[IPSM] A Highly Unsuitable Candidate: New Zealand Government Is Not Fit to Sit on UN Human Rights Council

[Aziz Choudry]

A Highly Unsuitable Candidate: New Zealand Government Is Not Fit to
Sit on UN Human Rights Council

By Aziz Choudry

The New Zealand Government must be stopped.  At home and abroad.

On 14 September this year, the New Zealand government and three other
governments (Canada, USA and Australia) shared the dubious distinction
as the only states to vote against the adoption of the United Nations
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. On Friday, it
announced its candidacy for the United Nations (UN) Human Rights
Council, for the period 2009-2012. The announcement came at the end of
a shocking week where Maori sovereignty campaigners,
environmentalists, and other activists had been arrested in a major
series of Police raids throughout the country, under the post-9/11
Suppression of Terrorism Act, and where armed paramilitary police
besieged and terrorized the Tuhoe Maori communities of Ruatoki and
Taneatua, in the "Bay of Plenty" region in the east of the North
Island.   Some 15% of Aotearoa/New Zealand's population of just over 4
million are Maori.  Ruatoki Maori charge that among many other
outrages, armed police in black commando gear traumatized children by
searching school buses.

Clearly Helen Clark's supposedly centre-left Labour Party-led social
democratic government has no shame. The Maori Party Minister of
Parliament and co-leader Dr Pita Sharples said that the raids had
taken race relations in New Zealand back 100 years. Many agreed, while
a torrent of racist anti-Maori sentiment flowed forth in the nation's
media. Meanwhile, prominent Tuhoe Maori sovereignty campaigner,
community worker, and artist, Tame Iti, his nephew Rawiri, and 15
others have been arrested.  Most have been denied bail and remain in
jail. Activist homes and offices were raided, searched or visited by
police in several centres, on a major fishing expedition against those
who would challenge the status quo.  Protests against the raids, and
in support of those targeted, have been organized in a number of
cities and towns throughout New Zealand, with an impressive 1500
people turning out in the small, largely Maori East Coast town of
Whakatane where Tame Iti was arrested at gunpoint last Monday.
Placards included: "He taonga te mokopuna [our children are
treasures]", "We are not terrorists, we've been terrorised" and "Don't
point the gun at me! I'm under 5". Solidarity protests have taken
place in Australia, Germany and other countries. More are planned.

The New Zealand state, built as it is on the dispossession of Maori
and the continued colonization of Maori lands, lives and resources has
always inherently equated Maori resistance and decolonization
initiatives with subversion, sedition and criminality.  Perhaps
especially so in Tuhoe territory, for whom this is yet another very
real wave of armed invasion and occupation.

Almost a century ago, in 1916, the Tuhoe settlement of Maungapohatu in
the bush-clad Urewera ranges, a pacifist, religious community, was
raided by armed constabulary in the same way as Ruatoki was raided
last Monday by what some are calling a "ninja army" of police. Back
then, two men were shot dead and the remainder ended up in prison,
"guilty of moral resistance". The government unsuccessfully tried to
charge Tuhoe leader Rua Kenana with sedition.

Maungapohatu's crime was reluctance to engage in World War One. Back
then, they called it "sedition" and "treason". Now, Maori resistance
is being called 'terrorism'.  As elsewhere, 9/11 has provided a whole
new pretext for surveillance of domestic dissent.  With the Cold War
over, state security agencies in New Zealand and elsewhere, including
police forces, have had to find new enemies within to justify their
budgets and powers.  Yet in colonial-settler states like New Zealand,
Canada, Australia and the United States, the new enemies are often the
old enemies – Indigenous Peoples who have survived generations of
genocidal policies, and who continue to assert their fundamental
rights to self-determination. Creating and sustaining a climate of
fear is to the benefit of those in New Zealand who would rather
conveniently forget some hometruths about the basis for New Zealand's
much-vaunted democratic welfare state.  Invasion and colonial
occupation.  We may well be living in the 21st century, but
colonialism is alive and kicking.

An earlier Labour Party government imposed the most radical free
market reforms in any OECD country in the 1980s, which transformed
Aotearoa/New Zealand into an investment playground for transnational
corporations which often bought up privatized former state-owned
assets at firesale prices.  The social costs were high, and the
country's Maori and Pacific Island communities bore a disproportionate
part of the negative impacts.  But for many Maori this came as nothing
new. Many Maori saw the commercialization, privatization and
deregulation process as yet another wave of colonization; the further
appropriation and commodification of their lands and resources. Prior
to corporatization and privatization, these had been stolen from
Maori. Some of the strongest challenges to the economic reforms have
come from Maori, through legal challenges, direct actions and other
methods.

Commenting on the police offensive, a recent editorial in the
country's largest circulation daily newspaper, the New Zealand Herald
was critical:
 "When police in other countries foil plans of apparent terrorism,
they usually act quietly and invariably they quickly give the public a
reasonable account of what they have discovered. The New Zealand
police this week have done neither.

Their swoop on a suspicious camp in the Ureweras and the homes of
activists in several causes was carried out so conspicuously that news
cameras were able to catch some of it. But when it came to explaining
the raids, Police Commissioner Howard Broad was circumspect in the
extreme. Over ensuing days, when the arrested were brought to court,
judges too have closed the door.

Consequently the country is still in the dark at the end of a week in
which its confidence in its internal security, and in its police and
law, has been put to a test."  (20 October 2007).

The Herald editorial pointed out that those who are arguing that this
is a case of major police overkill can indeed derive support from the
fact that thus far, charges laid against the 18 arrestees have all
been under the Arms Act, not the Terrorism Suppression Act.  But the
headlines throughout New Zealand have been replicated uncritically
throughout the world proclaiming the existence of "Maori terror camps"
– although a growing number of people are now asking some harder
questions about the operation, and the nature of police intelligence
behind it all.  Plenty of people in the Ureweras own firearms.  Tuhoe
consider the forest their food basket, and hunt for pigs and deer.
There is a disturbing mindset and operational culture within parts of
the New Zealand police which frequently equates challenges to
prevailing political and economic orthodoxies with criminal activity.
While their operations relate partly to narcotics and vice, the
police's Criminal Intelligence Service (CIS) also monitors political
activities which the police consider may involve a breach of the
criminal law, though how such activities are assessed is anybody's
guess.

The service conducts similar surveillance operations to the New
Zealand Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS) and there is strong
liaison between them. For many years, the CIS has clearly granted
itself a broad mandate to collect information on people on the basis
of their political beliefs and sympathies, and views formed by police
intelligence officers. Their work in this area seems to have much in
common with political elements in police forces elsewhere in the world
which routinely monitor, harass and criminalize legitimate political
organizers and activities.

By deeming many groups and individuals as having a sufficient
propensity to commit criminal offences on the basis of their perceived
political views and affiliations, the CIS is contributing towards the
criminalization of dissent in New Zealand. Whatever data gets fed into
a filter or frame such as that constructed by police intelligence in
relation to political activism, inevitably gets twisted and
manipulated every which way. In turn, this encourages front line
police to exercise contempt and a cavalier disregard towards people's
rights to freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly. In
May 2000, two dozen unions, academics, religious and political leaders
called on the justice and electoral select committee to hold an
inquiry in to the CIS's role in targeting political organizations and
activists. Predictably, this call went unanswered.  Maybe it needs to
be restated even more forcefully now.

Critics of successive expansions of Police and state security
intelligence agency powers, both before and after 9/11, have pointed
out that such laws are likely to target a wide range of organizations
that are working for social change in Aotearoa/New Zealand. New
technology in the hands of the New Zealand police is a bit of a worry.
 In 2003, it was revealed, embarrassingly, that the National Bureau of
Criminal Intelligence, in its threat assessment of an Algerian
refugee, Ahmed Zaoui, until recently detained on secret evidence under
a security risk certificate issued by the NZSIS drew "evidence" from a
cult website of convicted fraudster, cryptofascist and conspiracy
theorist, Lyndon Larouche which claimed that Mr Zaoui had links with a
terrorist organization.

So what would the New Zealand government have to gain by the
stormtrooper tactics unleashed last week? The raids and accompanying
"domestic terror" hysteria add extra impetus to a Terrorism
Suppression Amendment Bill now before Parliament.  They create both a
climate of fear while modelling a strong "no-nonsense" government.
Getting tough on "crime" is a tried and tested formula in the lead-up
to an election.

So is racism.  Not that New Zealand governments need much help in
scapegoating Indigenous Peoples. But they seem to be taking a clear
leaf from Australia's John Howard, who habitually campaigns on racist
get-tough policies against Indigenous Australians (especially 1998 and
this election – maybe his outrageous militarization of Indigenous
communities in Northern Territory in the name of child welfare gave
Helen Clark some ideas), refugees (2001) and the war on Iraq/"war on
terror" (2004 and this year). The Clark government must hope that this
macho demonstration of state power being unleashed against Indigenous
Peoples who have the temerity to believe in rights to
self-determination and decolonization will play out well for them in
the polls.  The chilling effect this operation will have on people who
advocate for social justice, and healthy political debate in
Aotearoa/New Zealand is of great concern.


There's nothing "postcolonial" about the era that we live in. This
week's actions clearly illustrate that the governments of colonial
settler states, like leopards, don't change their spots, but just
stalk their prey in other ways, to paraphrase Maori lawyer Moana
Jackson. In Aotearoa/New Zealand, the non-Maori majority have a
responsibility to challenge the New Zealand government's actions now
and in the future, and resist a new wave of McCarthyism which
threatens to cast a chilling spell on all who dissent against the
status quo. If they do not know it already, non-Maori need to learn
the real history of not only the Tuhoe people and their territory, but
also the history of colonization in Aotearoa. And to understand that
this process continues. Elsewhere, people would do well to see through
the mythmaking prancing and posturing of the New Zealand government on
the world stage as it boasts about how progressive it is.  As a friend
said to me yesterday, if this were happening in Burma, the story would
have much more airtime.  If Burma was applying for a seat on the UN
Human Rights Council, there would be outrage and protests around the
world.  Why should the New Zealand government be able to terrorize
whole communities and criminalize Maori sovereignty activists and
their supporters and not expect strong challenges to its colonial
hypocrisy?

20 October 2007

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