More than 400 candidates have put their hands up to contest the Bougainville general election in September, hoping to enter Parliament.
Incumbent President Ishmael Toroama is among the 404 people lining up to win a seat.
Bougainville is involved in the process of achieving independence from Papua New Guinea — an issue expected to dominate campaigning, which lasts until the beginning of September.
Voting is scheduled to start on September 2, finishing a week later, depending on the weather.
Seven candidates — all men — are contesting the Bougainville presidency. This number is down from when 25 people stood, including two women.
Toroama is seeking a second term and is being challenged by his former colleague in the leadership of the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA), Sam Kauona.
Kauona is one of several contesting a second time, along with Thomas Raivet and a former holder of the Bougainville Regional Seat in the PNG Parliament, Joe Lera.
There are 46 seats to be decided, including six new constituencies.
Two seats will have 21 candidates: the northern seat of Peit and the Ex-Combatants constituency.
Several other constituencies — Haku, Tsitalato, Taonita Tinputz, Taonita Teop, Rau, and Kokoda — also have high numbers of candidates.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Almost two months ago, a UN special rapporteur, Dr Michael Fakhri, penned an opinion article in The Guardian newspaper warning that “if aid doesn’t enter Gaza now, 14,000 babies may die.”
“UN peacekeepers must step in,” he added.
Dr Fakhri is the UN Special Rapporteur for the Right to Food and an associate professor of international law at the University of Oregon.
His article came 15 days after a long list of UN experts — including Dr Fakhri and beginning with the outspoken Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese — published an extraordinary joint statement declaring: “End unfolding genocide or watch it end life in Gaza: UN experts say States face defining choice.”
The joint statement said humanity was descending into “a moral abyss”, and Dr Fakhri decried the response so far of nations as “slow and ghastly”.
On the other hand, he praised the individuals who “mobilise and enforce international law through their own hands”, particularly the Gaza Freedom Flotillas and the land marchers attempting to reach the Rafah crossing from Egypt to Gaza.
Dr Fakhri appears to consider the deployment by the UN General Assembly of UN Peacekeepers as the only feasible option that is practical and also fast enough and vigorous enough to properly address the gravity of the situation in Gaza.
Many others have expressed similar sentiments. For instance, just days after The Guardian article, Ireland’s Labour Party asked the Irish government “to use every lever at its disposal to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza through a UN-mandated peacekeeping force”.
Dr Fakhri makes his case for UN peacekeepers action. Video: Badil Resource Centre
As another example, DAWN, a group promoting democracy and human rights in the Middle East and North Africa has long advocated for UN Peacekeepers for Gaza and has just started a petition.
Dr Michael Fakhri . . . deployment by the UN General Assembly of peacekeepers is the only feasible option that is practical and fast enough for saving Gaza. Image: UN
DAWN’s petition may have been timed to influence the “emergency summit”
on the crisis being held today and tomorrow in Bogota, Colombia. It is co-hosted by Colombia and South Africa and will be attended by representatives from more than 30 nations and prominent actors such as Albanese.
A crucial point is that Dr Fakhri and others have explained how the UN General Assembly can rapidly deploy a UN Peacekeeping Force for this purpose. This is important because of the widespread, but erroneous, belief that only the UN Security Council — the UN’s other main legislative organ — can authorise UN peacekeeping missions.
Arab League calls for UN peacekeepers . . . but the subheading in this report wrongly says it is up to UNSC to make the call. Image: NYT screenshot
An example of this falsehood being spread by the corporate news media is shown by this New York Times claim.
Whereas all UN member states are equally represented in the General Assembly, the Security Council is dominated by its five permanent members — the United States, China, Russia, Britain, and France — with each having the power to veto all proposals.
But the US is actively supporting Israel’s activities in occupied Palestine, and it would surely block any such peacekeeping initiative if submitted to the Security Council. This leaves it up to the UN General Assembly to organise any UN Peacekeeping Force for Gaza.
As indicated by Dr Fakri, the founding UN Charter of 1945 provides for the General Assembly to step in to restore peace where the Security Council has failed in its primary responsibility to act.
Relevant sections of the UN Charter.
As shown above, primary responsibility was given to the Security Council under the UN Charter for practical reasons only, “to ensure prompt and effective action”.
Formal protocols for the General Assembly to take over from the Security Council were added in 1950, in what is widely referred to as the “Uniting for Peace” resolution. It explicitly provides the option of setting up an armed force, as shown below.
The Uniting for Peace resolution, 1950.
As also shown, Uniting for Peace resolutions are addressed in Emergency Special Sessions of the UN General Assembly. These can be called within 24 hours and from a request by any member state. To be passed, a resolution requires a two-thirds majority of the states that voted either for, or against, the resolution.
Historically, the very first UN Peacekeeping force was set up in this way in response to the Suez Crisis of 1956-7 — see below. Those UN Peacekeepers oversaw the prompt retreat from Egypt of Israel and of the Security Council permanent members, Britain and France. Eventually, in 1957 they were present for Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza itself, then a protectorate of Egypt.
UN General Assembly resolutions setting up the first UN Peacekeeping Force in 1956.
Returning to the current circumstances, Dr Fakhri says that if a UN peacekeeping force is formed then Israel’s permission is not required for its deployment in Gaza.
The actual main impediment to the success of the plan may come from covert bullying of UN member nations by the US and Israel. As explained by prominent law professor Francis Boyle: “The US government will bribe, threaten, intimidate and blackmail all members of the UN General Assembly not to [act against] Israel.”
Dr King is a physicist researching topics in renewable energy, with an interest in humanitarian issues.
The Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa has called on the New Zealand government to not follow Australia’s policy moves which would effectively criminalise the Palestine solidarity movement.
Co-chair John Minto said PSNA had no tolerance for anti-semitism in Aotearoa New Zealand, or anywhere else.
“But equally there should be no place for any other kind of racism, such as Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism. Our government must speak out against all forms of discrimination and support all communities when racism rears its ugly head,” he said.
“Let’s not forget the murderous attacks on the Christchurch mosques.”
Minto said the Australian measures would “inevitably” be used to criminalise the Palestinian solidarity movement across the country.
Trump ‘demonising’ support
“We see it happening in the US, to attack and demonise support for Palestinian human rights by the Trump administration. We see it orchestrated in the UK to shut down any speech which Prime Minister Starmer and the Israeli government don’t like.”
“undermining Australia’s democratic freedoms, inflaming community divisions, and entrenching selective approaches to racism that serve political agendas.”
Minto said the free speech restrictions in the US, UK and Australia had nothing to do with what people usually understand as anti-semitism.
“The drive comes from the Israeli government. They see making anti-semitism charges as the most effective means of preventing anyone publicly pointing to the genocide its armed forces are perpetrating in Gaza,” he said.
“The definition of anti-semitism, usually inserted into codes of ethics or legislation, is from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. The IHRA definition includes 11 examples. Seven of the examples are about criticising Israel.”
“It’s quite clear the Israeli campaign is to distract the community from Israel’s horrendous war crimes, such as the round-the-clock mass killing and mass starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, and deflect calls for sanctions against Israel.
“Already we can see in both the UK and US, that people have been arrested for saying things about Israel which would not have been declared illegal if they’d said it about other countries, including their own.”
Worrying signs
Minto said there were already worrying signs that the New Zealand government, media and police were “falling into the trap”.
“Just over the past few weeks, there has been an unusually wide-ranging mainstream media focus on anti-semitism,” Minto said citing:
At least one opinion article in the Stuff newspapers from NZ Jewish Council spokesperson Ben Kepes on anti-semitism in New Zealand
A New Zealand Herald podcast featuring Holocaust Foundation spokesperson Deborah Hart. The Holocaust Foundation is partly funded by the Israeli Embassy.
An enthusiastic 1News item on the latest appeal to the government to adopt similar measures here to those taken in Australia (TVNZ One News, 13 July 2025)
Stories highlighting anti-semitic graffiti in Wellington — numerous reports along these lines
However, New Zealand politicians and media had been silent about:
An attack which knocked a young Palestinian woman to the ground when she was using a microphone to speak during an Auckland march
An attack where a Palestine supporter was kicked and knocked to the pavement outside the Israeli embassy in Wellington. The accused was wearing an Israeli flag. He was not held in custody and the Post newspaper has reported neither the arrest nor the resulting charge (this case is due in court July 15)
An attack on a Palestine solidarity marshal in Christchurch who was punched in the face, in front of police, but no action taken.
An attack in Christchurch when a Destiny Church member kicked a solidarity marshal in the chest (no action taken by police)
Anti-Palestinian racist attacks on the home of a Palestine solidarity activist in New Plymouth. One supporter has had their front fence spraypainted twice with pro-Israel graffiti and their car tyres slashed twice (4 tyres in total) and had vile defamatory material circulated in their neighbourhood. (Police say they cannot help)
The refusal of the Human Rights Commission to publicly correct false statements it published in The Post newspaper which claimed anti-semitism was increasing, when in fact the evidence it was using was that the rate of incidents had declined.
‘Silence on mass killings’
Minto said that in each of the cases above there would have been far more attention from politicians, the police and the media had the victims been Israeli supporters.
“Meanwhile, both our government and the New Zealand Jewish Council have refused to condemn Israel’s blatant war crimes. There is silence on the mass killing, mass starvation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza,” he said.
“The Jewish Council and our government stand together and refuse to hold Israel’s racist apartheid regime to account in just about any way.
“Adding to the clear perception of appalling bias on the part of our government, both the Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs have met with New Zealand Jewish Council spokespeople over the war in Gaza.
“But both have refused to meet with representatives of Palestinian New Zealanders, or the huge number of Jewish supporters of the Palestine solidarity movement.”
Minto said New Zealand must “stand up and be counted against genocide” wherever it appeared and no matter who the victims were.
New Zealand paused $18.2 million in development assistance funding to the Cook Islands in June after its government signed several agreements with China in February.
At the time, a spokesperson for Foreign Minister Winston Peters said the pause was because the Cook Islands did not consult with Aotearoa over the China deals and failed to ensure shared interests were not put at risk.
Peters and New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon will not attend the celebrations.
Ten years ago, former Prime Minister Sir John Key attended the celebrations that marked 50 years of Cook Islands being in free association with New Zealand.
Officials from the Cook Islands and New Zealand have been meeting to try and restore the relationship.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!”
Great effort (and amounts of money) are required to churn out arguments justifying actions that cannot be justified by standards of common sense and human decency. For example, billions upon billions spent to maintain pro-Zionist and pro-capitalist institutions. In a nation where the agendas of the state are underwritten by billionaires — if a singular truth happens to enter public discourse it would have had to have come about by accident. Extreme amounts of money have been invested to prevent such occurrences of democratic happenstance.
Hence, the US Congress, by means of outright unconstitutional legislation, legislates: anti-Zionist speech is anti-Semitic hate speech. Hey, people against genocide – where are your billions to counter: condemnation of Israel’s genocidal rampage in Gaza and ethnic cleansing operations in the West Bank are in fact constitutionally protected speech? You say, you don’t have billions at your disposal. Then you have been shut up and shut out of the conversation.
From global militarism to Alligator Alcatraz: Fascism is imperialism turned inward.
ICE ahead…slippery slope to totalitarianism.
The rise of ICE thuggery is the policy wing of the Right’s xenophobic “Replacement Theory.” ICE’s mission is, to aid in returning the US to be, in their fantasy-rancid words, the “White Christian nation” it was founded to be, and to achieve the goal by means of policies of ethnic cleansing.
Have you noticed this about people driven by odious intentions: they have an intense bearing of certainty; they posit a ready answer for everything? Have you noticed this about people bearing insight: they approach life as a mystery? They have a tolerance for ambiguity. The best teachers teach students to ask good questions. The worst among us lead us to doom by becoming intoxicated by their hell-pitched certainty.
Are you suffering emotional pain due to the trajectory of the times? Pain is a warning proffered to pull you back from the abyss. When there is sickness in the collective soul, you will experience the symptoms. If the culture is drunk on lies, you will experience the hangover. Sanity will entail you sobering up.
Yes, you are powerless over the stupidity of the times: the bacchanal of bullshit, cupidity, and cruelty. Therein, there is a hint of a higher power than the degraded power structures of the present. Where there is bullshit — there can be a cleansing current of the heart to wash away, like Hercules’ labor of cleaning the Augean stables, the piles upon piles of excrement. Cupidity can be superseded by a generosity of spirit. And what about the homunculi of cruelty that has been unloosed upon the land as if a portal from Hell has been opened and hordes of lower order imps have emerged to become hirelings at ICE recruitment offices?
Where they trod they leave a wasteland, yes. A landscape as barren as their own inner life.
“The merciful man does good to his own soul, but the cruel troubles his own flesh.” — Proverbs 11:17
They will attempt to dine on power; yet, they will continue to suffer a famine in their soul. They will hunger for more and yet still hunger for more and more control and power thus are driven further into their wasteland within. The totalitarian personality signs a murder/suicide pact with itself. History reports, while it is tragically true they will cause much suffering as they destroy the essential qualities that sustains life, in the end, they have laid the path of their own undoing. ICE thugs (MAGA, in general) to IDF predators (to the Zionist state, in general) you have numbered your days.
“Righteousness leads to life, but those who pursue evil find their own death.” Proverbs 11:19
In diametric opposition to the above line of Biblical verse:
Regarding the ghosted Epstein files: MAGA cultists i.e., grifted, cretinous dupes, were moved to clamor to the polls to bring down the Deep State cabalists, by the enthronement of (Epstein’s best friend in predation) Donald Trump. Stupid, of course, is the calling card of the plebs but witnessing their cope and contortions is a sight to behold.
The cultists were convinced the Democratic Party’s confederacy of perverts would be exposed in all its hideous iniquity. What happened: well, it turned out perversion crosses party affiliation. Republicans and Democrats fingerprints alike are all over the crime scene. Trump’s fat, stubby digits were the most prominent in view.
The crime itself is this: the manner the wealth inequality inherent to capitalism enables the covering up of the iniquity of those who serve the system. In fact, what they will receive for their crimes will be massive tax cuts.
As for the rest of us: We are not even allowed in sight of the VIP (Very Iniquitous Pervert) rope line. The entrance fee: the obscene amounts of bribe money it requires to own the political class.
Epstein et al. thrive in a landscape wherein everything within reach that can be commodified will be relentlessly subjected to exploitation. It is an ugly business. There is not anything that can exist for its own sake: truth; beauty; a sense of integrity.
In the US, beauty has been banished by the zealots of expediency and profiteering. They erect temples of commercialized cacophony thus from every direction meaningless noise dominates the senses.
What price is paid for beauty having been buried deep as Hades? Stop and listen closely. Hear the lament of exquisite things cast into the cultural abyss.
When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
— John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn
Perhaps the sum of selfhood, the centering of self required to connect and engage the world, both material and Anima Mundi, arrives by means of an openness to experience and the garnered truth concomitant to enduring suffering.
The fear of engagement, over time, numbs out the heart; the wings of the spirit will atrophy. Beauty no longer moves a deadened heart. One’s soul exiles itself back into the collective, resulting in pathological detachment or psychosis.
Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! — Isaiah 5:20
Speaking on a personal basis, I need inexorable longing to engage life on life’s terms. This is serious work; the act of merging and mingling the burden of grief with a wingedness of mind. It is a feat of levitation. As in music, the dark chords caress the heart as they rise heavenward.
The mind searches for reasons life unfolds as it does. But poetic depth reveals sleeping fragments of pure being dreaming within the heart of all things. Art must invite logic to dance through the night until it goes mad beneath the morning star.
Why? What is the logic of this? Because the mind is an empire, its ideas and notions crumble and fade into indifferent air while the seasons of the heart are located in a cosmos of eternal renewal.
It’s possible I am pushing through solid rock
in flintlike layers, as the ore lies, alone;
I am such a long way in I see no way through,
and no space: everything is close to my face,
and everything close to my face is stone.
I don’t have much knowledge yet in grief
so this massive darkness makes me small.
You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in:
then your great transforming will happen to me,
and my great grief cry will happen to you.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
In a depth-bereft culture where people shun reading for meme consumption, the center cannot hold in the culture because culture is a product of psyche. Sans psyche, an inferno of fuckwit dominates. Imagination is shunned; people resist being carried away into the depths of themselves hence they lose the ability to proceed into and navigate the depths of passing moments. The outer-world withers to wasteland. Cliches are the architecture of the mind. Imagination is in exile. Thus all too many experience a loss of soul.
Fascism arrives from the margins to fill in the void.
The fascist mob’s mania is borne by its by-reflex fear of experiencing human suffering… to evince god-like invincibility while swathed in the anonymity of the mob.
Yet the joys and suffering of human life make up the foundation of the self. Great books convey an affinity — a dawning recognition we connected, each to each, by suffering. Memes, being meant for the mob, are inherently fascist. Upon sight, memes should be driven off by waving a book at them in a threatening manner as an act of self-defense.
The rapidity by which information (instead, aren’t we talking about the conveyance of thought itself?) arrives is directly implicated in the US lack of political memory and its shallowness of culture. The illusion of moving at high speed is conveyed hence even the recent past seems too far in the past to be retrieved and reflected upon. History is reduced to non-linear data; connections cannot be made between the sequence of events. There is an immersion in the present but without bestowing animal vitality and grace. Therefore, we feel like animals imprisoned in a cage that is being shaken by a source unknown. .
As a result, we attempt to obtain clarity by “getting above it all.” A new form of distress follows: vertigo. You know, what goes up, comes down in flames and scattered debris like a SpaceX rocket launch.
The future must involve falling. Not the fall from fabled Eden. But reconnection with Earth. Cold data and manic memes are softened and come to rest upon the embrace of the veritable ground. At present, the mind is a cluttered mess of gibbering satellites and space junk. The earth breathes… so that you can pause and lay aside your troubles.
I am not talking about a longing for paradise: that trope was explored in the fable of the serpent, the apple, and the Tree Of Knowledge. The knowledge ended our childhood, our tromp and traipse through the glens and gardens of Eternity. Banished from paradise, we gained our humanity.
Empires, like the thoughts of the harried and vexed mind, rise and dissipate in indifferent air. Beauty remains. The tears at the heart of things are vouchsafed with deathless truths. Thus we can grant ourselves hours of restorative rest:
We sleep in the arms of an exquisitely played song that has played since the beginning of time and will play on forever.
Heart, mind, and soul restored, we can navigate life and respond with clarity to its perils; thus see through the lies piled upon lies retailed by the powerful — whose propagandists promise a return to paradise but deliver a soul-defying landscape of deprivation and perpetual exploitation.
New Caledonia’s pro-and-anti-independence parties have committed to an “historic” deal over the future political status of the French Pacific territory, which is set to become — for the first time — a “state” within the French realm.
The 13-page agreement yesterday, officially entitled “Agreement Project of the Future of New Caledonia”, is the result of a solid 10 days of difficult negotiations between both pro and anti-independence parties.
They have stayed under closed doors at a hotel in the small city of Bougival, in the outskirts of Paris.
French Minister for Overseas Manuel Valls (centre) shows signatures on the last page of New Caledonia’s new agreement. Image: RNZ Pacific/FB
The talks were convened by French President Emmanuel Macron after an earlier series of talks held between February and May 2025 failed to yield an agreement.
After opening the talks on July 2, Macron handed over them to his Minister for Overseas, Manuel Valls, to oversee. Valls managed to bring together all parties around the same table earlier this year.
In his opening speech earlier this month, Macron insisted on the need to restore New Caledonia’s economy, which was brought to its knees following destructive and deadly riots that erupted in May 2024.
He said France was ready to study any solution, including an “associated state” for New Caledonia.
During the following days, all political players exchanged views under the seal of strict confidentiality.
While the pro-independence movement, and its Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS), remained adamant they would settle for no less than “full sovereignty”, the pro-France parties were mostly arguing that three referendums — held between 2018 and 2021 — had already concluded that most New Caledonians wanted New Caledonia to remain part of France.
Those results, they said, dictated that the democratic result of the three consultations be respected.
Group photo of participants at the end of negotiations. Image: Philippe Gomes
With this confrontational context, which resulted in an increasingly radicalised background in New Caledonia, that eventually led to the 2024 riots, the Bougival summit was dubbed the “last chance summit”.
In the early hours of Saturday, just before 7 am (Paris time, 5 pm NZ time), after a sleepless night, the secrecy surrounding the Bougival talks finally ended with an announcement from Valls.
He wrote in a release that all partners taking part in the talks had signed and “committed to present and defend the agreement’s text on New Caledonia’s future.”
Valls said this was a “major commitment resulting from a long work of negotiations during which New Caledonia’s partners made the choice of courage and responsibility”.
The released document, signed by almost 20 politicians, details what the deal would imply for New Caledonia’s future.
In its preamble, the fresh deal underlines that New Caledonia was “once again betting on trust, dialogue and peace”, through “a new political organisation, a more widely shared sovereignty and an economic and social refoundation” for a “reinvented common destiny.”
New Caledonia’s population will be called to approve the agreement in February 2026.
If approved, the text would be the centrepiece of a “special organic law” voted by the local Congress.
It would later have to be endorsed by the French Parliament and enshrined in an article of the French Constitution.
What does the agreement contain? One of the most notable developments in terms of future status for New Caledonia is the notion of a “State of New Caledonia”, under a regime that would maintain it as part of France, but with a dual citizenship — France/New Caledonia.
Another formulation used for the change of status is the often-used “sui generis”, which in legal Latin, describes a unique evolution, comparable to no other.
This would be formalised through a fundamental law to be endorsed by New Caledonia’s Congress by a required majority of three-fifths.
The number of MPs in the Congress would be 56.
The text also envisages a gradual transfer of key powers currently held by France (such as international relations), but would not include portfolios such as defence, currency or justice.
In diplomacy, New Caledonia would be empowered to conduct its own affairs, but “in respect of France’s international commitments and vital interests”.
On defence matters, even though this would remain under France’s powers, it is envisaged that New Caledonia would be “strongly” associated, consulted and kept informed, regarding strategy, goals and actions led by France in the Pacific region.
On police and public order matters, New Caledonia would be entitled to create its own provincial and traditional security forces, in addition to national French law enforcement agencies.
New Caledonia’s sensitive electoral roll The sensitive issue of New Caledonia’s electoral roll and conditions of eligibility to vote at local elections (including for the three Provincial Assemblies) is also mentioned in the agreement.
It was this very issue that was perceived as the main trigger for the May 2024 riots, the pro-independence movement feared at the time that changing the conditions to vote would gradually place the indigenous Kanak community in a position of minority.
It is now agreed that the electoral roll would be partly opened to those people of New Caledonia who were born after 1998.
The roll was frozen in 2007 and restricted to people born before 1998, which is the date the previous major autonomy agreement of Nouméa was signed.
Under the new proposed conditions to access New Caledonia’s “citizenship”, those entitled would include people who already can vote at local elections, but also their children or any person who has resided in New Caledonia for an uninterrupted ten years or who has been married or lived in a civil de facto partnership with a qualified citizen for at least five years.
Provincial elections once again postponed One of the first deadlines on the electoral calendar, the provincial elections, was to take place no later than 30 November 2025.
It will be moved once again — for the third time — to May-June 2026.
A significant part of the political deal is also dedicated to New Caledonia’s economic “refoundation”, with a high priority for the young generations, who have felt left out of the system and disenfranchised for too long.
One of the main goals was to bring New Caledonia’s public debts to a level of sustainability.
In 2024, following the riots, France granted, in the form of loans, over 1 billion euros (NZ $1.9 billion) for New Caledonia’s key institutions to remain afloat.
But some components of the political chessboard criticised the measure, saying this was placing the French territory in a state of excessive and long-term debt.
Group photo of participants at the end of negotiations with the signed agreement. Image: Philippe_Gomes/RNZ Pacific
Strategic nickel A major topic, on the macro-economic side, concerns New Caledonia’s nickel mining industry, after years of decline that has left it (even before 2024) in a state of near-collapse.
Nickel is regarded as the backbone of New Caledonia’s economy.
A nickel “strategic plan” would aim at re-starting New Caledonia nickel’s processing plants, especially in the Northern province, but at the same time facilitating the export of raw nickel.
There was also a will to ensure that all mining sites (many of which have been blocked and its installations damaged since the May 2024 riots) became accessible again.
Meanwhile, France would push the European Union to include New Caledonia’s nickel in its list of strategic resources.
New Caledonia’s nickel industry’s woes are also caused by its lack of competitiveness on the world market — especially compared to Indonesia’s recent rise in prominence in nickel production — because of the high cost of energy.
Swift reactions, mostly positive
New Caledonian politicians Sonia Backès (left to right), Nicolas Metzdorf, Gil Brial and Victor Tutugoro. Image: Nicolas Metzdorf/RNZ Pacific
The announcement yesterday was followed by quick reactions from all sides of New Caledonia’s political spectrum and also from mainland France’s political leaders.
French Prime Minister François Bayrou expressed “pride” to see an agreement “on par with history”, emerge.
“Bravo also to the work and patience of Manuel Valls” and “the decisive implication of Emmanuel Macron,” he wrote on X-Twitter.
From the ranks of New Caledonia’s political players, pro-France Nicolas Metzdorf said he perceived as one of the deal’s main benefits the fact that “we will at last be able to project ourselves in the future, in economic, social and societal reconstruction without any deadline.”
Metzdorf admitted that reaching an agreement required concessions and compromise from both sides.
“But the fact that we are no longer faced with referendums and to reinforce the powers of our provinces, this was our mandate”, he told public broadcaster NC La 1ère.
“We’ve had to accept this change from New Caledonia citizenship to New Caledonian nationality, which remains to be defined by New Caledonia’s Congress. We have also created a completely new status as part of the French Republic, a sui generis State”, he noted.
He said the innovative status kept New Caledonia within France, without going as far as an “associated state” mooted earlier.
“At least, what we have arrived at is that New Caledonians remain French”, pro-France Le Rassemblement-LR prominent leader Virginie Ruffenach commented.
“And those who want to contribute to New Caledonia’s development will be able to do so through a minimum stay of residence, the right to vote and to become citizens and later New Caledonia nationals”
“I’m aware that some could be wary of the concessions we made, but let’s face it: New Caledonia nationality does not make New Caledonia an independent State . . . It does not take away anything from us, neither of us belonging to the French Republic nor our French nationality,” Southern Province pro-France President Sonia Backès wrote on social media.
In a joint release, the two main pro-France parties, Les Loyalistes and Rassemblement-LR, said the deal was no less than “historic” and “perennial” for New Caledonia as a whole, to “offer New Caledonia a future of peace, stability and prosperity” while at the same time considering France’s Indo-Pacific strategy.
From the pro-independence side, one of the negotiators, Victor Tutugoro of UNI-UPM (Progressist Union in Melanesia) said what mattered was that “all of us have placed our bets on intelligence, beyond our respective beliefs, our positions, our postures”.
“We put all of these aside for the good of the country.”
“Of course, by definition, a compromise cannot satisfy anyone 100 percent. But it’s a balanced compromise for everyone,” he said.
“And it allows us to look ahead, to build New Caledonia together, a citizenship and this common destiny everyone’s been talking about for many years.”
Before politicians fly back to New Caledonia to present the deal to their respective bases, President Macron received all delegation members last evening to congratulate them on their achievements.
During the Presidential meeting at the Elysée Palace, FLNKS chief negotiator Emmanuel Tjibaou (whose father Jean-Marie Tjibaou also struck a historic agreement and shook hands with pro-France leader Jacques Lafleur, in 1988), stressed the agreement was one step along the path and it allows to envisage new perspectives for the Kanak people.
A sign of the changing times, but in a striking parallel — 37 years after his father’s historic handshake with Lafleur, Emmanuel Tjibaou (whose father was shot dead in 1989 by a radical pro-independence partisan who felt the independence cause had been betrayed — did not shake hands, but instead fist pumped with pro-France’s Metzdorf.
In a brief message on social networks, the French Head of State hailed the conclusive talks, which he labelled “A State of New Caledonia within the (French) Republic,” a win for a “bet on trust.”
“Now is the time for respect, for stability and for the sum of good wills to build a shared future.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Signatures on the last page of New Caledonia’s new agreement. Image: Philippe Dunoyer/RNZ Pacific
An opposition Labour Party MP today paid tribute to the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement, saying it should inspire Aotearoa New Zealand to maintain its own independence, embrace a strong regionalism, and be a “voice for peace and demilitarisation”.
But Phil Twyford, MP for Te Atatu and spokesperson on disarmament, warned that the current National-led coalition government was “rapidly going in the other direction”.
“It mimics the language of the security hawks in Washington and Canberra that China is a threat to our national interests,” he said.
READ MORE
“That is then the springboard for a foreign policy ‘reset’ under the current government to a closer strategic alignment with the United States and with what are often more broadly referred to as the ‘traditional partners’.
“For that read the Five Eyes members, but particularly the United States.”
Speaking at the opening of the week-long “Legends of the Pacific: Stories of a Nuclear-Free Moana 1975-1995” exhibition at the Ellen Melville Centre, Twyford referred to the 40th anniversary of the Rainbow Warrior bombing by French secret agents on 10 July 2025.
“Much has been made in the years since of what a turning point this was, and how it crystallised in New Zealanders a commitment to the anti-nuclear cause,” he said.
However, he said he wanted to talk about the “bigger regional phenomenon” that shaped activism, public attitudes and official policies across the region, and what it could “teach us today about New Zealand’s place in the world”.
“I am talking about the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement.
The Te Vaerua O Te Rangi dance group performing at the nuclear-free Pacific exhibition opening in Auckland today. Image: Asia Pacific Report
“Activists and leaders from across the Pacific built a movement that challenged neocolonialism and colonialism, put the voices of the peoples of the Pacific front and centre, and held the nuclear powers to account for the devastating legacy of nuclear testing.”
The NFIP movement led to the creation of the Treaty of Rarotonga, the Pacific’s nuclear weapons free zone, Twyford said. It influenced governments and shaped the thinking of a generation.
Twyford said that with increasing great power rivalry, the rise of authoritarian leaders, and the breakdown of the multilateral system “the spectre of nuclear war has returned”.
Labour’s Te Atatu MP Phil Twyford admiring part of the nuclear-free Pacific exhibition after opening it in Auckland today. Image: Del Abcede/APR
New Zealand faced some stark choices about how it made its way in the world, kept their people and the region safe, and remained “true to the values we’ve always held dear”.
The public debate about the policy “reset” reset had focused on whether New Zealand would be part of AUKUS Pillar Two, “the arrangement to share high end war fighting technology that would sit alongside the first pillar designed to deliver Australia its nuclear submarines”.
Part of the nuclear-free Pacific exhibition honouring Fernando Pereira, the Greenpeace photographer killed by French state saboteurs when they bombed the Rainbow Warrior on 10 July 1985. Image: APR
While the New Zealand government had had little to say on AUKUS Pillar Two since the US elections, the defence engagement with the US had “escalated”.
It now included participation in groupings around supply chains, warfighting in space, interconnected naval warfare, and projects on artificial intelligence and cyber capabilities.
China’s growing assertiveness as a great power was not the main threat to New Zealand.
“The biggest threat to our security and prosperity is the possibility of war in Asia between the United States and China,” he said.
NFIP activist Hilda Halkyard-Harawira (Ngāti Haua featured in one of the storytelling videos at the nuclear-free Pacific exhibition. Image: APR
“Rising tensions could conceivably affect trade, and that would be disastrous for us. All-out war, especially if it went nuclear, would be catastrophic for the region and probably for the planet.”
Labour’s view was that security for New Zealand and the Pacific could be pursued through active engagement with the country’s partners across the Tasman and in the Pacific, and Asia — and be a voice for peace and demilitarisation.
Twyford acknowledged Dr Robie’s “seminal book” Eyes of Fire, thanking him for “a lifetime’s work of reporting important stories, exposing injustice and holding the powerful to account”.
Dr Robie spoke briefly about the book as a publishing challenge following his earlier speech at the launch on Thursday.
Other speakers at the opening of the nuclear-free Pacific exhibition included veteran activist such as Reverend Mua Strickson-Pua; Bharat Jamnadas, an organiser of the original Nuclear-Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) conference in Suva, Fiji, in 1975; businessman and community advocate Nikhil Naidu, previously an activist for the Fiji Anti-Nuclear Group (FANG); and Dr Heather Devere, peace researcher and chair of the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN).
The Te Vaerua O Te Rangi dance group also performed Cook Islands items.
The exhibition has been coordinated by the APMN in partnership with Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga, with curator Tharron Bloomfield and Antony Phillips; Ellen Melville Centre; and the Whānau Communty Centre and Hub.
It is also supported by Pax Christi, Quaker Peace and Service Fund, and Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).
The exhibition recalls New Zealand’s peace squadrons, a display of activist tee-shirt “flags”, nuclear-free buttons and badges, posters, and other memorabilia. A video storytelling series about NFIP “legends” such as Hilda Halyard-Harawira and Dr Vijay Naidu is also included.
Nuclear-free and independent Pacific advocates are treating Aucklanders to a lively week-long exhibition dedicated to the struggle for nuclear justice in the region.
It will be opened today by the opposition Labour Party’s spokesperson on disarmament and MP for Te Atatu, Phil Twyford, and will include a range of speakers on Aotearoa New Zealand’s record as a champion of a nuclear-free Pacific and an independent foreign policy.
Speaking at a conference last month, Twyford said the country could act as a force for peace and demilitarisation, working with partners across the Pacific and Asia and basing its defence capabilities on a realistic assessment of threats.
Veteran nuclear-free Pacific spokespeople who are expected to speak at the conference include Reverend Mua Strickson-Pua; Bharat Jamnadas, an organiser of the original Nuclear-Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) conference in Suva, Fiji, in 1975; businessman and community advocate Nikhil Naidu, previously an activist for the Fiji Anti-Nuclear Group (FANG) and Dr Heather Devere, peace researcher and chair of the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN).
A group of Cook Islands young dancers will also take part.
Knowledge to children
One of the organisers, Nik Naidu, told Asia Pacific Report, it was vital to restore the enthusiasm and passion around the NFIP movement as in the 1980s.
“It’s so important to pass on our knowledge to our children and future generations,” he said.
“And to tell the stories of our on-going journey and yearning for true independence in a world free of wars and weapons of mass destruction. This is what a Nuclear-Free and Independent Pacific is.”
One of the many nuclear-free posters at the exhibition. Image: APR
The exhibition is is coordinated by the APMN in partnership with the Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga, with curator Tharron Bloomfield and coordinator Antony Phillips; Ellen Melville Centre; and the Whānau Communty Centre and Hub.
It is also supported by Pax Christi, Quaker Peace and Service Fund, and Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).
It recalls New Zealand’s peace squadrons, a display of activist tee-shirt “flags”, nuclear-free buttons and badges, posters, and other memorabilia.
“It is a sort of back to the future situation where the world is waking up again to a nuclear spectre not really seen since the Cold War years,” he said.
“With the horrendous Israeli genocide on Gaza — it is obscene to call it a war, when it is continuous massacres of civilians; the attacks by two nuclear nations on a nuclear weapons-free country, as is the case with Iran; and threats against another nuclear state, China, are all extremely concerning developments.”
A journalist who was on the Rainbow Warrior voyage to Rongelap last night condemned France for its “callous” attack of an environmental ship, saying “we haven’t forgotten, or forgiven this outrage”.
David Robie, the author of Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, said at the launch that the consequences of almost 300 US and French nuclear tests – many of them “dirty bombs” — were still impacting on indigenous Pacific peoples 40 years after the bombing of the ship.
French saboteurs had killed “our shipmate Fernando Pereira” on 10 July 1985 in what the New Zealand prime minister at the time, David Lange, called a “sordid act of international state-backed terrorism”.
Although relations with France had perhaps mellowed over time, four decades ago there was a lot of hostility towards the country, Dr Robie said.
“And that act of mindless sabotage still rankles very deeply in our psyche,” he said at the launch in Auckland Central’s Ellen Melville Centre on the anniversary of July 10.
About 100 people gathered in the centre’s Pioneer Women’s Hall for the book launch as Dr Robie reflected on the case of state terrorism after Greenpeace earlier in the day held a memorial ceremony on board Rainbow Warrior III.
“One of the celebrated French newspapers, Le Monde, played a critical role in the investigation into the Rainbow Warrior affair — what I brand as ‘Blundergate’, in view of all the follies of the bumbling DGSE spy team,” he said.
Plantu cartoon
“And one of the cartoons in that newspaper, by Plantu, who is a sort of French equivalent to Michael Leunig, caught my eye.
“You will notice it in the background slide show behind me. It shows François Mitterrand, the president of the French republic at the time, dressed in a frogman’s wetsuit lecturing to school children during a history lesson.
“President Mitterrand says, in French, ‘At that time, only presidents had the right to carry out terrorism!’
Tahitian advocate Ena Manurevia . . . the background Plantu cartoon is the one mentioned by the author. Image: Asia Pacific Report
He noticed that in the Mitterrand cartoon there was a “classmate” sitting in the back of the room with a moustache. This was none other than Edwy Plenel, the police reporter for Le Monde at the time, who scooped the world with hard evidence of Mitterrand and the French government’s role at the highest level in the Rainbow Warrior sabotage.
Dr Robie said that Plenel now published the investigative website Mediapart, which had played a key role in 2015 revealing the identity of the bomber that night, “the man who had planted the limpet mines on the Rainbow Warrior — sinking a peace and environmental ship, and killing Fernando Pereira.”
Jean-Luc Kister, a retired French colonel and DGSE secret agent, had confessed to his role and “apologised”, claiming the sabotage operation was “disproportionate and a mistake”.
“Was he sincere? Was it a genuine attempt to come to terms with his conscience. Who knows?” Dr Robie said, adding that he was unconvinced.
Hilari Anderson (right on stage), one of the speakers, with Del Abcede and MC Antony Phillips (obscured) . . . the background image shows Helen Clark meeting Fernando Pereira’s daughter Marelle in 2005. Image: Greenpeace
French perspective
Dr Robie said he had asked Plenel for his reflections from a French perspective 40 years on. Plenel cited three main take ways.
“First, the vital necessity of independent journalism. Independent of all powers, whether state, economic or ideological. Journalism that serves the public interest, the right to know, and factual truths.
“Impactful journalism whose revelations restore confidence in democracy, in the possibility of improving it, and in the usefulness of counterbalancing powers, particularly journalism.”
Secondly, this attack had been carried out by France in an “allied country”, New Zealand, against a civil society organisation. This demonstrated that “the thirst for power is a downfall that leads nations astray when they succumb to it.
“Nuclear weapons epitomise this madness, this catastrophe of power.”
Finally, Plenel expressed the “infinite sadness” for a French citizen that after his revelations in Le Monde — which led to the resignations of the defence minister and the head of the secret services — nothing else happened.
“Nothing at all. No parliamentary inquiry, no questioning of François Mitterrand about his responsibility, no institutional reform of the absolute power of the president in a French republic that is, in reality, an elective monarchy.”
‘Elective monarchy’ trend
Dr Robie compared the French outcome with the rapid trend in US today, “a president who thinks he is a monarch, a king – another elective monarchy.”
He also bemoaned that “catastrophe of power” that “reigns everywhere today – from the horrendous Israeli genocide in Gaza to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, from Trump to Putin to Netanyahu, and so many others.”
The continuous Gaza massacres were a shameful indictment of the West that had allowed it to happen for more than 21 months.
Dr Robie thanked many collaborators for their help and support, including drama teacher Hilari Anderson, an original crew member of the Rainbow Warrior, and photographer John Miller, “who have been with me all the way on this waka journey”.
He thanked his wife, Del, and family members for their unstinting “patience and support”, and also publisher Tony Murrow of Little Island Press.
Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior . . . published 10 July 2025. Image: David Robie/Little Island Press
Launching the book, Greenpeace Aotearoa programme director Niamh O’Flynn said one thing that had stood out for her was how the legacy of the Rainbow Warrior had continued despite the attempt by the French government to shut it down 40 years ago.
“We said then that ‘you can’t sink a rainbow’, and we went on to prove it.
“When the Rainbow Warrior was bombed in Auckland harbour, it was getting ready to set sail to Moruroa Atoll, to enter the test exclusion zone and confront French nuclear testing head-on.”
So threatened
The French government had felt so threatened by that action that it had engaged in a state-sanctioned terror attack to prevent the mission from going ahead.
“But we rebuilt, and the Rainbow Warrior II carried on with that mission, travelling to Moruroa three times before the French finally stopped nuclear testing in the Pacific.
“That spirit and tenacity is what makes Greenpeace and what makes the Rainbow Warrior so special to everyone who has sailed on her,” she said.
“It was the final voyage of the Rainbow Warrior to Rongelap before the bombing that is the focus of David Robie’s book, and in many ways, it was an incredibly unique experience for Greenpeace — not just here in Aotearoa, but internationally.
“And of course David was a key part in that.”
O’Flynn said that as someone who had not even been born yet when the Rainbow Warrior was bombed, “I am so grateful that the generation of nuclear-free activists took the time to pass on their knowledge and to build our organisation into what it is today.
“Just as David has by writing down his story and leaving us with such a rich legacy.”
Greenpeace Aotearoa programme director Niamh O’Flynn . . . “That spirit and tenacity is what makes Greenpeace and what makes the Rainbow Warrior so special to everyone who has sailed on her.” Image: APR
Other speakers
Among other speakers at the book launch were teacher Hilari Anderson, publisher Tony Murrow of Little Island Press, Ena Manuireva, a Mangarevian scholar and cultural adviser, and MC Antony Phillips of Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga.
Anderson spoke of the Warrior’s early campaigns and acknowledged the crews of 1978 and 1985.
“I have been reflecting what these first and last crews of the original Rainbow Warrior had in common, realising that both gave their collective, mostly youthful energy — to transformation.
“This has involved the bonding of crews by working hands-on together. Touching surfaces, by hammer and paint, created a physical connection to this beloved boat.”
She paid special tribute to two powerful women, Denise Bell, who tracked down the marine research vessel in Aberdeen that became the Rainbow Warrior, and the indomitable Susi Newborn, who “contributed to naming the ship and mustering a crew”.
Manuireva spoke about his nuclear colonial experience and that of his family as natives of Mangareva atoll, about 400 km from Muroroa atoll, where France conducted most of its 30 years of tests ending in 1995.
He also spoke of Tahitian leader Oscar Temaru’s pioneering role in the Nuclear-Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement, and played haunting Tahitian songs on his guitar.
New Delhi, July 10, 2025—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls for greater transparency and due process in how Indian authorities handle social media restrictions, following reports of the temporary block of multiple international news organizations’ X accounts over the weekend. X accused the Indian government of censoring the press.
“This incident once again underscores the serious lack of transparency and accountability in how the Indian government issues and enforces orders for the removal of social media content and the blocking of accounts,” said Kunāl Majumder, CPJ’s India representative. “Any action affecting journalists or news organizations must be based on clear legal grounds, be subject to independent judicial oversight, and not infringe on press freedom. India still lacks a credible mechanism to review or challenge these opaque and arbitrary orders.”
On July 5, two of Reuters’ handles, @Reuters and @ReutersWorld, were blocked, with X saying the accounts were obstructed “due to legal demands.” Severalreports also suggest that accounts of Turkish broadcaster TRT World and the Chinese state media outlet Global Times were censored. The accounts were restored the next day. A government official speaking on condition of anonymity told CPJ that the authorities had not issued any orders to block the accounts and that they were engaging with X to get them restored.
However, in a July 8 post, X countered the Indian claim and said that on July 3, the Indian authorities had ordered the platform to block 2,355 accounts. X also expressed concerns about “ongoing press censorship in India due to these blocking orders.” X has already sued the Indian government over a new official portal that it says grants “countless” government officials expanded powers to issue takedown orders.
The Indian government denied issuing any recent blocking order against Reuters and others and said the accounts were unintentionally restricted due to a previously issued directive that was part of broader digital enforcement measuresimplemented in the wake of heightened national security concerns.
Authorities said they’d asked X to restore access immediately and blamed a 21-hour delay on the platform for the continued impediment.
In May 2025, X expressed concern about the Indian government’s demand to block over 8,000 accounts, and asked for such executive orders to made public.
X and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology did not reply to CPJ’s emails seeking comment.
From the prologue of the 40th anniversary edition of David Robie’s seminal book on the Rainbow Warrior’s last voyage, former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark (1999-2008) writes about what the bombing on 10 July 1985 means today.
By Helen Clark
The bombing of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour on 10 July 1985 and the death of a voyager on board, Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira, was both a tragic and a seminal moment in the long campaign for a nuclear-free Pacific.
It was so startling that many of us still remember where we were when the news came through. I was in Zimbabwe on my way to join the New Zealand delegation to the United Nations World Conference on Women in Nairobi. In Harare I met for the first time New Zealand Anglican priest Father Michael Lapsley who, in that same city in 1990, was severely disabled by a parcel bomb delivered by the intelligence service of the apartheid regime in South Africa. These two bombings, of the Rainbow Warrior and of Michael, have been sad reminders to me of the price so many have paid for their commitment to peace and justice.
It was also very poignant for me to meet Fernando’s daughter, Marelle, in Auckland in 2005. Her family suffered a loss which no family should have to bear. In August 1985, I was at the meeting of the Labour Party caucus when it was made known that the police had identified a woman in their custody as a French intelligence officer. Then in September, French prime minister Laurent Fabius confirmed that French secret agents had indeed sunk the Rainbow Warrior. The following year, a UN-mediated agreement saw the convicted agents leave New Zealand and a formal apology, a small amount of compensation, and undertakings on trade given by France — the latter after New Zealand perishable goods had been damaged in port in France.
Both 1985 and 1986 were momentous years for New Zealand’s assertion of its nuclear-free positioning which was seen as provocative by its nuclear-armed allies. On 4 February 1985, the United States was advised that its naval vessel, the Buchanan, could not enter a New Zealand port because it was nuclear weapons-capable and the US “neither confirm nor deny” policy meant that New Zealand could not establish whether it was nuclear weapons-armed or not.
In Manila in July 1986, a meeting between prime minister David Lange and US Secretary of State George Schultz confirmed that neither New Zealand nor the US were prepared to change their positions and that New Zealand’s engagement in ANZUS was at an end. Secretary Schultz famously said that “We part company as friends, but we part company as far as the alliance is concerned”.
Pour les 40 ans de l’attentat de la France contre le Rainbow Warrior, le journaliste néo-zélandais @DavidRobie publie une nouvelle édition de son livre sur le dernier voyage du navire de Greenpeace. Préfacée par Helen Clark, ex-PM de Nouvelle-Zélandehttps://t.co/n1v8Nduel6
New Zealand passed its Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament and Arms Control Act in 1987. Since that time, until now, the country has on a largely bipartisan basis maintained its nuclear-free policy as a fundamental tenet of its independent foreign policy. But storm clouds are gathering.
Australia’s decision to enter a nuclear submarine purchase programme with the United States is one of those. There has been much speculation about a potential Pillar Two of the AUKUS agreement which would see others in the region become partners in the development of advanced weaponry. This is occurring in the context of rising tensions between the United States and China.
Many of us share the view that New Zealand should be a voice for deescalation, not for enthusiastic expansion of nuclear submarine fleets in the Pacific and the development of more lethal weaponry.
Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior . . . publication 10 July 2025. Image: David Robie/Little Island Press
Nuclear war is an existential threat to humanity. Far from receding, the threat of use of nuclear weapons is ever present. The Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists now sits at 89 seconds to midnight. It references the Ukraine theatre where the use of nuclear weapons has been floated by Russia. The arms control architecture for Europe is unravelling, leaving the continent much less secure. India and Pakistan both have nuclear arsenals. The Middle East is a tinder box with the failure of the Iran nuclear deal and with Israel widely believed to possess nuclear weapons. North Korea continues to develop its nuclear weapons capacity. An outright military conflict between China and the United States would be one between two nuclear powers with serious ramifications for East Asia, South-East Asia, the Pacific, and far beyond.
August 2025 marks the eightieth anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A survivors’ group, Nihon Hidankyo, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year. They bear tragic witness to the horror of the use of nuclear weapons. The world must heed their voice now and at all times.
In the current global turbulence, New Zealand needs to reemphasise the principles and values which drove its nuclear-free legislation and its advocacy for a nuclear-free South Pacific and global nuclear disarmament. New Zealanders were clear — we did not want to be defended by nuclear weapons. We wanted our country to be a force for diplomacy and for dialogue, not for warmongering.
The multilateral system is now in crisis — across all its dimensions. The UN Security Council is paralysed by great power tensions. The United States is unlikely to pay its dues to the UN under the Trump presidency, and others are unlikely to fill the substantial gap which that leaves. Its humanitarian, development, health, human rights, political and peacekeeping, scientific and cultural arms all face fiscal crises.
This is the time for New Zealand to link with the many small and middle powers across regions who have a vision for a world characterised by solidarity and peace and which can rise to the occasion to combat the existential challenges it faces — including of nuclear weapons, climate change, and artificial intelligence. If our independent foreign policy is to mean anything in the mid-2020s, it must be based on concerted diplomacy for peace and sustainable development.
Movement back towards an out-of-date alliance, from which New Zealand disengaged four decades ago, and its current tentacles, offers no safe harbour — on the contrary, these destabilise the region within which we live and the wide trading relationships we have. May this new edition of David Robie’s Eyes of Fire remind us of our nuclear-free journey and its relevance as a lode star in these current challenging times.
The 40th anniversary edition of Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior by David Robie ($50, Little Island Press) can be purchased from Little Island Press.
Forty years ago today, French secret agents bombed the Greenpeace campaign flagship Rainbow Warrior in an attempt to stop the environmental organisation’s protest against nuclear testing at Moruroa Atoll in Mā’ohi Nui.
People gathered on board Rainbow Warrior III to remember photographer Fernando Pereira, who was killed in the attack, and to honour the legacy of those who stood up to nuclear testing in the Pacific.
The Rainbow Warrior’s final voyage before the bombing was Operation Exodus, a humanitarian mission to the Marshall Islands. There, Greenpeace helped relocate more than 320 residents of Rongelap Atoll, who had been exposed to radiation from US nuclear testing.
The dawn ceremony was hosted by Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei and attended by more than 150 people. Speeches were followed by the laying of a wreath and a moment of silence.
Photographer Fernando Pereira and a woman from Rongelap on the day the Rainbow Warrior arrived in Rongelap Atoll in May 1985. Image: David Robie/Eyes of Fire
Tui Warmenhoven (Ngāti Porou), the chair of the Greenpeace Aotearoa board, said it was a day to remember for the harm caused by the French state against the people of Mā’ohi Nui.
Warmenhoven worked for 20 years in iwi research and is a grassroots, Ruatoria-based community leader who works to integrate mātauranga Māori with science to address climate change in Te Tai Rāwhiti.
She encouraged Māori to stand united with Greenpeace.
“Ko te mea nui ki a mātou, a Greenpeace Aotearoa, ko te whawhai i ngā mahi tūkino a rātou, te kāwanatanga, ngā rangatōpū, me ngā tāngata whai rawa, e patu ana i a mātou, te iwi Māori, ngā iwi o te ao, me ō mātou mātua, a Ranginui rāua ko Papatūānuku,” e ai ki a Warmenhoven.
Tui Warmenhoven and Dr Russel Norman in front of Rainbow Warrior III on 10 July 2025. Image:Te Ao Māori News
A defining moment in Aotearoa’s nuclear-free stand “The bombing of the Rainbow Warrior was a defining moment for Greenpeace in its willingness to fight for a nuclear-free world,” said Dr Russel Norman, the executive director of Greenpeace Aotearoa.
He noted it was also a defining moment for Aotearoa in the country’s stand against the United States and France, who conducted nuclear tests in the region.
Greenpeace Aotearoa executive director Dr Russel Norman speaking at the ceremony on board Rainbow Warrior III today. Image: Te Ao Māpri News
In 1987, the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act officially declared the country a nuclear-free zone.
This move angered the United States, especially due to the ban on nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed ships entering New Zealand ports.
Because the US followed a policy of neither confirming nor denying the presence of nuclear weapons, it saw the ban as breaching the ANZUS Treaty and suspended its security commitments to New Zealand.
The Rainbow Warrior’s final voyage before it was bombed was Operation Exodus, during which the crew helped relocate more than 320 residents of Rongelap Atoll in the Marshall Islands, who had been exposed to radiation from US nuclear testing between 1946 and 1958.
The evacuation of Rongelap Islanders to Mejatto by the Rainbow Warrior crew in May 1985. Image: Greenpeace/Fernando Pereira
The legacy of Operation Exodus Between 1946 and 1958, the United States carried out 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands.
For decades, it denied the long-term health impacts, even as cancer rates rose and children were born with severe deformities.
Despite repeated pleas from the people of Rongelap to be evacuated, the US government failed to act until Greenpeace stepped in to help.
“The United States government effectively used them as guinea pigs for nuclear testing and radiation to see what would happen to people, which is obviously outrageous and disgusting,” Dr Norman said.
He said it was important not to see Pacific peoples as victims, as they were powerful campaigners who played a leading role in ending nuclear testing in the region.
Marshallese women greet the Rainbow Warrior as it arrived in the capital Majuro in March 2025. Image: Bianca Vitale/Greenpeace
Between March and April this year, Rainbow Warrior III returned to the Marshall Islands to conduct independent research into the radiation levels across the islands to see whether it’s safe for the people of Rongelap to return.
What advice do you give to this generation about nuclear issues? “Kia kotahi ai koutou ki te whai i ngā mahi uaua i mua i a mātou ki te whawhai i a rātou mā, e mahi tūkino ana ki tō mātou ao, ki tō mātou kōkā a Papatūānuku, ki tō mātou taiao,” hei tā Tui Warmenhoven.
A reminder to stay united in the difficult world ahead in the fight against threats to the environment.
Warmenhoven also encouraged Māori to support Greenpeace Aotearoa.
Tui Warmenhoven and the captain of the Rainbow Warrior, Ali Schmidt, placed a wreath in the water at the stern of the ship in memory of Fernando Pereira. Image: Greenpeace
Dr Norman believed the younger generations should be inspired to activism by the bravery of those from the Pacific and Greenpeace who campaigned for a nuclear-free world 40 years ago.
“They were willing to take very significant risks, they sailed their boats into the nuclear test zone to stop those nuclear tests, they were arrested by the French, beaten up by French commandos,” he said.
Republished from Te Ao Māori News with permission.
Join us for this guided “virtual tour” around the Rainbow Warrior III in Auckland Harbour on the afternoon of 10 July 2025 — the 40th anniversary of the bombing of the original flagship.
The Rainbow Warrior is a special vessel — it’s one of three present-day Greenpeace ships.
The Rainbow Warrior works on the biggest issues affecting the future of our planet. It was the first ship in our fleet that was designed and built specifically for activism at sea.
Virtual tour of the Rainbow Warrior. Video: Greenpeace
It also represents a continuation of the legacy of the previous two Rainbow Warriors.
On this anniversary day we explored the ship and talked to key people about the current campaign to protect the world’s oceans.
Programmes director Niamh O’Flynn presented the tour, starting on Halsey Wharf.
Thanks to third mate Adriana, oceans campaigner Ellie; author David Robie, who sailed on the original Rainbow Warrior on the 1985 Rongelap relocation mission and whose new anniversary edition of Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior is being launched tonight, radio engineer Neil and Captain Ali!
I didn’t know much about the surrounding context of the infamous Rainbow Warrior bombing 40 years ago on Thursday. All I knew was that we, as a country, have not forgotten.
I was born in 1996, and although I didn’t know much about the vessel’s bombing, which galvanised anti-nuclear sentiment across Aotearoa further, the basics were common knowledge growing up.
On 10 July 1985, French secret agents destroyed the Rainbow Warrior at Marsden Wharf in Auckland, killing Portuguese-born Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira and sparking global outrage.
The Rainbow Warrior protested nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific, specifically targeting French atmospheric and underground nuclear tests at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls.
Their efforts drew international attention to the environmental devastation and human suffering caused by decades of radioactive fallout.
There’s plenty to learn from this book in terms of the facts, but what I took away from it most is its continued relevance since its original publication in 1986.
The opening prologue is former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark’s reflection on the Warrior’s bombing, Pereira’s death and the current socio-political climate of today in relation to back then.
Clark makes remarks on AUKUS, nuclear weapons and geopolitical pressures, describing it all as “storm clouds gathering again”.
The Nuclear Free Pacific banner on the Rainbow Warrior. Image: David Robie
Nuclear fallout It has been a tumultuous period for the Pacific region in the political realm, between being at the mercy of a tug-of-war between global superpowers and the impending finality of climate change to the livelihoods of many.
With EOF’s 40th Anniversary edition, it is yet another documentation of these turbulent times for the Pacific, which have never really stopped since colonial powers first made contact.
Between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted 67 atmospheric and underwater tests in the Marshall Islands. Then, in 1966, the French launched 46 atmospheric tests between 1966 and 1974, followed by 147 underground bombs from 1975 to 1996 after widespread international protest and scrutiny.
Specifically, the US 1954 Castle Bravo nuclear test, the largest atmospheric hydrogen bomb test, resulted in the fallout’s ash coating Rongelap Atoll. Though the US evacuated residents days later, they returned them in 1957, leaving them to suffer from health effects like miscarriages, cancer, and birth deformities.
Eventually, the Rainbow Warrior helped evacuate the Rongelap people in 1985 over several trips, where the locals packed down their homes and brought them onboard.
Throughout history to today, there’s a theme of constant disregard and dehumanisation of my people by the West.
PMN News interview with Dr David Robie on 20 May 2025.
When does it stop? A decade prior to the Rongelap evacuation, the infamous Dawn Raids occurred, where it wasn’t until 1986 that a Race Relations investigation found Pacific people comprised roughly a third of overstayers yet represented 86 per cent of all prosecutions.
The 506-day Bastion Point protest also occurred between 1977 and 1978, where Ngāti Whātua, led by Joe Hawke, pushed back against a proposed Crown sale of that land.
In the end, around 500 NZ police and army forcefully evicted the peaceful protestors.
So, while this was all happening, the Pacific, specifically the Marshall Islands and French Polynesia region, were reeling from the decades of nuclear testing and consequential sickness, pain and death.
Today, the Pacific is stuck between geopolitical egos, the fear of being used as a resource stepping stone, internal struggles, economic destabilisation and pleas for climate change to be made a priority not to save sinking islands but the world.
Amid this “political football”, it constantly feels like Pacific and Māori end up being the ball.
Robie’s book tells heartfelt moments with its facts, which helps connect to its story at a deeper level beyond sharing genealogy with the people involved.
Voices within it don’t hold back their urgency or outrage towards what happened, especially how that past negligence by bodies of power continues today.
When I read books like EOF 40th, whether it’s about my tangata Māori or Tagata Moana, I often close them and wonder: When do we get a break? When does it stop?
I wish I had an answer, but I don’t. At least we will always have answers on what happened to the Rainbow Warrior and why.
No matter what, it is indisputable that an informed generation will navigate the future better than their predecessors, and with EOF 40th, they’ll be well-equipped.
The Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior has sailed into Auckland to mark the 40th anniversary of the bombing of the original Rainbow Warrior in 1985.
Greenpeace’s vessel, which had been protesting nuclear testing in the Pacific, sank after French government agents planted explosives on its hull, killing Portuguese-Dutch photographer Fernando Pereira.
Today, 40 years on from the events on July 10 1985, a dawn ceremony was held in Auckland.
Author Margaret Mills was a cook on board the ship at the time, and has written about her experience in a book entitled Anecdotage.
Author Margaret Mills tells TVNZ Breakfast about the night of the Rainbow Warrior bombing 40 years ago. Image: TVNZ
The 95-year-old told TVNZ Breakfast the experience on board “changed her life”.
“I was sound asleep, and I heard this sort of bang and turned the light on, but it wouldn’t go on.
She said when she left her cabin, a crew member told her “we’ve been bombed”.
‘I laughed at him’
“I laughed at him, I said ‘we don’t get bombs in New Zealand, that’s ridiculous’.”
She said they were taken to the police station after a “big boom when the second bomb came through”.
“I realised immediately, I was part of a historical event,” she said.
TVNZ reporter Corazon Miller talks to Greenpeace Aotearoa executive director Russel Norman (centre) and journalist David Robie after the Rainbow Warrior memorial dawn service today. Image: TVNZ
Journalist David Robie. who travelled on the Rainbow Warrior and wrote the book Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior published today, told Breakfast it was a “really shocking, shocking night”.
“We were so overwhelmed by the grief and absolute shock of what had happened. But for me, there was no doubt it was France behind this.”
“But we were absolutely flabbergasted that a country could do this.”
He said it was a “very emotional moment” and was hard to believe it had been 40 years since that time.
‘Momentous occasion’
“It stands out in my life as being the most momentous occasion as a journalist covering that whole event.”
Executive director of Greenpeace Aotearoa Russel Norman said the legacy of the ship was about “people who really stood up for something important”.
“I mean, ending nuclear testing in the Pacific, imagine if they were still exploding bombs in the Pacific. We would have to live with that.
“And those people back then they stood up and beat the French government to end nuclear testing.
“It’s pretty inspirational.”
He said the group were still campaigning on some key environmental issues today.
Tomorrow marks 40 years since the bombing and sinking of the Rainbow Warrior — a moment that changed the course of New Zealand’s history and reshaped how we saw ourselves on the world stage.
Two French agents planted two explosives on the ship, then just before midnight, explosions ripped through the hull killing photographer, Fernando Pereira and sinking the 47m ex-fishing trawler.
The attack sparked outrage across the country and the world, straining diplomatic ties between New Zealand and France and cementing the country’s anti-nuclear stance.
Few people are more closely linked to the ship than author and journalist Dr David Robie, who spent eleven weeks on board during its final voyage through the Pacific, and wrote the book, Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, which is being published tomorrow. He joins Emile Donovan.
A prominent academic has criticised the New Zealand coalition government for compromising the country’s traditional commitment to upholding an international rules-based order due to a “desire not to offend” the Trump administration.
Professor Robert Patman, an inaugural sesquicentennial distinguished chair and a specialist in international relations at the University of Otago, has argued in a contributed article to The Spinoff that while distant in geographic terms, “brutal violence in Gaza, the West Bank and Iran marks the latest stage in the unravelling of an international rules-based order on which New Zealand depends for its prosperity and security”.
Dr Patman wrote that New Zealand’s founding document, the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, emphasised partnership and cooperation at home, and, after 1945, helped inspire a New Zealand worldview enshrined in institutions such as the United Nations and norms such as multilateralism.
Professor Robert Patman . . . “Even more striking was the government’s silence on President Trump’s proposal to own Gaza with a view to evicting two million Palestinian residents.” Image: University of Otago
“In the wake of Hamas’ terrorist attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023, the National-led coalition government has in principle emphasised its support for a lasting ceasefire in Gaza and the need for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the occupied territories of East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank,” he wrote.
However, Dr Patman said, in practice this New Zealand stance had not translated into firm diplomatic opposition to the Netanyahu government’s quest to control Gaza and annex the West Bank.
“Nor has it been a condemnation of the Trump administration for prioritising its support for Israel’s security goals over international law,” he said.
Foreign minister Winston Peters had described the situation in Gaza as “simply intolerable” but the National-led coalition had little specific to say as the Netanyahu government “resumed its cruel blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza in March and restarted military operations there”.
Silence on Trump’s ‘Gaza ownership’
“Even more striking was the government’s silence on President Trump’s proposal to own Gaza with a view to evicting two million Palestinian residents from the territory and the US-Israeli venture to start the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) in late May in a move which sidelined the UN in aid distribution and has led to the killing of more than 600 Palestinians while seeking food aid,” Dr Patman said.
While New Zealand, along with the UK, Australia, Canada and Norway, had imposed sanctions on two far-right Israeli government ministers, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar ben Gvir, in June for “inciting extremist violence” against Palestinians — a move that was criticised by the Trump administration — it was arguably a case of very little very late.
“The Hamas terror attacks on October 7 killed around 1200 Israelis, but the Netanyahu government’s retaliation by the Israel Defence Force (IDF) against Hamas has resulted in the deaths of more than 56,000 Palestinians — nearly 70 percent of whom were women or children — in Gaza.
Over the same period, more than 1000 Palestinians had been killed in the West Bank as Israel accelerated its programme of illegal settlements there.
‘Strangely ambivalent’
In addition, the responses of the New Zealand government to “pre-emptive attacks” by Israel (13-25 June) and Trump’s United States (June 22) against Iran to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities were strangely ambivalent.
Despite indications from US intelligence and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that Iran had not produced nuclear weapons, Foreign Minister Peters had said New Zealand was not prepared to take a position on that issue.
Confronted with Trump’s “might is right” approach, the National-led coalition faced stark choices, Dr Patman said.
The New Zealand government could continue to fudge fundamental moral and legal issues in the Middle East and risk complicity in the further weakening of an international rules-based order it purportedly supports, “or it can get off the fence, stand up for the country’s values, and insist that respect for international law must be observed in the region and elsewhere without exception”.
How Pacific live media communications have changed in the past 21 years.
In May 2004, the live broadcast of Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara’s funeral from Lau required a complex and resource-intensive setup.
Fiji TV relied on assistance from TVNZ, deploying a portable satellite installation to transmit signals from Lau to a satellite up in the sky, then to Auckland, back to another satellite, and finally down to Suva.
This intricate process underscored the technological limitations of the time, where live coverage from remote Fiji areas demanded significant logistical coordination and international support.
Fast forward to 2025, 21 years later, and the communication and media landscape in Fiji has undergone a remarkable transformation.
Today, I see video production houses, TV stations, radio stations, and newspaper media outlets delivering live coverage directly from Lau.
This shows how high-speed internet, mobile networks, and portable streaming devices like Starlink has eliminated the need for cumbersome satellite relays. No approval from any authority.
Where once international partnerships were essential, today’s media teams in Fiji can operate independently, delivering seamless live coverage of cultural, political, and social events from even the most isolated areas.
Republished from Fiji Times managing digital editor Anish Chand’s social media post with permission. He is a former Fiji TV news operations manager.
The New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) is not considering recruiting personnel from across the Pacific as talk continues of Australia doing so for its Defence Force (ADF).
In response to a question from The Australian at the National Press Club in Canberra about Australia’s plans to potentially recruit from the Pacific Islands into the ADF, Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka said he “would like to see it happen”.
“Whether Australia does it or not depends on your own policies. We will not push it.”
RNZ Pacific asked the NZDF under the Official Information Act (OIA) for all correspondence sent and received regarding any discussion on recruiting from the Pacific, along with other related questions.
The OIA request was declined as the information did not exist.
“Defence Recruiting has not and is not considering deliberate recruiting action from across the Pacific,” the response from the NZDF said.
Australia Defence Association executive director Neil James said citizenship needed to be a prerequisite to Pacific recruitment.
Australian citizen
“Even a New Zealander serving in the Australian military has to become an Australian citizen,” James said.
“They can start off being an Australian resident, but they’ve got to be on the path to citizenship.
”They’ve got to be capable of getting permanent residency in Australia and citizenship.
“And then you’ve got to tackle the moral problem — it’s pretty hard to ask foreigners to fight for your country when your own people won’t do it.”
James said he thought people might be “jumping at hairs” at Rabuka’s comments.
Unlike Samoa’s acting prime minister, who has voiced concern over a brain drain, both Papua New Guinea and Fiji have made it clear they have people to spare.
Ross Thompson, a managing director at People In, the largest approved employer in the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility Scheme, said if the recruitment drive does go ahead, PNG nationals would return home with a wider skill set.
‘Brain gain, not drain’
“This would be a brain gain, rather than be a drain on PNG.”
He’s spoken with people in PNG who welcome the proposal.
”PNG, its population is over 10 million . . . We’re proposing from PNG around 1000 could be recruited every year.”
Minister Rabuka joked Fiji could plug Australia’s personnel hole on its own.
“If it’s open [to recruiting Fijians] . . . [we will offer] the whole lot . . . 5000,” he said, while noting that Fiji was able to easily fill its quota under the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme.
“The villages are emptying out into the cities. What we would like to do is to reduce those who are ending up in settlements in the cities and not working, giving way to crime and becoming first victims to the sale of drugs and AIDS and HIV from frequently used or commonly used needles.”
Thompson was also a captain in the Queen’s Gurkha Engineers of the British Army and said he was proud to have served alongside Fijians.
Honour serving
“I had the honour to serve with a number of Fijians while deployed overseas; they’re fantastic soldiers.
“This is something that’s been going on since the Second World War and it’s a big part of the British Army.”
From a recruitment perspective, he said PNG and Fiji would be a good starting point before extending to any other Pacific nations.
”PNG has a strong history with the Australian Defence Force. There’s a number of programmes that are currently ongoing, on shared military exercises, there’s PNG officers that are serving in the ADF now, or on secondment to the ADF.
“So I think those two countries are definitely good to look up from a pilot perspective.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
On the last voyage of the Rainbow Warrior prior to its sinking by French secret agents in Auckland harbour on 10 July 1985 the ship had evacuated the entire population of 320 from Rongelap in the Marshall Islands.
After conducting dozens of above-ground nuclear explosions, the US government had left the population in conditions that suggested the islanders were being used as guinea pigs to gain knowledge of the effects of radiation.
Cancers, birth defects, and genetic damage ripped through the population; their former fisheries and land are contaminated to this day.
Denied adequate support from the US – they turned to Greenpeace with an SOS: help us leave our ancestral homeland; it is killing our people. The Rainbow Warrior answered the call.
Human lab rats or our brothers and sisters? Dr Merrill Eisenbud, a physicist in the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) famously said in 1956 of the Marshall Islanders: “While it is true that these people do not live, I might say, the way Westerners do, civilised people, it is nevertheless also true that they are more like us than the mice.”
Dr Eisenbud also opined that exposure “would provide valuable information on the effects of radiation on human beings.” That research continues to this day.
A half century of testing nuclear bombs Within a year of dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US moved part of its test programme to the central Pacific. Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands was used for atmospheric explosions from 1946 with scant regard for the indigenous population.
In 1954, the Castle Bravo test exploded a 15-megaton bomb — one thousand times more deadly than the one dropped on Hiroshima. As a result, the population of Rongelap were exposed to 200 roentgens of radiation, considered life-threatening without medical intervention. And it was.
Part of the Marshall Islands, with Bikini Atoll and Rongelap in the top left. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
Total US tests equaled more than 7000 Hiroshimas. The Clinton administration released the aptly-named Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE), report in January 1994 in which it acknowledged:
“What followed was a program by the US government — initially the Navy and then the AEC and its successor agencies — to provide medical care for the exposed population, while at the same time trying to learn as much as possible about the long-term biological effects of radiation exposure. The dual purpose of what is now a DOE medical program has led to a view by the Marshallese that they were being used as ‘guinea pigs’ in a ‘radiation experiment’.
This impression was reinforced by the fact that the islanders were deliberately left in place and then evacuated, having been heavily radiated. Three years later they were told it was “safe to return” despite the lead scientist calling Rongelap “by far the most contaminated place in the world”.
Significant compensation paid by the US to the Marshall Islands has proven inadequate given the scale of the contamination. To some degree, the US has also used money to achieve capture of elite interest groups and secure ongoing control of the islands.
Entrusted to the US, the Marshall Islanders were treated like the civilians of Nagasaki The US took the Marshall Islands from Japan in 1944. The only “right” it has to be there was granted by the United Nations which in 1947 established the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, to be administered by the United States.
What followed was an abuse of trust worse than rapists at a state care facility. Using the very powers entrusted to it to protect the Marshallese, the US instead used the islands as a nuclear laboratory — violating both the letter and spirit of international law.
Fellow white-dominated countries like Australia and New Zealand couldn’t have cared less and let the indigenous people be irradiated for decades.
The betrayal of trust by the US was comprehensive and remains so to this day:
Under Article 76 of the UN Charter, all trusteeship agreements carried obligations. The administering power was required to:
Promote the political, economic, social, and educational advancement of the people
Protect the rights and well-being of the inhabitants
Help them advance toward self-government or independence.
Under Article VI, the United States solemnly pledged to “Protect the inhabitants against the loss of their lands and resources.” Very similar to sentiments in New Zealand’s Treaty of Waitangi. Within a few years the Americans were exploding the biggest nuclear bombs in history over the islands.
Within a year of the US assuming trusteeship of the islands, another pillar of international law came into effect: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) — which affirms the inherent dignity and equal rights of all humans. Exposing colonised peoples to extreme radiation for weapons testing is a racist affront to this.
America has a long history of making treaties and fine speeches and then exploiting indigenous peoples. Last year, I had the sobering experience of reading American military historian Peter Cozzens’ The Earth is Weeping, a history of the “Indian wars” for the American West.
The past is not dead: the Marshall Islands are a hive of bases, laboratories and missile testing; Americans are also incredibly busy attacking the population in Gaza today.
Eyes of Fire – the last voyage of the Rainbow Warrior Had the French not sunk the Rainbow Warrior after it reached Auckland from the Rongelap evacuation, it would have led a flotilla to protest nuclear testing at Moruroa in French Polynesia. So the bookends of this article are the abuse of defenceless people in the charge of one nuclear power — the US — and the abuse of New Zealand and the peoples of French Polynesia by another nuclear power — France.
Senator Jeton Anjain (left) of Rongelap and Greenpeace campaign coordinator Steve Sawyer on board the Rainbow Warrior . . . challenging the abuse of defenceless people under the charge of one nuclear power. Image: David Robie/Eyes of Fire
This incredible story, and much more, is the subject of David Robie’s outstanding book Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior, published by Little Island Press, which has been relaunched to mark the 40th anniversary of the French terrorist attack.
A new prologue by former prime minister Helen Clark and a preface by Greenpeace’s Bunny McDiarmid, along with an extensive postscript which bring us up to the present day, underline why the past is not dead; it’s with us right now.
Between them, France and the US have exploded more than 300 nuclear bombs in the Pacific. Few people are told this; few people know this.
Today, a matrix of issues combine — the ongoing effects of nuclear contamination, sea rise imperilling Pacific nations, colonialism still posing immense challenges to people in the Marshall Islands, Kanaky New Caledonia and in many parts of our region.
Unsung heroes Our media never ceases to share the pronouncements of European leaders and news from the US and Europe but the leaders and issues of the Pacific are seldom heard. The heroes of the antinuclear movement should be household names in Australia and New Zealand.
Vanuatu’s great leader Father Walter Lini; Oscar Temaru, Mayor, later President of French Polynesia; Senator Jeton Anjain, Darlene Keju-Johnson and so many others.
Do we know them? Have we heard their voices?
Jobod Silk, climate activist, said in a speech welcoming the Rainbow Warrior III to Majuro earlier this year: “Our crusade for nuclear justice intertwines with our fight against the tides.”
Nuclear-Free and Independent Pacific . . . the Rainbow Warrior taking on board Rongelap islanders ready for their first of four relocation voyages to Mejatto island. Image: David Robie/Eyes of Fire
Former Tuvalu PM Enele Sapoaga castigated Australia for the AUKUS submarine deal which he said “was crafted in secret by former Prime Minister Scott Morrison with no public discussion.”
He challenged the bigger regional powers, particularly Australia and New Zealand, to remember that the existential threat faced by Pacific nations comes first from climate change, and reminded New Zealanders of the commitment to keeping the South Pacific nuclear-free.
Hinamoeura Cross, a Tahitian anti-nuclear activist and politician, said in a 2019 UN speech: “Today, the damage is done. My people are sick. For 30 years we were the mice in France’s laboratory.”
Until we learn their stories and know their names as well as we know those of Marco Rubio or Keir Starmer, we will remain strangers in our own lands.
The Pacific owes them, along with the people of Greenpeace, a huge debt. They put their bodies on the line to stop the aggressors. Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira, killed by the French in 1985, was just one of many victims, one of many heroes.
A great way to honour the sacrifice of those who stood up for justice, who stood for peace and a nuclear-free Pacific, and who honoured our own national identity would be to buy David Robie’s excellent book.
You cannot sink a rainbow.
Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira being welcomed to Rongelap Atoll by a villager in May 1985 barely two months before he was killed by French secret agents during the sabotage of the Rainbow Warrior. Image: David Robie/Eyes of Fire
West Papuan independence advocate Octovianus Mote was in Aotearoa New Zealand late last year seeking support for independence for West Papua, which has been ruled by Indonesia for more than six decades.
Mote is vice-president of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) and was hosted in New Zealand by the Green Party, which Mote said had always been a “hero” for West Papua.
He spoke at a West Papua seminar at the Māngere Mountain Education Centre and in this Talanoa TV segment he offers prayers for the West Papuan solidarity movement.
In a “blessing for peace and justice”, Octo Mote spoke of his hopes for the West Papuan struggle for independence at lunch at the Mount Albert home of New Zealand activist Maire Leadbeater in September 2024.
He gave a tribute to Leadbeater and the Whānau Community Centre and Hub’s Nik Naidu, saying:
“We remember those who cannot eat like us, especially those who oppressed . . . The 80,000 people in Papua who have had to flee their homes because of the Indonesian military operations.”
Video: Nik Naidu, Talanoa TV
Blessings by Octo Mote. Video: Talanoa TV
On Saturday, 12 July 2025 Te Atatu MP Phil Twyford will open the week-long Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) exhibition at the Ellen Melville Centre Women’s Pioneer Hall at 3pm.
Greenpeace Aotearoa executive director Russel Norman today recalled New Zealand’s heyday as a Pacific nuclear free champion in the 1980s, and challenged the country to again become a leading voice for “peace and justice”, this time for the Palestinian people.
He told the weekly Palestinian solidarity rally in Auckland’s central Te Komititanga Square that it was time for New Zealand to take action and recognise the state of Palestine and impose sanctions on Israel over its Gaza atrocities.
“From 1946 to 1996, over 300 nuclear weapons were exploded across the Pacific and consistently the New Zealand government spoke out against it,” he said.
“It took cases to the International Court of Justice, supported by Australia and Fiji, against the nuclear testing across the Pacific.
“Aotearoa New Zealand was a voice for peace, it was a voice for justice, and when the French government bombed the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior here and killed Fernando Pereira, it spoke out and took action against France.”
New Zealand will this week be commemorating the 40th anniversary of the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior by French secret agents on 10 July 1985 and the killing of Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira.
Dawn vigil on Greenpeace III
Greenpeace plans a dawn vigil on board their current flagship Rainbow Warrior III at Halsey Wharf.
He spoke about the Gaza war crimes, saying it was time for New Zealand to take serious action to help end this 20 months of settler colonial genocide.
“There are millions of people [around the world] who are trying to end this colonial occupation of Palestinian land,” Norman said.
“And millions of people who are trying to stop people simply standing to get food who are hungry who are being shelled and killed by the Israeli military simply for the ‘crime’ of being born in the land that Israel wants to occupy.”
Rocket Lab . . . a target for protests this week against the Gaza genocide. Image: David Robie/APR
Norman’s message echoed an open letter that he wrote to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Foreign Minister Winston Peters earlier this week criticising the government for its “ongoing failure … to impose meaningful sanctions on Israel”.
He cited the recent UN Human Rights Office report that said the killing of hundreds of Palestinians by the Israeli military while trying to fetch food from the controversial new “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” aid hubs was a ‘likely war crime”.
“Israel’s ongoing blockade of aid to Gaza has placed over 2 million people on the precipice of famine. Malnutrition and starvation are rife,” he said.
Israel ‘weaponising aid’
“Israel is weaponising aid, using starvation as a tool of genocide and is now shooting at civilians trying to access the scraps of aid that are available.”
He said this was “catastrophic”, quoting Luxon’s own words, and the human suffering was “unacceptable”.
Labour MP for Te Atatu and disarmament spokesperson Phil Twyford also spoke at the rally and march today, saying the Labour Party was calling for sanctions and accountability.
He condemned the failure to hold “the people who have been enabling the genocide in Gaza”.
“It’s been going on for too long. Not just the last [20 months], but actually the last 77 years.
“And it is time the Western world snapped out of the spell that the Zionists have had on the Western imagination — at least on the political classes, government MPs, the policy makers in Western countries, who for so long have enabled, have stayed quiet in the face of the US who have armed and funded the genocide”
For the Palestinian solidarity movement in New Zealand it has been a big week with four politicians — including Prime Minister Luxon — and two business leaders, the chief executives of Rocket Lab and Rakon, who have been referred by the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for investigation over allegations of complicity with the Israeli war crimes.
This unprecedented legal development has been largely ignored by the mainstream media.
On Friday, protesters picketed a Rocket Lab manufacturing site in Warkworth, the head office in Mount Wellington and the Māhia peninsula where satellites are launched.
Protesters against the Israeli genocide in Gaza and occupied West Bank targeted three business sites accused of being “complicit” in Aotearoa New Zealand today.
The Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa’s “End Rocket Lab Genocide Complicity” themed protest picketed Rocket Lab’s New Zealand head office in Mt Wellington.
Simultaneously, protesters also picketed a site in Warkworth where Rocket Lab equipment is built and Mahia peninsula where satellites are launched.
In a statement on the PSNA website, it was revealed this week that the advocacy group’s lawyers have prepared a 103-page “indictment” against two business leaders, including the head of Rocket Lab, along with four politicians, including Prime Minister Christopher Luxon.
They have been referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague for investigation on an accusation of complicity with Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Rocket Lab chief executive Sir Peter Beck is one of the six people named in the legal brief.
“Rocket Lab has recently launched geospatial intelligence satellites for BlackSky Technology,” said PSNA co-chair John Minto in a statement.
High resolution images
“These satellites provide high resolution images to Israel which are very likely used to assist with striking civilians in Gaza. Sir Peter has proceeded with these launches in full knowledge of these circumstances”
A “Genocide Lab” protest against Rocket Lab in Mt Wellington today. Image: PSNA
“When governments and business leaders can’t even condemn a genocide then civil society groups must act.”
The other business leader named is Rakon Limited chief executive officer Dr Sinan Altug.
“Despite vast weapons transfers from the United States to Israel since the beginning of its war on Gaza, Rakon has continued with its longstanding supply of crystal oscillators to US arms manufacturers for use in guided missiles which are then available to Israel for the bombing of Gaza, as well as Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran with consequential massive loss of life,” Minto said.
“Rakon’s claims that it has no responsibility over how these ‘dual-use’ technologies are used are not credible.”
Rocket Lab and Rakon have in the past rejected claims over their responsibility.
Speakers at Mount Wellington included the Green Party spokesperson for foreign affairs Teanau Tuiono; Dr Arama Rata, a researcher and lecturer from Victoria University; and Sam Vincent, the legal team leader for the ICC referral.
Law academic Professor Jane Kelsey spoke at the Warkworth picket.
Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, has called on countries to cut off all trade and financial ties with Israel — including a full arms embargo — and withdraw international support for what she termed an “economy of genocide”, reports Al Jazeera.
Albanese made the comments in a speech to the Human Rights Council in Geneva yesterday as she presented her latest report, which named dozens of companies she said were involved in supporting Israeli repression and violence towards Palestinians.
“The situation in the occupied Palestinian territory is apocalyptic,” she said. “Israel is responsible for one of the cruellest genocides in modern history.”
Nearly 57,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since the war — now in its 22nd month — began, hundreds of thousands have been displaced multiple times, cities and towns have been razed, hospitals and schools targeted, and 85 percent of the besieged and bombarded enclave is now under Israeli military control, according to the UN.
Al Jazeera’s Federica Marsi reports that Albanese’s latest document names 48 corporate actors, including United States tech giants Microsoft, Alphabet Inc. — Google’s parent company — and Amazon.
“[Israel’s] forever-occupation has become the ideal testing ground for arms manufacturers and Big Tech — providing significant supply and demand, little oversight, and zero accountability — while investors and private and public institutions profit freely,” the report said.
“Companies are no longer merely implicated in occupation — they may be embedded in an economy of genocide,” it said, in a reference to Israel’s ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip.
In an expert opinion last year, Albanese said there were “reasonable grounds” to believe Israel was committing genocide in the besieged Palestinian enclave.
The report stated that its findings illustrate “why Israel’s genocide continues”.
“Because it is lucrative for many,” it said.
Francesca Albanese v Israel’s lobby. Video: Al Jazeera
Military procurements Israel’s procurement of F-35 fighter jets is part of the world’s largest arms procurement programme, relying on at least 1600 companies across eight nations. It is led by US-based Lockheed Martin, but F-35 components are constructed globally.
Italian manufacturer Leonardo S.p.A is listed as a main contributor in the military sector, while Japan’s FANUC Corporation provides robotic machinery for weapons production lines.
The tech sector, meanwhile, has enabled the collection, storage and governmental use of biometric data on Palestinians, “supporting Israel’s discriminatory permit regime”, the report said.
Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon grant Israel “virtually government-wide access to their cloud and AI technologies”, enhancing its data processing and surveillance capacities.
The US tech company IBM has also been responsible for training military and intelligence personnel, as well as managing the central database of Israel’s Population, Immigration and Borders Authority (PIBA) that stores the biometric data of Palestinians, the report said.
It found US software platform Palantir Technologies expanded its support to the Israeli military since the start of the war on Gaza in October 2023.
The report said there were “reasonable grounds” to believe the company provided automatic predictive policing technology used for automated decision-making in the battlefield, to process data and generate lists of targets including through artificial intelligence systems like “Lavender”, “Gospel” and “Where’s Daddy?”
Companies supporting Israel. Graphic: Al Jazeera/Creative CommonsOther companies identified in the report
The report also lists several companies developing civilian technologies that serve as “dual-use tools” for Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory.These include Caterpillar, Leonardo-owned Rada Electronic Industries, South Korea’s HD Hyundai and Sweden’s Volvo Group, which provide heavy machinery for home demolitions and the development of illegal settlements in the West Bank.Rental platforms Booking and Airbnb also aid illegal settlements by listing properties and hotel rooms in Israeli-occupied territory.
The report named the US’s Drummond Company and Switzerland’s Glencore as the primary suppliers of coal for electricity to Israel, originating primarily from Colombia.
In the agriculture sector, Chinese Bright Dairy & Food is a majority owner of Tnuva, Israel’s largest food conglomerate, which benefits from land seized from Palestinians in Israel’s illegal outposts.
Netafim, a company providing drip irrigation technology that is 80-percent owned by Mexico’s Orbia Advance Corporation, provides infrastructure to exploit water resources in the occupied West Bank.
Treasury bonds have also played a critical role in funding the ongoing war on Gaza, according to the report, with some of the world’s largest banks, including France’s BNP Paribas and the UK’s Barclays, listed as having stepped in to allow Israel to contain the interest rate premium despite a credit downgrade.
Which are the main investors behind these companies? The report identified US multinational investment companies BlackRock and Vanguard as the main investors behind several listed companies.
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is listed as the second largest institutional investor in Palantir (8.6 percent), Microsoft (7.8 percent), Amazon (6.6 percent), Alphabet (6.6 percent) and IBM (8.6 per cent), and the third largest in Lockheed Martin (7.2 percent) and Caterpillar (7.5 percent).
Vanguard, the world’s second-largest asset manager, is the largest institutional investor in Caterpillar (9.8 percent), Chevron (8.9 percent) and Palantir (9.1 percent), and the second largest in Lockheed Martin (9.2 percent) and Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems (2 percent).
New Zealand referrals to the International Criminal Court
Meanwhile, the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa yesterday released a report saying that it was referring two New Zealand businessmen along with four politicians, including Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, to the International Criminal Court for investigation over alleged policies relating to Gaza.
The PSNA accused the six individuals of complicity in war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide by “assisting Israel’s mass killing and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza”.
In a statement, PSNA co-chairs John Minto and Maher Nazzal said the referral “carefully outlines a case that these six individuals should be investigated” by the Office of the Prosecutor for their knowing contribution to Israel’s crimes in Gaza.
“The 103-page referral document was prepared by a legal team which has been working on the case for many months,” said Minto and Nazzal.
“It is legally robust and will provide the prosecutor of the ICC more than sufficient documentation to begin their investigation.”
Which NZ politicians and business leaders have been referred by the PSNA to the ICC? Image: NZH screenshot APR
In an unprecedented legal move in Aotearoa New Zealand, a national Palestine solidarity advocacy group has filed a referral against the prime minister, three other ministers in the coalition government and two business leaders, alleging complicity with Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza.
The Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) has accused the six individuals of complicity in war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide by “assisting Israel’s mass killing and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza”.
The PSNA movement has led 90 consecutive weeks of protest at multiple locations across New Zealand in the country’s biggest humn rights campaign since the war began in October 2023.
In a statement, PSNA co-chairs John Minto and Maher Nazzal said the referral “carefully outlines a case that these six individuals should be investigated” by the Office of the Prosecutor for their knowing contribution to Israel’s crimes in Gaza.
“The 103-page referral document was prepared by a legal team which has been working on the case for many months,” said Minto and Nazzal.
“It is legally robust and will provide the prosecutor of the ICC more than sufficient documentation to begin their investigation.”
The six people named in the referral documentation are Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters, Minister for Defence and Space Judith Collins, Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour, and businessmen Rocket Lab chief executive Sir Peter Beck and Rakon Limited chief executive Dr Sinan Altug.
Spy satellites
According to PSNA, Rocket Lab launches spy satellites from Māhia, which PSNA claims Israel uses go target civilians in Gaza, while Rakon exports military-grade crystal oscillators to the US “to be put in missiles which Israel can deploy in Gaza and elsewhere”.
“This is a grave step which we have not taken lightly,” Minto and Nazzal said.
PSNA co-chair John Minto … “This is a grave step which we have not taken lightly.” Image: PMC
“The government’s ongoing and meaningful support for Israel, despite its horrendous war crimes, is not only egregious to most New Zealanders, but is also criminal conduct under international law.”
The PSNA referral follows an open letter by one of the country’s largest environmental organisations two days ago that called on the government to impose sanctions on Israel amid mounting criticism in New Zealand over war crimes allegations against the state over its 20-month war.
Greenpeace’s sanctions open letter to NZ Prime Minister Christopher Luxon. Image: Greenpeace screeshot APR
Greenpeace Aotearoa’s executive director Dr Russel Norman, a former Green Party co-leader, said in an open letter addressed to Prime Minister Luxon and Foreign Minister Peters that he was expressing grave concerns about the “ongoing genocide in Gaza being carried out by Israeli forces, and the ongoing failure of the New Zealand government to impose meaningful sanctions on Israel.”
Norman cited a statement by the UN Human Rights Office last week that “at least 410 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military while trying to fetch from controversial new aid hubs in Gaza”.
The office said this was “a likely war crime”.
‘Killing field’
He also cited Ha’aretz, a respected Israeli newspaper, quoting an Israeli soldier describing the Israeli and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHC) aid hubs as a “killing field”.
PSNA co-chair Maher Nazzal . . . “This has brought shame on the whole country.” Image: APR
In March last year, Sydney law firm Birchgrove Legal referred a case to ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan consisting of 92 pages of documented evidence, alleging that Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and several other high level local politicians were complicit in the Gaza genocide.
‘Letter of demand’
The New Zealand referral to the ICC followed a “letter of demand” issued to the government last year actions that a “reasonable government” would take to prevent and punish the crime of genocide, and the actions a government should take to avoid criminal complicity with Israel.
The ICC referral document from PSNA against the New Zealand coalition government individuals. Image: PSNA screenshot APR
“For 20 months these political and business leaders have supported Israel to commit crimes which have shocked the human conscience,” Minto and Nazzal said.
“This has brought shame on the whole country.”
It is understood that this is the first time that New Zealand political or business leaders have been referred to the ICC for investigation.
There were no immediate responses. However, a growing number of such cases are being filed around the world.
In July 2024, the UN’s highest global court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an advisory opinion declaring that Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including Gaza and East Jerusalem, was illegal.
It called on Israel to halt all settlements and withdraw settlers from the territory. The court is also investigating Israel over a case brought by South Africa alleging genocide.
Immediately after killing Fernando Pereira and blowing up Greenpeace’s flagship the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour, several of the French agents went on a ski holiday in New Zealand’s South Island to celebrate.
Such was the contempt the French had for the Kiwis and the abilities of our police to pursue them. How wrong they were.
A new prologue by former prime minister Helen Clark and a preface by Greenpeace’s Bunny McDiarmid, along with an extensive postscript which bring us up to the present day, underline why the past is not dead; it’s with us right now.
Written by David Robie, editor of Asia Pacific Report, who spent 11 weeks on the final voyage of the Warrior, the book is the most remarkable piece of history I have read this year and one of those rare books that has the power to expand your mind and make your blood boil at the same time. I thought I knew a fair bit about the momentous events surrounding the attack — until I read Eyes of Fire.
Heroes of our age The book covers the history of Greenpeace action — from fighting the dumping of nuclear and other toxic waste in European waters, the Arctic and the Pacific, voyages to link besieged communities across the oceans, through to their epic struggles to halt whaling and save endangered marine colonies from predators.
The Rainbow Warrior’s very last voyage before the bombing was to evacuate the entire population of Rongelap atoll (about 320 people) in the Marshall Islands who had been exposed to US nuclear radiation for decades.
This article is the first of two in which I will explore themes that the book triggered for me.
Neither secret nor intelligent – the French secret intelligence service
Jean-Luc Kister was the DGSE (Direction-générale de la Sécurité extérieure) agent who placed the two bombs that ripped a massive hole in the hull of the Warrior on 10 July 1985. The ship quickly sank, trapping Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira inside.
Former colonel Kister was a member of a large team of elite agents sent to New Zealand. One had also infiltrated Greenpeace months before, some travelled through the country prior to the attack, drinking, rooting New Zealand women and leaving a trail of breadcrumbs that led all the way to the Palais de l’Élysée where François Mitterrand, Socialist President of France, had personally given the order to bomb the famous peace vessel.
Robie aptly calls the French mission “Blundergate”. The stupidity, howling incompetence and moronic lack of a sound strategic rationale behind the attack were only matched by the mendacity, the imperial hauteur and the racist contempt that lies at the heart of French policy in the Pacific to this very day.
Thinking the Kiwi police would be no match for their élan, their savoir-faire and their panache, some of the killers hit the ski slopes to celebrate “Mission Accompli”. Others fled to Norfolk Island aboard a yacht, the Ouvéa.
Tracked there by the New Zealand police it was only with the assistance of our friends and allies, the Australians, that the agents were able to escape. Within days they sank their yacht at sea during a rendezvous with a French nuclear submarine and were evenually able to return to France for medals and promotions.
Two of the agents, however, were not so lucky. As everyone my age will recall, Dominique Prieur and Alain Mafart, were nabbed after a lightning fast operation by New Zealand police.
With friends and allies like these, who needs enemies? We should recall that the French were our allies at the time. They decided, however, to stop the Rainbow Warrior from leading a flotilla of ships up to Moruroa Atoll in French Polynesia where yet another round of nuclear tests were scheduled. In other words: they bombed a peace ship to keep testing bombs.
By 1995, France had detonated 193 nuclear bombs in the South Pacific.
David Robie sees the bombing as “a desperate attempt by one of the last colonial powers in the Pacific to hang on to the vestiges of empire by blowing up a peace ship so it could continue despoiling Pacific islands for the sake of an independent nuclear force”.
The US, UK and Australia cold-shouldered New Zealand through this period and uttered not a word of condemnation against the French. Within two years we were frog-marched out of the ANZUS alliance with Australia and the US because of our ground-breaking nuclear-free legislation.
It was a blessing and the dawn of a period in which New Zealanders had an intense sense of national pride — a far cry from today when New Zealand politicians are being referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague for war crimes associated with the Gaza genocide.
The French State invented the term ‘terrorism’ I studied French History at university in France and did a paper called “La France à la veille de révolution” (France on the eve of revolution). One of the chilling cultural memories is of the period from September 1793 to July 1794, which was known as La Terreur.
At the time the French state literally coined the term “terrorisme” — with the blade of the guillotine dropping on neck after neck as the state tried to consolidate power through terror. But, as Robie points out, quoting law professor Roger S. Clark, we tend to use the term today to refer almost exclusively to non-state actors.
With the US and Israel gunning down starving civilians in Gaza every day, with wave after wave of terror attacks being committed inside Iran and across the Middle East by Mossad, the CIA and MI6, we should amend this erroneous habit.
The DGSE team who attached limpet mines to the Rainbow Warrior did so as psychopathic servants of the French State. Eyes of Fire: “At the time, Prime Minister David Lange described the Rainbow Warrior attack as ‘nothing more than a sordid act of international state-backed terrorism’.”
Don’t get me wrong. I am not “anti-French”. I lived for years in France, had a French girlfriend, studied French history, language and literature. I even had friends in Wellington who worked at the French Embassy.
Curiously when I lived next to Premier House, the official residence of the prime minister, my other next door neighbour was a French agent who specialised in surveillance. Our houses backed onto Premier House. Quelle coïncidence. To his mild consternation I’d greet him with “Salut, mon espion favori.” (Hello, my favourite spy).
What I despise is French colonialism, French racism, and what the French call magouillage. I don’t know a good English word for it . . . it is a mix of shenanigans, duplicity, artful deception to achieve unscrupulous outcomes that can’t be publicly avowed. In brief: what the French attempted in Auckland in 1985.
Robie recounts in detail the lying, smokescreens and roadblocks that everyone from President Mitterrand through to junior officials put in the way of the New Zealand investigators. Mitterrand gave Prime Minister David Lange assurances that the culprits would be brought to justice. The French Embassy in Wellington claimed at the time: “In no way is France involved. The French government doesn’t deal with its opponents in such ways.”
It took years for the bombshell to explode that none other than Mitterrand himself had ordered the terrorist attack on New Zealand and Greenpeace!
We the people of the Pacific We, the people of the Pacific, owe a debt to Greenpeace and all those who were part of the Rainbow Warrior, including author David Robie. We must remember the crime and call it by its name: state terrorism.
The French attempted to escape justice, deny involvement and then welched on the terms of the agreement negotiated with the help of the United Nations secretary-general.
A great way to honour the sacrifice of those who stood up for justice, who stood for peace and a nuclear-free Pacific, and who honoured our own national identity would be to buy David Robie’s excellent book.
I’ll give the last word to former Prime Minister Helen Clark:
“This is the time for New Zealand to link with the many small and middle powers across regions who have a vision for a world characterised by solidarity and peace and which can rise to the occasion to combat the existential challenges it faces — including of nuclear weapons, climate change, and artificial intelligence. If our independent foreign policy is to mean anything in the mid-2020s, it must be based on concerted diplomacy for peace and sustainable development.”
You cannot sink a rainbow.
Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He contributes to Asia Pacific Report and Café Pacific, and hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz
In July 1985, Australia’s Pacific territory of Norfolk Island (pop. 2188) became the centre of a real life international spy thriller.
Four French agents sailed there on board the Ouvéa, a yacht from Kanaky New Caledonia, after bombing the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland, killing Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira.
The Rainbow Warrior was the flagship for a protest flotilla due to travel to Moruroa atoll to challenge French nuclear tests.
Australian police took them into custody on behalf of their New Zealand counterparts but then, bafflingly, allowed them to sail away, never to face justice.
On the 40th anniversary of the bombing (10 July 2025), award-winning journalist Richard Baker goes on an adventure from Paris to the Pacific to get the real story – and ultimately uncover the role that Australia played in the global headline-making affair.
The programme includes an interview with Pacific journalist David Robie, author of Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior. David’s article about this episode is published at Declassified Australia here.
Atlanta, July 2, 2025—The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns Paramount Global’s $16 million settlement with U.S. President Donald Trump reached on Tuesday, with deep concern that such a concession by a major news network will set a harmful precedent of media self-censorship.
“This is a major blow for press freedom in the United States: A network news outlet has just caved to groundless threats from the president over its coverage,” said CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg in New York. “This signals that the current administration–as well as any future administrations–can interfere with, or influence, editorial decisions.”
In a lawsuit filed last year, Trump accused CBS, whose parent company is Paramount Global, of deceptively editing a ’60 Minutes’ interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris to interfere with the election. Paramount Global will pay the settlement amount, including legal fees, to Trump’s future presidential library, according to newsreports.
Last month, CPJ wrote to the chair of Paramount Global, Shari Redstone, warning her that a settlement would signal that political figures can pressure news organizations into altering or censoring editorial decisions.
The FCC is investigating a merger deal between CBS parent company Paramount and Skydance, a deal that could have been endangered by the possibility of litigation from Trump. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) earlier this year re-opened a news distortion investigation into CBS.
CPJ’s request to Paramount Global for comment on the settlement’s editorial implications did not receive an immediate reply.
A Tongan cybersecurity expert says the country’s health data hack is a “wake-up call” for the whole region.
Siosaia Vaipuna, a former director of Tonga’s cybersecurity agency, spoke to RNZ Pacific in the wake of the June 15 cyberattack on the country’s Health Ministry.
Vaipuna said Tonga and other Pacific nations were vulnerable to data breaches due to the lack of awareness and cybersecurity systems in the region.
“There’s increasing digital connectivity in the region, and we’re sort of . . . the newcomers to the internet,” he said.
“I think the connectivity is moving faster than the online safety awareness activity [and] that makes not just Tonga, but the Pacific more vulnerable and targeted.”
Since the data breach, the Tongan government has said “a small amount” of information from the attack was published online. This included confidential information, it said in a statement.
Reporting on the attack has also attributed the breach to the group Inc Ransomware.
Vaipuna said the group was well-known and had previously focused on targeting organisations in Europe and the US.
New Zealand attack
However, earlier this month, it targeted the Waiwhetū health organisation in Aotearoa New Zealand. That attack reportedly included the theft of patient consent forms and education and training data.
“This type of criminal group usually employs a double-extortion tactic,” Vaipuna said.
It could encrypt data and then demand money to decrypt, he said.
“The other ransom is where they are demanding payment so that they don’t release the information that they hold to the public or sell it on to other cybercriminals.”
In the current Tonga cyberattack, media reports say that Inc Ransomware wanted a ransom of US$1 million for the information it accessed. The Tongan government has said it has not paid anything.
Vaipuna said more needed to be done to raise awareness in the region around cybersecurity and online safety systems, particularly among government departments.
“I think this is a wake-up call. The cyberattacks are not just happening in movies or on the news or somewhere else, they are actually happening right on our doorstep and impacting on our people.
Extra vigilance warning
“And the right attention and resources should rightfully be allocated to the organisations and to teams that are tasked with dealing with cybersecurity matters.”
The Tongan government has also warned people to be extra vigilant when online.
It said more information accessed in the cyberattack may be published online, and that may include patient information and medical records.
“Our biggest concern is for vulnerable groups of people who are most acutely impacted by information breaches of this kind,” the government said.
It said that it would contact these people directly.
The country’s ongoing response was also being aided by experts from Australia’s special cyberattack team.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
When advocates and defenders of a nuclear-free Pacific condemned the AUKUS military pact two years ago and warned New Zealand that the agreement would make the world “more dangerous”, a key speaker was Reverend Mua Strickson-Pua.
He was among leading participants at a Nuclear-Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement teachers’ wānanga, which launched a petition against the pact with one of the “elders” among the activists, Hilda Halkyard-Harawira (Te Moana Nui a Kiwa), symbolically adding the first signature.
Speaking about the petition declaration in a ceremony on the steps of the Auckland Museum marking the 10 July 1985 bombing of the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior, Reverend Mua Strickson-Pua explained that the AUKUS agreement was a military pact between Australia-UK-US that was centred on Canberra’s acquisition of nuclear propelled submarines.
Reverend Mua Strickson-Pua and the NFIP petition has been featured in a new video report by Nik Naidu as part of a “Legends of NFIP” series by Talanoa TV of the Whanau Community Centre and Hub.
![[AL Jazeera]](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/INTERACTIVE-UN-ISRAEL-COMPANIES-1-1751388779.png?w=770&resize=770%2C962&quality=80)
