Despite differences in their political systems, all three governments follow an approach that prioritises “national morale” and “operational security” over press freedom and the flow of information.

This approach redefines the concept of fake news and extends its authority to managing public sentiment, making coverage more “positive” and “optimistic”.

The goal is unified: to turn media into a state mouthpiece that tells only the official narrative of the war.

The Trump administration’s political pressure
In the US, media restrictions don’t appear as direct bans on journalism, as in more authoritarian systems. Instead, pressure comes through political and regulatory channels, alongside attempts to shape the war narrative against Iran.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr warned broadcasters they could lose their licences if they aired what he described as “false news” about the war.

In a post on X on March 14, Carr said stations airing “misleading” information had the opportunity “to correct course” before licence renewal. He added: “The law is clear: broadcast stations must operate in the public interest, or they will lose their licences.”

Later, President Donald Trump said he was extremely pleased to see Carr review licences of “corrupt” and “unpatriotic” news organisations because they “coordinate with Iran” and “should face treason charges”.

Regulatory pressure is accompanied by a political and media campaign to shape a specific image of the war.

Trump attacked major newspapers such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal for reports of damage to US military aircraft at a Saudi base, calling them “degenerate journalism” that wanted the country to “lose the war”.

This pressure has also extended to the military.

At a Pentagon press conference, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth accused the media of downplaying the success of the military campaign against Iran, criticised coverage of operations, suggested alternative headlines for television reports, and named CNN specifically, saying its performance would improve if ownership and management changed.

In an incident bordering on the absurd, The Washington Post reported that the Pentagon barred journalists from attending war briefings after Hegseth’s team objected to his appearance in previously taken photos, restricting access to Pentagon photographers.

Nevertheless, pressures did not start with the war on Iran.

In October 2025, the Department of War announced a new policy regulating journalists’ work inside the Pentagon, requiring official approval before publishing any information, even if it was not classified.

The Trump administration justified the restrictions as necessary for national security. Hegseth said access to the Pentagon was “a privilege, not a right,” while Trump argued the limits were needed because the press was “dishonest”.

Measures included removing dedicated offices for some media outlets and replacing them with shared facilities under a new rotation system.

Israel kills three Lebanese journalists                   Video: Al Jazeera

Israel’s approach
In Israel, media restrictions during war take a different form that is based on strict military censorship and obstructing journalists in the field, in addition to targeting media institutions in Iran and Lebanon.

This month, the Israeli military censor issued new instructions to foreign media limiting coverage of rocket attacks within Israel.

These included banning live broadcasts during sirens, forbidding filming missile interceptions or impact sites near security installations, and preventing the publication of exact impact locations or reposting videos from social media without prior approval.

Authorities justified the restrictions as a way to prevent opponents from using media coverage to “improve missile strike accuracy”.

Israeli forces detained CNN Türk reporter Emrah Cakmak and cameraman Khalil Kahraman during a live broadcast from Tel Aviv following an Iranian missile attack, confiscating their phones, camera, and microphone, and accessing a password-protected phone without permission.

The journalists stated that their equipment was not returned.

On the same day, Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Communications Minister Shlomo Karai announced stricter measures against foreign media violating military censorship instructions, adopting a policy of “zero tolerance”.

Authorities also detained Turkish journalists Ilyas Efe Ünal and Adam Metan while crossing from Egypt into Israel on March 4. Metan said they were interrogated for about six hours before being released.

The following day, Haifa municipal police attempted to remove international media teams covering war-related events, including CNN, Fox News, BBC, Anadolu Agency, and Al Arabiya, despite journalists following military censorship rules.

Days later, on March 8, Israeli police prevented Al Araby TV correspondent Abdelkader Abdel Halim from continuing coverage in Haifa, with an officer captured on video saying that “filming is prohibited in Haifa.”

Israeli strikes also targeted media institutions in Lebanon and Iran, and have killed five journalists in Lebanon in the past month — three of them (including a woman) just yesterday in a targeted assassination.

According to Reporters Without Borders, two-thirds of all journalists killed around the world last year were by Israel, mostly in Gaza.

Several Lebanese media outlets were hit during Israel’s raids, including Sawt Al-Farah radio in Tyre, Al Nour radio, and Al Manar TV in Haret Hreik in Beirut’s southern suburbs. And in a separate strike, Saksakiyah media centre in southern Lebanon was also targeted.

In Iran, strikes hit the state-run Radio Dezful offices in Khuzestan, the headquarters of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting in Tehran, a communications centre near the building, as well as the Kurdistan Network TV building in Sanandaj, and the reformist newspaper Sazandegi in Tehran.

Iran’s internet shutdown
If the US uses regulatory tools and Israel relies on military censorship and field restrictions, Iran’s model is based on direct control of information flow. Hours after the US-Israeli aggression began, authorities cut the nationwide internet.

Journalists said the outage hampered communication with sources, sending reports and photos, and verifying field information, while a limited number of users, including state media, retained restricted access through a government-controlled “white internet”.

As the war continued, Tehran tightened legal restrictions on media coverage.

The judiciary criminalised filming or covering US or Israeli strikes in Iran, considering the publication of such material as potential “evidence of cooperation with an enemy“.

Confrontations escalated with calls to target opposition media.

The Tabnak website published an article urging the armed forces to target Iran International TV and suggesting taking action against the channel’s offices and the homes of some staff.

Security agencies carried out a series of arrests in several provinces for sending photos and information about strikes to foreign media, including Iran International, classified by Iran as a “terrorist channel”.

Majdoline Al-Shammouri is a writer based in Beirut. This article was translated from Arabic by Afrah Almatwari and was first published by The New Arab here.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

When Iraqi troops attacked the Saudi border town of Khafji during the first Gulf War, Saudi soldiers fled in panic. Two French photographers and I watched frantic soldiers commandeering fire trucks and racing south. US Marines pushed the Iraqis back.

But in Riyadh, the press was told of our gallant Saudi allies defending their homeland. Once fighting ended, the press bus stopped a few miles down the road from Khafji. The pool reporters clambered out, escorted by military minders. They did stand-ups with the distant sound of artillery and smoke as a backdrop and repeated the lies the Pentagon wanted to tell.

Meanwhile, the two photographers and I were detained and beaten by enraged Saudi military police, furious that we had documented the panicked flight of Saudi forces, as we tried to leave Khafji.

My refusal to abide by press restrictions in the first Gulf War saw the other New York Times reporters in Saudi Arabia write a letter to the foreign editor saying I was ruining the paper’s relationship with the military. If not for the intervention of R.W. “Johnny” Apple, who had covered Vietnam, I would have been sent back to New York.

I do not fault anyone for not wanting to go into a war zone. This is a sign of normality. It is rational. It is understandable. Those of us who volunteer to go into combat — my colleague Clyde Haberman at The New York Times once quipped “Hedges will parachute into a war with or without a parachute” — have obvious personality defects.

Pretend war correspondents
But I fault those who pretend to be war correspondents. They do tremendous damage. They peddle false narratives. They mask reality. They serve as witting — or unwitting — propagandists. They discredit the voices of the victims and exonerate the killers.

When I covered the war in El Salvador, before I worked for The New York Times, the paper’s correspondent dutifully regurgitated whatever the embassy fed her. This had the effect of making my editors — as well as editors of the other correspondents who did report the war– question our veracity and “impartiality.”

It made it harder for readers to understand what was happening. The false narrative neutered and often overpowered the real one.

The slander used to discredit my Palestinian colleagues — claiming they are members of Hamas — is sadly familiar. Many Palestinian reporters I know in Gaza are, in fact, quite critical of Hamas. But even if they have ties with Hamas, so what?

Israel’s attempt to justify targeting journalists from the Hamas-run al-Aqsa media network is also a violation of Article 79 of the Geneva Convention.

I worked with reporters and photographers who had a wide variety of beliefs, including Marxist-Leninists in Central America. This did not prevent them from being honest. I was in Bosnia and Kosovo with a Spanish cameraman, Miguel Gil Moreno, who was later killed with my friend Kurt Schork.

Miguel was a member of the right-wing Catholic group Opus Dei. He was also a journalist of tremendous courage, great compassion and moral probity, despite his opinions about Spain’s fascist ruler Francisco Franco. He did not lie.

Seeking to crush
In every war I covered, I was attacked as supporting or belonging to whatever group the government, including the US government, was seeking to crush. I was accused of being a tool of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front in El Salvador, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity, the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, Hamas, the Muslim-led government in Bosnia and the Kosovo Liberation Army.

John Simpson of the BBC, like many Western reporters, argues that the “world needs honest, unbiased eyewitness reporting to help people make up their minds about the major issues of our time. This has so far been impossible in Gaza.”

The assumption that if Western reporters were in Gaza the coverage would improve is risible. Trust me. It would not.

Israel bans the foreign press because there is a bias in Europe and the United States in favour of reporting by Western reporters. Israel is aware that the scale of the genocide is too vast for Western outlets to hide or obscure, despite all the ink and airtime they give to Israeli and US apologists.

Israel also cannot continue its systematic campaign of annihilation of journalists in Gaza if it has to contend with foreign media in its midst.

Israeli lies amplified by Western media outlets, including my former employer The New York Times, are worthy of Pravda. Beheaded babies. Babies cooked in ovens. Mass rape by Hamas. Errant Palestinian rockets that cause explosions at hospitals and massacre civilians. Secret command tunnels and command centers in schools and hospitals. Journalists who direct Hamas rocket units. Protesters of the genocide on college campuses who are antisemites and supporters of Hamas.

Israel ‘lies like it breathes’
I covered the conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis, much of that time in Gaza, for seven years. If there is one indisputable fact, it is that Israel lies like it breathes. The decision by Western reporters to give credibility to these lies, to give them the same weight as documented Israeli atrocities, is a cynical game.

The reporters know these lies are lies. But they, and the news outlets that employ them, prize access — in this case access to Israeli and US officials — above truth. The reporters, as well as their editors and publishers, fear becoming targets of Israel and the powerful Israel lobby.

There is no cost for betraying the Palestinians. They are powerless.

Call those lies out and you will swiftly find your requests for briefings and interviews with officials rebuffed. You won’t be invited by press officers to participate in staged visits to Israeli military units. You and your news organisation will be viciously attacked.

You will be left out in the cold. Your editors will terminate your assignment or your employment. This is not good for careers. And so, the lies are dutifully repeated, no matter how absurd.

It is pathetic watching these reporters and their news outlets, as Fisk writes, fight “like tigers to join these ‘pools’ in which they would be censored, restrained and deprived of all freedom of movement on the battlefield”.

When Middle East Eye journalists Mohamed Salama and Ahmed Abu Aziz, along with Reuters photojournalist Hussam al-Masri, and freelancers Moaz Abu Taha, and Mariam Dagga — who had worked with several media outlets, including the Associated Press — were killed in a “double tap” strike — designed to kill first responders arriving to treat casualties from initial strikes — at Nasser Medical Complex, how did Western news agencies respond?

‘Hamas camera’
“Israeli military says strikes on Gaza hospital targeted what it says was a Hamas camera,” the Associated Press reported.

“IDF claims hospital strike was aimed at Hamas camera,” announced CNN.

“Israel army says six ‘terrorists’ killed in Monday strikes on Gaza hospital,” the AFP headline read.

“Initial inquiry says Hamas camera was target of Israeli strike that killed journalists,” Reuters said.

“Israel claims troops saw Hamas camera before deadly hospital attack,” Sky News explained.

Just for the record, the camera belonged to Reuters, which said Israel was “fully aware” the news agency was filming from the hospital.

When Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif and three other journalists were killed on August 10 in their media tent near al-Shifa Hospital, how was it reported in the Western press?

Pulitzer prize-winner
“Israel Kills Al Jazeera Journalist It Says Was Hamas Leader,” Reuters titled its story, despite the fact al-Sharif was part of a Reuters team that won a 2024 Pulitzer Prize.

The German newspaper Bild, published a front page story headlined: “Terrorist disguised as a journalist killed in Gaza.”

The barrage of Israeli lies amplified and given credibility by the Western press violates a fundamental tenet of journalism, the duty to transmit the truth to the viewer or reader.

It legitimizes mass slaughter. It refuses to hold Israel to account. It betrays Palestinian journalists, those reporting and being killed in Gaza. And it exposes the bankruptcy of Western journalists, whose primary attributes are careerism and cowardice.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report”. This article is republished from his X account.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

A Ukrainian man who complained about an RNZ story last year having Russian propaganda says his concerns are only now being noticed.

It comes after the revelation a staff member altered Reuters copy to include pro-Russian sentiment.

Since Friday, 250 articles published on RNZ back to January last year have been audited.

Of those articles, 15 are now known to have been altered, and an RNZ employee has been placed on leave. Fourteen of the articles were from the Reuters wire service, and one was from BBC.

An independent review of the editing of online stories has been commissioned by RNZ.

Michael Lidski, who wrote the complaint, signed by several Ukrainian and Russian-born New Zealanders said the article he complained about appeared not only on RNZ, but The New Zealand Herald and Newshub as well.

Lidski said it took some time after the article was published to send the complaint letter to RNZ to make sure everyone who signed it was happy with what it said.

It was received by RNZ on the evening of Labour Day, October 24.

Russian ‘behavior similar to Nazi Germany’
“Obviously Russia is the aggressor and behaving very similar to what the Nazi Germany did in the beginning of the Second World War,” Lidski said.

“Luckily”, he said, Russia was much less “efficient” and “successful on the front” but not so luckily, they were “very efficient” in their propaganda.

Lidski said he also sent the complaint to Broadcasting Minister Willie Jackson and other media outlets – but Jackson was the only one to provide any response.

Lidski said Jackson’s response essentially said the government could not interfere with the press and refrained from “taking sides”.

As part of the audit, RNZ reviewed the story published on rnz.co.nz on May 26, 2022 relating to the war in Ukraine, which it said was updated later that day to give further balance after an editorial process was followed.

When Lidski sent his letter, he said he received no response from RNZ.

Awaiting external review
He said he would be waiting to see what comes of the external review.

“I just want to stress that we are not dealing with a situation where someone just made a mistake.

“We are in the war, the enemy is attacking us, it’s very important that, you know, we take it seriously.”

RNZ chief executive Paul Thompson declined to speak with Morning Report today, describing the breaches of editorial standards as extremely serious.

In a statement, Thompson said it was a “very challenging time for RNZ and the organisations focus is on getting to the bottom of what happened and being open and transparent”.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Veteran journalist Robert Fisk, who for decades covered events in the Middle East and elsewhere as a foreign correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent, has died after suffering a suspected stroke at his Dublin home.

Fisk became unwell on Friday and was admitted to St Vincent’s Hospital where he died a short time later, reports Al Jazeera English.

Almost six months ago, RNZ Saturday Morning’s Kim Hill did the following interview with Fisk. The Pacific Media Centre republishes this article here as a tribute to the celebrated journalist.

Celebrated veteran war correspondent Robert Fisk believed that journalists aren’t automatons keeping neutral battle scores between oppressed and oppressors and are duty-bound to ensure history isn’t written by politicians.

Fisk, who had spent the past 40 years living in war zones covering conflicts in the Middle East, the Balkans and Ireland, died last Friday. He was 74.

He argued that journalists and editors cower from reporting honestly because of corporate and political influence.

He told Kim Hill in an interview in May that the notion unbiased reporting must not take a moral position was a nonsense and that journalists should, at the very least, challenge narratives of power, which were usually distortions of truth.

The high-profile career of the Englishman who took Irish nationality was the focus of This Is Not A Movie, a documentary by Canadian director Yung Chang about the journalist screened in New Zealand’s 2020 Doc Edge Festival.

Fisk broke several big stories in his time, even landing an interview with Osama bin Laden, notorious Saudi founder of the pan-Islamic terror group al-Qaeda.

A story that didn’t make it on to the front page of The Times – his former employer – was one exposing US responsibility for shooting down a Iranian passenger aircraft in 1988, at the tail end of the Iraq-Iran war.

Verified story spiked
The story, which Fisk verified using local air traffic control sources, was spiked and instead the paper published claims by the US navy that the pilot had tried to carry out a suicide mission on a US warship in the Gulf. His story was eventually published by Ireland’s Sunday Tribune, with Fisk resigning and moving to rival newspaper The Independent.

“I thought, that’s the time I go. If I’m going to risk my life for a newspaper but my editor will not risk his reputation with his owner over a story of mine then it’s time I left,” he said.

Fisk said The Times editor toed owner Rupert Murdoch’s political line, telling him his story was rubbish. An official inquiry by US authorities subsequently backed the content of Fisk’s story.

“It’s a sort of self-censorship… the problem is once you have a ruthless owner and you know your livelihood is in the pocket of that man – and if you’re not fortunate enough to have the reputation that can possibly get you another job – there is a tendency to start not wanting to rock the boat… so it’s in the journalists’ blood, as it is the editors’, not to do something that will cause a ‘crisis’.”

He said this power dynamic affected the way reporters framed stories and reflected the type of politically-contrived language used too. Not least in the Middle East, and especially when dealing with Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

“That’s why, for example, journalists refer to the Israeli wall separating the West Bank as a ‘security fence’, because they don’t want to offend the Israelis and Israel’s supporters by calling it a wall, even though it is higher and longer than the Berlin Wall.

“That’s why we call it a ‘Jewish settlement’ in the West Bank, when it’s a Jewish colony… which has a kind of soft impression of settlements in the Wild West perhaps, of course, you think of the Native Americans attacking them.

Distorting the Palestinian struggle
“And also you have this thing where you must never talk about a war between Israel and the Palestinians, it’s always a dispute… it’s more of course, it’s one group of people stealing other people’s land. By de-semiticising this conflict, because we are frightened of what editors or owners will say… we effectively say ‘there must be something wrong when the Palestinians throw stones, they must be generically a violent people’. So, in a sense, we contribute towards warfare, by self-censorship.”

He rejected the concept of giving a false “balance” to stories – that, in some fashion, balance was the ultimate measure of reporting. It was not enough that a journalist merely kept an accurate score of events in a conflict situation, without taking into account history or power differentials.

The argument that a slave owner’s views on the slave trade must be used to strike balance in a story for it to be fair and accurate, he argued, was morally absurd. So too with a Nazi’s views in a story dealing with the extermination of Jews.

Fisk cites a contemporary example – the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982. Scores of Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites were killed by a militia linked to a right-wing Lebanese party, allies of Israel.

The names of at least 1390 were identified, with some death-toll estimates nearly tripling that number. Fisk was on the scene in Lebanon.

Robert Fisk on ’50/50 journalism’. Video: Pacific Media Centre

“I did not spend my time giving equal time to the killers,” he said. “I talked to the relatives of the dead and tried to find out the identities of the dead… My feeling is, you must be neutral and unbiased, but unbiased on the side of those who suffer.

“The idea that we are some kind of robotic creature that reports wars as if it’s a football match, where you give equal time to each side, is a bloody tragedy. It is not a football match.”

Landed in hot water
Fisk’s manner of reporting landed him in hot water at times. In Belfast, he was accused of giving succour to the IRA because he exposed British security force brutality during the Anglo-Irish conflict, which ended in the 1990s.

More recently, he was attacked for undermining those attempting to overthrow Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, after a story questioned proof Assad’s forces had carried out a deadly chemical attack in April 2018.

The documentary This Is Not A Movie highlights a story Fisk wrote that found no trace of a chemical attack in Douma that had supposedly killed dozens of civilians, a story widely disseminated by western media.

He travelled to the Syrian town and talked exhaustively with local people to find proof of the attack, even inspecting underground tunnels of interest, again finding nothing to back the veracity of the claims.

Fisk talked to a doctor, who said respiratory distress by civilians had been caused by a dust storm created by nearby joint Syrian and Russian bombings.

“The final report of Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons did in fact censor out some of the evidence by its own scientists so that it would say that it’s an open-and-shut case that Assad did use gas. In fact, its own staff could not finally prove gas was used,” he said.

This didn’t stop verbal attacks suggesting he’d done Assad a favour. Fisk brushed this off as merely something to be expected if a journalist was doing their job properly.

“If we don’t do that we’re handing over the writing of history to political parties,” he said.

‘Do our best to get at the truth’
“We simply have to bash on and do our best to get at the truth, even though in Douma I couldn’t establish what it was, at least  we raise the doubt.”

Getting to grips with history was essential if serious reporters wanted to do their jobs properly, illuminating meaning behind what would otherwise seem random or vindictive acts of violence, Fisk said.

“I do very much think you cannot report a war or go to a war without at least a very good history book in your back pocket… without knowing what lies underneath the embers you don’t know why the fire is burning.”

An understanding of World War I and the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which ended the war between Germany and allied forces, could account of much of the antecedents of conflict in the Middle East, he said. The treaty, in part, amounted to a carve-up of imperial rights to occupy nations and created divisive, artificial lines of territory across the region.

“I think there’s an automatic connection between the collapse of industrial civilisation and WWI and then a peace treaty that was effectively going to collapse the ruins of the Ottaman Empire in 1919 and from that came all these borders… particularly the borders of Iraq and Lebanon and Syria and Turkey and all my working life in the Middle East and indeed also in Yugoslavia and Belfast I’ve watched over the past 50 years all the people within those borders burn.

“I said to my friend in Beruit yesterday I think the reason we’re not finding evidence of covid-19 among the Middle Eastern people is that, for them, it was covid 1919 – Versailles was their infection and that continues now to spread its disease across the Middle East, of injustice, lack of independence and lack of freedom.”

Good journalism was needed as much now as at any time in history. He said the hope that the world was getting better with the defeat of Fascism and the establishment of post-war institutions like the United Nations and human rights organisations had proven false. The historical causes of conflict hadn’t be resolved.

Living with tragedy every day
“When you go into the alleyways of the world, the Palestinian camps in Beirut for example, and you actually talk to the people there you realise that they are living in squalor and dirt because Arthur Balfour, the British foreign secretary, signed the Balfour Agreement in 1917, and because the victorious allies, principally the French and the British divided up the Middle East. Britain would have Palestine and France would get Syria and Lebanon in the aftermath of that war and for those people, waking up in their hovels everyday, Balfour signed the declaration last night.

“For them Versailles happened yesterday and history in their experience is something that they are living tragically with every day.

“Whereas we people can luxuriate in a post-war world with values of civilisation, or we think we do, and technology to look after us.”

Journalism should question our cozy, false impression of ourselves as enlightened and civilised Westerners, who conveniently see others embroiled in conflict as lacking these values. He also pointed out a Western hypocrisy of rightly attacking anyone who denied the German holocaust against the Jewish people, yet those in the West allowed Turkey to deny its own Armenian holocaust in 1915, when 1.5 million Christians were killed.

Our complicity in imperialist wars and attitudes should be challenged by reporting facts within an authentic historical context, shorn of political spin.

“One of the things I think journalists have to do, as well as recognise the goodness of ordinary people, is to try and find out why ordinary people do wicked things,” Fisk said.

“We all sort of participate in it in the sense that we wring our hands with anguish when a hospital is destroyed in northern Syria but when a hospital is destroyed in Mosul by an American aircraft we do not wring our hands.

Pandemic pushes Yemen from sight
“We wait to see if the Americans will give us an explanation and then we hope that their claim that they didn’t hit the hospital is true. Same applies to wedding parties and medical centres in Afghanistan and so on.

“When you consider that half a million Iraqis might have died as a result of the Anglo-American illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, when people used to say to me, ‘why don’t you want Tony Blair and George Bush put on trial’, I would always say ‘because they are not going to be put on trial’ there’s no point in wasting your energies’. Now I’m not so sure that would be my reply.”

With the current pandemic the focus of the world’s attention, the situation in places like Yemen had fallen from sight. But, he said, the intractable problems of the region were continuing without any respite.

“One of the great tragedies of the coronavirus pandemic is that the whole Middle East tragedy, of injustice, dispossession and blood, has basically faded away from all of us who are concentrating on our own families, our own countries, and we’ve largely forgotten that long after Covid-19 is in the history books, the same terrible history will continue in these regions.”

This article is republished by the Pacific Media Centre under a partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz