Posted on 5/11/2001

Anti-terrorism For Sale To Highest Bidder
by Geoff Fischer*

The New Zealand government's move to enact new "anti-terrorist" laws gives
cause to ask whether involvement in terrorist activities is not already
illegal in New Zealand, and if so, why additional legislation should be
necessary. The answer is that anyone who is a party to terrorism in New
Zealand already commits an offence against the existing Crimes Act. The new
legislation is not needed to either punish or deter terrorists. It will
have no effect upon terrorist activity of any description. And, in fact, it
is not intended to have any effect upon global or domestic terrorism.

New Zealand is nominally opposed to "terrorism", but its opposition has
limits and conditions, which were clearly revealed in the aftermath of the
"Rainbow Warrior" affair. The New Zealand government's decision to free
Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur, after they had been found guilty of
carrying out the fatal bombing, was made in response to a French threat,
(which was tacitly supported by British and the United States governments),
to obstruct New Zealand trade if the two convicted killers were not
repatriated to French territory. Thus, for the New Zealand state,
considerations of morality or sovereignty have never been permitted to
prevail over material interest. The former New Zealand Prime Minister
Robert Muldoon once candidly observed that "New Zealand's foreign policy is
trade", and it is trade considerations which have led New Zealand not only
to acquiesce in an act of terrorism conducted on its own territory, but
also to collaborate in a series of terrorist wars conducted by other states.

New Zealand trained and financed the Indonesian state terrorists who ruled
East Timor for the past quarter century; gave diplomatic recognition to the
ruthless Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia; maintained friendly ties with the
apartheid regime in South Africa; actively participated in crimes against
humanity in the course of the Vietnam war; implicitly supports Israel's
attempts to expropriate and destroy the people of Palestine; and is now an
accomplice in the terror bombing of Afghanistan.

New Zealand has also, in the words of its Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr
Phil Goff "fallen into line" with the "United States, Britain, Canada, and
Australia" by introducing so-called "anti-terrorist" legislation. But this
legislation is not intended to curtail the kinds of terrorist activity with
which the New Zealand state is presently, and always has been, associated,
or the kind of terrorism which New Zealand has tacitly condoned in other
states, such as the long-standing United States and Israeli programmes of
"targetted assassination" of political opponents.

The true intent is to restrict open political cooperation between the
victims and the opponents of the global rule of western capital. Like the
Emergency Regulations legislation enacted by a previous Labour government,
the "anti-terrorism" legislation is being put in place as an instrument for
the subsequent systematic violation of the civil rights of the New Zealand
public. The governments of the United States, Britain, and the British
dominions (Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) want "enduring freedom" to
employ their military power in any part of the world, with or without
invitation, and to ensure the free movement of western capital into, and
the free movement of profits out of, any nation on earth. This is the only
freedom which they are prepared to recognize. The freedom of people to live
peacefully in their own country according to their own faith, the freedom
of people to return to their own homes, the freedom of dispossessed people
to find new homes in other lands, the freedom to of people to establish
solidarity with and to direct charity towards nations suffering under
western domination - these are all freedoms which the New Zealand state and
the western powers are determined shall NOT endure.

At best, New Zealand is playing a pusillanimous role in this war, which is
not a war against terrorism, but a war against humanity. New Zealand has,
as always in the past, put its own economic interests ahead of
considerations of justice and human decency. This deplorable conduct is not
an accident of history but is of the essence of the New Zealand state. For
the person of moral sensibility an appropriate response is the renunciation
of New Zealand citizenship, and uncompromising defiance of the intent of
the so-called "anti-terrorist" legislation.

* fischerg39@xtra.co.nz