A
BAD CASE OF “TERRORISM” HYSTERIA
Peace Researcher 35 – December 2007
-
Murray Horton
I have
a confession to make (so pay attention, spies, and have those black ninjas on
full alert). I’ve spent a week in the Ureweras with gun toting Maori. From
memory they also sported bullet belts, camouflage gear and cowboy hats. It was
in 1981 (if ever there was a year when activists were tempted to become
“terrorists” that was it) but it was a tourist – not terrorist – trip run by
the country’s first Maori-run tour company. The only shots fired were by one of
the guides at a deer (I was his spotter and, I’m pleased to say, he missed).
But God knows what weird and wonderful distortions would be made of it in
today’s climate of hysteria and paranoia. After all my then partner and I were
both leading “Leftwing radicals”, with impressive criminal records to prove it.
Case closed, we must have been up to no good.
Like
the rest of the country I’ve been watching agog as recent events have unfolded.
Indeed I’ve been feeling rather left out, I’m obviously no longer on the cops’
A list. Two journalists rang me on October 15 to ask if I was included in that
day’s “anti-terrorist” raids – I didn’t have a clue what they were talking
about. Nor can the Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC) claim any inside knowledge about
what has or, more to the point, what hasn’t, been going on. On a November
Monday morning I was reading the Police’s leaked “evidence” against the
“terrorists” who never were when the Marlborough
Express rang to ask for comment on the “fact” that surveillance intercepts
had revealed suspects talking about bombing the Waihopai spybase. The reporter
asked if I knew who might be likely to do that? Funnily enough, I don’t. He
then asked if I thought that Waihopai is a “vulnerable target”? How’s that for
a leading question over breakfast? I suggested he ask those tasked with
defending the place and was duly quoted as saying that I thought the biggest
physical threat to the spybase is the grapevine monoculture relentlessly taking
over the whole Waihopai
Valley.
Bloody Funny
Sort Of “Terrorists”
As for
the arrested “terrorists” (who are now facing only Firearms Act charges, which
could still have serious consequences for them) I know a couple of them. I’ve
known Tame Iti for more than 35 years, starting from when he lived in Christchurch in the early
1970s (he had nothing to do with my Urewera trip, I’ve only met him in various
cities). I don’t know him at all personally but from my dealings with him I
find the very notion of him being described as a “terrorist” to be laughable.
To be sure, a provocateur, a showman (he’d probably prefer to be called a
performance artist), a bloody nuisance to a lot of people, with highly
questionable views on subjects like Fijian coups, but terrorist, no way. He’s
always depicted in the media as this scary tattooed Maori radical (a godsend to
scaremongers who face the problem of a dearth of scary bearded Muslim radicals
in NZ) but what sort of “terrorist” has such an extremely high public profile,
let alone attract attention for the various “offensive” public stunts of the
sort that Tame has regularly pulled? I don’t recall Osama bin Laden venturing
within shooting distance of his enemies and giving them a brown eye. Speaking
as a South Island pakeha activist of the sort
possibly expected to be given a hard time by “Maori radicals”, I can honestly
say, using very old fashioned language, that in all the decades I’ve known him
Tame has always been the perfect gentleman.
As for
the pakeha anarchists and other activists picked up in the October 2007
national dragnet, we in ABC know Valerie Morse from Wellington. The only terrorising she’s done
(and she’s done it plenty of times) is getting naked in public, to make a
political point, in settings ranging from outside Parliament to lying down on
the boiling hot asphalt outside the gate of the Waihopai spybase. So, Valerie’s
definitely an exhibitionist, a political nudist and very much a bloody nuisance
to lots of people as well to but, once again, I am incredulous at the
description of her as a “terrorist” (who tend to make themselves as inconspicuous
as possible. None of the faceless guys who flew the planes into the Twin Towers
had any previous form, let alone a propensity for spectacular public nudity).
And, of course, the dragnet extended as far as the Christchurch activists of the environmentalist
Save Happy Valley Campaign. The cops tried to get into the home of Campaign
spokesperson Frances Mountier and
she had the nous to tell them to bugger off as they didn’t have a search
warrant. Now this one does affect ABC directly as Francie is a valued member of
our committee. She is a very determined and successful non-violent direct
action specialist, with the criminal record to prove it, and a very articulate
and effective campaigner. But not a bloody “terrorist” by any stretch of the
imagination!
I can’t
comment on what Tame and Valerie et al are alleged to have been up to in the
Ureweras because I know no more about it than any other member of the public.
And, if I did, I would try not to lower myself to the gutter tactics of the
Police who, having had their “domestic terrorism conspiracy” so comprehensively
rubbished by the Solicitor-General, resorted to selective leaks of “evidence”
(it’s no such thing until it’s been proven in court) to a salivating media. The
“radicals” found themselves in the ironic situation of defending the
“conservative” position on the sub judice rule and the defendants’ right to a
fair trial – in a court and not in the media. This is not the first time that
the State has played dirty when it couldn’t make sensational politically
motivated charges stick – after the Security Intelligence Service failed to
have the late Bill Sutch convicted as a Soviet spy in his 1974 Official Secrets
Act trial, it stage managed a whole series of defamatory leaks about Sutch to
the media, in the hope of provoking him to sue and thus have the case re-heard
in a civil court where a lower standard of proof is required. Failing that, to
permanently smear him in the process. He didn’t take the bait but died just a
few months later, which may well have been the aim of the whole grubby
exercise. In those Cold War days, of course, Communists and Russian spies were
the bogeymen.
Deliberate
State Intimidation
But
seeing that the case is now (very selectively) in the public domain I feel free
to comment on the Police’s tactics in these raids. The leaked “evidence” claims
that they had had this “domestic terrorism conspiracy” under surveillance for
more than a year and that one of these Urewera “terrorist camps” took place just the weekend before the
Monday raids. So why didn’t they bust it and catch everyone redhanded? What a
field day the media would have had with that. But, no, they had to put on the
show of Monday dawn raids throughout the country, with a complete lockdown of
Ruatoki in Tuhoe country, traumatising innocent people and kids in the process.
Why? Because the anti-terror laws say that they can. This was an exercise in
muscle flexing and mass intimidation by State forces, a forceful demonstration
of “we’re the boss and don’t you forget it”, a further illustration of the
militarisation of the Police (who are not called the Police Force for nothing)
which behave in such situations like an occupying army. They dressed, looked
and acted like their military counterparts in Iraq,
Afghanistan or Palestine, or their Police counterparts in the US where
heavily armed cops routinely behave like an occupying army towards their own
people. They were supposedly looking for terrorists – as many commentators have
pointed out, the Police were the only ones looking and acting like terrorists
that day. Because that’s what they were – State terrorists.
In
continuing the finest traditions of colonisation, the worst manifestations of
this behaviour were directed at Maori and specifically in Ruatoki. This was just
the latest example of occupation, dispossession and powerlessness that Tuhoe
have had to suffer in the 160+ plus years since the British Crown and pakeha
settlers came to New Zealand.
The tribe has never signed the Treaty of Waitangi and was never defeated
militarily by the British but it paid a heavy price, to this day, in terms of
massive land confiscation. It continues to resist and has accordingly attracted
official heavyhandedness.
This
spectacular attack by the State was intended to lay the first ever charges
under the 2002 Terrorism Suppression Act (much as the 1974 unsuccessful
prosecution of the late Bill Sutch was intended to be the showpiece use of the
Official Secrets Act). Instead it came an inglorious gutser and never made it
to court when the Solicitor General declared it “incoherent” and basically
unworkable in relation to alleged domestic terrorism. ABC is happy to join the
chorus of those (such as unflappable Green MP, Keith
Locke) who could say “we told you so”. Back in 2001, ABC was
among those who made submissions opposing this law, which was rushed through in
the American-led global panic after the terrorist atrocities of September 11
that year. A central point we made was that the Act would suppress dissent, not
terrorism. You can read our full submission online at http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/abcterr.htm.
So, what was the Government’s reaction to this stinging rebuff by its own top
legal official? Did it have a rethink? No, within hours of the Solicitor
General’s decision, it rammed through Parliament, with the backing of all
parties except the Greens, Maori Party and Act, the Terrorism Suppression
Amendment Act which simply makes a bad law worse (in 2007 ABC made a submission
opposing that one as well. See Peace
Researcher 34, July 2007, “Another bloody Terror Submission”, by Bob Leonard).
If the medicine doesn’t work, then double the dose. It’s just a pity if
the patient dies in the process.
Putting
It Into Global Context
These laws don’t exist in isolation, they are simply part of a plethora
of security and intelligence laws dating back to the mid 1990s, when the
Security Intelligence Service (SIS) was given an extended mandate to target
people who “damage New
Zealand’s economic interests”. Within a
fortnight of that law coming into effect, SIS agents were caught trying to
break into the Christchurch home of
anti-globalisation activist, Aziz Choudry (who has now lived in Canada for
several years). The resulting successful court cases brought by him and David Small (who caught the bungling spies and
suffered Police harassment and dirty tactics as a result) were extensively
reported in Peace Researcher over the
several years they took to reach their conclusion. This established that
domestic dissenters were targeted by the State and were also smeared with the
“terrorist” tag (the homes of both Aziz and David were raided by cops looking
for non-existent bombs, after a highly suspicious “mock bomb” was planted in
central Christchurch
by persons unknown). Post-September 11 the securocrats in every Western
country, including New
Zealand, were given a major boost and saw it
as a godsend to push through a whole range of ever more repressive laws. The
Terrorism Suppression Amendment Act is just the latest manifestation of this
hysteria (indeed this issue includes Jeremy Agar’s review of a whole book on
the subject). Up until these raids, the main New Zealand victim of this has been
Ahmed Zaoui (see my article elsewhere in this issue on the happy ending to his
case). That was another total malicious cockup by the State.
Globally, terrorists have replaced Communists as the bogeymen. The powers
that be have taken to labelling everyone who opposes them as “terrorists”,
ranging from the thousands arrested without charge in Pakistan’s martial law regime to
seaborne environmentalists challenging Japanese whaling ships in the Southern
Ocean, to give just two of the most recent, 2007, examples. It has become a
catchall label to easily smear opponents. For example, in the Philippines,
the Government was able to get the Communist Party and its New People’s Army
and Party founder, Joma Sison, put
on lists of international terrorists. This is patently absurd as, throughout
the nearly 40 years of armed struggle waged by the Party and its Army, it has
always been exclusively a civil war, with no foreign content to it at all. Even
in the days when the US had
huge military bases in the Philippines,
the Communists did not target them. This terrorist listing has had real
personal consequences for Sison, who has lived in Dutch exile for 20 years. He
has been denied the ability to work, earn an income or live in State housing,
having to rely on friends and supporters for the wherewithal to live. Things
got worse in 2007 when Dutch police arrested him on completely trumped up
charges of conspiracy to murder (the actual murders having taken place in the Philippines).
After nearly three weeks in solitary confinement, the charges were thrown out
for lack of any evidence and he was freed. Another ignominious defeat for “the security State”. The irony is that the Philippine
State really is a terrorist regime, with its forces committing hundreds of
political murders, disappearances, torture and false imprisonments with complete
impunity. It routinely terrorises its own people and has done for many decades,
only now that repression is justified as being part of the “War on Terror”.
And the “War on Terror” is the global context for these unprecedented
raids in NZ. All around the world governments have seized the opportunity to
ram through repressive laws and to act outside any law by actions such as
torture, abductions, “renditions” of “terrorists who then disappear into
extra-judicial black holes such as Guantanamo
(see Bob Leonard’s review of Stephen
Grey’s “Ghost Plane” elsewhere in this issue).
“Anti-terror” raids and lengthy or even indefinite imprisonment without
charge or trial are the norm in many so-called First World
countries. Australia harassed and detained a perfectly innocent Indian Muslim
doctor for weeks in 2007 after claiming he was involved in the abortive
“doctors’ plot” to bomb civilian targets in Britain. At its worst, the “War on
Terror” authorises the State to murder the innocent, which was the fate of the
unfortunate Brazilian man shot repeatedly in the head at point blank range by
British cops as he sat on a London Underground train in 2005. Those State
terrorists and murderers are still free, untouched by the law and unidentified.
So that very culture of State impunity which is the norm in countries such as
the Philippines
is fast becoming the norm in the “civilised” countries of the West as well. In
this case the treatment is much worse than the disease.
Bringing
Home The “War On Terror”
New Zealand is internationally
involved, of course, in the “War on Terror”. From the outset, in 2001, this
country has had troops in Afghanistan, either directly involved in combat, in
the case of the Special Air Service (one of whose members was awarded NZ’s
first post-World War 2 Victoria Cross as a result, and hasn’t that been milked
for its maximum propaganda value), or in reconstruction, “winning hearts and
minds” work. The war in that benighted country is rapidly becoming a quagmire,
just like the bigger swamp in Iraq, with this latest bunch of foreign invaders
destined to go the same way as all the other foreign invaders who have come to
grief in Afghanistan over the centuries (the British and Russians being only
the most recent before this lot). The occupying armies are definitely not
helping their hearts and minds mission by inconvenient facts such as that more
Afghan civilians were killed by their “liberators” in 2007 than by the
resurgent Taliban forces.
New Zealand’s main contribution
to the “War on Terror” (and any other US-led war) is the Waihopai spybase. Peace Researcher readers don’t need me
to spell out what it does and how it is involved in waging war and killing
innocent people thousands of kilometres from the tranquil setting of its Marlborough valley. In
October 2007, for the first time, I took to Waihopai a member of one of the
“target groups” of the international network of spybases of which Waihopai is
part. Amirah Ali Lidasan is a leader
of the Moro (Muslim) people of the southern Philippines, a people who have
waging a struggle on many levels, including a decades-long civil war, for
autonomy and/or independence. The US never paid it any attention until after
September 11, 2001 whereupon President Bush and his Philippine counterpart,
Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, declared the Philippines to be the “Second Front in
the ‘War on Terror’”, and the Philippine Muslim struggle suddenly became
important to the US (and its regional allies, particularly Australia which has
signed a Status of Forces Agreement with the Philippines, already has
intelligence agents operating in the Muslim South and will be stationing troops
there as of 2008). By taking Amirah to the intimidating gate of that top secret
spybase, and having her visit there well covered by the mainstream media, we
(the Philippines Solidarity Network of Aotearoa, another one of my hats) made
the very clear connection between aggressor and victims. New Zealand has blood on its hands by dint of
that spybase and will continue to have as long as it functions in this country
as a vital outpost of US
electronic intelligence gathering.
So, the October 2007 “anti-terror raids” are the logical conclusion of New Zealand’s
involvement in the “War on Terror”. This was the bringing home of that war, in
all its’ manifestations (short of actually killing people) – the repressive
laws; the ninja attire of the heavily armed and militarised stormtroopers cum
police; the treatment of a small rural Maori community as an occupied
territory; the deliberate whipping up of a terrorism hysteria in the media and
among the public; the dragnet approach to a wide and disparate group of
activists, Maori and Pakeha and the attempt to brand them as “terrorists”; the
criminalising of dissent and the demonising of dissenters as “terrorists”. Having
failed to find any foreign terrorists despite several years of valiant effort
(Ahmed Zaoui being the best they could do and that became a public relations
disaster for the security State), the powers that be decided to create a
“domestic terrorism conspiracy”. It failed because it was an elaborately staged
show and when you go to the theatre it requires what is technically called “the
willing suspension of disbelief”. Once that disbelief was no longer willingly
suspended, the whole “terrorism” thing was revealed as bullshit. Now those
arrested still face serious charges under the Firearms Act, which could send
them to prison for years, but they are no longer in custody facing the prospect
of extremely serious consequences under the now discredited terrorism laws.
Fight
Back
This whole saga proves that the security State
can and will attack any political activists, individually or collectively,
Maori and pakeha, if it thinks that it can get away with it. The progressive
movement in this country, backed by a lot of public opinion, put aside any
disagreements and differences, recognising that an attack on one is an attack
on all, and threw itself into an ongoing campaign against the terrorism
hysteria. The lesson out of all this is that we need to redouble our efforts
against the “War on Terror”, globally and at home. Of course there are real
terrorists, who have committed appalling mass murders, and they must be caught
and dealt with as the murderers that they are. But the greater crime is that
the securocrats, aided and abetted by compliant politicians, have seized this
opportunity to launch a massive assault on the peoples of the world, all in the
name of “anti-terrorist security” and to plant the boot of “anti-terrorism”
firmly on the neck of their own peoples. As I’ve already said, the treatment
has proven to be worse than the disease. And, in this country, if we don’t
fight back hard now against this manufactured hysteria, then who will be next?
I’d better not take any chances –I’ll be wearing pyjamas to bed from now on,
just in case.