A former head of the United Nations Development Programme is concerned that US President Donald Trump may set a precedent for other countries.

The President has signed a memorandum ordering the withdrawal of the United States from 66 international organisations.

These include the Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Democracy Fund, and nearly 30 other United Nations agencies.

• READ MORE: NGOs warn of catastrophic impact in Gaza – Penny Wong doesn’t care

Helen Clark, who was also New Zealand prime minister from 1999 to 2008, said it was a “very troubling” move.

“It is an assault on the international system of cooperation, which has been painstakingly built up over many, many decades,” she said.

Clark was concerned that other countries, which were like-minded with the current US administration, would also withdraw.

New Zealand unlikely
However, Clark did not expect New Zealand to be one of them, as the country had always stood for multilateralism.

“I do think New Zealand, and other like-minded countries, do need to be thinking about their positioning, because to say nothing when there is a comprehensive assault on the international system is not a good position to be in.”

Clark said the Framework Convention on Climate Change was ratified by the United States Senate back in 1992.

“It’s not clear that President Trump can simply withdraw from it, and this will no doubt be litigated within the United States.”

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

There is no doubt that Donald Trump’s attack on Venezuela was illegal, former prime minister and UN leader Helen Clark says.

Over the weekend, the US attacked the Venezuelan capital Caracas and captured the South American nation’s president and his wife, citing alleged drug offences.

Nicolás Maduro is now being held in a federal jail in New York City, and is expected to appear in court this week.

• READ MORE: Trump’s gift-wrapped Maduro package has done the world a favour — revealing what a lie US foreign policy really is
• Venezuela army ready to ‘confront imperial aggression’ after Maduro seized

Speaking to RNZ’s Morning Report, Clark said there was no argument for the steps the US had taken.

“Article 24 of the UN Charter says states must refrain from using military force against each other and respect their sovereignty.

“There is a case for Maduro appearing before a court — that should be the International Criminal Court — on charges for crimes against humanity and there’s quite a long list of those that have been documented by various UN bodies over the years but this operation by the US . . .  is illegal.”

There was not an argument to be made that removing Maduro was in the security interests on the US, she said.

‘Not self-defence’
“There’s no evidence that the US was able to act in self-defence because it was not about to be attacked by Venezuela. So the self-defence argument does not apply at all.”

Hard not to conclude that intervention in #Venezuela is a breach of international law. Maduro was a dictatorial ruler presiding over arbitrary detention & torture of opponents. Iraq 2003 intervention, however, suggests unpredictable path ahead: https://t.co/4qjeENjpAH

— Helen Clark (@HelenClarkNZ) January 3, 2026

While some people in Venezuela were celebrating Maduro’s capture in the hopes it would create more stability, Clark said this might not be the case.

“The worry with the president of other such interventions, when you take out a leader of an apparatus and then if you try to dismantle that apparatus by external forces, as was the case with Iraq — and I suppose, to some extent, with Libya — is that you create more instability and chaos,” Clark said.

“We don’t really know at this point what the US’s even short-term, let alone medium-term plans are. There’s been, effectively a warning by President Trump this morning that if the acting president, Ms Rodriguez, doesn’t play ball, she will ‘pay a price even bigger than Maduro’.

“What does this mean? Will she be literally, physically taken out? Killed? So this is a very unstable, unpredictable, uncertain situation at the moment.”

On Sunday, Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters made the first public statement from New Zealand on the situation.

“New Zealand is concerned by and actively monitoring developments in Venezuela and expects all parties to act in accordance with international law,” Peters said in a post on X (formerly Twitter), using the official Minister of Foreign Affairs account.

NZ ‘stands with Venezuelan people’
“New Zealand stands with the Venezuelan people in their pursuit of a fair, democratic and prosperous future.

Clark said the statement was a “good start”.

RT @WhiteHouse: Nicolas Maduro on board the USS Iwo Jima. pic.twitter.com/Y4wzZM5qde

— Donald J Trump Posts TruthSocial (@TruthTrumpPost) January 3, 2026

New Zealand was known for following and upholding international law and Peters’ statement was consistent with the country’s long-held position, she said.

On Sunday, international relations Professor Robert Patman of the University of Otago described the US’ military actions against Venezuela as an “audacious move”.

“It’s a direct challenge for countries like New Zealand, which support the view that international relations should be based on rules, procedures and laws,” he told RNZ’s Worldwatch.

Patman said while many would be pleased to see Maduro gone, that did not mean they would be happy the US “violated Venezuela’s sovereignty”.

He believed New Zealand’s response to the US action in Venezuela should be firm and robust.

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

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.

New Zealand is lagging behind the rest of the world through its failure to recognise Palestinian statehood, says Former Prime Minister Helen Clark.

Canada yesterday became the latest country to announce it would formally recognise the state of Palestine when world leaders met at the UN General Assembly in September.

It follows recent similar commitments from the France and the United Kingdom.

• READ MORE: What would New Zealand recognising Palestinian statehood mean?
• Other Israeli war on Gaza reports

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon suggested the discussion was a distraction and said the immediate focus should be on getting humanitarian aid into Gaza.

But, speaking to RNZ Midday Report, Clark said New Zealand needed to come on board.

“We are watching a catastrophe unfold in Gaza. We’re watching starvation. We’re watching famine conditions for many. Many are using the word genocide,” she said.

“If New Zealand can’t act in these circumstances, when can it act?”

Elders call for recognition
“The Elders, a group of world leaders of which Clark is a part, last month issued a call for countries to recognise the state of Palestine, calling it the “beginning, not the end of a political pathway towards lasting peace”.

Clark said the government seemed to be trying avoid the ire of the United States by waiting until the peace process was well underway or nearing its end.

“That is no longer tenable,” she said.

“New Zealand really is lagging behind.”

Even before the recent commitments from France, Canada and the UK, 147 of the UN’s 193 member states had recognised the Palestinian state.

Clark said the hope was that the series of recognitions from major Western states would first shift the US position and then Israel’s.

“When the US moves, Israel eventually jumps because it owes so much to the United States for the support, financial, military and otherwise,” she said.

“At some point, Israel has to smell the coffee.”

Surprised over Peters
Clark said she was “a little surprised” that Foreign Minister Winston Peters had not been more forward-leaning given he historically had strongly advocated New Zealand’s even-handed position.

On Wednesday, New Zealand signed a joint statement with 14 other countries expressing a willingness to recognise the State of Palestine as a necessary step towards a two-state solution.

However, later speaking in Parliament, Peters said that was conditional on first seeing progress from Palestine, including representative governance, commitment to non-violence, and security guarantees for Israel.

“If we are to recognise the state of Palestine, New Zealand wants to know that what we are recognising is a legitimate, representative, viable, political entity,” Peters told MPs.

Peters also agreed with a contribution from ACT’s Simon Court that recognising the state of Palestine could be viewed as “a reward [to Hamas] for acts of terrorism” if it was done before Hamas had returned hostages or laid down arms.

Luxon earlier told RNZ New Zealand had long supported the eventual recognition of Palestinian statehood, but that the immediate focus should be on getting aid into Gaza rather than “fragmenting and talking about all sorts of other things that are distractions”.

“We need to put the pressure on Israel to get humanitarian assistance unfettered, at scale, at volume, into Gaza,” he told RNZ.

“You can talk about a whole bunch of other things, but for right now, the world needs to focus.”

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

Former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark warned activists and campaigners in a speech on the deck of the Greenpeace environmental flagship Rainbow Warrior III last night to be wary of global “storm clouds” and the renewed existential threat of nuclear weapons.

Speaking on her reflections on four decades after the bombing of the original Rainbow Warrior on 10 July 1985, she said that New Zealand had a lot to be proud of but the world was now in a “precarious” state.

Clark praised Greenpeace over its long struggle, challenging the global campaigners to keep up the fight for a nuclear-free Pacific.

• READ MORE: ‘Storm clouds are gathering’: 40 years on from the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior
• Operation Exodus: The Rainbow Warrior’s last Pacific mission
• Other Rainbow Warrior reports

“For New Zealand, having been proudly nuclear-free since the mid-1980s, life has got a lot more complicated for us as well, and I have done a lot of campaigning against New Zealand signing up to any aspect of the AUKUS arrangement because it seems to me that being associated with any agreement that supplies nuclear ship technology to Australia is more or less encouraging the development of nuclear threats in the South Pacific,” she said.

“While I am not suggesting that Australians are about to put nuclear weapons on them, we know that others do. This is not the Pacific that we want.

“It is not the Pacific that we fought for going back all those years.

“So we need to be very concerned about these storm clouds gathering.”

Lessons for humanity
Clark was prime minister 1999-2008 and served as a minister in David Lange’s Labour government that passed New Zealand’s nuclear-free legislation in 1987 – two years after the Rainbow Warrior bombing by French secret agents.

She was also head of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 2009-2017.

“When you think 40 years on, humanity might have learned some lessons. But it seems we have to repeat the lessons over and over again, or we will be dragged on the path of re-engagement with those who use nuclear weapons as their ultimate defence,” Clark told the Greenpeace activists, crew and guests.

“Forty years on, we look back with a lot of pride, actually, at how New Zealand responded to the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior. We stood up with the passage of the nuclear-free legislation in 1987, we stood up with a lot of things.

“All of this is under threat; the international scene now is quite precarious with respect to nuclear weapons. This is an existential threat.”

Nuclear-free Pacific reflections with Helen Clark         Video: Greenpeace

In response to Tahitian researcher and advocate Ena Manuireva who spoke earlier about the legacy of a health crisis as a result of 30 years of French nuclear tests at Moruroa and Fangataufa, she recalled her own thoughts.

“It reminds us of why we were so motivated to fight for a nuclear-free Pacific because we remember the history of what happened in French Polynesia, in the Marshall Islands, in the South Australian desert, at Maralinga, to the New Zealand servicemen who were sent up in the navy ships, the Rotoiti and the Pukaki, in the late 1950s, to stand on deck while the British exploded their bombs [at Christmas Island in what is today Kiribati].

“These poor guys were still seeking compensation when I was PM with the illnesses you [Ena] described in French Polynesia.

Testing ground for ‘others’
“So the Pacific was a testing ground for ‘others’ far away and I remember one of the slogans in the 1970s and 1980s was ‘if it is so safe, test them in France’. Right? It wasn’t so safe.

“Mind you, they regarded French Polynesia as France.

“David Robie asked me to write the foreword to the new edition of his book, Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, and it brought back so many memories of those times because those of you who are my age will remember that the 1980s were the peak of the Cold War.

“We had the Reagan administration [in the US] that was actively preparing for war. It was a terrifying time. It was before the demise of the Soviet Union. And nuclear testing was just part of that big picture where people were preparing for war.

“I think that the wonderful development in New Zealand was that people knew enough to know that we didn’t want to be defended by nuclear weapons because that was not mutually assured survival — it was mutually assured destruction.”

New Zealand took a stand, Clark said, but taking that stand led to the attack on the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour by French state-backed terrorism where tragically Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira lost his life.

“I remember I was on my way to Nairobi for a conference for women, and I was in Zimbabwe, when the news came through about the bombing of a boat in Auckland harbour.

‘Absolutely shocking’
“It was absolutely shocking, we had never experienced such a thing. I recall when I returned to New Zealand, [Prime Minister] David Lange one morning striding down to the party caucus room and telling us before it went public that it was without question that French spies had planted the bombs and the rest was history.

“It was a very tense time. Full marks to Greenpeace for keeping up the struggle for so long — long before it was a mainstream issue Greenpeace was out there in the Pacific taking on nuclear testing.

“Different times from today, but when I wrote the foreword for David’s book I noted that storm clouds were gathering again around nuclear weapons and issues. I suppose that there is so much else going on in a tragic 24 news cycle — catastrophe day in and day out in Gaza, severe technology and lethal weapons in Ukraine killing people, wherever you look there are so many conflicts.

“The international agreements that we have relied are falling into disrepair. For example, if I were in Europe I would be extremely worried about the demise of the intermediate range missile weapons pact which has now been abandoned by the Americans and the Russians.

“And that governs the deployment of medium range missiles in Europe.

“The New Start Treaty, which was a nuclear arms control treaty between what was the Soviet Union and the US expires next year. Will it be renegotiated in the current circumstances? Who knows?”

With the Non-proliferation Treaty, there are acknowledged nuclear powers who had not signed the treaty — “and those that do make very little effort to live up to the aspiration, which is to negotiate an end to nuclear weapons”.

Developments with Iran
“We have seen recently the latest developments with Iran, and for all of Iran’s many sins let us acknowledge that it is a party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty,” she said.

“It did subject itself, for the most part, to the inspections regime. Israel, which bombed it, is not a party to the treaty, and doesn’t accept inspections.

“There are so many double standards that people have long complained about the Non-Proliferation Treaty where the original five nuclear powers are deemed okay to have them, somehow, whereas there are others who don’t join at all.

“And then over the Ukraine conflict we have seen worrying threats of the use of nuclear weapons.”

Clark warned that we the use of artificial intelligence it would not be long before asking it: “How do I make a nuclear weapon?”

“It’s not so difficult to make a dirty bomb. So we should be extremely worried about all these developments.”

Then Clark spoke about the “complications” facing New Zealand.

Teariki’s message to De Gaulle
In his address, Ena Manuireva started off by quoting the late Tahitian parliamentarian John Teariki who had courageously appealed to General Charles De Gaulle in 1966 after France had already tested three nuclear devices:

“No government has ever had the honesty or the cynical frankness to admit that its nuclear tests might be dangerous. No government has ever hesitated to make other peoples — preferably small, defenceless ones — bear the burden.”

“May you, Mr President, take back your troops, your bombs, and your planes.

“Then, later, our leukemia and cancer patients would not be able to accuse you of being the cause of their illness.

“Then, our future generations would not be able to blame you for the birth of monsters and deformed children.

“Then, you would give the world an example worthy of France . . .

“Then, Polynesia, united, would be proud and happy to be French, and, as in the early days of Free France, we would all once again become your best and most loyal friends.”

‘Emotional moment’
Manuireva said that 10 days earlier, he had been on board Rainbow Warrior III for the ceremony to mark the bombing in 1985 that cost the life of Fernando Pereira – “and the lives of a lot of Mā’ohi people”.

“It was a very emotional moment for me. It reminded me of my mother and father as I am a descendant of those on Mangareva atoll who were contaminated by those nuclear tests.

“My mum died of lung cancer and the doctors said that she was a ‘passive smoker’. My mum had not smoked for the last 65 years.

“French nuclear testing started on 2 July 1966 with Aldebaran and lasted 30 years.”

He spoke about how the military “top brass fled the island” when winds start blowing towards Mangareva. “Food was ready but they didn’t stay”.

“By the time I was born in December 1967 in Mangareva, France had already exploded 9 atmospheric nuclear tests on Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls, about 400km from Mangareva.”

France’s most powerful explosion was Canopus with 2.6 megatonnes in August 1968. It was a thermonuclear hydrogen bomb — 150 times more powerful than Hiroshima.

‘Poisoned gift’
Manuireva said that by France “gifting us the bomb”, Tahitians had been left “with all the ongoing consequences on the people’s health costs that the Ma’ohi Nui government is paying for”.

He described how the compensation programme was inadequate, lengthy and complicated.

Manuireva also spoke about the consequences for the environment. Both Moruroa and Fangataufa were condemned as “no go” zones and islanders had lost their lands forever.

He also noted that while France had gifted the former headquarters of the Atomic Energy Commission (CEP) as a “form of reconciliation” plans to turn it into a museum were thwarted because the building was “rife with asbestos”.

“It is a poisonous gift that will cost millions for the local government to fix.”

Greenpeace Aotearoa executive director Russel Norman spoke of the impact on the Greenpeace organisation of the French secret service bombing of their ship and also introduced the guest speakers and responded to their statements.

A Q and A session was also held to round off the stimulating evening.

By Helen Clark

The bombing of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour on 10 July 1985 and the death of a voyager on board, Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira, was both a tragic and a seminal moment in the long campaign for a nuclear-free Pacific.

It was so startling that many of us still remember where we were when the news came through. I was in Zimbabwe on my way to join the New Zealand delegation to the United Nations World Conference on Women in Nairobi. In Harare I met for the first time New Zealand Anglican priest Father Michael Lapsley who, in that same city in 1990, was severely disabled by a parcel bomb delivered by the intelligence service of the apartheid regime in South Africa. These two bombings, of the Rainbow Warrior and of Michael, have been sad reminders to me of the price so many have paid for their commitment to peace and justice.

It was also very poignant for me to meet Fernando’s daughter, Marelle, in Auckland in 2005. Her family suffered a loss which no family should have to bear. In August 1985, I was at the meeting of the Labour Party caucus when it was made known that the police had identified a woman in their custody as a French intelligence officer. Then in September, French prime minister Laurent Fabius confirmed that French secret agents had indeed sunk the Rainbow Warrior. The following year, a UN-mediated agreement saw the convicted agents leave New Zealand and a formal apology, a small amount of compensation, and undertakings on trade given by France — the latter after New Zealand perishable goods had been damaged in port in France.

Both 1985 and 1986 were momentous years for New Zealand’s assertion of its nuclear-free positioning which was seen as provocative by its nuclear-armed allies. On 4 February 1985, the United States was advised that its naval vessel, the Buchanan, could not enter a New Zealand port because it was nuclear weapons-capable and the US “neither confirm nor deny” policy meant that New Zealand could not establish whether it was nuclear weapons-armed or not.

In Manila in July 1986, a meeting between prime minister David Lange and US Secretary of State George Schultz confirmed that neither New Zealand nor the US were prepared to change their positions and that New Zealand’s engagement in ANZUS was at an end. Secretary Schultz famously said that “We part company as friends, but we part company as far as the alliance is concerned”.

Pour les 40 ans de l’attentat de la France contre le Rainbow Warrior, le journaliste néo-zélandais @DavidRobie publie une nouvelle édition de son livre sur le dernier voyage du navire de Greenpeace. Préfacée par Helen Clark, ex-PM de Nouvelle-Zélandehttps://t.co/n1v8Nduel6

— Edwy Plenel (@edwyplenel) July 10, 2025

New Zealand passed its Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament and Arms Control Act in 1987. Since that time, until now, the country has on a largely bipartisan basis maintained its nuclear-free policy as a fundamental tenet of its independent foreign policy. But storm clouds are gathering.

Australia’s decision to enter a nuclear submarine purchase programme with the United States is one of those. There has been much speculation about a potential Pillar Two of the AUKUS agreement which would see others in the region become partners in the development of advanced weaponry. This is occurring in the context of rising tensions between the United States and China.

Many of us share the view that New Zealand should be a voice for deescalation, not for enthusiastic expansion of nuclear submarine fleets in the Pacific and the development of more lethal weaponry.

Nuclear war is an existential threat to humanity. Far from receding, the threat of use of nuclear weapons is ever present. The Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists now sits at 89 seconds to midnight. It references the Ukraine theatre where the use of nuclear weapons has been floated by Russia. The arms control architecture for Europe is unravelling, leaving the continent much less secure. India and Pakistan both have nuclear arsenals. The Middle East is a tinder box with the failure of the Iran nuclear deal and with Israel widely believed to possess nuclear weapons. North Korea continues to develop its nuclear weapons capacity. An outright military conflict between China and the United States would be one between two nuclear powers with serious ramifications for East Asia, South-East Asia, the Pacific, and far beyond.

August 2025 marks the eightieth anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A survivors’ group, Nihon Hidankyo, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year. They bear tragic witness to the horror of the use of nuclear weapons. The world must heed their voice now and at all times.

In the current global turbulence, New Zealand needs to reemphasise the principles and values which drove its nuclear-free legislation and its advocacy for a nuclear-free South Pacific and global nuclear disarmament. New Zealanders were clear — we did not want to be defended by nuclear weapons. We wanted our country to be a force for diplomacy and for dialogue, not for warmongering.

The multilateral system is now in crisis — across all its dimensions. The UN Security Council is paralysed by great power tensions. The United States is unlikely to pay its dues to the UN under the Trump presidency, and others are unlikely to fill the substantial gap which that leaves. Its humanitarian, development, health, human rights, political and peacekeeping, scientific and cultural arms all face fiscal crises.

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

Movement back towards an out-of-date alliance, from which New Zealand disengaged four decades ago, and its current tentacles, offers no safe harbour — on the contrary, these destabilise the region within which we live and the wide trading relationships we have. May this new edition of David Robie’s Eyes of Fire remind us of our nuclear-free journey and its relevance as a lode star in these current challenging times.

• The 40th anniversary edition of Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior by David Robie ($50, Little Island Press) can be purchased from Little Island Press. 

Former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark has warned the country needs to maintain its nuclear-free policy as a “fundamental tenet” of its independent foreign policy in the face of gathering global storm clouds.

Writing in a new book being published next week, she says “nuclear war is an existential threat to humanity. Far from receding, the threat of use of nuclear weapons is ever present.

“The Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists now sits at 89 seconds to midnight,” she says in the prologue to journalist and media academic David Robie’s book Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior.

• READ MORE: 40 years on: Reflecting on Rainbow Warrior’s legacy, fight against nuclear colonialism
• Other Eyes of Fire reports

Writing before the US surprise attack with B-2 stealth bombers and “bunker-buster” bombs on three Iranian nuclear facilities on June 22, Clark says “the Middle East is a tinder box with the failure of the Iran nuclear deal and with Israel widely believed to possess nuclear weapons”.

The Doomsday Clock references the Ukraine war theatre where “use of nuclear weapons has been floated by Russia”.

Also, the arms control architecture for Europe is unravelling, leaving the continent much less secure. India and Pakistan both have nuclear arsenals, she says.

“North Korea continues to develop its nuclear weapons capacity.”

‘Serious ramifications’
Clark, who was also United Nations Development Programme administrator from 2009 to 2017, a member of The Elders group of global leaders founded by Nelson Mandela in 2007, and is an advocate for multilateralism and nuclear disarmament, says an outright military conflict between China and the United States “would be one between two nuclear powers with serious ramifications for East Asia, Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and far beyond.”

She advises New Zealand to be wary of Australia’s decision to enter a nuclear submarine purchase programme with the United States.

“There has been much speculation about a potential Pillar Two of the AUKUS agreement which would see others in the region become partners in the development of advanced weaponry,” Clark says.

“This is occurring in the context of rising tensions between the United States and China.

“Many of us share the view that New Zealand should be a voice for de-escalation, not for enthusiastic expansion of nuclear submarine fleets in the Pacific and the development
of more lethal weaponry.”

In the face of the “current global turbulence, New Zealand needs to reemphasise the principles and values which drove its nuclear-free legislation and its advocacy for a nuclear-free South Pacific and global nuclear disarmament.

Clark says that the years 1985 – the Rainbow Warrior was bombed by French secret agents on 10 July 1985 — and 1986 were critical years in the lead up to New Zealand’s nuclear-free legislation in 1987.

“New Zealanders were clear – we did not want to be defended by nuclear weapons. We wanted our country to be a force for diplomacy and for dialogue, not for warmongering.”

Chronicles humanitarian voyage
The book Eyes of Fire chronicles the humanitarian voyage by the Greenpeace flagship to the Marshall Islands to relocate 320 Rongelap Islanders who were suffering serious community health consequences from the US nuclear tests in the 1950s.

The author, Dr David Robie, founder of the Pacific Media Centre at Auckland University of Technology, was the only journalist on board the Rainbow Warrior in the weeks leading up to the bombing.

His book recounts the voyage and nuclear colonialism, and the transition to climate justice as the major challenge facing the Pacific, although the “Indo-Pacific” rivalries between the US, France and China mean that geopolitical tensions are recalling the Cold War era in the Pacific.

Dr Robie is also critical of Indonesian colonialism in the Melanesian region of the Pacific, arguing that a just-outcome for Jakarta-ruled West Papua and also the French territories of Kanaky New Caledonia and “French” Polynesia are vital for peace and stability in the region.

Eyes of Fire is being published by Little Island Press, which also produced one of his earlier books, Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face: Media, Mayhem and Human Rights in the Pacific.

• Greenpeace executive director Dr Russel Norman is launching Eyes of Fire at the Ellen Melville Centre Pioneer Women’s Hall at 6pm on the bombing anniversary, July 10, following a memorial vigil in the morning on board the current flagship Rainbow Warrior III.
• Eyes of Fire microsite (Little Island Press)

Former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark believes the Cook Islands, a realm of New Zealand, caused a crisis for itself by not consulting Wellington before signing a deal with China.

The New Zealand government has paused more than $18 million in development assistance to the Cook Islands after the latter failed to provide satisfactory answers to Aotearoa’s questions about its partnership agreement with Beijing.

The Cook Islands is in free association with New Zealand and governs its own affairs. But New Zealand provides assistance with foreign affairs (upon request), disaster relief, and defence.

• READ MORE: Mark Brown: Cook Islands ‘not consulted’ on NZ-China agreements
• Other Cook Islands crisis reports

The 2001 Joint Centenary Declaration signed between the two nations requires them to consult each other on defence and security, which Foreign Minister Winston Peters said had not been honoured.

Peters and Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown both have a difference of opinion on the level of consultation required between the two nations on such matters.

“There is no way that the 2001 declaration envisaged that Cook Islands would enter into a strategic partnership with a great power behind New Zealand’s back,” Clark told RNZ Pacific on Thursday.

Clark was a signatory of the 2001 agreement with the Cook Islands as New Zealand prime minister at the time.

“It is the Cook Islands government’s actions which have created this crisis,” she said.

Urgent need for dialogue
“The urgent need now is for face-to-face dialogue at a high level to mend the NZ-CI relationship.”

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has downplayed the pause in funding to the Cook Islands during his second day of his trip to China.

Brown told Parliament on Thursday (Wednesday, Cook Islands time) that his government knew the funding cut was coming.

He also suggested a double standard, pointing out that New Zealand had also entered deals with China that the Cook Islands was not “privy to or being consulted on”.

A Pacific law expert says that, while New Zealand has every right to withhold its aid to the Cook Islands, the way it is going about it will not endear it to Pacific nations.

Auckland University of Technology senior law lecturer and a former Pacific Islands Forum advisor Sione Tekiteki told RNZ Pacific that for Aotearoa to keep highlighting that it is “a Pacific country and yet posture like the United States gives mixed messages”.

“Obviously, Pacific nations in true Pacific fashion will not say much, but they are indeed thinking it,” Tekiteki said.

Misunderstanding of agreement
Since day dot there has been a misunderstanding on what the 2001 agreement legally required New Zealand and Cook Islands to consult on, and the word consultation has become somewhat of a sticking point.

The latest statement from the Cook Islands government confirms it is still a discrepancy both sides want to hash out.

“There has been a breakdown and difference in the interpretation of the consultation requirements committed to by the two governments in the 2001 Joint Centenary Declaration,” the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Immigration (MFAI) said.

“An issue that the Cook Islands is determined to address as a matter of urgency”.

Tekiteki said that, unlike a treaty, the 2001 declaration was not “legally binding” per se but serves more to express the intentions, principles and commitments of the parties to work together in “recognition of the close traditional, cultural and social ties that have existed between the two countries for many hundreds of years”.

He said the declaration made it explicitly clear that Cook Islands had full conduct of its foreign affairs, capacity to enter treaties and international agreements in its own right and full competence of its defence and security.

However, he added that there was a commitment of the parties to “consult regularly”.

This, for Clark, the New Zealand leader who signed the all-important agreement more than two decades ago, is where Brown misstepped.

Clark previously labelled the Cook Islands-China deal “clandestine” which has “damaged” its relationship with New Zealand.

RNZ Pacific contacted the Cook Islands Ministry of Foreign Affairs for comment but was advised by the MFAI secretary that they are not currently accommodating interviews.

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

The Green Party has called on Prime Minister Christopher Luxon to rule out Aotearoa New Zealand joining the AUKUS military technical pact in any capacity following the row over Ukraine in the White House over the weekend.

President Donald Trump’s “appalling treatment” of his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy was a “clear warning that we must avoid AUKUS at all costs”, said Green Party foreign affairs and Pacific issues spokesperson Teanau Tuiono.

“Aotearoa must stand on an independent and principled approach to foreign affairs and use that as a platform to promote peace.”

• READ MORE: US pauses aid to Ukraine, puts tariffs on Canada, Mexico, China
• Other AUKUS reports

US President Donald Trump has paused all military aid for Ukraine after the “disastrous” Oval Office meeting with President Zelenskyy in another unpopular foreign affairs move that has been widely condemned by European leaders.

Oleksandr Merezhko, the chair of Ukraine’s Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee, declared that Trump appeared to be trying to push Kyiv to capitulate on Russia’s terms.

He was quoted as saying that the aid pause was worse than the 1938 Munich Agreement that allowed Nazi Germany to annex part of Czechoslovakia.

‘Danger of Trump leadership’
Tuiono, who is the Green Party’s first tagata moana MP, said: “What we saw in the White House at the weekend laid bare the volatility and danger of the Trump leadership — nothing good can come from deepening our links to this administration.

“Christopher Luxon should read the room and rule out joining any part of the AUKUS framework.”

Tuiono said New Zealand should steer clear of AUKUS regardless of who was in the White House “but Trump’s transactional and hyper-aggressive foreign policy makes the case to stay out stronger than ever”.

“Our country must not join a campaign that is escalating tensions in the Pacific and talking up the prospects of a war which the people of our region firmly oppose.

“Advocating for, and working towards, peaceful solutions to the world’s conflicts must be an absolute priority for our country,” Tuiono said.

Five Eyes network ‘out of control’
Meanwhile, in the 1News weekly television current affairs programme Q&A, former Prime Minister Helen Clark challenged New Zealand’s continued involvement in the Five Eyes intelligence network, describing it as “out of control”.

Her comments reflected growing concern by traditional allies and partners of the US over President Trump’s handling of long-standing relationships.

Clark said the Five Eyes had strayed beyond its original brief of being merely a coordinating group for intelligence agencies in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand.

“There’s been some talk in the media that Trump might want to evict Canada from it . . . Please could we follow?” she said.

“I mean, really, the problem with Five Eyes now has become a basis for policy positioning on all sorts of things.

“And to see it now as the basis for joint statements, finance minister meetings, this has got a bit out of control.”

Check out my interview with @GuyonEspiner on @NZQandA today on the implications of the disruptive reorientation of US foreign policy & its implications for Europe & #NZ; Chinese in the Tasman Sea, & the #CookIslands debacle: https://t.co/QD2N9NaBD1 via @YouTube

— Helen Clark (@HelenClarkNZ) March 2, 2025

Former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark maintains that Cook Islands, a realm of New Zealand, should have consulted Wellington before signing a “partnership” deal with China.

“[Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown] seems to have signed behind the backs of his own people as well as of New Zealand,” Clark told RNZ Pacific.

Brown said the deal with China complements, not replaces, the relationship with New Zealand.

• READ MORE: China deal ‘complements, not replaces’ NZ relationship, says Cook Islands PM
• Other China in Pacific reports
• The Joint Centenary Declaration of 2001

The contents of the deal have not yet been made public.

“The Cook Islands public need to see the agreement — does it open the way to Chinese entry to deep sea mining in pristine Cook Islands waters with huge potential for environmental damage?” Clark asked.

“Does it open the way to unsustainable borrowing? What are the governance safeguards? Why has the prime minister damaged the relationship with New Zealand by acting in this clandestine way?”

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Clark went into detail about the declaration she signed with Cook Islands Prime Minister Terepai Maoate in 2001.

“There is no doubt in my mind that under the terms of the Joint Centenary Declaration of 2001 that Cook Islands should have been upfront with New Zealand on the agreement it was considering signing with China,” Clark said.

“Cook Islands has opted in the past for a status which is not independent of New Zealand, as signified by its people carrying New Zealand passports. Cook Islands is free to change that status, but has not.”

Missing the mark
A Pacific law expert said there was a clear misunderstanding on what the 2001 agreement legally required New Zealand and Cook Islands to consult on.

Brown has argued that New Zealand does not need to be consulted with to the level they want, something Foreign Minister Winston Peters disagrees with.

AUT senior law lecturer and former Pacific Islands Forum policy advisor Sione Tekiteki told RNZ Pacific the word “consultation” had become somewhat of a sticking point:

“From a legal perspective, there’s an ambiguity of what the word consultation means. Does it mean you have to share the agreement before it’s signed, or does it mean that you broadly just consult with New Zealand regarding what are some of the things that, broadly speaking, are some of the things that are in the agreement?

“That’s one avenue where there’s a bit of misunderstanding and an interpretation issue that’s different between Cook Islands as well as New Zealand.”

Unlike a treaty, the 2001 declaration is not “legally binding” per se but serves more to express the intentions, principles and commitments of the parties to work together in “recognition of the close traditional, cultural and social ties that have existed between the two countries for many hundreds of years”, he added.

Tekiteki said that the declaration made it explicitly clear that Cook Islands had full conduct of its foreign affairs, capacity to enter treaties and international agreements in its own right and full competence of its defence and security.

There was, however, a commitment of the parties to “consult regularly”, he said.

For Clark, the one who signed the all-important agreement all those years ago, this is where Brown had misstepped.

Pacific nations played off against each other
Tekiteki said it was not just the Joint Centenary Declaration causing contention. The “China threat” narrative and the “intensifying geopolitics” playing out in the Pacific was another intergrated issue.

An analysis in mid-2024 found that there were more than 60 security, defence and policing agreements and initiatives with the 10 largest Pacific countries.

Australia was the dominant partner, followed by New Zealand, the US and China.

A host of other agreements and “big money” announcements have followed, including the regional Pacific Policing Initiative and Australia’s arrangements with Nauru and PNG.

“It would be advantageous if Pacific nations were able to engage on security related matters as a bloc rather than at the bilateral level,” Tekiteki said.

“Not only will this give them greater political agency and leverage, but it would allow them to better coordinate and integrate support as well as avoid duplications. Entering these arrangements at the bilateral level opens Pacific nations to being played off against each other.

“This is the most worrying aspect of what I am currently seeing.

“This matter has greater implications for Cook Islands and New Zealand diplomatic relations moving forward.”

Protecting Pacific sovereignty
The word sovereignty is thrown around a lot. In this instance Tekiteki does not think “there is any dispute that Cook Islands maintains sovereignty to enter international arrangements and to conduct its affairs as it determines”.

But he did point out the difference between “sovereignty — the rhetoric” that we hear all the time, and “real sovereignty”.

“For example, sovereignty is commonly used as a rebuttal to other countries to mind their own business and not to meddle in the affairs of another country.

“At the regional level is tied to the projection of collective Pacific agency, and the ‘Blue Pacific’ narrative.

“However, real sovereignty is more nuanced. In the context of New Zealand and Cook Islands, both countries retain their sovereignty, but they have both made commitments to “consult” and “cooperate”.

Now, they can always decide to break that, but that in itself would have implications on their respective sovereignty moving forward.

“In an era of intensifying geopolitics, militarisation, and power posturing — this becomes very concerning for vulnerable but large Ocean Pacific nations without the defence capabilities to protect their sovereignty.”

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

Australia and New Zealand’s populations must now wake up to the fact that our countries have been drawn into what ForeignPolicy.com called the knitting together of “the United States’ patchwork of different regional security systems into a global security architecture of networked alliances and partnerships”.

Hit pause right there.

Very few people have tuned into the fact that what is happening isn’t “NATO” moving into our region – it’s actually far bigger than that.  America is creating a super-bloc, a super-alliance of client states that includes both the EU and NATO, the AP4 (its key Asia Pacific partners Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Japan) and other partners like the Philippines (now the Marcos dynasty is back at the helm).

• READ MORE: Other NZ-China and Luxon reports

It explains why, in the midst of committing genocide in Palestine, Israel still managed to send defence personnel to participate in RIMPAC 2024 naval exercises: they’re part of our team.  It is taking the Military Industrial Complex to a global level. Where do you think it will lead us to?

New Zealand is about to sacrifice what it cannot afford to lose for something it doesn’t need: gambling we can keep the strength and security of our trading relationship with China while leaping into the US anti-China military alliance.

The Chinese have noticed. Writing in the South China Morning Post last week, Alex Lo gave an unvarnished Chinese perspective on this. In a piece titled “NATO barbarians are expanding and gathering at the gates of Asia,” he says: “Most regional countries want none of it, but four Trojan horses – South Korea, Japan, Australia and New Zealand – are ready to let them in”.

“Has it crossed Blinken’s mind that most of Asia, including the Indian subcontinent, don’t want NATO militarism to infect their parts of the world like the plague?”

While in Washington for the recent NATO summit, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon told The Financial Times that he viewed China as a strategic competitor in the Indo-Pacific.  In the next breath he said he wanted New Zealand to continue to develop trade with China and double the country’s overall exports over the next 10 years.

Good luck with that if we join a hostile alliance. And since when has New Zealand declared that China was a strategic competitor?  That’s an American position, surely not ours?

New Zealand could “add value” to its security relationships and be a “force multiplier for Australia and the US and other partners”, Luxon said while being hosted in Washington.  New Zealand was also “very open” to participating in the second pillar of AUKUS.

Firmly placing New Zealand in the anti-China camp in this way was immediately lambasted by former PM Helen Clark and ex National Party leader Don Brash. What has been abandoned, they argue, without any public consultation, is our relatively independent foreign policy.   They sounded a warning about where real danger lies:

New Zealand’s Labour Party is demanding Winston Peters be stood down as Foreign Minister for opening up the government to legal action over his “totally unacceptable” attack on a prominent AUKUS critic.

In an interview on RNZ’s Morning Report today, Peters criticised the former Australian senator Bob Carr’s views on the security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

RNZ has removed the comments from the interview online after Carr, who was Australia’s foreign minister from 2012 to 2013, told RNZ he considered the remarks to be “entirely defamatory” and would commence legal action.

• READ MORE: Helen Clark on why AUKUS isn’t in New Zealand’s national interest
• Other AUKUS reports

A spokesperson for Peters told RNZ the minister would respond if he received formal notification of any such action. The Prime Minister’s Office has been contacted for comment.

Speaking to media in Auckland, opposition Labour leader Chris Hipkins said Peters’ allegations were “totally unacceptable” and “well outside his brief”.

“He’s embarrassed the country. He’s created legal risk to the New Zealand government.”

Hipkins said Prime Minister Christopher Luxon must show some leadership and stand Peters down from the role immediately.

‘Abused his office’
“Winston Peters has abused his office as minister of foreign affairs, and this now becomes a problem for the prime minister,” he said.

“Winston Peters cannot execute his duties as foreign affairs minister while he has this hanging over him.”

Labour leader Chris Hipkins on AUKUS and the legal threat.  Video: RNZ

Peters was being interviewed on Morning Report about a major foreign policy speech he delivered in Wellington last night where he laid out New Zealand’s position on AUKUS.

Hipkins told reporters he was pleased with the “overall thrust” of Peters’ speech compared to recent comments he made while visiting the US.

“I welcome him stepping back a little bit from his previous ‘rush-headlong-into-signing-up-for-AUKUS’,” Hipkins said. “That is a good thing.”

Hipkins said the government needed to be very clear with New Zealanders about what AUKUS Pillar 2 involved.

Luxon praises Peters
Speaking to media in Auckland on Thursday afternoon, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, when asked about Peters’ comments, said as an experienced politician Carr should understand the “rough and tumble of politics”.

Luxon said he would not make the comments Peters made, and had not spoken to him about them.

Peters was doing an “exceptionally good job” as foreign minister and his comments posed no diplomatic risk, Luxon said.

Last month, Carr travelled to New Zealand to take part in a panel discussion on AUKUS, after Labour’s foreign affairs spokesperson David Parker organised a debate at Parliament.

⁦@radionz⁩ has edited the tape of NZ Foreign Minister interview this morning to remove shocking and unwarranted comments made about former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr: https://t.co/6f1i1M4RSW

— Helen Clark (@HelenClarkNZ) May 1, 2024

Former Labour Prime Minister Helen Clark was also on the panel, and has been highly critical of AUKUS and what she believes is the coalition government moving closer to traditional allies, in particular the United States.

Clark told Morning Report today she had contacted Carr after she heard Peters’ comments, which she also described as defamatory.

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

When former prime minister Helen Clark spoke out against New Zealand potentially compromising its independent foreign policy by joining pillar two of the AUKUS security pact, Foreign Minister Winston Peters responded bluntly:

On what could she have possibly based that statement? […] And I’m saying to people, including Helen Clark, please don’t mislead New Zealanders with your suspicions without any facts – let us find out what we’re talking about.

Pillar one of AUKUS involves the delivery of nuclear submarines to Australia, making New Zealand membership impossible under its nuclear-free policy.

• READ MORE: Joining AUKUS could boost NZ’s poor research and technology spending – but at what cost?
• Is Japan joining AUKUS? Not formally – its cooperation will remain limited for now
• New Zealand is reviving the ANZAC alliance – joining AUKUS is a logical next step

But pillar two envisages the development of advanced military technology in areas such as artificial intelligence, hypersonic missiles and cyber warfare. By some reckonings, New Zealand could benefit from joining at that level.

Peters denies the National-led coalition government has committed to joining pillar two. He says exploratory talks with AUKUS members are “to find out all the facts, all the aspects of what we’re talking about and then as a country to make a decision.”

But while the previous Labour government expressed a willingness to explore pillar two membership, the current government appears to view it as integral to its broader foreign policy objective of aligning New Zealand more closely with “traditional partners”.

Official enthusiasm
During his visit to Washington earlier this month, Peters said New Zealand and the Biden administration had pledged “to work ever more closely together in support of shared values and interests” in a strategic environment “considerably more challenging now than even a decade ago”.

In particular, he and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken agreed there were “powerful reasons” for New Zealand to engage practically with arrangements like AUKUS “as and when all parties deem it appropriate”.

Former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark warns a “profoundly undemocratic” shift in New Zealand’s foreign policy is taking place — warning the coalition Government off a geopolitical shift which Kiwis didn’t vote for. https://t.co/2E2aKOpf2w

— 1News (@1NewsNZ) April 9, 2024

Declassified documents reveal the official enthusiasm behind such statements and the tightly-curated public messaging it has produced.

A series of joint-agency briefings provided to the New Zealand government characterise AUKUS pillar two as a “non-nuclear” technology-sharing partnership that would elevate New Zealand’s longstanding cooperation with traditional partners and bring opportunities for the aerospace and tech sectors.

But any assessment of New Zealand’s strategic interests must be clear-eyed and not clouded by partial truths or wishful thinking.

Beyond great power rivalry
First, the current government inherited strong bilateral relations with traditional security partners Australia, the US and UK, as well as a consistent and cooperative relationship with China.

Second, while the contemporary global security environment poses threats to New Zealand’s interests, these challenges extend beyond great power rivalry between the US and China.

The multilateral system, on which New Zealand relies, is paralysed by the weakening of institutions such as the UN Security Council, Russian expansionism in Ukraine and a growing array of problems which do not respect borders.

Those include climate change, pandemics and wealth inequality — problems that cannot be fixed unilaterally by great powers.

Third, it is evident New Zealand sometimes disagrees with its traditional partners over respect for international law.

In 2003, for example, New Zealand broke ranks with the US (and the UK and Australia) over the invasion of Iraq. More recently, it was the only member of the Five Eyes network to vote in the UN General Assembly for an immediate humanitarian truce in Gaza.

China’s man in Wellington has a warning for the NZ Govt that joining Pillar II of AUKUS won’t make the region safer, in an exclusive commentary for Newsroom. https://t.co/xgXNwbWRSv

— Newsroom (@NewsroomNZ) April 13, 2024

Role of the US
In a robust speech to the UN General Assembly on April 7, Peters said the world must halt the “utter catastrophe” in Gaza.

He said the use of the veto — which New Zealand had always opposed — prevented the Security Council from fulfilling its primary function of maintaining global peace and security.

However, the government has been unwilling to publicly admit a crucial point: it was a traditional ally — the US — whose Security Council veto and unconditional support of Israel have led to systematic and plausibly genocidal violations of international law in Gaza, and a strategic windfall for rival states China, Russia and Iran.

Rather than being a consistent voice for justice and de-escalation, the New Zealand government has joined the US in countering Houthi rebels, which have been targeting commercial shipping in the Red Sea.

A done deal?
The world has become a more complex and conflicted place for New Zealand. But it would be naive to believe the US has played no part in this and that salvation lies in aligning with AUKUS, which lacks a coherent strategy for addressing multifaceted challenges.

There are alternatives to pillar two of AUKUS more consistent with a principled, independent foreign policy, centred in the Pacific, and which deserve to be seriously considered.

On balance, New Zealand involvement in pillar two of AUKUS would represent a seismic shift in the country’s geopolitical stance. The current government seems bullish about this prospect, which has fuelled concerns membership may be almost a done deal.

If true, it would be the government facing questions about transparency.

Marco de Jong, lecturer, Law School, Auckland University of Technology and Robert G. Patman, professor of international relations, University of Otago. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Helen Clark, how I miss you.  The former New Zealand Prime Minister — the safest pair of hands this country has had in living memory — gave a masterclass on the importance of maintaining an independent foreign policy when she spoke at an AUKUS symposium held in Parliament’s old Legislative Chambers yesterday.

AUKUS (Australia, UK, US) is first and foremost a military alliance aimed at our major trading partner China. It is designed to maintain US primacy in the “Indo-Pacific” region and opponents are sceptical of claims that China represents a threat to New Zealand or Australian security.

The recent proposal to bring New Zealand into the alliance under “Pillar II”  would represent a shift in our security and alliance settings that could dismantle our country’s independent foreign policy and potentially undo our nuclear free policy.

• READ MORE: Other AUKUS reports

Clark’s assessment is that the way the government has approached the proposed alliance lacks transparency.  National made no signal of its intentions during the election campaign and yet the move towards AUKUS seems well planned and choreographed.

Voters in the last election “were not sensitised to any changes in the policy settings,” Clark says, “and this raises huge issues of transparency.”

Such a significant shift should first secure a mandate from the electorate.

A key question the speakers addressed at the symposium was: is AUKUS in the best interest of this country and our region?

Highly questionable
“All of these statements made about AUKUS being good for us are highly questionable,” Clark says.  “What is good about joining a ratcheting up of tensions in a region?  Where is the military threat to New Zealand?”

Clark, PM from 1999-2008, has noticed a serious slippage in our independent position.  She contrasted current policy on the Middle East with the decision, under her leadership, of not joining the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Sceptical of US claims about weapons of mass destruction, New Zealand made clear it wanted no part of it — a stance that has proven correct. Our powerful allies the US, UK and Australia were wrong both on intelligence and the consequences of military action.

In contrast, New Zealand participating in the current bombardment of Yemen because of the Houthis disruption of Red Sea traffic in response to the Israeli war on Gaza is, says Clark, an indication of this change in fundamental policy stance:

“New Zealand should have demanded the root causes for the shipping route disruptions be addressed rather than enthusiastically joining the bombing.”

“There’s no doubt in my mind that if the drift we see in position continues, we will be positioned in a way we haven’t seen for decades –  as a fully-signed-up partner to US strategies in the region.

“And from that, will flow expectations about what is the appropriate level of defence expenditure for New Zealand and expectations of New Zealand contributing to more and more military activities.”

A hugely important interview with Helen Clark about AUKUS

Here are the highlights:

1- What are the issues here? How much are we prepared to spend? Where is this leading us to? https://t.co/mKVC21XSwQ pic.twitter.com/VHjWt3NboE

— Donna Miles دانا مجاب (@UnPressed) April 14, 2024

Economic security
Clark addressed another element which should add caution to New Zealand joining an American crusade against China: economic security.

China now takes 26 percent of our exports — twice what we send to Australia and 2.5 times what we send to the US.  She questioned the wisdom of taking a hostile stance against our biggest trading partner who continues to pose no security threat to this country.

So what is the alternative to New Zealand siding with the US in its push to contain China and help the US maintain its hegemon status?

“The alternative path is that New Zealand keeps its head while all around are losing theirs — and that we combine with our South Pacific neighbours to advocate for a region which is at peace,” Clark says, echoing sentiments that go right back to the dawn of New Zealand’s nuclear free Pacific, “so that we always pursue dialogue and engagement over confrontation.”

Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington, New Zealand. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at his public policy website Solidarity and is republished here with permission.

Former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark, who led the UN Development Programme which oversees UNRWA, told RNZ Morning Report today it was the biggest platform for getting humanitarian aid into Gaza for a population that is 85 percent displaced.

People are on the verge on starvation and going without medical supplies, she says.

“If you’re going to defund and destroy this platform, then the misery and suffering of the people under bombardment can only increase and you can only have more deaths.”

• LISTEN TO RNZ MORNING REPORT: Helen Clark’s full interview on UNRWA
• Palestinians condemn suspension of UNRWA funding by Western nations
• Delegitimise, defund, destroy: Israel’s long-waged war against UNRWA
• Amnesty chief calls UNRWA funding cuts ‘heartless’, ‘sickening’ – Breakdown of funding
• UNRWA funding cuts condemned as ‘collective punishment’
• Other UNRWA reports from Al Jazeera

Clark said it was “most regrettable that countries have acted in this precipitous way to defund the organisation on the basis of allegations”.

Al Jazeera reports that top Palestinian officials and Hamas have criticised the decision by nearly a dozen Western countries led by the US to suspend funding (totalling more than US$667 million) for UNRWA — the UN relief agency for Palestinians — and called for an immediate reversal of the move, which entails “great” risk.

Ireland, Norway, Spain, the European Union and others (with funding totalling more than $497 million) have confirmed continued support for UNRWA, saying the agency does crucial work to help Palestinians displaced and in desperate need of assistance in Gaza.

The Norwegian aid agency said the people of Gaza would “starve in the streets” without UNRWA humanitarian assistance.

Hamas’ media office said in a post on Telegram: “We ask the UN and the international organisations to not cave into the threats and blackmail” from Israel.

Defunding ‘not right decision’
Former PM Clark did not deny the allegations made were serious, but said defunding the agency without knowing the outcome of the investigation was not the right decision, RNZ reports.

“I led an organisation that had tens of thousands of people on contracts at any one time. Could I say, hand on heart, people never did anything wrong? No I couldn’t. But what I could say was that any allegations would be fully investigated and results made publicly known,” she said.

UNRWA funding cuts — why Israel is trying to destroy the UN Palestinian aid agency.  Video: Al Jazeera

“That’s exactly what the head of UNRWA has said, it’s what the Secretary-General’s saying, that process is underway, but this is not a time to be just cutting off the funding because a small minority of UNRWA staff face allegations.”

Luxon suggested Clark’s plea would not affect New Zealand’s response.

The European Union will NOT suspend funding to UNRWA. It will await the results of the investigation that UNRWA announced, not collectively punish Palestinian civilians while the investigation is underway the way the US government and others are doing. https://t.co/NUxEC0MrwJ

— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) January 29, 2024

“I appreciate that, but we’re the government, and they’re serious allegations, they need to be understood and investigated and when the foreign minister [Winston Peters] says that he’s done that and he’s happy for us to contribute and continue to contribute, we’ll do that.”

He compared the funding of about $1 million each year (in June) with the $10 million in humanitarian assistance provided by the government for the relief effort — “and we’ve split that money between the International Red Cross and also the World Food Programme”.

Clark said people could starve to death or die because they did not receive the medication they needed in the meantime.

Halting aid to Gaza via UNRWA is “deeply twisted and harmful”.
…And Australia has joined in the halt. https://t.co/17gV0AyPaj pic.twitter.com/5b7DU6dOaB

— Peter Cronau (@PeterCronau) January 30, 2024

If major donor countries like the United States and Germany continued to withhold funding, UNRWA would go down and there was no alternative, she said.

Clark did not believe there was any coincidence in the allegations being made known at the same time as the International Court of Justice’s ruling on the situation in Gaza.

According to the BBC, the court ordered Israel to do everything in its power to refrain from killing and injuring Palestinians and do more to “prevent and punish” public incitement to genocide. Tel Aviv must report back to the court on its actions within a month.

Clark said the timing of the UNRWA allegations was an attempt to deflect the significant rulings made of the court and dismiss them.

“I think it’s fairly obvious what was happening.”

States must reverse cruel decision to withdraw UNRWA funding
https://t.co/JRMfHH9P04

— Amnesty International (@amnesty) January 29, 2024

Israel had provided the agency with information alleging a dozen staff were involved in the October 7 attack by Hamas fighters in southern Israel, which left about 1139 dead and about 250 taken as hostages.

More than 26,000 people — mostly women and children — have been killed in Gaza since Israel launched a major military operation in response, according to the enclave’s Health Ministry.

Israel military have killed 152 UNRWA aid workers since the onslaught on Gaza began.

UNRWA was founded in the wake of the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 to provide hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees who were forcibly displaced with education, healthcare, social services and jobs. It started operations in 1950.

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

Former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark has joined a chorus of global development and political figures defending the United Nations “lifeline” for more than two million Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip enclave.

Declaring New Zealand should stick to its three-year funding agreement with the UN relief agency for Palestinians (UNRWA), Clark joined the pleas by the agency chief executive Philippe Lazzarini — who condemned the US action to suspend funding as “collective punishment” — and Secretary-General António Guterres.

New Zealand is due to fund the agency $1 million this year.

• READ MORE:  Israel’s war on Gaza live: Aid cuts are ‘collective punishment’ – UNRWA
• More countries pause funds for UN Palestinian agency

Protesters at an Auckland solidarity rally for Palestine demanding an immediate unconditional ceasefire also condemned the countries suspending UNRWA funding amid reports of serious flooding of Gaza refugee camps.

Suspension of funding by 9 countries to @UNRWA amounts to further collective punishment of besieged #Gaza population. #UNRWA is largest UN humanitarian & development service provider there. Staff accused of crimes have been dismissed. Do donors want relief operation to collapse? https://t.co/xU5jAfqm7T

— Helen Clark (@HelenClarkNZ) January 27, 2024

Other political leaders to voice concerns as eight countries joined the US in announcing they were suspending their funding for UNRWA include Scotland’s First Minister Humza Yousaf and former leader of the UK Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn.

Two countries — Ireland and Norway — declared they they would continue funding the agency and Lazzarini said: “It is shocking to see a suspension of funds to the agency in reaction to allegations against a small group of staff.”

Cuts one day after ICJ ruling
The cuts to funding were announced by the US a day after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) had ordered Israel to take steps to prevent genocidal acts and to punish those who committed such acts in its war on Gaza, and to immediately facilitate aid to the victims of the war.

Israel had alleged that about a dozen of the agency’s 13,000 employees had been involved in the deadly Hamas raid on southern Israel on October 7.

UNRWA is the primary humanitarian agency in #Gaza, with over 2 million people depending on it for their sheer survival.

93% of displaced families in southern governorates of#Gaza have reported inadequate food consumption.

People are desperate, hunger stalks everyone. pic.twitter.com/WLr0JYNRb2

— UNRWA (@UNRWA) January 27, 2024

The eight other countries that have joined the US in suspending funding are Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Finland.

“Serious as allegations around a tiny percentage of now former UNRWA staff may be, this isn’t the time to suspend funding to UN’s largest relief and development agency in Gaza,” said Clark, who is also the former head of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), in a post on social media.

Secretary-General Guterres said in a statement that the UN had taken “swift actions” following the “serious allegations” against UNRWA staff members, terminating most of the suspects and activating an investigation.

“Of the 12 people implicated, nine were immediately identified and terminated by the Commissioner General of UNRWA Philippe Lazzarini, one is confirmed dead, and the identity of the two others is being clarified,” he said.

“Any UN employee involved in acts of terror will be held accountable, including through criminal prosecution.

‘Ready to cooperate’
“The secretariat is ready to cooperate with a competent authority able to prosecute the individuals in line with the secretariat’s normal procedures for such cooperation.

“Meanwhile, 2 million civilians in Gaza depend on critical aid from UNRWA for daily survival, but UNRWA’s current funding will not allow it to meet all requirements to support them in February.”

The day after @ICJ concluded that Israel is plausibly committing Genocide in Gaza, some states decided to defund UNRWA, collectively punishing millions of Palestinians at the most critical time, and most likely violating their obligations under the Genocide Convention. https://t.co/fl32DrDeFs

— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) January 27, 2024

Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, said that states cutting funding to UNRWA could be “violating their obligations under the Genocide Convention”.

“The day after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) concluded that Israel is plausibly committing genocide in Gaza, some states decided to defund UNRWA,” Albanese said in a post on social media.

Albanese also described the decision taken by several UNWRA donors as “collectively punishing millions of Palestinians at the most critical time”.

Noting the irony, lawyer and social media content producer Rosy Pirani said in a post on Instagram: “The US stopped funding UNHRA over an unverified claim that some of its employees may have been involved in 10/7, but continues to fund Israel despite actual evidence [before the ICJ] that it is committing genocide.”

Meanwhile, the largest hospital in besieged Khan Younis city remained crippled and faced collapse as Israel’s offensive continued nearby. Doctors described it as a “dangerous situation”.

Footage showed people in the crowded facility being treated on blood-smeared floors as frantic loved ones shouted and jostled. Cats scavenged on a mound of medical waste.

Jacinda Ardern will largely be remembered in Aotearoa New Zealand as the prime minister whose pandemic-era policies saved thousands of Kiwi lives, according to former prime minister Helen Clark.

And she will also be considered an example of how to govern in the age of social media and endless crises, political experts say, while also achieving more than her critics might give her credit for.

Ardern was set to deliver her valedictory speech later today, having stepped down as prime minister earlier this year after just over five years in the job.

• LISTEN TO RNZ MORNING REPORT: ‘You can’t help feeling sad about her going’ — Former prime minister Helen Clark
• View of political scientists Dr Bronwyn Hayward and Dr Lara Greaves
• Ex-PM Ardern named Christchurch Call envoy against online violence

“I think that while I’m happy for Jacinda that she’s going to get a life and design what she wants to do and when she wants to do it, you can’t help feeling sad about her going,” Clark, herself a former Labour prime minister, told RNZ Morning Report ahead of Ardern’s speech.

“Leaders like Jacinda don’t come along too often and we’ve lost one.”

Ardern has played down suggestions online vitriol played a part in her decision to stand aside — but acknowledged on Tuesday she hoped her departure would “take a bit of heat out” of the conversation.

Clark said she “fundamentally” believed the hatred got to Ardern, powered by “populism and division” generated by former US President Donald Trump and his supporters.

‘Conspiracies took hold’
“Conspiracies took hold and suddenly you know, as the pandemic wore on here, I think the sort of relentless barrage from America — not, not just through Trump himself and the reporting of him, but through the social media networks — we have the anti-science people, the people who completely distrusted public authority, the QAnon conspiracies and hey, it played out on our Parliament’s front lawn and it still plays out and it’s very, very vitriolic and divisive.

“So I think that that spillover impact was really quite, well, not just unpleasant — it was horrible.”

Researchers have found Ardern was a lightning rod for online hate.

The perpetrator of the 2019 mosque shootings used the internet to connect with and learn from other extremists, which led to Ardern setting up the Christchurch Call movement to eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content online.

Her post-parliamentary career will include continuing that work, as New Zealand’s Special Envoy for the Christchurch Call, reporting to her replacement, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins.

“The mosque murders was just the most horrible thing to have happen on anyone’s watch, and she rose to the occasion, and I think the international reputation was very much associated with initially the empathy that she showed at that time,” said Clark.

But “one of New Zealand’s darkest days”, as Ardern put it at the time, was not the only near-unparalleled crisis she had to deal with in her time as prime minister.

“The White Island tragedy was another that needed, you know, very empathetic and careful handling. But then comes covid, and there’s no doubt that thousands of people are alive today because of the steps taken, particularly in 2020.

‘Would we have survived?’
“You know, I mean, I’m obviously in the older age group now which is more vulnerable. My father is 101 now and has survived the pandemic. But would we have survived it if it had been allowed to rip through our community, like it was allowed to rip through others?

“I think that there’d be so many New Zealanders not alive today had those steps not been taken.”

Data shows New Zealand has actually experienced negative excess mortality over the past few years — the elimination strategy so successful, fewer Kiwis have died than would have if there was no pandemic.

Former Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield said that was “unique, virtually unique around the world”.

Despite that, it was New Zealand’s aggressive approach towards covid-19 in 2020 and 2021 that arguably drove much of the polarisation and online vitriol.

“There’s no doubt that those measures did save lives. They also drove people into frenzied levels of opposition and fear and isolation,” said Clark. “They felt polarised, they felt locked out.”

But she said Ardern bore “very little” responsibility for that.

Political scientist Dr Bronwyn Hayward of the University of Canterbury said Ardern’s Christchurch Call to eliminate extremist content will have a long-lasting impact on not just New Zealand, but the world.

“There’s been a lot made about the fact that she resigned under pressure from the trolls, which is completely missing the point that what she’s saying is that in this era where we’ve got particularly Russian, but also other countries’ bots that are attacking liberal leaders,” Dr Hayward told Morning Report, saying Ardern was the first global leader to “really understand” how what happens online can spill over into the real world.

“She understands that democracies are now under attack, and the front line is your social media, where we’ve got a propaganda war coming internationally.

“So she’s taken a very systemic approach to thinking about how to tackle that, so that in local communities it feels like you’re reeling from Islamophobia, to racism to transphobia, but actually, when we look internationally at what’s happening, naive and quite disaffected groups have been constantly fed this material and she’s taken a systemic approach to it.”

Clark said one of the biggest differences in the world between Ardern’s time as prime minister and her own, was that she did not have to deal with social media.

“I didn’t have a Twitter account, didn’t know what it was really. We had texts, that was about it. We used to have pagers, for heaven’s sake.”

Ardern’s domestic legacy
One of the first things Hipkins did when he took over as prime minister was the “policy bonfire” — but critics have long said the Ardern-led government has had trouble delivering on its promises.

Interviewer Guyon Espiner reminded Clark that her government had brought in long-lasting changes like Working for Families, the NZ Super Fund and Kiwibank — asking her what Ardern could point to.

Clark defended Ardern, saying the coalition arrangement with NZ First in Ardern’s first term slowed any reform agenda she might have had, and then there was covid-19.

“Looking back, there needs to be more recognition that the pandemic blindsided governments, communities, publics around the world. It wasn’t easy.”

Dr Hayward pointed to the ban on new oil and gas exploration and child poverty monitoring, “which before that was ruled as impossible or too difficult”.

Dr Lara Greaves, a political scientist at the University of Auckland, said it was “incredibly hard to really evaluate” Ardern’s legacy outside of covid-19.

“Ultimately … she is the covid-19 prime minister.”

The future
Clark said Ardern would be emotional during her valedictory speech.

“You have very close relationships with colleagues, you have relationships with others of a different kind — with the opposition, with the media, with the public — and you’re walking away, you’re closing the door on it.

“But you know that a new chapter will open, and that life post-politics can be very rewarding. I’ve certainly found it so. I have no doubt that Jacinda will get back into her stride with doing things that she feels are worthwhile for the the general public and worthwhile for her.”

After losing the 2008 election, Clark rose the ranks at the United Nations. She said while that was an option for Ardern, there is plenty of time for the 42-year-old to do other things first.

“I was, you know, 58 when I left being prime minister. And Jacinda’s leaving in her early 40s and she has a young child, so who knows? She may want Neve to grow up with a good old Kiwi upbringing.

“And she may want her, you know, involvement internationally to be more, you know, forays out from New Zealand. That’s for her to decide. I mean, the world’s her oyster, if she chooses to follow that.”

Dr Greaves also pointed to Ardern’s relative youth.

“It seems like she’s going for a period of sort of recovery and reflection and figuring out what to do next. But of course, she’s got another 20 years in her career, at least — the world’s her oyster.”

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

As Jacinda Ardern gets ready to deliver her valedictory speech in the Parliament today, former prime minister Helen Clark says she will largely be remembered as the prime minister whose pandemic-era policies saved thousands of Kiwis’ lives. https://t.co/LhKPSZulpW

— RNZ (@radionz) April 5, 2023

Aotearoa New Zealand has become hugely polarised and it is little wonder Jacinda Ardern has decided to call it a day, says Helen Clark.

The former New Zealand prime minister and Labour Party leader is no stranger to the ups and downs of politics. However, she said current politicians faced vitriol 24/7 thanks to social media.

She said Aotearoa was seeing some of the worst elements of US politics.

• LISTEN TO RNZ MORNING REPORT: ‘It has been extraordinary to see this deterioration of basic science’ – Former PM Helen Clark
• READ MORE: ‘The shoes needing filling are on the large side of big’ – Jacinda Ardern’s legacy
• The hatred and vitriol NZ’s Jacinda Ardern endured ‘would affect anybody’
• Ardern’s resignation as NZ prime minister a game changer for 2023 general election
• Reaction from around the world
• Other Jacinda Ardern reports

Clark, who is in Switzerland at present, said she awoke to find she had received dozens of messages on her phone and was stunned, but, after a moment of reflection, not surprised by Ardern’s decision.

“I’ve seen the public pressures of vitriol and mouthing against Jacinda in a very, very unfair way and at some point, as she said, you’re human, at some point you don’t have any gas left in the tank, and she’s made the call that is absolutely right for her and her family.”

While Clark faced a huge amount of unpleasant criticism during her nine years as prime minister, she told RNZ Morning Report social media had given it more licence.

“The amount of anonymous trolling and venomous commentary is absolutely ghastly.

‘Anti-vaxxers . . . extreme language’
“I was going through the responses to the tweet I put up and the hate brigade is out in force — the anti-vaxxers, the people calling Jacinda a dictator, really just extreme and absurd language.”

In Clark’s time, talkback radio was the dominant outlet for people to express hateful views, but there was not the “24-hour trolling and viciousness on social media”.

Clark said she considered herself lucky to have led the country before the advent of social media which had made the role so much tougher.

She believed Ardern may have had an enjoyable summer and would have seriously considered if she could continue in the face of the antagonism she was experiencing.

The Waitangi Day barbecue had been cancelled late last year for security reasons and demonstrated the level of pressure the prime minister faced, Clark said.

Ardern’s programme could not be announced in advance because of the risk of “these militia-shouting crowds turn up”, she said.

“We haven’t experienced this in New Zealand for the most part. We’ve become very polarised. We’ve taken on a lot of the worst aspects of American politics, I think.

‘Time for society to reflect’
“So I think it is time to reflect as a society how we’re letting ourselves be so divided and polarised by this.”

Clark said normally mild-mannered people were proclaiming vicious views and the country did not used to be like this.

The covid-19 pandemic and the need for vaccinations had been a huge factor in the dissemination of extreme views.

Clark recalled going to school with a boy who had a withered leg, the result of polio, and there was a general acceptance of the need for vaccinations.

“It has been extraordinary to see this deterioration of basic science.”

She was not prepared to say publicly who should take over as Labour leader, but she was in no doubt there were well-qualified candidates within the caucus.

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

Former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark is supporting aid agencies’ decision to halt operations in Afghanistan, and a UN official has urged the Taliban to reverse its ban on women humanitarian workers.

The country’s Taliban administration on Saturday ordered all local and foreign non-governmental organisations (NGOs) not to let female staff work until further notice.

It said the move, which was condemned globally, was justified because some women had not adhered to the Taliban’s interpretation of Islamic dress code for women.

• READ MORE: UN to Taliban: ‘Vital’ to reverse ban on women in NGOs

The news led to the beginning of a withdrawal by organisations such as the Norwegian Refugee Council, Save the Children, and Unicef.

Clark, who also used to head the UN Development Programme, said the aid agencies were forced to suspend their services or yield to an oppressive policy.

She condemned Afghanistan’s banning of female humanitarian workers.

“It’s a huge violation of human rights of women. Where do you draw the line? If the organisations simply capitulated to this edict from the Taliban, they would be seen to be going along with a huge violation of women’s rights,” she said.

“So it is important that big organisations are speaking out now as they have, and are saying they will suspend their operations while this policy holds.

“The problem is the Taliban and these horrible hostile decisions that they’re taking towards women.”

Clark said the Taliban had tried to present itself as more legitimate than the last time it ruled Afghanistan, but a leopard did not change its spots.

She expected the Taliban leadership would face strong ongoing pressure from the UN and other entities, and they would see the consequences of foreign aid groups withdrawing.

UN calls for Taliban to reverse the decision
A senior UN official has urged Afghanistan’s Taliban administration to reverse the ban on female humanitarian workers, and charities fear it will worsen winter hardships.

“Millions of Afghans need humanitarian assistance and removing barriers is vital,” UNAMA said in the statement, adding that its acting head and humanitarian coordinator Ramiz Alakbarov had met with Economy Minister Mohammad Hanif.

The directives barring women from working at NGOs came from Hanif’s ministry.

The orders did not apply directly to the United Nations, but many of its programmes were carried out by NGOs subject to the order.

Four major global NGOs, whose humanitarian efforts had reached millions of Afghans, announced they were suspending operations on Sunday. Other smaller NGOs had also announced suspensions, including UK-based Islamic Relief Worldwide.

The NGOs said they were unable to run their programmes without female staff.

More than half of Afghanistan’s population relied on humanitarian aid, according to aid agencies. Basic aid was more critical during the mountainous nation’s harsh winter.

Two spokesmen for the Taliban administration did not respond to queries on the suspension of humanitarian programmes.

NGOs were also a critical source of employment for tens of thousands of Afghans, particularly women, as the local economy had collapsed following the withdrawal of US-led foreign forces and the Taliban takeover last year.

One such employee, a 27-year-old female aid worker in western Afghanistan who asked for her identity to be concealed because she feared retribution, said that her NGO had shut its office on Saturday and she could not go to work.

The NGO, funded by a Western country, worked with women in the agriculture sector, helping them set up sustainable incomes.

She said she was worried that losing her job would have a huge impact on her family because she was a single woman and the sole breadwinner.

Her father was dead and her mother was a housewife, she said, adding that she supported four sisters, three of whom were university students who could not complete their degrees since the Taliban administration barred women from attending university last week.

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

Former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark says the global handling of the covid-19 pandemic is marred with failures, gaps and delays.

Clark is a co-chair of the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response and is urging nations to spend less time debating commas in committees and instead get on with implementing the panel’s proposed reforms.

These include new financing of at least $10 billion a year for pandemic preparedness, and negotiations on a global pandemic treaty.

• LISTEN TO RNZ MORNING REPORT: ‘Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” – Helen Clark on public health measures for covid-19 (duration 6′:30″)
• Covid-19 update: One death and 215 new community cases in NZ

Clark told RNZ Morning Report the wheels were in motion on the structural responses the panel had called for but progress was slow.

“The wheels grind slowly but they are grinding,” she said, noting that the World Health Assembly (WHA) would meet for a special session next week and the sole item on the agenda was discussing whether to begin negotiating a treaty aimed at preventing future pandemics.

“I’m quite optimistic that they [the WHA] will embark on negotiations — now what they negotiate is another matter, but the process is kind of under way.”

If the WHA decided to move forward with treaty negotiations it would be only the second global public health treaty, after a 2003 accord to control tobacco use.

Unequal global response
Speaking in London overnight, at the launch of a six-month accountability review into the report commissioned by the World Health Organization (WHO) and published by the panel, Clark criticised the unequal response globally to the current pandemic’s more immediate challenges.

“There hasn’t been an equitable supply of tools to fight the pandemic, despite the sincere efforts of many people,” she said.

“We’ve talked a lot about vaccines, but many countries have lacked adequate access to other basics such as diagnostics, therapeutics, personal protective equipment, and even oxygen.”

She told Morning Report the panel had recommended reforms that addressed those inequalities, including dedicated financing for pandemic preparedness and a redesigned “end-to-end” platform that could control the flow of essential medical goods in the event of a future pandemic.

“That’s quite a big ask and in many ways this will be the hardest of all the asks that we had because it does require confronting the current way that the WTO (World Trade Organisation) deals with intellectual property,” Clark said.

The issue of intellectual property rights was already a hot topic, she said, adding that India and South Africa were leading the change in pushing for “the waiver of intellectual property rights in the event of pandemics, including this one”.

More than 257 million people have been reported to be infected by the SARS-CoV2 coronavirus and 5.4 million have died since the first cases were identified in central China in December 2019, according to a Reuters tally.

215 new cases in NZ
in New Zealand, the Ministry of Health reported 215 new community cases and one death, a patient in their 50s At Auckland City Hospital who was admitted to hospital on November 17.

This took the total of deaths to 40 since the pandemic began.

Clark said a key part of “how to do better next time” globally would hinge on reforms required at the WHO itself and admitted the slow progress on deciding what those reforms should be was “frustrating”.

The next regular meeting of the WHO was in late May next year and that would focus on the reform programme, she said.

“While it’s slow and it’s frustrating and we’re coming up, at the end of next month, to the two-year anniversary since what was then a novel coronavirus – which isn’t now so novel – was first identified, the wheels are in motion on these structural responses.”

‘We’re by no means through this’
Clark told Morning Report the newest wave of covid-19 infections in Europe was “largely avoidable” and should serve as a warning to New Zealand not to let its guard down.

“What we’ve seen in … developed countries that are capable of administering a vaccine rollout [is] they then tend to throw out all the other measures,” she said.

She was scathing of images she had seen showing almost no one on the London underground wearing masks: “Can we be surprised that there’s tens of thousands of cases a day?”

She said both the WHO and the panel’s report advocated the ongoing use of public health measures in addition to vaccination.

“Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Don’t be satisfied …

“In New Zealand, when you get to even 90 percent of vaccination of eligible people, don’t throw away the rest of the toolkit because you need it to control transmission among those who aren’t vaccinated,” Clark said.

“It’s a complex story but we’re by no means through this.”

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

Former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark says the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan shows “a catastrophic failure of intelligence in Western foreign policy” and to say that she is pessimistic about the country’s future would be an understatement.

Taliban insurgents have entered Kabul and President Ashraf Ghani has fled Afghanistan, bringing the Islamist militants close to taking over the country two decades after they were overthrown by a US-led invasion.

Clark has also served as administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) for eight years and has advocated globally for Afghan girls and women.

• READ MORE: New Zealanders, at-risk Afghan nationals being helped to leave Afghanistan
• NZ ramps up efforts to get 30 citizens out of Kabul as Taliban take capital
• LISTEN: ‘This is just such a massive step backwards’ – Helen Clark

She sent New Zealand troops to Afghanistan in 2001 during her term as prime minister and said it was surreal to see what had happened.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced today after the cabinet meeting this afternoon that the government had offered 53 New Zealand citizens in Afghanistan consular support.

“We are working through this with the utmost urgency,” she said.

The government was also aware of 37 individuals who had helped the NZ Defence Force (NZDF).

Gains for women, girls
Clark said today: “Twenty years of change there with so many gains for women and girls in society at large and to see what amounts to people motivated by medieval theocracy walk back in and take power and start issuing the same kinds of statements about constraints on women, and saying that stonings and amputations are for the courts – I mean this is just such a massive step backwards. It’s hard to digest.”

Clark said to find out what had gone wrong it was necessary to look back a couple of decades and it was not long after the Taliban had left that the US administration started to look away from Afghanistan, turning instead towards its intervention in Iraq.

“With the gaze off Afghanistan the Taliban started to come back. When I was at UNDP I would meet ambassadors from the region around Afghanistan and they would say ‘look 60 percent of the country is in effect controlled by the Taliban now’ and I’m going back four or five years, six years in saying that.”

Helen Clark is extremely dubious that this is “a new reformed Taliban”. Photo: 2018 Anadolu Agency

Clark said at that time the Taliban did not have the ability to capture and hold district and provincial capitals, but the Taliban was waiting for an opportunity and that came when former US president Donald Trump indicated they would withdraw troops from Afghanistan and current US President Joe Biden then followed through on that.

“Looking at it from my perspective I think the thought of negotiating a transition with the Taliban was naive and I think the failure of intelligence as to how strong the Taliban actually were on the ground is, as a number of American commentators are saying, equivalent to the failure of intelligence around the Tet Offensive in 1968 in Vietnam – I mean this is a catastrophic failure of intelligence in Western foreign policy,” she said.

Clark said the Taliban would be under pressure from Western powers to do anything if it was able to enlist the support of other powers.

Pessimistic about Afghanistan’s future
She said to say she was pessimistic about Afghanistan’s future would be an understatement and there were already reports of women being treated very badly in regions where the Taliban has taken over.

“We’re hearing stories from some of the district and provincial capitals that they’ve captured where women have been beaten for wearing sandals which expose their feet, we’re hearing of one woman who turned up to a university class who was told to go home, this wasn’t for them, women who were told to go away from the workplace because this wasn’t for them.”

Clark said she very much doubted that this was “a new reformed Taliban”, an idea that was accepted by some negotiators in Doha.

She said she did not expect that the UN Security Council would be able to do anything to improve the situation.

Clark said it met about Afghanistan within the last couple of weeks and the Afghanistan permanent representative pleaded on behalf of his elected government for support but there was no support forthcoming.

Clark said the UN Security Council was unlikely to get any results and the UN would likely then say that it needed humanitarian access.

Catastrophic hunger
“Because these developments create catastrophic hunger, flight of people, illness — but you know the UN will be left putting a bandage over the wounds and there will be nothing more constructive that comes out of it.”

Clark said Afghanistan’s problems were never going to be solved in 20 years.

“I understand that the Americans are sick of endless wars, we all are. But on the other hand they’ve kept a 50,000 strong garrison in Korea since 1953 in much greater numbers at times, they maintain 30,000 troops in the Gulf. They were in effect being asked to maintain a very small garrison which more or less kept the place stable enough for it to inch ahead, build its institutions and roll out education and health, when that commitment to do that failed then the whole project collapsed.

“This is not so much a Taliban takeover as simply a surrender by the government and by forces who felt it wasn’t worth fighting for it.”

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

It was supposed to chart a new way forward but He Puapua, a report on how the government can uphold tangata whenua rights by giving affect to tino rangatiratanga, has become bogged down in the swamp of politics.

New Zealand was one of four countries that voted against adopting the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007.

That was under a Helen Clark-led Labour government, just three years after the Foreshore and Seabed controversy.

• READ MORE: He Puapua – the working group report

Going back a few more years, Labour declared all government funding had to be based on need and not race, in response to former National Party leader Don Brash’s Ōrewa speech in 2004.

Within just a year of Brash’s campaign against Māori “special privileges”, Clark went from mentioning the Treaty of Waitangi 26 times in her speeches to just three.

Her senior cabinet minister, Trevor Mallard, now Speaker of the House, had the job of responding to the Ōrewa speech; as past of that response he stated “Māori have no extra rights or privileges under the treaty or in the policy of the New Zealand government”.

Fastforward to 2021 and the latest campaign by the National Party – with ACT alongside – against “separatist” and “racist” policies, cannot simply be dismissed as a desperate attempt to gain traction in the polls, as Minister of Māori Development Willie Jackson describes it.

Separatist rhetoric
The separatist rhetoric has sent Labour running from Māori before, and if there is a boost in National’s polls this time around, it could spook the Labour government into backing away from He Puapua.

It might end up like Puao-te-Ata-tu, the landmark report by a Ministerial Advisory Committee from 1988 on how to stop so many Māori children going into state care which includes recommendations to devolve power of the care and protection of tamariki Māori to iwi and hapū.

Willie Jackson describes National and ACT’s latest campaign against “separatist” and “racist” policies as a desperate attempt to gain traction in the polls. Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone

It gathered dust for more than 30 years and He Puapua could too be shelved.

Labour may have avoided much of the political spectacle if it had proactively released the report, and front-footed the kōrero on what partnership between iwi-hapū and the Crown could look like.

Ministers say they did not want it to appear like it was government policy and for it to be misrepresented, misquoted or misused.

That has backfired.

Upper House
National and ACT say the report calls for a “Māori Parliament”, when in fact it proposes an Upper House to scrutinise legislation for Te Tiriti o Waitangi compliance, made up of 50 percent rangatiratanga representation (iwi/hapū leadership) and the other half from Parliament.

Politics has overshadowed the substance of He Puapua and the opportunity to have a national conversation about New Zealand’s constitution and the place of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

It suggests making Waitangi Tribunal recommendations binding, and paying royalties to Māori for natural resources such as water and petrol.

It also calls to exclude Māori freehold land from the Public Works Act, and for Māori to maintain rights and interests in respect of all Crown lands.

Then there’s the higher level stuff or structural changes needed to give effect to tino rangatiratanga.

Much of this is pulled from existing literature like Matike Mai, the report by Professor Margaret Mutu and Dr Moana Jackson suggesting models for an “inclusive Constitution for Aotearoa” using Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the Māori Declaration of Sovereignty (He Whakaputanga o Te Rangatiratanga o Nu Tireni 1835) as its basis.

It proposes to massively expand the small sphere of Māori governance over people and places and the currently miniscule area of co-governance between rangatiratanga and the government in the next 20 years.

Co-governance bodies
For instance, it asks that co-governance and co-management bodies for freshwater be made compulsory.

There are a number of existing models of co-governance – just take a look at Te Mātāwai (the independent statutory body for the revitalisation of te reo Māori).

Then there are models for how Māori can have full authority over an area – like Te Urewera, which has the same legal rights as a person and is managed by Ngāi Tūhoe, the kaitiaki (guardians) of forest, making decisions on its behalf.

As Waikato-Tainui leader Rāhui Papa said this week, no one cares after three years.

There are those who will never agree with implementing Te Tiriti o Waitangi on the basis of its guarantee of tino rangatiratanga – self-determination, sovereignty – for Māori.

ACT Party leader David Seymour said self-determination should be for everyone, not the “exclusive preserve of Māori based on a certain interpretation of the Treaty”.

He argues that the modern English translation of the Māori version of the Treaty, by Sir Hugh Kawharu gives all people of New Zealand the same rights and privileges under article 3.

Māori equity guarantee
The interpretation put forward in He Puapua is that article 3 guarantees Māori equity, which “does not mean all individuals should be treated the same”.

The Waitangi Tribunal – the judiciary responsible for interpreting the Treaty – concludes the Crown must recognise the status of Māori groups exercising rangatiratanga in order to honour its Treaty obligations.

All of this is laid out in He Puapua which report author Claire Charters said was supposed to be an “instrument to have a genuine discussion about realising our international obligations and what Te Tiriti o Waitangi requires”.

Instead, it will likely keep being kicked around as a political football, particularly while the idea of the nascent Māori Health Authority – which seeks to give affect to Māori-Crown partnership – is still fresh.

Māori Party co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer cannot understand “what is so repelling and revolting” about partnership with Māori for National and ACT.

And there is the fear that current political discourse could lead to racial division like the Brash years, Minister for Māori Development Willie Jackson has said, although he adds his belief is New Zealanders are “more mature now”.

The Māori Labour caucus will need to be a backbone for the government as it progresses the Authority and chooses what recommendations of He Puapua it moves on.

The report name means “to break” which the authors said was to represent “the breaking of the usual political and societal norms and approaches”.

So far, that’s yet to be realised.

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

An independent panel says Chinese officials could have applied public health measures more forcefully in January to curb the initial covid-19 outbreak, and criticised the World Health Organisation (WHO) for not declaring an international emergency until 30 January.

The experts reviewing the global handling of the pandemic, led by former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark and former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, called for reforms to the Geneva-based United Nations agency.

Their interim report was published hours after the WHO’s top emergency expert, Dr Mike Ryan, said global deaths from covid-19 were expected to top 100,000 per week “very soon”.

• READ MORE: ‘Catastrophic moral failure’: WHO warns over vaccine distribution
• Other covid-19 pandemic reports

“What is clear to the Panel is that public health measures could have been applied more forcefully by local and national health authorities in China in January,” the report said, referring to the initial outbreak of the new disease in the central city of Wuhan, in Hubei province.

As evidence emerged of human-to-human transmission, “in far too many countries, this signal was ignored”, it added.

Specifically, it questioned why the WHO’s Emergency Committee did not meet until the third week of January and did not declare an international emergency until its second meeting on 30 January.

“Although the term pandemic is neither used nor defined in the International Health Regulations (2005), its use does serve to focus attention on the gravity of a health event. It was not until 11 March that WHO used the term,” the report said.

‘Not fit for purpose’
“The global pandemic alert system is not fit for purpose”, it said. “The World Health Organisation has been underpowered to do the job.”

Under President Donald Trump, the United States has accused the WHO of being “China-centric”, which the agency denies.

European countries led by France and Germany have pushed for addressing the WHO’s shortcomings on funding, governance and legal powers.

The panel called for a “global reset” and said that it would make recommendations in a final report to health ministers from the 194 member states of WHO in May.

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

Two former New Zealand prime ministers have called for an end to polarisation and the need for “healing” as the US presidential election remains in limbo.

Both former Labour PM Helen Clark and ex-National PM Sir John Key talked up the “television spectacle” in newspaper columns today with Key admitting that he “finally gets” why many voters like incumbent President Donald Trump.

Key said he had spent an hour watching one of Trump’s many rallies in Pennsylvania rather than “a few clips on the news”.

• READ MORE: Even if Biden has a likely win, leading a deeply divided nation will be difficult
  
• Al Jazeera live updates – US presidential election still in limbo
• US vote too close to call as Trump falsely claims victory
• Ilhan Omar easily wins reelection to the House of Representatives
• Nightmare ‘haunts US dream’, says leading NZ newspaper

“While some of Trump’s behaviour was unbecoming of a President, and the speech itself bereft of substance, for the first time I could see why 5000 people had bothered turning up on a freezing afternoon to watch him,” he wrote in The New Zealand Herald.

“Trump was their guy.

“He stands against all of what they believe is wrong with the world and, in particular, the Washington ‘swamp’.

“He is the outsider unafraid to say it as he sees it, which is how his audience sees the world. He identifies their favourite villain, China, repeatedly calling it out.”

He called on the next President to “get the nation’s mojo back”.

‘Compassionate leadership’ needed
Also writing in The Herald, Helen Clark said one thing was very clear from the election – “the United States is a deeply polarised country”.

But she predicted that a Biden presidency had a chance of turning this situation around.

“The fractures which run along political lines are a reflection of not only long-standing inequalities, particularly along ethnic lines, and widely divergent world views, but also of the impact of technological change and globalisation which have seen once secure and unionised jobs diappear, leaving whole communities and regions behind.”

Clark said Biden would have the skills for “calming emotions within the country and making it clear that he would pursue policies inclusive of all Americans”.

She also warned: “A superpower racked by division and self-doubt about its core values and its place in the world is a destabilising force in global affairs at a time when collaborative and compassionate leadership is sorely needed.”

New Zealand has lost some of its independence within the Five Eyes intelligence alliance and been “drawn in a lot closer” to the US-led spy network, former Prime Minister Helen Clark says.

She made the comments in new RNZ podcast The Service, which looks at the SIS during the Cold War.

Sir Geoffrey Palmer, who was deputy prime minister and then prime minister in the fourth Labour government, between 1984 and 1990, also spoke to the podcast about the Five Eyes, saying for New Zealand there was “always a feeling that we have to earn our stripes”.

THE RNZ PODCAST SERIES: The Service – The state, secrets and spies

“I remember doing things that the Americans wanted done on one occasion. I don’t think I can give the details of it. But it was quite important to them. And we facilitated it, and it was done.”

He also revealed that during the mid-1980s one of the Five Eyes partners knew more than most New Zealand Cabinet ministers about intelligence gathering by the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB).

When then-Australian Defence Minister Kim Beazley visited, he wanted to thank New Zealand Cabinet ministers for establishing the GCSB listening post at Waihopai, near Blenheim.

“I said, ‘Kim, you can’t do that. They don’t know anything about it.’ Only three ministers knew about that; the minister of defence, the prime minister and me,” Palmer said.

Clark said she believed the Five Eyes alliance was a net benefit for New Zealand, but it was vital that the country maintained its independence within the network.

“I think you’re as independent as you want to be. I consider we were independent in my time. I sense there’s been a bit of slippage since then, frankly.”

Clark said “sources in officialdom” had told her New Zealand had “got a lot closer back in” and that could threaten the country’s independent foreign policy, which went right back to the nuclear-free stance of the mid-1980s.

The nuclear-free law, which stopped port visits from US ships and saw New Zealand fall out of the ANZUS security pact, sparked the suspension of military exercises between the two countries.

But while the US and New Zealand parted ways on a political level – the relationship was downgraded from allies to friends – the flow of intelligence continued, according to Sir Bruce Ferguson, a former chief of Defence Force who went on to head the GCSB.

“I got everything I wanted. Right from when I became CDF, if I asked the questions, particularly with reference to Afghanistan, we got the answers, we got the intelligence,” he told The Service.

“There were definitely two levels: there was the political level … and the worker bee level. That was us – the intelligence side.”

Sir Bruce said he was plucked from obscurity to study at a US war college at the height of the anti-nuclear row. After he became GCSB director, he developed close relationships with Five Eyes spy chiefs, even playing golf “many times” with the heads of the NSA, CIA and FBI.

“We had very good, very strong relationships with all the personnel at the top. It was a very personal relationship, actually, with dinner at private houses. I would always be invited to their private houses for dinner with their families.”

Sir Bruce acknowledged there were often complaints – even from ‘friendly’ countries – about Five Eyes tactics, such as allegations that the NSA had hacked German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone.

“All those complaints are public knowledge. And that’s the way of the world. Yes, anyone’s fair game if it’s in your own national interests to look at them. And that could be for economic reasons, or whatever,” he said.

“There’s one very strong club: The Five Eyes. It’s jealously guarded. It’s looked on very enviously by probably every other western nation.”

He said people might ask why this group of five English-speaking countries was special or unique. “Well, they are unique. End of story. And we should safeguard that.”

Security expert Paul Buchanan, a former intelligence analyst for US security agencies, told The Service there were benefits to New Zealand but the downsides to Five Eyes should also be acknowledged.

“It’s made us a target,” he said. “Even though many people here may not think that, we’re squarely in the crosshairs of the intelligence services of adversaries of the UK, the United States, the whole Western alliance structure – we are.”

Because the bonds were so tight, and the eavesdropping equipment and methods so sensitive, Buchanan doubted New Zealand could extricate itself from the alliance, even if it wanted to.

“Trying to get out of the Five Eyes is – how can I put it? – it’s like trying to get out of the mafia.”

The Service was made with the support of New Zealand on Air.

More from this series

• Listen to The Service podcast
• SIS spied on Labour MP Richard Northey
• Geoffrey Palmer reveals KGB tried to infiltrate Labour Party
• Spy secret revealed: SIS and MI6 raided Czech embassy in Wellington
• SIS Minister Andrew Little refuse to deny signing off on embassy break-ins
• John Daniell on growing up around spies

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

Former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark is the new patron for the National Council of Women and she shared her stimulating thoughts and insights at the national conference in Auckland yesterday.

In an interview format with NCW chief executive Dr Gill Greer, Clark talked about violence against women, pay equity, leadership, abortion law reform, and sustainable development aid in the Asia-Pacific region.

Clark is a former administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The conference theme was He Toa Takitini – “strength in diversity”.

The Pacific Media Centre’s Del Abcede, of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), was on hand at Mount Wellington to get some pictures.

• PMC’s Jessica Marshall’s report on the conference

He Toa Takitini - 'strength in diversity'

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