Peacemonger is a collection of essays about the much travelled Aotearoa peace activist and researcher Owen Wilkes, who died in May 2005. Wilkes was an extraordinary peace campaigner who discovered a foreign spy base at Tangimoana and was once charged with espionage in Norway and again while on a cycling holiday in Sweden.

After he took up beekeeping near Karamea on the West Coast in 1983, it was discovered that Customs was helping the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service to read his mail, apparently worried about his legendary ability to snuffle out secret installations by foreign powers in countries from New Zealand to Norway.

They were right to note his impact – this book explains just how enormously influential Wilkes was.

Many of these short essays are by big names in the Aotearoa peace firmament, such as Maire Leadbeater, Murray Horton, David Robie, Nicky Hager and Peter Wills. Each chapter contains gems; some hilarious, others sobering.

Wilkes was a rare beast, a man who could be, as Mark Derby writes, “unpretentious, fearless, indefatigable, at times insufferable”.

Hager, a phenomenal investigative journalist, has contributed the chapter “The Wilkes How-to Guide to Public Interest Researching’.

Coming from Hager, one of the greatest public interest researchers in the country, this should be catnip to a new generation of proto-Hagers, Thunbergs and Wilkeses.

The last chapter, “Memories of Owen”, was written by his partner, peace activist May Bass.

It is a heartfelt send-off to a human comet who lit up everything he touched, one who may never have realised in his arc across the sky what a void he left behind him, not just in the peace movement, but in the hearts of his friends and loved ones.

Jenny Nicholls writes reviews for The Listener and this review has been republished from the Waiheke Weekender with permission. She is also a graphic designer: designandtype.org

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

The first of the above charts shows excess seasonal deaths in the United Kingdom as winter approaches. While the huge mortality peaks of the pandemic in Britain are long past, we do see significant excess mortality in the United Kingdom since April. And October 2022 excess mortality rates are higher than those of 2020 and 2021. The situation in Netherlands is similar.

The story in Germany is similar, since June 2022. While the recent unseasonal mortality peak – due to Covid19 if reports are accurate – is now waning, it seems likely that Germany will face another mortality peak comparable with its influenza peak of 2016/17. In Germany, none of its Covid waves had as much peak excess mortality as the influenza peak of February/March 2018.

The data is not as up-to-date in the following three countries.

For New Zealand, we see the Covid19 deaths as a period of rising seasonal excess from February to July this year. Then there was a sharp drop-off, meaning that from August New Zealand experienced just its normal late-winter seasonal mortality. While some of this was due to Covid19, it was offset by lower-than-expected deaths from other seasonal illnesses. My hunch is that New Zealand will see a summer Covid19 mortality peak; not as high as the July peak, but unambiguously Covid19.

The other New Zealand story is the unexplained winter mortality peak of 2021. All the New Zealand public knows about this is that it was neither Covid19 nor Influenza. It might have been due in part to RSV, which hospitalised many young children in 2021. In the United States at present, we are getting reports (eg from ABC News this week) of a “tripledemic”, which includes a nasty ‘flu’ and an RSV outbreak that is hospitalising older Americans as well as children.

Finland is one country in Europe which New Zealand likes to compare itself to. Finland avoided the dramatic Covid19 peaks experienced by United Kingdom and Netherlands. But it has had worryingly high excess mortality since June 2021, and continues to do so.

Sweden, unlike Finland, had two big peaks of Covid19 mortality in 2020. Since then, Sweden has generally looked much better than all other European countries. Nevertheless, Sweden did have a problem, presumably a Covid19 problem, from June to October 2022. Though not as bad as Finland.

Overall, the pattern seems to be that populations are becoming more vulnerable to respiratory illnesses. If people who have previously had Covid19 are dying more, then damage already done by the SARS-Cov2 virus is likely to be the main culprit. If people who did not get Covid19 previously are facing a higher risk of death from respiratory illness, then the main problem is likely to be compromised general immunity arising from reduced general community contact with these types of viruses.

The post-covid mortality problem is slightly worse than it appears, especially if we consider United Kingdom and Netherlands, both countries with high early death tolls from Covid19. In these countries, many of the people most vulnerable to Covid19 have already died. So the denominator populations are, disproportionately, covid survivors (meaning either they had it and recovered, or they avoided it). Typically, after a demographically-significant epidemic, subsequent death rates should be below the historical average.

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

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

A View from Afar – In this podcast, political scientist Paul Buchanan and Selwyn Manning examine the Implications of the Russia-Ukrainian conflict and how it impacts on regional security architecture.

In particular, we assess Finland and Sweden’s move to become NATO members and whether Turkey will prevent this from occurring.

Also, this week, Russia’s Vladimir Putin hosted the leaders of Russia’s equivalent to NATO – the CSTO, which stands for the Collective Security Treaty Organization and includes: Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan.

Belarus’ authoritarian leader, Aleksandr Lukashenko, was the only leader of the CSTO to speak persuasively about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Paul and I analyse the CSTO meeting and discuss its relevancy from a security and geopolitical perspective and what implications all this has on the East Asia region.

You can comment on this debate by clicking on one of these social media channels and interacting in the social media’s comment area. Here are the links:

• Facebook.com/selwyn.manning
• Youtube
• Twitter.com/Selwyn_Manning

If you miss the LIVE Episode, you can see it as video-on-demand, and earlier episodes too, by checking out EveningReport.nz or, subscribe to the Evening Report podcast here.

The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top  Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication.

Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category. You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.

A View from Afar – In this podcast, political scientist Paul Buchanan and Selwyn Manning will examine the Implications of the Russia-Ukrainian conflict and how it impacts on regional security architecture.

In particular, we will assess Finland and Sweden’s move to become NATO members and whether Turkey will prevent this from occurring.

Also, this week, Russia’s Vladimir Putin hosted the leaders of Russia’s equivalent to NATO – the CSTO, which stands for the Collective Security Treaty Organization and includes: Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan.

Belarus’ authoritarian leader, Aleksandr Lukashenko, was the only leader of the CSTO to speak persuasively about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Paul and I will analyse the CSTO meeting and discuss its relevancy from a security and geopolitical perspective and what implications all this has on the East Asia region.

Join Paul and Selwyn for this LIVE recording of this podcast while they consider these big issues, and remember any comments you make while live can be included in this programme.

You can comment on this debate by clicking on one of these social media channels and interacting in the social media’s comment area. Here are the links:

• Facebook.com/selwyn.manning
• Youtube
• Twitter.com/Selwyn_Manning

If you miss the LIVE Episode, you can see it as video-on-demand, and earlier episodes too, by checking out EveningReport.nz or, subscribe to the Evening Report podcast here.

The MIL Network’s podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top  Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication.

Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category. You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.

Now is as good a time as any to evaluate and reflect on the public health policy choices made in the period from February to April 2020, re the Covid19 pandemic. Here I have postulated a ‘league’ of 12 economically advanced countries which have made different choices which loosely fit onto a spectrum.

The choices made reflect a full spectrum from ‘herd immunity’ to pushing for ‘elimination’. The immediate context, in making those choices in February 2020, was twofold:

• memories of recent influenzas outbreaks (2009 Swine Flu, and the more recent Avian Flu outbreaks), combined with a recent centenary of the 1917-19 influenza pandemic
• experience of twenty-first century coronavirus epidemics; MERS and, especially, SARS in 2003

One big surprise is that western governments were most conscious of the need to prepare for influenza, while, despite the recent and highly lethal coronavirus outbreaks, only a few Asian governments had the coronavirus scenario at the forefront of their pre-pandemic preparedness.

At the two extreme ends of the spectrum of responses were Sweden and New Zealand; and, in 2020, the world noticed. Both responses were led by public health professionals – the bureaucrats of Sweden and the technocrats of New Zealand. In both countries there were dissenting views; views which were denied media ‘oxygen’ as the each dominant response narrative emerged. Sweden made its choice in late February 2020. New Zealand, which seemed initially to be going for the middle of the spectrum, was panicked into making its extreme and opposite ‘fortress’ choice, in the third week of March 2020. For both countries, the choices were made from an abundance of ignorance; especially a somewhat wilful ignorance about coronaviruses.

The United Kingdom, dealing with Brexit, initially made the Swedish choice, but ‘switched horses’ towards the New Zealand choice. However, the Johnson-led United Kingdom government was never able to erect a fortress, and was never as ideologically inclined towards fortress solutions as was a New Zealand government that was already feeling its way into an immigration policy based on labour-market nationalism. (We may note this week’s UK commission report, which also was an implicit critique of Sweden’s choice; refer to this story on RNZ on 13 October.)

So, the United Kingdom ended up with a policy hotch-potch; as did the United States under the circumstances of jealously-held federalism, and a nationalist exceptionalism that was driving the Trump administration. Denmark held to a much more coherent position (than UK or USA) on the centre of the spectrum; so did South Korea, with its prior advantage of coronavirus awareness and its early Covid19 outbreak. Japan took a position towards the Sweden end of the covid response spectrum. Australia and Germany, both federal countries, were able to take positions closer to New Zealand’s than was the United States. Of the Scandinavian countries, Finland’s response was closest to New Zealand’s. Israel took a position similar to United Kingdom, knowing that its traditions were not conducive to people being asked to take a ‘voluntary physical distancing’ approach. (Sweden and Japan were culturally much better suited to such ‘voluntarism’.)

Ireland took a coherent position between New Zealand and United Kingdom. Ireland had to respond quickly; it caught covid very early, in February 2020, and had worrying numbers of covid deaths by the end of March 2020.

Sweden versus New Zealand: the Trade-Offs

A (human) pandemic represents a relationship between a pathogen and a human host population. In essence Sweden’s approach, in March 2020, fully emphasised host immunity (ie it emphasised people over pathogen; people living with this a new virus that would soon become like viruses already in circulation); whereas New Zealand’s approach emphasised forward defence, keeping the pathogen out.

This passage from The coronavirus is here to stay (Nature, 16 Feb 2021) summarises Sweden’s position: “Flu pandemics occur when populations are naive [my emphasis] to a virus; by the time a pandemic virus becomes seasonal, much of the population has some immunity to it. … Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, thinks the coronavirus might follow a similar path.”

So Sweden opted to take an early hit; and to try to recover, stronger for the experience. New Zealand did the opposite, to shut out the pathogen indefinitely, knowing that host weakness (‘naivety’) would result, in the hope that the pathogen would disappear – as SARS and MERS appear to have disappeared – and in the hope that host strength could be restored by a yet-to-be-developed vaccine. New Zealand’s approach was critically dependent on a quick global elimination of the pathogen, or of a comparatively quick and comprehensive vaccine solution; New Zealand’s approach was clearly a gamble, and not the ‘cautious’ approach presented by the government.

With today’s hindsight, both Sweden’s and New Zealand’s approaches have been proved valid, and in the wider context of economic cost. Sweden made some bad mistakes early on, however, in its failure to adopt a Covid19 testing programme (until far too late) and in its failure to protect its elderly population.

New Zealand’s ‘public health solution as the best economic solution’ held until mid-2021, and by then effective mass-produced vaccinations were fully available. Sweden had a bad year in 2020, and was hit again as the alpha strain of covid spread through Europe a year after the spread of the original Wuhan strain. Nevertheless, Sweden seems to have had all its bad news in its first 12 months, with considerable host immunity present as the alpha-strain swept through Europe early this year; further, excess deaths in Sweden so far in the pandemic are close to zero (New Zealand’s excess deaths at present are negative). Sweden has had its pain, and New Zealand has had its gain. The future, however, points to gain to Sweden and pain to New Zealand. (An unfinished game of two halves; Sweden played into the wind in the first half.)

Japan’s position in October 2021 now looks much like Sweden’s, with both host immunity and a degree of voluntary physical distancing playing roles. In Japan’s case, the host immunity appears to have derived from ongoing exposure to seasonal endemic viruses, and not so much to Covid19 itself. In 2020, Japan largely eschewed lockdowns and facemask mandates.

In the meantime, the mish-mash countries (especially UK and USA) had a tough time, and have no ongoing surety that their tough times are over. Of the countries in the middle of the spectrum, Denmark and Ireland are now the poster-children for success. (We don’t dare mention yet, in polite circles, the successes of Sweden or Japan.) Of the other countries mentioned here, as well as New Zealand, only Australia – and possibly Finland and Ireland – have naïve populations; Australia’s naivety is least in Sydney, and (thanks to record-long lockdowns) greatest in Melbourne. Viral naivety results from lockdowns, facemasks, and enforced distancing of young people. And induced-naivety to one covid-like or flu-like pathogen means, to a large extent, acquired naivety to all such pathogens.

Vaccination

The big questions, relating to this pandemic, for the remainder of the 2020s are whether vaccination-acquired immunity is sufficient to remove viral naivety, how frequently immunity to coronaviruses and influenzas needs to be boosted, and how effective global supply chains will be at sustaining global mass-vaccination programmes.

It is pertinent to review vaccination percentages to date, for the ‘premier league’ countries mentioned here. The numbers provided give half-weight to people with partial vaccination.

The current leaders are Denmark and Ireland. Japan and South Korea are among the best of the rest, having been – like New Zealand and Australia – very slow to get started. The initial vaccination leaders, Israel and United Kingdom, have stalled somewhat, as has Germany. The United States has also stalled, now overtaken by the vaccination laggards, New Zealand and Australia.

Evaluation of Strategies

The logic of Sweden’s strategy was to emphasise natural immunity, especially among the non-vulnerable population. While having a shocking year in 2020, Sweden looks very well-placed to have a very good year in 2022; I am not aware that problems relating to long-covid are worse in Sweden than elsewhere, though I stand to be corrected. Sweden has been ‘middle-of-the-league’ on vaccination, treating it as a complement to its wider immunisation strategy, rather than as the strategy’s central focus. Sweden’s headline statistics are stable at present, at 400 weekly cases per million people [and 20 deaths] (equivalent to 290 daily cases in New Zealand [and 10 weekly deaths]).

The best-performing mid-spectrum countries have been Denmark and Ireland. Denmark has taken a coherent position in the centre of the spectrum. It is now open, and has a well-immunised population, though with greater reliance than Sweden on vaccination. Denmark’s ‘delta outbreak’ has been significantly more severe than Sweden’s, and seemed to be largely over until last week. Denmark’s cases increased 36% over the last seven days, and, per capita, are nearly double Sweden’s. Finland, this month, is on a par with Denmark.

Ireland is also seeing a small resurgence at present. It’s currently five times worse than Sweden, and three times worse than Denmark.

At the New Zealand end of the covid policy spectrum, the logic was an extreme reliance on vaccinations in the likely event that global elimination did not occur. There was a process of cognitive dissonance however, in that, despite New Zealand’s obvious strategic dependence on vaccinations, New Zealand’s political leaders had thought that New Zealand could afford to be a vaccination laggard. Like Australia, New Zealand is still near the bottom of the league vaccination table; both Australasian countries have only just overtaken that other recent laggard, the United States. (While not in the ‘premier league’ that I have constructed, Canada was an early vaccination leader, and its latest statistics fall just below Ireland’s.)

An interesting ‘local derby’ match is that of Japan versus South Korea. Both countries were slow starters with vaccination. Japan is much closer to the Sweden end of the covid policy spectrum, whereas South Korea is closer to Ireland or Denmark. Currently, South Korea’s case-incidence of Covid19 is five times that of Japan.

The country, of those considered here, that is currently worst for reported cases is the United Kingdom, with USA being easily the worst for deaths. Israel falls just short of USA for cases, and just short of United Kingdom for deaths.

So far, New Zealand is still clearly winning in the headline statistics’ – still the best of these countries on reported cases, recorded deaths; and, for that matter, on excess deaths.

The Sweden versus New Zealand match

But, let’s just consider – within the ‘covid stakes’ – the match contest between New Zealand and Sweden. We may treat it as a rugby test match (excuse the switch of metaphor from football to rugby) in a Wellington southerly storm. Sweden chose to play into the wind in the first half, and dropped the ball many times; New Zealand preferred to play with the wind in the first half, and got plenty of points on the board. So, the half-time score clearly favours New Zealand. It turns out, however, that New Zealand did not bother preparing for a second-half into the southerly; rather, New Zealand simply hoped that the wind would abate before half time. And Sweden’s first-half experience made the Swedish ‘team of 10 million’ more resilient. Now, in the second-half, with the southerly even stronger than it was at kick-off time, New Zealand is going into this phase of the match substantially and wilfully underprepared. We have no idea who will be the winner at fulltime (eg mid-2022); but if the fulltime result is a draw, then Sweden will almost certainly defeat New Zealand in extra-time.

Conclusion

New Zealand is currently leading the covid league tables, in terms of ‘points on the board’. And, despite missing a number of tackles early in the second-half, its half-time lead over Sweden is holding for now. But New Zealand is vulnerable, and underprepared; the match could easily turn out like France versus New Zealand in the 1999 Rugby World Cup. Sweden, after a torrid time, may now be ‘out of the woods’ and getting points on the board.

Of the other countries in the covid premier league, only Japan looks to be ‘out of the covid woods’. If New Zealand loses to Sweden, it may not have the resilience to avoid a steady decline towards the bottom of the league table. Even if New Zealand eventually defeats Sweden on its headline covid statistics, it may prove to be a Pyrrhic victory. New Zealand will not be the covid league champion that New Zealanders thought it could be.

It is possible that Sweden will win my Covid Premier League, with Japan as runner up. That’s not how a betting person would have seen it in January this year.

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Owen Wilkes, an internationally renowned peace researcher and Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa (CAFCA) founder, died in 2005, aged 65 (see my obituary in Watchdog 109, August 2005). And yet, 16 years later, I’m still learning more about him and gaining insights into his life and character.

In late 2020 I was contacted, out of the blue, by an octogenarian Kiwi expat in Oslo, who had been a good friend of Owen’s in Scandinavia in the 1970s and 1980s and then for most of the rest of Owen’s life.

In 1978, I and my then partner (Christine Bird, a fellow CAFCINZ founder and first chairperson of CAFCA) accompanied Owen on a “spy trip” through Norway’s northernmost province, the one bordering the former Soviet Union, which gave me my first glimpse of the sort of domes with which I’ve become so familiar at the Waihopai spy base during the last 30 plus years.

We met this expat Kiwi while in Oslo. Although we were strangers, he immediately recognised us as New Zealanders the second we stepped off the train at his station.

Why? Because of the distinctive shabbiness of our dress. I hadn’t heard from him in decades. In 2020, he went to the trouble of contacting an NZ national news website to get my email address.

He told me that he had a small collection of Owen’s letters and other material about him, and as he was decluttering and couldn’t think of any Scandinavian home for them, would I like them?

I was happy to do so. Reading them brought back vivid memories from more than 40 years ago, none more so than in connection with that “spy trip”.

Thrived in Scandinavia
Owen thrived in Scandinavia, and particularly loved his 18 months in Norway, paying Norwegians the highest accolade of being “good jokers”. All up, he lived six years in Scandinavia, most of it in Sweden, where he worked for the world-famous Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

He applied his unique talents to researching in both countries e.g., he identified the entire security police staff by the simple expedient of ringing every block of particular extension numbers.

In 1978, Christine Bird and I did our Big OE, part of which included crossing the former Soviet Union on the Trans-Siberian Express from the Pacific coast and staying with Owen in his Stockholm apartment.

In this most sophisticated of northern European cities, he still dressed and acted like The Wild Man of Borneo (when I inquired about toilet paper, he told me that he used the phonebook). It was quite a sight to visit the SIPRI office full of oh, so proper Swedes and there was Owen working away at his desk, naked except for shorts.

We met up with him for a reason, which was to accompany him on a “spy” trip through Norway’s northernmost Finnmark province, which was chokka with North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) military bases and lots of Waihopai-like spy bases, the first time I ever saw those distinctive domes.

Norway was then one of only two NATO members with a land border with the Soviet Union (the other being Turkey).

Mad Norwegian adventure
Off we went, the three of us, on this mad adventure, travelling by boat, train, bus and hitchhiking. We slept in a tent wherever we could pitch it.

Bird and I went by bus right up to the Soviet border; Owen got the deeply suspicious driver to drop off him beforehand so that he could walk up and check out a spy base in the border zone (photography was strictly forbidden near any of these bases, even at Oslo Airport, because it was also an Air Force base). From memory, he told the bus driver that he was a bird watcher (he had his ever-present binoculars to prove it).

He told us that if he hadn’t rejoined us within a couple of days, it would mean that he had been arrested and to ring the office in Oslo to let them know. Right on time he turned up.

We duly delivered the rolls of film back to the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo (PRIO) and they were used in a book co-authored by Owen and Nils Petter Gleditsch, the PRIO Director. The book, Uncle Sam’s Rabbits (a pun on the rabbit ear aerials used at some of the listening post spy bases) caused such a sensation in Norway that both authors were charged, tried, convicted and fined for offences under the Official Secrets Act.

Much more excitement was to come, not long after, in Sweden. Security agents swooped on Owen as he was returning from a bike trip around islands between Sweden and Finland, he was held incommunicado for several days amid sensational headlines about a Soviet spy being arrested (this was the sort of stuff that gave his poor old Mum palpitations back in Christchurch).

He was eventually released and charged with offences under Sweden’s Official Secrets Act (after his death, NZ media coverage mistakenly said that he was convicted of espionage offences. That means spying for a foreign country. He wasn’t charged with any such offence, let alone convicted).

Forded Arctic river in shorts to covertly enter Soviet Union
This was at the height of the Cold War, when neutral Sweden was being particularly paranoid about Soviet spies (not helped when a Soviet Whiskey class submarine got embarrassingly stuck in Stockholm Harbour, the famous “Whiskey On The Rocks” episode).

Owen’s trial was very high profile, attracting international media attention. At first, he was convicted and sentenced to six months’ prison. He never served a day of that, because he appealed, and the sentence was suspended but he was fined heavily and ordered expelled from Sweden for 10 years (he used to joke that he should have appealed for it to be increased to 20 years).

The 2020 package of material from Oslo added one vital detail I didn’t know about that “spy trip” we did with him. The Kiwi expat wrote to a work mate of Owen’s, after his death: “He once even crossed the Norwegian-Soviet border in the high north, wading across an icy river in his shorts and was there several hours – only a few people know about this.

It doesn’t bear thinking about what could have happened to him, or so-called international relations, if he’d been jumped on by the vodka-sodden Soviet frontier guards. As unshaven as Owen. He would have managed though …

No wonder that bus driver was so suspicious of him. There is great irony in the fact that both the Norwegian and Swedish security agencies suspected Owen of being some sort of a Soviet spy and both prosecuted him; yet if he’d been caught on his covert visit to the Soviet Union, he would have doubtless been presented to the world as a Western spy.

A 1981 letter that Owen wrote to his Oslo mate shed some light on his arrest and detention for several days by the Swedish Security Service (SAPO).

“Overall, it wasn’t such bad fun. I had a clear conscience all along and I wasn’t scared that SAPO would try and plant evidence or anything like that… So, I slept well at night, found the interrogations intellectually stimulating, read several novels. Getting out was fun too…”

I can personally testify as to how much Owen enjoyed being locked up. We were among a group of people arrested inside the US military transport base at Christchurch Airport during a 1988 protest (the base is still there). This is from my 2005 Watchdog obituary of Owen, cited above:

“It was a weekend, so we were bailed after a few hours to appear later in the week”.

“But that didn’t suit Owen, he had things to do and didn’t want to be mucking around with inconvenient court appearances. So, he refused bail and opted to stay locked up for 24 hours so that the cops had to produce him at the next day’s court hearing (which was more convenient for him), where he duly got bail.

“He told me that he’d found some old Reader’s Digests in the cells and had had a wonderful uninterrupted time reading their Rightwing conspiracy theories about how the KGB was behind the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul 11. In the meantime, I was left to deal with his then partner, who was frantic about how come he’d ended up in custody, as that hadn’t been part of their South Island holiday plans. In the end, we fought the good fight in court, were convicted and got a small fine each”.

Getting to read his Swedish security file
A letter to his Oslo mate at the turn of the century says that he learned that Swedish police files on him would be among those now available to the people who were the subjects of them. He wrote, from New Zealand, asking for access to their files on him from 1978-81.

He got a reply saying he could have access to 1025 pages and that he had two months to do so. Owen had been planning a Scandinavian trip with his partner, May Bass, and this was the icing on the cake for him (“she is going to find something else to do while I am poring through the archives in Stockholm”).

When I last saw Owen, in 2002, he told that me that the file showed that the Swedish authorities were absolutely convinced that he was a Soviet spy and there was circumstantial evidence of which he had been unaware – for instance, he had been monitoring a whole lot of radio frequencies broadcasting from the Soviet Union, and in the case of one, he had apparently stumbled onto the means of communication between the KGB (former Soviet spy agency) and their agent in Sweden.

He had no idea but this reinforced the Swedish spooks’ idea that he was a Soviet spy, rather than an insatiably curious peace researcher.

By contrast, to this day, the NZ Security Intelligence Service has refused to release anything but a fraction of its file on him (see my “Owen Wilkes’ SIS File. A bit more feleased, a decade after first smidgen”, in Watchdog 150, April 2019).

The SIS says it holds six volumes on Owen. It still deems the great majority of that too sensitive to be released, even to his one remaining blood relative – his younger brother.

In 1982, after six years of high drama in Scandinavia, he returned home in a blaze of publicity and CAFCINZ (as CAFCA was then) sent him around the country on an extremely successful speaking tour.

Christchurch academic, Professor Bill Willmott, nominated him for the 1982 Nobel Peace Prize (funnily enough, he didn’t win it. It was never likely that the Scandinavians would ever award their homegrown prize to a peace activist who had been convicted for “spying” on them).

A copy of Willmott’s nomination letter is among the material I was sent. After his involuntary return, Owen never lived overseas again, but he continued to be of ongoing interest to Scandinavian media.

A 1983 Norwegian article reported on Owen from where he was living in the Karamea district. It was titled: “’Spy’ yesterday, farmer today”.

Extreme adventurer, renouncing Peace Movement
Owen wasn’t a big fan of Sweden but he absolutely loved Norway. It gave him full scope for the extreme adventures that he loved, whether on foot, in the water, on skis or on a bike.

His letters describing some of his adventures are wonderful examples of travel writing, although not for the fainthearted reader. This is his description of what happened when he boarded a coastal ferry after one such jaunt through days of unrelenting rain:

“.. I noticed the people were looking rather strangely at me, which I assumed was just because of the way I went squilch-squelch when I walked, and the way a little rivulet would wend its way out from under my chair when I sat down. Then I chanced to look in a mirror, and discovered that my skin had gone all soft and wrinkly and puffy, so that I looked like a cadaver that had been simmered in caustic soda solution”.

He would have fitted right in to any movie about the zombie apocalypse.

His letters shed light on various fascinating aspects of his life and personality. In the 1990s he basically and publicly renounced the Peace Movement (I refer you to my 2005 Watchdog obituary, cited above. See the subheadings “Leaving the Peace Movement” and “Writer of crank letters”). A 1993 letter to his Oslo mate gives a small taste of this.

It lists his disagreements with “Greenpeas [not a typo. MH] …on quite a few issues. Some of their campaigns are just great, but some of them are pretty bloody stupid, I reckon. And it is only recently that they’ve started going screwy” (he then details six areas of disagreement).

“Grumble, grumble, it’s no wonder I am getting offside with the peace movement around these parts, is it… Anyway, I am sort of getting out of the peace movement”.

Another 1993 letter to Oslo (the only handwritten one) is a fascinating, hilarious and white-knuckle account of how – after the unexpected death of his father in Christchurch – he and his brother tried to get their bedridden mother moved by small plane from Christchurch to the brother’s district of Karamea.

A classic Canterbury norwester put paid to that and they had to land at a rural airstrip (after the sheep had been chased off it). The journey had to be finished by ambulance and took 26 hours. Owen’s parents died within a few months of each other, in 1993. I knew both of them and Becky and I attended both funerals.

Owen was a depressive, which played a role in his 2005 suicide. That same 1993 handwritten letter concluded with this: “There’s an election coming up in 3 weeks, but I feel quite detached. Basically, I think we’re all totally doomed + the civilisation is into its final orgy of environmental destruction before the end. Rather than trying to improve the future by changing the present, I plan on documenting the past, just in case civilisation is re-established in some distant future + its people are in a mood to learn from our past. Hence my archaeology. It’s a choice between archaeology or alcoholism, I reckon”.

Pleasure and sadness
Owen Wilkes was a fascinating and simultaneously infuriating man. He has been dead for 16 years and this quite unexpected package of material goes back more than 40 years. But that passage only reinforces for me what a loss he is, both to the progressive movement nationally and globally, but also as a person, an indomitable adventurer, and as a friend and colleague.

It was with both pleasure and sadness that I read through this material. It brought back so many memories.

As for the Oslo expat, he and I went on to have an extensive correspondence in late 2020 and on into 2021. And not just about Owen but about many other people and topics. He has permanently lived outside NZ since the 1960s but we still have people in common.

For example, in 1960s Christchurch he was involved with the Monthly Review and knew Wolfgang Rosenberg. I sent him my Watchdog obituary of Wolf (114, May 2007). The upshot of all this was that he insisted on sending CAFCA a donation.

Thank you, Owen, you’re the gift that keeps on giving.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz