Chris Trotter has written a helpful piece on the Urewera 17, providing background and context. The upshot: the Crown has had to drop charges against all but four of the "17" on technical legal grounds.
For benefit of our overseas readers, the Urewera 17 episode involved secretive bush camps in the Urewera forest four years ago with a bunch of Tuhoe Maori and a raggle taggle assortment of fair weather, left wing extremists. The camps were styled as "training camps" and involved practising with guns and explosives. Four years ago, the NZ Police raided the area and arrested a gaggle of the raggle taggles.
They were charged under the Terrorism Suppression Act--a hastily drafted, knee-jerk piece of legislation that Trotter describes as having "many and serious inadequacies".
For a start, when the Clark Government got the willies over the spectre of Islamic suicide bombers infiltrating and attacking New Zealanders, the focus was on "furrigners". Clark had ground to make up: she had infamously justified her evisceration of the NZ Air Force with the cavalier remark that she did not see any strategic threats to New Zealand on the horizon. Then came 9/11 and Clark and her coterie decided that they needed to make up for lost time. The frenzied passage of the Terrorism Suppression Act was one of the outcomes.
One expects that never in a thousand years would Clark and her simpering attendants have thought that terrorism might be home grown and that armed insurrection might occur from within. After all, Clark was riding high in the opinion polls and she had declared that the people loved her and regarded her as being a very competent Prime Minister.
When the Urewera conspiracies came to the attention of the NZ Police--Trotter describes how this most likely occurred--the Police (after receiving legal advice) decided to proceed against the raggle taggle army via the Terrorism Suppression Act, which includes, amongst other things, an indulgence of lower standards of normal investigative procedures. After the arrests, the Police found out they could not proceed under the anti-terrorism statute; they had to resort to the Arms Act. Unfortunately, normal investigative procedures applied under that Act. The upshot is that most of the evidence gathered against the raggle taggle army was rendered inadmissable.
Consequently, what was really going on up in the bush will never be publicly revealed. Trotter sums up:
This matter raises some interesting issues. At first glance the idea that our home grown raggle taggles can be compared with jihadi terrorism seems a very long bow. After all, these folk have lived (most, if not all, of them) off the public purse for years. They are upper middle class armchair revolutionaries, softened by years and years of living off the public welfare teat. While they may have committed a few cowardly and deadly acts, as soon as they were faced with the business end of a police rifle they would have folded like the cowards they undoubtedly are.New Zealand is one of the world’s oldest democracies: a nation committed to the rule of law. The Urewera 17 (or, at least 13 of them) have escaped prosecution and possible conviction because of that commitment. They have taken full advantage of the presumption of innocence, and have strenuously exercised their right to silence.
What they were doing up there in the bush, and to what end, remains hidden in the swirling Urewera mist.
We believe this is the reason why the public immediately jumped to the conclusion that the police had overreacted. These people were clearly not jihadis. They were middle class grievance mongers in search of a cause.
But maybe we should not be too hasty. New Zealand is a socialist nation which has grounded its culture on grievance and grievance mongering. "I have rights, and you are ripping me off" is the accepted dominant discourse of schools, unions, government, politics and media. If everyone believes their particular cause for more of other people's money is just then not to be receive the handout is ipso facto repression. When people come to believe genuinely that they are victims of an unjust repression and begin to coalesce into groups dedicated to redressing their perceived wrongs, armed insurrection and domestic terrorist acts in New Zealand are not impossible.
If, as Margaret Thatcher said, socialism eventually runs out of other people's money, a nation nursed in grievance could easily take to the streets to commit violent atrocities. As the recent riots in Britain show, it is not whether the rioters are relatively wealthy and comfortably provided for, but whether they see themselves as victims and oppressed. Clearly most people in New Zealand do.
There is a "saving grace" in this situation. As long as most people believe they have grounds for grievance all groups tend to remain engaged in the political process. Political parties seek to capture support by arguing that some grievances are more important than others. People stay hopeful that they will be heard and eventually paid off. But when the money runs out--as it eventually will--all bets will be off.
We believe the best outcome would be for the government to take a comprehensive look at the Terrorism Suppression Act, and re-write it, far removed from the peculiar follies of Helen Clark, to incorporate the probability of home-grown, domestic terrorism and armed insurrection in the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment