Alistar Kata, an award-winning journalist with Tagata Pasifika, made a 15 minute mini-documentary about the work of the Pacific Media Centre, founded by Dr David Robie in October 2007, and its dedicated crew.
At the time, she was the Pacific Media Watch freedom project contributing editor and chief storyteller.
Eyes of Fire is an updated version of the account of the 1985 sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, first published in 1986. No New Zealander old enough to have been around then will be unaware of the incident, but this is a timely reminder for a newer generation of the day when terrorism reached Waitemata Harbour.
Terrorism is supposed to be the last resort of alienated young men from places we know nothing of, but the bomb which blew up the Rainbow Warrior in downtown Auckland was detonated by men and women employed by the Government of France.
If you didn’t know otherwise, you might suppose that some time before the attack France had suffered a traumatic event, because how else might such an odd barbarism be explained? France surely is a modern and agreeable place which merits our sympathy as the target of terrorism, not its perpetrator.
Not really. France is the same place with the same public institutions as it had in 1985, its current President being from the same party — the Socialists for heaven’s sake — as the President back then. Neither, in essence, has its global circumstances changed.
France regarded Greenpeace as ‘terrorists’ Pollution of land and sea and the degradation of habitats are even more of a problem now than they were last century and you don’t find advanced Western democracies openly calling for the globe to get ever dirtier. And when the Rainbow Warrior docked in Auckland in July 1985, it was in the middle of voyages to draw attention to all sorts of environmental issues. Greenpeace had protested nuclear tests, acid rain, whaling, attacks on dolphins and the dumping of toxic waste. It was doing great work.
Not in the eyes of the French State. Their problem was that the Rainbow Warrior was due to sail towards Tahiti and the French islands in the south-east Pacific, where they were testing nukes. If, for the rest of us, it was bad enough that the Russians and Americans were in a perpetual nuclear confrontation which had the potential to wipe us all away, that tension was at least understandable, given the circumstances at the time.
But France had as much reason to want to join the nuclear club as it would have if it started to do so now. That is, zero. It was pure folly.
Being primarily focused on environmental issues, Greenpeace was protesting the very real and obvious threat to marine life. The French of course said that their tests were clean. Which prompted the obvious response that they should, therefore, test their bombs in mainland France. Rainbow Warrior had just arrived from the Marshall Islands, where the US had long polluted (and where areas are still uninhabitable) with nuclear bombs.
By 1985, France had conducted 193 tests in the Pacific and it wasn’t done yet. France (still) pretends to believe that its overseas colonies are no different politically from Paris or Marseilles, so it felt able to treat the New Zealand government, then beginning to respond to Greenpeace’s campaign for a nuclear-free Pacific, as an ally of its activities, which France labelled terrorism.
Staked out on watch
So it was that one winter’s night on Tamaki Drive boat club members, who had been the target of thieves, were staked out on watch when a speedboat landed. Two people got out, dumped the boat’s engine in the water, and were then picked by a car driven by someone in a frogman suit. The yachties noted the car’s plate number.
A later search of the water came up with water bottles made in France. NZ’s petty criminals had enabled the police to arrest France’s state terrorists.
A Frenchwoman who joined the open activities of Greenpeace in Auckland apparently expressed hostility to the idea of independence for New Caledonia and support for France’s bombs, both opinions being the last things you’d expect to hear around Greenpeace. She advanced the rationale that nukes were needed as otherwise “we risk becoming like Finland, which is so influenced by Russia”.
Hearing this ingénue, an experienced observer who knew European history would have intuited that she had been indoctrinated by an older and nostalgic extremist as no-one else had worried about Finnish sovereignty since about 1940. She turned out later to have been a spy.
While it might not be surprising that no local NZ activist would have suspected her, it is surprising that an agent of the French secret police was so gauche.
It seems that the French didn’t know enough of their own history to have created a convincing persona for their agent, who would have been detected had she operated in a more experienced milieu.
Operationally, too, French tactics were clumsy. Twice before they had sunk ships, and both times they achieved nothing beyond discrediting the activities they were hoping to defend.
And just as its secret police have been amateurishly incompetent, so has its political class. David Robie tells us in Eyes of Fire that theories from the political elites in France included the assertion that low-tech Greenpeace was about to advance on French Polynesia with an armada so loaded with the latest gadgets to thwart the tests that the nuke programme would have to be abandoned.
It was said that Greenpeace was financed by BP to maintain its oil interests, that the UK’s MI6, the South African secret police and the Soviet’s KGB had infiltrated Greenpeace. The latter, an old favourite, was picked up a naive NZ media and across the Tasman in the Australian. This detail is significant in that, as a “quality” Tory broadsheet with sophisticated journalists, the paper must have known the claim was suspect. Ideology trumps truth every time.
The rhetoric did not often reach eloquence. One letter to the Greenpeace office after the bombing warned of the traitors ready to deliver the country to the commies. They included “pacifists, hooligans, hippies, trade unions, PLO, Khomeinists, Labour terrorists – all the same riff-raff, all KGB agents.”
No wonder the correspondent concluded with: “Revenge. Better dead than Red. No more Vietnams”. For years serious and educated people had been debating this dilemma of whether they would prefer to be crimson or expired.
Exact opposite of intended result You’d think that the combined resources of the French elites would have come up with something better than these childish conspiracy theories, but perhaps the greatest of the many asinine calculations of the French State was its assumption that blowing up a Greenie ship in an allied country on the other side of the world would help it to carry on poisoning the South Pacific.
Instead, inevitably, international outrage raised Greenpeace’s profile enormously. It is no coincidence that the peace and environmental movements around the world became increasingly popular from the mid-1980s.
Only one man was killed, a Portuguese-born photographer, Fernando Pereira, but there could easily have been a high death toll. The frogmen who placed the bomb timed it to detonate just before midnight when normally there would have been many others in their cabins, but most happened to be on shore that night.
Robie himself had been on board when the ship docked in Auckland, having sailed from the Marshall Islands.
Even after the event, after the terrorists were caught, President Mitterrand’s France knew no shame, and the dirty tricks continued. Now perhaps there’s some resolution, some (in the irritating vernacular of the day) closure.
In 1987 – after Robie’s original account came out – the Rainbow Warrior was sunk off Matauri Bay in Northland as a likely future marine habitat for divers to explore. And in 1996 France signed the nuclear test ban treaty.
Robie’s professional life has been devoted to the peoples of the Pacific. A journalist and university teacher, he’s written a series of investigative accounts of the struggles of the island nations against big power politics.
Eyes Of Fire is an excellent production, thorough and informed with a restrained passion, with interesting photographs. French politicians, by and large, might now be behaving in a more acceptable fashion, but the global issues that Robie has analysed – of pollution and violence and the stupidity and corruption of power – still demand our witness.
This review of Eyes of Fire was written for CAFCA’s Foreign Control Watchdog 141 magazine April 2016 and has been republished with permission on Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Day. The publisher Little Island Press’s companion website for the book, Eyes of Fire: 30 Years On, features articles and a photo gallery by the author David Robie; an article by French journalist Pierre Gleizes; author of Rainbow Warrior Mon Amour; and more than 40 video interviews and stories featuring the protagonists by AUT University student journalists.
So the mystery is finally over. In 1983, I took this photo below of a young ni-Vanuatu girl at a nuclear-free Pacific rally in Independence Part, Port Vila. She was aged about five at the time.
She was just a delightful painted happy face in the crowd that day. But her message was haunting: “Please don’t spoil my beautiful face” had quite an impact on me. When monochrome and colour versions of this photo were published in various Pacific media and magazines, a question kept tugging at my heart.
“Who is she? Where is she from and what is she doing now?”
June Keitadi — as a five-year-old — in the 1983 Huarere video “Nuclear Free”. (She is seen at 1m08).
2016: June Warigini (Keitadi) at work at Teruja secondary school yesterday. Image: Shirley Loughman
I would have loved to have named her in the book with the cover image of her. So this spurred me onto to more determined efforts to discover her identity.
First of all I posted the photo – and a Hawai’ian solidarity video that also showed the little girl, discovered by Alistar Kata – on my blog Café Pacific late in 2015. More than 1000 people viewed the blog item, but there were no tip-offs.
Then it was reposted on other blogs.
Finally, friends at Vanuatu Daily Digest reposted my appeal – and voila, there she was discovered on the southernmost island of Aneityum (traditional name “Keamu”). And curiously, my wife Del and I were on that island at the same village, Anelgauhat, where she lives, on last Christmas Day 2015 – but didn’t realise who she was.
In fact, we have only recognised her as “June” our village guide that day now that we have seen her photo sent from the island. After all, this was 32 years after I had seen her fleetingly when she was a child in Port Vila.
She is June Keitadi (Warigini) daughter of Weitas and Jack Keitadi, then curator of the Vanuatu Kaljoral Senta with Kirk Huffman. Her sister, Shirley Loughman, says June is the assistant bursar at Teruja secondary school on Aneityum.
According to Selwyn A. Leodoro, Anglican regional secretary of Port Vila and New Caledonia, one of the many VDD readers who have responded and identified her, June was very “surprised” about the search for her and keen to meet up. All going well, Del and I hope to visit Vanuatu again later this year, and we would love to personally give her a copy of the book with her cover photo.
Today June is married to Ruyben Warigini and they have three children, Letisha (21), Alphonse (13) and Ray (8), and a grandchild.
June Warigini (Keitadi) with her husband Ruyben and family, Letisha (with baby) and Ray, on Aneityum Island, Vanuatu. Alphonse is not in this photo.
Spasifik Magazine cover with the Pacific Media Centre Fiji elections article, Summer 2015. Image: Spasifik screenshot
Spasifik Magazine
After the Fiji military coup of 5 December 2006, caretaker Prime Minister Jona Senilagakali announced that elections would take place “hopefully in 12 months, two years”. Later it was made clear to the Fijian people that none of the ministers in the interim government would be allowed to contest the elections.
Fast forward eight years and Fiji’s first general elections since 2006 were finally held on 17 September 2014 to select the 50 members of the new Fiji Parliament.
The new constitution signalled a new era for Fijians; for the first time in eight years they felt they had a say in the direction the country would take over the next few years. The new constitution lowered the voting age to 18 and gave the right of multiple citizenship to Fijians for the first time. Voreqe (Frank) Bainimarama, this time standing for the FijiFirst Party, was elected Prime Minister.
For a group of AUT University Asia-Pacific journalism students, the elections presented an opportunity for them to delve deep into the world of Pacific political journalism and uncover many untold truths about life in Fiji during this new era of political freedom.
They were also the first New Zealand university student journalists to cover a general election in the Pacific.
As this article was going to press, the students were told they had been awarded the Ossie Award for Best Use of Convergent Media for their Fiji coverage at a ceremony in Sydney organised by the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia (Jeraa).
The AUT student news bureau comprised of student journalists Alistar Kata and Mads Anneberg, who reported on the elections through a Fiji-based internship with local media, while coordinating editor Thomas Carnegie (abive), based at the Pacific Media Centre and Pacific Scoop in Auckland, managed the publication and distribution of their stories.
Professor David Robie: “This was a great opportunity for New Zealand-based student journalists to experience an historic election coming eight years after the 2006 coup.”
Kata was based at the University of the South Pacific’s student journalism newspaper Wansolwara and Radio Pasifik, while Anneberg was based at Repúbika magazine in Fiji.
“This was a great opportunity for New Zealand-based student journalists to experience an historic election coming eight years after the 2006 coup,” says Professor David Robie, director of AUT University’s Pacific Media Centre.
“It follows the tradition of having students from our Asia-Pacific Journalism course reporting on the Pacific Islands Forum over the past four years.”
Anneberg says covering the elections was an “amazing experience”.
“As a young reporter in Denmark, I had never reported on anything where the stakes were even as remotely as high for the readers.”
Spasifik Magazine gets a detailed account of what covering the Fiji general elections was like from student journalist Alistar Kata’s and Mads Anneberg’s viewpoints. Image: Screenshot Spasifik
Professor Sudesh Mishra, head of the University of the South Pacific’s School of Language, Arts and Media, says the USP-AUT partnership was significant.
“We were thrilled to be hosting graduate journalists from our sister university in Auckland. Cross-institutional exchanges and attachments are a vital part of what we do since our students stand to benefit from working with their counterparts from abroad.”
Ricardo Morris, editor of Repúblika, adds it was a great opportunity for journalists-in-training from a close major neighbour of Fiji to observe the country’s transition back to parliamentary democracy after eight years of rule by decree.
“Not only will it be a new experience for our New Zealand colleagues, very few local journalists left in the industry have covered the previous or any other election.
“For all of us, the electoral system was completely new and for the first time voters were not compelled by law to vote along ethnic lines,” says Morris.
The new proportional representational system required voters to make only a single choice from a field of almost 250 candidates for 50 parliamentary seats. To explain the changes in Fiji’s electoral system to voters — or an audience back in NZ — required a thorough understanding of the system and the tallying of votes and distribution of seats.
‘Blue wash’, elections and Fiji’s reborn democracy. Video: Alistar Kata (Pacific Media Centre)
“Alistar and Mads took on the challenge with relish, and it was refreshing to hear their take on the democratic processes,” says Professor Robie.
Kata described the situation in Fiji as “real and tentative”.
“For me, it was a golden opportunity to use what I have been learning through the course this year,” she says.
Carnegie is aiming for a career in political journalism in the Asia-Pacific region.
“This was a great opportunity for me to develop my knowledge and understanding of the political system,” he says.
Under the Fiji government’s media decree, the student journalists were required to register with the Media Industry Development Authority (MIDA) and gain permission to report on the elections.
A profile on the Asia Pacific Journalism course and the Fiji elections coverage project, Professor David Robie. Image: Screenshot Spasifik
Republished from Spasifik Magazine, Summer 2015, issue No 63, pp. 42-43.
Book review and interview with the author David Robie by David Blackall
Introduction
David Robie’s latest book is incisive and autobiographical. Kalafi Moala, a courageous publisher and pro-democracy campaigner in his own right, attests to this in the book’s foreword. For many years, Moala was exiled by the kingdom of Tonga and was involved in the celebrated case of the ‘Tongan Three’ — he and his colleagues are the only people to have been jailed for ‘contempt of Parliament’ in the Pacific.
Informed by his articles and notes, this long-form narrative documents David Robie’s journalism and educational work over 40 years. The book covers his vast experience in journalism, education and travel. He has worked in and travelled through Africa, worked for Agence France-Presse (AFP) in Paris in the 1970s, then in Australia and lastly, his specialty, in the Asia-Pacific region. David Robie is politically astute, promoting a journalism education that delivers peace and political independence in the Pacific region, freeing it of what he calls ‘colonial legacy conflicts’. His environmental concerns and his striving for truth for Indigenous peoples create opportunities for public debate.
David Blackall’s interview with author David Robie, Asia Pacific Media Educator, 2015. Image: Screenshot
In 1979, he covered the French nuclear accident, which killed workers on Moruroa Atoll. ‘The bunker was flushed out with a film of acetone, a solvent capable of absorbing plutonium, a deadly radioactive substance’ (Robie, 2014, p. 47). Plutonium may be recovered using Sc-CO2 (supercritical carbon dioxide in a fluid state), and this is modified with acetyl acetone (Sujatha, Pitchaiah, Sivaraman, Srinivasan & Rao, 2012). Acetone is highly volatile, and when a ‘six-man decontamination squad was sent into the bunker, and an electric drill switched on, an explosion killed one man instantly, another was crushed by a hurtling door and four others were badly burnt’ (Robie, 2014, p. 47). These sorts of accidents, and the resultant pollution, are often absent from corporate news because the corporations responsible strive to keep them secret. Since the time of nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific, Robie has written about these tragedies and the ensuing deception by the US and French militaries. He has reported these events extensively, almost single-handedly, while immersed in the story. On one occasion, he was aboard Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior when it rescued the Rongelap Atoll refugees after they were exposed to nuclear contamination.(1) Three days after returning to Auckland, after his 10-week voyage, French secret agents bombed the Rainbow Warrior on 10 July 1985. He was lucky not to be on board that night.
Edited transcript of interview with David Robie:
David Blackall (DB): In 1969, you were chief subeditor at the Sunday Observer in Melbourne, the first newspaper with a reasonably large circulation (100,000 plus) to ‘campaign vigorously against Australian involvement’ in the Vietnam War (Robie, 2014). The newspaper published a selection of photographs taken by Ronald L. Haeberle of the My Lai massacre in 1968:
Between 340 and 500 unarmed civilians were murdered in the hamlets of My Lai and My Khe of Son My village on 16 March that year by US Army soldiers of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment.
(Haeberle in Robie, 2014)
The Sunday Observer supplied Haeberle’s photographs to the Australian Federal Parliament to help end the war. This was a brave act, David Robie, in standing up to a political correctness at the time in Australia; where there was a belief the war was justified. We find ourselves in a similar predicament today in many theatres of war throughout Africa and the Middle East (Epstein & Welch, 2012). As chief subeditor, you — and then editor Michael Cannon — decided to do something because you both understood it to be an issue of conscience.
…‘journalism of attachment’ proposes a form of journalism that ‘cares as well as knows’. …this phenomenon is in opposition to the traditional model of what [is] coined
as ‘by-stander journalism’. (Ruigrok, 2010)
Can you comment please, David?
David Robie (DR): Ironically, during the period that you are referring to, when I was chief subeditor, and shortly after editor, of the original Sunday Observer (it later became the Nation Review), I had been grappling with these very issues about journalism of accountability.
At the time I was 24 and already a metropolitan editor. I had had a reasonably conventional start to my journalism career, first with New Zealand’s capital city morning newspaper The Dominion, then The New Zealand Herald, followed by the Melbourne Herald. Our chief Southeast Asian correspondent at the Observer was none other than Australia’s enigmatic Wilfred Burchett who paid a high price for exposing the Hiroshima ‘atomic plague’ and reporting war from the ‘other side’ (Burchett & Shimmin, 2007). Burchett had to contend with the Cold War, being an Australian, and the mass ignorance about the Vietnam War (although one wonders whether we have learnt anything from history given our propensity to fall in with ‘coalition of the willing’ in Iraq, Afghanistan and now the ‘Levant’).
As you suggest, military photographer Ronald Haeberle’s documentation of the My Lai atrocities was a form of journalism of accountability. You have cited Nel Ruigrok’s paper, on journalism of accountability, rather than ‘activism’. Although this paper is a compelling argument about activist journalism in Bosnia, Kosovo and in the ‘embedded’ invasion of Iraq, and it is particularly draws on examples in the Netherlands media, it is fairly applicable in a global context. There are many Pacific examples too, where activist journalism prejudges some situations and totally excludes others. A classic example of this is the shoddy Australian and New Zealand journalistic ‘consensus’ for the past six years on Fiji — a military regime after 2006, a dictatorship, or at least a military backed government.
There is plenty of evidence that the contemporary Indonesian atrocity in West Papua (perpetuated since paratroopers dropped into the one-time Dutch colony in 1962 and the so-called ‘Act of Free Choice’ in 1969 legitimised a sham). This is a non-story with virtually this same Australian and New Zealand journalistic ‘consensus’ committing editorial hypocrisy. The problem that I see in recent years is that the so-called ‘journalism of activism’ is most often deployed as an extension of power of the political elites, whether in Canberra or Wellington, or their ringmasters in Washington or Whitehall. ‘Activism’ and ‘journalistic consensus’ often revolves around the parliamentary press galleries and media political insiders, so devastatingly exposed by Nicky Hager in his Dirty Politics (2014). The political manipulation seems far easier these days with the massive public relations and political minder machinery at the disposal of governments.
As a journalist, and more recently as a media educator, I have tried to work outside that manipulated zone and seek a journalism of accountability and a synergy with those who suffer and [are] the victims uppermost in my mind. Much of my book provides case studies in the Asia-Pacific region from my personal experience, but the final sections also examine the critical development journalism, deliberative journalism (Romano, 2013), human rights journalism and also peace journalism models (Dixit, 2010; Freedman & Thussu, 2012). In some cases, I have developed strategies such as with the notion of Talanoa journalism (taking into account Indigenous cultural values for cross-cultural reporting) that I have applied to Fiji and other Pacific examples (Robie, 2013).
I have also argued for closer collaboration in the Pacific between journalists and non-government organisations because the latter often have the investigative or research skills missing in most smaller media groups.
The frame of peace journalism being developed by people such as Shaw, Lynch and Hackett (2011) is also rather intriguing and certainly applicable in an Asia-Pacific context. I have been drawn to some of these ideas in recent years as they provide a more robust framework for journalism of accountability when confronted with societies and media dominated by neoliberal discourses and infotainment.
In a world where the so-called ‘war on terror’ impacts so heavily on politics and media, ‘violence-victory-oriented’, ‘propaganda-oriented’ and ‘elite-oriented’ coverage (Lynch & Galtung, 2010) needs a counter-narrative. What is so often missing in journalism of accountability is context and interpretation. As Lynch and Galtung argue:
Media and journalists should be well enough organised to stand up for democracy against censorship and, in spite of censorship, try to get the story nonetheless. They should give a contextual background to understand the conflict. They should report the truth and suffering from all sides.
(2010, p. 94)
DB: Agreed. One only has to look to the Pacific, as you have shown, to see how the West ignores news that does not serve the desired outcomes for the hegemony of multinational corporations. As you say, another of the many Pacific-based stories that your book covers is that of West Papua, its troubles, particularly concentrated around the security required for the US-owned Freeport (McMoRan) mine near Grasberg, West Papua. It is the largest gold mine and the third largest copper mine in the world (Australian Council for Overseas Aid, 1995). For decades, allegations from reliable sources, like the global Free West Papua Campaign (FWPC), tell of torture, assassination and massacre.
The [Indonesian] military’s reaction to security disturbances around resource projects was often indiscriminate. …given its vested interests in providing security to resource companies, rumours regularly emerged that the military were covertly triggering conflict as a pretext for demanding additional funds or justifying the maintenance of its role. (McGibbon, 2006)
West Papuans are under extraordinary levels of surveillance and are basically at war. I note you advocate on page 315 the concept of journalism education that includes peace studies and conflict sensitisation. There is an imperative for teaching non-corporate and sceptical peace journalism, as conducted by you over a lifetime, for journalists working independently, or with non-elite interests like Amnesty International and the global Free West Papua Campaign. Can you comment on this please?
DR: I try to instil in my students a strongly independent, but careful, stance and autonomy for their actions. This is a much easier approach as an independent or freelance journalist, which is probably why I was motivated as an independent for a decade in running my Pacific news agency out of my backyard, before moving into academic and campus-based independent journalism. However, it is easy to take this lofty stance from an armchair, but it is not easy for independents to make a living. They are always vulnerable without media organisation support. Negotiation and survival skills are part of the teaching mix. I would
really like to see universities step up to the mark and take more of a leading role in ‘independent journalism’. The Conversation alliance between academics and journalists is already making its mark — a pointer in a small way to how things
could be different.
I have had many skirmishes as a journalist. One of these saw me arrested as an alleged spy and detained in New Caledonia by French soldiers for six hours (and handed over to the gendarmerie), and also arrested for photographing bogus voters under a corrupt proxy voting system (also in New Caledonia). I was also on the run from security forces in the Philippines because of my reportage on Indigenous Lumad activists that embarrassed corporate loggers and exploiters.
And I have reported in conflict zones without necessarily being in wartime frontlines. The experience tends to shape one’s judgement and alertness to possible dangers. This in turn is very helpful for briefing students on dicey assignments — such as my team that covered the George Speight coup in Fiji, 19 May 2000.
Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face cover
It depends on which side you are embedded, how the political struggles look. For example, during the height of the Kanak uprising for self-determination in New Caledonia in the mid-1980s, I did a series of pictures on both sides of the picket lines. On one side was the French CRS riot police, in a Kanak urban area in Nouméa’s Montravel district. Another was from the Kanak side, looking out from the urban quarter at the foot of Montravel, where protesters faced the heavily armed French security forces. This was Indigenous land and the Kanaks were the First Nations people. The difference between the two worlds was dramatic. Too often, the media are safely embedded with the forces of control, and don’t necessarily get to see the world from the other perspective of the desperate ordinary people.
The global West Papua Campaign and Amnesty International are both effective in raising issues that are being lost from public consciousness. Benny Wenda and the West Papua Campaign can be thanked for bringing back the West Papua human rights to the negotiation table — Benny made a huge impression a couple of years ago when visiting New Zealand and the Parliament made the inexplicably stupid decision to ban him from making a statement. This immediately put the West Papua cause in the spotlight. Prior to that, most journalists never gave a damn. This coupled with the tremendous media-savvy tactics of Benny — always wearing a traditional Highlands headdress, for example — meant that he was visually appealing as a political player.
Conclusion Media Mayhem demonstrates that the best journalism education derives from the first-hand independent journalism experience, travelling and learning to survive, applying diplomatic skills and resources rather than attempting to rely on confrontation. As journalism educators, we must therefore ask ourselves, how do we best introduce this concept in times of extremist propaganda?
The New York Times’s journalist Judith Miller won a Pulitzer Prize for her inaccurate series of features in 2003 about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which were non-existent. Her stories assisted the US and the UK case for war (Boyd-Barrett, 2010). In Media Mayhem, David Robie delineates differences between peace and war journalism. He shows the distinction between corporate media like The New York Times and independent news agencies that work for peace. Noam Chomsky’s 1988 five-filter propaganda model provides tools for using scepticism to identify areas where researchers and journalists can look for evidence of collaboration (whether intentional or otherwise) between corporate media and the propaganda aims of the ruling establishment. The controversy surrounding Miller in particular ‘helped elicit evidence of the operation of some filters of the propaganda model, including dependence on official sources, fear of flak, and ideological convergence’ (Boyd-Barrett, 2010).
On the negative side, Media Mayhem occasionally lacks flow and meanders into asides, a characteristic of French journalism, and one that makes it difficult to read. Perhaps this lack of flow is due to the author’s French connections. Occasionally, there are annoying typographical errors. One, for instance, on page 39, has the Black Mountain Pass in Lesotho at 16 metres elevation! That pass is at least 2,876 metres above sea level, depending on the point of reference. Despite this, Media Mayhem conveys a passionate commitment to journalistic activism and to something more important — accountability. A sample of the
book’s chapter headings testifies to this commitment: ‘Indigenous struggles’, ‘Forgotten wars, elusive peace’ and ‘Moruroa, mon amour’.
As Rosen says, ‘journalism can in certain cases intervene in the service of broad public values without compromising its integrity’ but needs proactive neutrality (1996, p. 13). However, despite (or perhaps because of) Robie’s commitment to neutrality, Media Mayhem lacks colour and detail, important in an autobiographical work to hold the reader’s attention (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000). For me, this was a lost opportunity to express himself and describe journalistic culture, in the context of a career of incisive, alternative and sceptical journalism that, as journalism educators, we must advocate.
Robie’s unique and committed examinations of the vast and secret histories, ignored by corporate news, are essential reading, if only for utilitarian purposes. However, narrative theory suggests that he may have improved Media Mayhem by using the techniques of fiction writing, in particular dialogue and descriptive prose. Perhaps it is his discipline in left-wing reformist public journalism that positions his storytelling, through his referencing, ordering and framing, and this requires a degree of neutrality for veracity purposes (Woodstock, 2002).
In addition, despite its author’s career being devoted to exposing nuclear contamination and the corruption that enables it, Media Mayhem makes no mention of the ongoing and serious nuclear contamination of the Northern Pacific by Fukushima’s Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (FNPP). This occurred after the massive earthquake and tsunami of 11 March 2011: ‘. . . large amounts of water contaminated with radionuclides, including Cesium-137, were released into the Pacific Ocean. With a half-life of 30.1 years, Cs-137 has the potential to travel large distances within the ocean’ (Rossi, Van Sebille, Sen Gupta, Garçon & England, 2013). Contaminated water in 2013 reached the US coastline, where radioactive iodine levels were up 200-fold. Signature FNPP caesium-137 is now in mushrooms and berries around the world; bird deaths have risen, while, in Alaska, sockeye salmon populations are declining (Corley, 2013).
Exposure to radiation dramatically increases the probability of cancers such as leukaemia and thyroid cancer (Mangano & Sherman, 2013). Some of the crew of the USS Ronald Reagan, anchored near the FNPP meltdown, are now blind and have developed cancers. The crew is filing a lawsuit against the nuclear power company TEPCO (Burke, 2014). ‘Cesium-137 (137Cs) with a half-life of 30.1 years causes the greatest concern because of its deleterious effect on agriculture and stock farming, and, thus, human life for decades (Yasunaria, Hayanoc, Burkhartb’d, Eckhardtb & Yasunarie, 2011). ‘Numerical simulation results show that the higher caesium, observed in the western North Pacific one month after the FNPP-AC, was transported not only by diffusion and advection of seawater but also via the atmosphere as an aerosol’ (Honda, Aono, Aoyama, Hamajima, Kawakami, Kitamura, Masumoto, Miyazawa, Takigawa & Saino, 2012). Dr Helen Caldicott (2014) adapted/compiled Crisis Without End: The Medical and Ecological Consequences of the Fukushima Nuclear Catastrophe. The book was adapted from a symposium, in 2013: The Medical and Ecological Consequences of Fukushima, held at the New York Academy of
Medicine in 2013.
Despite these shortcomings, Media Mayhem is a detailed and wonderful account of important and overlooked events and issues in the news media, and so it outlines the imperatives for journalism education, which provide learning opportunities to skill journalists in resisting political and corporate agendas. Students must learn to use independent sources that reflect unbiased realities, rather than simply following the well-trodden corporate news media paths.
Note
1. Since this interview, Dr David Robie has republished Eyes of Fire, marking the 30th anniversary of the bombing of the Greenpeace environmental flagship Rainbow Warrior on 10 July 1985. Dr Robie, some 40 student journalists at AUT University and Little Island Press collaborated in publishing an independent Eyes of Fire: 30 Years On , a microsite
with more than 20 video stories and interviews published in the public interest.
References
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Author’s bio-sketch: Dr David Blackall is a senior lecturer at the University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia. He is a documentary filmmaker and also produces television material for current affairs programmes like ABC 7.30. He conducts research in ethical and legal areas; his recent academic publications overlapping and complimenting his television investigation of the Trio Capital fraud in Australia. This article is republished from Asia Pacific Media Educator.
Green Planet FM’s Lisa Er talks to Pacific Media Centre’s David Robie on the state of the media in NZ and the Asia-Pacific region. Image: Del Abcede
INTERVIEW: Presented by Lisa Er
Freedom of the press describes the right to gather, publish, and distribute information and ideas without government restriction.
This right encompasses freedom from censorship, but does our media really have complete freedom in New Zealand? We need to ask this question when we see the government’s response to Nicky Hager’s investigative journalism, and Channel 7 is removed from TV in spite of having half a million viewers.
A journalist was recently no longer required by the New Zealand Herald after writing an honest critique of the TPPA, and what happened to Campbell Live and why?
David Robie, professor of communication studies and Pacific journalism, director of the Pacific Media Centre, journalist and author answers these questions and more.
Are journalists part of a movement that merely holds up a mirror to society with all its cynicism, or are they part of a process of empowerment and action for a better world?
Why are certain topics ignored? Perhaps the headings would not be sexy enough. Perhaps sport and tabloid news are appealing to the masses more than educated comment on important events in this country and around the world.
Have the corporations bought the larger media outlets? How do economic issues affect the impartiality of the media?
Optimistic view
In spite of all this, David Robie is optimistic about the work of “our last TV public broadcaster” – Maori TV.
However, he is concerned for his students as to what sort of career they can expect in New Zealand’s media.
Political crises and indigenous issues throw a spotlight on a region’s news media and its role in democracy.
David Robie champions media scrutiny in the Pacific and believes more research will contribute much to the communications industry. This is an area where young journalists can go and experience stories that need to be reported, but they might be dangerous assignments.
For example in West Papua people are being arrested and detained for taking part in peaceful activities.
The victims of security force harassment and violence in West Papua are predominantly those who have publicly expressed their support for self-determination or independence.
We hear little about this in New Zealand, although Māori Television did a story recently. The journalists were escorted by the Indonesian authorities, however.
Embarrassing Indonesia
Perhaps if the world’s mainstream media reported on this it would embarrass Indonesia into modifying their behaviour somewhat.
Also “Understanding our neighbours is vitally important and researching and publishing on the media is an important goal for good governance for the region,” says Professor Robie.
Having been a journalist on board the Rainbow Warrior on the voyage leading up to the bombing in 1985, David has always had an interest in peace.
He talks on how peace journalism can challenge “war voyeurism”.
Is a peace keeper keeping peace peacefully when carrying a gun, for example.
Peace journalism explains conflicts and the reasons for them in some depth. It gives all parties a voice, whereas war journalism is propaganda oriented and is mainly concerned with victory.
“The idea of peace journalism troubles some journalists – mostly due to a lifetime of relying on ‘conflict’ as a core news value. This is surprising, because in this era of ‘infotainment’ and super-hype in news media, this peace notion is much more about reasserting basic news values such as truth, context, fairness and depth.”
Reporters and editors have the choice to create opportunities for society to consider non violent responses to conflict.
This is an example of where journalists can be a part of the solution and not part of the problem.
The Rainbow Warrior moored off Rongelap Atoll in May 1985. Image: David Robie
Dedicated to Fernando Pereira (1950–1985) who was killed in the attack on the Rainbow Warrior by French secret agents.
David Robie’s book Eyes of Fire tells the story of the last voyage of the original Rainbow Warrior, a Greenpeace campaign vessel bombed by French secret agents on 10 July 1985.
Thirty years ago [in 2015], the Rainbow Warrior and her crew were invited to help the people of Rongelap Atoll escape from their nuclear contaminated island. The events that followed still haunt the Pacific. On this Little Island microsite, we look at the legacy of this vessel, its small crew of resourceful Greenpeace activists and the Pacific Island communities they tried to help.
Thirty years on a new generation is rediscovering the Rainbow Warrior through David Robie’s book. Thirteen teams of tertiary students from Auckland’s AUT university have been hard at work researching the events described in David’s text. They have also been interviewing members of the original Rainbow Warrior crew.
New Zealand journalist and media educator David Robie returns with two books commemorating the sinking of Greenpeace’s iconic campaign ship and the nuclear-free Pacific movement. Ed Rampell reports from the US.
SPECIAL REPORT: By Ed Rampell
Thirty years ago today French secret agents blew up Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior in nuclear-free New Zealand. The covert action, code-named Opération Satanique (Operation Satanic), sank the 40m ship in Auckland Harbour, killing 35-year-old Portuguese photographer Fernando Pereira and leaving his eight-year-old daughter Marelle fatherless.
The goal of the 10 July 1985 attack was to stop Greenpeace’s flagship vessel from sailing to Moruroa atoll and joining a peace flotilla of New Zealanders and Tahitians to protest at France’s South Pacific nuclear test site.
Since the 1970s, Dr Robie has arguably been to the nuclear-free and independent Pacific movement what John Reed, author of Ten Days That Shook the World, was to the Russian Revolution. Wherever Pacific Islanders have defended their rights and environment, the intrepid island-hopper has been there to report.
Now that he is 70, the hard-hitting journalist and media educator is taking a reflective look back at a career spent on the frontlines of the anti-colonial, anti-nuclear, eco-struggles of Oceania’s indigenous peoples in two recently released books.
To commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Rainbow Warrior’s demise, Auckland-based Little Island Press has published the fifth edition of Robie’s 1986 classic Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior.
A book launching was scheduled for today, not far from where the Rainbow Warrior was bombed by state terrorists.
The event will include Greenpeace’s “Courage Works”, a special Rainbow Warrior anniversary photography exhibition.
Robie was aboard the Rainbow Warrior during its fateful final mission, evacuating islanders from Rongelap atoll in the Marshall Islands, which had been irradiated on 1 March 1954 “when the Americans exploded the H-bomb Bravo on Bikini atoll,” as Robie wrote in Eyes of Fire.
“The bomb was a 15-megaton giant, more than 1000 times as powerful as the bomb which devastated Hiroshima.”
Democracy Now! Interview with Rainbow Warrior skipper Peter Willcox, 10 June 2015. Video: Democracy Now!
Dr Robie, now professor of journalism and director of New Zealand’s Pacific Media Centre, covered “Operation Exodus,” as the Greenpeace ship transported roughly 320 Marshallese atomic exiles from contaminated Rongelap to Mejato and Ebeye at Kwajalein atoll in May 1985.
Because Robie had spent two-and-a-half months on board the Rainbow Warrior reporting for top regional news outlets — including Radio Australia, Radio New Zealand, New Zealand Herald, New Zealand Times, The Australian and Fiji-based Islands Business — he had the scoop.
Robie won New Zealand’s Media Peace Prize in 1985 and published the original Eyes of Fire the following year.
Recounting the 1985 attack, Robie told Earth Island Journal: “The first limpet mine blew a hole in the engine room on the starboard side of the Rainbow Warrior big enough for a bus to drive through.
“The second bomb crippled the aft propeller and shaft. My cabin was almost adjacent to that of Fernando Pereira, the Portuguese-born Dutch photographer who lost his life.”
“I managed to go on board some time later after the [Rainbow Warrior] had been refloated and towed across to Devonport Naval Base dry dock on the other side of Auckland’s Waitemata Harbour,” he continued.
“I inspected my old cabin and the second bomb had lifted the whole of the floor into a giant egg-shaped hump and the bunks were a wreck. I wouldn’t have stood a chance if I had been asleep in the cabin.”
Why wasn’t the far-flung Kiwi correspondent in his bunk? “I had left the ship three nights earlier after arriving in Auckland after a ten-week voyage,” he recounted.
“Although I was on board the previous night for a reception for local indigenous Maori leaders I wasn’t there on the actual night of the bombing. I was home asleep in bed.”
The current edition of Eyes of Fire is different from its previous incarnations, in part because times have changed.
“Eyes of Fire was written in 1985, the year of the bombing, and first published early in 1986 during the Cold War years,” Robie said.
“US and Soviet rivalry over the Pacific was still an issue, France’s colonial policy was intransigent and ruthless in the face of Kanak [in New Caledonia] and Tahitian calls for independence, and [France] was determined to crush the nuclear-free movement across the Pacific.
“At the time, nuclear testing loomed over the Pacific in terms of the health legacy from scores, even hundreds, of American, British and French nuclear tests with callous disregard for indigenous Pacific Islanders. They have been shamefully treated as guinea pigs by the nuclear powers.”
The new edition moves beyond this context and looks to the future. “The original Eyes of Fire focused mainly on nuclear refugees, the legacy of nuclear testing and the outrageous French state terrorism in bombing the Rainbow Warrior on July 10, 1985,” Robie said.
“The new Eyes of Fire is both reflective and looking forward to the climate change challenges.”
Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior. Cover photo: David Robie
Climate change is now the overwhelming issue in the Pacific.
“Although there is inertia in global responses to the threat of climate change, especially over the low-lying Pacific micro-nations such as Kiribati, Marshall Islands and Tuvalu with sprawling atolls and islets, there are exciting developments in terms of creative Pacific responses,” Robie continued.
“An example is the rise of the Pacific climate warriors movement, which staged a spectacular canoe protest against plans for a mega coal port in Newcastle in the Australian state of New South Wales” in 2014.
He adds, “For me personally, though, there are strong visual connections between nuclear refugees, such as the time of the Rongelap evacuation in 1985 and the climate change refugees from Taku’u, a Polynesian enclave on remote islands in Papua New Guinea.”
These include reporting on Fiji’s military coups, which toppled an anti-nuclear government; national liberation struggles against Indonesian colonialism in East Timor and West Papua; and “bio-piracy” and “bio-prospecting” in Papua New Guinea, where a Western biotech firm sought to turn the Pacific into “a life forms patent-free zone” wherein indigenous people would not be protected by intellectual property laws regarding natural healing and traditional medicine.
The book also includes a chapter on climate change and nuclear refugees, in which Robie writes about the environmental migrants of the Carteret Islands near Bougainville who have had to relocate due to rising ocean levels and global warming.
Although Robie does not believe he was targeted by the Rainbow Warrior saboteurs, he does think he was impacted on by the release of his first book.
“I was arrested by the French military in New Caledonia about a year after Eyes of Fire came out and information I received indicated the arrest was linked to my ‘unpopular’ book condemning French nuclear policy in the Pacific region,” he said.
Fortunately, this thorn in the side of colonialism, nuclearism and environmental degradation is alive, well and still rocking the boat. In addition to remaining a courageous human rights and social justice champion, this ink-stained journalist who has always stood up for the wretched of the Earth in his courageous reporting has also devoted much of his life to media education work in Oceanic universities such as Fiji’s University of the South Pacific.
David Robie’s reportage truly tells the Pacific’s David and Goliath stories. And his books are well worth reading for all those interested in the history and ongoing struggles of the indigenous peoples of Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia against colonialism, nuclearism, militarism and global warming.
Ed Rampell is the co-author of The Hawaii Movie and Television Book. His Progressive Magazine interview with America’s former Poet Laureate is included in the new book Conversations with W.S. Merwin. This article was first published in Earth Island Journal.
David Robie reflecting on the past three decades at the 2015 Eyes of Fire book launch at The Cloud in Auckland marking the day of the bombing, 10 July 1985. The author is pictured top right in Japanese headband. Image: Del Abcede/Asia Pacific Report
Eyes Of Fire cover (30th Anniversary Edition) 2015
By David Robie
On 10 July 1985, French secret agents bombed the Greenpeace campaign flagship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour, Aotearoa New Zealand. Portuguese-born Dutch photographer Fernando Pereira died in the sabotage outrage that shook the world. The bombed ship was scuttled off Matauri Bay in 1987 to form a living reef and Rainbow Warrior II was commissioned.
Eyes Of Fire tells this story, and also the story of nuclear testing in the Pacific. In 1954, the United States government tested a nuclear weapon in the Marshall Islands that poisoned Rongelap Atoll. Thirty years later the people of Rongelap, who were still suffering from radiation poisoning, asked the crew of the Rainbow Warrior to move them to Mejato, 180 kilometres away.
This was the Warrior’s last and most dramatic mission, before it sailed to Auckland to meet its fate.
The 30th anniversary edition has a Little Island microsite with plenty of Rainbow Warrior resources. We have created this site in the lead-up to the 30th anniversary of the bombing to provide context and capture interviews with the Warrior’s crew members.
We think that it’s a fantastic resource, made with the help of AUT University and Greenpeace.
Publisher: Little Island Press, Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa New Zealand, 2015, 196 pages
Welcome to Evening Report. This Friday, July 10, marks 30 years since French DGSE operatives exploded two bombs destroying the Greenpeace flagship — the Rainbow Warrior — at Marsden Wharf in Auckland harbour.
And on Friday July 10, journalist and academic Dr David Robie will launch the fifth edition of his book, Eyes of Fire.
The book is a rich account of the events surrounding the Rainbow Warrior affair.
And earlier today he joined me to discuss Eyes of Fire… why he was on board the vessel on its last journey through the Pacific, his enduring memories of the time, and what lessons the Rainbow Warrior affair offers us now and in the future.
Launch of David Robie’s book Eyes of Fire (fifth edition)
Pollution of land and sea and the degradation of habitats are even more of a problem now than they were last century and you don’t find advanced Western democracies openly calling for the globe to get ever dirtier. And when the Rainbow Warrior docked in Auckland in July 1985, it was in the middle of voyages to draw attention to all sorts of environmental issues. Greenpeace had protested nuclear tests, acid rain, whaling, attacks on dolphins and the dumping of toxic waste. It was doing great work.
