – hosted simultaneously at AUT South campus and in Wellington and Christchurch.

The screening of Vincent Tañada’s harrowing – especially the graphic torture scenes – yet also joyful and poignant musical drama touched a raw nerve among many in the audience who shared tears and their experiences of living in fear, or in hiding, during the hate-filled Marcos dictatorship.

READ MORE: Two films duel for last word on brutal Marcos dictatorship in Philippines

The martial law denunciations, arbitrary arrests, desaparecidos (“disappeared”), brutal tortures and murders by state assassins in the 1970s made the McCarthy era red-baiting witchhunts in the US seem like Sunday School picnics.

Amnesty International says more than 3200 people were killed, 35,000 tortured and 70,000 detained during the martial law period.

Tañada has brushed off claims that the film has a political objective in an attempt to sabotage the leadership of the dictator’s son, Ferdinand Bongbong Marcos Jr, who won the presidency in a landslide victory in the May elections to return the Marcos family to the Malacañang.

He has insisted in many interviews — and he repeated this in a live exchange with the audiences in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch — that the film is educational and his intention is to counter disinformation and to ensure history is remembered.

Telling youth about atrocities
Tañada, from one of the Philippines’ great political and legal families and grandson of former Senator Lorenzo Tañada, a celebrated human rights lawyer, says he wanted to tell the youth about the atrocities that happened during the imposition of martial law under Marcos.

He wanted to tell history to those who had forgotten and those who aren’t yet aware.

The Katips movie trailer.

“You know, as an artist it is also our objective not just to entertain people but more important than that, we are here to educate,” he says.

“We also want to educate the young people about the atrocities – the reality of martial law.

“History is slowly being forgotten. We have forgotten it during the last elections and I guess we also have the responsibility to educate and let the youth know what happened during those times.”

Katips film director and writer Vince Tañada talking by video to New Zealand audiences in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch today. Image: David Robie/APR

It is rare that such brutal torture scenes are seen on the big screen, and before the main screening at AUT the organisers — Banyuhay Aotearoa, Migrante Aotearoa and Auckland Philippine Solidarity — showed two shorts made by the University of the Philippines and Santo Tomas University of Manila featuring martial law survivors describing their horrifying treatment during the Marcos years to contemporary students.

Some of the students broke down in tears while others, surprisingly, remained impassive, sometimes with an air of disbelief.

The film evolved from the 2016 stage musical Katips: Mga Bagong Katipunero – Katips: The New Freedom Fighters, which won Aliw Awards for best musical performance that year.

Freedom fighter love story
In a nutshell, Katips tells the love story of Greg, a medical student and leader of the National Unions of Students in the Philippines (NUSP), who with other freedom fighting protesters stage a demonstration against martial law on a mountainside called Mendiola.

His professor is abducted by the state Metropol police, murdered and his body dumped in a remote location.

The protesters begin a vigil and the police brutally suppress the protest and arrest and kidnap other freedom fighters. They are subjected to atrocious torture and their bodies dumped.

A safehouse branded “Katips House” takes in Lara, a New York actress and the daughter of the murdered professor who is visiting Manila but doesn’t yet know about the fate of her father. Lara and Greg form an unlikely relationship and their lives are thrown into upheaval when the safehouse “mother” Alet is abducted and tortured to death.

Greg and another protester, Ka Panyong, a writer for the underground newspaper Ang Bayan, are forced to flee into the jungle for the safety and become rebels. Both get shot while on the run, but manage to survive.

When Greg returns to Lara at the “Katips House” during the Edsa Revolution in 1986, he finds he has a son.

The film has a stirring end featuring the Bantayog ng mga Bayani, a memorial wall to the fallen heroes struggling against martial law– a fitting antidote to the Marcoses and their crass attempts to rewrite Philippine history.

Ironically, the same month that Katips was released in public cinemas, another film, the self-serving Maid of Malaçanang, was launched in a bid to perpetuate the Marcos myths.

Katips – The Movie, director Vincent Tañada (2022)

A member of the audience poses a question to Katips film director Vince Tañada on AUT South campus today. Image: David Robie/APR

Late Queen Elizabeth’s 1953 Pacific royal tour teaches us much about how we saw the world

APR editor — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 21:08:56 +0000

REVIEW: By Philip Cass, editor of Pacific Journalism Review

One of the joys of travelling the world and collecting books is the historical oddities that turn up in the most unexpected places.

I have a splendid copy of the complete works of Shakespeare dating to the Second World War, completely re-set, so the frontispiece notes, due to the original plates having been “destroyed by enemy action”. One wonders at the perfidy of the Luftwaffe in trying to blow up the Bard.

I have a copy of Grove’s encyclopaedia of music from the 1930s which notes with disdain that attempts to make jazz respectable by using an orchestra have failed—and this written several years after Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. The same volume also contains a section on the influence of Jews in classical music, noting such important ‘Hebrew’ composers as Mahler.

Both these volumes came from a secondhand bookseller near the bus station in Suva: relics, I suppose, of a long departed British colonial administrator.

Each of these volumes is a window into the past and into attitudes and ideas that have long vanished.

In the year of the Platinum Jubilee of the late Queen Elizabeth II—who died yesterday aged 96 after a 70-year reign—it was therefore timely to find a copy of the Royal Tour Picture Album, a lavishly illustrated record of her 1953 tour of the Commonwealth in my local Salvation Army shop.

The 1953 tour seems to have been a strange affair, a tour of places rarely visited by royalty alongside some more important, but equally far-flung outposts of the Commonwealth. It was rather like Iron Maiden playing in Christchurch or Caracas.

Pacific and other places
The Queen and Prince Philip visited Bermuda, Jamaica, Panama, Fiji, Tonga, New Zealand, Australia, what was then Ceylon, Aden, Uganda, Tobruk (Libya), Malta and Gibraltar.

The African segment seems to have been beset by security issues and Britain would eventually be expelled from Aden and Libya, where the Queen paid tribute to the defence of Tobruk during the Second World War.

The Sunday Graphic’s 1953 Royal Tour Picture Album … the cover. Image: PJR

What is intriguing is the concentration on the small island states in the Caribbean and the Pacific, places which did not, at the time, seem to have afforded much material benefit to the UK (although the Fijian soldiers who served in the British army and the Windrush migrants might argue otherwise), but which could be relied upon to provide a loyal, colourful and exotic welcome.

It is the Pacific that takes up most of the pages here. There are some splendid colour plates (one suspects some of them are actually hand tinted) showing, among other things, Her Majesty and the Secretary for Fijian Affairs, Ratu Lala Sukuna, in Albert Park in Suva, surrounded by Fijians with their gifts for the visitors—50 newly killed pigs, 50 cooked pigs, 10 tons of bananas and 50 metres of tapa cloth.

It is the depictions of the local people that intrigue after so many decades. Some of the Indigenous peoples, like the Tongans, are well defined (at least in the somewhat patronising terms of the day), others are projected as members of a happy, multi-racial Commonwealth (the various inhabitants of Fiji) and others, like the First Nations peoples of Australia are very awkwardly presented, with little or no information or explanation about who they are or why they are there. Given the things we know now, some of the images raise disturbing questions to which we may never know the answers.

The late Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh share a banquet with their Tongan hosts. The visitors were waited on by members of the Tongan nobility. Image: PJR

It is unclear whether the author, Elizabeth Morton, accompanied the tour or simply worked from a pile of press releases and newspaper clippings. The book was co-produced with the Sunday Graphic, which closed in 1960, so she may have worked for that masthead.

Whatever the case, she was clearly eager to present Fiji as a multi-racial success story. While we are told that the royal vessel, the SS Gothic, was greeted by canoes manned by ‘fuzzy haired warriors’ we are also told that ‘Fijians, Indians, Chinese and Europeans’ all cheered the Queen.

Lautoka’s ‘tremendous welcome’
Later they visited Lautoka where they received ‘a tremendous welcome from the Indian sugar-cane workers’. Alas, it would only take a few more decades for that multicultural vision to be shattered by the first of the coups that have bedevilled Fiji

From Fiji, Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh flew to Nuku’alofa in a TEAL Solent Mk IV flying boat, the Aranui, which is now in the MOTAT aviation collection in Auckland.
Despite only visiting for two days, the royal visitors were given a hearty welcome.

She and the Duke were greeted by Queen Salote, who had entranced the British when she visited London for Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. When the Tongan monarch rode in an open carriage oblivious of the rain, her fortitude drew the admiration of the crowd and prompted both Noel Coward and Flanders and Swan to make jokes that are probably unrepeatable today.

Despite preserving its independence, Tonga had strong ties with the United Kingdom. During the Second World War, when the then Princess Elizabeth was driving an ambulance, Queen Salote raised enough money to buy three Spitfires for the RAF.

After being greeted at the wharf by Queen Salote, the Queen and the Duke drove through the rain into the capital where people from all over the kingdom, including its remotest islands, gathered to greet her.

Ex-servicemen marched through the streets and at the mala’e the British visitors were waited on by members of the Nobility as they and 2000 guests tucked into a banquet of pork, chicken crayfish, lobsters, yams and pineapples.

A sipi tau (the Tongan equivalent of the haka) was given in honour of the visitors.
That night they slept at the royal palace and were wakened in the morning by a serenade of nose flutes.

Overflowing church
After breakfast they attended service in the Wesleyan church that was full to overflowing.

In her speech, Queen Elizabeth said: ‘Never was a more appropriate name bestowed on any lands than that which Captain Cook gave to these beautiful islands when he called them The Friendly Islands.’

The photographs accompanying the report are of the kind we have become used to: The Queen and her party enjoying local hospitality, receiving gifts and inspecting local curiosities, including Tui Malila, the tortoise said to have been presented by Captain Cook in 1777. The tortoise died in 1966.

And how were the Tongans presented? It is worth reading, 70 years later, Morton’s description:

The Tongans are a simple, happy, devout people. They share their fervent loyalty between their own Queen and the Sovereign Head of the Empire and Commonwealth which since 1900 has protected their 1000 year old independence. Their land is rich and fertile, their seas teem with fish; for longer than they can remember there has never been poverty or unemployment in their paradise. Queen Elizabeth II came to them as their friend from afar whose navies guard their shores and whose peoples buy all the bananas, copra and coconuts they produce.

They welcomed the Queen and her husband with sincere and abandoned joy and gave them a feast that was fabulous in its lavishness. But before this began there was a simple little ceremony on the quay at Nuku’alofa shortly after the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh landed. Five-year-old Mele Siuilikutape, granddaughter of Queen Salote, came shyly forward and, with all the dignity and grace of her ancient race, presented the friend of Tonga with a basket of wild flowers.

This passage lays out a vision that was very familiar, an Island paradise presided over by a wise local ruler loyal to Britain and a people forever grateful for the protection of the Royal Navy. Was it only slightly more than 50 years since Kipling had prophesied: ‘Far-called, our navies melt away?’ In another 30 years Britain would barely be able to scrape together enough ships to rescue the Falklands from the Argentine invaders.

Her Majesty Queen Salote welcomes the late Queen Elizabeth II to the Kingdom of Tonga at the start of the British monarch’s 1953-54 visit. Image: PJR

Queen Elizabeth visited Tonga again in 1970 and 1977.

‘Cherished memories’
When Prince Harry visited Tonga in 2018 he read a message from his grandmother: ‘To this day I remember with fondness Queen Salote’s attendance at my own Coronation, while Prince Philip and I have cherished memories from our three wonderful visits to your country.’

From Tonga, the Queen travelled on to New Zealand, where, according to Morton, ‘the Maoris, once the most warlike and adventurous of the Polynesian races, now live in peace and understanding with the people of British stock’.

Later, she writes: ‘The Maoris gave their first vociferous welcome at Waitangi, an historic spot on the placid waters of the Bay of Islands. Here in 1840 the Maori chiefs met Captain William Hobson—who became the first Governor of New Zealand-and signed a treaty acknowledging Queen Victoria as their sovereign.’ It is possibly not too much to suggest that some modern readers might bridle at this interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi.

From New Zealand, the Queen travelled on to Australia. Here too we have a picture of a predominantly white nation, but unlike New Zealand the Indigenous people remain in the background; if not unacknowledged then certainly unexplained. Clumsy as the writing about Māori might seem to us today, it is a reflection of the Pākehā view of the day and Māori representatives are present and clearly indicated in several photographs.

In Australia, the identified Indigenous face practically disappears. Here is a colour photograph of ‘fearsome looking Torres Straits Islanders armed with bows and arrows and wearing elaborate feather head dresses’ providing a guard of honour in Cairns.

Here is a group of Aborigines from the Northern Territory who had been shipped to Toowoomba in Queensland where they ‘performed native dances’. Here are two Aboriginal girls in ‘immaculate white dresses’ curtseying to the Queen, but they have their backs to the camera. They have no identity. In the background an Aboriginal dancer looks on.
Here, though, is six-year-old Beverley Joy Noble, from the Kurrawong Native Mission in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, presenting a bouquet. One wonders whether she was one of the Stolen Generation.

There are other, unexplained photographs. There is a picture of the royal party in Busselton in Western Australia where they were greeted by a Boy Scout troop—most of whom seem to be Indigenous Peoples, but nothing is said about who they are or how a multi-racial troop evolved.

Unexplained picture
And last but not least, there is an entirely unexplained picture of the late Queen reviewing ‘soldiers and sailors from Australia’s Island Territories’. These vaguely determined people are clearly members of the Pacific Islands Regiment (the PIR) from what was then the Territory of Papua and New Guinea.

The Royal Tour Picture Album is a glimpse into a world that simply never existed for much of today’s population. However, this does not make the book simply a curiosity. Indeed, for the curious, the book is a joy because of what it contains. It preserves images and ideas and views that need to examined, not just for their historical value, or as a mark of how far attitudes have changed, but as a warning that in 70 years our descendants will look upon our own world—and us—and wonder with equal puzzlement at why or how we behaved and thought as we do.

Dr Philip Cass is editor of Pacific Journalism Review. This review is republished from PJR in a partnership and was written and published before the death of Queen Elizabeth II on 8 September 2022 aged 96 after a remarkable reign of 70 years.

Royal Tour Picture Album, by Elizabeth Morton. London, UK: Sunday Graphic/Pitkin Pictorials Ltd, 1953. 104 pages.
To read the full article and see the photo gallery go to: https://doi.org/10.24135/pjr.v28i1and2.1262

A new book argues Julian Assange is being tortured. Will Australia’s new PM do anything about it?

APR editor — Mon, 06 Jun 2022 23:54:35 +0000

REVIEW: By Matthew Ricketson, Deakin University

It is easy to forget why Julian Assange has been on trial in England for, well, seemingly forever.

Didn’t he allegedly sexually assault two women in Sweden? Isn’t that why he holed up for years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid facing charges?

When the bobbies finally dragged him out of the embassy, didn’t his dishevelled appearance confirm all those stories about his lousy personal hygiene?

Didn’t he persuade Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning to hack into the United States military’s computers to reveal national security matters that endangered the lives of American soldiers and intelligence agents? He says he is a journalist, but hasn’t The New York Times made it clear he is just a “source” and not a publisher entitled to first amendment protection?

If you answered yes to any or all of these questions, you are not alone. But the answers are actually no. At very least, it’s more complicated than that.

To take one example, the reason Assange was dishevelled was that staff in the Ecuadorian embassy had confiscated his shaving gear three months before to ensure his appearance matched his stereotype when the arrest took place.

Julian Assange arrives at Westminster Magistrates Court in London, Britain, on April 11, 2019. His shaving gear had been confiscated. Image: The Conversation/EPA/Stringer

That is one of the findings of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, whose investigation of the case against Assange has been laid out in forensic detail in The Trial of Julian Assange.

What is the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture doing investigating the Assange case, you might ask? So did Melzer when Assange’s lawyers first approached him in 2018:

I had more important things to do: I had to take care of “real” torture victims!

Melzer returned to a report he was writing about overcoming prejudice and self-deception when dealing with official corruption. “Not until a few months later,” he writes, “would I realise the striking irony of this situation.”

Cover of The Trial of Julian Assange … “the continuation of diplomacy by other means”. Image: Verso

The 47 members of the UN Human Rights Council directly appoint
special rapporteurs on torture. The position is unpaid — Melzer earns his living as a professor of international law — but they have diplomatic immunity and operate largely outside the UN’s hierarchies.

Among the many pleas for his attention, Melzer’s small office chooses between 100 and 200 each year to officially investigate. His conclusions and recommendations are not binding on states. He bleakly notes that in barely 10 percent of cases does he receive full co-operation from states and an adequate resolution.

He received nothing like full co-operation in investigating Assange’s case. He gathered around 10,000 pages of procedural files, but a lot of them came from leaks to journalists or from freedom-of-information requests.

Many pages had been redacted. Rephrasing Carl Von Clausewitz’s maxim, Melzer wrote his book as “the continuation of diplomacy by other means”.

What he finds is stark and disturbing:

The Assange case is the story of a man who is being persecuted and abused for exposing the dirty secrets of the powerful, including war crimes, torture and corruption. It is a story of deliberate judicial arbitrariness in Western democracies that are otherwise keen to present themselves as exemplary in the area of human rights.

It is the story of wilful collusion by intelligence services behind the back of national parliaments and the general public. It is a story of manipulated and manipulative reporting in the mainstream media for the purpose of deliberately isolating, demonizing, and destroying a particular individual. It is the story of a man who has been scapegoated by all of us for our own societal failures to address government corruption and state-sanctioned crimes.

Collateral murder
The dirty secrets of the powerful are difficult to face, which is why we — and I don’t exclude myself — swallow neatly packaged slurs and diversions of the kind listed at the beginning of this article.

Melzer rightly takes us back to April 2010, four years after the Australian-born Assange had founded WikiLeaks, a small organisation set up to publish official documents that it had received, encrypted so as to protect whistle-blowers from official retribution.

Assange released video footage showing in horrifying detail how US soldiers in a helicopter had shot and killed Iraqi civilians and two Reuters journalists in 2007.

Apart from how the soldiers spoke — “Hahaha, I hit them”, “Nice”, “Good shot” — it looks like most of the victims were civilians and that the journalists’ cameras were mistaken for rifles. When one of the wounded men tried to crawl to safety, the helicopter crew, instead of allowing their comrades on the ground to take him prisoner, as required by the rules of war, seek permission to shoot him again.

As Melzer’s detailed description makes clear, the soldiers knew what they were doing:

“Come on, buddy,” the gunner comments, aiming the crosshairs at his helpless target. “All you gotta do is pick up a weapon.”

The soldiers’ request for authorisation to shoot is given. When the wounded man is carried to a nearby minibus, it is shot to pieces with the helicopter’s 30mm gun. The driver and two other rescuers are killed instantly. The driver’s two young children inside are seriously wounded.

US army command investigated the matter, concluding that the soldiers acted in accordance with the rules of war, even though they had not. Equally to the point, writes Melzer, the public would never have known a war crime had been committed without the release of what Assange called the “Collateral Murder” video.

The video footage was just one of hundreds of thousands of documents that WikiLeaks released last year in tranches known as the Afghan war logs, the Iraq war logs, and cablegate. They revealed numerous alleged war crimes and provided the raw material for a shadow history of the disastrous wars waged by the US and its allies, including Australia, in Aghanistan and Iraq.

Julian Assange in 2010. Image: The Conversation/ Stefan Wermuth/AP

Punished forever
Melzer retraces what has happened to Assange since then, from the accusations of sexual assault in Sweden to Assange taking refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in an attempt to avoid the possibility of extradition to the US if he returned to Sweden. His refuge led to him being jailed in the United Kingdom for breaching his bail conditions.

Sweden eventually dropped the sexual assault charges, but the US government ramped up its request to extradite Assange. He faces charges under the 1917 Espionage Act, which, if successful, could lead to a jail term of 175 years.

Two key points become increasingly clear as Melzer methodically works through the events.

The first is that there has been a carefully orchestrated plan by four countries — the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden and, yes, Australia — to ensure Assange is punished forever for revealing state secrets.

Assange displaying his ankle security tag in 2011 at the house where he was required to stay by a British judge. Image: The Conversation/Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP

The second is that the conditions he has been subjected to, and will continue to be subjected to if the US’s extradition request is granted, have amounted to torture.

On the first point, how else are we to interpret the continual twists and turns over nearly a decade in the official positions taken by Sweden and the UK? Contrary to the obfuscating language of official communiques, all of these have closed down Assange’s options and denied him due process.

Melzer documents the thinness of the Swedish authorities’ case for charging Assange with sexual assault. That did not prevent them from keeping it open for many years. Nor was Assange as uncooperative with police as has been suggested. Swedish police kept changing their minds about where and whether to formally interview Assange because they knew the evidence was weak.

Melzer also takes pains to show how Swedish police also overrode the interests of the two women who had made the complaints against Assange.

It is distressing to read the conditions Assange has endured over several years. A change in the political leadership of Ecuador led to a change in his living conditions in the embassy, from cramped but bearable to virtual imprisonment.

Since being taken from the embassy to Belmarsh prison in 2019, Assange has spent much of his time in solitary confinement for 22 or 23 hours a day. He has been denied all but the most limited access to his legal team, let alone family and friends.

He was kept in a glass cage during his seemingly interminable extradition hearing, appeals over which could continue for several years more years, according to Melzer.

Julian Assange’s partner, Stella Morris, speaks to the media outside the High Court in London in January this year. Image: The Converstion/Alberto Pezzali/AP

Assange’s physical and mental health have suffered to the point where he has been put on suicide watch. Again, that seems to be the point, as Melzer writes:

The primary purpose of persecuting Assange is not – and never has been – to punish him personally, but to establish a generic precedent with a global deterrent effect on other journalist, publicists and activists.

So will the new Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, do any more than his three Coalition and two Labor predecessors to advocate for the interests of an Australian citizen? In December 2021, Guardian Australia reported Albanese saying he did “not see what purpose is served by the ongoing pursuit of Mr Assange” and that “enough is enough”.

Since being sworn in as prime minister, he has kept his cards close to his chest.

The actions of his predecessors suggest he won’t, even though Albanese has already said on several occasions since being elected that he wants to do politics differently.

Melzer, among others, would remind him of the words of former US president Jimmy Carter, who, contrary to other presidents, said he did not deplore the WikiLeaks revelations.

They just made public what was the truth. Most often, the revelation of truth, even if it’s unpleasant, is beneficial. […] I think that, almost invariably, the secrecy is designed to conceal improper activities.

Dr Matthew Ricketson is professor of communication, Deakin University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

The Trial of Julian Assange: A Story of Persecution, by Nils Melzer (Verso). ISBN 9781839766220
The first in a two-part series, Ithaka: A Fight to Free Julian Assange, airs on ABC TV tonight at 8.30pm (AET).

Is the #MeToo era a reckoning, a revolution, or something else?

APR editor — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 19:13:05 +0000

REVIEW: By Zora Simic, UNSW Sydney

“The world”, declares Laurie Penny on the first page of their new book, “is in the middle of a sexual revolution.” And unlike earlier sexual revolutions, this one is for real — provided we eradicate capitalism, fascism and the patriarchy.

With this call, it’s business as usual for British writer and activist Penny, who has never sugar-coated their feminist and radical politics.

Penny — who is genderqueer and uses they/them pronouns — first came to public attention in the 2000s with the blog Penny Red and regular columns in left-leaning outlets like The Guardian and New Statesman.

International Women’s Day

A steady stream of books followed, with arresting titles like Unspeakable Things (2014) and Bitch Doctrine (2017), in which Penny dared to call out the sexism of the radical-left circles in which they moved.

Anticipating the first-person feminism of Australia’s Clementine Ford, among others — and updating the 1970s mantra “the personal is political” for a new generation — Penny has often shared difficult and intimate personal experiences, from anorexia to masturbation to sexual assault. And while they have been what would now be described as “extremely online”, they have also gone in person to where the action is, whether taking part in the Occupy movement or travelling to Greece to observe the financial crisis up close.

Given all that Penny has been writing and protesting about for well over a decade, it was inevitable that they would write what could broadly be described as a #MeToo book — indeed, most of their six previous books have been #MeToo books of a kind.

Penny deserves recognition for writing about sex and power in unapologetically feminist terms when mainstream feminism was widely considered to be in the doldrums, passé, and/or no longer necessary.

Still, it’s no longer 2007 — which, as well as being the year Penny started blogging, was also the year that African American activist and survivor Tarana Burke launched the #MeToo movement, her hashtag raising awareness of the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and assault.

Sexual Revolution, by Laurie Penny

Since 2017, when #MeToo went viral and then global, countless words have been written about it by feminists, including Burke, whose memoir Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement (2021) is essential reading. Penny is entering a crowded field, inviting the question of what is new and distinctive about the grandiosely titled Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback.

At their best, Penny offers a rousing and enticing prediction for what sits on the other side of the #MeToo era. For Penny, the present moment is one in which “sex and gender are in crisis”. #MeToo is part of a “Great Reckoning” that almost nobody saw coming, because “when it came, it came from women”.

Tanara Burke launched the #MeToo movement in 2007. Image: The Conversation/Mick Tsikas/AAP

We are now “living through a profound and permanent alteration in what gender means, what sex means, and whose bodies matter”.

Everywhere “women, men and LGBTQ people … are walking quietly away from the expectations posed on them by thousands of years of patriarchy”. The changes underway promise “ways of life that are not based on competition, coercion and dominance but on consent, community and pleasure”.

Author and activist Laurie Penny … an ode to the heroes of the global pandemic – “not fighters or soldiers”, but “doctors, nurses, care workers and community leaders”. Image: The Conversation/Wikimedia commons

Yet rather than telling us more about the “paradigm shift” that is remaking “our civilisation”, Penny’s book mostly explains the present moment by covering similar terrain to their earlier titles, with some new piecemeal research and updated terminology.

Frequently, Penny’s declarative mode undercuts rather than generates analysis. The abrupt pivots throughout suggest a book written in some haste. Anecdotal evidence and personal experience drive the narrative and analysis, so much so that Penny’s own journalism is alluded to rather than showcased.

For instance, Penny tells the reader that they have spent years “researching and attempting to understand the mindset behind the incel and ‘men’s rights’ and ‘seduction’ communities” and that the “problem is getting worse”. But rather than properly extrapolate, Penny references a few random studies and concludes with an ode to the heroes of the global pandemic – “not fighters or soldiers”, but “doctors, nurses, care workers and community leaders”.

The flashpoints of sexual and gender politics
There’s no doubting Penny’s ambition. Across 14 chapters, most with an arresting if formulaic opening (“Pain is political, and so is pleasure”; “Heterosexuality is in trouble”; “Sooner or later, every revolution comes down to who does the dishes”), Penny covers the flashpoints of contemporary sexual and gender politics, including #MeToo and the backlash against it.

Much of what is argued is easy to agree with: capitalism exploits some people and bodies more than others; women continue to carry the weight of domestic and caring labour; economic and sexual exploitation are not separate issues, but are intimately linked.

In the chapter focussed on work, Penny refreshingly moves #MeToo beyond the realm of celebrity to other industries, such as hospitality, agriculture and domestic work. They devote the most attention to sex work as paradigmatic of all labour under capitalism.

Yet Penny cuts short rather than enhances another promising thread by focusing on arguments that have been made more powerfully by others. These include sex workers themselves, as showcased in the anthology We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival (2021).

The organising themes of sexual revolution, modern fascism and feminist fightback provide some cohesion, but not in an especially sustained or persuasive fashion.

In Penny’s telling, “modern fascism” is a catch-all term that includes “neo-masculinist” strongmen like Putin, Bolsonaro, Trump and Johnson, the “overwhelmingly White men” who voted for them (a claim in need of some qualifications), incels, the far right, and any man experiencing a crisis or threat to his masculinity.

It is a “brutal political backlash” provoked by “changes in the balance of power between men and women”.

Now, it is clear that authoritarian governments everywhere are much more likely to take away women’s rights than extend them, as Penny covers in a chapter on reproduction that focuses mostly on the US. But to make the case that “modern fascism” is best understood as a backlash against feminism requires more work than Penny is willing to do.

Other feminist thinkers have offered far more probing and genuinely disturbing accounts of contemporary misogyny, including another British journalist Laura Bates, in her book Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pick-up Artists (2020).

The genealogies of #MeToo
Like “modern fascism”, the “feminist fightback” is taken as a given, rather than something to be accounted for or documented. Penny prefers sweeping statements about “the greatest challenge to the social order in this century” coming from

women, girls and queer people, particularly women, girls and queer people of colour, finally coming together to talk about sexual violence and structural abuse of power.

Furthermore, the “feminism” most often referenced is not the left, black or trans feminisms Penny seems most aligned with. It is the “choice”, neoliberal, mainstream feminism she criticises (as have many other feminists in far more encompassing fashion). For a self-proclaimed feminist book, Sexual Revolution is sparsely populated with actual feminists and largely bereft of feminist history. It is as though #MeToo came from nowhere.

Tania Serisier’s Speaking Out is an important work of feminist genealogy.

Genealogies have been identified and scrutinised by Tania Serisier in her important book Speaking Out: Feminism, Rape and Sexual Politics (2018), among many others, including Tarana Burke. Yet in place of proper details about “feminist fightback”, we get Penny’s intervention: sexual revolution.

Cognisant that the concept of “sexual revolution” comes with hefty historical and cultural baggage (though not to the extent that they engage with relevant critiques), Penny attempts to rehabilitate it anyway. This sexual revolution, writes Penny, will deal “not just with sexual licence but with sexual liberation” — as though they are the first rather than umpteenth person to make this argument. This “new sexual revolution is a feminist one”.

Feminist revolution.

The idea of sexual revolution as unfinished business is decades old. So are expressions of what a “feminist” sexual revolution might entail. Penny’s update is to advocate for consent as the fundamental basis of the new sexual and economic order. Of course! But if we are at the midpoint of a sexual revolution, as Penny suggests, there is very little sense of positive developments in the sexual sphere.

Instead, Penny’s focus is overwhelmingly on how dire heterosexual relations are and how abhorrent the sexually desiring woman continues to be.

Sexual Revolution is a bulldozer of a book in which Penny opts for full-throttled polemic instead of nuanced analysis at almost every turn. There has always been a place for such books in the feminist canon, and Penny brings flair and spirit to the task. But beyond its potential value as a primer for contemporary feminism, it is difficult to discern who Sexual Revolution is written for.

I suspect most readers are already familiar with “patriarchy”, “rape culture”, “toxic masculinity”, “intersectionality”, and other key terms.

From the rote to the muddled

Though Penny was once a welcome feminist voice at a time of “post-feminism”, Sexual Revolution reads as outdated, or not up to its proclaimed task, despite its contemporary focus. It suffers from comparison with other books which have tackled similar material with more depth and insight.

The major titles of the #MeToo era have involved forensic investigative reporting. She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Started a Movement by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, and Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow, both released in 2019, focussed on the case of film producer Harvey Weinstein and the women he targeted.

Penny promises a more wide-ranging and grassroots approach to sex and power, but only really skims the surface. In contrast to the polyphonic format of numerous anthologies, including the edited collection #MeToo: Stories from the Australian Movement (2019), Penny’s voice eclipses the voices of people she knows have often been marginalised, including Indigenous women, women of colour, and trans, queer and non-binary people.

Penny is attentive to the racial and racist dynamics of both the far right and mainstream (or White or carceral) feminism. But these discussions are too condensed to take root and sometimes read as rote. “Quite apart from being ethnically suspect,” Penny states, “any movement to end exploitation that fails to centre race is intellectually useless.”

Sara Ahmed, author of the groundbreaking book Complaint! Image: The Conversation/Wikimedia commons

In terms of connecting the dots between White feminism and political Whiteness, a more illuminating book is Alison Phipps’ Me Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism (2020). Phipps carefully and powerfully draws out the racist logic of what has come to be known as “carceral feminism” — an approach that advocates for increased policing, prosecution and imprisonment as key strategies for combating violence against women — evident in some parts of the #MeToo movement.

Penny’s book is muddled by comparison in the solutions it offers for dealing with perpetrators of sexual violence. As for the victims, Penny is sensitive to how and why they are often dismissed as “mad” or unreliable, but Sara Ahmed’s recent book Complaint! (2021) takes the subject much further and in new directions.

Proper comprehension of what consent entails is at the heart of Penny’s sexual revolution. Given that it was only last year that NSW Police Commissioner Mick Fuller thought a consent phone app was a good idea, Penny’s promotion of “real, continuous, enthusiastic sexual consent” is welcome.

Yet as Kathleen Angel persuasively argues in Tomorrow Sex Will be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent (2021), the contemporary fixation on consent as the solution to the pervasive problem of sexual violence can place additional burdens on women, including the need to know emphatically what they want sexually.

In making this argument, Angel hardly disavows the “bare minimum” of consent as central to contemporary sexual ethics. But she’s also sceptical about the very notion of “sexual revolution” that Penny so heartily advocates. Her book’s title is a reference to philosopher Michel Foucault’s highly influential critique of what he saw as one of the delusions of the earlier so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s — that tomorrow sex will be good again.

As Penny recognises, #MeToo is not a stand-alone event or movement, but an expression of wider social patterns. It is a tipping point in understanding the ubiquity of sexual and gendered violence. It has galvanised feminism, and redirected and refocused contemporary discourses around gender and sex.

But its effects are too varied, diffuse and contradictory for the sledgehammer treatment Penny favours. Other feminist thinkers, such as British academics Amia Srinivasan and Jacqueline Rose, have pursued far more generative approaches. Srinivasan has productively revisted the feminist “sex wars” in The Right To Sex (2021), while Rose has consistently turned to psychoanalysis, most recently in On Violence and Violence Against Women (2021).

A reckoning
Penny is more successful in capturing the affective dimensions of the #MeToo era. On this front, Sexual Revolution is a worthy successor or companion to Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger (2018) and Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger (2018), two early responses to #MeToo and the Trump presidency. These books are clearly part of the same zeitgeist, as their almost identical subtitles indicate.

While Penny clearly shares their faith in the political potential of rage (not all feminists do), Sexual Revolution is more useful is in its reflections, right at the end of the book in an extended endnote, on “trauma politics”.

Penny writes that “pain is not supposed to be part of the political conversation”. But it has become so, and the connections or continuities between intimate and structural forms of violence have become much more explicit.

Brittany Higgins addresses the National Press Club, Canberra, 9 February 2022. Image: The Conversation/Mick Tsikas/AAP

Where Penny leaves us is where Australian journalist Amy Remeikis begins in On Reckoning (2022), her recently released and already bestselling monograph: the moment at which the complicity of modern politics in gendered violence is made starkly and painfully apparent.

For Remeikis, this was the day after former parliamentary staffer Brittany Higgins went public on 15 February 2021 with the allegation that she had been raped by a male colleague in Parliament House in March 2019. Some 24 hours later, Prime Minister Scott Morrison addressed the nation.

At the prompting of his wife Jenny, Morrison declared that “he’d been reminded to think of the situation as a father”.

A parliamentary reporter, Remeikis was at work, typing out the Prime Minister’s words. She was first traumatised, then enraged by them: “Somebody else’s daughter. We always have to be somebody else’s daughter.”

Soon after, Remeikis shared her own experience of sexual violence in The Guardian, becoming a spokesperson for survivors in the process. On Reckoning powerfully reiterates and extends her key point that being “thought of as someone else’s daughter is not empathy”.

It obliterates the experiences of real, rather than imagined victims. It sets limits on whose pain can even be conceived. Is it any wonder then, writes Remeikis, that “First Nations women, women of colour, trans and culturally and religiously diverse women have found it so hard to be heard?”

In the #MeToo era, the word “reckoning” has been used so often it can slip into meaninglessness. But Remiekis — like another Australian journalist Jess Hill, in another recently released essay with an almost identical title The Reckoning: How #MeToo is Changing Australia (2021) — imbues it with fresh force.

As records of Australia at a moment of profound cultural change, they offer vital local and personal perspectives of a global phenomenon that has — among its many effects — reinvigorated feminist writing for the mainstream, mostly for the better.

Dr Zora Simic is a senior lecturer, School of Humanities, UNSW Sydney. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Review: Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, by Laurie Penny (Bloomsbury)

Behind scenes probe of Bougainville struggle for independence tops PJR

APR editor — Sat, 02 Oct 2021 02:51:37 +0000

Pacific Journalism Review

A Frontline investigative journalism article on the politics behind the decade-long Bougainville war leading up to the overwhelming vote for independence is among articles in the latest Pacific Journalism Review.

The report, by investigative journalist and former academic Professor Wendy Bacon and Nicole Gooch, poses questions about the “silence” in Australia over the controversial Bougainville documentary Ophir that has won several international film awards in other countries.

Published this week, the journal also features a ground-breaking research special report by academics Shailendra Singh and Folker Hanusch on the current state of journalism across the Pacific – the first such region-wide study in almost three decades.

READ MORE: Pacific Journalism Review – the articles

The cover of the latest Pacific Journalism Review. Image: PJR

Griffith University’s journalism coordinator Kasun Ubayasiri has produced a stunning photo essay, “Manus to Meanjin”, critiquing Australian “imperialist” policies and the plight of refugees in the Pacific.

The main theme of the double edition focuses on a series of articles and commentaries about the major “Pacific crises” — covid-19, climate emergency (including New Zealand aid) and West Papua.

Unthemed topics include journalism and democracy, the journalists’ global digital toolbox, cellphones and Pacific communication, a PNG local community mediascape, and hate speech in Indonesia.

This is the first edition of PJR published since it became independent of AUT University last year after previously being published at the University of Papua New Guinea – where it was launched in 1994 – and the University of the South Pacific.

Lockdowns challenge
“Publishing our current double edition in the face of continued covid-driven lockdowns and restrictions around the world has not been easy, but we made it,” says editor Dr Philip Cass.

“From films to photoessays, from digital democracy to dingoes and disease, the multi-disciplinary, multi-national diversity of our coverage remains a strength in an age when too many journals look the same and have the same type of content.”

“We promise this journal will have a strong focus on Asian media, communication and journalism, as well as our normal focus on the Pacific.”

Founding editor Dr David Robie is quoted in the editorial as saying the journal is at a “critical crossroads for the future” and he contrasts PJR with the “oppressively bland” nature of many journalism publications.

“I believe we have a distinctively different sort of journalism and communication research journal – eclectic and refreshing,” he said.

The next edition of PJR will be linked to the “Change, Adaptation and Culture: Media and Communication in Pandemic Times” online conference of the Asian Congress for Media and Communication (ACMC) being hosted at AUT on November 25-27.

Pacific Crises: Covid, climate emergency and West Papua, Pacific Journalism Review, edited by Philip Cass and David Robie, September 2021

How extraordinary Marshall Islands fisheries story grew … and grew

APR editor — Sat, 02 Oct 2021 01:30:01 +0000

Marshall Islands Journal

The story of how the Marshall Islands went from being a bystander in commercial fishing in the Pacific to operating the world’s busiest tuna trans-shipment port, two fish processing facilities, a purse seine vessel net repair yard, and a fleet of locally-flagged and based fishing vessels is documented in a groundbreaking new book.

Our Ocean’s Promise: From Aspirations to Inspirations — The Marshall Islands Fishing Story is a 196-page overview of the Marshall Islands expanding engagement in the tuna fishery value chain.

The book documents how the Marshall Islands has benefitted from purse seine fishery revenue rising from about US$4 million annually to more than $30 million a year since 2010 through the country’s participation in Parties to the Nauru Agreement’s (PNA) globally recognised conservation and management regime that ensures sustainable fishing as well as dramatically increasing the islands’ share of tuna revenue.

READ MORE: Other books and video reviews

Our Ocean’s Promise book cover. Image: MIJ

“I personally witnessed the transformation in Marshall Islands’ fisheries through the collective endeavors of the PNA grouping of countries that control most of the tuna that is taken in the Western and Central Pacific Ocean,” Dr Transform Aqorau, the founding PNA CEO, writes in a foreword to the new book.

“As host of the PNA Office, the Marshall Islands was instrumental in promoting the PNA purse seine Vessel Day Scheme, and was a vociferous advocate of the PNA initiatives.”

Marshall Islands Marine Resources Authority Director Glen Joseph conceived the idea for a book narrating the history of commercial fishing in this central Pacific nation.

A partnership with the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency provided necessary support for the work on the book that was researched and written by Giff Johnson, long-time editor of the Marshall Islands Journal, the weekly newspaper published in Majuro.

‘Document our story’
Joseph recognised the FFA for its key role in supporting MIMRA “to document our story in the region”.

While the book takes the reader on a journey that begins in the 1920s, it focuses on the period from the late 1970s — as the Marshall Islands was gaining its independence and beginning to engage in the tuna fishery as a sovereign nation — to the present day.

It features a forward look at MIMRA’s latest initiatives to participate in the many levels of the tuna value chain, well beyond the limited role it once played as a collector of license fees from distant water fishing nations.

“The ‘oceanscape’ in 2021 is unrecognisable from the 1970s, with numerous opportunities at MIMRA’s doorstep and the agency well-prepared to pursue those opportunities,” writes Johnson in Our Ocean’s Promise.

“Our interest goes back to our humble beginning, and that is the ocean’s promise, which is our heritage, culture, food security, economic opportunity and highway to global engagement,” says Joseph in a quote from the new book. “All we aspire to is to sustainably and successfully manage our fishery.”

The book includes the first-ever detailed chronology of Marshall Islands and regional fisheries developments that catalogues the many challenges and roadblocks this nation and other independent Pacific islands faced as they worked to develop sovereign control first over their 200-mile exclusive economic zones and more recently to implement the PNA’s Vessel Day Scheme in order to shift the paradigm of the commercial fishery to one of rights-based management controlled by Pacific islands.

MIMRA will launch the new publication with a formal book ceremony in Majuro on October 8.

Marshall Islands President David Kabua is scheduled to keynote the launch event and FFA Director-General Dr Manu Tupou-Roosen is expected to deliver a virtual message to the programme.

Our Ocean’s Promise: From Aspirations to Inspirations — The Marshall Islands Fishing, by Giff Johnson, Amazon Direct Kindle Publishing.

New covid book exposes global media bias, racism and stigmatisation

APR editor — Sun, 29 Aug 2021 22:36:46 +0000

REVIEW: By Krishan Dutta

While the covid-19 pandemic’s relentless cyclone continues across the globe wreaking havoc on economies and social systems, this book sheds light on the adversarial reporting culture of the media, and how it impacts on racism and politicisation driving the coverage.

It explores the global response to the covid-19 pandemic, and the role of national and international media, and governments, in the initial coverage of the developing crisis.

With specific chapters written mostly by scholars living in these countries, Covid-19, Racism and Politicization: Media in the Midst of a Pandemic examines how the media in Australia, Bangladesh, China, India, New Zealand, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Taiwan and the United States have responded to the pandemic, and highlights issues specific to these countries, such as racism, Sinophobia, media bias, stigmatisation of victims and conspiracy theories.

This book explores how the covid-19 coverage developed over the year 2020, with special focus given to the first six months of the year when the reporting trends were established.

The introductory chapter points out that the media deserve scrutiny for their role in the day-to-day coverage that often focused on adversarial issues and not on solutions to help address the biggest global health crisis the world has seen for more than a century.

In chapter 2, co-editor Dr Kalinga Seneviratne, former head of research at the Asian Media Information and Communication Centre (AMIC) takes a comprehensive look at how the blame game developed in the international media with a heavy dose of Sinophobia, and how between March and June 2020 a global propaganda war developed.

He documents how conspiracy theories from both the US and China developed after the virus started spreading in the US and points out some interesting episodes that happened in the US in 2019 that may have vital relevance for the investigation of the origins of the virus.

Attacks on WHO
The attacks on the World Health Organisation (WHO), particularly by the former Trump administration, are well documented with a timeline of how WHO worked on investigating the virus in its early stages with information provided from China.

The chapter also discusses the racism that underpinned the propaganda war, especially from the West, which led to the Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s controversial call for an “independent” inquiry into the origins of the pandemic that riled China.

Co-editor Kalinga Seneviratne … the book highlights pandemic issues such as racism, Sinophobia, media bias, stigmatisation of victims and conspiracy theories. Image: IDN-News

“The covid-19 pandemic has exposed the inadequacies and inequalities of the globalised world. In an information-saturated society, it has also laid bare many political economy issues especially credibility of news, dangers of misinformation, problems of politicisation, lack of media literacy, and misdirected government policy priorities,” argues co-editor Sundeep Muppidi, professor of communications at the University of Hartford in the US.

“This book explores the implications of some of these issues, and the government response, in different societies around the world in the initial periods of the pandemic.”

In chapter 3, Muppidi examines specifically the US media coverage of covid-19 and he explores the “othering” of the blame related to failures and non-performances from politicians, governments and media networks themselves.

Yun Xiao and Radika Mittal, writing about a study they have done on the coverage in The New York Times during the early months of the covid-19 pandemic, argue that unsubstantiated criticism of governance measures, lack of nuance and absence of alternative narratives is indicative of a media ideology that strengthens and embeds the process of “othering”.

Ankuran Dutta and Anupa Goswani from Gauhati University in Assam, India, analyse the coverage of the covid-19 crisis in five Indian newspapers using 10 key words. They argue that the Indian media coverage could be seen as what constitutes “Sinophobia” with some mainstream media even calling it the “Wuhan Virus”.

Historical background
They trace the historical background to India’s anti-China nationalism, and show how it has been reflected in the covid-19 coverage, especially after India became one of the world’s hotspots.

“This Sinophobia hasn’t much impacted on the government policy; rather it has tightened its nationalist sentiments promoting Indian vaccines over the Chinese.” They say the Indian media’s Sinophobia has abated after the delta variant hit India.

“The narrative concerning covid-19 has taken a sharp turn bringing out the loopholes of the government’s inability to sustain its vigilance against the virus,” he notes, adding, ‘considering the global phobia concerning the delta variant put India in a tight spot and India has to defend itself from its newfound identity of being the primary source of this seemingly untameable variant.”

Zhang Xiaoying from the Beijing Foreign Studies University and Martin Albrow from the University of Wales explain what they call the “Moral Foundation of the Cooperative Spirit” in chapter 4.

Drawing on Chinese philosophical traditions—Confucianism, Daoism and Mohism—they argue that the “cooperative spirit” enshrined in these philosophies is reflected in the Chinese media’s coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic in its early stages. Taking examples from the Chinese media—Xinhua, China Daily, Global Times and CGTN—they emphasise that the Chinese media has promoted international cooperation rather than indulge in blame games or politicising the issue.

This chapter provides a good insight into Chinese thinking when it comes to journalism.

Chapters on Sri Lanka and New Zealand examine how positive coverage in the local media of the governments’ initially successful handling of the covid-19 pandemic has contributed to emphatic election victories for the ruling parties.

Hit on NZ media industry
David Robie, founding director of Auckland University of Technology’s Pacific Media Centre, explains in his chapter how New Zealand’s magazine sector was devastated by the pandemic lockdowns and economic downturn, although enterprising buy-outs and start-ups contributed to a recovery.

He points out that a year later, in April 2021, Media Minister Kris Faafoi, himself a former journalist, announced a NZ$50 million plan to help the media industry deal with its huge drop in income, because, as he says, Facebook and Google were instrumental in drawing advertising revenue away from local media players.

The chapter from Bangladesh offers a depressing picture of the social issues that came up as the virus spread, such as the stigmatisation and rejection of returning migrant worker who have for years provided for families back home, and how old people were abandoned by their families when they were suspected of having contacted the virus.

The chapter gives a clear illustration of how the adversarial reporting culture of the media impacts negatively on the community and its social fabrics.

But, the chapter’s author, Shameem Reza, communications lecturer at Dhaka University, says that when the second outbreak started in March 2021, he observed a shift in the media coverage of covid-19 pandemic.

Now, the stories are more about harassment and discrimination, such as migrant workers facing hurdles to access vaccine; uncertainty over confirming air tickets and flights for their return; and facing risk of losing jobs and becoming unemployed. Thus, now the media coverage particularly includes ordinary peoples’ suffering.

Reza believes that the initial stigmatisation of victims, had influenced social media coverage of harassment, and “changed agendas in the public sphere”.

Lack of skills, knowledge
The authors argue in the chapter on the Philippines that the covid-19 coverage exposed the “lack of skills and knowledge in reporting on health issues”. Said a senior newspaper editor, “in the past, whenever there were training opportunities on science or health reporting, we’d send the young reporters to give them the chance to go out of the newsroom. Now we know we should have sent editors and senior reporters.”

In the concluding chapter, Seneviratne and Muppidi discuss various social and economic issues that should be the focus of the coverage as the world recovers from the covid-19 pandemic that reflects the inequalities around the world. These include not only vaccine rollouts, but also the vulnerability of migrant labour and their rights, the plight of casual labour in the so-called “gig economy”, priority for investments on health services, the power of Big Tech and many others.

This book is an attempt to raise the voices of the “Global South” in discussing the media’s role in the coverage of the covid-19 crisis, explain Seneviratne and Muppidi, pointing out that there cannot be a return to the “normal” when that is full of inequalities that have been exposed by the pandemic.

“There are many issues that the media should be mindful of in reporting the inevitable recovery from the covid-19 pandemic in 2021 and beyond.”

Krishan Dutta is a freelance journalist writing for IDN – News (In-Depth News). An earlier version of this review was first published by IDN-News under the title “New book explores how adversarial reporting culture drives politicised covid-19 coverage and this version is republished from Pacific Journalism Review.

Covid-19, Racism and Politicization: Media in the Midst of a Pandemic, edited by Kalinga Seneviratne and Sundeep R. Muppidi. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2021. 230 pages. ISBN: 9781527570894

Single Asian Female: A reflection

APR editor — Wed, 05 May 2021 19:06:16 +0000

REVIEW: By Sherry Zhang

Last week, writer Sherry Zhang was at the opening night of Auckland Theatre Company’s production of Single Asian Female. She’s waited to see it since 2019 and now, having finally seen it on New Zealand shores, she reflects on the play and what it means to her.

I’ve been waiting for a while to see this show. I first heard about Single Asian Female in 2019 from a Sydney friend who told me I had to see it. “I’ll fly over from Auckland then,” I joked, but more than half-serious.

So in 2021, when Kat Tsz Hung, who plays Chinese matriarch Pearl Wong, stared defiantly at me on a giant yellow post in Auckland Theatre Company’s Waterfront Theatre, I was beyond chuffed.

I’ve waited so long because it’s about time.

Single Asian Female premiered in Sydney years ago and only reached New Zealand shores in 2021.

To be produced at ATC is as mainstream as you can get with theatre in New Zealand. It’s validating to have an Asian-centric story, directed and written, right at the Viaduct. I’ve been to a few ATC shows now, and the audience is generally a sea of white hair on white people.

There’s been incredible mahi buzzing from Proudly Asian Theatre for the past few years, championing the community needs and interests. From producing works, supporting emerging artists, and calling out the lack of diversity in Aotearoa’s performance spaces for Asian creatives.

Working with PAT on this project is smart for ATC, it provides them with some street cred for an institution that has otherwise been slow on the diversity and inclusion front.

Just a few years ago, ATC was still pumping out predominantly all-white casts and all-white production teams. (The two actors of colour had fleeting, almost silent roles).

Sacrifice of our parents
Single Asian Female is a thank you to the sacrifice our parents endure to bring up children in an Australasian space. As the character Pearl says, “food is the great equaliser, our stomachs are the same”.

Our parents run restaurants or takeaways so we can have a chance at a better life. They cook because they can, and it pays.

A scene familiar to me: older siblings running the tables while you sit in the corner finishing maths homework. Or being pulled in to do shift work even if you have prior commitments, because who else is going to run the family business?

Playwright Michelle Law isn’t afraid to pick apart the “tiger mum”, parenting trope. Pearl has so much love for her daughters Zoe (Xana Tang) and Mei (Bridget Wong). She’s funny, supportive and would do anything to protect her children. But she’s also snappy, harsh and overbearing.

Playwright Michelle Law … not afraid to pick apart the “tiger mum”, parenting trope. Image: Asia Media Centre

It tapped into a fair amount of mother issues I’m still carrying. My friends and I all walked out of the theatre slightly dazed, because “I’m pretty sure line for line, that’s something my Mum has said”.

I was pretty good at holding back the tears, until the final scenes when Zoe shares the songs Pearl would sing to calm her down when she has panic attacks. I sobbed a bit in the dark until the red lanterns and glitzy dance lights came on again for the karaoke finale spectacular.

I see how Asian mothers talk about their duty to their children. This martyrdom of suffering, of keeping up a strong face, often translates into coldness. Pearl’s chants of “I am strong,” is both inspiring and heart-wrenching.

Gorgeous one-liners
The transition from the play’s original setting on the Gold Coast to Mt Maunganui provides some gorgeous one-liners about Winston Peters and L&P. But there are some awkward translations, with jokes about Penny Wong, openly queer Australian MP, not sitting as smoothly.

It felt like a missed opportunity to flesh out queerness in Chinese culture.

I understood the joke was in Pearl’s unexpected openness regarding sexuality (and her complete horror of Zoe’s unexpected pregnancy). But to use queerness as the punchline felt like a slap in the face as someone who’s continuing to unpack the trauma of being queer in a conservative Chinese family.

Other moments that stung include the racist comments Mei endures from her Pākeha high school friends. The internalised racism and identity unravelling is a particular point of growing up Kiwi-Asian.

But it frustrated me when on opening night, non-Asian audience members laughed at these comments. “Oi, it’s literally just our reality,” I wanted to shout.

At first, I struggled to place how old Mei was. But through her growth, I found her characterisation to be realistically matched with the sophistication 17-year-old teenage girls deserve.

Xana Tang’s performance as Zoe was particularly charming, while Kat Tsz Hung was flamboyant and unapologetic as Pearl. To see Asian women taking up space, loud and demanding attention is a necessary breakdown of the small, quiet and obedient stereotypes enforced upon us.

Director Cassandre Tse expertly moves us from moments of immense heartache and grief to fits of laughter. A balance and lightness needed to transport us through a two and a half hour play that holds rather heavy traumatic themes.

We’ve been waiting to hear our mothers, sisters and ourselves speak for so long, and now I just want even more.

Single Asian Female. By Michelle Law. ASB Waterfront Theatre, Auckland. 27 April– 15 May 2021. This review is republished from the Asia Media Centre under a Creative Commons licence.

Pioneering saga of early Otago horse whisperer author’s dream come true

APR editor — Wed, 23 Dec 2020 21:17:45 +0000

Asia Pacific Report

For Margaret Mills, adventurer, environmental campaigner, activist poet and Greenpeace stalwart, it was a lifetime dream coming true at 91.

When she opened her parcel from the mail at her hilltop Waiheke island home just over a week ago, out popped advance copies of her maiden book, The Nine Lives of Kitty K. – the saga of a horse whisperer and her happiness and tragedies in the early settler days of outback Otago.

This was a wonderful Christmas present after a five-year labour of love. Writing the book took 14 months and then a further four years to get it published.

READ MORE: Sleeping with the bomb – Gulf News

But she really dreamed about writing the book many years ago and when she finally had a chance to write it, she did so with tremendous enthusiasm and persistence.

“An extraordinary New Zealand debut historical novel … celebrating an unsung heroine of the Goldfields,” says her publicist Karen McKenzie.

In fact, most of the book is a true story, with only the early parts in Ireland being a reconstruction.

“Set in a turbulent period of goldfields’ history, The Nine Lives of Kitty K. paints a vivid picture of pioneer life as told by the sons and daughters of those who lived it and survived the terrible Depression of the 1890s,” says McKenzie.

‘Toughest woman in Otago history’
“Kitty Kirk (1855–1930), arguably the toughest woman in Otago history, endured those times, supporting herself as a woman alone.”

Former Pacific Media Centre director David Robie says the book tells a story of Kitty’s life at the tail end of the goldrush that “provides a glimpse of the harshness of life in early settler times – especially for women”.

He adds: “The author, Margaret Mills, herself an outback adventurer with a green heart, characterises in real life some of the grit and joyous energy displayed by Kitty.”

Mills is a much liked character on Waiheke island who had a role on the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior when it was bombed in Auckland on 10 July 1985 with the death of photographer Fernando Pereira.

She asked to be relief cook for a month when the campaign vessel arrived in New Zealand after a humanitarian voyage rescuing Rongelap islanders from the ravages of a US nuclear testing legacy in the Marshall Islands.

Mills had only been on board three days when French secret agents bombed the ship.

“I heard the captain say, ‘Oh Margaret, are you still here? We’ve been bombed!’ and I laughed. Well I mean, would you think of being bombed here? No,” she told Newshub in 2015.

After the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior Mills continued to work on Greenpeace ships.

Her friendships with crew members changed her life.

Her Kitty K. book will go on sale in mid-February and she hopes to have two launches – one on Waiheke and the other in Queenstown where “people will really care about this story of early hardships”.

The Nine Lives of Kitty K.: The Unsung Heroine of the Goldfields, by Margaret Mills (Mary Egan Publishing, February, NZ$34.95)

In search of our Hawaiki origins – behind the myths and storytelling

Sri Krishnamurthi — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 18:33:09 +0000

REVIEW: By Sri Krishnamurthi of Pacific Media Watch

When I first learned about the mythical place called Hawaiki. I understood it to be Cape Reinga at the tip of Aotearoa New Zealand’s North Island, where the two oceans meet – the Blue Pacific and the Tasman Sea.

As Māori told me, it was the place where their tupuna (ancestors) departed.

In this three-part series Origins (TVNZ), Scotty Morrison, a Te Reo expert and host of Te Karare, goes in search of his Hawaiki and much more beyond. It is a journey through the origins of time in search of where Māori came from.

READ MORE: The three episodes of Origins

It’s the universal question – who are we and how did we get here? Morrison travels “across the world and through time” to discover just that.

“When our ancestors were believed to be the last people on earth to inhabit these shores, I want to know who they were these people and how they got here,” he says.

He asks the question: “Were they great sailors or starving refugees?”

He goes back to his marae where the carvings depict his tupuna, including Tamate Kapua, captain of the first waka to bring his ancestors to these shores. However, the tales of legends is not enough to convince of roots.

Waka and names
The Ngati Whakaue man describes Hawaiki as the “Homeland” which is how the eldest of his three children is named.

As he explains, every iwi arrived on a different waka and his was no different, arriving as the Ngati Whakaue did on the waka of captain Tamate Kapua

After the tribulations, they finally arrived at Maketu where the Te Arawa iwi takes it name, settling in the Bay of Plenty. They believe the waka set of from a real place which he wants to visit.

In the first episode, he takes viewers of the documentary to the sacred archaeological site at Wairau Bar, or Te Pokohiwi, where some of the first people to arrive in Aotearoa, are buried.

“There is a whole lot of Hawaikis” says Sir Toby Curtis of Te Arawa. “The last Hawaiki is in the Pacific. The other Hawaikis are named in India and Africa before they moved to the Pacific.

“Wherever they stayed, that place was called Hawaiki.

“So, there are many places that are Hawaiki, but the Hawaikii we talk about is here is the Pacific,” the Te Arawa kaumatua says.

Keeps pointing to Rangitea
“The Hawaiki we talk about keeps on pointing back to Rangitea [in “French” Polynesia], and it is important because we want to know where we came from,” says Toby.

That is the quest that Morrison undertakes tracing the journey of the first people to arrive in New Zealand and also the history of the first people to walk the Earth which features him travelling from Polynesia to Asia to Africa.

As Morrison says, the story “starts here with us and the Māori story, but it turns into a story around human existence basically, and where we all seem to have originated from.”

The series was inspired by Meg Douglas of Scottie Productions who has worked on the project for nearly a decade and was motivated by the tales that her father narrated to her about his own epic journey to uncover and write about the origins of his own iwi.

And so, in 2018 Scottie Productions teamed up with Greenstone TV and TVNZ came on board to support the project.

Production started in early 2019. It was a massive task, with research being undertaken through immeasurable hours of sifting through papers, historical books, and talking to people all over New Zealand and the world.

The project began shooting in July 2019 and finished in January 2020 just before the covid-19 pandemic hit the world.

First tupuna to arrive
For Morrison, the next part of his journey was from the Wairau Bar, Te Pokohiwi, where some of the first tupuna to arrive are buried. After learning the secrets of history that the Bar had to offer him to give him a grounding it was time to move on.

Next, he goes to Tahiti, Eastern Polynesia where finds connections through language as he discovers that he can converse in te reo with a man speaking Tahitian Ma’ohi at the museum and similarities in language can only be described as remarkable.

The indigenous language is no longer commonplace but Ma’ohi is starting to enjoy a revival, as Morrison discovers.

He feels a connection to Tahiti even though the journey to Aotearoa is a 4000km and dangerous voyage.

As Jack Thatcher, a master builder from Aotearoa who prepares to sail his waka from Tahiti to New Zealand tells him: “Hawaiki is an ideal, it’s one of those places, it’s one of those places from whence we came and where we settled we had a Hawaiki back to Rarotonga, Tahitinui, Rangitea, so I think Hawaiki might just be moana,”

After travelling to Meheti’a, or Maketu, where voyagers made their final preparation, he then travels to Rangitea (or Rai’atea) to Taputapuatea, a Unesco World Heritage site on Rai’atea, which is said to be the launch place of Tamatekapua’s waka, Morrison’s Te Arawa ancestor.

“I feel as though I’m about to walk to into my tribe’s sacred places,” he says discovering that the Tainui, Te Arawa and Tokomaru waka left Rai’atea for Aotearoa.

Felt in the DNA
“This is a good point to start because when you come here we feel it in your DNA and genealogy as Maori and I think if you take the time to come here you’ll feel it to.”

The calm serenity on the beach where he sits on Rai’atea reveals that to be his personal Hawaiki.

Morrison learns how early Pākehā researchers got the origins of Māori so wrong. He is surprised to find that several traditional folktales in Samoa are replicated in Māori culture and he makes a shock personal discovery at an ancient Vanuatu urupa (burial place).

Much of Pakeha research is debunked by historian Dr Rawiri Taonui who says: “You really need to go in with your eyes and heart wide open because there is a lot of stuff in these books that are exciting and interesting but not true.”

Then in later episodes he explores links with Western Polynesia and goes to Western Samoa, Vanuatu and Taiwan, where Morrison says there are some linguistic similarities with te reo in an usurping discovery which tells the tale of his ancestors voyagers.

It surprises him that Māori may have travelled from Western Polynesia too and the discovery of Lapita pottery in Samoa then takes him to Vanuatu where it came from.

He is welcomed by a challenge by young warriors like a wero but it is the Lapita pots that gives a clue to the colonisation of Vanuatu where he similarities in the words found in common word.

Pots similar to Taiwan
But the Lapita pots are that similar to those found in Taiwan and in 2003 a major burial site or urupa (burial ground) was discovered.

In the final episode Morrison travels to Taiwan and Ethiopia to explore the place that is said to be the origin of us all, and he visits the Cook Islands – the stepping off point for waka heading to Aotearoa hundreds of years ago.

He travels to Eastern Taiwan which hasn’t been inhabited by the Han Chinese and ancient rituals still hold true.

Once again he finds similarities in the language when he ask an indigenous sailor to recite numbers to 10. And he travels inland to find a structure not to dissimilar to the Wharenui back home.

“It is extraordinary how similar this whare is to the whare back home,” Morrison says in astonishment.

However, his last stop 8000 km away in Addis Abba, Ethiopia, said to be “cradle of humanity” and one which Sir Toby Curtis spoke as a knowing elder of Te Arawa.

He discovers the bones of “Lucy” a 3.2 million-year-old woman whose relics can be found at the National Museum of Ethiopia.

Left in ‘search for food’
As it explained to him by the curator of the mueum, human beings left in “search of food”.

In Ethiopia, he visits the Omo Valley where the cradle of humanity is said to be and where the oldest, completely formed human skeleton was found.

The question of where we come from is “always going to be something that’s debated,” says Morrison, and there are many varying beliefs about how we came to be here.

While visiting with a traditional tribal group in the Omo River Valley, Morrison met a chief who took umbrage at the most popular theory of human evolution.

“I said through an interpreter, ‘Do you believe in the theory that eventually monkeys stood up and walked out of the bush and that was the evolution of human beings?’

“And the chief who I was talking to said to the interpreter, ‘Tell him if he says that to me again I’m going to take his head off’,” laughs Morrison

From visiting the Hamar people in Omo River Valley he then returns fron the 5000-year-old journey to the Cook Islands and to familiar surroundings to where three waka sailed – Te Arawa, Tainui and Takitimu.

The afterbirth is buried
As a master builder and carver from Rarotonga Mike Tavaoni says: Avaiki (Hawaiki) is where you are born, where afterbirth is buried. It is simply where you originated,” that is what it means to the Cook Island Māori.

“Ultimately (the journey) has strengthened my commitment to my own Maori culture and I finish in the firm belief that I visited my Hawaikii in Ra’aitea,” says Morrison.

The documentary is a mammoth feat of research and travel and does much to tell where Māori originated from.

Origins: In search of the mythical Hawaiki and beyond (TVNZ), a three-part documentary series.
Director: Dan Salmon
Camera-man: Jack Bryant
TVNZ On Demand