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.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: An Israeli court has closed an investigation into the death of Walid Ahmad, a 17-year-old from the occupied West Bank who died in an Israeli jail six months after he was arrested, held without charges and accused of throwing stones at Israeli soldiers.

An autopsy showed Ahmad likely starved to death after suffering extreme weight loss, muscle wasting and untreated scabies. Human rights groups say nearly 100 Palestinians have died in Israeli jails since October 2023.

Meanwhile, local and international media outlets report Israeli forces recently tortured a Palestinian toddler in Gaza to coerce a confession from his father.

• READ MORE: Trump talks up deal with Tehran as Iranian missile, drone attacks continue
• Other US-Israeli attacks on Iran, Palestine genocide

According to reports from Palestine TV, Al Jazeera and others, the child’s father, Osama Abu Nassar, was detained near the al-Maghazi refugee camp after he came under fire from Israeli soldiers.

He was forced to approach an Israeli checkpoint, where he was separated from his 18-month-old son, stripped naked and forced to watch as soldiers used a cigarette to burn one of the toddler’s legs while using a nail to puncture the other.

AMY GOODMAN: This comes as a new UN report warns Israel is systematically torturing Palestinians on a scale that “suggests collective vengeance and destructive intent”.The report, titled “Torture and Genocide”, was written by Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory.

In July, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on her over her report naming dozens of companies she says are profiting from Israeli occupation and genocide in Gaza. Amnesty International blasted the sanctions as a “shameless and transparent attack on the fundamental principles of international justice”. Francesca Albanese’s new book is When the World Sleeps: Stories, Words and Wounds of Palestine. She joins us from Geneva, Switzerland.

Francesca, thank you so much for being with us. Why don’t you lay out what you found in your new report, “Torture and Genocide,” that you just presented at the U.N. Human Rights Council?

Torture and Genocide — a new UN report.     Video: Democracy Now!

Transcript

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Thank you. Thank you, Amy and Nermeen.

I’ve been investigating genocide for over two years now. So, five out of eight reports I’ve produced for the United Nations focus on genocide, acts of genocide, the context in which a genocide happens, why the genocide is not stopped, the layers of complicity from states and private companies, which is the reason why also I’m sanctioned by the United States, against which now my 13-year-old daughter, who’s an American citizen, is the only one to take action suing the Trump administration.

But of all the investigations I’ve carried out, this has been absolutely the most excruciating, that led me to say that Israel uses torture in a systematic and widespread fashion, intentionally and sadistically, to break the spirit of the Palestinians, not just as individuals, but as a people, considering the scale and intensity of torture.

And I monitored torture behind bars, collecting hundreds, hundreds of testimonies, directly and from Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations, but also analyzing what experts call torturous environment, meaning the cumulative impact of all the practices, of all the crimes that Israel has massively inflicted on the Palestinians — again, beyond the torture, sodomisation, raping in jail, the enforced disappearance, which is touching 4000 people.

This is new. This is a new crime, including for Israel, toward the Palestinians. But also starvation, constant forced displacement, not just in Gaza, but in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and home demolition, the fear of being always threatened with death or other crimes, it creates a torturous environment for the Palestinians, which is an essential element of genocide.

And it is genocide.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Francesca, if you could elaborate on this point that you’ve just made and that you make in the report, namely, that torture has effectively become state policy for Israel since October 2023? So, what are the kinds of transformations you’ve seen, both in terms of Israeli security personnel, as well as settlers, against the Palestinians?

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Yeah, I have to say that what I’ve investigated is something on which even the United Nations Committee Against Torture and the United Nations Independent Commission of Inquiry on Israel/Palestine had shed light already, the fact that Israel, after October 7, has massively used torture to punish the Palestinians vindictively.

In fact, the concept of torture has become a state policy is something that the Committee Against Torture found out recently.

I have zoomed in: What does it mean, and where does it come from? Surely, one of the main engineers or architects of this, what’s been called — what he has called the “prison revolution,” is Itamar Ben-Gvir, was — immediately after October 7, has declared that the Palestinians in jail will not be afforded luxury treatment or five-star treatment anymore, as if it was a five-star hotel, what the Israeli prison system afforded Palestinians before October 7.

By the way, in 2023, in July 2023, I produced a report showing how widespread and systemic was the arbitrary treatment of Palestinian detainees, so, just to give a context.

But the conditions have become more and more brutal, and intentionally so. What does it mean? Palestinians have routinely been abducted — I mean, detained without charge or trial. They’ve been arrested, because Palestinians, if they were specific professionals, like journalists and doctors or headed medical personnel, all the more.

Seventeen hundred Palestinian healthcare personnel have been killed. Hundreds remain in jail. And they have been shackled, blindfolded, beaten, humiliated, stripped naked, photographed, filmed, exposed to Israeli civilians, including settlers, coming in to document and to film, to participate into this orgy of depravity, of how a person can be humiliated.

But the most painful, excruciating thing — and I’ve read some of the testimonies — is how Palestinian women and men have been sodomised, have been raped, with bottles, with knives, with metal rods. Even the prisoner who was sodomised through — was raped with a knife, brought to the hospital.

Five Israeli officials were identified and pressed charged against, and now the charges have been dropped. And the person who leaked the video from within the military apparatus is under house arrest on top of it.

So, not only that I’ve documented the vindictiveness toward the Palestinians, the humiliation, the continuous abuses against them in jail, really to break their spirit once and for all as a people, but also the fact that there has been almost something celebratory against the mistreatment of Palestinians in jail among the society.

The legislative power, the Knesset, has been discussing the right to rape Palestinians, and so other members of the executive. The judiciary has not looked into it. And as I said, even those who were found, caught on video, committing this crime were released.

AMY GOODMAN: Francesca, in this last 30 seconds, what are you calling for?

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Oh, for justice. Justice. Israel must be stopped, because, Amy, I can’t even use the past tense. As we speak, there are still over 9000 Palestinian hostages, hostages to an unlawful occupation in Israeli jail.

The only thing this — International Court of Justice has spoken. Israel must withdraw the occupation, the troops, the colonies. And the exploitation of Palestinian resources must end.

Meanwhile, the settlers continue to terrorise people. Very few Israelis are engaged against this. So member states must intervene, cut ties and stop weapons transfers to Israel once and for all, and bring the perpetrators to justice.

AMY GOODMAN: Francesco Albanese, we thank you so much for being with us, UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory. We’ll link to your report, “Torture and Genocide,” and have you back on to talk about your book.

Republished from Democracy Now! under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

TVNZ’s 1News Pacific correspondent Barbara Dreaver has released a new memoir looking back at over 30 years of reporting in the region.

The book, titled Be Brave, details moments in Dreaver’s career in the Pacific from covering natural disasters to coups and personal tragedies.

Speaking to Pacific Waves, Dreaver said she wanted readers to see the Pacific through her eyes.

• READ MORE: Other Barbara Dreaver reports

“Be Brave” – Pacific correspondent Barbara Dreaver reflects   Video: RNZ Pacific Waves

“The Pacific is so important to the world, it is important to New Zealand and Australia and I thought, if I show it like the real stories . . .  what happens behind the scenes that it just might provide, you know, share that joy really of the Pacific with people.

“I’m really concerned about the way the region is going at the moment, and I think there’s volatile times ahead and so I really decided some time ago that I wanted to record it and record, for my family as well.”

The Kiribati-born journalist also encourages up and coming Pacific journalists to report “without fear or favour”.

“When people say to you, as a Pacific journalist ‘you’re not being culturally aware’ . . .  we know what’s culturally aware.

“We do and quite often people in power use it as a means of stopping you reporting.

“So you have to be really aware of the boundaries on that.”

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

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.

• READ MORE: Barbara Dreaver: I’ve never defended who I am, why should I?
• Other Barbara Dreaver reports

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

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

As we’ve reported, the Gaza ceasefire deal is in effect. Phase one of the US.-backed 20-point plan is underway. Hamas has released all 20 living captives. Israel has released almost 2000 Palestinians in Ramallah and now in Khan Younis in Gaza.

Yesterday, President Trump addressed the Israeli Knesset and then co-chaired a so-called peace summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not among the 20 or more world leaders who attend. He was invited but said he was not going.

• READ MORE: Opposition Israeli lawmakers interrupt Trump and call for recognition of Palestinian statehood
• Joy as Palestinians prisoners freed after Israeli captives released
• Trump addresses the Knesset and speaks of ‘historic dawn for new Middle East’

For more, we’re joined by the Israeli historian, author and professor Ilan Pappé, professor of history and director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter and the chair of the Nakba Memorial Foundation. Among his books, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, almost 20 years ago, and Gaza in Crisis, which he co-wrote with Noam Chomsky. His new book, Israel on the Brink: And the Eight Revolutions That Could Lead to Decolonization and Coexistence.

We thank you so much for being with us. Professor Pappé, if you could start off by responding to what has happened? We’re watching, in Khan Younis, prisoners being released, Palestinian prisoners, up to 2000, and in the occupied West Bank, though there families were told if they dare celebrate the release of their loved ones, they might be arrested.

And we saw the release of the 20 Israeli hostages as they returned to Israel. Hamas says they’re returning the dead hostages, the remains, over the next few days. Israel has not said they will return the dead prisoners, of which it’s believed there are nearly 200 in Israeli prisons.

Your response overall, and now to the summit in Egypt?

ILAN PAPPÉ: Yes. First of all, there is some joy in knowing that the bombing of the people in Gaza has stopped for a while. And there is joy knowing that Palestinian political prisoners have been reunited with their families, and, similarly, that Israeli hostages were reunited with their families.

But except from that, I don’t think we are in such an historical moment as President Trump claimed in his speech in the Knesset and beforehand. We are not at the end of the terrible chapter that we have been in for the last two years.

And that chapter is an Israeli attempt by a particularly fanatic, extremely rightwing Israeli government to try and use ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and genocide in Gaza to downsize the number of Palestinians in Palestine and impose Israel’s will in a way that they hope would be at least endorsed by some Arab governments and the world.

So far, they have an alliance of Trump and some extreme rightwing parties in Europe.

And now I hope that the world will not be misled that Israel is now ready to open a different kind of page in its relationship with the Palestinians. And what you told us about the way that the celebrations were dealt with in the West Bank and the incineration of the sanitation center shows you that nothing has changed in the dehumanisation and the attitude of this particular Israeli government and its belief that it has the power to wipe out Palestine as a nation, as a people and as a country.

I hope the world will not stand by, because up to now it did stand by when the genocide occurred in Palestine.

AMY GOODMAN: We have just heard President Trump’s address to the Israeli Knesset. He followed the Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu. I’m not sure, but in listening to Netanyahu, I don’t think he used the word “Palestinian.” President Trump has just called on the Israeli president to pardon Netanyahu.

Your thoughts on this, and also the possibility of why Netanyahu has not joined this summit that President Trump is co-chairing? Many are speculating for different reasons — didn’t want to anger the right, that’s further right than him. Others are saying the possibility of his arrest, not on corruption charges, but on crimes against humanity, the whole case before the International Criminal Court.

ILAN PAPPÉ: It could be a mixture of all of it, but I think at the center of it is the nature of the Israeli government that was elected in November 2022, this alliance between a very opportunistic politician, who’s only interested in surviving and keeping his position as a prime minister, alongside messianic, neo-Zionist politicians who really believe that God has given them the opportunity to create the Greater Israel, maybe even beyond the borders of Palestine, and, in the process, eliminate Palestinians.

I think that his consideration should all — are always about his chances of survival. So, whatever went in his mind, he came to the conclusion that going to Cairo is not going to help his chances of being reelected.

My great worry is not that he didn’t go to Cairo. My greatest worry is that he does believe that his only chance of being reelected is still to have a war going on, either in Gaza or in the West Bank or against Iran or in the north with Lebanon.

We are dealing here with a reckless, irresponsible politician, who is even willing to drown his own state in the process of saving his skin and his neck. And the victims will always be, from this adventurous policy, the Palestinians.

I hope the world understands that, really, the urgent need of — and I’m talking about world leaders rather than societies. You already discussed what is the level of solidarity among civil societies. But I do hope that political elites will understand — especially in the West — their role now is not to mediate between Israelis and Palestinians.

Their role now is to protect the Palestinians from destruction, elimination, genocide and ethnic cleansing. And nothing of that duty, especially of Europe, that is complicit with what happened, and the United States, that are complicit with what happened in the last two years — nothing that we heard in the speeches so far in the — in preparation for the summit in Egypt, and I have a feeling that we won’t hear anything about it also later on.

There is a different way in which our civil societies refer to Palestine as a place that has to be saved and protected, and still this irrelevant conversation among our political elites about a peace deal, a two-state solution, all of that, that has nothing to do with what we are experiencing in the way that the Israeli government thinks it has an historical moment to totally de-Arabise Palestine and eliminate and expunge the Palestinians from history and the area.

AMY GOODMAN: Ilan Pappé, I want to thank you for being with us, Israeli historian, professor of history, director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter, chair of the Nakba Memorial Foundation. His new book, Israel on the Brink: And the Eight Revolutions That Could Lead to Decolonization and Coexistence.

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 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 New Zealand government needs to do more for its Pacific Island neighbours and stand up to nuclear powers, a distinguished journalist, media educator and author says.

Professor David Robie, a recipient of the New Zealand Order of Merit (MNZM), released the latest edition of his book Eyes of Fire: The last voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior (Little Island Press), which highlights the nuclear legacies of the United States and France.

Dr Robie, who has worked in Pacific journalism and academia for more than 50 years, recounts the crew’s experiences aboard the Greenpeace flagship the Rainbow Warrior in 1985, before it was bombed in Auckland Harbour.

• LISTEN: Dr David Robie talks to RNZ Pacific last week
• Crimes NZ: David Robie on the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior — RNZ Afternoons
• Other Eyes of Fire reports

At the time, New Zealand stood up to nuclear powers, he said.

“It was pretty callous [of] the US and French authorities to think they could just carry on nuclear tests in the Pacific, far away from the metropolitan countries, out of the range of most media, and just do what they like,” Dr Robie told RNZ Pacific. “It is shocking, really.”

Speaking to Pacific Waves, Dr Robie said that Aotearoa had “forgotten” how to stand up for the region.

“The real issue in the Pacific is about climate crisis and climate justice. And we’re being pushed this way and that by the US [and] by the French. The French want to make a stake in their Indo-Pacific policies as well,” he said.

‘We need to stand up’
“We need to stand up for smaller Pacific countries.”

Dr Robie believes that New Zealand is failing with its diplomacy in the region.

He accused the coalition government of being “too timid” and “afraid of offending President Donald Trump” to make a stand on the nuclear issue.

However, a spokesperson for New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters told RNZ Pacific that New Zealand’s “overarching priority . . . is to work with Pacific partners to achieve a secure, stable, and prosperous region that preserves Pacific sovereignty and agency”.

The spokesperson said that through its foreign policy “reset”, New Zealand was committed to “comprehensive relationships” with Pacific Island countries.

“New Zealand’s identity, prosperity and security are intertwined with the Pacific through deep cultural, people, historical, security, and economic linkages.”

The New Zealand government commits almost 60 percent of its development funding to the region.

Pacific ‘increasingly contested’
The spokesperson said that the Pacific was becoming increasingly contested and complex.

“New Zealand has been clear with all of our partners that it is important that engagement in the Pacific takes place in a manner which advances Pacific priorities, is consistent with established regional practices, and supportive of Pacific regional institutions.”

They added that New Zealand’s main focus remained on the Pacific, “where we will be working with partners including the United States, Australia, Japan and in Europe to more intensively leverage greater support for the region.

“We will maintain the high tempo of political engagement across the Pacific to ensure alignment between our programme and New Zealand and partner priorities. And we will work more strategically with Pacific governments to strengthen their systems, so they can better deliver the services their people need,” the spokesperson said.

However, former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark, writing in the prologue of Dr Robie’s book, said: “New Zealand needs to re-emphasise the principles and values which drove its nuclear-free legislation and its advocacy for a nuclear-free South Pacific and global nuclear disarmament.”

Dr Robie added that looking back 40 years to the 1980s, there was a strong sense of pride in being from Aotearoa, the small country which set an example around the world.

“We took on . . . the nuclear powers,” Dr Robie said.

“And the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior was symbolic of that struggle, in a way, but it was a struggle that most New Zealanders felt a part of, and we were very proud of that [anti-nuclear] role that we took.

“Over the years, it has sort of been forgotten”.

‘Look at history’
France conducted 193 nuclear tests over three decades until 1996 in French Polynesia.

Until 2009, France claimed that its tests were “clean” and caused no harm, but in 2010, under the stewardship of Defence Minister Herve Morin, a compensation law was passed.

From 1946 to 1962, 67 nuclear bombs were detonated in the Marshall Islands by the US.

In 2024, then-US deputy secretary of state Kurt Campbell, while responding to a question from RNZ Pacific about America’s nuclear legacy, said: “Washington has attempted to address it constructively with massive resources and a sustained commitment.”

However, Dr Robie said that was not good enough and labelled the destruction left behind by the US, and France, as “outrageous”.

“It is political speak; politicians trying to cover their backs and so on. If you look at history, [the response] is nowhere near good enough, both by the US and the French.”

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

A journalist who was on the Rainbow Warrior voyage to Rongelap last night condemned France for its “callous” attack of an environmental ship, saying “we haven’t forgotten, or forgiven this outrage”.

David Robie, the author of Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, said at the launch that the consequences of almost 300 US and French nuclear tests – many of them “dirty bombs” — were still impacting on indigenous Pacific peoples 40 years after the bombing of the ship.

French saboteurs had killed “our shipmate Fernando Pereira” on 10 July 1985 in what the New Zealand prime minister at the time, David Lange, called a “sordid act of international state-backed terrorism”.

• READ MORE: NFIP activists, advocates to open nuclear-free Pacific exhibition
• ‘Storm clouds are gathering’: 40 years on from the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior
• Rainbow Warrior bombing remembered 40 years on
• Rainbow Warrior bombing ‘should have led to French Watergate’, says saboteur
• Other nuclear-free Pacific reports

Although relations with France had perhaps mellowed over time, four decades ago there was a lot of hostility towards the country, Dr Robie said.

“And that act of mindless sabotage still rankles very deeply in our psyche,” he said at the launch in Auckland Central’s Ellen Melville Centre on the anniversary of July 10.

About 100 people gathered in the centre’s Pioneer Women’s Hall for the book launch as Dr Robie reflected on the case of state terrorism after Greenpeace earlier in the day held a memorial ceremony on board Rainbow Warrior III.

“One of the celebrated French newspapers, Le Monde, played a critical role in the investigation into the Rainbow Warrior affair — what I brand as ‘Blundergate’, in view of all the follies of the bumbling DGSE spy team,” he said.

Plantu cartoon
“And one of the cartoons in that newspaper, by Plantu, who is a sort of French equivalent to Michael Leunig, caught my eye.

“You will notice it in the background slide show behind me. It shows François Mitterrand, the president of the French republic at the time, dressed in a frogman’s wetsuit lecturing to school children during a history lesson.

“President Mitterrand says, in French, ‘At that time, only presidents had the right to carry out terrorism!’

He noticed that in the Mitterrand cartoon there was a “classmate” sitting in the back of the room with a moustache. This was none other than Edwy Plenel, the police reporter for Le Monde at the time, who scooped the world with hard evidence of Mitterrand and the French government’s role at the highest level in the Rainbow Warrior sabotage.

Dr Robie said that Plenel now published the investigative website Mediapart, which had played a key role in 2015 revealing the identity of the bomber that night, “the man who had planted the limpet mines on the Rainbow Warrior — sinking a peace and environmental ship, and killing Fernando Pereira.”

Jean-Luc Kister, a retired French colonel and DGSE secret agent, had confessed to his role and “apologised”, claiming the sabotage operation was “disproportionate and a mistake”.

“Was he sincere? Was it a genuine attempt to come to terms with his conscience. Who knows?” Dr Robie said, adding that he was unconvinced.

French perspective
Dr Robie said he had asked Plenel for his reflections from a French perspective 40 years on. Plenel cited three main take ways.

“First, the vital necessity of independent journalism. Independent of all powers, whether state, economic or ideological. Journalism that serves the public interest, the right to know, and factual truths.

“Impactful journalism whose revelations restore confidence in democracy, in the possibility of improving it, and in the usefulness of counterbalancing powers, particularly journalism.”

Secondly, this attack had been carried out by France in an “allied country”, New Zealand, against a civil society organisation. This demonstrated that “the thirst for power is a downfall that leads nations astray when they succumb to it.

“Nuclear weapons epitomise this madness, this catastrophe of power.”

Finally, Plenel expressed the “infinite sadness” for a French citizen that after his revelations in Le Monde — which led to the resignations of the defence minister and the head of the secret services — nothing else happened.

“Nothing at all. No parliamentary inquiry, no questioning of François Mitterrand about his responsibility, no institutional reform of the absolute power of the president in a French republic that is, in reality, an elective monarchy.”

‘Elective monarchy’ trend
Dr Robie compared the French outcome with the rapid trend in US today, “a president who thinks he is a monarch, a king – another elective monarchy.”

He also bemoaned that “catastrophe of power” that “reigns everywhere today – from the horrendous Israeli genocide in Gaza to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, from Trump to Putin to Netanyahu, and so many others.”

The continuous Gaza massacres were a shameful indictment of the West that had allowed it to happen for more than 21 months.

Dr Robie thanked many collaborators for their help and support, including drama teacher Hilari Anderson, an original crew member of the Rainbow Warrior, and photographer John Miller, “who have been with me all the way on this waka journey”.

He thanked his wife, Del, and family members for their unstinting “patience and support”, and also publisher Tony Murrow of Little Island Press.

Launching the book, Greenpeace Aotearoa programme director Niamh O’Flynn said one thing that had stood out for her was how the legacy of the Rainbow Warrior had continued despite the attempt by the French government to shut it down 40 years ago.

“We said then that ‘you can’t sink a rainbow’, and we went on to prove it.

“When the Rainbow Warrior was bombed in Auckland harbour, it was getting ready to set sail to Moruroa Atoll, to enter the test exclusion zone and confront French nuclear testing head-on.”

So threatened
The French government had felt so threatened by that action that it had engaged in a state-sanctioned terror attack to prevent the mission from going ahead.

“But we rebuilt, and the Rainbow Warrior II carried on with that mission, travelling to Moruroa three times before the French finally stopped nuclear testing in the Pacific.

“That spirit and tenacity is what makes Greenpeace and what makes the Rainbow Warrior so special to everyone who has sailed on her,” she said.

“It was the final voyage of the Rainbow Warrior to Rongelap before the bombing that is the focus of David Robie’s book, and in many ways, it was an incredibly unique experience for Greenpeace — not just here in Aotearoa, but internationally.

“And of course David was a key part in that.”

O’Flynn said that as someone who had not even been born yet when the Rainbow Warrior was bombed, “I am so grateful that the generation of nuclear-free activists took the time to pass on their knowledge and to build our organisation into what it is today.

“Just as David has by writing down his story and leaving us with such a rich legacy.”

Other speakers
Among other speakers at the book launch were teacher Hilari Anderson, publisher Tony Murrow of Little Island Press, Ena Manuireva, a Mangarevian scholar and cultural adviser, and MC Antony Phillips of Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga.

Anderson spoke of the Warrior’s early campaigns and acknowledged the crews of 1978 and 1985.

“I have been reflecting what these first and last crews of the original Rainbow Warrior had in common, realising that both gave their collective, mostly youthful energy — to transformation.

“This has involved the bonding of crews by working hands-on together. Touching surfaces, by hammer and paint, created a physical connection to this beloved boat.”

She paid special tribute to two powerful women, Denise Bell, who tracked down the marine research vessel in Aberdeen that became the Rainbow Warrior, and the indomitable Susi Newborn, who “contributed to naming the ship and mustering a crew”.

Manuireva spoke about his nuclear colonial experience and that of his family as natives of Mangareva atoll, about 400 km from Muroroa atoll, where France conducted most of its 30 years of tests ending in 1995.

He also spoke of Tahitian leader Oscar Temaru’s pioneering role in the Nuclear-Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement, and played haunting Tahitian songs on his guitar.

• Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, by David Robie, prologue by Helen Clark (Little Island Press).

Author David Robie and Little Island Press are about to publish next week a 40th anniversary edition of Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, a first-hand account of the relocation of the Rongelap people by Greenpeace’s flagship Rainbow Warrior in 1985.

Dr Robie joined what turned out to be the ill-fated voyage of the Rainbow Warrior from Hawai’i across the Pacific, with its first stop in the Marshall Islands and the momentous evacuation of Rongelap Atoll.

After completing the evacuation of the 320 people of Rongelap from their unsafe nuclear test-affected home islands to Mejatto Island in Kwajalein Atoll, the Rainbow Warrior headed south via Kiribati and Vanuatu.

• READ MORE: Other Eyes of Fire reports

After a stop in New Zealand, it was scheduled to head to the French nuclear testing zone at Moruroa in French Polynesia to protest the then-ongoing atmospheric nuclear tests conducted by France for decades.

But French secret agents attached bombs to the hull of the Rainbow Warrior while it was tied up at a pier in Auckland. The bombs mortally damaged the Warrior and killed Greenpeace photographer Fernando Peirera, preventing the vessel from continuing its Pacific voyage.

The new edition of Eyes of Fire will be launched on July 10 in New Zealand.

“This edition has a small change of title, Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, and has an extra 30 pages, with a new prologue by former Prime Minister Helen Clark,” Dr Robie said in an email to the Journal.

“The core of the book is similar to earlier editions, but bookended by a lot of new material: Helen’s Prologue, Bunny McDiarmid’s updated Preface and a long Postscript 2025 by me with a lot more photographs, some in colour.”

Dr Robie added: “I hope this edition is doing justice to our humanitarian mission and the Rongelap people that we helped.”

He said the new edition is published by a small publisher that specialises in Pacific Island books, often in Pacific languages, Little Island Press.

• For more information about the new book: https://littleisland.nz/books/eyes-fire

Four researchers and authors from the Asia-Pacific region have provided diverse perspectives on the media in a new global book on intercultural communication.

The Sage Handbook of Intercultural Communication published this week offers a global, interdisciplinary, and contextual approach to understanding the complexities of intercultural communication in our diverse and interconnected world.

It features University of Queensland academic Dr Mairead MacKinnon; founding director of the Pacific Media Centre professor David Robie; University of Ottawa’s Dr Marie M’Balla-Ndi Oelgemoeller; and University of the South Pacific journalism coordinator associate professor Shailendra Singh.

• READ MORE: Daily use of Indigenous languages in intercultural communication boosts social justice
• Other intercultural communication reports

Featuring contributions from 56 leading and emerging scholars across multiple disciplines, including communication studies, psychology, applied linguistics, sociology, education, and business, the handbook covers research spanning geographical locations across Europe, Africa, Oceania, North America, South America, and the Asia Pacific.

It focuses on specific contexts such as the workplace, education, family, media, crisis, and intergroup interactions. Each chapter takes a contextual approach to examine theories and applications, providing insights into the dynamic interplay between culture, communication, and society.

One of the co-editors, University of Queensland’s associate professor Levi Obijiofor, says the book provides an overview of scholarship, outlining significant theories and research paradigms, and highlighting major debates and areas for further research in intercultural communication.

“Each chapter stands on its own and could be used as a teaching or research resource. Overall, the book fills a gap in the field by exploring new ideas, critical perspectives, and innovative methods,” he says.

Refugees to sustaining journalism
Dr MacKinnon writes about media’s impact on refugee perspectives of belonging in Australia; Dr Robie on how intercultural communication influences Pacific media models; Dr M’Balla-Ndi Oelgemoeller examines accounting for race in journalism education; and Dr Singh unpacks sustaining journalism in “uncertain times” in Pacific island states.

Dr Singh says that in research terms the book is important for contributing to global understandings about the nature of Pacific media.

“The Pacific papers address a major gap in international scholarship on Pacific media. In terms of professional practice, the papers address structural problems in the regional media sector, thereby providing a clearer idea of long term solutions, as opposed to ad hoc measures and knee-jerk reactions, such as harsher legislation.”

Dr Robie, who is also editor of Asia Pacific Report and pioneered some new ways of examining Pacific media and intercultural inclusiveness in the Asia-Pacific region, says it is an important and comprehensive collection of essays and ought to be in every communication school library.

He refers to his “talanoa journalism” model, saying it “outlines a more culturally appropriate benchmark than monocultural media templates.

“Hopefully, this cross-cultural model would encourage more Pacific-based approaches in revisiting the role of the media to fit local contexts.”

Comprehensive exploration
The handbook brings together established theories, methodologies, and practices and provides a comprehensive exploration of intercultural communication in response to the challenges and opportunities presented by the global society.

From managing cultural diversity in the workplace to creating culturally inclusive learning environments in educational settings, from navigating intercultural relationships within families to understanding the role of media in shaping cultural perceptions, this handbook delves into diverse topics with depth and breadth.

It addresses contemporary issues such as hate speech, environmental communication, and communication strategies in times of crisis.

It also offers theoretical insights and practical recommendations for researchers, practitioners, policymakers, educators, and students.

The handbook is structured into seven parts, beginning with the theoretical and methodological development of the field before delving into specific contexts of intercultural communication.

Each part provides a rich exploration of key themes, supported by cutting-edge research and innovative approaches.

With its state-of-the-art content and forward-looking perspectives, this Sage Handbook of Intercultural Communication serves as an indispensable resource for understanding and navigating the complexities of intercultural communication in our increasingly interconnected world.

• More information about the Sage Handbook of Intercultural Communication

For 30 years, Filipino journalist Manny “Bok” Mogato covered the police and defence rounds, and everything from politics to foreign relations, sports, and entertainment, eventually bagging one of journalism’s top prizes — the Pulitzer in 2018, for his reporting on Duterte’s drug war along with two other Reuters correspondents, Andrew Marshall and Clare Baldwin.

For Mogato it was time for him to “write it all down,” and so he did, launching the autobiography It’s Me, Bok! Journeys in Journalism in October 2024.

Mogato told Rappler, he wanted to “write it all down before I forget and impart my knowledge to the youth, young journalists, so they won’t make the same mistakes that I did”.

• READ MORE: Killing as policy: Duterte’s bloody drug war that Marcos will inherit
• PHOTOESSAY: Buried in debt only to have their loved ones get a burial — Pacific Journalism Review
• Other Duterte war on drugs reports

His career has spanned many organisations, including the Journal group, The Manila Chronicle, The Manila Times, Japan’s Asahi Shimbun, and Rappler. Outside of journalism, he also serves as a consultant for Cignal TV.

Recently, we sat down with Mogato to talk about his career — a preview of what you might be able to read in his book — and pick out a few lessons for today’s journalists, as well as his views on the country today.

You’ve covered so many beats. Which beat did you enjoy covering most? 

Manny Mogato: The military. Technically, I was assigned to the military defence beat for only a few years, from 1987 to 1992. In early 1990, FVR (Fidel V. Ramos) was running for president, and I was made to cover his campaign.

When he won, I was assigned to cover the military, and I went back to the defence beat because I had so many friends there.

‘We faced several coups’
I really enjoyed it and still enjoy it because you go to places, to military camps. And then I also covered the defence beat at the most crucial and turbulent period in our history — when we faced several coups.

Rappler: You have mellowed through the years as a reporter. You chronicled in your book that when you were younger, you were learning the first two years about the police beat and then transferred to another publication.

How did your reporting style mellow, or did it grow? Did you become more curious or did you become less curious? Over the years as a reporter, did you become more or less interested in what was happening around you?

How would you describe your process then?

MM: Curiosity is the word I would use. So, from the start until now, I am still curious about things happening around me. Exciting things, interesting things.

But if you read the book, you’ll see I’ve mellowed a lot because I was very reckless during my younger days.

I would go on assignments without asking permission from my office. For instance, there was this hostage-taking incident in Zamboanga, where a policeman held hostages of several officers, including a general and a colonel.

So when I learned that, I volunteered to go without asking permission from my office. I only had 100 pesos (NZ$3) in my pocket. And so what I did, I saw the soldiers loading bullets into the boxes and I picked up one box and carried it.

Hostage crisis with one tee
So when the aircraft was already airborne, they found out I was there, and so I just sat somewhere, and I covered the hostage crisis for three to four days with only one T-shirt.

Reporters in Zamboanga were kind enough to lend me T-shirts. They also bought me underpants. I slept in the headquarters crisis. And then later, restaurants. Alavar is a very popular seafood restaurant in Zamboanga. I slept there. So when the crisis was over, I came back. At that time, the Chronicle and ABS-CBN were sister companies.

When I returned to Manila, my editor gave me a commendation — but looking back . . . I just had to get a story.

Rappler: So that is what drives you?

MM: Yes, I have to get the story. I will do this on my own. I have to be ahead of the others. In 1987, when a PAL flight to Baguio City crashed, killing all 50 people on board, including the crew and the passengers, I was sent by my office to Baguio to cover the incident.

But the crash site was in Benguet, in the mountains. So I went there to the mountains. And then the Igorots were in that area, living in that area.

I was with other reporters and mountaineering clubs. We decided to go back because we were surrounded by the Igorots [who made it difficult for us to do our jobs]. Luckily, the Lopezes had a helicopter and [we] were the first to take photos.

‘I saw the bad side of police’
Rappler: Why are military and defense your favourite beats to cover?

MM: I started my career in 1983/1984, as a police reporter. So I know my way around the police. And I have many good friends in the police. I saw the bad side of the police, the dark side, corruption, and everything.

I also saw the military in the most turbulent period of our history when I was assigned to the military. So I saw good guys, I saw terrible guys. I saw everything in the military, and I made friends with them. It’s exciting to cover the military, the insurgency, the NPAs (New People’s Army rebels), and the secessionist movement.

You have to gain the trust of the soldiers of your sources. And if you don’t have trust, writing a story is impossible; it becomes a motherhood statement. But if you go deeper, dig deeper, you make friends, they trust you, you get more stories, you get the inside story, you get the background story, you get the top secret stories.

Because I made good friends with senior officers during my time, they can show me confidential memorandums and confidential reports, and I write about them.

I have made friends with so many of these police and military men. It started when they were lieutenants, then majors, and then generals. We’d go out together, have dinner or some drinks somewhere, and discuss everything, and they will tell you some secrets.

Before, you’d get paid 50 pesos (NZ$1.50) as a journalist every week by the police. Eventually, I had to say no and avoid groups of people engaging in this corruption. Reuters wouldn’t have hired me if I’d continued.

Rappler: With everything that you have seen in your career, what do you think is the actual state of humanity? Because you’ve seen hideous things, I’m sure. And very corrupt things. What do you think of people? 

‘The Filipinos are selfish’
MM: Well, I can speak of the Filipino people. The Filipinos are selfish. They are only after their own welfare. There is no humanity in the Filipino mentality. They’re pulling each other down all the time.

I went on a trip with my family to Japan in 2018. My son left his sling bag on the Shinkansen. So we returned to the train station and said my son had left his bag there. The people at the train station told us that we could get the bag in Tokyo.

So we went to Tokyo and recovered the bag. Everything was intact, including my money, the password, everything.

So, there are crises, disasters, and ayuda (aid) in other places. And the people only get what they need, no? In the Philippines, that isn’t the case. So that’s humanity [here]. It isn’t very pleasant for us Filipinos.

Rappler: Is there anything good?

MM: Everyone was sharing during the EDSA Revolution, sharing stories, and sharing everything. They forgot themselves. And they acted as a community known against Marcos in 1986. That is very telling and redeeming. But after that… [I can’t think of anything else that is good.]

Rappler: What is the one story you are particularly fond of that you did or something you like or are proud of? 

War on drugs, and typhoon Yolanda
MM: On drugs, my contribution to the Reuters series, and my police stories. Also, typhoon Yolanda in 2013. We left Manila on November 9, a day after the typhoon. We brought much equipment — generator sets, big cameras, food supply, everything.

But the thing is, you have to travel light. There are relief goods for the victims and other needs. When we arrived at the airport, we were shocked. Everything was destroyed. So we had to stay in the airport for the night and sleep.

We slept under the rain the entire time for the next three days. Upon arrival at the airport, we interviewed the police regional commander. Our report, I think, moved the international community to respond to the extended damage and casualties. My report that 10,000 people had died was nominated for the Society Publishers in Asia in Hong Kong.

Every day, we had to walk from the airport eight to 10 kilometers away, and along the way, we saw the people who were living outside their homes. And there was looting all over.

Rappler: There is a part in your book where you mentioned the corruption of journalists, right? And reporters. What do you mean by corruption? 

MM: Simple tokens are okay to accept. When I was with Reuters, its gift policy was that you could only accept gifts as much as $50. Anything more than $50 is already a bribe. There are things that you can buy on your own, things you can afford. Other publications, like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Associated Press [nes agency], have a $0 gift policy. We have this gift-giving culture in our culture. It’s Oriental.

If you can pay your own way, you should do it.

Rappler: Tell us more about winning the Pulitzer Prize.

Most winners are American, American issues
MM: I did not expect to win this American-centric award. Most of the winners are Americans and American stories, American issues. But it so happened this was international reporting. There were so many other stories that were worth the win.

The story is about the Philippines and the drug war. And we didn’t expect a lot of interest in that kind of story. So perhaps we were just lucky that we were awarded the Pulitzer Prize. In the Society of Publishers in Asia, in Hong Kong, the same stories were also nominated for investigative journalism. So we were not expecting that Pulitzer would pay attention.

The idea of the drug war was not the work of only three people: Andrew Marshal, Clare Baldwin and me. No, it was a team effort.

Rappler: What was your specific contribution?

MM: Andrew and Clare were immersed in different communities in Manila, Tondo, and Navotas City, interviewing victims and families and everybody, everyone else. On the other hand, my role was on the police.

I got the police comments and official police comments and also talked to police sources who would give us the inside story — the inside story of the drug war. So I have a good friend, a retired police general who was from the intelligence service, and he knew all about this drug war — mechanics, plan, reward system, and everything that they were doing. So, he reported about the drug war.

The actual drug war was what the late General Rodolfo Mendoza said was a ruse because Duterte was protecting his own drug cartel.

Bishops wanted to find out
He had a report made for Catholic bishops. There was a plenary in January 2017, and the bishops wanted to find out. So he made the report. His report was based on 17 active police officers who are still in active service. So when he gave me this report, I showed it to my editors.

My editor said: “Oh, this is good. This is a good guide for our story.” He got this information from the police sources — subordinates, those who were formerly working for him, gave him the information.

So it was hearsay, you know. So my editor said: “Why can’t you convince him to introduce us to the real people involved in the drug war?”

So, the general and I had several interviews. Usually, our interviews lasted until early morning. Father [Romeo] Intengan facilitated the interview. He was there to help us. At the same time, he was the one serving us coffee and biscuits all throughout the night.

So finally, after, I think, two or three meetings, he agreed that he would introduce us to police officers. So we interviewed the police captain who was really involved in the killings, and in the operation, and in the drug war.

So we got a lot of information from him. The info went not only to one story but several other stories.

He was saying it was also the police who were doing it.

Rappler: Wrapping up — what do you think of the Philippines?

‘Duterte was the worst’
MM: The Philippines under former President Duterte was the worst I’ve seen. Worse than under former President Ferdinand Marcos. People were saying Marcos was the worst president because of martial law. He closed down the media, abolished Congress, and ruled by decree.

I think more than 3000 people died, and 10,000 were tortured and jailed.

But in three to six years under Duterte, more than 30,000 people died. No, he didn’t impose martial law, but there was a de facto martial law. The anti-terrorism law was very harsh, and he closed down ABS-CBN television.

It had a chilling effect on all media organisations. So, the effect was the same as what Marcos did in 1972.

We thought that Marcos Jr would become another Duterte because they were allies. And we felt that he would follow the policies of President Duterte, but it turned out he’s much better.

Well, everything after Duterte is good. Because he set the bar so low.

Everything is rosy — even if Marcos is not doing enough because the economy is terrible. Inflation is high, unemployment is high, foreign direct investments are down, and the peso is almost 60 to a dollar.

Praised over West Philippine Sea
However, the people still praise Marcos for his actions in the West Philippine Sea. I think the people love him for that. And the number of killings in the drug war has gone down.

There are still killings, but the number has really gone so low, I would say about 300 in the first two years.

Rappler: Why did you write your book, It’s Me, Bok! Journeys in Journalism?

MM:  I have been writing snippets of my experiences on Facebook. Many friends were saying, ‘Why don’t you write a book?’ including Secretary [of National Defense] Gilberto Teodoro, who was fond of reading my snippets.

In my early days, I was reckless as a reporter. I don’t want the younger reporters to do that. And no story is worth writing if you are risking your life.

I want to leave behind a legacy, and I know that my memory will fail me sooner rather than later. It took me only three months to write the book.

It’s very raw. There will be a second printing. I want to polish the book and expand some of the events.

Republished with permission from Rappler.

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

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

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

• READ MORE: Other Pacific Media Conference reports

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As an economy, Fiji has paid a “very high price for being unable to protect freedom” but people can speak and criticise the government freely now, says Deputy Prime Minister Professor Biman Prasad.

He highlighted the “high price” while launching the new book titled Waves of Change: Media, Peace, and Development in the Pacific, which he also co-edited, at the Pacific International Media conference in Suva last week.

Prasad, a former University of the South Pacific (USP) economics professor, said that he, in a deeply personal way, knew how the economy had been affected when he saw the debt numbers and what the government had inherited.

• READ MORE: Other Pacific Media Conference reports

Professor Prasad says the government had reintroduced media self-regulation and “we can actually feel the freedom everywhere, including in Parliament”.

USP head of journalism associate professor Shailendra Singh and former USP lecturer and co-founder of The Australia Today Dr Amrit Sarwal also co-edited the book with Professor Prasad.

While also speaking during the launch, PNG Minister for Information and Communications Technology Timothy Masiu expressed support for the Fiji government repealing the media laws that curbed freedom in Fiji in the recent past.

He said his Department of ICT had set up a social media management desk to monitor the ever-increasing threats on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and other online platforms.

Fiji Deputy Prime Minister Professor Biman Prasad speaking at the book launch. Video: Fijivillage News

• promote media self-regulation;
• improve government media capacity;
• roll out media infrastructure for all; and
• diversify content and quota usage for national interest.

He said that to elevate media professionalism in PNG, the policy called for developing media self-regulation in the country without direct government intervention.

Strike a balance
Masiu said the draft policy also intended to strike a balance between the media’s ongoing role in transparency and accountability on the one hand, and the dissemination of developmental information, on the other hand.

He said it was not an attempt by the government to restrict the media in PNG and the media in PNG enjoyed “unprecedented freedom” and an ability to report as they deemed appropriate.

The PNG Minister said their leaders were constantly being put in the spotlight.

While they did not necessarily agree with many of the daily news media reports, the governmenr would not “suddenly move to restrict the media” in PNG in any form.

The 30th anniversary edition of the research journal Pacific Journalism Review, founded by former USP Journalism Programme head Professor David Robie at the University of Papua New Guinea, was also launched at the event.

The PJR has published more than 1100 research articles over the past 30 years and is the largest media research archive in the region.

Republished from Fijivillage News with permission.

A New Zealand author, journalist and media educator who has covered the Asia-Pacific region since the 1970s says liberation “must come” for Kanaky/New Caledonia.

Professor David Robie sailed on board Greenpeace’s flagship Rainbow Warrior until it was bombed by French secret agents in New Zealand in July 1985 and wrote the book Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior.

He has also been arrested at gun point in New Caledonia while on a mission reporting on the indigenous Kanak uprising in the 1980s and wrote Blood on their Banner: Nationalist Struggles in the South Pacific.

• LISTEN TO RNZ PACIFIC WAVES: Kanak ‘liberation must be granted’
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia crisis reports

The Asia Pacific Report editor told RNZ Pacific’s Lydia Lewis France was “torpedoing” any hopes of Kanaky independence.

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

By Antony Loewenstein

The Israeli defence industry inspires nations across the globe, many of which view themselves as under threat from external enemies.

The Taiwanese foreign minister, Joseph Wu, recently told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that: “Every aspect of the Israeli fighting capability is amazing to the Taiwanese people and the Taiwanese government.”

Wu explained that he appreciated how Israel protected its own country because, “basically, we [Taiwan] have barely started. The fighting experiences of Israel are something we’re not quite sure about ourselves. We haven’t had any war in the last four or five decades, but Israel has that kind of experience”.

• READ MORE: Antony Loewenstein: Palestine a testing ground for war tech
• Middle East Eye
• Antony Loewenstein’s website

Wu also expressed interest in Israeli weapons, suggesting his country had considered their usefulness in any potential war with China.

“Israel has the Iron Dome,” he said, referring to Israel’s defence system against short-range missiles. “We should look at some of the technology that has been used by the Israelis in its defence. I’m not sure whether we can copy it, but I think we can look at it and learn from it.”

It isn’t just Taiwan imagining itself as akin to Israel. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in April 2022 that his vision for his nation was to mimic “the Jewish state“.

Two months after Russia’s illegal invasion of its territory, Zelensky, who is a long-time supporter of Israel, argued that “our people will be our great army. We cannot talk about ‘Switzerland of the future’ — probably, our state will be able to be like this a long time after. But we will definitely become a ‘big Israel’ with its own face.”

Zelensky went on to explain that what he meant was the need in the future to have “representatives of the armed forces or the national guard in all institutions, supermarkets, cinemas; there will be people with weapons.”

The Palestine laboratory
This admiration for Israel is both unsurprising and disturbing. The praise for Israel almost always completely ignores its occupation of Palestinian territory — one of the longest in modern times — and the ways in which this colonial project is implemented.

When Taiwan, Ukraine or any other country looks to Israel for innovation, it’s a highly selective gaze which completely disappears the more than five million Palestinians under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.

The appeal of the Palestine laboratory is endless. I’ve spent the last years researching this concept and its execution in Palestine and across the globe.

My new book, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, uncovers how Israel has used the occupied Palestinians as the ultimate guineapigs when developing tools of repression, from drones to spyware and facial recognition to biometric data, while maintaining an “enemy” population, the Palestinians, under control for more than half a century.

Israel has sold defence equipment to at least 130 countries and is now the 10th biggest arms exporter in the world. The US is still the dominant player in this space, accounting for 40 percent of the global weapons industry.

Washington used its failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a testing ground for new weapons. During the current Russian invasion of Ukraine, the war has been a vital “beta test” for new weapons and sophisticated forms of surveillance and killing.

But Israel has a ready-made population of occupied Palestinians over which it has complete control. For more than five decades, Israeli intelligence authorities have built an NSA-level system of surveillance across the entire occupied Palestinian territories.

Nowhere is completely immune from listening, watching or following.

In the last decade, the most infamous example of Israeli repression tech is Pegasus, the phone hacking tool developed by the company NSO Group. Used and abused by dozens of nations around the world, Mexico is its most prolific adherent.

I spoke to dissidents, lawyers and human rights activists in Togo, Mexico, India and beyond whose lives were upended by this invasive, mostly silent tool.

Israeli state and spyware
However, missing from so much of the western media coverage, including outrage against NSO Group and its founders who were Israeli army veterans, is acknowledgement of the close ties between the firm and the Israeli state.

NSO is a private corporation in name only and is in fact an arm of Israel’s diplomacy, used by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Mossad to attract new friends in the international arena. Despite being blacklisted by the Biden administration in November 2021, the company still hopes to continue trading.

My research, along with that of other reporters, has shown a clear connection between the sale of Israeli cyberweapons and Israel’s attempts to neuter any potential backlash to its illegal occupation.

From Rwanda to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to India, Israeli spyware and surveillance tech are used by countless democracies and dictatorships alike.

Beyond Pegasus, many other similar tools have been deployed by newer and lesser-known Israeli companies, though they’re just as destructive. The problem isn’t just Pegasus — it could close down tomorrow and the privacy-busting technology would transfer to any number of competitors — but the unquenchable desire by governments, police forces and intelligence services for the relatively inexpensive Israeli tech that powers it.

India is even looking for alternatives to NSO Group with a less controversial history.

The Palestine laboratory is so successful because nobody wants to seriously regulate the fruits of its labours.

Ideological alignment
The extent of Israeli collusion with 20th and 21st century repression is overwhelming.

Perhaps the most revealing was the deep relationship between apartheid South Africa and Israel. It wasn’t just about arms trading, but an ideological alignment between two states that truly believed that they were fighting for their very existence.

In 1976, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin invited South African Prime Minister John Vorster, a Nazi sympathiser during the Second World War, to visit Israel. His tour included a stop at Yad Vashem, the country’s Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

When Vorster arrived in Israel, he was feted by Rabin at a state dinner. Rabin toasted “the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence”. Both nations faced “foreign-inspired instability and recklessness”.

Israel and South Africa viewed themselves as under attack by foreign bodies committed to their destruction. A short time after Vorster’s visit, the South African government yearbook explained that both states were facing the same issue: “Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples.”

A love of ethnonationalism still fuels Israel today, along with a desire to export it. Some arms deals with nations, such as Bangladesh or the Philippines, are purely on military grounds and to make money.

Israel places barely any restrictions on what it sells, which pleases leaders who don’t want meddling in their actions. Pro-Israel lobbyists are increasingly working for repressive states, such as Bangladesh, to promote their supposed usefulness to the West.

Israel and the global far right
But Israel’s affinity with Hungary, India and the global far right, a group that traditionally hates Jews, speaks volumes about the inspirational nature of the modern Israeli state. As Haaretz journalist Noa Landau recently wrote, while explaining why Netanyahu’s government defended the latest arguably antisemitic comments by Elon Musk about George Soros:

“The government’s mobilisation in the service of stoking antisemitism is not surprising. It is the fruit of a long and consistent process in which the Netanyahu government has been growing closer to extreme right-wing elements around the world, at the expense of Jewish communities it purports to represent.”

It’s worth pausing for a moment to reflect on this undeniable reality. Israel, which claims to represent global Jewry, is encouraging an alignment between itself and a hyper-nationalist, bigoted and racist populism, regardless of the long-term consequences for the safety and security of Jews around the world.

Israel has thrived as an ethnonationalist state for so long because the vast bulk of the world grants it impunity. European nations have been key supporters of Israel, willing to overlook its occupation and abuse of Palestinians.

According to newly declassified documents from the files of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, between 1967 and 1990 it’s clear that West Germany was becoming more critical of Israel’s settlement project in Palestine, but the main concern was protecting its own financial interests in the region if a regional war broke out.

In a document written on 16 February 1975 to the deputy director of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Western Europe, Nissim Yaish, before Israel’s Foreign Minister Yigal Allon’s visit to West Germany, Yaish explained the thinking in his country’s diplomatic bureaucracy:

“There is unanimity that this time such a war will have a far-reaching impact on all its affairs internally and externally and that it could wreak a Holocaust on the German economy. Based on this attitude, West Germany is interested in rapid progress toward a [peace] agreement.”

Western silence
But there has rarely been any serious interest in pursuing peace, or holding Israel to account for its blatantly illegal actions, because the economic imperative is too strong. Even today, when another Nakba against Palestinians is becoming more possible to imagine, there’s largely silence from Western elites.

Germany has banned public recognition of the 1948 Nakba and criminalised any solidarity with the Palestinian people. Germany is also keen to buy an Israeli missile defence system, confirming its priorities.

This is why Israeli apartheid and the Palestine laboratory are so hard to stop; countless nations want a piece of Israeli repression tech to surveil their own unwanted populations or election meddling support in Latin America or Africa.

Without a push for accountability, economic boycotts and regulation or banning Israeli spyware — the EU is flirting with the idea — Israel can feel comfortable that its position as a global leader in offensive weapons is secure.

This article was first published in the Middle East Eye.

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.

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

Peace campaigners, activists and Nuclear-Free and Independent Pacific stalwarts were among those who gathered in Auckland this evening to celebrate publication of a new book dedicated to the remarkable mahi of the late international peace researcher Owen Wilkes.

This Auckland launch of Peacemonger at Grey Lynn’s Trades Hall was the second of three such events following one in Christchurch last week and a third planned for Wellington on February 24.

Speakers included three of the four Auckland contributors to the book — event organiser Maire Leadbeater, Dr Bob Mann and Dr David Robie — with the fourth, Dr Peter Wills, sending his apologies. Dr Robie also shared a message from Swedish researcher Paul Claesson.

Guest speakers Bob Woodward and Lyn Hume reflected on the Peace Movement and the remarkable achievements over many years.

Activist musician Roger Fowler rounded off the evening with a performance.

Photographs: Del Abcede/WILPF and APR

• 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

Owen Wilkes book launch

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COMMENT: By Paul Claesson in Stockholm

I got to know Owen Wilkes through friends in 1980, when as a 22-year-old student I ended up in a housing collective where his ex-partner lived. He was then at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), having recently arrived from the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), and was, in addition to his collaboration with Nils-Petter Gleditsch, already in full swing with his Foreign Military Presence project.

He hired me as an assistant with responsibility for Spanish and Portuguese-language source material.

During this time I got to know Søren MC and Kirsten Bruun in Copenhagen, who had recently launched the magazine Försvar — Militärkritiskt Magasin. I contributed a couple of articles and was then invited to participate in the editorial team.

• READ MORE: Peacemonger – a tribute to peace researcher Owen Wilkes out now

A theme issue about the American bases in Greenland grew into a book, Greenland — The Pearl of the Mediterranean, which apparently caused considerable consternation in the Ministry of Greenland. The book resulted in a hearing in Christiansborg.

I was also responsible for a theme issue about the DEW (Early Warning Line) and Loran C facilities on the Faroe Islands. I was in Stockholm when SÄPO’s spy target against Owen started, and I was there the whole way.

SÄPO interrogated me a couple of times, and at one point during the trial, when I took the opportunity to hand out relevant material about Owen’s research — all publicly available — to journalists in the audience, I was visibly thrown out of the case by a couple of angry young men from FSÄK (the security service of the Swedish defence establishment).

Distorted by media
Owen and I saw each other almost every day — sometimes I stayed with him in his little cabin in Älvsjö — and together we wondered how his various activities, such as his innocent fishing trip in Åland, were distorted in the media by FSÄK and the prosecutor’s care (SÄPO had subsequently begun to show greater doubt about Owen’s guilt).

In 1984-85, after he had been expelled from Sweden, I was Owen’s house guest at his farm in Karamea, Mahoe Farm, on New Zealand’s West Coast, at the northern end of the road. He was in the process of selling it.

With his brother Jack, he had started a commercial bee farm, and together we spent an intensive summer — harvesting bush honey, pollinating apple and kiwifruit orchards and building a small harvest house for the honey collection.

In the meantime, we sold — or ate up — the farm’s remaining flock of sheep. When the farm was sold, we moved to Wellington — I was offered a room in the Quakers’ guest house, where I joined the work at Peace Movement Aotearoa’s premises on Pirie Street.

Then Prime Minister David Lange had recently let New Zealand withdraw from ANZUS, as a result of his government’s refusal to allow US Navy ships to call at port unless they declared themselves disarmed of nuclear weapons.

As a result, PMA organised a conference with the theme nuclear-free Pacific, with participants from all over the Pacific region. Together with Owen, Nicky Hager and others I contributed to the planning and execution of the conference.

Surveying US signals intelligence
Before this, Owen and Nicky had begun surveying American signals intelligence facilities in New Zealand. I took part in this, ie. with a couple of photo excursions to Tangimoana.

Owen and I kept in touch after my return to Sweden. What I remember best from his letters from this time — apart from his musings about his work as a government defence consultant — are his often comical anecdotes about his adventures in the bush, where his task was mainly to map Māori cultural remains before they were chewed up into pieces by the forest industry.

His sudden death took a toll. I got the news from his partner May Bass. I would have liked to have flown to NZ to attend the memorial services for him, but ironically they coincided with my wedding.

Owen played a very big role in my life. I admired him, and miss him all the time. More than anyone else I have known, he deserves to be remembered in writing. I was therefore very happy when I heard about the time and energy devoted to this book project. My sincere gratitude.

• 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
• Book launch: 5.30-7.30, 16 December 2022, Trades Hall, 147 Great North Road, Grey Lynn. All welcome. More information

Owen Wilkes (1940–2005) was known throughout the Pacific and across the world as an outstanding researcher on peace and disarmament.

His work:

• exposed plans to build a US Navy satellite tracking station in the Southern Alps
• identified a foreign spy base at Tangimoana (near Bulls)
• led to job offers from leading peace research institutes in Norway and Sweden — and an espionage charge for taking photographs during a cycling holiday, and
• supported local campaigns against foreign military activity in the Philippines, and for a nuclear-free Pacific.

Born in Christchurch, Owen Wilkes was an internationalist and a dedicated New Zealander — a subsistence farmer on the West Coast (where his self-built eco-home was demolished by the local council), an archaeologist, tramper and yachtsman.

In this forthcoming book, edited by historian Mark Derby and Wilkes’ former partner May Bass, experts in their own fields who knew and worked with him reflect on his achievements and his legacy. The contributors include:

Ingvar Botnen
Nils Petter Gleditsch
Nicky Hager
Di Hooper
Murray Horton
Maire Leadbeater
Robert Mann
Neville Ritchie
David Robie
Ken Ross
Peter Wills

The book, published by Raekaihau Press in association with Steele Roberts Aotearoa, has a timeline, a bibliography of Owen’s publications in several languages, and an index.

The book is being published on November 23.

• More information

“These are dark times for our nation”, former US President Donald Trump declared when he announced his mansion at Mar-A-Lago had been raided by FBI agents on Monday night Florida time.

An assault like this “could only take place in broken, Third World countries […] corrupt at a level not seen before”.

“They even broke into my safe!” he went on, comparing the FBI action to Watergate:

What is the difference between this and Watergate, where operatives broke into the Democrat National Committee? Here, in reverse, Democrats broke into the home of the 45th President of the United States.

• READ MORE: The January 6 hearings have been spectacular TV, but will they have any consequences for Trump?
• Watergate at 50: the burglary that launched a thousand scandals
• US Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade – but for abortion opponents, this is just the beginning

Watergate was the hotel–office complex in Washington, home to the Democratic Party national headquarters, which was famously burgled in June 1972 by political operatives working for the re-election of Richard Nixon.

After more than two years of tortuous judicial and political inquiries, Nixon became the first — and still the only — American president to resign.

Trump says MAL has been searched by feds pic.twitter.com/UEC5KE5pJm

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) August 8, 2022

The differences between the raid on Trump’s mansion and Watergate are obvious. Trump’s mansion was raided by law officers executing a legally issued search warrant.

They entered by the front door and searched openly. Watergate was an illegal break in by political operatives acting secretly.

And where Trump, playing to his shrinking base, claimed last night’s raid was undertaken by “Democrats”, it was in fact conducted by a group of FBI agents. The Florida raid took place to enforce the law; the Watergate action broke the law.

Speculation intense
As of late Monday night Washington time, neither the FBI nor the Justice Department had made an official announcement about the raid.

However, on the basis of background comments by various officials, most media reports agree that its purpose was to secure various documents, including classified material, from Trump’s presidency. Some reports said the FBI officers left with 15 boxes of documents.

Trump had failed to meet the requirements of the innocuous-sounding national Archives Act, which exists to minimise the scope for corruption and abuse of process.

Trump has treated these legal obligations, and any accountability provisions, with contempt. Indeed, a soon to be published book by New York Times political correspondent, Maggie Haberman, includes photos showing Trump used to flush unwanted documents down the toilet.

The FBI raid follows the recent critical scrutiny of Trump’s actions in inciting a riot against the Capitol on January 6, 2021, when the congressional vote for the presidential election was declared. While politically humiliating to Trump, it is not clear that any legal action will follow from those hearings.

Congress has no power to initiate such action, and some speculate that Attorney-General Merrick Garland is reluctant to be seen to be undertaking politically motivated prosecutions.

Trump, speaking of himself in the third person, asserted in his statement on the FBI raid that “the political persecution of President Donald J. Trump has been going on for years.”

Loyalty or else
More than anything, that response is testimony to Trump’s paranoid worldview, which demands the loyalty of those around him despite any inconvenient principle or evidence to the contrary.

In another soon-to-be published book, Trump’s former White House chief-of-staff, John Kelly, a retired marine general, recounts how Trump said he wanted his generals to be loyal to him the way Hitler’s were loyal to him under Nazi rule.

One of the Watergate reporters, Bob Woodward, wrote a series of books about Trump and interviewed him several times. He reported an episode where Trump went through the faces of various Democratic congressional figures watching him deliver his State of the Union address, most of whom — according to Woodward — looked bland, bored or unemotional.

After each of them, Trump exclaimed to Woodward “look at the hate” – “they hate me”.

“It was a remarkable moment,” Woodward commented.

A psychiatrist might say it was a projection of his own hatred of Democrats. But it was so intense that it did not resemble the subdued reaction of the Democrats. His insistence that it was “Hate!” was unsupported by the images […] This Trump spectacle was unforgettable and bizarre.

From the Roe v Wade anti-abortion and anti-gun control rulings of the Supreme Court, to charges against Trump’s supporters for violence on January 6, to the various dubious activities of Trump himself, much in American politics looks likely to be played out in the courts over the next year or two — far more than is healthy in a democracy.

But when Trump has slashed and burnt his way through many political conventions, recourse to legal sanction may be the only means of protecting democracy. These are dark times for the American nation, but for precisely the opposite reason Trump asserted.

Dr Rodney Tiffen is emeritus professor, Department of Government and International Relations, University of Sydney. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

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?

• READ MORE: What charges does Julian Assange face, and what’s likely to happen next?
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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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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).

Those born after 2001 have only known a world “at war on terror”.

This means a generation growing up under under fears and moral panics about Muslims and unparalleled security measures around their bodies and lives.

In my new book, Coming of Age in the War on Terror, I look at what this has meant for young Muslims in Australia as they navigate their political identities at school.

• READ MORE: These young Muslim Australians want to meet Islamophobes and change their minds. And it’s working
• Auckland terror attacker ‘brainwashed’ by neighbours, mother says

In 2018 and 2019, I interviewed and held writing workshops with more than 60 Muslim and non-Muslim high school students across Sydney who were born around the time of the September 11 terror attacks.

We explored their fears, their levels of trust with peers and teachers and political expression in a post 9/11 world.

No matter how many Muslim students spoke to me about their typically adolescent hobbies and interests, almost every student spoke about the impact of political and media discourse in their everyday lives.

Abdul-Rahman, a 17-year-old Muslim boy at an Islamic school in western Sydney, put it this way:

I’m not afraid of terrorism. I’m afraid of being accused of being a terrorist.

Another student, Laila, told me:

I’ve always had this almost preconceived guilt attached to me […] [It’s] the million messages in the media, politicians, popular culture, all these little things that add up and add up.

‘Countering violent extremism’
For teenagers to talk about themselves as potentially “accused” is devastating, but not particularly surprising.

For two decades, millions of federal and state dollars have been poured into “countering violent extremism” programmes targeting Muslim youth. There has been no subtlety here.

Counter-terrorism policies have been announced by politicians on the steps of mosques, with a focus on geographic and demographic populations deemed “at risk” (in other words, suburbs with large Muslim populations).

Consultations and round tables with government over “national security” have been highly publicised. Meanwhile, Islamophobic attacks have been condemned by politicians and the police because of how they might “undermine” relationships of cooperation between intelligence and law enforcement and the Muslim community.

The public has been routinely reassured the government is tackling the “problem” of young Muslim Australians, “with strong, deradicalisation programmes, working with Muslim communities”.

The figure of the vulnerable but also dangerous Muslim youth pops up time and time again, from moral panics around young “homegrown” terrorists, to attempts to introduce “jihadi watch” schemes in schools.

The pressure to self-censor
This landscape trickles down into young people’s everyday lives, including their schools.

The pressure to self-censor and manage your political and religious expression at school was a common theme among many students, resonating with what academics in the United Kingdom describe in their research.

Anticipating how their tone, words and emotion would be interpreted by teachers and peers restricted students’ political expression.

This included a young Palestinian girl who had to push back against teachers, who reprimanded her for wearing a “Free Palestine” t-shirt at school, to students who refrained from writing about Iraq or Afghanistan as part of assignments because they had been cautioned not to “bring overseas conflicts into the classroom”.

Other students talked of staying quiet if controversial topics came up in class, such as news of a terrorist attack involving Muslims, or media headlines about Islam.

I also met students who tried to appear as “good” or “moderate” Muslims (which inevitably meant apolitical) and erased all traces of their Muslimness to “fit in”.

Feeling targeted, isolated
In 2015, there was a media frenzy about youth radicalisation in prayer rooms in Sydney’s state schools. I interviewed students at a school in north-west Sydney three years later and they spoke about how that controversy had been felt in their school life.

Most of the students from suburbs and schools who came under media and political scrutiny as “problematic” had felt targeted and isolated. One student withdrew from his Muslim peers, abandoned his prayers at school, took different routes to school to avoid being hassled by the media, and “shut down” in class.

I got dragged into an argument with other kids in class about me following the same religion as these terrorists […] but my tone […] I came off very aggressive […] then I was scared, because that’s what people think of as radical extremists […] I felt like I’d be taken straight to the principal and you would have to deal with that. So I shut up.

We need a new approach
After two decades of seeing young Muslims as “problems” to be contained and managed, it is time we approached them in a different way.

Adolescence is a time to encourage critical thinking and support young people navigating their political identities and agency. Young people need to be empowered to work through their political and religious ideas and identities in safe, supportive environments. They need to be seen as individuals in their own right, not members of a demonised, racialised collective.

The vast majority of the young Muslims I spoke to were matter-of-fact about the global rise of Islamophobia and racism. They knew about certain jokes and assumptions in the popular vernacular (for example, “Allahu Akbar and bomb jokes” or “terrorist” equals “Muslim”).

Many were concerned about what this meant as they grew up and left school. They worried about facing discrimination at work and being able to practise their faith openly. They also knew how this suspicion and dehumanisation had been triggered by wider discourses and policies over which they had no power.

It is not up to the 9/11 generation to change this. We need teachers, politicians and the media to create a culture where young Muslims feel accepted and secure in their right to express their religious and political identities.

• This article was produced as part of Social Sciences Week, running 6-12 September. A full list of 70 events can be found here. Randa Abdel-Fattah will appear in a webinar on the “Implications of 9/11: 20 years” at 6pm on Thursday September 9.

Dr Randa Abdel Fattah is a DECRA research fellow, Macquarie University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Retired politics professor and historian Robert “Robbie” Robertson, 69, co-author of the book Shattered Coups about the 1987 coups led by then Lieutenant-Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka, has died in Melbourne, his family has confirmed.

Dr Robertson wrote the book with his partner Akosita Tamanisau, then a Fiji journalist. It was published in January 1988 and he also wrote other books and papers on Fiji and globalisation.

He and Dr William Sutherland co-authored the fast moving and readable Government by the Gun: The unfinished business of Fiji’s 2000 coup.

• READ MORE: The General’s Goose: Coups, globalisation and Fiji’s reset ‘democracy’ paradigm
• Fiji’s actions threaten to unwind the Pacific’s great experiment in regional education at USP – Robbie Robertson and Akosita Tamanisau

His last book on Fiji in 2017 was The General’s Goose: Fiji’s contemporary tale of misadventure.

Dr Robertson was the second person at the University of the South Pacific to have his work permit rescinded and he was deported to New Zealand by Rabuka’s government.

Attempts to have him relocated to Port Vila were sabotaged by the then Vanuatu government.

Moved to Australia
He moved to Australia and joined La Trobe University and became associate professor of history and development studies in Bendigo.

Dr Robertson returned to USP from 2004 to 2006 as professor and director of development studies.

Subsequently, he served as professor and head of school of arts and social sciences at James Cook University (2010-2014) and as professor and dean of arts, social sciences and humanities at Swinburne University of Technology from July 2014 until he retired.

Retired professor of development studies at USP Dr Vijay Naidu and New Zealand researcher Dr Jackie Leckie recalled his contribution as a progressive and inspirational academic, and his sense of humour, Dr Leckie saying “Robbie was one of the good guys. I am so sorry that he had suffered in health recently.”

Dr Robertson is survived by his wife Akosita and sons Nemani and Julian.

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)

Described by a Guardian reviewer as “superb hate-reading”, writer and columnist Anand Giridharadas‘s latest book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World investigates the hypocrisy of billionaire “do-gooders”.

He questions how and why we have become reliant on the philanthropy of the super-rich to help solve our biggest global issues, and their role in eroding the public institutions that should be leading the way.

Giridharadas is an editor-at-large for Time magazine and was a foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times from 2005 to 2016. His two previous books are India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking and The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas.

LISTEN: Kim Hill interviewing author Anand Giridharadas

He told Saturday Morning he once rubbed shoulders with the elite at Aspen Institute but had a revelation when seminar rooms there were named after some of the “worst actors in American and global life, David Koch for example and others”.

“We were discussing how to make the world better. And it occurred to me that some of these very people in the room had flown into Aspen from their jobs making the world worse.

“They worked for some of the Silicon Valley tech companies putting our democracy at risk, monopolising the economy and political power, they worked for food companies … lobbying against nutrition wavering, they worked for employers that fought against … raising minimum wages. And then they would fly to Aspen to talk about solving problems they were causing.”

Giridharadas said there was a spectrum of complicity – from the naive to the shrewd – among the richest and most powerful people in the world.

‘Shrewd’ financial crisis actions
He referred to the actions of Goldman Sachs in the global financial crisis of 2008 as shrewd.

“Tech is where the new money, the new power is.”

Tech elites like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, felt privileged because of their finances and that they had mastery over a specific set of tools which they could use to change the world, he said.

“This vision is fundamentally incompatible with democracy.”

He said neoliberalism was a notion that “you should always do what’s good for money because when you do what’s good for money, people benefit somehow”.

But the money never trickles down.

“This was a fraudulent ideology from the beginning.”

‘Reputation laundering’
At the heart of the argument of “winner takes all”, he said flamboyant do-gooding around the world increased one’s chokehold on wealth and power.

“You first get rich by cutting every possible social corner you can cut – you avoid taxes if you can avoid them, you use trusts and Cayman Islands accounts, you lobby for bottle service public policies that are good for you and your rich friends and bad for most people, you avoid paying people in creative ways by suppressing minimum wage, outsourcing to contractors.”

Bottle service, he explained, was like at a nightclub, where a patron commits to spending a large sum for it.

“You now have a lot of money, but you also have a lot of resentment if these connections are going to be made by people about what’s going on.

“Then what you do is you turn around and you start donating a fraction of that money to various forms of elite do-gooding – philanthropy, corporate social responsibility, for-profit social enterprises, maybe something involving Africa even if you’ve never been.”

He called this “reputation laundering”.

Do-gooding a smokscreen
Giridharadas said a person with money and a selfless demeanour could easily reach policymakers.

He said elite do-gooding was a smokescreen so the rich and powerful could continue to have their way.

There was a need for thought leaders to combat plutocracy, he said.

“A lot of these very wealthy business people are smart enough at business to make money and keep power, they’re not intellectuals, they’re not thinkers and they’re not necessarily gifted at spinning the web for justifications for their rule, so there is a need for quirk thinkers to supply the argumentation for an age of plutocracy.”

• Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing The World (Penguin Random House).

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

A book excerpt published by The Guardian narrates the survival of six shipwrecked Tongan boys on an island for 15 months in 1965. The story received more than seven million hits in just four days, but some Tongans have pointed out that the story, which foregrounds the point of view of the Australian sailor who rescued the teenagers, lacks a Pacific voice.

The Guardian story, ‘The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months,’ was published on May 9 and immediately went viral, attracting the attention of filmmakers and global leaders.

The book from which it is excerpted is Humankind: A Hopeful History, by Dutch historian Rutger Bregman.

READ MORE: The real Tongan boys of ‘Ata were not the real boys of Lord of the Flies

Bregman recounted how Tongan teenagers Sione, Stephen, Kolo, David, Luke and Mano survived on the depopulated ‘Ata island for 15 months by relying on each other after their boat was destroyed by a storm. They were rescued by Australian sailor Peter Warner.

Bregman contrasted the story of the six Tongans with the tragic fate of the characters in the popular 1954 novel Lord of the Flies by British author William Golding. In the novel, the children survive a plane crash and end up on a remote Pacific island.

Some of them become violent, with fatal consequences.

For Bregman, the story of the six Tongans offers a more positive view of humanity:

It’s time we told a different kind of story. The real Lord of the Flies is a tale of friendship and loyalty; one that illustrates how much stronger we are if we can lean on each other.

The Guardian story was picked up by the local press in Tonga. Through the Matangi Tonga Online, we learned that the full names of the six teenagers are Kolo Fekitoa, Sione Fataua, “David” Tevita Siola’a, “Stephen” Fatai Latu, Mano Totau, and Luke Veikoso.

Not all are happy with the story published by The Guardian. In an ABC Australia audio interview Meleika Gesa-Fatafehi, a Tongan author and storyteller, took issue with the story’s “colonial lens”.

She felt there was too much focus on the Australian rescuer while omitting reference to the island’s history of colonialism (which is why it was depopulated), and the local belief systems that could explain why the boys behaved the way they did.

She expressed frustration that a foreigner owns the rights to the story about what happened to the six teenagers, which is well-known in the Tongan community.

Gesa-Fatafehi added that understanding Tongan history and the values promoted in the community would have made readers see that the Western novel Lord of the Flies provided an inaccurate counterpoint to the story of the six teenagers.

In a widely-shared Twitter thread, Gesa-Fatafehi elaborated her other concerns:

Samoan journalist Tahlea Aualiitia also commented:

On Twitter, Janet. U revealed that her grandfather is one of the six castaways and posted the following appeal to the public:

Bregman responded to the Twitter thread of Meleika Gesa-Fatafehi by pointing out that The Guardian excerpt did not include his interview with Mano and Sione.

He said he also tackled the history of slavery on the island.

On May 13, The Guardian published an interview with Mano. The article quoted Mano and Bregman, who clarified that Warner did not benefit financially from the story of the rescue.

Gesa-Fatafehi posted a rejoinder to Bregman’s point that the story is not about racism or colonialism but resilience and interracial friendship:

She wrote a longer piece summarizing the points she raised on her Twitter thread:

The original article could’ve done more for the six men. The story should have been told by a Tongan. The story should have been told by the men themselves and their families. This is their story, will always be their story. The article doesn’t mention how the boys felt or why they made the choices they made. It lacked their perspective. It lacked the very Tongans the story was about, with the exception of Mano. But even then, Mano was sidelined. He deserves to share his story how he would want to.

Gesa-Fatafehi said in the ABC Australia interview that if ever a film were to be made about the six teenagers, her advice is to hire a local crew and incorporate local perspectives in sharing the story to the world.

Mong Palatino is regional editor for Southeast Asia of Global Voices, an activist and two-term member of the Philippine House of Representatives. He has been blogging since 2004 at mongster’s nest.

Many people have revelled in a return to a simpler life in recent weeks. While lockdown restrictions are eased in many places around the world, people will return to a faster-paced, more cluttered lifestyle.

But does it have to be that way? Can we live a simpler life post-lockdown?

With a dramatic decrease in consumer activity, US philosophy professor Emrys Westacott believes this is a time to reflect on whether the type of society we had built was, in fact, the kind of society we want.

READ MORE: Al Jazeera live updates – Obama criticises US coronavirus response

Dr Westacott, author of the 2016 book Wisdom of Frugality, said that while a more frugal lifestyle might not be the path for everyone, now was the time for many people to consider what they wanted in life.

For many, that will be a more simpler, frugal life.

The problem is, however, that our society is set up on a high level of economic activity, premised on the chains of buying and selling, and without it operating at a certain level of activity, it grinds to a halt, as seen in recent weeks.

The key was a more rational distribution of employment, Dr Westacott told RNZ Sunday Morning.

More comfortable life
“If there was a more equitable distribution of wealth, which is perfectly achievable with, both through companies having more rational pay structures, and also through taxation, I think people could and actually would choose a pleasantly comfortable life where they might be able to work 25 or 35 hours a week instead of 45 or 50 hours a week.”

That was provided there was a fair pension, decent public transport, housing and healthcare available.

Moving into life out of lockdown, people should reflect on what they want in life, what gives them pleasure and what matters, he said.

“But I would really hope we would take the opportunity to reflect more generally on what type of society we actually want.”

Neoliberalism – assuming market forces know best and produce best outcomes – had been the dominant philosophy in the last 40 years, Dr Westacott said.

“I think the pandemic spells the end of the neoliberal era and I think the idea that government should be small and inactive and everything should be left to market forces has seen its day.”

Few possessions
People had few possessions until there was an explosion of prosperity in the 20th Century, and now people have garages, basements and houses full of stuff, and full themselves with too much food, Westacott said

He hoped the pandemic would be the start of a shift to a more consumer-free society.

Regardless, it will be “game changer”.

“I think it’s going to be one of the great historical events. In the United States I think it will compare to, not so much to 9/11, as to World War II and the Depression and the Civil War. I think it is a huge gamechanger, but I think there will be a long period of great difficulty.

“I am kind of optimistic but I think there is going to be a pretty tough period ahead.”

• This article is republished by the Pacific Media Centre under a partnership agreement with RNZ.
• If you have symptoms of the coronavirus, call the NZ Covid-19 Healthline on 0800 358 5453 (+64 9 358 5453 for international SIMs) or call your GP – don’t show up at a medical centre.
• Follow RNZ’s coronavirus newsfeed

A new handbook for the existential problem of our time – climate change – has been published as a boost for journalists working in the Asia-Pacific region.

Launched at the 27th Asian Media Information and Communication (AMIC) conference at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand, this week, Science Writing and Climate Change is a “book for our times”, says lead author Professor Crispin Maslog.

Dr Maslog, chair of the Manila-based AMIC, said at the launch that a book of this kind had been needed by journalists for a few years.

“Climate change is upon us and we need to educate people about this urgent problem now,” he said.

“What former US Vice-President Al Gore described as an ‘inconvenient truth’ years ago is now an ‘incontrovertible fact’.”

Many of the chapters have been adapted from Dr Maslog’s regular science and development columns in the global SciDev.net website.

SciDev.net regional editor for the Asia-Pacific Joel Adriano and New Zealand’s Pacific Media Centre director Professor David Robie are co-authors for the 104-page volume.

Ripped by tornadoes
In his introductory preface “Climate Change 101”, Dr Maslog writes: “Halfway into this year, 2019, some 1009 tornadoes have ripped through the United States with unusual violence – about double the average number in previous years.

“In the Philippines and Southeast Asia, the typhoons have become more frequent, violent and destructive.

“We are reminded of 2013 when the category 5 Superstorm Haiyan (Yolanda) smashed into Central Philippines and flattened the city of Tacloban and nearby cities on Leyte and Samar, killing some 10,000 people and causing property damage in the billions of dollars.

“It was the strongest typhoon to hit land at 350 kph.”

Part one of the book explains the role of science in development and the science education of the population in the Asia-Pacific region. It includes news writing tips for science reporters.

Part two offers sample writing from effective science stories.

According to Dr Maslog, the book will be “useful for science writing teachers in schools and trainers in non-formal science journalism training programmes”.

• The book is a co-publication with SciDev.net and Auckland University of Technology’s Pacific Media Centre support.
• Available in the Philippines through AMIC
• Available in New Zealand and the Pacific online through AUT Shop

An Iranian asylum-seeker detained in Papua New Guinea under Australian asylum laws has won Australia’s most valuable literary prize for a book he reportedly wrote using the online messaging service WhatsApp, reports France 24/AFP.

Behrouz Boochani, a Kurd who has been held on PNG’s Manus Island since 2013, was awarded the Victorian Prize for Literature yesterday, said a statement on a government website for the state of Victoria.

The journalist and filmmaker was awarded the A$100,000 (NZ$106,000) prize for his book No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison.

READ MORE: The book written one text at a time

He will receive an additional A$25,000 after it also won the non-fiction category.

“(Boochani’s) award was accepted by the book’s translator Omid Tofighian, who worked with Boochani over five years to bring the stories to life,” the state website said.

Media reports said Boochani wrote the work on his phone and sent it to Tofighian bit-by-bit in text messages.

This was because he felt unsafe in the guarded camp, which was shut last year after a local court ruling and the asylum-seekers moved elsewhere on the island.

For years Canberra has sent asylum-seekers who try to enter the country by boat to Manus Island or Nauru in the Pacific for processing, with those found to be refugees barred from resettling in Australia.

The harsh policy is meant to deter people embarking on treacherous sea journeys, but the United Nations and other rights groups have criticised the camps’ conditions and long detention periods.

Boochani’s book beat 27 other shortlisted works published last year in Australia to win the overall prize.

• The Guardian’s account of the award
• Other Behrouz Boochani stories

A Dutch freelance journalist, Rohan (a pen name), had been interested in the political turmoil in Papua for years. In 2015, his application for a journalistic visa was denied. The 32-year-old then decided to embark on an undercover reporting assignment in the country’s easternmost province.

For 153 days, he observed the way local people lived, met with leaders of the pro-independence Free Papua Movement (OPM) in the jungle, enjoyed the beauty of Papua’s nature and met Aprila Russiana Amelia Wayar, or Emil, a local journalist who later became his girlfriend.

It was Emil who wrote about Rohan’s adventures in Papua and their love story in the novel Sentuh Papua, 1500 Miles, 153 Hari, Satu Cinta (Touch Papua, 1500 Miles, 153 Days, One Love).

In the novel, Rohan’s character said foreign media agencies in Jakarta refused to publish his report on Papua, worrying that the government would revoke the visas of their Jakarta correspondents.

Emil recently launched her 374-page novel in a discussion forum organised by the Alliance of Independent Journalists’ (AJI) Yogyakarta chapter and the Yogyakarta Legal Aid Institute (LBH).

Emil has been in Yogyakarta since early this year to publish the book. She chose Yogyakarta because she had spent time there as a student at Duta Wacana Christian University (UKDW).

The 38-year-old author said she initially intended to write a journalistic piece that was rich in data and interviews. She used the character of Rohan to describe the lack of press freedom in Papua, human rights violations in the province and challenges to OPM’s quest for self-determination.

‘Easier to understand’
“I then chose [to write a] novel to make it easier for Papuans and Indonesians to understand the [province’s] issues,” she said.

Through the book, Emil, who used to work for independent media platform Tabloid Jubi, was determined to represent the other side of Papua’s story vis-a-vis mainstream reporting on the province, which she deemed mostly biased.

She said many journalists covering cases of human rights abuses in Papua only interviewed security personnel and neglected the victims.

“Journalists writing about Papua have to cover both sides,” she said.

However, she realised both the challenge and risks that come with reporting Papua as a journalist, as she herself often received threats and harassment while doing her job.

In her book, the characters Rohan and Amelia, who is based on herself, are chased by a group of people armed with machetes.

According to Reporters Sans Frontier’s (RSF) latest World Press Freedom Index, Indonesia ranks 124th out of 180 countries – the same position as last year.

Open access promise
The Paris-based group highlighted the restriction of media access to Papua and West Papua as a factor that has kept Southeast Asia’s largest democracy at the bottom of the list.

The condition prevails despite President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s campaign promises to open access to Papua for foreign journalists.

Meanwhile, the Indonesian Press Council categorised Papua and West Papua as “medium/relatively free” in its 2017 press freedom index.

Yogyakarta-based lawyer Emmanuel Gobay said Emil’s book, despite being published as fiction, was a good reference for those who want to understand Papua from both the local and professional perspective.

“This novel reflects the state of press freedom in Papua,” he said.

The novel, which Emil wrote in eight months, is her third after Mawar Hitam Tanpa Akar (Black Rose Without Its Stem) and Dua Perempuan (Two Women), both of which told stories about social issues in Papua.

Emil was the first indigenous Papuan novelist invited to the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival (UWRF) in Bali in 2012. She plans to write a fourth book in the Netherlands, where she is currently undergoing medical treatment for a heart condition.

Bambang Muryanto is a Jakarta Post journalist and an Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) advocate.

• Sentuh Papua 1500 Miles, 153 Hari, Satu Cinta (Touch Papua 1500 miles, 153 days, one love), by Aprila Wayar.
• PMC director condemns ‘targeting’ of journalists and silence over West Papua
• More West Papua stories

It can’t have been easy for the New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) and their political leaders to deny the results of a botched military intervention in which 21 civilians were killed or wounded as outlined in Hit & Run.

The task becomes next to impossible in the face of testimonies from survivors and witnesses and the local government documents listing the names of the killed and wounded.

When such evidence is fact-checked against the known coordinates and timeline of the operation, only one conclusion seems plausible: the official deniers inhabit an alternative world beyond the reach of inquiry, research, proof, disproof and argumentation.

The situation reminds me of a hilarious Monty Python sketch in which hapless game show competitors make fabricated claims of authorship or accomplishment. It goes like this:

Host: Good evening and welcome to Stake Your Claim. And first this evening we have (John Cleese) with us Mr Norman Bowles from Gravesend who claims he wrote all Shakespeare’s works… Mr Bowles, I understand that you wrote all those plays normally attributed to Shakespeare.

Mr Bowles: That is correct, I wrote all his plays and my wife and I wrote his sonnets (Michael Palin)

Host: Mr Bowles, these plays are known to have been performed in the early 17th century. How old are you Mr Bowles?

Mr Bowles: Forty three.

Host: Well, how is it possible for you to have written plays performed over 300 years before you were born?

Mr Bowles: Ah well, this is where my claim falls to the ground. There’s no possible way of answering that argument, I’m afraid. I was rather hoping you wouldn’t make that particular point. But I can see that you are more than a match for me.

Here, Mr Bowles’ claims cannot survive the merest scrutiny. In the absence of time travel, he could not possibly have written any of Shakespeare’s plays.

Contradicts testimony
Satirically speaking, recent statements from the Chief of the New Zealand Defence Force, appear just as untenable. His claim that NZDF troops never operated in the villages of Naik and Khak Khuday Dad contradicts all available testimony and documentary records.

The onus of proof is on the NZDF. They have to demonstrate, empirically and legally, that the “hit and run” case compiled by Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson is false.

The NZDF’s associated claim, that the military operation took place elsewhere in a settlement called Tirgiran requires justification. Available geographic evidence suggests that Tirgiran is a river valley rather than a settlement.

If the NZDF cannot prove that such a substantial raid occurred (at a particular location outside of Naik and Khak Khuday Dad), then Hager and Stephenson’s case stands.

These and other matters must be addressed by an independent commission of inquiry. The public needs to know whether the SAS committed war crimes in their pursuit of enemy combatants.

In this eventuality, Hit & Run represents a basic outline of the prosecution case. The authors argue that operation Burnham was an attempted retaliatory raid against the insurgents responsible for a roadside bomb which had killed a New Zealand solider, Lieutenant Timothy O’Donnell in August 2010.

Based on the intelligence gathered, and the kill-capture authorisations of US military commanders, the SAS along with Afghan commandos landed near the villages, supported by US Apache helicopters.

No insurgents found
Although no insurgents were found, a dozen houses were burnt or blown up. At Naik and Khak Khuday Dad, four civilians including a three-year-old child were killed by helicopter fire.

The extent to which Apache helicopter pilots were directed by the SAS on the ground is yet to be determined.

According to local testimony, two other deaths at Khak Khuday Dad are said to have resulted from bullet wounds, perhaps from sniper fire.

Hager and Stephenson maintain that SAS soldiers later returned to the villages to destroy partially rebuilt houses.

Furthermore, a leading insurgent, allegedly involved in the death of Tim O’Donnell, is said to have been bound and beaten inside an SAS vehicle after capture. These need to be legally tested at a commission of inquiry.

The construction of this book was a painstaking and dangerous enterprise. Jon Stephenson risked life and limb by returning to the villages and interviewing survivors, and assembling the family trees of the dead and wounded.

Empty shell casings from Apache helicopter cannon rounds were collected and photographed. A series of locally sourced stories from the Pajhwok News Agency, pointing to civilian deaths and casualties were filed.

Triangulated material
And, as mentioned earlier, a locally documented list of the dead and wounded was obtained and photocopied. By triangulating this material with the admissions of anonymous sources throughout the SAS and NZDF, Hager and Stephenson have built a powerful case.

The ramifications of the events described are considerable. Allow me to compile a small list:

• The official cover up and denials concerning the raids within the NZDF suggests a lack of top level accountability;
• Government deference to the NZDF has allowed a military clique to usurp civilian authority over foreign policy;
• The range of military sources available to the authors points to division and dysfunction within the Army, SAS and the NZDF itself; and
• The rationale and purpose of New Zealand’s foreign policy, in contradistinction to our “five eyes” obligations is impossible to determine.

Is the New Zealand government and New Zealand Defence Force likely to reflect upon these ramifications? Probably not. I think it is more likely that Mr Bowles did in fact write all of Shakespeare’s plays.

Dr Wayne Hope is a professor of communication studies at Auckland University of Technology. This review was first published by The Daily Blog.

• Hit & Run: The NZ SAS in Afghanistan and the meaning of honour, by Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson. Nelson: Potton and Burton. 160pp. ISBN 9780947503390. $34.99
• Analysis of the NZ Defence Force ‘defence’ by Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson

The Chief of Defence Force Lieutenant-General Tim Keating presented the NZ Defence Force response to the book Hit & Run at a press conference on Monday, 27 March 2017. For 45 minutes he and his colleagues suggested that everything in the book was incorrect.

The Hit and Run authors have now had time to study the defence chief’s statements. Our conclusion is that the NZDF criticisms are wrong – with one exception – and that they have failed to address almost everything of substance in the book.

This is what a cover up looks like.

READ MORE: Villagers say both NZDF and authors wrong on village names – but confirm civilian deaths

1. The raid described in the book “is not an operation NZSAS conducted”: INCORRECT

The information presented in Keating’s press conference leaves no doubt that the book and the defence chief are talking about the same raid. Keating gave the name of the raid (Operation Burnham), the times and date (12.30-3.45am on 22 August 2010), the location in the Tirgiran Valley, and said the SAS arrived in two Chinook helicopters, used SAS snipers, found a quantity of ammunition in one building and had one SAS trooper injured by falling debris.

All of these are details of the SAS raid publicised first in chapter 3 of the book. There were not two different raids with the same operation name at the same time in the same valley. It is obviously the same raid.

An NZDF power point presentation shown in the press conference showed three main SAS objectives in the valley called A1, A2 and A3. The book had already identified the SAS’s main targets as being the house and guest house of an insurgent named Abdullah Kalta and the house of an insurgent named Naimatullah, neither of whom were present during the raid.

The NZDF objectives A1 and A2 are the buildings belonging to Abdullah Kalta seen in a photo on p. 60 of the book and NZDF objective A3 is the house of Nematullah shown on pp. 39 and 60 of the book.

2. The SAS raid was in a different village with a different name: INCORRECT

The defence force claimed that the SAS raid occurred in a village called Tirgiran, not the villages of Naik and Khak Khuday Dad named in the book. This is not true. The locals know the names of their own villages and they are called Naik and Khak Khuday Dad. The raid occurred there.

3. The SAS raid was about two kilometres from the position we gave in the book: CORRECT, BUT DOES NOT CHANGE THE STORY IN ANY SIGNIFICANT WAY

After the NZDF press conference, Nicky Hager said that the authors stood by the whole story and that at most the NZDF denials might mean that the events in the book occurred two kilometres from where we thought they were, ie. a slightly different location in the isolated mountain valley.

We have checked the NZDF maps shown at the press conference and it appears the location of the raid and the villages is indeed slightly different to what our local sources told us. But the villages at that location are definitely called Naik and Khak Khuday Dad, and all the rest of the story in the book is unchanged.

Likewise the photos in the book of the villages attacked in the raid are correct, as are the photos of the victims and destroyed houses.

The Defence Force leapt on this and tried to sow doubt about the rest of the book. Keating said the “central premise” of the book was incorrect; that there were “major inaccuracies – the main one being the location”.

But the location is a minor detail, difficult to establish in mountains with no roads or detailed maps (there are no known maps of the valley that include the locations and names of the villages along it).

Contrary to what Keating said, the central premise of the book is that the actions of the SAS and its allies in the villages of Naik and Khak Khuday Dad led to civilian deaths and injuries, destruction of houses, neglect of wounded people and then a cover up – and none of that has changed.

4. The NZDF has now replied to the allegations in the book: INCORRECT

The defence force has not replied to most allegations in the book. Most strikingly, Keating’s presentation did not address the deaths and injuries suffered by children, mothers and elderly people who were obviously not insurgents – which are the most important allegations in the book.

The allegations that the defence force has avoided or answered inadequately to date are:

• SAS-controlled attack helicopters fired at civilians in Khak Khuday Dad village with many casualties, including the three-year-old child Fatima;
• SAS snipers appear to have shot at least one civilian, a recently graduated school teacher home on holiday;
• SAS-controlled attack helicopters pursued two farmers who opposed the Taliban along the valley and killed them;
• Twelve houses were destroyed despite there being no military necessity to do so;
• No assistance was given to the wounded at the time, including in houses that Defence now says it knew might have contained civilians;
• Nor did the SAS go back to render assistance later, despite knowing that civilians were likely to have been injured;
• The SAS returned for a second raid on the village Naik and blew up a house or houses;
• A bound and blindfolded prisoner was beaten by an SAS trooper while his colleagues looked on and did nothing;
• The prisoner was then handed over to the Afghan secret police who were known to have a notorious reputation for torturing prisoners;
• That prisoner was then tortured by the Afghan secret police and when the defence force learned about this it kept it secret;
• The SAS arranged the extra-judicial killing of some other insurgent suspects; and
• The NZDF repeatedly denied and covered up what the SAS have done, and continue to do so to this day.

5. An ISAF investigation has already occurred, there is no need for another inquiry: A WEAK SELF-SERVING ARGUMENT

First it is important to explain about the investigation done in August 2010 by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) coalition headquarters, which was cited repeatedly during the NZDF press conference. In 2010 the subject of civilian deaths was very sensitive in Afghanistan and so ISAF was attempting to investigate all suspected cases of civilians being killed by ISAF forces. But these “assessments” were very far from being full or independent.

The ISAF investigation into the 22 August 2010 raid was completed in less than a week and did not involve anyone going to the area or talking to the affected villagers. It included a review of attack helicopter weapons system video and concluded that several “errant rounds”, caused by a gun sight malfunction, “may have resulted in civilian casualties”.

However reports from SAS members and local people interviewed for the book describe multiple heavy attacks that wounded and killed civilians in different locations. Thus the hastily-conducted ISAF review appears far from being adequate. It is silent on most of the allegations in the book.

There is no need for New Zealand to rely on the brief and inadequate ISAF review. Most of the information needed to confirm whether or not the allegations in the book are correct is located here in New Zealand, in the SAS files. The best option is an independent inquiry where this information can be gathered and assessed.

6. Keating said the insurgents may have used civilians as human shields; aircraft video showed insurgents were killed; the conduct of the New Zealand ground forces was “exemplary”; and so on: UNSUBSTANTIATED CLAIMS AND SELECTIVE INFORMATION

Much of Keating’s presentation was unsubstantiated assertions. This does not help the public find the truth since the defence force has an obvious interest in avoiding bad news about itself. He also said that the book claimed the SAS “deliberately killed civilians”, which we did not say. If we are correct that bad things are being covered up, we cannot expect the people at the heart of the cover up to provide impartial information.

Once again, this means that the only acceptable option is a full and independent inquiry.

7. Lieutenant General Tim Keating told the press conference: “The ground force commander was an NZSAS Officer who controlled both the ground activities and provided clearance, after the appropriate criteria had been met, for any involvement of the aircraft. These elements were co-ordinated by an air controller in his location.” CORRECT AND IMPORTANT INFORMATION

This statement contradicts earlier statements by the government (in 2014) where ministers suggested that if there had been any civilian deaths they were the responsibility of the US pilots, not the New Zealand SAS. It confirms what we said in the book: that the SAS commanders in charge of the raid have responsibility for deaths and injuries caused by the US attack helicopters, which they controlled and had requested to be part of the raid.

8. Finally, Keating told the press that there were legal complications for having an inquiry: INCORRECT

This is not correct. We are not proposing an inquiry by the Defence Force about itself. The government has the power to launch a full and independent inquiry at any time. We believe the NZDF is trying to avoid a full and independent inquiry precisely because some officers are scared of what it will show. But the issue will continue to fester, as it has for years, until that happens.

This article was first published in The Daily Blog.

• ‘Put up or shut up,’ Defence Force chief told
• Hit & Run review – a painstaking and dangerous book challenge
• Did NZ commit war crimes?
• Authors call for full inquiry into SAS claim
• SAS soldier backs up Afghan raid claim

Despite being expelled from secondary school and suspended from teachers college, AUT Professor Welby Ings’ new book is about a lifetime of inspirational teaching.

Disobedient Teaching: Surviving and creating change in education was launched at Auckland University of Technology tonight.

Professor Ings says he wrote the book because he has for a long time questioned the “dehumanised systems of learning” and New Zealand’s preoccupation with micromanaging teachers.

“In the book, I question the obsession we have with assessing performance, and argue for higher levels of creativity in learning, teaching and educational management,” he says.

Disobedient Teaching takes a stand against our national obsession with testing and reporting. It calls for higher levels of teacher agency and learning that operate away from the restrictions of performance indicators, predetermined criteria and tick-box teaching.

Professor Ings argues that “positive disobedience” is a fundamental teaching behaviour among successful practitioners, and the ability of excellent teachers to change learning and learning environments is predicated on it.

His book examines creativity, assessment, passion, our obsession with “success”, and how teachers influence change. To do this it tells stories from the chalk face. Some are funny and some are heartbreaking, but they all happen in New Zealand schools.

Disobedient Teaching suggests that the essence of what makes a great teacher is the ability to stand up to, and change educational practices that have been shaped by “anxiety, ritual and convention”.

In the face of New Zealand’s increasing and uncritical political obsession with accountability and reporting, his book argues the transformative power of teachers who think, critique, defy and act.

• Professor Welby Ings criticises NZ ‘performance obsession’
• Disobedient Teaching

Bookstore owners, writers, authors, family, friends and a group hopeful of West Papuan independence squeezed into the Women’s Bookshop in Ponsonby last night to celebrate the work of young New Zealand author Bonnie Etherington and her novel The Earth Cries Out.

Not only is the novel being celebrated and praised for Etherington’s mastery of the written word, but because of its ability to make the public more aware of life in West Papua, a region controversially ruled by Indonesia since the 1960s.

Plagued by media freedom and human rights violations, many media freedom and human rights organisations and several Pacific nations have condemned the widespread arrests and imprisonment of West Papuans for non-violent expression of their political views.

These are issues Etherington herself acknowledged speaking with Asia Pacific Report earlier this week, saying she wanted to show readers West Papua’s rich and diverse history, not only its complex political situation.

“I really wanted to show multiple sides of West Papua because it is so often forgotten or stereotyped by the rest of the world.”

This is something those who have already read The Earth Cries Out praise.

Harriet Allan, fiction publisher for Penguin Books New Zealand, commended Etherington in a speech on her ability to provide insight into West Papua through the eyes of a child, that of female protagonist Ruth.

“As Ruth bears witness to what she sees, we too start to hear the voices that have been silenced by politics, sickness, violence and poverty.”

Like Ruth, we come away with a greater understanding of this country and its diverse people and also of ourselves and the bonds of love and friendship.”

‘Shed some light’
Although she has not had the chance to read her sister’s entire novel, Etherington’s younger sister, Aimee, says what she has read is very similar to how she and her sister experienced West Papua.

“With the descriptions, I felt like I was back there. She’s done a really good job of capturing how it feels, I guess.”

Aimee Etherington says she hopes her sister’s novel spreads awareness of West Papua.

“Most people that I’ve spoken to don’t really know that it exists, so it will be good to shed some light as to what’s going on there and, I guess, giving a bit of insight on how as New Zealanders and Australians we can actually do something about it.”

‘Almost experiencing it’
Like Harriet Allan, Women’s Bookshop owner Carol Beu loved Ruth’s voice.

“I think becoming aware of the situation in Papua through the eyes of this child, Ruth, is really quite special”, Beu told the audience.

“The way it’s revealed, it’s fascinating.”

Beu admits this was also “quite shocking”, due to Etherington’s ability to place the reader in the moment.

“You’re almost experiencing it.”

Bea also acknowledged those in the audience who were supporting the book on more of a political level, such as West Papua Action Auckland spokesperson Maire Leadbeater.

Bea told those gathered she found the politics of The Earth Cries Out “quite astonishing and wonderful”.

“It’s a book that makes you angry in many ways on a political level.”

Leadbeater herself, however, says she is looking forward to reading the novel.

Mister Pip comparisons
“I think looking at countries through a literary perspective can be very helpful at times. I can’t help thinking of the book Mister Pip, about Bougainville and how amazingly helpful that was I think in terms of people understanding the conflict.

“It’s done in a fictionalised way but it’s true to the situation, so I’m picking from what I’ve heard about the book it may achieve that as well.”

Leadbeater is not the only one to draw comparisons with Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip, however.

Tony Moores, owner of bookstore Poppies in Remuera, reached a similar conclusion.

“This is not Mister Pip, but the issues it deals with are quite similar, from a different perspective.”

Powerful, shocking
The Creative Hub founder, John Cranna, who also noted ties with Mister Pip, praised Etherington on her talent after listening to several excerpts read by Allan and Etherington herself.

“For such a young writer to be writing about such dramatic and shocking events, and to be pulling it off, is quite an achievement.

To write about violent death is … very hard in a reserved, powerful way, but she certainly did that very well.

• Publicity of Etherington’s novel continues this week in Palmerston North.
• Debut novel offers rare glimpse of grief amid life in West Papua

 By Kendall Hutt

Speaking to Asia Pacific Report in transit from the United States, author Bonnie Etherington says her early life in West Papua motivated her to write the novel The Earth Cries Out, but more importantly a desire to make the public more aware of the repressed Indonesian-ruled region.

“I really wanted to show multiple sides of West Papua because it is so often forgotten or stereotyped by the rest of the world,” she says.

Controversy has surrounded West Papua since its incorporation into Indonesia through a controversial Act of Free Choice — dubbed by critics as an “Act of no choice”–  in 1969.

Such controversy is compounded by the fact that the region is plagued by media freedom and human rights violations.

Despite President Joko Widodo’s lifting of restrictions on foreign journalists in 2015, harassment and assaults against journalists have continued, a Freedom House report shows.

“Access is not automatic, unimpeded, or granted quickly”, the report states.

Papuan independence silenced
The situation for West Papuans themselves is also dark, with Human Rights Watch World Report 2017 revealing dozens of Papuans remain imprisoned for non-violent expression of their political views.

More than 1700 Papuan independence supporters were detained in early May last year while showing solidarity with the International Parliamentarians for West Papua (IPWP) protest in London.

Many organisations and human rights groups condemned the arrests, whilst allegations of torture also emerged following the mass arrests.

Such events have prompted several Pacific nations to recently raise grave concerns regarding such human rights violations, at the 34th session of the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council in March.

Calls by Pacific nations echo those of the Catholic Justice of Peace Commission back in May, whose report found no improvement in human rights violations, prompting the group to call on the UN to investigate human rights abuses.

These are all grave issues Etherington herself acknowledges.

“West Papua’s political situation is complex and its history is rich and diverse, and the novel shows just some parts of that,” she says.

“I really did not want to homogenise the region or its many peoples, but give a glimpse into its multiplicities.”

Loss, grief, pain
The Earth Cries Out does just that, following a Nelson family as they attempt to heal and atone through aid work after the accidental death of Julia, the sister of young female protagonist Ruth.

Dropping into a mountain village in West Papua (Irian Jaya, as it was known then) during a time of civil unrest and suppression, Ruth’s parents struggle with their grief.

Ruth, meanwhile, seeks redemption in bearing witness to and passing on the stories of others, of those who have been silenced.

Although never having lost a sibling, as Ruth does, Etherington says the main challenge she faced was gathering the courage to write the novel.

“In part, it was challenging because there are some experiences of grief that Ruth and I both share, and similar experiences of disorientation, witnessing, and survivor’s guilt”.

Etherington and her family moved to West Papua in the early 1990s, where her father partnered with a Papuan church to provide language, literacy and healthcare services.

She has spent roughly a total of 11 years in West Papua, between 1992 and 2007.

Despite four years living in Darwin, Australia, from 2000-2004, Etherington says she popped “back and forth quite a bit”, with the family also spending time in New Zealand.

Mass killings
It is therefore unsurprising Etherington’s experiences speak to the ongoing situation in West Papua, with the author declining to name the village where she grew up “in order to protect the people who still live there”.

With mass killings marring West Papua’s history under Indonesia, it is understandable why Etherington’s novel explores loss and grief.

“Death and illness were common parts of life in the village where I grew up.”

She explains this was largely due to high infant mortality rates and malaria.

Etherington’s first encounter with so much death came when she was just five years old.

“I was at the funeral of my best friend, a boy who had the same name as I did. He died from malaria … I remember how small his coffin was”.

Centrality of women
With young female protagonist Ruth at the heart of the novel, and West Papua seen through her eyes, women have a central place in The Earth Cries Out.

“To some extent, the novel is about relationships between women, especially mothers and their daughters, and the shades of loss and pain, as well as love that can colour those relationships,” Etherington says.

Harriet Allan, fiction publisher for Penguin Books New Zealand, agrees women have a central place in the novel.

“The novel gives voice to those who have been silenced, in particular, though not exclusively, to women.

The relationships between the young protagonist Ruth and her dead sister, her mother and her new friend Susumina are at the heart of the book.”

Allan, who first met Etherington at a creative writing workshop at Massey University five years ago, says the novel offers a window into life in West Papua – its people, harsh realities, vivid landscape, and the love and warmth of West Papua’s people.

“The novel is a compelling story and valuable insight into another country and into other people – but ultimately into ourselves”.

‘Home of my heart’
Reflecting on the “home of my heart” Etherington says she hopes she has drawn attention to the perseverance of West Papua’s people and that her readers are encouraged to listen more to others stories.

“I hope that the novel, on some scale, is about listening to those who have been marginalised on their own lands.”

However, when asked what she would like to see happen over the situation in West Papua, Etherington says it is not her place to say how the indigenous peoples of West Papua gain justice for themselves and their land.

“I support dignity and justice for the indigenous peoples of West Papua and their lands. How that should best come about is not my place to say.

“It is the place of indigenous Papuans to say, whether that takes the shape of full political autonomy from Indonesia or some other configuration of reconciliation and reparations.

I hope that their voices will be heard and respected.”

• The Earth Cries Out is being launched tonight at 6pm at the  Women’s Bookshop, Ponsonby.

She had the most enchanting smile, even though she had lost her baby teeth. Her toothless grin turned out to be perfect for the role.

The five-year-old girl had her face painted with a black anti-nuclear symbol – different motifs on both her cheeks.

Beside her was a neatly sketched poster: “No nukes: Please don’t spoil my beautiful face”.

This was the scene in Port Vila’s Independence Park in 1983 during the region’s second Nuclear-Free and Independent Pacific Movement conference.

It was during the heady days of nuclear-free activism with Vanuatu, the world’s newest nation only three years old and founding Prime Minister Walter Hadye Lini leading the way.

I was there that day as an independent journalist taking many photographs for my series of articles for Pacific and international media.

One person who really stood out was the little girl with the beautiful smile. But I never knew her name back then.

33 years on
Thirty-three years have passed since then and my wife, Del Abcede, and I have just visited Aneityum (“Atomic”) Island in Vanuatu this week to meet that girl – June Keitadi and her family.

She is now June Warigini, mother of three, grandmother and a Salvation Army volunteer living on her home island. And she still has that stunning smile.

I wanted to present her with a copy of my 2014 book, Don’t Spoil My beautiful Face: Media, Mayhem and Human Rights in the Pacific, that was inspired by her and she is featured on the cover.

Not only June, her mother Annie Keitadi is featured there too. Her father, Jack Keitadi, was deputy curator of the Vanuatu Kaljoral Senta at the time and he later became curator.

It was a delight and a privilege for Del and me to be able to visit the family on Aneityum and to be treated to a “royal” welcome by the community and tribe.

June remembers that day in 1983 really well. It left a deep impression on her in later life.

“They wanted someone young who could go on their behalf to the French Embassy and present a petition calling on France to halt its nuclear tests in the Pacific – so they chose me,” she recalls.

Symbolic of N-ravages
“But the ambassador left in a hurry out the back. I don’t know why he was afraid of a little girl.”

She remembers her toothless smile was regarded as symbolic of the ravages of nuclear testing in the Pacific, not only by France, but also the United States and Britain.

Faced with persistent protests in the Pacific, France eventually ended all nuclear testing in 1996, thirteen years after that rally. But the campaign for full compensation for the victims of nuclear testing continues.

June feels that her experience at that young age helped give her an inner strength for the challenges of life today and inspiring her in her desire to help others in her church work.

Ironically, both Del and I met her by chance on Christmas Day at the end of last year, but had no idea at that time of her connection with my book.

While visiting Aneityum for a day, we shared in an “olden days” traditional food and customs exposure in a model 18th century village on the island.

When we eventually discovered her identity – after my appeals on my blog Café Pacific and an NFIP network had failed and Vanuatu Daily Digest came to the rescue earlier this year – and we saw photographs of her, my wife exclaimed:

“That’s her, the June we have met.”

We realised that the guide “June” we had met that day on the island was indeed June Keitadi now Warigini.

Idyllic island
Aneityum, the southernmost island in Vanuatu, currently has a population of 1740. It is not part of Vanuatu’s electricity grid and islanders rely on solar power. The island has no cars, or even a road.

The air connection is only two return flights a week from the Tafea provincial capital on Tanna. There is also no doctor, although a dispensary is now operating with two nurses and a midwife.

On the other hand, for visitors like ourselves, island life seems idyllic, a byword for “paradise”.
Aneityum has a wonderful healthy lifestyle for youngsters, remote from the world’s conflicts and problems.

There are three primary schools and a boarding secondary school – one that attracts students from other outer islands whose parents want an education where the traditional way of life is important and free from the urban ills of Port Vila.

June is assistant bursar at Teruja secondary school.

She tells a delightful story about a recent excursion for students from Aneityum who went on a “field trip” adventure by island cargo ship to Tanna to visit the famous Mt Yasur volcano.

The island’s micro economy is self-sustaining and is augmented by occasional cruise ship visits and tourism days on Mystery Island. It appears that Aneityum is remote from government services or assistance and the support of cruise shipping companies, such as P&O, is crucial for the islanders.

Dr David Robie, director of the Pacific Media Centre, is currently on sabbatical from Auckland University of Technology. He is author of the book Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face: Media, Mayhem and Human Rights in the Pacific and many other books. This article is republished from his blog Cafe Pacific.

• Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face – more information
• A Contemporary Pacific review of the book

A research report about Pacific media outlets in New Zealand was launched today at Auckland University of Technology – the first time an extensive investigation of the Pasifika diaspora media in Auckland has been produced.

New Zealand journalist and former Auckland University of Technology postgraduate student Michael Neilson undertook the research in 2015 with the guidance of PMC director Professor David Robie.

The monograph, published by the Pacific Media Centre, includes interviews with staff at more than18 of Auckland’s Pacific media outlets and provides a broad snapshot of Pasifika media representation in New Zealand and seeks to improve the recognition of Pacific within media coverage as well as the profession.

Neilson, who is currently in Indonesia after an internship with the Sydney Morning Herald bureau in Jakarta, was unable to be at the launch but he was praised by staff and colleagues for the depth and range of the research.

Former postgraduate leader at AUT, Dr Frances Nelson, said the monograph included quotes, data and photographic material that had captured the essence of the organisations that participated in the research.

‘Beautifully written’
“It is also beautifully written. And it shows his engagement with the Pasifika community and their media outlets,” she said.

Dr Robie, who is editor of the Pacific Journalism Monograph series, said: “This will be a tremendously useful booklet for both Pasifika newsrooms and our student journalists. Michael did a really dedicated and thorough job on this project.”

Outgoing chair of the Pacific Media Centre, Isabella Rasch, launched the monograph before she stepped down after three years in the role. Associate Professor Camille Nakhid was elected as the new chair.

The monograph can be purchased at the AUT bookshop. It will be distributed to Pasifika media offices and libraries, and will eventually be made available online.

More information

Behind the Blockade, by Veronica Hatutasi. Boroko, Papua New Guinea: Word Publishing Company. 233 pages hardcover. ISBN 978-9980-89-024-5.

Reviewed by Anna Solomon

Behind the Blockade, by first time author Veronica Hatutasi, is a book recounting her personal experience in war-torn Bougainville between 1990 and 1994. It is the story of a mother who flees with her young family from their idyllic beach-front home in Toniva, to what she thought then was the safe haven of her family hamlet in Korikunu, Siwai district, in South Bougainville.

However, the turn of events beyond her control made them prisoners in their hamlet, cut off from the rest of the world and the daily struggles to survive behind the economic blockade imposed on Bougainville by the national government in Port Moresby.

They were then confronted with another crisis within the crisis, what the author describes as the Siwai sub-crisis.

When Veronica Hatutasi began the journey to Siwai for what was supposed to be just a short sojourn, little did she or other civilians know that what had started off as a disagreement on land compensation between the old executives of the Panguna Landowners Association and the younger well-educated new executive, would escalate into a civil war on Bougainville that would see the death and displacement of many innocent children, women and men.

Divided into four parts, the book, launched in Port Moresby on Friday evening, begins with life in Toniva from 1989 to 1990 where the author had spent 8 years with her family. In Part Two, the laid back lifestyle is not so idyllic any more as the daily gun battle between the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) and PNG Defence Force brings home the reality that their days in Toniva are numbered.

As trouble escalated and non-Bougainvilleans left, she knew it was a matter of time before she and her husband had to make a choice of whether to travel with her sister-in-law on the last boat out of the island or to make the long trip inland to her home in Siwai. She opted for the latter.

The story starts with enjoyment of the sea and sand through the innocent eyes of her son Jonath and his young friends during the halcyon days in Toniva. It ends with a more mature Jonath now living in Port Moresby, wondering if he will ever visit this favourite beach again.

Other books written
Books have already been written about the Bougainville crisis by academics, historians, political and defence analysts, overseas journalists and even some armchair experts, often focussing on the landowner issues and political decisions that led to the civil war and its aftermath.

However, there have also been publications that record personal experiences of people during that period.

A former PNGDF officer had his experiences during the crisis published, while a 2006 novel, Mr Pip, by New Zealand author Loyd Jones, fictionalised events of this dark period of Bougainville’s history. It was later made into a film with local actors and scenes shot on location.

However, Behind the Blockade is unique in that this is the first book by a Bougainvillean woman and a journalist who recounts her first-hand experience of life with her children during the civil war in her part of the island.

It is not an official record of events or atrocities that may have been committed on the island during the civil war and the author does not set out to make that point or get involved in the blame game.

Instead, the author draws from events in her part of Siwai, recorded in a diary she kept throughout the blockade to tell this story. An important part of this diary is the section on the Siwai crisis in which she describes the agony of seeing families being divided in their loyalty to the militants or to let common sense prevail and surrender their arms.

It tells of kidnappings of men, women and children. This was the turning point in Siwai, which would see the revival of the chief’s power and the people’s stand to put an end to the reign of terror and the suffering of innocent people at the hands of the BRA.

Winning hearts
The last part of the book comprises official events she covered as a journalist working in Port Moresby, of the peace process and the long road to winning the hearts and minds of the people and bringing normalcy to Bougainville.

The author acknowledges the role of the many strong and determined mothers of Bougainville, the peace advocates, who fearlessly entered the stronghold of the militants and started dialogue with their sons, brothers and male relatives to lay down arms and return home.

Some of them are still alive today, many more have passed on.

She also recounts the tale of loyal nurses at the Monoitu health centre and their dedication in tending to the sick and expectant mothers when medical supplies were practically non-existent.

She pays tribute to the local politicians and former senior public servants in Bougainville and at the national level who fearlessly stood up against the threats and intimidation of the militants. Again some died in their fight to save their people.

The book also describes the peacemaking efforts of the church, especially the lone Italian priest in Siwai, Fr Dario Monegatti, SVD, and his tireless trips between the militant factions as well his homilies during Sunday mass until his departure from Bougainville.

On the flip side, the civil war also caused divisions among the churches, with one faction of the BRA using their denomination to terrorise the other Christians.

Well-illustrated
Written in simple English, this book with pictures, will appeal to both young and old and especially those who have heard about the Bougainville crisis but were too young to understand its consequences.

It gives a glimpse of one family’s struggle and a mother’s determination to survive and bring her children out of the war-torn island. It shows a mother’s heartache in watching her children missing out on the simple pleasures of childhood they were used to while living in town.

It shows the important role of the extended family ties and how they rally around, during the time of need.

The book also talks about the people resorting to traditional medicines and appropriate technology when the store-bought medicines and food were no longer available.

The inclusion of the Bougainville chronology and a chronology of the peace process at the end of the book, will help the reader keep track of important historical dates from 1884 until the November 11th 2007 agreement with the national government to establish an autonomous government.

A must read for the mothers and fathers of PNG, Behind the Blockade offers a glimpse of the determination to overcome blockades in order to give innocent children another chance in life.

It also captures the beginnings of a healing process between the national government and people of Papua New Guinea, and the people of Bougainville.

Author Veronica Hatutasi is a respected senior journalist in Papua New Guinea. She is now the editor of Wantok Niuspepa, the weekly Tok Pisin paper where she started work as a displaced person from Bougainville in 1993. Ordering and other information about her book is available from the author.

By Adam Elliott

Journalist Veronica Hatutasi has recently launched her new book on the Bougainville crisis, Behind the Blockade, in Papua New Guinea.

Based in Port Moresby, she has worked for a long time as senior a reporter for Word Publishing’s Wantok newspaper and is now chief reporter.

The book starts in Toniva, just south of Kieta, as the conflict builds and follows Hatutasi’s story from there back to Monoitu in the Siwai District of south Bougainville.

Here Veronica stayed with her family until late 1992 when, in August of that year, she was able to get herself and her family to Port Moresby.

The book focuses on her personal experiences in the village as the crisis played out and then, from 1993, on her role as a journalist covering the Bougainville story from Port Moresby.

Hatutasi gained many insights into the conflict and how it affected the Bougainville people from repeated trips back to the island over the years and her book covers the restoration, reconstruction, reconciliation and peace processes.

Behind the Blockade is entirely Hatutasi’s initiative.

I worked with her through the late 1990s when I was based at Aitape after the tsunami, then for a few more years when based in Madang.

The book is 233 pages long and published by Word Publishing (ISBN 978 9980 89 024 5). It is available from Veronica Hatutasi and you can email her for further information.

Profile by Ivamere Nataro in Suva

If you’re a person who loves history and values culture then you would certainly want to meet Fiji’s Professor Alan Quanchi.

Dr Quanchi, commonly known to his peers and students as Max, is an academic by profession and is leaving the University of the South Pacific.

He specialises in the teaching of Pacific history and has been doing so for 43 years.

Growing up in rural farming areas of Victoria, Australia, Max was determined to attain his dream career. His humble beginnings and his perseverance made him the first member of his family to complete high school and matriculate.

Max, who was born in 1945, is the youngest of three brothers. According to him, he was too young to enter university so he spent two years training to be a primary schoolteacher. And if you know Max as well as I do, believe me when I say, his students love to attend his classes.

However, the saying “destiny works in mysterious ways” was exactly how life turned out to be for Max as history became a focal point of his journey when he managed to achieve a BA Honours degree and MA thesis on Fiji’s history in 1973 which, according to him was a breakthrough.

Max says his research and findings on Fiji’s attempts to cede itself to Great Britain drove him towards the study of Pacific history.

‘Hooked over Fiji’
“I was hooked after discovering about Fiji’s history,” he said.

And for the next 30 years he visited Fiji and most Pacific countries on a regular basis with a quest to quench his thirst for Pacific history and culture.

Now who would ever dream someone who played basketball, was an Australian Football League player and surfed was on his way to becoming an academic? This was possible when he received his doctorate from Monash University in Australia.

Max stated his journey could not have been possible if it were not for mentors such as Professor John Legge and Dr Jack Lacey who pushed him to become what he is today.

“They were responsible for heading me towards an academic career. They made me aware of the importance I can play, in turn, as a mentor to young Islanders.”

His passion for history was evident in how he presented himself to history critics, as he recalled in the 1990s when he responded to a speaker who argued the Pacific was a basket case and needed to learn more from the rest of the world.

“I pointed out that this thinking needed to be reversed, and that it was indeed the Pacific that had a lot to teach the world. The world needs to pay attention to the success in terms of harmony, conflict resolution, cultural maintenance and survival.”

And not only is he stern in his opinion of Pacific history, he also shares characteristics that lightsup a person’s world on a gloomy day. His humorous personality made him one of the friendliest lecturers on campus.

Sense of humour
Friends Felicia Leitupo and Wendy-Jane Powell in their description of Max stated they had only known him for a year and it seemed like a lifelong friendship.

“Max has a great sense of humour and is a very sociable person,” Leitupo says.

The jolly 70-year-old historian, according to Powell, has also adopted the rich cultural background and friendliness of Fijians. And this is true for a man who rarely loses the bula smile when extending his arms welcoming students and friends to his abode.

As a person who can create friendship with strangers, Max is also a widely respected person when it comes to the learning sphere.

Within the four walls of the classroom, he presents himself as a person with high calibre in the mastering of Pacific history.

His years of teaching in USP allowed him to not only better understand Fijian history and culture, but also engage in the publication of textbooks such as that for Year 9, Fiji in the Pacific and co-author and editor of five recently introduced history textbooks for Year 11, 12 and 13 students.

His book Postcards from Oceania, reviewed last month in The Fiji Times by Vinesh Maharaj, was launched by USP Press late last year and he said his favourite postcard was the one that reversed the gaze by having Fijian subject clothed, and the photographer naked.

Fiji archive of the past
“The postcard has disappeared now but a hundred years ago, photographers trekked inland to places like Namosi to take snaps, later converted into postcards. They are an important archive of Fiji’s past.”

He is an award-winning researcher of USP for the past two years, as well as with other small universities across the region on online course development.

Max is the author of more than 100 books, articles and reports.

A popular speaker, he has spoken on Fiji TV and over the air, at numerous schools, Rucksack Club and recently at the WWI commemoration conference at USP.

Mikaele Vakasilimiratu, formerly with the social science team at the Ministry of Education’s curriculum development unit, recalled that Max had run professional development for history teachers back in the 1990s.

“He was then co-ordinating the regional Teaching the Pacific Forum (TTPF) project funded by Japan and when he came to Fiji and joined USP he carried on in his own time with this guidance to our teachers,” he said.

Max has also taught in schools such as the University of Papua New Guinea, Queensland University of Technology and Monash University in Melbourne.

Tantalising local food
Having developed a taste for tantalising local food, Max said his favourite was “grilled fish from the market”.

But for a drink he certainly is not a fan of yaqona, although he said there were certain occasions where he had to give in to Fiji’s traditional drink.

Now that he will soon say adios to USP, he says Fiji is a “fantastic and exciting” place to live in and has a lot of potential as a Pacific country to develop.

He said he planned to continue teaching in the University of Goroka in Papua New Guinea or the University of Queensland in Brisbane and for a person such as Max who knows no barrier, sky was the limit even if the tides swept against him.

When asked about what job he would take if life did not throw him into the profession he is in, Max jokingly said he would gladly be a rock star or be part of the Miss Hibiscus pageant.

His words of advice, knowledge and friendliness will surely be missed by all who consider him a friend and if only the hands of time could turn back to the exciting interview which shows his friendly personality, I would gladly allow history to repeat itself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And earlier today he joined me to discuss Eyes of Fire… why he was onboard the vessel on its last journey through the Pacific, his enduring memories of the time, and what lessons the Rainbow Warrior affair offers us now and in the future.

Transcript summary

Father Francis X. Hezel reviews a new book on climate change corruption and development in the Pacific. And the message is rather sobering.

BOOK REVIEW: Giff Johnson’s latest work – Idyllic No More: Pacific Islands Climate, Corruption and Development Dilemmas – is a call to serious planning and more. The author summons leaders to recognise that life has changed in the Marshalls and the status quo is the road to disaster.

There was a time when this might not have been true – when people who wanted to kick back and live a simple island life could quietly opt out of school and retire to the family land to provide for themselves as their ancestors had done for generations in an island society that offered the resources, physical and social, to support its population.

But times have changed, the author convincingly argues. That kind of idyllic fallback is no longer an option. Residents of the Marshalls, including those outer atolls where life was simple and cheap, are voting with their feet.

The outflow of Marshallese to the United States is steadily increasing, slowly emptying the remote atolls even as it drains the population of the two large population centers, Majuro and Ebeye. Islanders today expect meaningful employment but find none at home.

Marshallese today want more but seem to be getting less. Water supplies are contaminated in many places, the copra industry which once provided modest disposable income for those who worked the land has gone south, and the quality of education is not what it once was.

No wonder people now describe themselves as “poor”. Normal household tasks have become more challenging with the breakdown of the old extended family on which they relied. As a result, even basic care of children often leaves a lot to be desired.

In today’s world no island is simply an island. All nations have subscribed, willingly or not, to standards that are spelled out in global millennium development goals.

Stalled progress
Measured by these standards, progress in the Marshalls has stalled.

Donors may open their hearts and wallets to the Marshalls, but the money given is all too often regarded as a treat to be passed around the table and sampled by everyone rather than for its real purpose. Consultants come in and craft a report outlining reform measures that goes unread and unimplemented.

Government employees fly off to attend meetings that multiply each year and leave them little time to provide the public services their people so badly need.

How does this small island nation chart a new course for itself? One that offers it the hope of finding new resources while conserving those it now has? One that provides a pathway to the development that government and people claim to want for themselves? One that is, in that over-worked phrase, sustainable?

The answer is not nearly as elusive as it might appear, the author suggests. But making this happen will require reform: a change in habits, especially on the part of the government, and a readiness to implement practices that we know can be successful but threaten our own interests.

That’s what it will take, no matter whether we’re dealing with global warming, preserving fish stock in national waters, improving education and health services, or trying to make the heavy emigration work to the advantage of the Marshall Islands.

Father Francis X. Fran Hezel was the founder and long-time director of the Micronesian Seminar in Pohnpei. He is now based on Guam and writes a regular blog at: www.wheresfran.org.

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