Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) congratulates New Zealand film director Jane Campion over her request for her 1989 debut film Sweetie to be withdrawn from apartheid Israel’s Jerusalem Film Festival.
The announcement was made by Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) late last night.
We are delighted to have an esteemed New Zealand director join at least four other international film directors — from the Basque region in Spain, United Kingdom and the United States — in requesting their films be withdrawn from the festival which is partnered with the Israeli Ministry of Culture.
At a time when Palestinians are suffering immeasurably under the most fanatical, openly racist Israeli government ever, this solidarity action will be deeply appreciated by Palestinians everywhere.
These film directors are taking action where governments — New Zealand included — have failed morally and politically, again and again and again to hold Israel accountable for its crimes against the Palestinian people.
This is similar to the fight against apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s when it was civil society organisations around the world, and in New Zealand, which led the anti-apartheid struggle outside South Africa while Western governments either colluded with the regime or looked the other way.
John Minto is national chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa.
"Rising Storm in the Pacific." Greenpeace, January/February 1989
On 10 July 2023 — marking the 1985 bombing of the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior — Television New Zealand began broadcasting a BBC/Oxford Scientific documentary miniseries, Rainbow Warrior: Murder in the Pacific, about the Rongelap humanitarian voyage and the subsequent state terrorism by French secret agents. Republished here is David Robie’s cover story in the US Greenpeace magazine in 1989.
“We, the people of the Pacific, have been victimised too long by foreign powers . . . Alien colonial, political and military domination persists as an evil cancer in some of our native territories, such as Tahiti-Polynesia, Kanaky, Australia and Aotearoa [New Zealand]. Our environment continues to be despoiled by foreign powers developing nuclear weapons for a strategy of warfare that has no winners, no liberators and imperils the survival of all mankind . . . “
— From the preamble to the People’s Charter for a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific.
By David Robie
December 1984: Ten militant activists are massacred by mixed-race French settlers near the Kanaky New Caledonia township of Hienghene. March 1985: New Zealand prohibits the entry of US warship. June 1985: President Haruo Remeliik of the nuclear-free state of Belau/Palau is assassinated. July 1985: French secret agents blow up the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in Aotearoa New Zealand, killing one crew member. May 1987: A rightwing military coup topples the elected nuclear-free government of Fiji. May 1988: Kanak militants in New Caledonia take French gendarmes hostage on the island of Ouvéa, declare an insurrection and are killed by French government troops. August 1988: Remeliik’s successor, Lazarus Salii, commits suicide.
Although separated in some cases by thousands of kilometres of open ocean, these incidents in the now not-so-peaceful South Pacific are linked in essence; they represent a loss of geopolitical innocence, a sign that nationalist aspirations in Oceania are rekindling in new forms, with troubling and sometimes violent implications.
“Rising Storm in the Pacific”, published by the US Greenpeace magazine, January/February 1989.
Western observers who speak of the “Pacific Century” restrict their analysis to economics — specifically to the “successes” of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. For most of the Pacific’s island nations, however, there is little that is miraculous. On the contrary, three decades of the pervasive and overpowering influence of France and the United States has skewed Pacific politics, spawning local anomalies that pit nation against nation and people against people.
The consequences of this foreign presence are clear — the stereotyped image of the Pacific as a region of untroubled idyllic island paradises has been irreparably shattered.
Promise of riches The Pacific Ocean covers nearly a third of the world’s surface and is home to more than 5 million indigenous islanders. And for 400 years, these people have lived under the flag, nominally and otherwise, of various Western nations. At first, Western interests in the scattered islands were largely economic. At the time of of Captain James Cook’s “discovery” of New Caledonia in 1774, noted one historian, voyages of exploration in the region were “motivated as much by scientific curiosity as the lure of gain”.
But the promise of riches in the scattered islands proved illusory. As a result, colonialism tended to be superficial; the French and the British, who superseded Spain as the dominant power in the region in the 19th and early 20th centuries, ruled in an offhand way, in one case through a bizarre French-British condominium, with minimal administration. The economic rewards were not great enough to warrant the expense of direct rule over the sparsely populated islands.
“Rainbow Warrior: Murder in the Pacific” . . . the 2023 BBC/Oxford Scientific series. Photo of Fernando Pereira at Rongelap: David Robie
Thus, while Africa, Asia and the Caribbean were embroiled in intense and often violent liberation struggles after World War II, the Pacific enjoyed tranquil or even stagnant relations with its metropolitan overlords. In fact, by the mid-1960s, when the decolonisation process had been virtually completed in most parts of the world, it had barely begun in the South Pacific.
It was not until the late 1960s that a fresh political geography began to emerge in the South Pacific. in a decolonisation process that was remarkably peaceful, name changes and new nations altered maps, as the last outposts of the European empires were cast adrift. Britain in particular had no qualms about letting its unprofitable wards loose, such a Fiji in 1970. A the same time, Tonga shed its protectorate status.
New Zealand had already accepted the early independence of Western Samoa in 1962, later granting self-government to the Cook Islands and Niue. Australia shed iys trusteeship of Nauru and eventually bowed to Papua New Guinea’s desire for independence. This was followed by Tuvalu (formerly the Ellice Islands) and the Solomon islands in 1978, Kiribati (Gilbert islands) in 1979 and Vanuatu (New Hebrides) in 1980.
The 1980 independence of Vanuatu became the turning point in the politics of the region. That year, French-speaking Melanesians, partly financed by American business interests and supported by the French colonial administration, staged the Santo rebellion. Although French commercial interests in the plantation economy had waned several years before, France belatedly decided to sabotage independence in Vanuatu because it feared the impact of decolonisation on New Caledonia (also known by its indigenous name, Kanaky) and Tahiti Nui (“French” Polynesia).
Kanak militants, the core of New Caledonia’s independence movement, have largely abandoned violence in recent years in favour of peaceful protest. Image: David Robie/US Greenpeace
Eventually, overcome by Vanuatu’s fledgling government with the help of troops from Papua New Guinea, the Santo rebellion ended the first phase of decolonisation in the region and heralded a new era of growing conflict and uncertainty.
The rebellion also brought about the development France feared most: since independence, Vanuatu, under the leadership of Prime Minister Father Walter Lini, has championed the cause of the Kanak and other independence movements in the region. And Father Lini is leading the campaign against the increased nuclearisation of the region and for a “niuklia fri Pasifik”, as it is called in Vanuatu’s national pidgin language, Bislama.
Less well known, and considerably more bloody, are the guerrilla wars that continue to be waged by Melanesian liberation groups in southwestern Pacific territories of East Timor and West Papua (Irian Jaya, which borders Papua New Guinea). Afrer Indonesian troops invaded both territories (West Papua in 1962 and East Timor in 1975), the United Nations recognised the annexation of West Papua but not East Timor. More than 200,000 Timorese, a third of the country’s population, have died in battle or have been executed by Indonesian troops, or have starved to death — a level of atrocity comparable to the carnage that gripped Cambodia at the hands of the Khmer Rouge.
Today, France and the United States are the only other Western countries retaining clear and complete control over regions of the South Pacific. The concrete manifestations of this presence is nuclear; both nations have built extensive nuclear-related facilities in the region, and France maintains a nuclear testing programme that has exploded nearly 150 bombs in the fragile basalt beneath Polynesia’s Moruroa atoll.
As a result, the aspirations for independence of the people of the Pacific have become paired with their desire to be free of nuclear weapons, giving rise to the catch-all name the loose Pacific colaition has taken on: the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement.
Tightened grip on Kanaky
Since the aborted attempt to scuttle Vanuatu’s bid for independence, France has tightened its grip on “French” Polynesia and Kanaky New Caledonia. France justifies its presence here in part by raising the spectre of Soviet interference and in part by simple declaration, supporte by vocal and strident French immigrants, that Polynesia and New Caledonia are part of France.
A Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement poster. Image: NFIP
The first argument, although widely accepted, is hardly supportable. The Soviet strategic position in the North Pacific is bleak, as even senior American commanders admit, and it is negligible in the South Pacific. A major part of the Soviet military presence in the hemisphere is directed toward China. Unlike the United States, the Soviet Union has few forward bases and a limited military capability beyond its territory. Moreover, according to one political analyst, the region is “almost extraordinarily devoid of communist parties or Marxist political groups”. However, like the United States, the Soviet Union has deployed an inordinately powerful nuclear arsenal.
The real reasons for France’s unwelcome range from the economic t the purely psychological. Economically, the region is a drain on France; maintaining the military presence alone costs nearly 2 billion French francs a year. But the possession holds the promise of future riches; the islands include the world’s second largest 200-mile offshore economic zone.
As to the psychological, France’s foreign policy can be interpreted, in the words of one domestic critic, as an “attempt to resurrect past grandeur in the absence of the means that had once made it possible”. This past grandeur is dependent, from the perspective of France’s military, on France’s nuclear capacity, its “Force de Frappe”.
Moruroa is the linchpin of France’s nuclear weapons programme. Thus Kanaky, in France’s eyes has become a domino; any threat to French control over New Caledonia/Kanaky is a threat to Moruroa and consequently to France’s position as a global power. France has the second largest global distribution of military bases after the United States, stretching like stepping stones from France to Djbouti to Mayotte to Reunion to New Caledonia to Tahiti to Martinique to Senegal and back to France.
“Geography,” remarked the Noumea newspaper Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes, “has turned New Caledonia into a [French] aircraft carrier.” As Paul Dijoud, France’s former State Secretary for Overseas Territories, put it, “Battle must be done to keep New Caledonia French.”
France’s military presence in the Pacific is overwhelming. A referendum on New Caledonian independence in 1987 was held in the presence of 8400 soldiers and paramilitary gendarmes – one for every six people. Image: David Robie/US Greenpeace
Dijoud can be taken literally. The “battle” in the case of New Caledonia, has cost dozens of lives — 32 as a result of the 1984-85 Kanak insurrection, including 10 in the Hienghène massacre, and another 25 during the two week revolt by Kanak militants at the time of the French presidential elections in May 1988.
Kanaky militants set up barricades in a tragic 1984 protest that left 32 dead. Image: David Robie/US Greenpeace
France’s reaction to the unrest has been decidedly obstinate. It has increased the militarisation of the islands; a referendum on independence for Kanaky in 1987 was held in the presence of 8400 soldiers and paramilitary gendarmes — one for every six Kanak people. The Australian ambassador to the UN, Richard Woolcott, subsequently called the vote “fundamentally flawed”. And a French court acquitted the seven self-confessed killers in the Hienghéne massacre, a ruling that provoked the bloody Ouvéa uprising. As for the criticism of its nuclear presence, French Defence Minister Andrew Giraud told an Australian television audience, “It’s not your country. Mind your own business.”
However, the new Socialist government, led by Prime Minister Michel Rocard, has offered a glimmer of hope with the so-called Matignon peace accord. Endorsed by an historic national referendum last November, the 10-year plan calls for dividing New Caledonia into three self-governing provinces, followd by a vote on self-determination in 1998. Although still cautious, the Kanak independence movement hopes this process will lead to decolonisation.
Fiji coup ‘sits uncomfortably’
In this context, one of the region’s most publicised political developments, the Fiji coup of May 1987, sits uncomfortably alongside the independence struggles of its neighbouring islands. In April 1987, Dr Timoci Bavadra’s Labour Party-led multiracial coalition was elected. Dr Bavadra, himself an indigenous Fijian and a former trade unionist, pledged far-reaching reforms. The coalition government also declared it would become non-aligned, ban nuclear warships and support other Pacific nationalist struggles — foreign policies in common with Vanuatu and other Melanesian states.
In retaliation, the extreme rightwing Taukei movement exploited rivalries between indigenous Fijians, who are Melanesians, and the Indo-Fijians who slightly outnumber them, embarking on a campaign of subversion and violence. In the West, the conflict was portrayed as purely racial, a simplification that belies the class conflict that played a larger role in the crisis.
When the coalition was deposed by Major-General Sitiveni Rabuka (at the time of the coup he was a lieutenant-colonel and the third-ranked officer in the Fiji military) a month later, many of the key people in the defeated oligarchy of Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, which had been accused of growing corruption, regained power. Rabuka, declaring his narrow sectional an indigenous rights movement, has maintained control through measures such as the Internal Security Decree in June 1988, which gave the military and police virtually unlimited powers. Fiji is now the first totalitarian country in the South Pacific.
Although the coup provoked cries of outrage in neighbouring countries, such as Australia and New Zealand, and in the Commonwealth, several Pacific nations were reluctant to criticise this Pacific rarity, a violent change of government, because they saw it as a victory for indigenous sovereignty and traditional land rights.
Not surprisingly, the reversal of Fiji’s antinuclear policy met with tacit approval of French and US military strategists. France, which has an overt political agenda to its Pacific aid programme, has since packaged an $18 million aid programme for Fiji and supplied it with military helicopters and other hardware, effectively endorsing the coup.
Nuclear free and independent Pacific ‘a threat’
American and French strategists regard the campaign to make the Pacific “nuclear free and independent” as a major threat to their interests. As a former US Ambassador to Fiji, William Bodde Jr, warned in 1982, “The most potentially disruptive development for US relations with the South Pacific is the growing anti-nuclear movement in the region. The US government must do everything possible to counter this movement.”
Kanak visionary Jean-Marie Tjibaou, one of the new generation of leaders emerging in Kanaky New Caledonia the Pacific was assassinated on 4 May 1989. Image: David Robie/US Greenpeace
It seems clear from recent history that this policy actually may prove more inimical to the interests of both the Western countries and the Pacific nations han one that acknowledges and adjusts to the region’s desires for independence. Moreover, time will work against France and the United States. As old guard leaders in the Pacific Islands either die or lose authority at the ballot box, younger more radical leaders are emerging to take their place.
Among national leaders with a more progressive outlook are Vanuatu’s Father Walter Lini, President Ieremia Tabai of Kiribati and Fiji’s Dr Bavadra. Others in nationalist movements include Jean-Marie Tjibaou, a poetic visionary of Kanaky New Caledonia, and Tahiti’s Oscar Temaru and Jacqui Drollet.
The newcomers have given a dynamic and crusading voice to the region’s unspoken wishes. “The great ocean surrounding us carries the seeds of life. We must ensure they they don’t become the seeds of death,” said Tjibaou in a moving speech before the 1985 signing of the Rarotonga Treaty (see sidebar in US Greenpeace magazine, p. 10). “A nuclear-free Pacific is our responsibility, and we must face the issues to live and protect our lives.”
This article was originally published in the US Greenpeace magazine, January/February 1989 (pp. 6-10). Barely three months later, Jean-Marie Tjibaou and his deputy, Yeiwene Yeiwene, were assassinated on 4 May 1989. At the time of writing, David Robie was a New Zealand-based journalist specialising in Pacific affairs. He sailed on the Rainbow Warrior in 1985 and is author of Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior (New Society Publishers, available through Greenpeace) about the 1985 bombing by French secret agents. His 1989 book, Blood on their Banner: Nationalist Struggles of the South Pacific (Zed Books, London), was about to be published.
Suva lawyer Richard Naidu is a free man after the Suva High Court ruled this week that no conviction be recorded against him.
High Court judge Justice Daniel Goundar ruled on Tuesday that the charge of contempt scandalising the court against Naidu be dismissed.
He said summons to set aside the judgment that had found Naidu guilty in November last year was by consent and was dismissed as he did not have jurisdiction.
Justice Gounder ordered the parties to bear their own costs.
While delivering his judgment, Justice Gounder said while mitigation and sentencing were pending, a new government had come into power and a new Attorney-General had been appointed.
He said that after the change of government [FijiFirst lost the general election last December], Justice Jude Nanayakkara, who had been previously presiding over the case, had resigned as a Fiji judge and left the jurisdiction without concluding proceedings.
Justice Gounder said the new Attorney-General, Siromi Turaga had taken a different position regarding the proceedings, which he had expressed in an affidavit filed in support of the summons to dismiss the proceedings.
Ruling set aside
Turaga stated that his view was that the proceedings should never have been instituted against Naidu in the first place.
In the affidavit, Turaga said he had conveyed to Naidu that his view was that the ruling of 22 November 2022 ought to be set aside and the proceedings dismissed.
He added that Naidu had confirmed he would not seek to recover any costs he had incurred in defending the proceedings.
Justice Gounder said the Attorney-General played an important function as the guardian of public interest in contempt proceedings which alleged conduct scandalising the court.
Lawyer Richard Naidu’s conviction ruled not to be recorded and the charge of contempt dismissed. Video: Fijivillage.com
He said the position of the Attorney-General had shifted and he was not seeking an order of committal against Naidu.
The judge said Turaga dkid not support the findings that Naidu was guilty of contempt scandalising the court.
He said it had not been suggested that the present Attorney-General was acting unfairly as the representative of public interest in consenting to an order setting aside the judgement.
Facebook posting
Naidu was found guilty in November last year by High Court judge Justice Jude Nanayakkara for contempt scandalising the court.
Naidu posted on his Facebook page a picture of a judgment in a case represented by his associate that had the word “injunction” misspelt [as “injection”], and then made some comments that he was pretty sure the applicant wanted an injunction.
The committal proceeding was brought against Naidu by the then Attorney-General, Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum.
Naidu was represented by Jon Apted while Feizal Haniff represented the Attorney-General.
Rashika Kumaris a Fijivillage reporter. Republished with permission.
Lawyer Richard Naidu . . . case dismissed. Image: The Fiji Times
Author Antony Loewenstein speaking about his new book, The Palestine Laboratory, in Auckland last night . . . Israel, which claims to represent global Jewry, is encouraging an alignment between itself and a hyper-nationalist, bigoted and racist populism, he says. Image: David Robie/Asia Pacific Report
Journalist and critic of Israeli apartheid Antony Loewenstein wrapped up his New Zealand tour with another damning address in Auckland last night but was optimistic about a swing in global grassroots sentiment with a stronger understanding of the plight of the repressed 5 million Palestinians. In this article for Middle East Eye, he says that for more than a half century the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has given the Israeli state invaluable military experience in “controlling” a population.
By Antony Loewenstein
The Israeli defence industry inspires nations across the globe, many of which view themselves as under threat from external enemies.
The Taiwanese foreign minister, Joseph Wu, recently told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that: “Every aspect of the Israeli fighting capability is amazing to the Taiwanese people and the Taiwanese government.”
Wu explained that he appreciated how Israel protected its own country because, “basically, we [Taiwan] have barely started. The fighting experiences of Israel are something we’re not quite sure about ourselves. We haven’t had any war in the last four or five decades, but Israel has that kind of experience”.
Wu also expressed interest in Israeli weapons, suggesting his country had considered their usefulness in any potential war with China.
“Israel has the Iron Dome,” he said, referring to Israel’s defence system against short-range missiles. “We should look at some of the technology that has been used by the Israelis in its defence. I’m not sure whether we can copy it, but I think we can look at it and learn from it.”
It isn’t just Taiwan imagining itself as akin to Israel. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in April 2022 that his vision for his nation was to mimic “the Jewish state“.
Two months after Russia’s illegal invasion of its territory, Zelensky, who is a long-time supporter of Israel, argued that “our people will be our great army. We cannot talk about ‘Switzerland of the future’ — probably, our state will be able to be like this a long time after. But we will definitely become a ‘big Israel’ with its own face.”
Zelensky went on to explain that what he meant was the need in the future to have “representatives of the armed forces or the national guard in all institutions, supermarkets, cinemas; there will be people with weapons.”
The Women’s Bookshop’s Carole Beu with author Antony Loewenstein at his book signing in Auckland last night. Image: David Robie/Asia Pacific Report
The Palestine laboratory This admiration for Israel is both unsurprising and disturbing. The praise for Israel almost always completely ignores its occupation of Palestinian territory — one of the longest in modern times — and the ways in which this colonial project is implemented.
When Taiwan, Ukraine or any other country looks to Israel for innovation, it’s a highly selective gaze which completely disappears the more than five million Palestinians under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.
The Palestine Laboratory . . . uncovers how Israel has used the occupied Palestinians as the ultimate guinea pigs.
The appeal of the Palestine laboratory is endless. I’ve spent the last years researching this concept and its execution in Palestine and across the globe.
Israel has sold defence equipment to at least 130 countries and is now the 10th biggest arms exporter in the world. The US is still the dominant player in this space, accounting for 40 percent of the global weapons industry.
Washington used its failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a testing ground for new weapons. During the current Russian invasion of Ukraine, the war has been a vital “beta test” for new weapons and sophisticated forms of surveillance and killing.
But Israel has a ready-made population of occupied Palestinians over which it has complete control. For more than five decades, Israeli intelligence authorities have built an NSA-level system of surveillance across the entire occupied Palestinian territories.
In the last decade, the most infamous example of Israeli repression tech is Pegasus, the phone hacking tool developed by the company NSO Group. Used and abused by dozens of nations around the world, Mexico is its most prolific adherent.
I spoke to dissidents, lawyers and human rights activists in Togo, Mexico, India and beyond whose lives were upended by this invasive, mostly silent tool.
Israeli state and spyware However, missing from so much of the western media coverage, including outrage against NSO Group and its founders who were Israeli army veterans, is acknowledgement of the close ties between the firm and the Israeli state.
NSO is a private corporation in name only and is in fact an arm of Israel’s diplomacy, used by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Mossad to attract new friends in the international arena. Despite being blacklisted by the Biden administration in November 2021, the company still hopes to continue trading.
Unregulated Israeli spyware . . . a global threat.
My research, along with that of other reporters, has shown a clear connection between the sale of Israeli cyberweapons and Israel’s attempts to neuter any potential backlash to its illegal occupation.
From Rwanda to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to India, Israeli spyware and surveillance tech are used by countless democracies and dictatorships alike.
Beyond Pegasus, many other similar tools have been deployed by newer and lesser-known Israeli companies, though they’re just as destructive. The problem isn’t just Pegasus — it could close down tomorrow and the privacy-busting technology would transfer to any number of competitors — but the unquenchable desire by governments, police forces and intelligence services for the relatively inexpensive Israeli tech that powers it.
Perhaps the most revealing was the deep relationship between apartheid South Africa and Israel. It wasn’t just about arms trading, but an ideological alignment between two states that truly believed that they were fighting for their very existence.
In 1976, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin invited South African Prime Minister John Vorster, a Nazi sympathiser during the Second World War, to visit Israel. His tour included a stop at Yad Vashem, the country’s Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.
Israel’s then President Reuven Rivlin (right) welcomes his Philippine counterpart Rodrigo Duterte at the presidential compound in Jerusalem on 4 September 2018. Image: MEE/AFP
When Vorster arrived in Israel, he was feted by Rabin at a state dinner. Rabin toasted “the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence”. Both nations faced “foreign-inspired instability and recklessness”.
Israel and South Africa viewed themselves as under attack by foreign bodies committed to their destruction. A short time after Vorster’s visit, the South African government yearbook explained that both states were facing the same issue: “Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples.”
A love of ethnonationalism still fuels Israel today, along with a desire to export it. Some arms deals with nations, such as Bangladesh or the Philippines, are purely on military grounds and to make money.
Israel places barely any restrictions on what it sells, which pleases leaders who don’t want meddling in their actions. Pro-Israel lobbyists are increasingly working for repressive states, such as Bangladesh, to promote their supposed usefulness to the West.
Israel and the global far right But Israel’s affinity with Hungary, India and the global far right, a group that traditionally hates Jews, speaks volumes about the inspirational nature of the modern Israeli state. As Haaretz journalist Noa Landau recently wrote, while explaining why Netanyahu’s government defended the latest arguably antisemitic comments by Elon Musk about George Soros:
A Palestinian flag at the Auckland venue for author Antony Loewenstein’s address about his new book The Palestine Laboratory last night. Image: David Robie/Asia Pacific Report
“The government’s mobilisation in the service of stoking antisemitism is not surprising. It is the fruit of a long and consistent process in which the Netanyahu government has been growing closer to extreme right-wing elements around the world, at the expense of Jewish communities it purports to represent.”
It’s worth pausing for a moment to reflect on this undeniable reality. Israel, which claims to represent global Jewry, is encouraging an alignment between itself and a hyper-nationalist, bigoted and racist populism, regardless of the long-term consequences for the safety and security of Jews around the world.
Israel has thrived as an ethnonationalist state for so long because the vast bulk of the world grants it impunity. European nations have been key supporters of Israel, willing to overlook its occupation and abuse of Palestinians.
According to newly declassified documents from the files of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, between 1967 and 1990 it’s clear that West Germany was becoming more critical of Israel’s settlement project in Palestine, but the main concern was protecting its own financial interests in the region if a regional war broke out.
In a document written on 16 February 1975 to the deputy director of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Western Europe, Nissim Yaish, before Israel’s Foreign Minister Yigal Allon’s visit to West Germany, Yaish explained the thinking in his country’s diplomatic bureaucracy:
“There is unanimity that this time such a war will have a far-reaching impact on all its affairs internally and externally and that it could wreak a Holocaust on the German economy. Based on this attitude, West Germany is interested in rapid progress toward a [peace] agreement.”
Western silence But there has rarely been any serious interest in pursuing peace, or holding Israel to account for its blatantly illegal actions, because the economic imperative is too strong. Even today, when another Nakba against Palestinians is becoming more possible to imagine, there’s largely silence from Western elites.
Germany has banned public recognition of the 1948 Nakba and criminalised any solidarity with the Palestinian people. Germany is also keen to buy an Israeli missile defence system, confirming its priorities.
This is why Israeli apartheid and the Palestine laboratory are so hard to stop; countless nations want a piece of Israeli repression tech to surveil their own unwanted populations or election meddling support in Latin America or Africa.
Without a push for accountability, economic boycotts and regulation or banning Israeli spyware — the EU is flirting with the idea — Israel can feel comfortable that its position as a global leader in offensive weapons is secure.
This article was first published in the Middle East Eye.
Matu Tangi Matua Reid . . . a name every political faction will manage to find offence with. Image: TDB
By Martyn Bradbury
My daughter came into the kitchen early today to tell me her friends were downtown in Auckland at Britomart, the transit hub of New Zealand’s biggest city, and that a construction worker had just run past them saying a man with a gun was shooting people.
I immediately swept all the online news media and saw nothing and was in the process of suggesting to her that maybe her friends were pranking her when it broke on Breakfast TV.
I know the area this shooting occurred in well — I was there a few days ago; most Aucklanders will know it as it is a vital entry point to downtown Auckland. To have a mass shooting event there is utterly outside the norm for Aucklanders.
As the reverberations and shock ease, there will of course be immediate political fall out.
Before all that though, first, let us acknowledge the uncompromising courage of our New Zealand police and emergency services. We all saw them sprint into that building knowing someone was armed and shooting people.
I am the first to be critical of the NZ Police, but on this day, their professionalism and unflinching bravery was one of the few things we can be grateful for on such a poisoned morning.
Let us also pause and mourn the two who were killed and 10 wounded. These were simply good honest folk going about their day of work and not one of them deserved the horror visited upon them by 24-year-old Matu Tangi Matua Reid.
Now let’s talk about Matu.
Troubling pump-action shotgun access The media have already highlighted that he was on home detention for domestic violence charges and was wearing an ankle bracelet. This is of no surprise nor shock, many on home detention have the option of applying for leave to work — we do this because those on home detention still need to pay the rent, far more troubling was his access to a pump-action shotgun he didn’t have a gun licence for.
We know he had already been in a Turn Your Life Around Youth Development Trust programme.
Political partisans will try and seize any part of his story to whip into political frenzy for their election narrative and we should reject and resist that.
The banality of evil always tends to be far more basic than we ever appreciate.
There is nothing special about Matu; he is simply another male without the basic emotional tools to facilitate his anger beyond violence. In that regard Matu is depressingly like tens of thousands of men in NZ.
His background didn’t justify this terrible act of violence today and his actions can’t be conflated to show Labour are soft on crime.
Another depressing violent male
Matu is just another depressing male whose violence he could not control. There are tens of thousands like him and until we start focusing on building young men who have the emotional tools to facilitate their anger beyond violence, he won’t be the last.
He has shamed himself.
He has shamed his family.
He has shamed us all.
Today isn’t a day for politics, it is far too sad for that, the politics will come and everyone will be screaming their sweaty truth, but at its heart this is about broken men incapable of keeping their violence to themselves.
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins told media a witness called the incident in at 7.23am, reporting there was a man with a gun shooting inside a construction site on lower Queen Street.
The gunman moved through the construction site shooting a pump-action shotgun.
When he reached the upper levels he hid inside an elevator shaft.
Police attempted to engage with him, but the gunman fired further shots, before he was found dead a short time later, they say.
He said there was no identified “political or ideological motivation” for the shooter and as such, there was no need to change the national security risk.
Coster said the shooter was a worker at the construction site, and had an exemption from home detention to go to work.
At 7.22am police received multiple emergency calls about a person shooting a gun on the third floor of a building under construction on lower Queen Street. Commissioner Coster said officers arrived on the scene within minutes.
“The offender made his way up the building site, discharging his firearm on multiple occasions. Police entered in the building within 10 minutes,” he said.
The police commissioner said the gunman fired at police, wounding an officer, and shots were then exchanged.
“The offender was later found deceased.”
The wounded police officer was taken to hospital in a critical condition, but has since stabilised.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Oppenheimer . . . a wait-and-see approach from the Japanese film industry, but stories of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not a taboo topic in Japan. Image: Universal Pictures
ANALYSIS:By Peter C. Pugsley
While Christopher Nolan’s new film Oppenheimer is opening in much of the world this week, a Japanese release date has not yet been announced.
A delay in naming a release date is nothing new for Japan, where Hollywood releases often take place weeks or months later than other national markets.
Japan’s cinema industry is savvy enough to take a wait-and-see approach to blockbuster films.
If Oppenheimer fails at the box office in other markets, then Japan may decide on a quick opening in a smaller number of cinemas. If it is the global hit the producers hope, it may open across the country.
Some have speculated the tragic history of events in Hiroshima and Nagasaki make the film too sensitive for Japanese audiences. But concerns that the film contains sensitivities to Japan’s past can be easily discarded by a quick glance through Japan’s cinematic history.
The Oppenheimert trailer. Video: Universal Pictures
The Japanese film industry
The Japanese film industry began in 1897, developing quickly through studios such as Nikkatsu and Shochiku. In the 1930s, the industry gained international attention with emerging filmmakers such as Yasujiro Ozu.
By the late 1930s, studios and filmmakers were drafted into the war effort, making propaganda films.
Until the end of the Second World War, the Japanese government had been strictly censoring all films in line with efforts to produce this state-sanctioned propaganda. From 1945 to 1949, the US-Occupation forces set up procedures to ensure films avoided intensely nationalist or militaristic themes.
Japan’s film classification body was created in 1949 following the withdrawal of the Production Code. This gave Japanese authorities the chance to determine their own rules around film content based on themes of language, sex, nudity, violence and cruelty, horror and menace, drug use and criminal behaviour.
Japanese film was always quite progressive in terms of artistic licence, escaping the type of strictly enforced limitations found in America’s Hays Code, which put restrictions on content including nudity, profanity and depictions of crime.
Filmmakers in Japan had freedom to practise their art, so the pinku (soft pornography) films of the 1960s and 70s were the products of the major studios rather than underground independents.
These freedoms saw Japanese filmmakers absorb influences from Europe (particularly through French and Italian cinema), but saw significant content differences between Japanese and Hollywood cinema until the close of the Hays era.
Since the 1950s, censorship in the form of suggested edits or very rarely, “disallowed films”, has mostly been in response to violent or overly-explicit sexual imagery, rather than concerns over political or militaristic issues.
Japan is the third biggest box office market in the world, behind only China and North America, and cinema is dominated by local films.
While it can appear that Japanese cinema is dominated by anime and live-action remakes of manga and anime, it includes a rich array of genres and styles. The late 1990s saw a global appetite for horror films, under the mantle of J-horror. Films like Battle Royale (2000) and Ichi: The Killer (2001) created a new level of violence combining the horror genre with comic moments. Meanwhile samurai and yakuza films continue to find audiences, as do high-school themed dramas.
Internationally, the arthouse stylistics of films by Hirokazu Kore-eda, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Naomi Kawase are feted at Cannes and Venice.
The war on screen Many Japanese filmmakers have explored the Second World War.
As early as 1952, Kaneto Shindo’s Children of Hiroshima directly addressed the aftermath of the war through confronting imagery then with a gentle, humanist touch.
A year later, Hideo Sekigawa’s Hiroshima upped the political ante with a docudrama critical of the United States’ actions in a film that included real survivors from the nuclear blast acting as victims.
The obvious metaphorical imagery of successive Godzilla films reflect fears of the potential horrors nuclear activities could unleash.
The title of Shōhei Imamura’s Black Rain (1989, not to be confused with Ridley Scott’s yakuza film of the same name and same year) referenced the colour of the acid rain following the nuclear blast in Hiroshima, and was recognised with some of Japan’s highest film honours.
Anime has also directly shown the damage wrought by Oppenheimer’s device, most notably with Barefoot Gen in 1983, and its sequel in 1986.
In the style of Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion, a young wide-eyed boy, Gen, is caught in the horrors of the conflict, watching as his mother literally melts in front of him.
Summer with Kuro (1990) and In This Corner of the World (2016) each gave their own, less graphic, anime versions of lives touched by the conflict.
Foreign films
Foreign films about the second world war have also found an audience in Japan.
Alain Resnais’ intensely serious French New Wave drama, the French/Japanese co-production Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), exposed the international implications of personal relations after the bomb.
Japan warmly welcomed Clint Eastwood’s 2006 twin-release of Letters from Iwo Jima and Flags of Our Fathers, which showed the battle from the views of Japanese and US soldiers, respectively.
Stories of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not a taboo topic in Japan. Of all the nations in the world to be banning films, Japan must surely be near the bottom of the list.
Whether there’s a release date or not, Oppenheimer must have the appeal to be a box office hit to determine its suitability for release in Japan.
Suspended Papua Governor Lukas Enembe when he was taken to the Gatot Subroto Army Central Hospital (RSPAD) last Sunday night. His health is reported go have sharply deteriorated. Image: Odiyaiwuu.com
SPECIAL REPORT: By Yamin Kogoya
Suspended Papua Governor Lukas Enembe, who is detained in Indonesia on corruption charges, was supposed to go on trial yesterday but this did not go ahead as he is gravely ill and could not attend.
Upon realising the governor’s health had deteriorated, the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) tried to transport him to Gatot Subroto Army Central Hospital (RSPAD) last Saturday.
However, the governor refused due to what he said was KPK’s “mishandling” of the legal case.
A member of the Governor’s legal team, Petrus Bala Pattyona, said he had been contacted by the KPK prosecutor on Sunday.
Bala Pattyona was asked by the prosecutor to convince Enembe to be taken to the hospital. Enembe had not eaten for two days, was vomiting, nauseous, and dizzy, reports Odiyaiwuu.com.
The Governor is currently in an intensive care unit — suffering from a serious life-threatening illness.
Jakarta’s ‘legal mishandling’ of Governor
Governor Enembe was on trial a week ago on July 10, but public prosecutors failed to bring witnesses to the hearing.
After the trial was adjourned for another week until yesterday, he was taken to a KPK prison cell despite being seriously ill.
Prior to these two failed trial hearings, the Governor appeared in court on June 24.
However, the hearing wqs suspended after a panel of judges rejected Governor Enembe’s appeal for the charges to be waived.
Given the governor’s ill health, the judges ruled to prioritise his health and grant his request to suspend proceedings until he was medically fit to stand trial.
On June 12, an anticipated and highly publicised trial was scheduled to take place in Jakarta’s District Court. However, the trial was not held due to KPK’s mishandling of the ordeal.
To date, a total of nine attempts have been made to deliver a satisfactory closure of the Governor’s legal case since he was “kidnapped” from Papua in January 2023.
New August date set
The trial is now rescheduled for early August 2023. However, there is no guarantee that this will be the last hearing over what critics describe as a tragic and disgraceful mishandling of the case concerning a respected tribal chief and Governor who is fighting for his life.
For the government of Indonesia, KPK and judges, every moment that is mismanaged, mishandled, or delayed might mean just a delay in justice, but for the Governor and his family it means life and death.
According to the governor’s family, KPK are already waiting to bring this sick man back from hospital and lock him up in a KPK prison cell again.
The Governor’s family ask how could this “cruel treatment be happening”?
Yamin Kogoya is a West Papuan academic/activist who has a Master of Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development from the Australian National University and who contributes to Asia Pacific Report. From the Lani tribe in the Papuan Highlands, he is currently living in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
Owen Wilkes (carrying his daughter Koa) and Joan Wilkes during an anti-apartheid march in Christchurch 1971. CAFCA organiser Murray Horton recalls: "The march was headed to a Christchurch beach to protest the presence of a South African surf lifesaving team. Owen later swam out and disrupted one of the races by moving the marker buoys, all the while dodging enraged race officials who rode after him, trying to grab him with a big boat hook." Image: Ron Hazlehurst/Labour History
REVIEW: By Ken Mansell
The recent publication of a book of essays honouring the life of legendary New Zealand peace researcher and activist Owen Wilkes is a must read for historians of social movements, those who were active in the anti-nuclear and peace movements of the seventies and eighties, as well as those growing numbers who today carry on the resistance to escalating militarism.
Wilkes, an iconic figure revered in the Peace Movement, exposed covert military activity worldwide and inspired many in the fight for New Zealand’s nuclear-free status.
Thirteen of Owen’s contemporaries, all of whom were associated with him in his peace movement activities, have contributed essays. They are New Zealanders Mark Derby, May Bass, Robert Mann, Ken Ross, Murray Horton, Maire Leadbeater, Diane Hooper, David Robie, Peter Wills, Nicky Hager, and Neville Ritchie; and the Norwegians Ingvar Botnen and Nils Petter Gleditsch.
Their individual memories combine and overlap to provide a detailed biographical sketch. It has not been possible to write a conventional review because this would have required a review of each of the various essays.
I have, however, drawn on the contents of each essay to pen, in summary form, the story of Owen’s extraordinary life. Here I mainly have an Australian reading audience in mind.
Owen Wilkes was a household name in New Zealand but was comparatively unknown in Australia beyond those, like myself, who knew him in the Australian peace movement of the eighties. Hopefully, however, my article, because it includes Owen’s exploits on this side of the ditch, will also arouse some interest in Aotearoa.
Who then was Owen Wilkes?
Owen Wilkes – peace researcher
Owen, born in 1940 and raised in Christchurch, dropped out of university in 1960 but soon displayed a remarkable proclivity for exposing the hidden and obscure, initially on Māori rock art digs for the Canterbury Museum (1963-64) and then in jobs that awakened him to hidden militarism.
As a field entomologist in Papua New Guinea, Owen exposed a secret US Army germ warfare research programme; at the US McMurdo Sound Antarctic base, he found evidence that Christchurch Airport’s “Operation Deep Freeze” was a cover for US military activity (and later exposed the installation of a small nuclear reactor at the base); at the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, he responded to the horror of the Vietnam War by researching US military activities in New Zealand and the Pacific.
Peacemonger . . . the first full-length account of peace researcher Owen Wilkes’ life and work. Image: Raekaihau Press
In June 1968, the New Zealand government proposed to establish an Omega transmitter in the South Island high country, ostensibly only for civilian navigation purposes. Owen acquired a 364-page report from the US Navy Omega Implementation Committee that described Omega’s role in sending VLF signals to submerged ballistic missile submarines, enabling them to locate their position and calculate trajectories to their targets.
Canta, the University of Christchurch student newspaper, published 72,000 copies of a special Omega edition featuring an article by Owen. Three days later, 4000 marched in protest through the streets of Christchurch. Owen Wilkes, a pioneer peace researcher, was now a household name.
A militant anti-bases movement was built in New Zealand, inspired by Owen’s knowledge and leadership. In the early 1970s, he exposed two US Air Force operations, “Project Longbank” (monitoring nuclear tests by France and China) and the Mt John Observatory (providing targeting data for a US anti-satellite weapons system), and found that Christchurch Airport (Harewood) was being used to service American spy bases in Australia under cover of the Antarctic “Operation Deep Freeze”.
In the 1980S, Owen uncovered the role of the Black Birch US Naval Observatory in improving the stellar guidance system of long-range missiles (Trident, MX) and the role of two electronic spy bases linked to the US National Security Agency — at Tangimoana in the North Island (contributing to the targeting of US naval weapons) and at Waihopai in the South Island (targeting the international Intelsat system).
Owen Wilkes addressing protesters at Waihopai, Aotearoa New Zealand, in February 1988. Image: Ken Mansell/Labour History
From 1976-1982 Owen lived in Scandinavia and worked for peace research institutes in Oslo and Stockholm. At the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), he researched technical intelligence systems (sonars, seismometers detecting nuclear explosions) and foreign military installations linked to nuclear weapons command and control systems (including navigation aids for nuclear missile submarines). For the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), he compiled a database of 1500 US bases and 300 Soviet bases, and contributed articles to three SIPRI Yearbooks.
The security services in both countries cracked down hard on him. Owen had been subjected to surveillance and harassment (opening of mail) in New Zealand, but his treatment at the hands of the security state in the Nordic countries went beyond this level.
The controversial book Uncle Sam’s Rabbits: Technical Intelligence in Norway, Oslo, 1981.
Owen and PRIO colleague Nils Petter Gleditsch discovered that Norway was secretly hosting NATO/U.S electronic direction-finding bases (“Uncle Sam’s Rabbits”). This brought charges under the Official Secrets Act and a June 1981 trial in the City Court of Oslo, where they were fined and given suspended prison sentences (confirmed by the Norwegian Supreme Court in February 1982).
Owen’s arraignment in Sweden was even more dramatic. After an innocent bicycle tour of the Swedish island of Götland, where he stopped occasionally to photograph or jot down notes about glaringly public antennae, Owen was grabbed by secret police on a charge of “espionage”, later revised to the spurious “piecing together data from open sources and field observations”.
His suspended sentence and deportation for 10 years meant that Owen left Sweden in a blaze of publicity and with an international reputation as a “spy”. One interesting suggestion in an endnote is that SIPRI disapproved of Owen’s adventurous fieldwork and failed to defend him (and its own independence).
‘Jigsaw puzzle principle’
In their detailed treatment of Owen’s research methods, the investigative journalists David Robie and Nicky Hager are both at pains to refute the charge of “espionage”. What really offended the Defence authorities was the “jigsaw puzzle principle” — Owen’s ability to piece together information from multiple publicly available (albeit obscure) open sources (such as what could be gleaned from US Congressional hearings, Defence Department reports to Congress, and aerospace trade journals) to create new information that governments wanted to keep secret.
Many of Owen’s insights and discoveries were the result of “fieldwork”, where the self-taught researcher used his expertise to deduce the functions of military installations (antennae and radar systems) simply from observing them. His efforts resulted in a vast store of accumulated knowledge about electronic signals intelligence systems, and communication systems for land/sea-based nuclear forces.
Hager describes Owen’s meticulous filing system, every page having a file code, allowing him to write about a wide variety of subjects, such as, for example, his history of New Zealand’s involvement with chemical warfare.
Based in Wellington from 1984-1994, where he worked for Peace Movement Aotearoa (PMA), much of the time in libraries (Alexander Turnbull; US Embassy), Owen increasingly widened his investigative scope to include foreign military activities across the whole of the Pacific, including the intelligence (spying) activity associated with it.
He conducted speaking tours of “intelligence sites” in Wellington and exposed the destabilising activity of the CIA in New Zealand (Māori Loans Affair) and the Pacific (Fiji) with his articles in PMA’s Peacelink and in the newsletters Wellington Confidential and Wellington Pacific Report. Owen was dedicated to sharing his documents with peace researchers and with activists. Likewise, his discoveries, such as when Owen informed the anti-nuclear movement in the Philippines of the existence of a secret US nuclear test detection facility in Bukidnon, Mindanao.
Protesters from Sydney prepare their camp at Mildura, Victoria, during the 1974 Long March against the US communications base at North West Cape . . . Owen Wilkes is pictured in the centre carrying his steel box of research files. Image: Peter Lusk
Owen Wilkes in Australia Owen Wilkes made an enormous contribution to the anti-nuclear and peace movements in Australia from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. Very little of this aspect of Owen’s career is covered in Peacemonger, so here I’ll fill in some of the gaps. Owen’s association with the peace movement in Australia started soon after the announcement in March 1971 that an Omega transmitter, having been rejected by New Zealand in May 1969, would be sited in Australia.
Owen was hosted by the Melbourne Stop Omega Committee and produced (with Albert Langer) a detailed submission on Omega’s military role as a navigation aid for Polaris ballistic missile submarines to the (August-November 1973) hearings of the Australian Parliamentary Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence.
Owen was one of 11 New Zealanders who participated in the 1974 “Long March” to North West Cape, a three-week-long bus trip to Exmouth in Western Australia, the site of the sprawling US Navy nuclear submarines communications base. The North West Cape demonstrators benefited from Owen’s knowledge and leadership and inspired the 1975 South Island “Resistance Ride” in New Zealand.
Originally earmarked for Tasmania (and then Boort in north-west Victoria), Omega was eventually constructed near Sale in Gippsland but only after a vigorous anti-base campaign had delayed its opening until 1982.
On 28 August 1982, in Melbourne, the fledgling People for Nuclear Disarmament (PND) movement held a seminar on Omega as part of the preparation for a protest rally at the site later in the year. Owen, one of three listed speakers, arrived late after having passed through Sydney on his return from Stockholm. His deflating message was that he had changed his mind about Omega.
The system had originally been intended to play a role as a navigation aid for ballistic missile submarines but was now unlikely to be used by them because it had been sidelined by the more advanced VLF radio navigation system of Loran-C. Omega was more useful to “hunter-killer” (attack) submarines and to other anti-submarine warfare systems, and as such, was still involved in counterforce nuclear strategies against Soviet military forces.
On September 2, Owen called a press conference in Wellington to convey the same message, admitting publicly he had been partially wrong in his original criticism of Omega.
In the years that followed, Owen maintained contact with the growing Australian nuclear disarmament movement. He regularly posted copies of documents across the Tasman to Australian researchers and was welcomed here as an expert guest speaker at public meetings and on the radio.
Owen visited Melbourne in July 1984 and completed four separate speaking engagements in the space of a week, including a meeting of the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement and a meeting of the group organising a peace camp at the satellite terminal in suburban Watsonia (confirmed by Owen as involved in the US Naval Ocean Surveillance Information System).
Owen Wilkes addressing protesters outside the Melbourne Magistrates Court where he appeared as an expert witness, March 1986. Image: Ken Mansell/Labour History
In March 1986, Owen appeared as an expert witness for the Christian activists on trial in the Melbourne Magistrates Court for splashing blood on the Watsonia dish at Easter 1985 and was eagerly sought for interviews by the Watching Brief public broadcast team.
In June 1988, Owen (accompanied by CAFCA organiser Murray Horton) again made the trip to North West Cape for the demonstration organised by the Australian Anti Bases Campaign Coalition and then followed up with a month-long speaking tour focusing on the destabilisation of the Pacific.
In early 1990, Owen lived in Melbourne for several weeks, taking the time for a spot of “fieldwork” while researching (with Peter Hayes) the history of US ballistic missile testing in the Pacific for the 1991 Nautilus Pacific Research publication Chasing Gravity’s Rainbow. No wonder that Owen filled multiple file boxes about Australia.
Owen Wilkes on “fieldwork” near Rockbank, Victoria, in March 1986. Image: Ken Mansell/Labour History
Owen Wilkes – the man (1940-2005) Owen Wilkes was always much more than simply a busy and committed peace researcher. Most of the chapters in the book are also mini-biographical sketches that variously describe aspects of Owen’s personal life and his many interests and preoccupations outside of the peace movement.
In his earlier years, Owen supported his activism with a succession of part-time jobs as dustman, tomato grower, baker, ski field attendant and beekeeper. A lover of the outdoors and proudly Spartan in lifestyle, he lived at one time in a railway carriage as a member of a remote West Coast hippy commune, at another time in his own self-built energy-efficient house.
In 1995, Owen took permanent leave from the peace movement and worked for the Department of Conservation on an inventory of archaeological sites, a life-long passion. He spent his final years living in remote Kawhia, yachting, sailing, tramping, and tending to his vegetable garden.
The contributors to Peacemonger have explained why Owen Wilkes was such a revered activist. Explaining his personal characteristics would have been more difficult, but they have not shied away from it, describing him as a complex, eccentric personality with many admirable qualities (“stubborn, but generous and honest”, according to his partner May Bass).
Several of the essays, however, contrast Owen’s physical sturdiness — in Sweden he was known to ski in shorts with the temperature as low as minus 25 centigrade — with his apparent psychological fragility. As a researcher and campaigner, Owen displayed an iron will, but he was also prone to occasional debilitating depression and negativity.
In the 1990s, Owen took issue with the New Zealand peace movement, his somewhat hostile and cranky views including the outlandish notion that visiting nuclear-powered ships were perfectly safe. However, none of this could have prepared all who knew and revered him for the shock and devastation they would feel upon learning that Owen had taken his own life.
RIP Owen Wilkes.
Ken Mansell contributed this review to Labour History, the website of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, and it is republished by Café Pacific with the permission of both the author and society.
Media organisations in Papua — including the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) of Jayapura City, the Indonesian Journalists Association (PWI) of Papua and the Indonesian Television Journalists Association (IJTI) of Papua — have lambasted intimidation against Abdel Gamel Naser, a reporter with the Cenderawasih Pos.
The incident occurred while he was covering the issue of mangrove forest destruction in the Youtefa Bay Nature Park conservation area in Jayapura City last Tuesday.
Gamel, as he is commonly known, allegedly faced intimidation from two police officers who were present near the location.
The officers approached Gamel and questioned why he was photographing the area.
Despite explaining that he was a journalist, the officers forced him to delete three images from his reportage.
“To avoid further conflict so I can continue my reporting elsewhere, I deleted the photos,” he explained.
“As I was leaving the location, [the police officers] issued further threats,” Gamel said in a press release issued by the media groups.
A halt to logging
Gamel was among a group of about a dozen journalists who were covering the halt of logging and material stockpiling in the mangrove forest area of Youtefa Bay Nature Tourism Park.
The halt was carried out by the Papua Forestry and Environment Service, the Papua Natural Resources Conservation Center, and the Papua Police Special Crimes Unit.
According to Gamel, the intimidation occurred while he was capturing images near a location where police lines had been established, and several police officers were nearby.
Lucky Ireeuw, chair of the AJI Jayapura, strongly condemned the alleged intimidation faced by Gamel during his work. he said such repressive actions hindered the exercise of press freedom in Papua.
“The intimidation suffered by Gamel obstructs press freedom and violates Law No. 40/1999 on Press,” Ireeuw said.
He called on the Papua police to take decisive action against the officers implicated in the alleged intimidation.
“We urge the police to ensure press freedom in Papua,” Ireeuw added.
‘Arrogant’ display
Meanwhile, PWI Papua deputy chair Ridwan Madubun strongly condemned the “display of arrogance” that resulted in the intimidation of his fellow journalist Gamel. Madubun saoid such actions were unjustifiable, especially when they happened while journalists were carrying out their responsibilities in the public domain.
He also expressed dismay at the ongoing repressive acts against journalists in Papua.
Journalists are safeguarded by law in carrying out their coverage duties to inform the public.
Papua police spokesperson Senior Commander Ignatius Beny Ady Prabowo said efforts had been made within the police institution to educate officers about press freedom since their training at the National Police School.
“I have just been made aware of the alleged intimidation against Gamel,” Prabowo said. “Journalists who encounter such incidents can report them to our Internal Division.”
