The University of the South Pacific (USP) is at the heart of a global legal victory with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivering a historic opinion last week affirming that states have binding legal obligations to protect the environment from human-induced greenhouse gas emissions.
The case, hailed as a triumph for climate justice, was driven by a student-led movement that began within USP’s own regional classrooms.
In 2021, the government of Vanuatu took a bold step by announcing its intention to seek an advisory opinion from the ICJ on climate change. But what many may not have realised is that the inspiration behind this unprecedented move came from a group of determined young Pacific Islanders — students from USP who formed the Pacific Island Students Fighting Climate Change (PISFCC).
READ MORE: How Pacific students took their climate fight to the world’s highest court. And won
According to the United Nations background information, these USP students led the charge, campaigning for years to bring the voices of vulnerable island nations to the highest court in the world.
Their call for accountability resonated across the globe, eventually leading to the adoption of a UN resolution in March 2023 that asked the ICJ two critical legal questions:
What obligations do states have under international law to protect the environment?
What are the legal consequences when they fail?
Students from the University of the South Pacific who formed the Pacific Island Students Fighting Climate Change (PISFCC). Image: Wansolwara News
The result A sweeping opinion from the ICJ affirming that climate change treaties place binding duties on countries to prevent environmental harm.
As the ICJ President, Judge Iwasawa Yuji, stated in the official delivery the court was: “Unanimously of the opinion that the climate change treaties set forth binding obligations for States parties to ensure the protection of the climate system and other parts of the environment from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.”
USP alumni lead the celebration USP alumna Cynthia Houniuhi, president of the PISFCC, shared her pride in a statement to USP’s official news that this landmark opinion must guide not only courtrooms but also global climate negotiations and policy decisions and it’s a call to action.
“The law is on our side. I’m proud to be on the right side of history.”
Her words reflect the essence of USP’s regional identity, a university built not just to educate, but to empower Pacific Islanders to lead solutions to the region’s most pressing challenges.
Why is the ICJ’s climate ruling such a big deal? Video: Almost
Students in action, backed by global leaders UN Secretary-General Antόnio Guterres, in a video message released by the UN, gave credit where it was due.
“This is a victory for our planet, for climate change and for the power of young people to make a difference. Young Pacific Islanders initiated this call for humanity to the world, and the world must respond.”
Vishal Prasad, director of PISFCC, in a video reel of the SPC (Secretariat of the Pacific Community), also credited youth activism rooted in the Pacific education system as six years ago young people from the Pacific decided to take climate change to the highest court and today the ICJ has responded.
“The ICJ has made it clear, it cemented the consensus on the science of climate change and formed the heart of all the arguments that many Pacific Island States made.”
USP’s influence is evident in the regional unity that drove this case forward showing that youth educated in the Pacific are capable of reshaping global narratives.
Residents wade through flooding caused by high ocean tides in low-lying parts of Majuro Atoll, the capital of the Marshall Islands. In 2011, the Marshall Islands warned that the clock was ticking on climate change and the world needed to act urgently to stop low-lying Pacific nations disappearing beneath the waves. Image: PHYS ORG/Wansolwara
A win for the Pacific From coastal erosion and rising sea levels to the legacy of nuclear testing, the Pacific lives with the frontline effects of climate change daily.
Coral Pasisi, SPC Director of Climate Change & Sustainability, highlighted in a video message, the long-term importance of the ruling:
“Climate change is already impacting them (Pacific people) and every increment that happens is creating more and more harm, not just for the generations now but those into the future. I think this marks a real moment for our kids.”
Additionally, as Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s Minister for Climate Change, noted to SPC, science was the cornerstone of the court’s reasoning.
“The opinion really used that science as the basis for its definitions of accountability, responsibility, and duty.”
Among the proud USP student voices is Siosiua Veikune, who told Tonga’s national broadcaster that this is not only a win for the students but for the Pacific islands also.
What now? With 91 written statements and 97 countries participating in oral proceedings, this was the largest case ever seen by the ICJ and it all began with a movement sparked at USP.
Now, the challenge moves from the courtroom to the global stage and will see how nations implement this legal opinion.
Though advisory, the ICJ ruling carries immense moral and legal weight. It will likely shape global climate negotiations, strengthen lawsuits against polluting states, and empower developing nations especially vulnerable Pacific Islands to demand justice on the international stage.
For the students who dreamed it into motion, it’s only the beginning.
“Now, we have to make sure this ruling leads to real action — in parliaments, at climate summits, and in every space where our future is at stake,” said Veikune.
Vahefonua Tupola is a second-year student journalist at University of the South Pacific’s Laucala Campus. Republshed from Wansolwara News, the USP student journalism newspaper and website in partnership with Asia Pacific Report.
It was 2019 when a group of law students at the University of the South Pacific’s campus in Port Vila, the harbourside capital of Vanuatu, were set a challenge in their tutorial - find an innovative way they could address climate change. Image: RNZ Pacific/Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change
Last week, the UN’s highest court issued a stinging ruling that countries have a legal obligation to limit climate change and provide restitution for harm caused, giving legal force to an idea that was hatched in a classroom in Port Vila. This is how a group of young students from Vanuatu changed the face of international law.
SPECIAL REPORT: By Jamie Tahana
Vishal Prasad admitted to being nervous as he stood outside the imposing palace in the Hague, with its towering brick facade, marble interiors and crystal chandeliers.
It had taken more than six years of work to get here, where he was about to hear a decision he said could throw a “lifeline” to his home islands.
The Peace Palace, the home of the International Court of Justice, could not feel further from the Pacific.
It was 2019 when a group of law students at the University of the South Pacific’s campus in Port Vila, the harbourside capital of Vanuatu, were set a challenge in their tutorial – find an innovative way they could address climate change. Image: RNZ Pacific/Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change
Yet it was here in this Dutch city that Prasad and a small group of Pacific islanders in their bright shirts and shell necklaces last week gathered before the UN’s top court to witness an opinion they had dreamt up when they were at university in 2019 and managed to convince the world’s governments to pursue.
The International Court of Justice in The Hague last week . . . a landmark non-binding rulings on the climate crisis. Image: X/@CIJ_ICJ
“We’re here to be heard,” said Siosiua Veikune, who was one of those students, as he waited on the grass verge outside the court’s gates. “Everyone has been waiting for this moment, it’s been six years of campaigning.”
What they wanted to hear was that more than a moral obligation, addressing climate change was also a legal one. That countries could be held responsible for their greenhouse gas emissions — both contemporary and historic — and that they could be penalised for their failure to act.
“For me personally, [I want] clarity on the rights of future generations,” Veikune said. “What rights are owed to future generations? Frontline communities have demanded justice again and again, and this is another step towards that justice.”
And they won.
Vishal Prasad of the Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change group speaks to the media in front of the International Court of Justice following the conclusion last week of an advisory opinion on countries’ obligations to protect the climate. Image: Instagram/Pacific Climate Warriors
The court’s president, Judge Yuji Iwasawa, took more than two hours to deliver an unusually stinging advisory opinion from the normally restrained court, going through the minutiae of legal arguments before delivering a unanimous ruling which largely fell on the side of Pacific states.
“The protection of the environment is a precondition for the enjoyment of human rights,” he said, adding that sea-level rise, desertification, drought and natural disasters “may significantly impair certain human rights, including the right to life”.
After the opinion, the victorious students and lawyers spilled out of the palace alongside Vanuatu’s Climate Minister, Ralph Regenvanu. Their faces were beaming, if not a little shellshocked.
“The world’s smallest countries have made history,” Prasad told the world’s media from the palace’s front steps. “The ICJ’s decision brings us closer to a world where governments can no longer turn a blind eye to their legal responsibilities”.
“Young people around the world stepped up, not only as witnesses to injustice, but as architects of change”.
Vanuatu’s Climate Minister Ralph Regenvanu talks to the media after the historic ICJ ruling in The Hague on Tuesday. Image: Arab News/VDP
A classroom exercise
It was 2019 when a group of law students at the University of the South Pacific’s campus in Port Vila, the harbourside capital of Vanuatu, were set a challenge in their tutorial. They had been learning about international law and, in groups, were tasked with finding ways it could address climate change.
It was a particularly acute question in Vanuatu, one of the countries most vulnerable to the climate crisis. Many of the students’ teenage years had been defined by Cyclone Pam, the category five storm that ripped through much of the country in 2015 with winds in excess of 250km/h.
It destroyed entire villages, wiped out swathes of infrastructure and crippled the country’s crops and water supplies. The storm was so significant that thousands of kilometres away, in Tuvalu, the waves it whipped up displaced 45 percent of the country’s population and washed away an entire islet.
Cyclone Pam was meant to be a once-in-a-generation storm, but Vanuatu has been struck by five more category five cyclones since then.
Foormer Solomon Islands student at USP Belyndar Rikimani . . . It was seen as obscene that the communities with the smallest carbon footprint were paying the steepest price for a crisis they had almost no hand in creating.” Image: RNZ Pacific
Among many of the students, there was a frustration that no one beyond their borders seemed to care particularly much, recalled Belyndar Rikimani, a student from Solomon Islands who was at USP in 2019. She saw it as obscene that the communities with the smallest carbon footprint were paying the steepest price for a crisis they had almost no hand in creating.
Each year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was releasing a new avalanche of data that painted an increasingly grim prognosis for the Pacific. But, Rikimani said, the people didn’t need reams of paper to tell them that, for they were already acutely aware.
On her home island of Malaita, coastal villages were being inundated with every storm, the schools of fish on which they relied were migrating further away, and crops were increasingly failing.
“We would go by the sea shore and see people’s graves had been taken out,” Rikimani recalled. “The ground they use to garden their food in, it is no longer as fertile as it has once been because of the changes in weather.”
The mechanism used by the world to address climate change is largely based around a UN framework of voluntary agreements and summits — known as COP — where countries thrash out goals they often fail to meet. But it was seen as impotent by small island states in the Pacific and the Caribbean, who accused the system of being hijacked by vested interests set on hindering any drastic cuts to emissions.
So, the students argued, what if there was a way to push back? To add some teeth to the international process and move the climate discussion beyond agreements and adaptation to those of equity and justice? To give small countries a means to nudge those seen to be dragging their heels.
“From the beginning we were aware of the failure of the climate system or climate regime and how it works,” Prasad, who in 2019 was studying at the USP campus in Fiji’s capital, Suva, told me.
“This was known to us. Obviously there needs to be something else. Why should the law be silent on this?”
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) is the main court for international law. It adjudicates disputes between nations and issues advisory opinions on big cross-border legal issues. So, the students wondered, could an advisory opinion help? What did international law have to say about climate change?
Members of the Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change activist group. Image: RNZ Pacific/PISFCC
Unlike most students, who would leave such discussions in the classroom, they decided to find out. But the ICJ does not hear cases from groups or individuals; they would have to convince a government to pursue the challenge.
Together, they wrote to various Pacific governments hoping to discuss the idea. It was ambitious, they conceded, but in one of the regions most threatened by rising seas and intensifying storms, they hoped there would at least be some interest.
But rallying enough students to join their cause was the first hurdle.
“There was a lot of doubts from the beginning,” Rikimani said. “We were trying to get the students who could, you know, be a part of the movement. And it was hard, it was too big, too grand.”
In the end, 27 people gathered to form the genesis of a new organisation: Pacific Island Students Fighting Climate Change (PISFCC).
A couple of weeks went by before a response popped up in their inboxes. The government of Vanuatu was intrigued. Ralph Regenvanu, who was at that time the foreign minister, asked the students if they would like to swing by for a meeting.
“I still remember when [the] group came into my office to discuss this. And I felt solidarity with them,” Regenvanu recalled last week.
“I could empathise with where they were, what they were doing, what they were feeling. So it was almost like the time had come to actually, okay, let’s do something about it.”
The students — “dressed to the nines,” as Regenvanu recalled — gave a presentation on what they hoped to achieve. Regenvanu was convinced. Not long after the wider Vanuatu government was, too. Now it was time for them to convince other countries.
“It was just a matter of the huge diplomatic effort that needed to be done,” Regenvanu said. “We had Odi Tevi, our ambassador in New York, who did a remarkable job with his team. And the strategy we employed to get a core group of countries from all over the world to be with us.
“A landmark ruling . . . International Court of Justice sides with survivors, not polluters.” Image: 350 Pacific
“It’s interesting that, you know, some of the most important achievements of the international community originated in the Pacific,” Regenvanu said, citing efforts in the 20th century to ban nuclear testing, or support decolonisation.
“We have this unique geographic and historic position that makes us able to, as small states, have a voice that’s much louder, I think. And you saw that again in this case, that it’s the Pacific once again taking the lead to do something that is of benefit to the whole world.”
What Vanuatu needed to take the case to the ICJ was to garner a majority of the UN General Assembly — that is, a majority of every country in the world — to vote to ask the court to answer a question.
To rally support, they decided to start close to home.
Hope and disappointment The students set their sights on the Pacific Islands Forum, the region’s pre-eminent political group, which that year was holding its annual leaders’ summit in Tuvalu. A smattering of atolls along the equator which, in recent years, has become a reluctant poster child for the perils of climate change.
Tuvalu had hoped world leaders on Funafuti would see a coastline being eaten by the ocean, evidence of where the sea washes across the entire island at king tide, or saltwater bubbles up into gardens to kill crops, and that it would convince the world that time was running out.
But the 2019 Forum was a disaster. Pacific countries had pushed for a strong commitment from the region’s leaders at their retreat, but it nearly broke down when Australia’s government refused to budge on certain red lines. The then-prime minister of Tuvalu, Enele Sopoaga, accused Australia and New Zealand of neo-colonialism, questioning their very role in the Forum.
“That was disappointing,” Prasad said. “The first push was, okay, let’s put it at the forum and ask leaders to endorse this idea and then they take it forward. It was put on the agenda but the leaders did not endorse it; they ‘noted’ it. The language is ‘noted’, so it didn’t go ahead.”
Another disappointment came a few months later, when Rikimani and another of the students, Solomon Yeo, travelled to Spain for the annual COP meeting, the UN process where the world’s countries agree their next targets to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
Solomon Yeo (standing, second left) of the Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change, with youth climate activists. Image: RNZ Pacific/PISFCC
That was an eye-opening two weeks in Madrid for Rikimani, whose initial scepticism of the system had been validated.
“It was disappointing when there’s nothing that’s been done. There is very little outcome that actually, you know, safeguards the future of the Pacific,” she said.
“But for us, it was the COP where there was interest being showed by various young leaders from around the world, seeing that this campaign could actually bring light to these climate negotiations.”
By now, Regenvanu said, that frustration was boiling over and more countries were siding with their campaign. By the end of 2019, that included some major countries from Europe and Asia, which brought financial and diplomatic heft. Other small-island countries from Africa and the Caribbean had also joined.
“Many of the Pacific states had never appeared before the ICJ before. So [we were] doing write shops with legal teams from different countries,” he said.
“We did write shops in Latin America, in the Caribbean, in the Pacific, in Africa, getting people just to be there at the court to present their stories, and then of course trying to coordinate.”
Meanwhile, Prasad was trying to spread word elsewhere. The hardest part, he said, was making it relevant to the people.
International law, The Hague, the Paris Agreement and other bureaucratic frameworks were nebulous and tedious. How could this possibly help the fisherman on Banaba struggling to haul in a catch?
To rally support, the Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change decided to start close to home. Image: RNZ Pacific/PISFCC
They spent time travelling to villages and islands, sipping kava shells and sharing meals, weaving a testimony of Indigenous stories and knowledge.
In Fiji, he said, the word for land is vanua, which is also the word for life.
“It’s the source of your identity, the source of your culture. It’s this connection that the land provides the connection with the past, with the ancestors, and with a way of life and a way of doing things.”
He travelled to the village of Vunidologa where, in 2014, its people faced the rupture of having to leave their ancestral lands, as the sea had marched in too far. In the months leading up to the relocation, they held prayer circles and fasted. When the day came, the elders wailed as they made an about two kilometre move inland.
“That’s the element of injustice there. It touches on this whole idea of self-determination that was argued very strongly at the ICJ, that people’s right to self-determination is completely taken away from them because of climate change,” Prasad said.
“Some have even called it a new face of colonialism. And that’s not fair and that cannot stand in 2025.”
Preparing the case If 2019 was the year of building momentum, then a significant hurdle came in 2020, when the coronavirus shuttered much of the world. COP summits were delayed and the Pacific Islands Forum postponed. The borders of the Pacific were sealed for as long as two years.
But the students kept finding ways to gather their body of evidence.
“Everything went online, we gathered young people who would be able to take this idea forward in their own countries,” Prasad said.
On the diplomatic front, Vanuatu kept plugging away to rally countries so that by the time the Forum leaders met again — in 2022 — they were ready to ask for support again.
“It was in Fiji and we were so worried about the Australia and New Zealand presence at the Forum because we wanted an endorsement so that it would send a signal to all the other countries: ‘the Pacific’s on board, let’s get the others’,” Prasad recalled.
“We were very worried about Australia, but it was more like if Australia declines to support then the whole process falls, and we thought New Zealand might also follow.”
They didn’t. In an about-turn, Australia was now fully behind the campaign for an advisory opinion, and the New Zealand government was by now helping out too. By the end of 2022, several European powers were also involved.
Attention now turned to developing what question they wanted to actually ask the international court. And how would they write it in such a way that the majority of the world’s governments would back it.
“That was the process where it was make and break really to get the best outcome we could,” said Regenvanu.
“In the end we got a question that was like 90 percent as good as we wanted and that was very important to get that and that was a very difficult process.”
By December 2022, Vanuatu announced that it would ask the UN General Assembly to ask the International Court of Justice to weigh what, exactly, international law requires states to do about climate change, and what the consequences should be for states that harm the climate through actions or omissions.
More lobbying followed and then, in March 2023, it came to a vote and the result was unanimous. The UN assembly in New York erupted in cheers at a rare sign of consensus.
“All countries were on board,” said Regenvanu. “Even those countries that opposed it [we] were able to talk to them so they didn’t oppose it publicly.”
They were off to The Hague.
A tense wait Late last year, the court held two weeks of hearings in which countries put forth their arguments. Julian Aguon, a Chamorro lawyer from Guam who was one of the lead counsel, told the court that “these testimonies unequivocally demonstrate that climate change has already caused grievous violations of the right to self-determination of peoples across the subregion.”
Over its deliberations, the court heard from more than 100 countries and international organisations hoping to influence its opinion, the highest level of participation in the court’s history. That included the governments of low-lying islands and atolls, which were hoping the court would provide a yardstick by which to measure other countries’ actions.
They argued that climate change threatened fundamental human rights — such as life, liberty, health, and a clean environment — as well as other international laws like those of the sea, and those of self-determination.
In their testimonies, high-emitting Western countries, including Australia, the United States, China, and Saudi Arabia maintained that the current system was enough.
It’s been a tense and nervous wait for the court’s answer, but they finally got it last Wednesday.
“We were pleasantly surprised by the strength of the decision,” Regenvanu said. “The fact that it was unanimous, we weren’t expecting that.”
The court said states had clear obligations under international law, and that countries — and, by extension, individuals and companies within those countries — were required to curb emissions. It also said the environment and human rights obligations set out in international law did indeed apply to climate change, and that countries had a right to pursue restitution for loss and damage.
The opinion is legally non-binding. But even so, it carries legal and political weight.
Individuals and groups could bring lawsuits against their own countries for failing to comply with the court’s opinion, and states could also return to the ICJ to hold each other to account, something Regenvanu said Vanuatu wasn’t ruling out. But, ultimately, he hoped it wouldn’t reach that point, and the advisory opinion would be seen as a wake-up call.
“We can call upon this advisory opinion in all our negotiations, particularly when countries say they can only do so much,” Regenvanu said. “They have said very clearly [that] all states have an obligation to do everything within their means according to the best available science.
“It’s really up to all countries of the world — in good faith — to take this on, realise that these are the legal obligations under custom law. That’s very clear. There’s no denying that anymore.
“And then discharge your legal obligations. If you are in breach, fix the breach, acknowledge that you have caused harm. Help to set it right. And also don’t do it again.”
Student leader Vishal Prasad . . . “Oh, it definitely does not feel real. I don’t think it’s settled in.” Image: Instagram/Earth.org
Vishal Prasad still hadn’t quite processed the whole thing by the time we met again the next morning. In shorts, t-shirt, and jandals, he cut a much more relaxed figure as he reclined on a couch sipping a mug of coffee. His phone had been buzzing non-stop with messages from around the world.
“Oh, it definitely does not feel real. I don’t think it’s settled in,” he said. “I got, like, a flood of messages, well wishes. People say, ‘you guys have changed the world’. I think it’s gonna take a while.”
He was under no illusions that there was a long road ahead. The court’s advisory came at a time when international law and multilateralism was under particular strain.
When the urgency of the climate debate from a few years ago appears to have given way to a new enthusiasm for fossil fuel in some countries. He had no doubt the Pacific would continue to lead those battles.
“People have been messaging me that across the group chats they’re in, there’s this renewed sense of courage, strength and determination to do something because of what the ICJ has said,” he said.
“I’ve just been responding to messages and just saying thanks to people and just talking to them and I think it’s amazing to see that it’s been able to cause such a shift in the climate movement.”
Watching the advisory opinion being read out at 3am in Honiara was Belyndar Rikimani, hunched over a live stream in the dead of the night.
“What’s very special about this campaign is that it didn’t start with government experts, climate experts or policy experts. It started with students.
“And these law students are not from Harvard or Cambridge or all those big universities, but they are students from the Pacific that have seen the first-hand effects of climate change. It started with students who have the heart to see change for our islands and for our people.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The debate is over. The Israel apologists lost. And we are seeing this reflected in mainstream discourse.
Pop megastar Ariana Grande has started speaking out in support of Gaza, telling her social media followers that “starving people to death is a red line.” This is a new threshold.
We’re now seeing notoriously Zionist swamp monsters in the Democratic Party like Barack Obama, Hakeem Jeffries, Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar changing their tune and attacking Netanyahu and Trump for their joint genocide project in Gaza, with increasingly forceful pushback from some on the right like Marjorie Taylor Greene as well.
As Western pundits, politicians and celebrities suddenly pivot to denouncing Israel’s genocidal atrocities after two years of silence, it’s hard to believe that just a few weeks ago we were being told that saying “death to the IDF” is a hate crime.
People who’ve been staring at this genocide from the beginning have been asking the entire time, what is it going to take? What will it take for our society to stop sleepwalking through inane trivialities and vapid distractions and start opposing the holocaust of our day?
It shouldn’t have taken this much … Video: Caitlin Johnstone
Raining military explosives on a giant concentration camp packed full of children wasn’t enough.
Systematically destroying Gaza’s entire healthcare infrastructure — up to and including entering hospitals they’ve attacked and destroying individual pieces of medical equipment one by one — wasn’t enough.
Killing more journalists than were killed in both World Wars plus the US Civil War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Yugoslav Wars, the War in Afghanistan, and the ongoing war in Ukraine wasn’t enough.
The systemic rape and torture of prisoners wasn’t enough.
After months of silence, Obama has been shamed into finally saying something about Israel’s Auschwitizing of Gaza
His statement was truly Obama-esque, in that it was milquetoast and delivered with cold, calculated detachment https://t.co/jAVBHC5ffr
IDF soldiers routinely sharing photos and videos of themselves mockingly dressing in the clothes of dead and displaced Palestinian women and playing with the toys of dead and displaced Palestinian children wasn’t enough.
Leaving countless civilians to slowly suffocate or die of dehydration trapped under the rubble of bombed buildings wasn’t enough.
Creating an AI system to ensure that suspected Hamas fighters are bombed when they’re at home with their children and naming it “Where’s Daddy?” wasn’t enough.
When you see extremely Zionist CNN is literally cooking Israel so hard for straight 4 minutes you know that the situtation is far worse than what you know pic.twitter.com/JzhGuC0HTB
The IDF admitting to running a popular Telegram channel called “72 Virgins” which posted extremely gory and sadistic snuff films of people in Gaza being butchered by Israeli forces wasn’t enough.
But now that starvation has hit a critical point and deaths from malnutrition are skyrocketing, now that images of dead skeletal children are filling our screens, now that the damage to organs and brains from starvation will be irreversible in many cases — now it’s enough.
That was the line, apparently. That’s what mainstream Western consciousness has decided is too much. Everything up until that line was fine, but now it’s not fine anymore.
And the killing is still going on. The sudden awakening of conscience hasn’t translated into any material actions or changes at all yet. If it had come in October or November 2023 like it should have we might be seeing that opposition translate into actually saving Gaza by now, but the light has only just been switched on.
Hello I am a North American journalist and op Ed writer. For the last 18 months my dang computer has been auto correcting all of my writing and posts to say that what’s happening in Gaza is complicated but necessary. What I actually meant is that it’s bad. Thank you
It’s not even guaranteed that those who are speaking up will continue to do so.
I’m glad people are waking up to the cruel reality of this nightmare. I’m grateful to each and every influential voice who uses their platform to speak out, even at this late date. I truly am.
But I also think we need to take a very hard, very uncomfortable look at ourselves as a society right now. If all those monstrous abuses were tolerable for us over these last two years, there’s something deeply and profoundly sick about our civilisation.
We are not living right. We are not thinking right. We are not feeling right. We are warped and twisted. The information we consume and the norms we’ve been conditioned to accept have corrupted our souls.
We have been made into something bad. Something ugly. Something shameful. Something we need to do everything in our power to change.
We need to rescue ourselves from what we have become. We need to transform, deeply and radically, into something that could never again allow something like this to occur.
I appreciate all of the celebrities speaking out about Gaza but why now, all at once, at the same time?
The way things are clearly isn’t working. The mainstream worldview is clearly a lie. Everything we’ve been taught to believe about our society, our nation, our government and our world was clearly false.
We need to fight our way through the cognitive dissonance of recognizing that our entire way of looking at things as a collective has failed, and we need to find a new way of being.
Otherwise we’re going to keep being smashed in the face with increasingly horrifying reminders of what we have allowed ourselves to become.
It’s a psychological operation – to push out the boundaries of what’s normal and acceptable in our minds so that we will consent to even more horrific abuses in the future.
It’s a symptom — of Zionism, of colonialism, of militarism, of capitalism, of Western supremacism, of empire-building, of propaganda, of ignorance, of apathy, of delusion, of ego.
It’s a manifestation — of violent racist, supremacist and xenophobic belief systems that have always been there but were previously restrained, meeting with the unwholesome nature of alliances that have long been in place but have been aggressively normalised.
It’s a mirror —– showing us accurately and impartially who we currently are as a civilisation.
It’s a genocide … Video: Caitlin Johnstone
It’s a disclosure — showing us what the Western empire we live under really is underneath its fake plastic mask of liberal democracy and righteous humanitarianism.
It’s a revelation – showing us who among us really stands for truth and justice and who has been deceiving us about themselves and their motives this entire time.
It’s a catalyst – a galvanising force and a rallying cry for all who realise that the murderous power structures we live under can no longer be allowed to stand, and a blaring alarm clock opening more and more snoozing eyes to the need for revolutionary change.
It’s a test – of who we are as a species and what we are made of, and of whether we can transcend the destructive patterning that is driving humanity to its doom.
It’s a question — asking us what kind of world we want to live in going forward, and what kind of people we want to be.
It’s an invitation — to become something better than what we are now.
"It is a triumph for Netanyahu and his government, cause for celebration in Tel Aviv, but diminishes the nobility of an event that was created with the explicit intention to say Never Again and to remind the world of the indefensible criminality of attacks on defenceless civilian populations." Image: www.solidarity.co.nz/AI
COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle
Israel’s key enablers, the G7, plus Australia and New Zealand, have succeeded in muscling Israel back onto the invite list for the commemorations in Nagasaki on August 9.
Last year Israel was excluded, triggering a refusal by these countries to attend in 2024.
Does the “personal” invitation that Nagasaki has just sent to Israel represent a triumph of Western diplomacy or a sick joke?
You know who your mates are when you’re committing genocide As I wrote at the time, the boycott by the powerful white-dominated Western nations was a stunning “Fuck you” to the Hibakusha, the last few survivors of the US’s 1945 nuclear attack.
More importantly it was as clear a statement of collective commitment to Israel’s war on Palestine as you could possibly wish for. You really find out who your true mates are when you’re committing genocide.
At the time, Shigemitsu Tanaka, the 83-year-old head of the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Survivors Council, said he supported the move to keep the Israelis away from the commemorations, saying it was inappropriate to invite representatives from countries waging armed conflicts in defiance of calls from the international community.
Israel’s invitation is a triumph of Western pressure A year later, the City buckled under pressure and has personally invited the Israelis.
“After Israel was excluded last year over the Gaza war, Nagasaki’s mayor is avoiding renewed diplomatic tensions — especially following a clear message from the US,” Israel’s influential news site Ynet reported this month.
It is a triumph for Netanyahu and his government, cause for celebration in Tel Aviv, but diminishes the nobility of an event that was created with the explicit intention to say Never Again and to remind the world of the indefensible criminality of attacks on defenceless civilian populations.
Nagasaki and the Boycott Israel campaign Israel goes to incredible lengths to break efforts to impose BDS (Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions) and so Nagasaki had to be brought to heel. July 2025 marked the 20th anniversary of the founding of BDS, a non-violent campaign designed to hold Israel accountable for its crimes and apply real-world pressure for the state to change course.
BDS is potentially a game-changer which is why Israeli government ministers routinely make threats of physical violence against leading BDS activists.
Israel Katz, currently the Israeli Defence Minister, is on record as calling for Israel to engage in “targeted civil eliminations” of BDS leaders with the help of Israeli intelligence.
70,000 tons of bombs on Gaza – and Israel is invited to a peace ceremony Think for a moment what the presence of Israel at this year’s event represents as an astonishing piece of semiology. A state that is actively committing the crime of crimes, genocide, sitting alongside the Hibakusha.
They won’t be the only war criminals in attendance. American, German, and British bombs have levelled the tiny enclave of Gaza. More of their bombs — 70,000 tons and climbing — have been used to massacre Palestinians in Gaza than were used in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (36,000 tons), the fire bombings of Tokyo (1,665 tons) and Dresden (3,900 tons), and the London Blitz (19,000 tons) combined. And it is happening on our watch.
Another piece of astonishing optics: less than two months ago the US and Israel bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, doing so with no UN mandate but only their position as powerful, lawless states.
Their actions dramatically raise the prospect of Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and others deciding they need nuclear weapons as deterrence. What look will the US and Israeli ambassadors cast over their faces as the Mayor of Nagasaki delivers the message of “Nagasaki’s wish for the establishment of lasting world peace and the abolition of nuclear weapons?”
Is the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize the next to be trashed? Talking of tone deaf and morally repellent, Donald Trump has been openly lobbying to receive the Nobel Peace Prize despite having killed thousands of people and bombed multiple countries this year.
Interestingly, the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize winner was Nihon Hidankyo (Japan’s Atomic Bomb Survivors Organisation).
In his acceptance speech last year, Terumi Tanaka, one of the co-chairpersons of Nihon Hidankyo, said that the organisation was created in 1956 “to demand the immediate abolition of nuclear weapons, as extremely inhumane weapons of mass killing, which must not be allowed to coexist with humanity”.
New Zealand is a genocide enabler. What happened to our soft power? As a New Zealander I am deeply ashamed of my country for having refused to attend last year’s ceremony and for its criminal complicity with Israel today. New Zealand’s tragic trajectory from humanitarian champions and nuclear-free pioneers to racist genocide enablers is captured in all its horror in this month’s Nagasaki commemorations.
New Zealand, the country that went to the brink of civil war in 1981 to stop sporting contact with Apartheid South Africa is now a fully-paid up member of Apartheid Israel’s war on Palestine.
Everywhere our government is tearing down the pillars built by decades of struggle in New Zealand. The anti-nuclear policy, the anti-apartheid victories, the non-aligned foreign policies, the sacred principles of partnership between indigenous Māori and the Pākehā (those who settled from Europe and elsewhere) are all being shredded.
We refuse to recognise Palestine, we refuse to join South Africa’s case against Israel at the ICJ, we refuse to join the Hague Group which is mobilising countries to make those responsible for the genocide accountable and to shoulder state-level responsibility for forcing the end to it.
But we mobilise to get Israel invited to the Nagasaki peace events.
From Auschwitz to Nagasaki to Gaza: whatever happened to Never Again? Whatever happened to our decency?
The Australian journalist Caitlin Johnstone wrote this month “If you’re still supporting Israel in the year 2025, there’s something seriously wrong with you as a person.” That goes triple for governments.
Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He contributes to Asia Pacific Report and Café Pacific, and hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz
Former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark warned activists and campaigners in a speech on the deck of the Greenpeace environmental flagship Rainbow WarriorIII 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.
Former NZ prime minister Helen Clark speaking on the deck of the Rainbow Warrior . . . “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.” Image: Greenpeace screenshot APR
“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.
Former NZ prime minister Helen Clark . . . “I remember one of the slogans in the 1970s and 1980s was ‘if it is so safe, test them in France’.” Image: Asia Pacific Report
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.
Mangareva researcher and advocate Ena Manuireva . . . “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.” Image: Asia Pacific Report
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.
Greenpeace Aotearoa executive director Russel Norman . . . a positive of the campaign future. Image: Asia Pacific Report
‘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.
A question during the open mike session on board the Rainbow Warrior. Image: Asia Pacific Report
The New York Times has published an op-ed by a genocide scholar who says that he resisted acknowledging the truth of what Israel is doing in Gaza for as long as he could, but can no longer deny the obvious.
It’s an admission that may as well have come from The New York Times itself.
In an article titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.”, a Brown University professor of Holocaust and genocide studies named Omer Bartov argues that “Israel is literally trying to wipe out Palestinian existence in Gaza,” and denounces his fellow Holocaust scholars for failing to acknowledge reality.
“My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people,” Bartov writes. “Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the IDF as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could.
“But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognise one when I see one.”
And resist he did. In November 2023, Bartov wrote another op-ed for The New York Times saying “As a historian of genocide, I believe that there is no proof that genocide is currently taking place in Gaza, although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening.”
Apparently he is seeing the proof now and has stopped resisting what’s been clear from the very beginning. And it would seem the editors of the Gray Lady have ceased resisting as well.
The New York Times, which has an extensivelydocumentedpro-Israel bias, has frenetically avoided the use of the g-word on its pages from the very beginning of the Gaza onslaught.
In an internal memo obtained by The Intercept last year, New York Times reporters were explicitly told to avoid the use of the word “genocide”, as well as terms like “ethnic cleansing” and “occupied territory”.
“‘Genocide’ has a specific definition in international law,” the memo reads. “In our own voice, we should generally use it only in the context of those legal parameters. We should also set a high bar for allowing others to use it as an accusation, whether in quotations or not, unless they are making a substantive argument based on the legal definition.”
Earlier this year the American Friends Service Committee cancelled its paid advertisement in The New York Times calling for an end to the genocide in Gaza, saying the outlet had wanted them to change the word “genocide” to “war” in order for their ad to be published.
What is significant is that even experts who’ve been resisting acknowledging the reality of the genocide in Gaza because of their bias toward Israel have stopped doing so, and that even the imperial media outlets most fiendishly devoted to running propaganda cover for that genocide have run out of room to hide.
The Israel apologists have lost the argument. They might not know it yet, but they have. Public sentiment has turned irreversibly against them as people’s eyes are opened to the truth of what’s happening in Gaza, and more and more propagandists are choosing to rescue what’s left of their tattered credibility instead of going down with the sinking ship.
Truth is slowly beginning to get a word in edgewise.
The New Zealand government needs to do more for its Pacific Island neighbours and stand up to nuclear powers, a distinguished journalist, media educator and author says.
Professor David Robie, a recipient of the New Zealand Order of Merit (MNZM), released the latest edition of his book Eyes of Fire: The last voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior(Little Island Press), which highlights the nuclear legacies of the United States and France.
Dr Robie, who has worked in Pacific journalism and academia for more than 50 years, recounts the crew’s experiences aboard the Greenpeace flagship the Rainbow Warrior in 1985, before it was bombed in Auckland Harbour.
“Hot off the press” . . . David Robie talks Eyes of Fire just after receiving the first copy of his book marking 40 years since the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior on 10 July 1985. Image: RNZ Pacific/Lydia Lewis
At the time, New Zealand stood up to nuclear powers, he said.
“It was pretty callous [of] the US and French authorities to think they could just carry on nuclear tests in the Pacific, far away from the metropolitan countries, out of the range of most media, and just do what they like,” Dr Robie told RNZ Pacific. “It is shocking, really.”
Speaking to Pacific Waves, Dr Robie said that Aotearoa had “forgotten” how to stand up for the region.
“The real issue in the Pacific is about climate crisis and climate justice. And we’re being pushed this way and that by the US [and] by the French. The French want to make a stake in their Indo-Pacific policies as well,” he said.
‘We need to stand up’ “We need to stand up for smaller Pacific countries.”
Dr Robie believes that New Zealand is failing with its diplomacy in the region.
He accused the coalition government of being “too timid” and “afraid of offending President Donald Trump” to make a stand on the nuclear issue.
However, a spokesperson for New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters told RNZ Pacific that New Zealand’s “overarching priority . . . is to work with Pacific partners to achieve a secure, stable, and prosperous region that preserves Pacific sovereignty and agency”.
The spokesperson said that through its foreign policy “reset”, New Zealand was committed to “comprehensive relationships” with Pacific Island countries.
“New Zealand’s identity, prosperity and security are intertwined with the Pacific through deep cultural, people, historical, security, and economic linkages.”
Legends of a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific. Video: Talanoa TV
Pacific ‘increasingly contested’
The spokesperson said that the Pacific was becoming increasingly contested and complex.
“New Zealand has been clear with all of our partners that it is important that engagement in the Pacific takes place in a manner which advances Pacific priorities, is consistent with established regional practices, and supportive of Pacific regional institutions.”
They added that New Zealand’s main focus remained on the Pacific, “where we will be working with partners including the United States, Australia, Japan and in Europe to more intensively leverage greater support for the region.
“We will maintain the high tempo of political engagement across the Pacific to ensure alignment between our programme and New Zealand and partner priorities. And we will work more strategically with Pacific governments to strengthen their systems, so they can better deliver the services their people need,” the spokesperson said.
The cover of the latest edition of Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior. Image: Little Island Press
However, former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark, writing in the prologue of Dr Robie’s book, said: “New Zealand needs to re-emphasise the principles and values which drove its nuclear-free legislation and its advocacy for a nuclear-free South Pacific and global nuclear disarmament.”
Dr Robie added that looking back 40 years to the 1980s, there was a strong sense of pride in being from Aotearoa, the small country which set an example around the world.
“We took on . . . the nuclear powers,” Dr Robie said.
“And the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior was symbolic of that struggle, in a way, but it was a struggle that most New Zealanders felt a part of, and we were very proud of that [anti-nuclear] role that we took.
“Over the years, it has sort of been forgotten”.
‘Look at history’ France conducted 193 nuclear tests over three decades until 1996 in French Polynesia.
Until 2009, France claimed that its tests were “clean” and caused no harm, but in 2010, under the stewardship of Defence Minister Herve Morin, a compensation law was passed.
From 1946 to 1962, 67 nuclear bombs were detonated in the Marshall Islands by the US.
The 1 March 1954 Bravo hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll, the largest nuclear weapon ever exploded by the United States, left a legacy of fallout and radiation contamination that continues to this day. Image: Marshall Islands Journal
In 2024, then-US deputy secretary of state Kurt Campbell, while responding to a question from RNZ Pacific about America’s nuclear legacy, said: “Washington has attempted to address it constructively with massive resources and a sustained commitment.”
However, Dr Robie said that was not good enough and labelled the destruction left behind by the US, and France, as “outrageous”.
“It is political speak; politicians trying to cover their backs and so on. If you look at history, [the response] is nowhere near good enough, both by the US and the French.”
Susana Suisuiki is RNZ Pacific Waves presenter/producer, and Lydia Lewis is RNZ Pacific presenter/bulletin editor. This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
I want to acknowledge David Robie whose seminal book Eyes of Fire has been republished to mark the 40th anniversary of the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior. David, thank you for a lifetime’s work of reporting important stories, exposing injustice and holding the powerful to account.
I have found the 40th anniversary of the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior stirring. The memory of the shock on hearing the news of the explosion seems like yesterday. And in the days that followed the slow dawning realisation that left us aghast that it had been an act of French state terrorism.
Much has been made in the years since of what a turning point this was, and how it crystallised in New Zealanders a commitment to the anti-nuclear cause.
But I want to talk today about the bigger regional phenomenon that shaped activism, public attitudes and official policies across our region, and what it can teach us today about New Zealand’s place in the world. I am talking about the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement.
Activists and leaders from across the Pacific built a movement that challenged neocolonialism and colonialism, put the voices of the peoples of the Pacific front and centre, and held the nuclear powers to account for the devastating legacy of nuclear testing.
We must remember them. So many activists, community leaders, politicians across the region who were part of this movement. David’s book is an invaluable aid to that remembering.
Also the survivors of the nuclear testing, and all those who died prematurely from radiation exposure and the intergenerational cancers it left them with. Those who were displaced from their homes, and those who had their lagoons and lands poisoned.
The Te Vaerua O Te Rangi dance group performing at the nuclear-free Pacific exhibition opening in Auckland today. Image: David Robie/Asia Pacific Report
This movement led to the creation of the Treaty of Rarotonga, the Pacific’s nuclear weapons free zone. It influenced governments and shaped the thinking of a generation.
But as Helen Clark writes about today’s international environment in the prologue to the newly republished Eyes of Fire by David Robie, storm clouds are gathering. With increasing great power rivalry, the rise of authoritarian leaders, and the breakdown of the multilateral system the spectre of nuclear war has returned.
New Zealand faces some stark choices about how we make our way in the world, keep ourselves and our region safe, and be true to the values we’ve always held dear.
The Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement can help us here. It should inspire us to maintain our own independence, embrace a strong regionalism and be a voice for peace and demilitarisation.
Unfortunately, the current National-led coalition government is rapidly going in the other direction.
It mimics the language of the security hawks in Washington and Canberra that China is a threat to our national interests.
That is then the springboard for a foreign policy re-set under the current government to a closer strategic alignment with the United States and with what are often more broadly referred to as the “traditional partners”. For that read the Five Eyes members, but particularly the United States.
For most of the last year and a half, the public debate about this reset has focused on whether New Zealand would be part of AUKUS Pillar Two, the arrangement to share high end war fighting technology that would sit alongside the first pillar designed to deliver Australia its nuclear submarines.
The New Zealand government has had little to say on AUKUS Pillar Two since the US elections. But defence engagement with the United States has escalated to include participation in groupings around supply chains, warfighting in space, interconnected naval warfare, and projects on artificial intelligence and cyber capabilities.
There are a number of things that need to be said about this, beginning with the idea that China’s increasing assertiveness and growing military strength are the root of the problem.
The fact is that China is already a great power. Its economy has on some measures reached parity with the United States, and it is behaving as great powers do.
As uncomfortable as this may be for its neighbours, this is not the biggest threat New Zealand faces. The biggest threat to our security and prosperity is the possibility of war in Asia between the United States and China.
Rising tensions could conceivably affect trade, and that would be disastrous for us. All-out war, especially if it went nuclear, would be catastrophic for the region and probably for the planet.
Many analysts believe, and I agree, that there is no realistic way the United States can retain the military primacy in East Asia and the western Pacific which it has had since the end of World War Two.
We are well into a transition from the United States being the leader of a post-World War Two international order and since the end of the Cold War the world’s only superpower, to a multipolar world.
The size, demographics, and economic trajectories of China and India mean that they will both be great powers at least in their own immediate neighbourhoods with considerable military assets.
Seen from this angle, it is not China’s great power status which is the biggest threat to us and our national interests. It is rather the risk of competition between the two current great powers spiralling into conflict. No matter how you frame it, then, we are living in a time of considerable risk.
It is not Labour’s view that everything is rosy and that we don’t need to be concerned. On the contrary. Militarisation, great power rivalry, the breakdown of multilateralism, and the daily assaults on international law should concern us all.
Labour’s disarmament spokesperson Phil Twyford, MP for Te Atatu, cuts the ribbon to open the nuclear-free Pacific exhibition. Also pictured are Asia Pacific Media Network deputy chair Dr David Robie (centre) and Reverend Mua Strickson-Pua. Image: Del Abcede/APR
But the more pressing question is what is New Zealand’s best hope for the pursuit of security and prosperity in the face of all this uncertainty?
Let me begin by saying what is not in our best interests. When the biggest risk facing your country is conflict in your region between two great powers, joining one of those great powers in its struggle with the other is a high-risk bet, in more ways than one.
First, it is particularly risky when the great power which you are positioning through your foreign policy statements as a threat is also your largest trading partner.
Second, by in effect supporting a strategy of nuclear and other deterrence designed to contain a great power, you risk increasing the chance of a war that would be disastrous for all in the vicinity.
One of the videos in the Legends of a Nuclear-Free Pacific series. Video: Talanoa TV
Third, I would question whether it makes any sense at all to be pursuing “closer strategic alignment” with or being a “force multiplier” of the transactional and coercive foreign policy coming out of Washington DC.
In sum, the risk is that New Zealand, by joining a strategy of deterrence under an increasingly unreliable partner, makes a negligible contribution to a losing cause, further provoking an unwinnable confrontation with no security guarantees or economic benefit in return.
So, what are the options for New Zealand in this environment? For the last 80 years, whether to conduct an independent foreign policy or one characterised by close alliance with a great power was a genuine choice for New Zealand. But that is no longer the case.
The new multipolar world and the demise of the 80-year-old US-led liberal international order leaves us no choice but to find ways to keep New Zealand and our region safe and pursue our national interests through an independent approach.
It’s Labour’s view that we can pursue security for New Zealand and the Pacific through active engagement with our partners across the Tasman and in the Pacific, and Asia, and be a voice for peace and demilitarisation.
Our defence capability should be based on a realistic assessment of what threats there are to New Zealand and our interests in the region — not an open-ended commitment to interoperability with the United States and its allies for the sake of being part of a club.
New Zealand must be a voice for peace. Nuclear disarmament and international law’s rules of war are under threat, but that also means that they are needed more than ever. New Zealand has a credible and principled voice on these issues that should be heard.
We must urge the great powers to coexist and share power in the region, rather than engage in an arms race and some kind of competition for supremacy.
In this multipolar world with multilateral institutions under such pressure we can still be a voice for the things we have long stood for, including the rule of law, rights of small states, disarmament, open trade, and human rights.
We are just going to have to work more selectively, independently and on a case-by-case basis, with those who share common interests.
NFIP activist Hilda Halkyard-Harawira (Ngāti Hauā, Te Rarawa) features in one of the storytelling videos at the nuclear-free Pacific exhibition. Image: APR
So what would this approach mean for us in the Pacific?
I’ll finish with these three points.
First, we must demand nuclear justice. The nuclear powers have never owned up, apologised and made amends for their toxic legacy of testing. The Forum should lead a comprehensive internationally backed research programme to definitively document nuclear harms, as a precursor to victim assistance and environmental remediation.
Second, we should champion demilitarisation. In Honiara this September, Pacific Islands Forum leaders will meet to consider declaring the Pacific an “Ocean of Peace”.
New Zealand should support the proposal with a strong emphasis on demilitarisation, and an expanded notion of Pacific-led security focused on human development, climate action, and nuclear disarmament outside of intensifying major power competition.
Third, we should advance regional self-determination. That means strengthening the Pacific Islands Forum, and working alongside Pacific people on the things that really matter in the region: decolonisation and indigenous rights, urgent climate action, and sustainable economic development. By reforming labour mobility to be more circular, making sure policing is with the community, and managing fisheries responsibly for regional benefit, Aotearoa can be part of a community of states where there is opportunity and genuine security for all.
There is a clear choice here: get sucked into a new Cold War, this time between the US and China with the risk of nuclear war in Asia, or work with our friends and partners in the Pacific and Asia, be a voice for peace, and pursue a genuine Pacific-led idea of security.
The Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement gives us a good pointer on the way to go.
Phil Twyford is the Labour Member of Parliament for Te Atatū. He is spokesperson for immigration, disarmament and arms control, and associate foreign affairs. This speech was delivered at while opening the Legends of the Pacific: Stories of a Nuclear-Free Moana 1975-1995 exhibition at the Ellen Melville Centre on 12 July 2025. The exhibition was organised by the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN).
Part of the nuclear-free Pacific exhibition honouring Fernando Pereira, the Greenpeace photographer killed by French state saboteurs when they bombed the Rainbow Warrior on 10 July 1985. Image: APR
A journalist who was on the Rainbow Warrior voyage to Rongelap last night condemned France for its “callous” attack of an environmental ship, saying “we haven’t forgotten, or forgiven this outrage”.
David Robie, the author of Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, said at the launch that the consequences of almost 300 US and French nuclear tests – many of them “dirty bombs” — were still impacting on indigenous Pacific peoples 40 years after the bombing of the ship.
French saboteurs had killed “our shipmate Fernando Pereira” on 10 July 1985 in what the New Zealand prime minister at the time, David Lange, called a “sordid act of international state-backed terrorism”.
Author David Robie with his latest book, Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior. . . . “media independence and restoring democracy.” Image: Michelle Beard/AP
Although relations with France had perhaps mellowed over time, four decades ago there was a lot of hostility towards the country, Dr Robie said.
“And that act of mindless sabotage still rankles very deeply in our psyche,” he said at the launch in Auckland Central’s Ellen Melville Centre on the anniversary of July 10.
About 100 people gathered in the centre’s Pioneer Women’s Hall for the book launch as Dr Robie reflected on the case of state terrorism after Greenpeace earlier in the day held a memorial ceremony on board Rainbow Warrior III.
“One of the celebrated French newspapers, Le Monde, played a critical role in the investigation into the Rainbow Warrior affair — what I brand as ‘Blundergate’, in view of all the follies of the bumbling DGSE spy team,” he said.
Plantu cartoon
“And one of the cartoons in that newspaper, by Plantu, who is a sort of French equivalent to Michael Leunig, caught my eye.
“You will notice it in the background slide show behind me. It shows François Mitterrand, the president of the French republic at the time, dressed in a frogman’s wetsuit lecturing to school children during a history lesson.
“President Mitterrand says, in French, ‘At that time, only presidents had the right to carry out terrorism!’
Tahitian advocate Ena Manurevia . . . the background Plantu cartoon is the one mentioned by the author. Image: Asia Pacific Report
He noticed that in the Mitterrand cartoon there was a “classmate” sitting in the back of the room with a moustache. This was none other than Edwy Plenel, the police reporter for Le Monde at the time, who scooped the world with hard evidence of Mitterrand and the French government’s role at the highest level in the Rainbow Warrior sabotage.
Dr Robie said that Plenel now published the investigative website Mediapart, which had played a key role in 2015 revealing the identity of the bomber that night, “the man who had planted the limpet mines on the Rainbow Warrior — sinking a peace and environmental ship, and killing Fernando Pereira.”
Jean-Luc Kister, a retired French colonel and DGSE secret agent, had confessed to his role and “apologised”, claiming the sabotage operation was “disproportionate and a mistake”.
“Was he sincere? Was it a genuine attempt to come to terms with his conscience. Who knows?” Dr Robie said, adding that he was unconvinced.
Hilari Anderson (right on stage), one of the speakers, with Del Abcede and MC Antony Phillips (obscured) . . . the background image shows Helen Clark meeting Fernando Pereira’s daughter Marelle in 2005. Image: Greenpeace
French perspective
Dr Robie said he had asked Plenel for his reflections from a French perspective 40 years on. Plenel cited three main take ways.
“First, the vital necessity of independent journalism. Independent of all powers, whether state, economic or ideological. Journalism that serves the public interest, the right to know, and factual truths.
“Impactful journalism whose revelations restore confidence in democracy, in the possibility of improving it, and in the usefulness of counterbalancing powers, particularly journalism.”
Secondly, this attack had been carried out by France in an “allied country”, New Zealand, against a civil society organisation. This demonstrated that “the thirst for power is a downfall that leads nations astray when they succumb to it.
“Nuclear weapons epitomise this madness, this catastrophe of power.”
Eyes of Fire 10 years ago . . . same author, same publisher. Video: Pacific Media Centre
Finally, Plenel expressed the “infinite sadness” for a French citizen that after his revelations in Le Monde — which led to the resignations of the defence minister and the head of the secret services — nothing else happened.
“Nothing at all. No parliamentary inquiry, no questioning of François Mitterrand about his responsibility, no institutional reform of the absolute power of the president in a French republic that is, in reality, an elective monarchy.”
‘Elective monarchy’ trend
Dr Robie compared the French outcome with the rapid trend in US today, “a president who thinks he is a monarch, a king – another elective monarchy.”
He also bemoaned that “catastrophe of power” that “reigns everywhere today – from the horrendous Israeli genocide in Gaza to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, from Trump to Putin to Netanyahu, and so many others.”
The continuous Gaza massacres were a shameful indictment of the West that had allowed it to happen for more than 21 months.
Dr Robie thanked many collaborators for their help and support, including drama teacher Hilari Anderson, an original crew member of the Rainbow Warrior, and photographer John Miller, “who have been with me all the way on this waka journey”.
He thanked his wife, Del, and family members for their unstinting “patience and support”, and also publisher Tony Murrow of Little Island Press.
Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior . . . published 10 July 2025. Image: David Robie/Little Island Press
Launching the book, Greenpeace Aotearoa programme director Niamh O’Flynn said one thing that had stood out for her was how the legacy of the Rainbow Warrior had continued despite the attempt by the French government to shut it down 40 years ago.
“We said then that ‘you can’t sink a rainbow’, and we went on to prove it.
“When the Rainbow Warrior was bombed in Auckland harbour, it was getting ready to set sail to Moruroa Atoll, to enter the test exclusion zone and confront French nuclear testing head-on.”
So threatened
The French government had felt so threatened by that action that it had engaged in a state-sanctioned terror attack to prevent the mission from going ahead.
“But we rebuilt, and the Rainbow Warrior II carried on with that mission, travelling to Moruroa three times before the French finally stopped nuclear testing in the Pacific.
“That spirit and tenacity is what makes Greenpeace and what makes the Rainbow Warrior so special to everyone who has sailed on her,” she said.
“It was the final voyage of the Rainbow Warrior to Rongelap before the bombing that is the focus of David Robie’s book, and in many ways, it was an incredibly unique experience for Greenpeace — not just here in Aotearoa, but internationally.
“And of course David was a key part in that.”
O’Flynn said that as someone who had not even been born yet when the Rainbow Warrior was bombed, “I am so grateful that the generation of nuclear-free activists took the time to pass on their knowledge and to build our organisation into what it is today.
“Just as David has by writing down his story and leaving us with such a rich legacy.”
Greenpeace Aotearoa programme director Niamh O’Flynn . . . “That spirit and tenacity is what makes Greenpeace and what makes the Rainbow Warrior so special to everyone who has sailed on her.” Image: APR
Other speakers
Among other speakers at the book launch were teacher Hilari Anderson, publisher Tony Murrow of Little Island Press, Ena Manuireva, a Mangarevian scholar and cultural adviser, and MC Antony Phillips of Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga.
Anderson spoke of the Warrior’s early campaigns and acknowledged the crews of 1978 and 1985.
“I have been reflecting what these first and last crews of the original Rainbow Warrior had in common, realising that both gave their collective, mostly youthful energy — to transformation.
“This has involved the bonding of crews by working hands-on together. Touching surfaces, by hammer and paint, created a physical connection to this beloved boat.”
She paid special tribute to two powerful women, Denise Bell, who tracked down the marine research vessel in Aberdeen that became the Rainbow Warrior, and the indomitable Susi Newborn, who “contributed to naming the ship and mustering a crew”.
Manuireva spoke about his nuclear colonial experience and that of his family as natives of Mangareva atoll, about 400 km from Muroroa atoll, where France conducted most of its 30 years of tests ending in 1995.
He also spoke of Tahitian leader Oscar Temaru’s pioneering role in the Nuclear-Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement, and played haunting Tahitian songs on his guitar.
