BookHero Review

Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, by David Robie, isn’t only a gripping tale of adventure and tragedy but also a testament to the enduring spirit of environmental activism. It serves as an important reminder of the power of collective action and the indomitable human spirit in the face of adversity.’

This book is a compelling narrative that delves into a poignant moment in history and its lasting repercussions. Set against the backdrop of Pacific activism, the book meticulously chronicles the ill-fated journey of the Greenpeace vessel, the Rainbow Warrior, in a vividly detailed account that captures the tension and ideals of environmental advocacy.

The story unfolds as the Rainbow Warrior embarks on a critical mission to protest nuclear testing in the Pacific. The ship’s crew, a resolute group of environmental activists, intends to disrupt nuclear tests that threaten to devastate the delicate ecology of the region. Traversing the vast and often perilous waters of the Pacific, the campaigners demonstrate unwavering commitment to their cause.

Traversing the vast and often perilous waters of the Pacific, the campaigners demonstrate unwavering commitment to their cause.

However, their journey turns tragic on the night of 10 July 1985, when French secret agents carry out a covert sabotage operation in Auckland Harbour, New Zealand, bombing the ship in a stunning act of violence that reverberates globally.

David Robie, a veteran journalist and witness to the events, offers an insightful account filled with his personal experiences and observations. Through his lens, readers gain a comprehensive understanding of the geopolitical dynamics at play and the fierce dedication of those aboard the vessel.

40 years on: The Rainbow Warrior, the bombing and French colonial culture in Pacific – David Robie talks to the Fabian Society

Dr Robie incorporates a deeply human perspective, portraying the hope, courage, and grief that accompany such a devastating loss.

The tragedy claimed the life of Fernando Pereira, a courageous Portuguese-born photographer who tragically perished in the attack, igniting international outrage and drawing widespread attention to both the cause of environmental protection and the political tensions underlying the act of sabotage.

Dr Robie’s narrative goes beyond the immediate incident, reflecting on the far-reaching consequences for Greenpeace and the environmental movement at large.

Following the attack, the remnants of the Rainbow Warrior were repurposed into a living reef in a New Zealand bay in 1987, a symbol of resilience and renewal. Subsequently, Rainbow Warrior II was commissioned, and later still, Rainbow Warrior III, carrying on the legacy of their predecessor in the fight for environmental justice.

The prologue in the 2025th edition is by former Prime Minister Helen Clark and the foreword by former Greenpeace International co-executive director Bunny McDiarmid. This edition has major new sections on climate crisis and updates.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

As we’ve reported, the Gaza ceasefire deal is in effect. Phase one of the US.-backed 20-point plan is underway. Hamas has released all 20 living captives. Israel has released almost 2000 Palestinians in Ramallah and now in Khan Younis in Gaza.

Yesterday, President Trump addressed the Israeli Knesset and then co-chaired a so-called peace summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not among the 20 or more world leaders who attend. He was invited but said he was not going.

For more, we’re joined by the Israeli historian, author and professor Ilan Pappé, professor of history and director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter and the chair of the Nakba Memorial Foundation. Among his books, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, almost 20 years ago, and Gaza in Crisis, which he co-wrote with Noam Chomsky. His new book, Israel on the Brink: And the Eight Revolutions That Could Lead to Decolonization and Coexistence.

We thank you so much for being with us. Professor Pappé, if you could start off by responding to what has happened? We’re watching, in Khan Younis, prisoners being released, Palestinian prisoners, up to 2000, and in the occupied West Bank, though there families were told if they dare celebrate the release of their loved ones, they might be arrested.

And we saw the release of the 20 Israeli hostages as they returned to Israel. Hamas says they’re returning the dead hostages, the remains, over the next few days. Israel has not said they will return the dead prisoners, of which it’s believed there are nearly 200 in Israeli prisons.

Your response overall, and now to the summit in Egypt?

ILAN PAPPÉ: Yes. First of all, there is some joy in knowing that the bombing of the people in Gaza has stopped for a while. And there is joy knowing that Palestinian political prisoners have been reunited with their families, and, similarly, that Israeli hostages were reunited with their families.

But except from that, I don’t think we are in such an historical moment as President Trump claimed in his speech in the Knesset and beforehand. We are not at the end of the terrible chapter that we have been in for the last two years.

And that chapter is an Israeli attempt by a particularly fanatic, extremely rightwing Israeli government to try and use ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and genocide in Gaza to downsize the number of Palestinians in Palestine and impose Israel’s will in a way that they hope would be at least endorsed by some Arab governments and the world.

So far, they have an alliance of Trump and some extreme rightwing parties in Europe.

And now I hope that the world will not be misled that Israel is now ready to open a different kind of page in its relationship with the Palestinians. And what you told us about the way that the celebrations were dealt with in the West Bank and the incineration of the sanitation center shows you that nothing has changed in the dehumanisation and the attitude of this particular Israeli government and its belief that it has the power to wipe out Palestine as a nation, as a people and as a country.

I hope the world will not stand by, because up to now it did stand by when the genocide occurred in Palestine.

AMY GOODMAN: We have just heard President Trump’s address to the Israeli Knesset. He followed the Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu. I’m not sure, but in listening to Netanyahu, I don’t think he used the word “Palestinian.” President Trump has just called on the Israeli president to pardon Netanyahu.

Your thoughts on this, and also the possibility of why Netanyahu has not joined this summit that President Trump is co-chairing? Many are speculating for different reasons — didn’t want to anger the right, that’s further right than him. Others are saying the possibility of his arrest, not on corruption charges, but on crimes against humanity, the whole case before the International Criminal Court.

ILAN PAPPÉ: It could be a mixture of all of it, but I think at the center of it is the nature of the Israeli government that was elected in November 2022, this alliance between a very opportunistic politician, who’s only interested in surviving and keeping his position as a prime minister, alongside messianic, neo-Zionist politicians who really believe that God has given them the opportunity to create the Greater Israel, maybe even beyond the borders of Palestine, and, in the process, eliminate Palestinians.

I think that his consideration should all — are always about his chances of survival. So, whatever went in his mind, he came to the conclusion that going to Cairo is not going to help his chances of being reelected.

My great worry is not that he didn’t go to Cairo. My greatest worry is that he does believe that his only chance of being reelected is still to have a war going on, either in Gaza or in the West Bank or against Iran or in the north with Lebanon.

We are dealing here with a reckless, irresponsible politician, who is even willing to drown his own state in the process of saving his skin and his neck. And the victims will always be, from this adventurous policy, the Palestinians.

I hope the world understands that, really, the urgent need of — and I’m talking about world leaders rather than societies. You already discussed what is the level of solidarity among civil societies. But I do hope that political elites will understand — especially in the West — their role now is not to mediate between Israelis and Palestinians.

Their role now is to protect the Palestinians from destruction, elimination, genocide and ethnic cleansing. And nothing of that duty, especially of Europe, that is complicit with what happened, and the United States, that are complicit with what happened in the last two years — nothing that we heard in the speeches so far in the — in preparation for the summit in Egypt, and I have a feeling that we won’t hear anything about it also later on.

There is a different way in which our civil societies refer to Palestine as a place that has to be saved and protected, and still this irrelevant conversation among our political elites about a peace deal, a two-state solution, all of that, that has nothing to do with what we are experiencing in the way that the Israeli government thinks it has an historical moment to totally de-Arabise Palestine and eliminate and expunge the Palestinians from history and the area.

AMY GOODMAN: Ilan Pappé, I want to thank you for being with us, Israeli historian, professor of history, director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter, chair of the Nakba Memorial Foundation. His new book, Israel on the Brink: And the Eight Revolutions That Could Lead to Decolonization and Coexistence.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The Enemy Within, by Maire Leadbeater is many things. It is:

• A family history
• A social history
• A history of the left-wing in Aotearoa
• A chilling reminder of the origin and continuation of the surveillance state in New Zealand, and
• A damn good read.

The book is a great example of citizen or activist authorship. The author, Maire Leadbeater, and her family are front and centre of the dark cloud of the surveillance state that has hung and still hangs over New Zealand’s “democracy”.

What better place to begin the book than the author noting that she had been spied on by the security services from the age of 10. What better place to begin than describing the role of the Locke family — Elsie, Jack, Maire, Keith and their siblings — have played in Aotearoa society over the last few decades.

And what a fitting way to end the book than with the final chapter entitled, “Person of Interest: Keith Locke”; Maire’s much-loved brother and our much-loved friend and comrade.

In between these pages is a treasure trove of commentary and stories of the development of the surveillance state in the settler colony of NZ and the impact that this has had on the lives of ordinary — no, extra-ordinary — people within this country.

The book could almost be described as a political romp from the settler colonisation of New Zealand through the growth of the workers movement and socialist and communist ideology from the late 1800s until today.

I have often deprecatingly called myself a mere footnote of history as that is all I seem to appear as in many books written about recent progressive history in New Zealand. But it was without false modesty that when Maire gave me a copy of the book a couple of weeks back, I immediately went to the index, looked up my name and found that this time I was a bit more than a footnote, but had a section of a chapter written on my interaction with the spooks.

But it was after reading this, dipping into a couple of other “person of interest” stories of people I knew such as Keith, Mike Treen, the Rosenbergs, Murray Horton and then starting the book again from the beginning did it become clear on what issues the state was paranoid about that led it to build an apparatus to spy on its own citizens.

These were issues of peace, anti-conscription, anti-nuclear, de-colonisation, unemployed workers and left trade unionism and socialist and communist thought. These are the issues that come up time and time again; essentially it was seditious or subversive to be part of any of these campaigns or ideologies.

Client state spying
The other common theme through the book is the role that the UK and more latterly the US has played in ensuring that their NZ client settler state plays by their rules, makes enemies of their enemies and spies on its own people for their “benefit”.

It was interesting to read how the “5 Eyes”, although not using that name, has been in operation as long as NZ has had a spying apparatus. In fact, the book shows that 3 of the 5 eyes forced NZ to establish its surveillance apparatus in the first place.

Maire, and her editor have arranged this book in a very reader friendly way. It is mostly chronological showing the rise of the surveillance state from the beginning of the 19th century, in dispersed with a series of vignettes of “Persons of Interest”.

Maire would probably acknowledge that this book could not have been written without the decision of the SIS to start releasing files (all beit they were heavily redacted with many missing parts) of many of us who have been spied on by the SIS over the years. So, on behalf of Maire, thank you SIS.

Maire has painstakingly gone through pages and pages of these primary source files and incorporated them into the historical narrative of the book showing what was happening in society while this surveillance was taking place.

I was especially delighted to read the history of the anti-war and conscientious objectors movement. Two years ago, almost to the day, we held the 50th anniversary of the Organisation to Halt Military Service (OHMS); an organisation that I founded and was under heavy surveillance in 1972.

We knew a bit about previous anti-conscription struggles but Maire has provided much more context and information that we knew. It was good to read about people like John Charters, Ormand Burton and Archie Barrington as well more known resisters such as my great uncle Archibald Baxter.

Within living memory
Many of the events covered take place within my living memory. But it was wonderful to be reminded of some things I had forgotten about or to find some new gems of information about our past.

Stories around Bill Sutch, Shirley Smith, Ann and Wolfgang Rosenberg, Jack and Mary Woodward, Gerald O’Brien, Allan Brash (yes, Don’s dad), Cecil Holmes, Jack Lewin are documented as well as my contemporaries such as Don Carson, David Small, Aziz Choudry, Trevor Richards, Jane Kelsey, Nicky Hager, Owen Wilkes, Tame Iti in addition to Maire, Keith and Mike Treen.

The book finishes with a more recent history of NZ again aping the US’s so-called war on terror with the introduction of an anti and counter-terrorism mandate for the SIS and its sister agencies

The book traverses events such as the detention of Ahmed Zaoui, the raid on the Kim Dotcom mansion, the privatisation of spying to firms such as Thomson and Clark, the Urewera raids, “Hit and Run” in Afghanistan. Missing the cut was the recent police raid and removal of the computer of octogenarian, Peter Wilson for holding money earmarked for a development project in DPRK (North Korea).

When we come to the end of the book we are reminded of the horrific Christchurch mosque attack and massacre and prior to that of the bombing of Wellington Trades Hall and the Rainbow Warrior. Also, the failure of the SIS to discover Mossad agents operating in NZ on fake passports.

We cannot but ask the question of why multi-millions of dollars have been spent spying on, surveilling and monitoring peace activists, trade unionists, communists, Māori and more latterly Muslims, when the terrorism that NZ has faced has been that perpetrated on these people not by these people.

Maire notes in the book that the SIS budget for 2021 was around $100 million with around 400 FTEs employed. This does not include GCSB or other parts of the security apparatus.

Seeking subversives in wrong places
This level of money has been spent for well over 100 years looking for subversives and terrorists in the wrong place!

Finally, although dealing with the human cost of the surveillance state, the book touches on some of the lighter sides of the SIS spying. Those of us under surveillance in the 1970s and 1980s remember the amateurish phone tapping that went on at that time.

Also, the men in cars with cameras sitting outside our flats for days on end. Not in the book, but I have one memory of such a man with a camera in a car outside our flat in Wallace Street, Wellington.

After a few days some of my flatmates took pity on him and made him a batch of scones which they passed through the window of his car. He stayed for a bit longer that day but we never saw him or an alternate again.

Another issue the book picks up is the obsession that the SIS and its foreign counterparts had with counting communists in NZ. I remember that the CIA used to put out a Communist Yearbook that described and attempted to count how many members were in each of the communist parties all around the world.

In NZ, my party, the Workers Communist League, was smaller than the SUP, CPNZ and SAL, but one year near the end of our existence we were pleasantly surprised to see that the CIA had almost to a person, doubled our membership.

We could not work out why, until we realised that we all had code names as well as real names and we were getting more and more slack at using the correct one in the correct place. Anyone surveilling us, counting names, would have counted double the names that we had as members! We took the compliment.

Thank you, Maire, for this great book. Thank you and your family for your great contribution to Aotearoa society.

Hopefully the hardships and human cost that you have shown in this book will commit or recommit the rest of us to struggle for a decolonised and socialist Aotearoa within a peaceful and multi-polar world.

And as one of Jack Locke’s political guides said: “the road may be long and torturous, but the future is bright.”

Robert Reid has more than 40 years’ experience in trade unions and in community employment development in Aotearoa New Zealand. He is a former general secretary the president of FIRST Union. Much of his work has been with disadvantaged groups and this has included work with Māori, Pacific peoples and migrant communities. This was his address tonight for the launch of The Enemy Within: The Human Cost of State Surveillance in Aotearoa New Zealand, by Maire Leadbeater.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

With the lights on one of his sneakers blinking as he ran through the gallery, a little boy looked up at several works of art. One of them was a sculpture of his grandfather: the man who changed how we see the Pacific — Epeli Hau’ofa, a name renowned across the Pacific as writer, as artist, as mentor, as friend.

The great Hau’ofa certainly wore many hats and made his mark on many lives, and his influence did not end the day his breath did in 2009.

The Tongan-Fijian writer and anthropologist was, among other things, the founder of the University of the South Pacific’s Oceania Centre for Arts.

A man who recognised the need for a place where fellow creatives could create, he can be credited with nurturing several generations of Pacific writers and artists.

His own work, particularly his side-splitting short stories and his 1993 paper titled “Our Sea of Islands” which sought to destroy the notion that Pacific Islands were small and insignificant in the larger world around us, will live on forever in the hands of academics.

But now, those who knew and loved the man have gone the extra step to ensure his name lives on. On March 7, 2024, a book titled “Remembering Epeli Hau’ofa: His Life and Legacy” was launched at the University of the South Pacific’s Laucala Campus in Fiji.

The book, a compilation of the memories of and odes to Hau’ofa, was compiled and edited by Eric Waddell, Professor Vijay Naidu and Dr Claire Slatter.

Poetry opening
Current director of the Oceania Centre for Arts and a renowned artist himself, Larry Thomas, called the book launch to order. Professor Sudesh Mishra read out a poem he wrote about Hau’ofa that can be found in the opening of the book itself.

The book was officially launched by USP Deputy Vice-Chancellor Dr Giulio Masasso Tu’ikolongahau Paunga, sharing the tale of a younger Hau’ofa amused at Dr Paunga’s very formal tie to an otherwise informal event years ago, a look he recreated for the launch event.

“Remembering Epeli Hau’ofa is a book about a visionary,” the book’s foreword by Archbishop Emeritus of the Anglican Church, New Zealand and Polynesia, Winston Halapua says.

“Epeli was a leader who opened our eyes to the pulsing reality around us, the reality which sustains and connects us.

“This book, written in his memory, draws a portrait of a man with great mana who will continue to have wide influence on thinking and action throughout the region.”

Hau’ofa’s love for the Pacific and our oceans is legendary. As such, the book would have been incomplete without an excerpt of his own words expressing the feeling of belonging shared by all Pacific Islanders. Hau’ofa wrote:

“Wherever I am at any given moment, there is comfort in the knowledge stored at the back of my mind that somewhere in Oceania is a piece of earth to which I belong.

“In the turbulence of life, it is my anchor. No one can take it away from me. I may never return to it, not even as mortal remains, but it will always be homeland.

“We all have or should have homelands: family, community, national homelands. And to deny human beings the sense of homeland is to deny them a deep spot on earth to anchor their roots.”

Enlivened by humour
The book launch, a highly emotional event for some attendees but enlivened by humour in every speech and conversation in a very Hau’ofa style was an apt way to celebrate the comedic genius’ life.

His own family, community, and fellow nationals, it seems, will never forget him.

Several notable art pieces were displayed at the Oceania Centre for the book launch, including the piece by Lingikoni E. Vaka’uta that serves as the cover art for the book, an oil on canvas piece titled “The Legend of Maui slowing the sun”.

Another is “Boso”, a 1998 welded scrap metal sculpture of Epeli Hau’ofa himself, by artist Ben Fong.

The event was attended by noted academics, artists, friends, fans of the late Epeli Hau’ofa, and several members of the Hau’ofa family, including his son and aforementioned grandson.

Epeli Hau’ofa’s stories are sure to knock the wind out of you.

Republished from The Fiji Times with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

COMMENT: By Paul Claesson in Stockholm

I got to know Owen Wilkes through friends in 1980, when as a 22-year-old student I ended up in a housing collective where his ex-partner lived. He was then at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), having recently arrived from the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), and was, in addition to his collaboration with Nils-Petter Gleditsch, already in full swing with his Foreign Military Presence project.

He hired me as an assistant with responsibility for Spanish and Portuguese-language source material.

During this time I got to know Søren MC and Kirsten Bruun in Copenhagen, who had recently launched the magazine Försvar — Militärkritiskt Magasin. I contributed a couple of articles and was then invited to participate in the editorial team.

A theme issue about the American bases in Greenland grew into a book, Greenland — The Pearl of the Mediterranean, which apparently caused considerable consternation in the Ministry of Greenland. The book resulted in a hearing in Christiansborg.

I was also responsible for a theme issue about the DEW (Early Warning Line) and Loran C facilities on the Faroe Islands. I was in Stockholm when SÄPO’s spy target against Owen started, and I was there the whole way.

SÄPO interrogated me a couple of times, and at one point during the trial, when I took the opportunity to hand out relevant material about Owen’s research — all publicly available — to journalists in the audience, I was visibly thrown out of the case by a couple of angry young men from FSÄK (the security service of the Swedish defence establishment).

Distorted by media
Owen and I saw each other almost every day — sometimes I stayed with him in his little cabin in Älvsjö — and together we wondered how his various activities, such as his innocent fishing trip in Åland, were distorted in the media by FSÄK and the prosecutor’s care (SÄPO had subsequently begun to show greater doubt about Owen’s guilt).

In 1984-85, after he had been expelled from Sweden, I was Owen’s house guest at his farm in Karamea, Mahoe Farm, on New Zealand’s West Coast, at the northern end of the road. He was in the process of selling it.

With his brother Jack, he had started a commercial bee farm, and together we spent an intensive summer — harvesting bush honey, pollinating apple and kiwifruit orchards and building a small harvest house for the honey collection.

In the meantime, we sold — or ate up — the farm’s remaining flock of sheep. When the farm was sold, we moved to Wellington — I was offered a room in the Quakers’ guest house, where I joined the work at Peace Movement Aotearoa’s premises on Pirie Street.

Then Prime Minister David Lange had recently let New Zealand withdraw from ANZUS, as a result of his government’s refusal to allow US Navy ships to call at port unless they declared themselves disarmed of nuclear weapons.

As a result, PMA organised a conference with the theme nuclear-free Pacific, with participants from all over the Pacific region. Together with Owen, Nicky Hager and others I contributed to the planning and execution of the conference.

Surveying US signals intelligence
Before this, Owen and Nicky had begun surveying American signals intelligence facilities in New Zealand. I took part in this, ie. with a couple of photo excursions to Tangimoana.

Owen and I kept in touch after my return to Sweden. What I remember best from his letters from this time — apart from his musings about his work as a government defence consultant — are his often comical anecdotes about his adventures in the bush, where his task was mainly to map Māori cultural remains before they were chewed up into pieces by the forest industry.

His sudden death took a toll. I got the news from his partner May Bass. I would have liked to have flown to NZ to attend the memorial services for him, but ironically they coincided with my wedding.

Owen played a very big role in my life. I admired him, and miss him all the time. More than anyone else I have known, he deserves to be remembered in writing. I was therefore very happy when I heard about the time and energy devoted to this book project. My sincere gratitude.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Owen Wilkes (1940–2005) was known throughout the Pacific and across the world as an outstanding researcher on peace and disarmament.

His work:

• exposed plans to build a US Navy satellite tracking station in the Southern Alps
• identified a foreign spy base at Tangimoana (near Bulls)
• led to job offers from leading peace research institutes in Norway and Sweden — and an espionage charge for taking photographs during a cycling holiday, and
• supported local campaigns against foreign military activity in the Philippines, and for a nuclear-free Pacific.

Born in Christchurch, Owen Wilkes was an internationalist and a dedicated New Zealander — a subsistence farmer on the West Coast (where his self-built eco-home was demolished by the local council), an archaeologist, tramper and yachtsman.

In this forthcoming book, edited by historian Mark Derby and Wilkes’ former partner May Bass, experts in their own fields who knew and worked with him reflect on his achievements and his legacy. The contributors include:

Ingvar Botnen
Nils Petter Gleditsch
Nicky Hager
Di Hooper
Murray Horton
Maire Leadbeater
Robert Mann
Neville Ritchie
David Robie
Ken Ross
Peter Wills

The book, published by Raekaihau Press in association with Steele Roberts Aotearoa, has a timeline, a bibliography of Owen’s publications in several languages, and an index.

The book is being published on November 30.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

It is easy to forget why Julian Assange has been on trial in England for, well, seemingly forever.

Didn’t he allegedly sexually assault two women in Sweden? Isn’t that why he holed up for years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid facing charges?

When the bobbies finally dragged him out of the embassy, didn’t his dishevelled appearance confirm all those stories about his lousy personal hygiene?

Didn’t he persuade Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning to hack into the United States military’s computers to reveal national security matters that endangered the lives of American soldiers and intelligence agents? He says he is a journalist, but hasn’t The New York Times made it clear he is just a “source” and not a publisher entitled to first amendment protection?

If you answered yes to any or all of these questions, you are not alone. But the answers are actually no. At very least, it’s more complicated than that.

To take one example, the reason Assange was dishevelled was that staff in the Ecuadorian embassy had confiscated his shaving gear three months before to ensure his appearance matched his stereotype when the arrest took place.

That is one of the findings of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, whose investigation of the case against Assange has been laid out in forensic detail in The Trial of Julian Assange.

What is the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture doing investigating the Assange case, you might ask? So did Melzer when Assange’s lawyers first approached him in 2018:

I had more important things to do: I had to take care of “real” torture victims!

Melzer returned to a report he was writing about overcoming prejudice and self-deception when dealing with official corruption. “Not until a few months later,” he writes, “would I realise the striking irony of this situation.”

The 47 members of the UN Human Rights Council directly appoint
special rapporteurs on torture. The position is unpaid — Melzer earns his living as a professor of international law — but they have diplomatic immunity and operate largely outside the UN’s hierarchies.

Among the many pleas for his attention, Melzer’s small office chooses between 100 and 200 each year to officially investigate. His conclusions and recommendations are not binding on states. He bleakly notes that in barely 10 percent of cases does he receive full co-operation from states and an adequate resolution.

He received nothing like full co-operation in investigating Assange’s case. He gathered around 10,000 pages of procedural files, but a lot of them came from leaks to journalists or from freedom-of-information requests.

Many pages had been redacted. Rephrasing Carl Von Clausewitz’s maxim, Melzer wrote his book as “the continuation of diplomacy by other means”.

What he finds is stark and disturbing:

The Assange case is the story of a man who is being persecuted and abused for exposing the dirty secrets of the powerful, including war crimes, torture and corruption. It is a story of deliberate judicial arbitrariness in Western democracies that are otherwise keen to present themselves as exemplary in the area of human rights.

It is the story of wilful collusion by intelligence services behind the back of national parliaments and the general public. It is a story of manipulated and manipulative reporting in the mainstream media for the purpose of deliberately isolating, demonizing, and destroying a particular individual. It is the story of a man who has been scapegoated by all of us for our own societal failures to address government corruption and state-sanctioned crimes.

Collateral murder
The dirty secrets of the powerful are difficult to face, which is why we — and I don’t exclude myself — swallow neatly packaged slurs and diversions of the kind listed at the beginning of this article.

Melzer rightly takes us back to April 2010, four years after the Australian-born Assange had founded WikiLeaks, a small organisation set up to publish official documents that it had received, encrypted so as to protect whistle-blowers from official retribution.

Assange released video footage showing in horrifying detail how US soldiers in a helicopter had shot and killed Iraqi civilians and two Reuters journalists in 2007.

Apart from how the soldiers spoke — “Hahaha, I hit them”, “Nice”, “Good shot” — it looks like most of the victims were civilians and that the journalists’ cameras were mistaken for rifles. When one of the wounded men tried to crawl to safety, the helicopter crew, instead of allowing their comrades on the ground to take him prisoner, as required by the rules of war, seek permission to shoot him again.

As Melzer’s detailed description makes clear, the soldiers knew what they were doing:

“Come on, buddy,” the gunner comments, aiming the crosshairs at his helpless target. “All you gotta do is pick up a weapon.”

The soldiers’ request for authorisation to shoot is given. When the wounded man is carried to a nearby minibus, it is shot to pieces with the helicopter’s 30mm gun. The driver and two other rescuers are killed instantly. The driver’s two young children inside are seriously wounded.

US army command investigated the matter, concluding that the soldiers acted in accordance with the rules of war, even though they had not. Equally to the point, writes Melzer, the public would never have known a war crime had been committed without the release of what Assange called the “Collateral Murder” video.

The video footage was just one of hundreds of thousands of documents that WikiLeaks released last year in tranches known as the Afghan war logs, the Iraq war logs, and cablegate. They revealed numerous alleged war crimes and provided the raw material for a shadow history of the disastrous wars waged by the US and its allies, including Australia, in Aghanistan and Iraq.

Punished forever
Melzer retraces what has happened to Assange since then, from the accusations of sexual assault in Sweden to Assange taking refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in an attempt to avoid the possibility of extradition to the US if he returned to Sweden. His refuge led to him being jailed in the United Kingdom for breaching his bail conditions.

Sweden eventually dropped the sexual assault charges, but the US government ramped up its request to extradite Assange. He faces charges under the 1917 Espionage Act, which, if successful, could lead to a jail term of 175 years.

Two key points become increasingly clear as Melzer methodically works through the events.

The first is that there has been a carefully orchestrated plan by four countries — the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden and, yes, Australia — to ensure Assange is punished forever for revealing state secrets.

The second is that the conditions he has been subjected to, and will continue to be subjected to if the US’s extradition request is granted, have amounted to torture.

On the first point, how else are we to interpret the continual twists and turns over nearly a decade in the official positions taken by Sweden and the UK? Contrary to the obfuscating language of official communiques, all of these have closed down Assange’s options and denied him due process.

Melzer documents the thinness of the Swedish authorities’ case for charging Assange with sexual assault. That did not prevent them from keeping it open for many years. Nor was Assange as uncooperative with police as has been suggested. Swedish police kept changing their minds about where and whether to formally interview Assange because they knew the evidence was weak.

Melzer also takes pains to show how Swedish police also overrode the interests of the two women who had made the complaints against Assange.

It is distressing to read the conditions Assange has endured over several years. A change in the political leadership of Ecuador led to a change in his living conditions in the embassy, from cramped but bearable to virtual imprisonment.

Since being taken from the embassy to Belmarsh prison in 2019, Assange has spent much of his time in solitary confinement for 22 or 23 hours a day. He has been denied all but the most limited access to his legal team, let alone family and friends.

He was kept in a glass cage during his seemingly interminable extradition hearing, appeals over which could continue for several years more years, according to Melzer.

Assange’s physical and mental health have suffered to the point where he has been put on suicide watch. Again, that seems to be the point, as Melzer writes:

The primary purpose of persecuting Assange is not – and never has been – to punish him personally, but to establish a generic precedent with a global deterrent effect on other journalist, publicists and activists.

So will the new Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, do any more than his three Coalition and two Labor predecessors to advocate for the interests of an Australian citizen? In December 2021, Guardian Australia reported Albanese saying he did “not see what purpose is served by the ongoing pursuit of Mr Assange” and that “enough is enough”.

Since being sworn in as prime minister, he has kept his cards close to his chest.

The actions of his predecessors suggest he won’t, even though Albanese has already said on several occasions since being elected that he wants to do politics differently.

Melzer, among others, would remind him of the words of former US president Jimmy Carter, who, contrary to other presidents, said he did not deplore the WikiLeaks revelations.

They just made public what was the truth. Most often, the revelation of truth, even if it’s unpleasant, is beneficial. […] I think that, almost invariably, the secrecy is designed to conceal improper activities.

Dr Matthew Ricketson is professor of communication, Deakin University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Those born after 2001 have only known a world “at war on terror”.

This means a generation growing up under under fears and moral panics about Muslims and unparalleled security measures around their bodies and lives.

In my new book, Coming of Age in the War on Terror, I look at what this has meant for young Muslims in Australia as they navigate their political identities at school.

In 2018 and 2019, I interviewed and held writing workshops with more than 60 Muslim and non-Muslim high school students across Sydney who were born around the time of the September 11 terror attacks.

We explored their fears, their levels of trust with peers and teachers and political expression in a post 9/11 world.

No matter how many Muslim students spoke to me about their typically adolescent hobbies and interests, almost every student spoke about the impact of political and media discourse in their everyday lives.

Abdul-Rahman, a 17-year-old Muslim boy at an Islamic school in western Sydney, put it this way:

I’m not afraid of terrorism. I’m afraid of being accused of being a terrorist.

Another student, Laila, told me:

I’ve always had this almost preconceived guilt attached to me […] [It’s] the million messages in the media, politicians, popular culture, all these little things that add up and add up.

‘Countering violent extremism’
For teenagers to talk about themselves as potentially “accused” is devastating, but not particularly surprising.

For two decades, millions of federal and state dollars have been poured into “countering violent extremism” programmes targeting Muslim youth. There has been no subtlety here.

Counter-terrorism policies have been announced by politicians on the steps of mosques, with a focus on geographic and demographic populations deemed “at risk” (in other words, suburbs with large Muslim populations).

Consultations and round tables with government over “national security” have been highly publicised. Meanwhile, Islamophobic attacks have been condemned by politicians and the police because of how they might “undermine” relationships of cooperation between intelligence and law enforcement and the Muslim community.

The public has been routinely reassured the government is tackling the “problem” of young Muslim Australians, “with strong, deradicalisation programmes, working with Muslim communities”.

The figure of the vulnerable but also dangerous Muslim youth pops up time and time again, from moral panics around young “homegrown” terrorists, to attempts to introduce “jihadi watch” schemes in schools.

The pressure to self-censor
This landscape trickles down into young people’s everyday lives, including their schools.

The pressure to self-censor and manage your political and religious expression at school was a common theme among many students, resonating with what academics in the United Kingdom describe in their research.

Anticipating how their tone, words and emotion would be interpreted by teachers and peers restricted students’ political expression.

This included a young Palestinian girl who had to push back against teachers, who reprimanded her for wearing a “Free Palestine” t-shirt at school, to students who refrained from writing about Iraq or Afghanistan as part of assignments because they had been cautioned not to “bring overseas conflicts into the classroom”.

Other students talked of staying quiet if controversial topics came up in class, such as news of a terrorist attack involving Muslims, or media headlines about Islam.

I also met students who tried to appear as “good” or “moderate” Muslims (which inevitably meant apolitical) and erased all traces of their Muslimness to “fit in”.

Feeling targeted, isolated
In 2015, there was a media frenzy about youth radicalisation in prayer rooms in Sydney’s state schools. I interviewed students at a school in north-west Sydney three years later and they spoke about how that controversy had been felt in their school life.

Most of the students from suburbs and schools who came under media and political scrutiny as “problematic” had felt targeted and isolated. One student withdrew from his Muslim peers, abandoned his prayers at school, took different routes to school to avoid being hassled by the media, and “shut down” in class.

I got dragged into an argument with other kids in class about me following the same religion as these terrorists […] but my tone […] I came off very aggressive […] then I was scared, because that’s what people think of as radical extremists […] I felt like I’d be taken straight to the principal and you would have to deal with that. So I shut up.

We need a new approach
After two decades of seeing young Muslims as “problems” to be contained and managed, it is time we approached them in a different way.

Adolescence is a time to encourage critical thinking and support young people navigating their political identities and agency. Young people need to be empowered to work through their political and religious ideas and identities in safe, supportive environments. They need to be seen as individuals in their own right, not members of a demonised, racialised collective.

The vast majority of the young Muslims I spoke to were matter-of-fact about the global rise of Islamophobia and racism. They knew about certain jokes and assumptions in the popular vernacular (for example, “Allahu Akbar and bomb jokes” or “terrorist” equals “Muslim”).

Many were concerned about what this meant as they grew up and left school. They worried about facing discrimination at work and being able to practise their faith openly. They also knew how this suspicion and dehumanisation had been triggered by wider discourses and policies over which they had no power.

It is not up to the 9/11 generation to change this. We need teachers, politicians and the media to create a culture where young Muslims feel accepted and secure in their right to express their religious and political identities.

• This article was produced as part of Social Sciences Week, running 6-12 September. A full list of 70 events can be found here. Randa Abdel-Fattah will appear in a webinar on the “Implications of 9/11: 20 years” at 6pm on Thursday September 9.

Dr Randa Abdel Fattah is a DECRA research fellow, Macquarie University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Retired politics professor and historian Robert “Robbie” Robertson, 69, co-author of the book Shattered Coups about the 1987 coups led by then Lieutenant-Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka, has died in Melbourne, his family has confirmed.

Dr Robertson wrote the book with his partner Akosita Tamanisau, then a Fiji journalist. It was published in January 1988 and he also wrote other books and papers on Fiji and globalisation.

He and Dr William Sutherland co-authored the fast moving and readable Government by the Gun: The unfinished business of Fiji’s 2000 coup.

His last book on Fiji in 2017 was The General’s Goose: Fiji’s contemporary tale of misadventure.

Dr Robertson was the second person at the University of the South Pacific to have his work permit rescinded and he was deported to New Zealand by Rabuka.

Attempts to have him relocated to Port Vila were sabotaged by the then Vanuatu government.

Moved to Australia
He moved to Australia and joined La Trobe University and became associate professor of history and development studies in Bendigo.

Dr Robertson returned to USP from 2004 to 2006 as professor and director of development studies.

Subsequently, he served as professor and head of school of arts and social sciences at James Cook University (2010-2014) and as professor and dean of arts, social sciences and humanities at Swinburne University of Technology from July 2014 until he retired.

Retired professor of development studies at USP Dr Vijay Naidu and New Zealand researcher Dr Jackie Leckie recalled his contribution as a progressive and inspirational academic, and his sense of humour, Dr Leckie saying “Robbie was one of the good guys. I am so sorry that he had suffered in health recently.”

Dr Robertson is survived by his wife Akosita and sons Nemani and Julian.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The Governor-General, Dame Patsy Reddy, this week invested social justice advocate and former Green Party MP Keith Locke as a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit “for services to human rights advocacy”.

Locke described the the award in the New Year Honours list as recognition of the great work of human rights advocates in the many organisations he had worked in, such as those mentioned in the tribute read out at the ceremony.

“Mr Keith Locke has been a long-term human rights activist at both national and international levels,” said the citation.

“Mr Locke became the National Co-ordinator of the Philippines Solidarity Network from 1986 to 1991 and created exchange programmes between social justice groups in New Zealand and their counterparts in the Philippines.

“Around this time he opened the progressive One World Books store, which provided a hub for activists in Auckland.

“He was Secretary of the Wellington Latin America Committee from 1980 to 1985.

In the 1990s he was a Foreign Affairs spokesperson for the NewLabour, Alliance and Green parties and was a Green Member of Parliament between 1999 and 2011.

“During this time, he advocated on politically unpopular international human rights issues and drew attention to human rights abuses in Tibet, China, East Timor, Fiji, Sri Lanka, and the Middle East.

“He was recognised by Amnesty International with the Human Rights Defender Award in 2012 and the Harmony Award from the Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand in 2013.

“Since retiring from Parliament, Mr Locke has served on the Boards of the Auckland Refugee Council from 2012 to 2017 and the New Zealand Peace and Conflict Studies Centre Trust until 2019.”

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz