On the morning of September 12th, 2001, when New Zealand woke to the terrorist attacks in the United States, I can remember feeling (among other things) tangibly embarrassed when then Deputy Prime Minister, Jim Anderton, said the government had “stepped-up” security around the Beehive (New Zealand’s House of Parliament). I cringed because it seemed so ridiculous, like he was trying to be important. Who would ever attack something in New Zealand? Terrorism, bombings and assassinations don’t really happen in New Zealand; they’re the rest of the world’s problems. Whereas leaders of other countries travel in heavily armed cavalcades, our leaders are a little more accessible. Recently defeated Prime Minister Helen Clark’s suburban residence is so “heavily fortified” that a year or two ago its back garden was used as a hiding place by a guy who’d robbed a dairy and was running away from the cops.

This prompted the diplomatic protection agency to be posted next door, but even these highly trained security professionals weren’t enough to stop the house being tagged with graffiti by some kids last December. The closest thing I can think of to a political assassination attempt was when someone chucked a dirt clod at former National party leader, Don Brash, whose concerned wife, on hearing of the incident, immediately called him to ask if his shirt needed cleaning.

New Zealand is not exactly a country rife with terrorism and political violence (domestic violence, maybe, but not political), though it is a country saturated with foreign media, and when so much of this media is dedicated to terrorism, I think we in New Zealand feel a little bit left out. This is perhaps why, when the news was full of anthrax-laced letters being sent to people in the States back in 2001, it didn’t take us long to see, on our own news, guys in chemical suits searching the Turangi Post Office or Queenstown Court House on suspicion of anthrax-infected parcels of our own – and, of course, finding nothing. Like Jean Baudrillard’s idea of “hyper-reality,” where representation precedes reality, we in New Zealand seem to need that sort of shit to feel “real” ourselves, like: “Hey, we’re important enough too!” This mindset perhaps goes some way towards explaining why we apparently suddenly need to find terrorists in New Zealand as well, and why, on October 15th, 2007, 300 police, including the Armed Offenders Squad, conducted a massive, coordinated anti-terrorist operation, Operation 8, across New Zealand, raiding several properties and even blockading an entire town.

18 people were arrested, including prominent activist, Tama Iti, and police attempted to charge 12 of these people under the previously unused Terrorism Suppression Act, 2002 passed four months after September 11th . The Solicitor-General later dismissed these charges due to inadequacies in the legislation those arrested instead currently being prosecuted for firearms offenses). The commando-style raids targeted many people and properties nationwide, but primarily focused on the Maori community of Ruatoki, which was completely locked-down by the police, who alleged they had uncovered terrorist training camps in the Urawera mountains near the town.

The nature of the raids and the logic behind them has been criticized by many however, particularly with respect to the handling of Ruatoki, a Tuhoe town, the Maori tribe with the history of strongest resistance to the Crown. Operation 8 raised a whole lot of human rights issues for New Zealand that had previously been the domain of television and America’s “War on/of Terror.” It sparked massive protest action in New Zealand and several protests in solidarity around the world. The raids have been described by many as a “fishing” exercise by New Zealand’s security/intelligence agencies (excuse the oxy-moron), hoping to find some evidence of terrorism in the country to justify the existence and salaries of departments and positions created after 9/11. Some, like Maori party MP Tariana Turia, have even noted it could be “a softening up exercise for even more hard-line security measures and greater infringement of human rights” in the future.

Frances Mountier might not be a name you will find on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists webpage, nor is the Save Happy Valley Coalition an internationally recognized terrorist organization. However, the police saw fit to raid Frances’ Christchurch house on October 15th because of her association with the group, which, far from being an Al-Qaeda subsidiary, is, in fact, an environmental sit-in protest against a proposed open-cast coal mine on the South Island’s West Coast. The Save Happy Valley Coalition have, to my knowledge, enriched little to no weapons grade plutonium and aim to protect, among other things, a rare breed of snails. Francie says on the morning of October 15th, she was with two Save Happy Valley Coalition members who were being sentenced for blockading a coal train in April that year, “I was just heading out of the Court when I got a call from the media asking if I knew anything about terror raids on activists up north. (It would seem the media called anyone and everyone on their books who had some relationship to activism and political organizing!) I’d heard nothing but rushed home and woke my flatmate.” Francie and her flatmate then had to brace themselves for a ruthlessly efficient New Zealand-style terror raid, “The head cop at ours was from the CIB (Organised Crime Unit) in Wellington! My flatmate asked them repeatedly if they had a warrant and as they didn’t he told them to get off the property, and eventually they left.”

While that “raid” may have been slightly hilariously incompetent, Francie notes that, “The police full-on raided one home in Christchurch (complete with Armed Offenders squad and dawn arrival). They made visits to our house and three others. In Wellington and around the country Armed Offenders squads raided over 60 homes. It is very telling that while they didn’t shut down suburbs around any of these houses, when it came to Ruatoki the police shut down the road, forced people out of their cars at gunpoint, searched a kohanga reo bus, stood on the confiscation line, etc”. Indeed, the police approach at Ruatoki was markedly different to the rest of the country, which is one of the most troubling aspects of the anti-terrorist operation, as it was this small Maori town, as a community, that received exclusively heavy-handed treatment.

As mentioned above, the entire town was locked-down by police – an event unprecedented in living memory in New Zealand – who stopped and searched every vehicle going in and out of the town. Armed police in balaclavas arrived around dawn, storming into four dwellings and three “non-dwellings,” and detained five people, but only ended-up prosecuting two. People were hauled out of bed at gunpoint in the early hours of the morning and herded into prescribed areas where they were kept under guard for several hours. According to Peter Williams QC, the lawyer representing Ruatoki residents in a lawsuit against the police, adult victims of the raid “were not allowed to get food or blankets for hungry, crying children, and a girl as young as 15 was subjected to “an intimate body search”. Armed police even allegedly searched a school bus, though the police deny this. There are even reports of police trashing houses, kicking in doors, and causing other damage to property like “holes smashed in the ceilings”.

The egregious use of force by officers involved can, perhaps, largely be attributed to major flaws in the planning of the operation. As journalist Nicky Hager notes, “Most of the officers who took part knew nothing about the case in advance. They were brought together for briefings at 3am on Monday, October 15, [2 hours before the raids began] many thinking they were part of another P lab operation.” Hager says the officers were briefed that they would be going into to deal with heavily armed IRA-style groups, and that “With little time to digest the news, the officers headed out fired-up and ready to subdue the terrorists. Soon people were waking up with doors being smashed in, machine guns pressed to heads and families held at gunpoint.”

Police storm-trooper action occurred in other places raided, but why was it only Ruatoki, as a community, that was blockaded? As Moana Jackson notes, “When houses were raided in Auckland and Wellington the surrounding suburbs were not locked down, and no innocent Pakeha people [European New Zealanders] were stopped going about their daily lives.” That people were ordered out of their cars and photographed against their will in Ruatoki was also a blatant breach of the law, as “The Police simply do not have that right,” and this occurred nowhere else. As Jackson points-out, “It was only in Ruatoki that innocent people were stopped, searched and harassed.”

Indeed, the significance of police acting this way towards Tuhoe, the tribe that resisted colonial rule for the longest and which has a tragic history at the hands of the Crown, was not lost on many. Government land confiscation in 1866 cut-off Tuhoe access to the sea and left with them relatively poor farming area, causing famines that destroyed the population in later years. Many considered it provocative that it was along this “confiscation line” that police set up their October 15th roadblock, a line that Tuhoe member Tamiti Kruger says driving through feels “like it would if you had to travel every day past a point where your family was murdered”. Was this purely insensitivity, or deliberate?

For some in Ruatoki, the invocation of the Terrorism Suppression Act as the means of prosecution was eerily reminiscent of the Tohunga Suppression Act used against Tuhoe leader Rua Kenana in 1916, and the raids brought back collective memories this tragedy, where 57 police were dispatched against the Iwi’s leader deep in Ureweras, in what most now consider to have been an “illegal armed invasion“. Some people even held-up banners with Kenana’s name on it outside the Rotorua courthouse where Tame Iti was being tried.

That Tame Iti himself was among those arrested was also interesting, as he has long been a figurehead of resistance to the government in New Zealand. His distinctive full facial moko (tattoo) is intimidating to many, and some people find his protest methods offensive, New Zealand radio host Leighton Smith even calling him “a pig, a savage” for “spitting and snotting” at the Government during a seabed and foreshore protest (though the same case for offensiveness could easily be made about the shit comes out of Smith’s mouth). In 2005, Iti was prosecuted for firing a shotgun into a New Zealand flag on the ground during the powhiri for a Waitangi Tribunal hearing (though curiously not for the infinitely more offensive act of subjecting the public to his hanging naked rear end).

Graham Jury, spokesperson extraordinaire for the Save Happy Valley Coalition and prominent New Zealand sex symbol, perhaps best sums up the significance of Ruatoki and Tame Iti being targeted by Operation 8:

“I think an autonomous region of the country that does not cede government rule is very provocative to a government that has methodically stamped out all other such cesspits of people exercising their right not follow what institutionalized colonial murderers tell them to. Tame Iti is a particularly provocative gentleman… who has been a sitting duck for this kind of attention for some time. Anarchists and activists have always been the enemy within, and new anti-terror legislation made direct intervention a genuine legitimate possibility for the state. Don’t stick your neck out or it will meet an axe.”

In this case, the axe’s affidavit is that Tame Iti and up to 40 others were operating paramilitary training camps in the use of firearms and other weaponry in the Urewera mountain range behind Ruatoki. The alleged aim of the people involved was to wage an “IRA-style” separatist campaign, with the police affidavit contending that the ultimate aim was “to secure an independent Tuhoe Nation.” Police commissioner Howard Broad said the police acted on what they considered to be a “genuine threat to public safety” after conducting a year-long surveillance campaign, videoing camp attendees and monitoring emails, text messages and phone calls. The Dominion Post reported that Tame Iti allegedly said he was going to “make war on New Zealand”, and one suspect, Jamie Lockett, is reported to have said, “I am training to be a very, very vicious commando… White men are going to die in this country. Anyone with a white face comes near me if they haven’t got f***ing manners or call me sir, I’ll f***ing kill them.” Though Lockett claims to have known he was under surveillance for a long time, and that such communications were a deliberate “wind-up” for the cops. In total, four guns and 230 rounds of ammunition were seized (70 fewer bullets than required to shoot all the officers involved in the operation), with rumors of the groups possessing semi-automatic weapons, Molotov cocktails, and napalm. However, due to the prosecution under the Terrorism Suppression Act being dismissed by the Solicitor-General, most the evidence gathered by police can never be disclosed.

It should be mentioned that the Solicitor-General David Collins’s dismissal was not based on lack of evidence, saying the police inquiry had uncovered some “very disturbing activities,” but rather due to inadequacies in the Terrorism Suppression Act, which, as mentioned above, was rushed through parliament after 9/11. This reaction to September 11th is undoubtedly the key factor leading to the October 15th raids, and Nicky Hager assesses, “By late 2002 the new anti-terrorism bureaucracy was in place, closely tied into US and British thinking [my emphasis].” With the passage of the Act, a raft of new anti-terrorism forces and agencies were created in New Zealand. As noted on IndyMedia,

“The following positions have been established since 2001:

· An Assistant Commissioner, Jon White, to take an executive lead on counter-terrorism and national security matters

· A full time Special Tactics Group to respond operationally to terrorist emergencies

· A full time Specialist Search Group and National Bomb Data Centre Manager

· A new Strategic Intelligence Unit (SIU)

· New liaison positions at diplomatic missions in London, Washington DC and Jakarta, and the pending creation of a further liaison position in Suva.”

As well, “An extra 35 “national security” police posts were added in 2004, the majority in “investigative and intelligence” units.” Hager notes, “The Security Intelligence Service also got 20 new anti-terrorism staff at that time. Their task: increasing terrorism intelligence collection within New Zealand…and, like the police, an SIS officer was posted to the Washington embassy to increase collaboration with the US intelligence and security agencies.” As Hager also points-out, the agencies began to target protest groups around the time of the United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003, where police began to crack-down with unusual force, and “written briefings for the minister of police on US embassy protests were not written by the ordinary Wellington police, but by counter-terrorism assistant commissioner Jon White.” Police also began cracking-down on environmental and animal rights activists. Of the hundreds arrested, or harassed very few have been charged with any offenses at all.

Frances Mountier was, of course, one of the many charged with nothing, and says with regards to the October 15th raids, that it’s “really important to remember that the state had put millions into finding terrorists – and so the Police went looking for terrorists and narrated it like they’d found some. That’s the logic of the state.” This is an opinion shared by many, with even Ross Meurant, former policeman and head of the notorious Red Squad anti-protest force from the 1981 South African rugby team tour, saying,

“The problem as I see it is, that information they have has been self assessed by the same people who collate the data…all of whom view society from within the forest [=police culture] and with vested interests in producing an outcome which justifies the retention of their unit. These subjective conclusions are presented to judicial officers as the basis of justification for warrants and implementation of anti terror legislation which abrogate the most basic of our legal rights.”

Or, as an article on IndyMedia puts it: “It is a mad cycle: legislation passed; budget increased, special units set up; report about ‘threats’ found; budget increased, staff increased; more threats found”.

Ultimately, as Nicky Hager summarises: “The problem appears to be a mixture of poor judgement, preconceived ideas and organisational vested interest. Anti-terrorism staff arranged ill-fitting evidence, on people they’d already defined as threats, into the picture they were being paid to find. It was inductive logic reinforced by group think, as NZ officials unthinkingly followed the American-style “security” model that’s been so spectacularly bad at providing real security and peace elsewhere.”

Indeed, “security and peace” were shattered for the people of Ruatoki and elsewhere, whose houses were raided on October 15th, and its potentially traumatic effect on the children involved is one of the worst aspects of the operation. Professor Innes Asher, of Starship Childrens’ Hospital says of the raids: “This will go down in history as the most terribly abuse [sic], by authority of figures, against New Zealand children… It’s the most profound abuse of power in our memory, in the century.”

Its effect on race relations in New Zealand is almost as damaging. Says Rawiri Taonui, head of the Maori and Indigenous Studies School at the University of Canterbury, “This is an appalling follow on from the foreshore and seabed debacle, consecutive damning UN reports on Maori rights and the government’s reprehensible opposition to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. There is widespread disquiet within Maoridom. People who already feel marginalised are further alienated.” And this is particularly true for the people of Tuhoe, their land portrayed as a terrorist hiding place. Taonui paints a more balanced picture of the Ureweras:

“It is no secret that there are scores of camps in the Urewera. Many are bare hunters’ sites like the one police raided; others are huge wharenui, constructed from logs and tarpaulins, sleeping 60 to 100 people… Hundreds of Tuhoe family members flock there during school holidays, Christmas and New Year, relaxing, swimming, learning traditional lore, rongoa (medicines), taiaha, bush craft, survival and firearms use… There are lots of guns… Every lower socio-economic home has an old .303 and a .22 for hunting kai. Gangs, guns and dope growing will complicate things, as will historical tensions between commercial and local hunters Urewera crews took pot-shots at each other a few years back… Police may have legitimate prosecutions over unlicensed guns under the Firearms Act, but terrorist accusations are simple scaremongering. Osama bin Laden does not live in the Ureweras, turbans and tataramoa (bush law) simply don’t mix. Ruatoki will not invade Auckland. Who would pay for the gas?… This is about scaring the community to enhance state power and restore a faltering police force beset by allegations of sexual misconduct, cover ups, fatal car chases, computer porn scandals and failing 111 [New Zealand's emergency number] systems.”

New Zealand has a long, proud tradition as a politically progressive nation in many respects – we were the first country in which women were able to vote, for example – but this is curiously juxtaposed with a wide conservative, largely politically apathetic base (enabling the election of the National party last week). While there has been widespread condemnation, talking to people when I was last back in New Zealand revealed many people are also supportive of the police raids, and don’t think they were an overreaction at all.

Again, Graham Jury eloquently and succinctly phrases this condition:

“We are a conservative, middleclass white nation that sometimes pays lip service to liberal ideas… The wider sentiment of the ‘great New Zealand public’ is that the Maori should just get over it and that social change activists should just go and get jobs. We are a people with no nationalism, no cohesion and a diminishing respect for our natural heritage. Accordingly we let ourselves get brutalised by conservative foreign legislation in the name of progress. And people do not give a damn because it is not cool to do so”.

New Zealanders have long sucked-up American culture; our TV and movie screens are still dominated by it, and we constantly assimilate American-style trends, from fashion to language, into our own culture. Blinding fear of and overreaction to terrorism however, is one trend I think we can do without, especially if it involves wasting tax-payers money to create it. As Taonui says: “The only evidence of terrorism [on October 15th, 2007] was a phalanx of fools dressed in black targeting a poor brown community and those who dare to keep democracy honest by thinking differently.”

Sixteen people are still facing trial and possible prison sentences in relation to the anti-terror terrorization, and information about the court proceedings and how to support these 18 can be found here.

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