And I certainly did not expect Peter Dutton — amid an election campaign, one with citizens heading to the polls on World Press Freedom Day — to come out swinging at the ABC and Guardian Australia, telling his followers to ignore “the hate media”.
I’m not saying Labor is likely to be the great saviour of the free press either.
The ALP has been slow to act on a range of important press freedom issues, including continuing to charge journalism students upwards of $50,000 for the privilege of learning at university how to be a decent watchdog for society.
Labor has increased, slightly, funding for the ABC, and has tried to continue with the Coalition’s plans to force the big tech platforms to pay for news. But that is not enough.
The World Press Freedom Index has been telling us for some time that Australia’s press is in a perilous state. Last year, Australia dropped to 39th out of 190 countries because of what Reporters Without Borders said was a “hyperconcentration of the media combined with growing pressure from the authorities”.
We should know on election day if we’ve fallen even further.
What is happening in America is having a profound impact on journalism (and by extension journalism education) in Australia.
‘Friendly’ influencers
We’ve seen both parties subtly start to sideline the mainstream media by going to “friendly” influencers and podcasters, and avoid the harder questions that come from journalists whose job it is to read and understand the policies being presented.
What Australia really needs — on top of stable and guaranteed funding for independent and reliable public interest journalism, including the ABC and SBS — is a Media Freedom Act.
My colleague Professor Peter Greste has spent years working on the details of such an act, one that would give media in Australia the protection lacking from not having a Bill of Rights safeguarding media and free speech. So far, neither side of government has signed up to publicly support it.
Australia also needs an accompanying Journalism Australia organisation, where ethical and trained journalists committed to the job of watchdog journalism can distinguish themselves from individuals on YouTube and TikTok who may be pushing their own agendas and who aren’t held to the same journalistic code of ethics and standards.
I’m not going to argue that all parts of the Australian news media are working impartially in the best interests of ordinary people. But the good journalists who are need help.
The continuing underfunding of our national broadcasters needs to be resolved. University fees for journalism degrees need to be cut, in recognition of the value of the profession to the fabric of Australian society. We need regulations to force news organisations to disclose when they are using AI to do the job of journalists and broadcasters without human oversight.
And we need more funding for critical news literacy education, not just for school kids but also for adults.
Critical need for public interest journalism
There has never been a more critical need to support public interest journalism. We have all watched in horror as Donald Trump has denied wire services access for minor issues, such as failing to comply with an ungazetted decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
And mere days ago, 60 Minutes chief Bill Owens resigned citing encroachments on his journalistic independence due to pressure from the president.
The Committee to Protect Journalists is so concerned about what’s occurring in America that it has issued a travel advisory for journalists travelling to the US, citing risks under Trump administration policies.
Those of us who cover politically sensitive issues that the US administration may view as critical or hostile may be stopped and questioned by border agents. That can extend to cardigan-wearing academics attending conferences.
While we don’t have the latest Australian figures from the annual Reuters survey, a new Pew Research Centre study shows a growing gap between how much Americans say they value press freedom and how free they think the press actually is. Two-thirds of Americans believe press freedom is critical. But only a third believe the media is truly free to do its job.
If the press isn’t free in the US (where it is guaranteed in their constitution), how are we in Australia expected to be able to keep the powerful honest?
Every single day, journalists put their lives on the line for journalism. It’s not always as dramatic as those who are covering the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, but those in the media in Australia still front up and do the job across a range of news organisations in some fairly poor conditions.
If you care about democracy at all this election, then please consider wisely who you vote for, and perhaps ask their views on supporting press freedom — which is your right to know.
Alexandra Wake is an associate professor in journalism at RMIT University. She came to the academy after a long career as a journalist and broadcaster. She has worked in Australia, Ireland, the Middle East and across the Asia Pacific. Her research, teaching and practice sits at the nexus of journalism practice, journalism education, equality, diversity and mental health.
New Zealand’s Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA) has upheld complaints about two 1News reports relating to violence around a football match in Amsterdam between local team Ajax and Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv.
The authority found an item on “antisemitic violence” surrounding the match, and another on heightened security in Paris the following week, breached the accuracy standard.
In a majority decision, the BSA upheld a complaint from John Minto on behalf of Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) about reporting on TVNZ’s 6pm 1News bulletin on 9 November 2024.
This comprised a trailer reporting “antisemitic violence”, an introduction by the presenter with “disturbing” footage of violence against Israeli fans described by Amsterdam’s mayor as “an explosion of antisemitism”, and a pre-recorded BBC item.
TVNZ upheld one aspect of this complaint over mischaracterised footage in the trailer and introduction. This was originally reported as showing Israeli fans being attacked, but later corrected by Reuters and other outlets as showing Israeli fans chasing and attacking a Dutch man.
“The footage contributed to a materially misleading impression created by TVNZ’s framing of the events, with an emphasis on antisemitic violence against Israeli fans without acknowledging the role of the Maccabi fans in the violence – despite that being previously reported elsewhere,” the BSA found.
A majority of the authority found TVNZ did not make reasonable efforts to ensure accuracy.
It considered the background to the events was highly sensitive and more care should have been taken to not overstate or adopt, without question, the antisemitic angle.
The minority considered it was reasonable for TVNZ to rely on Reuters, the BBC and Dutch officials’ description of the violence as “antisemitic”, in a story developing overseas in which not all facts were clear at the time of broadcast.
The authority considered TVNZ should have issued a correction when it became aware of the error with the footage. It therefore found the action taken was insufficient, but considered publication of the BSA’s decision to be an adequate remedy in the circumstances.
Western media’s embarrassing failures on Amsterdam violence. Video: AJ’s The Listening Post
In a separate decision, the authority upheld two complaints about a brief 1News item on 15 November 2024 reporting on heightened security in Paris in the week following the violence.
The item reported: “Thousands of police are on the streets of Paris over fears of antisemitic attacks . . . That’s after 60 people were arrested in Amsterdam last week when supporters of a Tel Aviv football team were pursued and beaten by pro-Palestinian protesters.”
TVNZ upheld both complaints under the accuracy standard on the basis the item “lacked the nuance” of earlier reporting on Amsterdam, by omitting to mention the role of the Maccabi fans in the lead-up to the violence.
The authority agreed with this finding but determined TVNZ took insufficient action to remedy the breach.
“The broadcaster accepted more care should have been taken, but did not appear to have taken any action in response, or made any public acknowledgement of the inaccuracy,” the BSA said.
The authority found the framing and focus careless, noting “the role of both sides in the violence had been extensively reported” by the time of the 15 November broadcast. TVNZ had also aired the mischaracterised footage again, not realising Reuters had issued a correction several days earlier.
As TVNZ was not monitoring the Reuters fact-check site, the correction only came to light when the complaints were being investigated.
Other standards raised in the three complaints were not breached or did not apply, the authority found.
The BSA did not consider an order was warranted over the item on November 15 – deciding publication of the decision was sufficient to publicly acknowledge and correct the breach, censure the broadcaster and give guidance to TVNZ and other broadcasters.
Palestinians do not have the luxury to allow Western moral panic to have its say or impact. Not caving in to this panic is one small, but important, step in building a global Palestine network that is urgently needed, writes Dr Ilan Pappé
ANALYSIS:By Ilan Pappé
Responses in the Western world to the genocide in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank raise a troubling question: why is the official West, and official Western Europe in particular, so indifferent to Palestinian suffering?
Why is the Democratic Party in the US complicit, directly and indirectly, in sustaining the daily inhumanity in Palestine — a complicity so visible that it probably was one reason they lost the election, as the Arab American and progressive vote in key states could, and justifiably so, not forgive the Biden administration for its part in the genocide in the Gaza Strip?
This is a pertinent question, given that we are dealing with a televised genocide that has now been renewed on the ground. It is different from previous periods in which Western indifference and complicity were displayed, either during the Nakba or the long years of occupation since 1967.
During the Nakba and up to 1967, it was not easy to get hold of information, and the oppression after 1967 was mostly incremental, and, as such, was ignored by the Western media and politics, which refused to acknowledge its cumulative effect on the Palestinians.
But these last 18 months are very different. Ignoring the genocide in the Gaza Strip and the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank can only be described as intentional and not due to ignorance.
Both the Israelis’ actions and the discourse that accompanies them are too visible to be ignored, unless politicians, academics, and journalists choose to do so.
This kind of ignorance is, first and foremost, the result of successful Israeli lobbying that thrived on the fertile ground of an European guilt complex, racism and Islamophobia. In the case of the US, it is also the outcome of many years of an effective and ruthless lobbying machine that very few in academia, media, and, in particular, politics, dare to disobey.
The moral panic phenomenon
This phenomenon is known in recent scholarship as moral panic, very characteristic of the more conscientious sections of Western societies: intellectuals, journalists, and artists.
Moral panic is a situation in which a person is afraid of adhering to his or her own moral convictions because this would demand some courage that might have consequences. We are not always tested in situations that require courage, or at least integrity. When it does happen, it is in situations where morality is not an abstract idea, but a call for action.
This is why so many Germans were silent when Jews were sent to extermination camps, and this is why white Americans stood by when African Americans were lynched or, earlier on, enslaved and abused.
What is the price that leading Western journalists, veteran politicians, tenured professors, or chief executives of well-known companies would have to pay if they were to blame Israel for committing a genocide in the Gaza Strip?
It seems they are worried about two possible outcomes. The first is being condemned as antisemites or Holocaust deniers. Secondly, they fear an honest response would trigger a discussion that would include the complicity of their country, or Europe, or the West in general, in enabling the genocide and all the criminal policies against the Palestinians that preceded it.
This moral panic leads to some astonishing phenomena. In general, it transforms educated, highly articulate and knowledgeable people into total imbeciles when they talk about Palestine.
It disallows the more perceptive and thoughtful members of the security services from examining Israeli demands to include all Palestinian resistance on a terrorist list, and it dehumanises Palestinian victims in the mainstream media.
On ‘Moral Panic’ and the Courage to Speak – Professor Ilan Pappé examines how fear of professional consequences silences Western voices in the face of genocide in Gaza — and what this reveals about power, complicity, and moral responsibility.
— The Palestine Chronicle (@PalestineChron) April 18, 2025
Lack of compassion
The lack of compassion and basic solidarity with the victims of genocide was exposed by the double standards shown by mainstream media in the West, and, in particular, by the more established newspapers in the US, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post.
When the editor of The Palestine Chronicle, Dr Ramzy Baroud, lost 56 members of his family — killed by the Israeli genocidal campaign in the Gaza Strip — not one of his colleagues in American journalism bothered to talk to him or show any interest in hearing about this atrocity.
On the other hand, a fabricated Israeli allegation of a connection between the Chronicle and a family, in whose block of flats hostages were held, triggered huge interest by these outlets.
This imbalance in humanity and solidarity is just one example of the distortions that accompanies moral panic. I have little doubt that the actions against Palestinian or pro-Palestinian students in the US, or against known activists in Britain and France, as well as the arrest of the editor of the Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah, in Switzerland, are all manifestations of this distorted moral behaviour.
A similar case unfolded just recently in Australia. Mary Kostakidis, a famous Australian journalist and former prime-time weeknight SBS World News Australia presenter, has been taken to the federal court over her — one should say quite tame — reporting on the situation in the Gaza Strip.
The very fact that the court has not dismissed this allegation upon its arrival shows you how deeply rooted moral panic is in the Global North.
But there is another side to it. Thankfully, there is a much larger group of people who are not afraid of taking the risks involved in clearly stating their support for the Palestinians, and who do show this solidarity while knowing it may lead to suspension, deportation, or even jail time. They are not easily found among the mainstream academia, media, or politics, but they are the authentic voice of their societies in many parts of the Western world.
The Palestinians do not have the luxury of allowing Western moral panic to have its say or impact. Not caving in to this panic is one small but important step in building a global Palestine network that is urgently needed — firstly, to stop the destruction of Palestine and its people, and second, to create the conditions for a decolonised and liberated Palestine in the future.
Dr Ilan Pappé is an Israeli historian, political scientist, and former politician. He is a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, director of the university’s European Centre for Palestine Studies, and co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies. This article is republished from The Palestine Chronicle, 19 April 2025.
Greenpeace has condemned an announcement by The Metals Company to submit the first application to commercially mine the seabed.
“The first application to commercially mine the seabed will be remembered as an act of total disregard for international law and scientific consensus,” said Greenpeace International senior campaigner Louisa Casson.
“This unilateral US effort to carve up the Pacific Ocean already faces fierce international opposition. Governments around the world must now step up to defend international rules and cooperation against rogue deep sea mining.
“Leaders will be meeting at the UN Oceans Conference in Nice in June where they must speak with one voice in support of a moratorium on this reckless industry.”
Greenpeace Aotearoa spokesperson Juressa Lee said: “The disastrous effects of deep sea mining recognise no international borders in the ocean.
“This will be another case of short-term profits for a very few, from the Global North, with the Pacific bearing the destructive impacts for generations to come.”
Bypassed ISA rules
Trump’s action bypasses the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the regulatory body which protects the deep sea and decides whether deep sea mining can take place in international waters.
“The Metals Company and Donald Trump are wilfully ignoring the rules-based international order and the science that deep sea mining will wreak havoc on the oceans,”said Lee.
“Pacific Peoples have deep cultural ties to the ocean, and we regard ‘home’ as more ocean than land. Our ancestors were wayfarers and ocean custodians who have traversed the Pacific and protected our livelihoods for future generations.
“This is the Indigenous knowledge we should be led by, to safeguard our planet and our environment. Deep sea mining is not the answer to the green transition away from carbon-based fossil fuels — it’s another false solution.”
President Trump’s order follows negotiations in March at the ISA, at which governments refused to give wannabe miners The Metals Company a clear pathway to an approved mining application via the ISA.
Thirty two countries around the world publicly support a moratorium on deep sea mining.
Millions of people have spoken out against this dangerous emerging industry.
30 April 1975. Saigon Fell, Vietnam Rose. The story of Vietnam after the US fled the country is not a fairy tale, it is not a one-dimensional parable of resurrection, of liberation from oppression, of joy for all — but there is a great deal to celebrate.
After over a century of brutal colonial oppression by the French, the Japanese, and the Americans and their various minions, the people of Vietnam won victory in one of the great liberation struggles of history.
It became a source of inspiration and of hope for millions of people oppressed by imperial powers in Central & South America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
Civil war – a war among several
The civil war in Vietnam, coterminous with the war against the Western powers, pitted communists and anti-communists in a long and pitiless struggle.
Within that were various strands — North versus South, southern communists and nationalists against pro-Western forces, and so on. As various political economists have pointed out, all wars are in some way class wars too — pitting the elites against ordinary people.
As has happened repeatedly throughout history, once one or more great power becomes involved in a civil war it is subsumed within that colonial war. The South’s President Ngô Đình Diệm, for example, was assassinated on orders of the Americans.
By 1969, US aid accounted for 80 percent of South Vietnam’s government budget; they effectively owned the South and literally called the shots.
Donald Trump declared April 2 “Liberation Day” and imposed some of the heaviest tariffs on Vietnam because they didn’t buy enough U.S. goods! Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
US punishes its victims
This month, 50 years after the Vietnamese achieved independence from their colonial overlords, US President Donald Trump declared April 2 “Liberation Day” and imposed some of the heaviest tariffs on Vietnam because they didn’t buy enough US goods!
As economist Joseph Stiglitz pointed out, they don’t yet have enough aggregate demand for the kind of goods the US produces. That might have something to do with the decades it has taken to rebuild their lives and economy from the Armageddon inflicted on them by the US, Australia, New Zealand and other unindicted war criminals.
Straight after they fled, the US declared themselves the victims of the Vietnamese and imposed punitive sanctions on liberated Vietnam for decades — punishing their victims.
Under Gerald Ford (1974–1977), Jimmy Carter (1977–1981), Ronald Reagan (1981–1989), George H.W. Bush (1989–1993) right up to Bill Clinton (1993–2001), the US enforced the Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA) of 1917.
The US froze the assets of Vietnam at the very time it was trying to recover from the wholesale devastation of the country.
Tens of millions of much-needed dollars were captured in US banks, enforced by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The US also took advantage of its muscle to veto IMF and World Bank loans to Vietnam.
Countries like Australia and New Zealand, to their eternal shame, took part in both the war, the war crimes, and imposing sanctions and other punitive measures subsequently.
The ‘Boat People’ refugee crisis While millions celebrated the victory in 1975, millions of others were fearful. The period of national unification and economic recovery was painful, typically repressive — when one militarised regime replaces another.
This triggered flight: firstly among urban elites — military officers, government workers, and professionals who were most closely-linked to the US-run regime.
You can blame the Commies for the ensuing refugee crisis but by strangling the Vietnamese economy, refusing to return Vietnamese assets held in the US, imposing an effective blockade on the economy via sanctions, the US deepened the crisis, which saw over two million flee the country between 1975 and the 1980s.
More than 250,000 desperate people died at sea.
Đổi Mới: the move to a socialist-market economy In 1986, to energise the economy, the government moved away from a command economy and launched the đổi mới reforms which created a hybrid socialist-market economy.
They had taken a leaf out of the Chinese playbook, which under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping (1978 –1989), had moved towards a market economy through its “Reform and Opening Up” policies. Vietnam saw the “economic miracle” of its near neighbour and its leaders sought something similar.
Vietnam’s economy boomed and GDP grew from $18.1 billion in 1984 to $469 billion by 2024, with a per capita GDP at purchasing power parity (PPP) of $15,470 (up from about $300 per capita in the 1970s).
After a sluggish start, literacy rates soared to 96.1 percent by 2023, and life expectancy reached 73.7 years, only a few short of the USA. GDP growth is around 7 percent, according to the OECD.
An unequal society Persistent inequality suggests the socialist vision has partially faded. A rural-urban divide and a rich-poor divide underlines ongoing injustices around quality of life and access to services but Vietnam’s Gini coefficient — a measure of income inequality — puts it only slightly more “unequal” as a society than New Zealand or Germany.
Corruption is also an issue in the country.
Press controls and political repression As in China, political power resides with the Party. Freedom of expression — highlighted by press repression — is severely limited in Vietnam and nothing to celebrate.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) rates Vietnam as 174th out of 180 countries for press freedom and regularly excoriates its strongmen as press “predators”. In its country profile, RSF says of Vietnam: “Independent reporters and bloggers are often jailed, making Vietnam the world’s third largest jailer of journalists”.
Vietnam is forging its own destiny What is well worth celebrating, however, is that Vietnam successfully got the imperial powers off its back and out of its country. It is well-placed to play an increasingly prosperous and positive role in the emerging multipolar world.
It is part of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and the ASEAN network, and borders China, giving Vietnam the opportunity to weather any storms coming from the continent of America.
Vietnam today is united and free and millions of ordinary people have achieved security, health, education and prosperity vastly better than their parents and grandparents’ generations were able to.
In the end the honour and glory go to the Vietnamese people.
Ho Chi Minh, the great leader of the Vietnamese people who reached out to the United States, and sought alliance not conflict. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
I’ll give the last word to Ho Chi Minh, the great leader of the Vietnamese people who reached out to the United States, and sought alliance not conflict. He was rebuffed by the super-power which had a different agenda.
On September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam in Hanoi’s Ba Dinh square:
“‘All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’
“This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.
“… A people who have courageously opposed French domination for more than eight years, a people who have fought side by side with the Allies against the Fascists during these last years, such a people must be free and independent.
“For these reasons, we, members of the Provisional Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, solemnly declare to the world that Vietnam has the right to be a free and independent country — and in fact is so already. The entire Vietnamese people are determined to mobilise all their physical and mental strength, to sacrifice their lives and property in order to safeguard their independence and liberty.”
And, my god, they did.
To conclude, a short poem attributed to Ho Chi Minh:
“After the rain, good weather.
“In the wink of an eye,
the universe throws off its muddy clothes.”
Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington, New Zealand. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at his public policy website Solidarity and is republished here with permission.
Claire Charters, an expert in indigenous rights in international and constitutional law, has told the United Nations the New Zealand government is pushing the most “regressive” policies she has ever seen.
“New Zealand’s policy on the Declaration (on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples) sits alongside its legislative strategy to dismantle Māori rights in Aotearoa New Zealand, which has received global attention for its regressiveness,” said Charters.
While in New York, Charters organised meetings between senior UN officials, New Zealand diplomats, and Māori attending UNPFII.
The officials included the UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Rights, Dr Albert Barume, Sheryl Lightfoot, the Vice-Chair of the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (EMRIP), and EMRIP Chair Valmaine Toki (Ngāti Rehua, Ngātiwai, Ngāpuhi).
Charters said the New Zealand government should be of exceptional concern to the UN, given that the country’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Winston Peters, had publicly expressed his rejection of the declaration.
In the same year, Peters claimed Māori were not indigenous peoples.
“New Zealand’s current government, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs specifically, has expressly rejected the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It has committed to not implementing the declaration,” said Charters.
Indigenous people’s forum at the United Nations. Video: UN News
Charters invited the special rapporteur to visit New Zealand but also noted that the government ignored EMRIP’s request for a follow-up visit to support New Zealand’s implementation of UNDRIP.
She also called on the Permanent Forum to take all measures to require New Zealand to implement the declaration.
Republished from Te Ao Māori News with permission.
Claire Charters presenting her intervention on the implementation of UNDRIP – this year’s theme for the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigneous Issues. Image: Te Ao Māori News
French Minister for Overseas Manuel Valls, who is visiting New Caledonia this week for the third time in two months, has once again called on all parties to live up to their responsibilities in order to make a new political agreement possible.
Failing that, he said a potential civil war was looming.
“We’ll take our responsibilities, on our part, and we will put on the table a project that touches New Caledonia’s society, economic recovery, including nickel, and the future of the younger generation,” he told a panel of French journalists on Sunday.
He said that he hoped a revised version on a draft document — resulting from his previous visits in the French Pacific territory and new proposals from the French government — there existed a “difficult path” to possibly reconcile radically opposing views expressed so far from the pro-independence parties in New Caledonia and those who want the territory to remain part of France.
The target remains an agreement that would accommodate both “the right and aspiration to self-determination” and “the link with France”.
“If there is no agreement, then economic and political uncertainty can lead to a new disaster, to confrontation and to civil war,” he told reporters.
“That is why I have appealed several times to all political stakeholders, those for and against independence,” he warned.
“Everyone must take a step towards each other. An agreement is indispensable.”
Valls said this week he hoped everyone would “enter a real negotiations phase”.
He said one of the ways to achieve this will be to find “innovative” solutions and “a new way of looking at the future”.
This also included relevant amendments to the French Constitution.
Local parties will not sign any agreement ‘at all costs’ Local parties are not so enthusiastic.
In fact, each camp remains on their guard, in an atmosphere of defiance.
And on both sides, they agree at least on one thing — they will not sign any agreement “at all costs”.
Just like has been the case since talks between Valls and local parties began earlier this year, the two main opposing camps remain adamant on their respective pre-conditions and sometimes demands.
The pro-independence Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS), largely dominated by the Union Calédonienne, held a convention at the weekend to decide on whether they would attend this week’s new round of talks with Valls.
They eventually resolved that they would attend, but have not yet decided to call this “negotiations”, only “discussions”.
They said another decision would be made this Thursday, May 1, after they had examined Valls’s new proposals and documents which the French minister is expected to circulate as soon as he hosts the first meeting tomorrow.
FLNKS reaffirms ‘Kanaky Agreement’ demand
During their weekend convention, the FLNKS reaffirmed their demands for a “Kanaky Agreement” to be signed not later than 24 September 2025, to be followed by a five-year transition period.
The official line was to “maintain the trajectory” to full sovereignty, including in terms of schedule.
On the pro-France side, the main pillar of their stance is the fact that three self-determination referendums have been held between 2018 and 2021, even though the third and last consultation was largely boycotted by the pro-independence camp.
All three referendums resulted in votes rejecting full sovereignty.
One of their most outspoken leaders, Les Loyalistes party and Southern Province President Sonia Backès, told a public rally last week that they had refused another date for yet another referendum.
“A new referendum would mean civil war. And we don’t want to fix the date for civil war. So we don’t want to fix the date for a new referendum,” she said.
However, Backès said they “still want to believe in an agreement”.
“We’re part of all discussions on seeking solutions in a constructive and creative spirit.”
Granting more provincial powers
One of their other proposals was to grant more powers to each of the three provinces of New Caledonia, including on tax collection matters.
“We don’t want differences along ethnic lines. We want the provinces to have more powers so that each of them is responsible for their respective society models.”
Under a draft text leaked last week, any new referendum could only be called by at least three-fifths of the Congress and would no longer pose a “binary” question on yes or no to independence, but would consider endorsing a “project” for New Caledonia’s future society.
Another prominent pro-France leader, MP Nicolas Metzdorf, repeated this weekend he and his supporters “remain mobilised to defend New Caledonia within France”.
“We will not budge,” Metzdorf said.
Despite Valls’s warnings, another scenario could be that New Caledonia’s political stakeholders find it more appealing or convenient to agree on no agreement at all, especially as New Caledonia’s crucial provincial elections are in the pipeline and scheduled for no later than November 30.
Concerns about security But during the same interview, Valls repeated that he remained concerned that the situation on the ground remained “serious”.
“We are walking on a tightrope above embers”.
He said top of his concerns were New Caledonia’s economic and financial situation, the tense atmosphere, a resurgence in “racism, hatred” as well as a fast-deteriorating public health services situation or the rise in poverty caused by an increasing number of jobless.
“So yes, all these risks are there, and that is why it is everyone’s responsibility to find an agreement. And I will stay as long as needed and I will put all my energy so that an agreement takes place.
“Not for me, for them.”
Valls also recalled that since the riots broke out in May 2024, almost one year ago, French security and law enforcement agencies are still maintaining about 20 squads of French gendarmes (1500 personnel) in the territory.
This is on top of the normal deployment of 550 gendarmes and 680 police officers.
Valls said this was necessary because “any time, it could flare up again”.
Outgoing French High Commissioner Louis Le Franc said in an interview recently that in case of a “new May 13” situation, the pre-positioned forces could ensure law enforcement “for three or four days . . . until reinforcements arrive”.
If fresh violence erupts again, reinforcements could be sent again from mainland France and bring the total number to up to 6000 law enforcement personnel, a number similar to the level deployed in 2024 in the weeks following the riots that killed 14 and caused some 2.2 billion euros (NZ$4.2 billion) in damage.
Carefully chosen words Valls said earlier in April the main pillars of future negotiations were articulated around the themes of:
“democracy and the rule of law”;
a “decolonisation process”;
the right to self-determination;
a “fundamental law” that would seal New Caledonia’s future status;
the powers of New Caledonia’s three provinces; and a future New Caledonia citizenship with the associated definition of who meets the requirements to vote at local elections.
Valls has already travelled to Nouméa twice this year — in February and March.
Since his last visit that ended on April 1, discussions have been maintained in conference mode between local political stakeholders and Valls, and his cabinet, as well as French Prime Minister François Bayrou’s special advisor on New Caledonia, constitutionalist Eric Thiers.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Filipo Tarakinikini has been appointed as Fiji’s Ambassador-designate to Israel.
This has been stated on two official X, formerly Twitter, handle posts overnight.
“#Fiji is determined to deepen its relations with #Israel as Fiji’s Ambassador-designate to Israel, HE Ambassador @AFTarakinikini prepares to present his credentials on 28 April, 2025,” stated the Fiji at UN twitter account.
Tarakinikini is also Fiji’s current Ambassador to the United Nations.
In a separate post, Deputy Director-General Eynat Shlein of Israel’s international development cooperation agency said she was “honoured” to meet Tarakinikini.
“We discussed the vast cooperation opportunities, promoting & enhancing sustainable development, emphasizing investment in capacity building & human capital,” she said on X.
Centre of controversy
Pacific Media Watch reports that Lieutenant-Colonel Tarakinikini was at the centre of controversy in Fiji in 2005 when he was declared a “deserter” by the Fiji military.
Great honor to have have this timely briefing @EynatShlein, Ambassador Roi @IsraelMFA#Fiji is determined to deepen its relations with #Israel as Fiji’s Ambassador-designate to Israel, HE Ambassador @AFTarakinikini prepares to present his credentials on 28 April, 2025 … https://t.co/mGPKjYM5Qc
Beginning in 2003, he was the UN Department for Security and Safety’s (UNDSS) Chief Security Adviser in Jerusalem, as well as in Kathmandu, Nepal, from 2006 to 2008.
From 2008 to 2018, he served in numerous United Nations integrated assessment missions, programme working groups, restructuring and redeployments and technical assessment missions.
‘Weapons of war’
Yesterday, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) began week-long hearings at The Hague into global accusations of Israel using starvation and humanitarian aid as “weapons of war” and failing to meet its obligations to the Palestinian people in Gaza as the occupying power in its genocidal war on the besieged enclave.
Forty countries are expected to give evidence.
The ICJ has been tasked by the UN with providing an advisory opinion “on a priority basis and with the utmost urgency”.
Although the ICJ judges’ opinion is not binding, it provides clarity on legal questions.
In January 2024, the ICJ ruled that Israel must take “all measures” to prevent a genocide in Gaza.
Then in June, it said in an advisory opinion that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza was illegal.
Both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant are wanted on arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court (ICC) to face charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Communities in Vanuatu are learning to grow climate resilient crops, 18 months after Cyclone Lola devastated the country.
The category 5 storm struck in October 2023, generating wind speeds of up to 215 kmph, which destroyed homes, schools, plantations, and left at least four people dead.
Save the Children Vanuatu country director Polly Banks said they have been working alongside Vanuatu’s Ministry of Agriculture and local partners, supporting families through the Tropical Cyclone Lola Recovery Programme.
“It really affected backyard gardening and the communities across the areas affected – their ability to pursue an income and also their own nutritional needs,” she said.
She said the programme looked at the impact of the cyclone on backyard gardening and on people’s economic reliance on what they grow in their gardens, and developed a recovery plan to respond.
“We trained community members and also provided them with the equipment to establish cyclone resilient nurseries.
Ready for harsh weather
“So for example, nurseries that can be put up and then pulled down when a harsh weather event – including cyclones but even heavy rainfall — is arriving.
“There was a focus on these climate resilient nurseries, but also through that partnership with the Department of Agriculture, there was also a much stronger focus than we’ve had before on teaching community members climate smart agricultural techniques.”
Banks said these techniques included open pollinating seed and learning skills such as grassing; and another part of the project was introducing more variety into people’s diets.
She said out of the project has also come the first seed bank on Epi Island.
“That seed bank now has a ready supply of seeds, and the community are adding to that regularly, and they’re taking those seeds from really climate-resilient crops, so that they have a cyclone secure storage facility,” she said.
“The next time a cyclone happens — and we know that they’re going to become more ferocious and more frequent — the community are ready to replant the moment that the cyclone passes.
Setting up seed bank
“But in setting the seed bank up as well, the community have been taught how to select the most productive seeds, the seeds that show the most promise; how to dry them out; how to preserve them.”
Banks said they were also working with the Department of Agriculture in the delivery of a community-based climate resilience project, which is funded by the Green Climate Fund.
Rolled out across 282 communities across the country, a key focus of it is the creation of more climate-resilient backyard gardening, food preservation and climate resilient nurseries.
“We’re also setting up early warning systems through the provision of internet to really remote communities so that they have better access to more knowledge about when a big storm or a cyclone is approaching and what steps to take.
“But that particular project is still just a drop in the ocean in terms of the adaptation needs that communities have.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
After a successful beta-launch this month, PodTalk.live has now called for people to register as foundation members — it’s free to join the post and podcast social platform.
The foundation membership soft-launch is a great opportunity for founders to help shape a brand new, vibrant, algorithm-free, info discussion and debate social platform.
“PodTalk.live has been put to test by selected individuals and we’re pleased to report that it has performed fabulously,” said the the platform developer Selwyn Manning.
Manning is founder and managing director of the company that custom-developed PodTalk.live — Multimedia Investments Ltd.
PodTalk.live . . . a new era. Image: PodTalk screenshot APR
MIL is based in Aotearoa New Zealand, where PodTalk.live was developed and is served from.
And now, PodTalk.live has emerged from its beta stage and is ready for foundation members to shape the next phase of its development.
An alternative platform
PodTalk.live was designed to be an alternative platform to other social media platforms.
PodTalk has all the functions that most social media platforms have but has placed the user-experience at the centre of its backend design and engineering.
PodTalk.live has been custom-designed, created and is served from New Zealand.
“We ourselves became annoyed at how social media giants use algorithms to drive what content their users see and experience,” Manning said.
“And, we also were appalled at how some social media companies trade user data, and were unresponsive to user-concerns.
“So we decided to create a platform that focuses on ‘discussion and debate’ communities, and we have engineered PodTalk to ensure the content that users see is what they choose — rather than some obscure algorithm making that decision for them.
“PodTalk.live is independent from other social media platforms, and at best will become an alternative choice for people who seek a community where they are the centre of a platform’s core purpose.
Sign-up invitation
““And today, we invite people to sign up now and become foundation members of this new and ethically-based social community platform,” Manning said.
What PodTalk.live provides includes:
user profiles with full interactivities with other users and friends;
user created groups, posts, video, images, polls, and file sharing;
private and secure one-on-one (and group) messages;
availability of all the above for entry users with a free membership;
premium membership for podcasters and event publishers requiring easy to use podcast publication and syndication services; and next-level community engagement tools that users have all on the one platform.
Manning said PodTalk.live was founded on the belief that for social, political and economical progress to occur people needed to discuss issues in a safe environment and embark on robust debate.
“The day-to-day chaos of the American political news cycle can make it hard to fully take stock of the seismic shifts that are happening,” said Clayton Weimers, executive director of RSF North America.
“But when you step back and look at the whole picture, the pattern of blows to press freedom is quite clear.
“RSF refuses to accept this massive attack on press freedom as the new normal. We will continue to call out these assaults against the press and use every means at our disposal to fight back against them.
“We urge every American who values press freedom to do the same.”
Here is the Trump administration’s war on the press by the numbers: *
427 million – Weekly worldwide audience of the USAGM news outlets silenced by Trump
In an effort to eliminate the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) by cutting grants to outlets funded by the federal agency and placing their reporters on leave, the government has left millions around the world without vital sources of reliable information.
This leaves room for authoritarian regimes, like Russia and China, to spread their propaganda unchecked.
However, RSF recently secured an interim injunction against the administration’s dismantling of the USAGM-funded broadcaster Voice of America,which also reinstates funding to the outlets Radio Free Asia (RFA) and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN).
8,000+ – US government web pages taken down
Webpages from more than a dozen government sites were removed almost immediately after President Trump took office, leaving journalists and the public without critical information on health, crime, and more.
3,500+ – Journalists and media workers at risk of losing their jobs thanks to Trump’s shutdown of the USAGM
Journalists from VOA, the MBN, RFA, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty are at risk of losing their jobs as the Trump administration works to shut down the USAGM. Furthermore, at least 84 USAGM journalists based in the US on work visas now face deportation to countries where they risk prosecution and severe harassment.
At least 15 journalists from RFA and eight from VOA originate from repressive states and are at serious risk of being arrested and potentially imprisoned if deported.
180 – Public radio stations at risk of closing if public media funding is eliminated
The Trump administration reportedly plans to ask Congress to cut $1.1 billion in allocated funds for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). These cuts will hit rural communities and stations in smaller media markets the hardest, where federal funding is most impactful.
74 –Days the Associated Press (AP) has been banned from the White House
On February 11, the White House began barring the Associated Press (AP) news agency from its events because of the news agency’s continued use of the term “Gulf of Mexico,” which President Trump prefers to call the “Gulf of America” — a blatant example of retaliation against the media.
Despite a federal judge ruling the administration must reinstate the news agency’s access on April 9, the White House has continued to limit AP’s access.
64 – Disparaging comments made by Trump against the media on Truth Social since inauguration
In addition to regular, personal attacks against the media in press conferences and public speeches, Trump takes to his social media site nearly every day to insult, threaten, or intimidate journalists and media workers who report about him or his administration critically.
13 –Individuals pardoned by President Trump after being convicted or charged for attacking journalists on January 6, 2021
Trump pardoned over a dozen individuals charged with or convicted of violent crimes against journalists at the US Capitol during the January 6 insurrection.
6 –Federal Communications Commission (FCC) inquiries into media companies
Brendan Carr, co-author of the Project 2025 playbook and chair of the FCC, has wasted no time launching politically motivated investigations, explicit threats against media organisations, and implicit threats against their parent companies. These include inquiries into CBS, ABC parent company Disney, NBC parent company Comcast, public broadcasters NPR and PBS, and California television station KCBS.
4 – Trump’s personal lawsuits against media organisations
While Trump settled a lawsuit with ABC’s parent company Disney, he continues to sue CBS, The Des Moines Register, Gannett, and the Pulitzer Center over coverage he deemed biased.
$1.60 – Average annual amount each American pays for public media
Donald Trump has threatened to eliminate federal funding for public broadcasting, framing the move as a cost-cutting measure.
However, public media only costs each American about $1.60 each year, representing a tremendous bargain as it gives Americans access to a wealth of local, national, and lifesaving emergency programming.
The United States was 55th out of 180 nations listed by the RSF World Press Freedom Index in 2024. The new index rankings will be released this week.
* Figures as of the date of publication, 24 April 2025. Pacific Media Watch collaborates with RSF.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.
Activists for Palestine paid homage to Pope Francis in Aotearoa New Zealand today for his humility, care for marginalised in the world, and his courageous solidarity with the besieged people of Gaza at a street theatre rally just hours before his funeral in Rome.
He was remembered and thanked for his daily calls of concern to Gaza and his final public blessing last Sunday — the day before he died — calling for a ceasefire in Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinian enclave.
Several speakers thanked the late Pope for his humanitarian concerns and spiritual leadership at the vigil in Auckland’s “Palestinian Corner” in Te Komititanga Square, beside the Britomart transport hub, as other rallies were held across New Zealand over the weekend.
“Last November, Pope Francis said that what is happening in Gaza was not a war. It was cruelty,” said Catholic deacon Chris Sullivan. “Because Israel is always claiming it is a war. But it isn’t a war, it’s just cruelty.”
During the last 18 months of his life, Pope Francis had a daily ritual — he called Gaza’s only Catholic church to see how people were coping with the “cruel” onslaught.
Deacon Sullivan said the people of the church in Gaza “have been attacked by Israeli rockets, Israeli shells, and Israeli snipers, and a number of people have been killed as a result of that.”
In his Easter message before dying, Pope Francis said: “I appeal to the warring parties: call a ceasefire, release the hostages and come to the aid of a starving people that aspires to a future of peace.”
‘We lost the best man’
Also speaking at today’s rally, Dr Abdallah Gouda said: “We lost the best man. He was talking about Palestine and he was working to stop this genocide.
“Pope Francis, as a Palestinian, as a Palestinians from Gaza, and as a Moslem, thank you Pope Francis. Thank you. And we will never, never forget you.
“As we will always talk about you, the man who called every night to talk to the Palestinians, and he asked, ‘what do you eat’. And he talked to leaders around the world to stop this genocide.”
Pope Francis called Gaza’s Catholic parish every night. Video: AJ+
In Rome, the coffin of Pope Francis made its way through the city from the Vatican after the funeral to reach Santa Maria Maggiore basilica for a private burial ceremony.
It arrived at the basilica after an imposing funeral ceremony at St Peter’s Square.
The Vatican said that more than 250,000 people attended the open-air service that was held under clear blue skies
Dozens of foreign dignitaries, including heads of state, were also in attendance.
Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re eulogised Pope Francis as a pontiff who knew how to communicate to the “least among us” and urged people to build bridges and not walls.
In Auckland at the “guerrilla theatre” event, several highly publicised examples of recent human rights violations and war crimes in Gaza were recreated in several skits with “actors” taking part from the crowd.
Palestinian Dr Faiez Idais role played the kidnapping of courageous Kamal Adwan Hospital medical director Dr Hussam Abu Safiya by the Israeli military last December and his detention and torture in captivity since.
Palestinian Dr Faiez Idais (hooded) during his role played for courageous Kamal Adwan Hospital medical director Dr Hussam Abu Safiya held prisoner by Israeli forces. Image: APR
Khalil was seized by ICE agents from his university apartment without a warrant and abducted to a remote immigration prison in Louisiana but the courts have blocked his deportation in a high profile case.
He is one of at least 300 students who have been captured ICE agents for criticising Israel and its genocide.
A two-year-old child holds a “peace for all children” in Gaza placard at today’s rally. Image: APR
The skits included a condemnation of the US corporation Starbucks, the world’s leading coffee roaster and retailer, with mock blood being kicked over fake bodies on the plaza.
The backlash against the brand has caused heavy losses and 100 outlets in Malaysia have been forced to shut down.
Singers and musicians Hone Fowler, who was also MC, Brenda Liddiard and Mark Laurent — including their dedicated “Make Peace Today” inspired by Jesus’ “Blessed are the peacemakers” — also lifted the spirits of the crowd.
Protesters call for an end to the genocide in Palestine, both in Gaza and the West Bank. Image: APR
When the US Embassy knocked on my door in late 2024, I was both pleased and more than a little suspicious.
I’d worked with them before, but the organisation where I did that work, Tohatoha, had closed its doors. My new project, Dark Times Academy, was specifically an attempt to pull myself out of the grant cycle, to explore ways of funding the work of counter-disinformation education without dependence on unreliable governments and philanthropic funders more concerned with their own objectives than the work I believed then — and still believe — is crucial to the future of human freedom.
But despite my efforts to turn them away, they kept knocking, and Dark Times Academy certainly needed the money. I’m warning you all now: There is a sense in which everything I have to say about counter-disinformation comes down to conversations about how to fund the work.
There is nothing I would like more than to talk about literally anything other than funding this work. I don’t love money, but I do like eating, having a home, and being able to give my kids cash.
I have also repeatedly found myself in roles where other people look to me for their livelihoods; a responsibility that I carry heavily and with more than a little clumsiness and reluctance.
But if we are to talk about President Donald Trump and disinformation, we have to talk about money. As it is said, the love of money is the root of all evil. And the lack of it is the manifestation of that evil.
Trump and his attack on all of us — on truth, on peace, on human freedom and dignity — is, at its core, an attack that uses money as a weapon. It is an attack rooted in greed and in avarice.
In his world, money is power
But in that greed lies his weakness. In his world, money is power. He and those who serve him and his fascist agenda cannot see beyond the world that money built. Their power comes in the form of control over that world and the people forced to live in it.
Of course, money is just paper. It is digital bits in a database sitting on a server in a data centre relying on electricity and water taken from our earth. The ephemeral nature of their money speaks volumes about their lack of strength and their vulnerability to more powerful forces.
They know this. Trump and all men like him know their weaknesses — and that’s why they use their money to gather power and control. When you have more money than you and your whānau can spend in several generations, you suddenly have a different kind of relationship to money.
It’s one where money itself — and the structures that allow money to be used for control of people and the material world — becomes your biggest vulnerability. If your power and identity are built entirely on the power of money, your commitment to preserving the power of money in the world becomes an all-consuming drive.
Capitalism rests on many “logics” — commodification, individualism, eternal growth, the alienation of labour. Marx and others have tried this ground well already.
In a sense, we are past the time when more analysis is useful to us. Rather, we have reached a point where action is becoming a practical necessity. After all, Trump isn’t going to stop with the media or with counter-disinformation organisations. He is ultimately coming for us all.
What form that action must take is a complicated matter. But, first we must think about money and about how money works, because only through lessening the power of money can we hope to lessen the power of those who wield it as their primary weapon.
Beliefs about poor people
If you have been so unfortunate to be subject to engagement with anti-poverty programmes during the neoliberal era either as a client or a worker, you will know that one of the motivations used for denying direct cash aid to those in need of money is a belief on the part of government and policy experts that poor people will use their money in unwise ways, be it drugs or alcohol, or status purchases like sneakers or manicures.
But over and over again, there’s another concern raised: cash benefits will be spent on others in the community, but outside of those targeted with the cash aid.
You see this less now that ideas like a universal basic income (UBI) and direct cash transfers have taken hold of the policy and donor classes, but it is one of those rightwing concerns that turned out to be empirically accurate.
Poor people are more generous with their money and all of their other resources as well. The stereotype of the stingy Scrooge is one based on a pretty solid mountain of evidence.
The poor turn out to understand far better than the rich how to defeat the power that money gives those who hoard it — and that is community. The logic of money and capital can most effectively be defeated through the creation and strengthening of our community ties.
Donald Trump and those who follow him revel in creating a world of atomised individuals focused on themselves; the kind of world where, rather than relying on each other, people depend on the market and the dollar to meet their material needs — dollars. of course, being the source of control and power for their class.
Our ability to fund our work, feed our families, and keep a roof over our heads has not always been subject to the whims of capitalists and those with money to pay us. Around the world, the grand multicentury project known as colonialism has impoverished us all and created our dependency.
Colonial projects and ‘enclosures’
I cannot speak as a direct victim of the colonial project. Those are not my stories to tell. There are so many of you in this room who can speak to that with far more eloquence and direct experience than I. But the colonial project wasn’t only an overseas project for my ancestors.
Enclosure is one of the core colonial logics. Enclosure takes resources (land in particular) that were held in common and managed collectively using traditional customs and hands them over to private control to be used for private rather than communal benefit. This process, repeated over and over around the globe, created the world we live in today — the world built on money.
As we lose control over our access to what we need to live as the land that holds our communities together, that binds us to one another, is co-opted or stolen from us, we lose our power of self-determination. Self-governance, freedom, liberty — these are what colonisation and enclosure take from us when they steal our livelihoods.
As part of my work, I keep a close eye on the approaches to counter-disinformation that those whose relationship to power is smoother than my own take. Also, in this the year of our Lord 2025, it is mandatory to devote at least some portion of each public talk to AI.
I am also profoundly sorry to have to report that as far as I can tell, the only work on counter-disinformation still getting funding is work that claims to be able to use AI to detect and counter disinformation. It will not surprise you that I am extremely dubious about these claims.
AI has been created through what has been called “data colonialism”, in that it relies on stolen data, just as traditional forms of colonialism rely on stolen land.
Risks and dangers of AI
AI itself — and I am speaking here specifically of generative AI — is being used as a tool of oppression. Other forms of AI have their own risks and dangers, but in this context, generative AI is quite simply a tool of power consolidation, of hollowing out of human skill and care, and of profanity, in the sense of being the opposite of sacred.
Words, art, conversation, companionship — these are fiercely human things. For a machine to mimic these things is to transgress against all of our communities — all the more so when the machine is being wielded by people who speak openly of genocide and white supremacy.
However, just as capitalism can be fought through community, colonialism can and has been fought through our own commitment to living our lives in freedom. It is fought by refusing their demands and denying their power, whether through the traditional tools of street protest and nonviolent resistance, or through simply walking away from the structures of violence and control that they have implemented.
In the current moment, that particularly includes the technological tools that are being used to destroy our communities and create the data being used to enact their oppression. Each of us is free to deny them access to our lives, our hopes, and dreams.
This version of colonisation has a unique weakness, in that the cyber dystopia they have created can be unplugged and turned off. And yet, we can still retain the parts of it that serve us well by building our own technological infrastructure and helping people use that instead of the kind owned and controlled by oligarchs.
By living our lives with the freedom we all possess as human beings, we can deny these systems the symbolic power they rely on to continue.
That said, this has limitations. This process of theft that underlies both traditional colonialism and contemporary data colonialism, rather than that of land or data, destroys our material base of support — ie. places to grow food, the education of our children, control over our intellectual property.
Power consolidated upwards
The outcome is to create ever more dependence on systems outside of our control that serve to consolidate power upwards and create classes of disposable people through the logic of dehumanisation.
Disposable people have been a feature across many human societies. We see it in slaves, in cultures that use banishment and exile, and in places where imprisonment is used to enforce laws.
Right now we see it in the United States being directed at scale towards those from Central and Latin America and around the world. The men being sent to the El Salvadorian gulag, the toddlers sent to immigration court without a lawyer, the federal workers tossed from their jobs — these are disposable people to Trump.
The logic of colonialism relies on the process of dehumanisation; of denying the moral relevance of people’s identity and position within their communities and families. When they take a father from his family, they are dehumanising him and his family. They are denying the moral relevance of his role as a father and of his children and wife.
When they require a child to appear alone before an immigration judge, they are dehumanising her by denying her the right to be recognised as a child with moral claims on the adults around her. When they say they want to transition federal workers from unproductive government jobs to the private sector, they are denying those workers their life’s work and identity as labourers whose work supports the common good.
There was a time when I would point out that we all know where this leads, but we are there now. It has led there, although given the US incarceration rate for Black men, it isn’t unreasonable to argue that in fact for some people, the US has always been there. Fascism is not an aberration, it is a continuation. But the quickening is here. The expansion of dehumanisation and hate have escalated under Trump.
Dehumanisaton always starts with words and language. And Trump is genuinely — and terribly — gifted with language. His speeches are compelling, glittering, and persuasive to his audiences. With his words and gestures, he creates an alternate reality. When Trump says, “They’re eating the cats! They’re eating the dogs!”, he is using language to dehumanise Haitian immigrants.
An alternate reality for migrants
When he calls immigrants “aliens” he is creating an alternate reality where migrants are no longer human, no longer part of our communities, but rather outside of them, not fully human.
When he tells lies and spews bullshit into our shared information system, those lies are virtually always aimed at creating a permission structure to deny some group of people their full humanity. Outrageous lie after outrageous lie told over and over again crumbles society in ways that we have seen over and over again throughout history.
In Europe, the claims that women were consorting with the devil led to the witch trials and the burning of thousands of women across central and northern Europe. In Myanmar, claims that Rohinga Muslims were commiting rape, led to mass slaughter.
Just as we fight the logics of capitalism with community and colonialism with a fierce commitment to our freedom, the power to resist dehumanisation is also ours. Through empathy and care — which is simply the material manifestation of empathy — we can defeat attempts to dehumanise.
Empathy and care are inherent to all functioning societies — and they are tools we all have available to us. By refusing to be drawn into their hateful premises, by putting morality and compassion first, we can draw attention to the ridiculousness of their ideas and help support those targeted.
Disinformation is the tool used to dehumanise. It always has been. During the COVID-19 pandemic when disinformation as a concept gained popularity over the rather older concept of propaganda, there was a real moment where there was a drive to focus on misinformation, or people who were genuinely wrong about usually public health facts. This is a way to talk about misinformation that elides the truth about it.
There is an empirical reality underlying the tsunami of COVID disinformation and it is that the information was spread intentionally by bad actors with the goal of destroying the social bonds that hold us all together. State actors, including the United States under the first Trump administration, spread lies about COVID intentionally for their own benefit and at the cost of thousands if not millions of lives.
Lies and disinformation at scale
This tactic was not new then. Those seeking political power or to destroy communities for their own financial gain have always used lies and disinformation. But what is different this time, what has created unique risks, is the scale.
Networked disinformation — the power to spread bullshit and lies across the globe within seconds and within a context where traditional media and sources of both moral and factual authority have been systematically weakened over decades of neoliberal attack — has created a situation where disinformation has more power and those who wield it can do so with precision.
But just as we have the means to fight capitalism, colonialism, and dehumanisation, so too do we — you and I — have the tools to fight disinformation: truth, and accurate and timely reporting from trustworthy sources of information shared with the communities impacted in their own language and from their own people.
If words and images are the chosen tools of dehumanisation and disinformation, then we are lucky because they are fighting with swords that we forged and that we know how to wield. You, the media, are the front lines right now. Trump will take all of our money and all of our resources, but our work must continue.
Times like this call for fearlessness and courage. But more than that, they call on us to use all of the tools in our toolboxes — community, self-determination, care, and truth. Fighting disinformation isn’t something we can do in a vacuum. It isn’t something that we can depersonalise and mechanise. It requires us to work together to build a very human movement.
I can’t deny that Trump’s attacks have exhausted me and left me depressed. I’m a librarian by training. I love sharing stories with people, not telling them myself. I love building communities of learning and of sharing, not taking to the streets in protest.
More than anything else, I just want a nice cup of tea and a novel. But we are here in what I’ve seen others call “a coyote moment”. Like Wile E. Coyote, we are over the cliff with our legs spinning in the air.
We can use this time to focus on what really matters and figure out how we will keep going and keep working. We can look at the blue sky above us and revel in what beauty and joy we can.
Building community, exercising our self-determination, caring for each other, and telling the truth fearlessly and as though our very lives depend on it will leave us all the stronger and ready to fight Trump and his tidal wave of disinformation.
Mandy Henk, co-founder of Dark Times Academy, has been teaching and learning on the margins of the academy for her whole career. As an academic librarian, she has worked closely with academics, students, and university administrations for decades. She taught her own courses, led her own research work, and fought for a vision of the liberal arts that supports learning and teaching as the things that actually matter. This article was originally presented as an invited address at the annual general meeting of the Asia Pacific Media Network on 24 April 2025.
When the US Embassy knocked on my door in late 2024, I was both pleased and more than a little suspicious.
I’d worked with them before, but the organisation where I did that work, Tohatoha, had closed its doors. My new project, Dark Times Academy, was specifically an attempt to pull myself out of the grant cycle, to explore ways of funding the work of counter-disinformation education without dependence on unreliable governments and philanthropic funders more concerned with their own objectives than the work I believed then — and still believe — is crucial to the future of human freedom.
But despite my efforts to turn them away, they kept knocking, and Dark Times Academy certainly needed the money. I’m warning you all now: There is a sense in which everything I have to say about counter-disinformation comes down to conversations about how to fund the work.
There is nothing I would like more than to talk about literally anything other than funding this work. I don’t love money, but I do like eating, having a home, and being able to give my kids cash.
I have also repeatedly found myself in roles where other people look to me for their livelihoods; a responsibility that I carry heavily and with more than a little clumsiness and reluctance.
But if we are to talk about President Donald Trump and disinformation, we have to talk about money. As it is said, the love of money is the root of all evil. And the lack of it is the manifestation of that evil.
Trump and his attack on all of us — on truth, on peace, on human freedom and dignity — is, at its core, an attack that uses money as a weapon. It is an attack rooted in greed and in avarice.
In his world, money is power
But in that greed lies his weakness. In his world, money is power. He and those who serve him and his fascist agenda cannot see beyond the world that money built. Their power comes in the form of control over that world and the people forced to live in it.
Of course, money is just paper. It is digital bits in a database sitting on a server in a data centre relying on electricity and water taken from our earth. The ephemeral nature of their money speaks volumes about their lack of strength and their vulnerability to more powerful forces.
They know this. Trump and all men like him know their weaknesses — and that’s why they use their money to gather power and control. When you have more money than you and your whānau can spend in several generations, you suddenly have a different kind of relationship to money.
It’s one where money itself — and the structures that allow money to be used for control of people and the material world — becomes your biggest vulnerability. If your power and identity are built entirely on the power of money, your commitment to preserving the power of money in the world becomes an all-consuming drive.
Capitalism rests on many “logics” — commodification, individualism, eternal growth, the alienation of labour. Marx and others have tried this ground well already.
In a sense, we are past the time when more analysis is useful to us. Rather, we have reached a point where action is becoming a practical necessity. After all, Trump isn’t going to stop with the media or with counter-disinformation organisations. He is ultimately coming for us all.
What form that action must take is a complicated matter. But, first we must think about money and about how money works, because only through lessening the power of money can we hope to lessen the power of those who wield it as their primary weapon.
Beliefs about poor people
If you have been so unfortunate to be subject to engagement with anti-poverty programmes during the neoliberal era either as a client or a worker, you will know that one of the motivations used for denying direct cash aid to those in need of money is a belief on the part of government and policy experts that poor people will use their money in unwise ways, be it drugs or alcohol, or status purchases like sneakers or manicures.
But over and over again, there’s another concern raised: cash benefits will be spent on others in the community, but outside of those targeted with the cash aid.
You see this less now that ideas like a universal basic income (UBI) and direct cash transfers have taken hold of the policy and donor classes, but it is one of those rightwing concerns that turned out to be empirically accurate.
Poor people are more generous with their money and all of their other resources as well. The stereotype of the stingy Scrooge is one based on a pretty solid mountain of evidence.
The poor turn out to understand far better than the rich how to defeat the power that money gives those who hoard it — and that is community. The logic of money and capital can most effectively be defeated through the creation and strengthening of our community ties.
Donald Trump and those who follow him revel in creating a world of atomised individuals focused on themselves; the kind of world where, rather than relying on each other, people depend on the market and the dollar to meet their material needs — dollars. of course, being the source of control and power for their class.
Our ability to fund our work, feed our families, and keep a roof over our heads has not always been subject to the whims of capitalists and those with money to pay us. Around the world, the grand multicentury project known as colonialism has impoverished us all and created our dependency.
Colonial projects and ‘enclosures’
I cannot speak as a direct victim of the colonial project. Those are not my stories to tell. There are so many of you in this room who can speak to that with far more eloquence and direct experience than I. But the colonial project wasn’t only an overseas project for my ancestors.
Enclosure is one of the core colonial logics. Enclosure takes resources (land in particular) that were held in common and managed collectively using traditional customs and hands them over to private control to be used for private rather than communal benefit. This process, repeated over and over around the globe, created the world we live in today — the world built on money.
As we lose control over our access to what we need to live as the land that holds our communities together, that binds us to one another, is co-opted or stolen from us, we lose our power of self-determination. Self-governance, freedom, liberty — these are what colonisation and enclosure take from us when they steal our livelihoods.
As part of my work, I keep a close eye on the approaches to counter-disinformation that those whose relationship to power is smoother than my own take. Also, in this the year of our Lord 2025, it is mandatory to devote at least some portion of each public talk to AI.
I am also profoundly sorry to have to report that as far as I can tell, the only work on counter-disinformation still getting funding is work that claims to be able to use AI to detect and counter disinformation. It will not surprise you that I am extremely dubious about these claims.
AI has been created through what has been called “data colonialism”, in that it relies on stolen data, just as traditional forms of colonialism rely on stolen land.
Risks and dangers of AI
AI itself — and I am speaking here specifically of generative AI — is being used as a tool of oppression. Other forms of AI have their own risks and dangers, but in this context, generative AI is quite simply a tool of power consolidation, of hollowing out of human skill and care, and of profanity, in the sense of being the opposite of sacred.
Words, art, conversation, companionship — these are fiercely human things. For a machine to mimic these things is to transgress against all of our communities — all the more so when the machine is being wielded by people who speak openly of genocide and white supremacy.
However, just as capitalism can be fought through community, colonialism can and has been fought through our own commitment to living our lives in freedom. It is fought by refusing their demands and denying their power, whether through the traditional tools of street protest and nonviolent resistance, or through simply walking away from the structures of violence and control that they have implemented.
In the current moment, that particularly includes the technological tools that are being used to destroy our communities and create the data being used to enact their oppression. Each of us is free to deny them access to our lives, our hopes, and dreams.
This version of colonisation has a unique weakness, in that the cyber dystopia they have created can be unplugged and turned off. And yet, we can still retain the parts of it that serve us well by building our own technological infrastructure and helping people use that instead of the kind owned and controlled by oligarchs.
By living our lives with the freedom we all possess as human beings, we can deny these systems the symbolic power they rely on to continue.
That said, this has limitations. This process of theft that underlies both traditional colonialism and contemporary data colonialism, rather than that of land or data, destroys our material base of support — ie. places to grow food, the education of our children, control over our intellectual property.
Power consolidated upwards
The outcome is to create ever more dependence on systems outside of our control that serve to consolidate power upwards and create classes of disposable people through the logic of dehumanisation.
Disposable people have been a feature across many human societies. We see it in slaves, in cultures that use banishment and exile, and in places where imprisonment is used to enforce laws.
Right now we see it in the United States being directed at scale towards those from Central and Latin America and around the world. The men being sent to the El Salvadorian gulag, the toddlers sent to immigration court without a lawyer, the federal workers tossed from their jobs — these are disposable people to Trump.
The logic of colonialism relies on the process of dehumanisation; of denying the moral relevance of people’s identity and position within their communities and families. When they take a father from his family, they are dehumanising him and his family. They are denying the moral relevance of his role as a father and of his children and wife.
When they require a child to appear alone before an immigration judge, they are dehumanising her by denying her the right to be recognised as a child with moral claims on the adults around her. When they say they want to transition federal workers from unproductive government jobs to the private sector, they are denying those workers their life’s work and identity as labourers whose work supports the common good.
There was a time when I would point out that we all know where this leads, but we are there now. It has led there, although given the US incarceration rate for Black men, it isn’t unreasonable to argue that in fact for some people, the US has always been there. Fascism is not an aberration, it is a continuation. But the quickening is here. The expansion of dehumanisation and hate have escalated under Trump.
Dehumanisaton always starts with words and language. And Trump is genuinely — and terribly — gifted with language. His speeches are compelling, glittering, and persuasive to his audiences. With his words and gestures, he creates an alternate reality. When Trump says, “They’re eating the cats! They’re eating the dogs!”, he is using language to dehumanise Haitian immigrants.
An alternate reality for migrants
When he calls immigrants “aliens” he is creating an alternate reality where migrants are no longer human, no longer part of our communities, but rather outside of them, not fully human.
When he tells lies and spews bullshit into our shared information system, those lies are virtually always aimed at creating a permission structure to deny some group of people their full humanity. Outrageous lie after outrageous lie told over and over again crumbles society in ways that we have seen over and over again throughout history.
In Europe, the claims that women were consorting with the devil led to the witch trials and the burning of thousands of women across central and northern Europe. In Myanmar, claims that Rohinga Muslims were commiting rape, led to mass slaughter.
Just as we fight the logics of capitalism with community and colonialism with a fierce commitment to our freedom, the power to resist dehumanisation is also ours. Through empathy and care — which is simply the material manifestation of empathy — we can defeat attempts to dehumanise.
Empathy and care are inherent to all functioning societies — and they are tools we all have available to us. By refusing to be drawn into their hateful premises, by putting morality and compassion first, we can draw attention to the ridiculousness of their ideas and help support those targeted.
Disinformation is the tool used to dehumanise. It always has been. During the COVID-19 pandemic when disinformation as a concept gained popularity over the rather older concept of propaganda, there was a real moment where there was a drive to focus on misinformation, or people who were genuinely wrong about usually public health facts. This is a way to talk about misinformation that elides the truth about it.
There is an empirical reality underlying the tsunami of COVID disinformation and it is that the information was spread intentionally by bad actors with the goal of destroying the social bonds that hold us all together. State actors, including the United States under the first Trump administration, spread lies about COVID intentionally for their own benefit and at the cost of thousands if not millions of lives.
Lies and disinformation at scale
This tactic was not new then. Those seeking political power or to destroy communities for their own financial gain have always used lies and disinformation. But what is different this time, what has created unique risks, is the scale.
Networked disinformation — the power to spread bullshit and lies across the globe within seconds and within a context where traditional media and sources of both moral and factual authority have been systematically weakened over decades of neoliberal attack — has created a situation where disinformation has more power and those who wield it can do so with precision.
But just as we have the means to fight capitalism, colonialism, and dehumanisation, so too do we — you and I — have the tools to fight disinformation: truth, and accurate and timely reporting from trustworthy sources of information shared with the communities impacted in their own language and from their own people.
If words and images are the chosen tools of dehumanisation and disinformation, then we are lucky because they are fighting with swords that we forged and that we know how to wield. You, the media, are the front lines right now. Trump will take all of our money and all of our resources, but our work must continue.
Times like this call for fearlessness and courage. But more than that, they call on us to use all of the tools in our toolboxes — community, self-determination, care, and truth. Fighting disinformation isn’t something we can do in a vacuum. It isn’t something that we can depersonalise and mechanise. It requires us to work together to build a very human movement.
I can’t deny that Trump’s attacks have exhausted me and left me depressed. I’m a librarian by training. I love sharing stories with people, not telling them myself. I love building communities of learning and of sharing, not taking to the streets in protest.
More than anything else, I just want a nice cup of tea and a novel. But we are here in what I’ve seen others call “a coyote moment”. Like Wile E. Coyote, we are over the cliff with our legs spinning in the air.
We can use this time to focus on what really matters and figure out how we will keep going and keep working. We can look at the blue sky above us and revel in what beauty and joy we can.
Building community, exercising our self-determination, caring for each other, and telling the truth fearlessly and as though our very lives depend on it will leave us all the stronger and ready to fight Trump and his tidal wave of disinformation.
Mandy Henk, co-founder of Dark Times Academy, has been teaching and learning on the margins of the academy for her whole career. As an academic librarian, she has worked closely with academics, students, and university administrations for decades. She taught her own courses, led her own research work, and fought for a vision of the liberal arts that supports learning and teaching as the things that actually matter. This article was originally presented as an invited address at the annual general meeting of the Asia Pacific Media Network on 24 April 2025.
The doors of St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican have now been closed and the coffin sealed, ahead of preparations for tonight’s funeral of Pope Francis.
The Vatican says a quarter of a million people have paid respects to Pope Francis in the last three days.
Sister Susana Vaifale of the Missionaries of Faith has lived in Rome for more than 10 years and worked at the Vatican’s St Peter’s parish office.
She told RNZ Pacific Waves that when she met the Pope in 2022 for an “ad limina” (obligatory visit) with the bishops from Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands, she was lost for words.
“When I was there in front of him, it’s like a blur, I couldn’t say anything,” she said.
Sister Vaifale said although she was speechless, she thought of her community back home in Samoa.
“In my heart, I brought everyone, I mean my country, my people and myself. So, in that time . . . I was just looking at him and I said, ‘my goodness’ I’m here, I’m in front of the Pope, Francis . . . the leader of the Catholic Church.”
At Easter celebration
Sister Vaifale said she was at the Easter celebration in St Peter’s Square where Pope Francis made his last public appearance.
However, the next day it was announced that Pope Francis died.
The news shattered Sister Vaifale who was on a train when she heard what had happened.
“Oh, I cried, yeah I cried . . . until now I am very emotional, very sad.”
“He passed at 7:30 . . . I am very sad but like we say in Samoa: ‘maliu se toa ae toe tula’i mai se toa’.. so, it’s all in God’s hands.”
Pope Francis with Fatima Leung Wai in Krakow, Poland in 2016. Image: Fatima Leung Wai/RNZ Pacific
Siblings pay final respects
The Leung-Wai family from South Auckland are in Rome and joined the long queue to pay their final respects to Pope Francis lying in state at St Peter’s Basilica.
Fatima Leung-Wai along with her siblings Martin and Ann-Margaret are proud of their Catholic faith and are active parishioners at St Peter Chanel church in Clover Park.
The family’s Easter trip to Rome was initially for the canonisation of Blessed Carlo Acutis — a young Italian boy who died at the age of 15 from leukemia and is touted to be the first millennial saint.
Leung Wai siblings in St Peter’s Basilica were among the thousands paying their final respects to Pope Francis. Image: Leung Wai family/RNZ Pacific
Plans changed as soon as they heard the news of the Pope’s death.
Leung-Wai said it took an hour and a half for her and her siblings to see the Pope in the basilica and the crowd numbers at St Peter’s Square got bigger each day.
Despite only seeing Pope Francis’ body for a moment, Leung-Wai said she was blessed to have met him in 2016 for World Youth Day in Krakow, Poland.
She said Pope Francis was well-engaged with the youth.
“I was blessed to have lunch with him nine years ago,” Leung-Wai said.
“Meeting him at that time he was like a grandpa, he was like very open and warm and very much interested in what the young people and what we had to say.”
Leung Wai siblings with their parents, mum Lesina, and dad Aniseko. Image: Leung Wai family/RNZ Pacific
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
There was faint hope that efforts to achieve a ceasefire deal in Gaza would succeed. That hope is now all but gone, offering 2.1 million tormented and starved Palestinians dismal prospects for the days and weeks ahead.
Last Saturday, the Israeli Prime Minister once again affirmed he had no intention to end the war. Benjamin Netanyahu wants what he calls “absolute victory” to achieve US President Donald Trump’s so-called vision for Gaza of ethnic cleansing and annexation.
To that end, Israel is weaponising food at a scale not seen before, including immediately after the October 7 attack by Hamas. It has not allowed any wheat, medicine boxes, or other vital aid into the Gaza Strip since 2 March.
This engineered starvation has pushed experts to warn that 1.1 million Palestinians face imminent famine.
Many believe this was Israel’s “maximum pressure” plan all along: massive force, starvation, and land grabs. It’s what the Israeli Minister of Defence, Israel Katz, referred to in March when he gave Palestinians in Gaza an ultimatum — surrender or die.
A month after breaking the ceasefire, Israel has converted nearly 70 percent of the tiny territory into no-go or forced displacement zones, including all of Rafah. It has also created a new so-called security corridor, where the illegal settlement of Morag once stood.
Israel is bombing the Palestinians it is starving while actively pushing them into a tiny strip of dunes along the coast.
Israel only interested in temporary ceasefire
This mentality informed the now failed ceasefire talks. Israel was only interested in a temporary ceasefire deal that would keep its troops in Gaza and see the release of half of the living Israeli captives.
In exchange, Israel reportedly offered to allow critically needed food and aid back into Gaza, which it is obliged to do as an occupying power, irrespective of a ceasefire agreement.
Israel also refused to commit to ending the war, just as it did in the Lebanon ceasefire agreement, while also demanding that Hamas disarm and agree to the exile of its prominent members from Gaza.
Disarming is a near-impossible demand in such a context, but this is not motivated by a preserved arsenal that Hamas wants to hold on to. Materially speaking, the armaments Israel wants Hamas to give up are inconsequential, except in how they relate to the group’s continued control over Gaza and its future role in Palestinian politics.
Symbolically, accepting the demand to lay down arms is a sign of surrender few Palestinians would support in a context devoid of a political horizon, or even the prospect of one.
While Israel has declared Hamas as an enemy that must be “annihilated”, the current right-wing government in Israel doesn’t want to deal with any Palestinian party or entity.
The famous “no Hamas-stan and no Fatah-stan” is not just a slogan in Israeli political thinking — it is the policy.
Golden opportunity for mass ethnic cleansing
This government senses a golden opportunity for the mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the annexation of Gaza and the West Bank — and it aims to seize it.
Hamas’s chief negotiator Khalil al-Hayya recently said that the movement was done with partial deals. Hamas, he said, was willing to release all Israeli captives in exchange for ending the war and Israel’s full withdrawal from Gaza, as well as the release of an agreed-on number of Palestinian prisoners.
But the truth is, Hamas is running out of options.
Netanyahu does not consider releasing the remaining Israeli captives as a central goal. Hamas has no leverage and barely any allies left standing.
Hezbollah is out of the equation, facing geographic and political isolation, demands for disarmament, and the lethal Israeli targeting of its members.
Armed Iraqi groups have signalled their willingness to hand over weapons to the government in Baghdad in order not to be in the crosshairs of Washington or Tel Aviv.
Meanwhile, the Houthis in Yemen have sustained heavy losses from hundreds of massive US airstrikes. Despite their defiant tone, they cannot change the current dynamics.
Tehran distanced from Houthis
Finally, Iran is engaged in what it describes as positive dialogue with the Trump administration to avert a confrontation. To that end, Tehran has distanced itself from the Houthis and is welcoming the idea of US investment.
The so-called Arab plan for Gaza’s reconstruction also excludes any role for Hamas. While the mediators are pushing for a political formula that would not decisively erase Hamas from Palestinian politics, some Arab states would prefer such a scenario.
As these agendas and new realities play out, Gaza has been laid to waste. There is no food, no space, no hope. Only despair and growing anger.
This chapter of the genocide shows no sign of letting up, with Israel under no international pressure to cease the bombing and forced starvation of Gaza. Hamas remains defiant but has no significant leverage to wield.
In the absence of any viable Palestinian initiative that can rally international support around a different dialogue altogether about ending the war, intervention can only come from Washington, where the favoured solution is ethnic cleansing.
This is a dead-end road that pushes Palestinians into the abyss of annihilation, whether by death and starvation or political and material erasure through mass displacement.
Nour Odeh is a political analyst, public diplomacy consultant, and an award-winning journalist. She also reports for Al Jazeera. This article was first published by The New Arab and is republished under Creative Commons.
An ocean conservation non-profit has condemned the United States President’s latest executive order aimed at boosting the deep sea mining industry.
President Donald Trump issued the “Unleashing America’s offshore critical minerals and resources” order on Thursday, directing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to allow deep sea mining.
The order states: “It is the policy of the US to advance United States leadership in seabed mineral development.”
NOAA has been directed to, within 60 days, “expedite the process for reviewing and issuing seabed mineral exploration licenses and commercial recovery permits in areas beyond national jurisdiction under the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act.”
Ocean Conservancy said the executive order is a result of deep sea mining frontrunner, The Metals Company, requesting US approval for mining in international waters, bypassing the authority of the International Seabed Authority (ISA).
US not ISA member
The ISA is the United Nations agency responsible for coming up with a set of regulations for deep sea mining across the world. The US is not a member of the ISA because it has not ratified UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
“This executive order flies in the face of NOAA’s mission,” Ocean Conservancy’s vice-president for external affairs Jeff Watters said.
“NOAA is charged with protecting, not imperiling, the ocean and its economic benefits, including fishing and tourism; and scientists agree that deep-sea mining is a deeply dangerous endeavor for our ocean and all of us who depend on it,” he said.
He said areas of the US seafloor where test mining took place more than 50 years ago still had not fully recovered.
“The harm caused by deep sea mining isn’t restricted to the ocean floor: it will impact the entire water column, top to bottom, and everyone and everything relying on it.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The former head of BenarNews’ Pacific bureau says a United States court ruling this week ordering the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) to release congressionally approved funding to Radio Free Asia and its subsidiaries “makes us very happy”.
However, Stefan Armbruster, who has played a key role in expanding the news agency’s presence in the region, acknowledged, “there’s also more to do”.
On March 14, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to defund USAGM outlets Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting Networks, including placing more than 1300 Voice of America employees on leave.
“This order continues the reduction in the elements of the Federal bureaucracy that the President has determined are unnecessary,” the executive order states.
Armbruster told RNZ Pacific Waves that the ruling found the Trump administration failed to provide evidence to support their actions.
Signage for US broadcaster Voice of America in Washington, DC . . . Trump administration failed to provide evidence to support its actions. Image: RNZ Pacific
“[Judge Royce Lamberth] is basically saying that the actions of the Trump administration [are] likely to have been illegal and unconstitutional in taking away the money from these organisations,” he said.
Order to restore funding
“The judgments are saying that the US administration should return funding to its overseas broadcasters, which include Voice of America [and] Radio Free Asia.”
He said that in America, they can lay people off without a loss, and they can still remain employees. But these conditions did not apply for overseas employees.
“Basically, all the overseas staff have been staff let go, except a very small number in the US who are on visas, dependent on their employment, and they have spoken out about this publicly.
“They have got 60 days to find a job, a new sponsor for them, or they could face deportation to places like China, Cambodia, and Vietnam.
“So for the former employees, at the moment, we are just waiting to see how this all plays out.”
Armbruster said there were hints that a Trump administration could take such action during the election campaign, when the Trump team had flagged issues about the media.
Speed ‘totally unexpected’
However, he added the speed at which this has happened “was totally unexpected”.
“And the judge ruled on that. He said that it is hard to fathom a more straightforward display of arbitrary, capricious action, basically, random and unexplained.
“In short, the defendants had no method or approach towards shutting down USAGM that this Court could discern.”
Armbruster said the US Congress funds the USAGM, and the agency has a responsibility to disburse that funding to Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, and Radio Free Asia.
The judge ruled that the President does not have the authority to withhold that funding, he said.
“We were funded through till September to the end of the financial year in the US.
“In terms of how quickly [the executive order] came, it was a big surprise to all of us. Not totally unexpected that this would be happening, but not this way, not this hard.”
BenarNews ‘gave a voice’ The BenarNews Pacific bureau was initially set up two-and-a-half years ago but evolved into a fully-fledged bureau only 12 months ago. It had three fulltime staff based in Australia and about 15 stringers and commentators across the region.
“We built up this fantastic network of people, and the response has been fantastic, just like Radio New Zealand [Pacific],” Armbruster said.
“We were doing a really good thing and having some really amazing stories on our pages, and big successes. It gave a voice to a whole lot of Pacific journalists and commentators to tell stories from perspectives that were not being presented in other forums.
“It is hard to say if we will come back because there has been a lot of court orders issued recently under this current US administration, and they sometimes are not complied with, or are very slowly complied with, which is why we are still in the process.”
However, Armbruster remains hopeful there will be “some interesting news” next week.
“The judgment also has a little bit of a kicker in the tail, because it is not just an order to do [restore funding].
“It is an order to turn up on the first day of each month, and to appraise the court of what action is [the USAGM] taking to disburse the funds.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Part Two of Solidarity’s Vietnam War series: The folly of imperial war
COMMENTARY:By Eugene Doyle
Vietnam is a lesson we should have learnt — but never did — about the immorality, folly and counter-productivity of imperial war. Gaza, Yemen and Ukraine are happening today, in part, because of this cultural amnesia that facilitates repetition.
It’s time to remember the Quiet Mutiny within the US army — and why it helped end the war by undermining military effectiveness, morale, and political support at home.
There were many reasons that the US and its allies were defeated in Vietnam. First and foremost they were beaten by an army that was superior in tactics, morale and political will.
The Quiet Mutiny that came close to a full-scale insurrection within the US army in the early 1970s was an important part of the explanation as to why America’s vast over-match in resources, firepower and aerial domination was insufficient to the task.
Beaten by an army that was superior in tactics, morale and political will. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
‘Our army is approaching collapse’ Marine Colonel Robert D. Heinl Jr wrote: “By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non-commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous.” — Armed Forces Journal 7 June, 1971.
A paper prepared by the Gerald R Ford Presidential Library — “Veterans, Deserters and Draft Evaders” (1974) — stated, “Hundreds of thousands of Vietnam-era veterans hold other-than-honorable discharges, many because of their anti-war activities.”
Between 1965-73, according to the Ford papers, 495,689 servicemen (and women) on active duty deserted the armed forces! Ponder that.
For good reason, the defiance, insubordination and on many occasions soldier-on-officer violence was something that the mainstream media and the Western establishment have tried hard to expunge from our collective memory.
Something that the mainstream media and the Western establishment have tried hard to expunge from our collective memory. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
‘The officer said “Keep going!” He kinda got shot.’ At 12 years old in 1972, I took out a subscription to Newsweek. Among the horrors I learnt about at that tender age was the practice of fragging — the deliberate killing of US officers by their own men, often by flicking a grenade — a fragmentation device (hence fragging) — into their tent at night, or simply shooting an officer during a combat mission.
There were hundreds of such incidents.
GI: “The officer said, ‘Keep on going’ but they were getting hit pretty bad so it didn’t happen. He kinda got shot.”
GI: “The grunts don’t always do what the Captain says. He always says “Go there”. He always stays back. We just go and sit down somewhere. We don’t want to hit “Contact”.
GI: “We’ve decided to tell the company commander we won’t go into the bush anymore; at least we’ll go to jail where it’s safe.”
Hundreds of GI antiwar organisations and underground newspapers challenged the official narratives about the war. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
US Army — refusing to fight “Soldiers in Revolt: G.I. Resistance During the Vietnam War,” by David Cortright, professor emeritus at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame, himself a Vietnam veteran, documents the hundreds of GI antiwar organisations and underground newspapers that challenged the official narratives about the war.
Cortright’s research indicated that by the early 1970s the US Army was close to a full mutiny. It meant that the US, despite having hundreds of thousands of troops in the country, couldn’t confidently put an army into combat.
By the war’s end the US army was largely hunkered down in their bases. Cortright says US military operations became “effectively crippled” as the crisis manifested itself “in drug abuse, political protest, combat refusals, black militancy, and fraggings.”
Cortright cites over 900 fragging incidents between 1969–1971, including over 500 with explosive devices.
“Word of the deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs of certain units,” Colonel Heinl said in his 1971 article.
At times entire companies refused to move forward, an offence punishable by death, but never enforced. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
At times entire companies refused to move forward, an offence punishable by death, but never enforced because of the calamitous knock-on effect this would have had both at home and within the army in the field.
‘The rebellion is everywhere’ It was heroic journalists like John Pilger who refused to file the reassuring stories editors back in London, New York, Sydney and Auckland wanted. Pilger told uncomfortable truths — there was a rebellion underway. The clean-cut, spit-and-polish boys of the 1960s Green Machine (US army) had morphed into a corps whose 80,000-strong frontline was full of defiant, insubordinate Grunts (infantry) who wore love beads, grew their hair long, smoked pot, and occasionally tossed a hand grenade into an officer’s tent.
John Pilger’s first film “Vietnam: The Quiet Mutiny”, aired in 1970. “The war is ending,” Pilger said, “because the largest, wealthiest and most powerful organisation on earth, the American Army, is being challenged from within — by the most brutalised and certainly the bravest of its members.
“The war is ending because the Grunt is taking no more bullshit.”
That short piece to camera is one of the most incredible moments in documentary history yet it likely won’t be seen during the commemorations of the Fall of Saigon on April 30.
At the time, Granada Television’s chairman was apoplectic that it went to air at all and described Pilger as “a threat to Western civilisation”. So tight is the media control we live under now it is unlikely such a documentary would air at all on a major channel.
“I don’t know why I’m shooting these people” a young grunt tells Pilger about having to fight the Vietnamese in their homeland. Another asks: “I have nothing against these people. Why are we killing them?”
Shooting the messenger Huge effort goes into attacking truth-tellers like Pilger, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden or Julian Assange, but as Phillip Knightley pointed out in his book The First Casualty, Pilger’s work was among the most important revelations to emerge from Vietnam, a war in which a depressingly large percentage of journalists contented themselves with life in Saigon and chanting the official Pentagon narrative.
Thus it ever was.
Pilger was like a fragmentation device dropped into the official narrative, blasting away the euphemisms, the evasions, the endless stream of official lies. He called the end of the war long before the White House and the Pentagon finally gave up the charade; his actions helped save lives; their actions condemned hundreds of thousands to unnecessary death, millions more to misery.
African Americans were sent to the front in disproportionately large numbers – about a quarter of all frontline fighters. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
Race politics, anti-racism, peace activism
Race politics was another important factor. African Americans were sent to the front in disproportionately large numbers — about a quarter of all frontline fighters. There was a strong feeling among black conscripts that “This is not our war”.
In David Loeb Weiss’ No Vietnamese ever called me Nigger we see a woman at an antiwar protest in Harlem, New York. “My boy is over there fighting for his rights,” she says, “but he’s not getting them.” Then we hear the chant: “The enemy is whitey! Not the Viet Cong!”
We should recall that at this time the civil rights movement was battling powerful white groups for a place in civil society. The US army had only ended racial segregation in the Korean War and back home in 1968, there were still 16 States that had miscegenation laws banning sexual relations between whites and blacks.
Martin Luther King was assassinated this same year. All this fed into the Quiet Mutiny.
Truth-telling and the lessons of history Vietnam became a dark arena where the most sordid aspects of American imperialism played out: racism, genocidal violence, strategic incoherence, belief in brute force over sound policy.
Sounds similar to Gaza and Yemen, doesn’t it?
Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington, New Zealand. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at his public policy website Solidarity and is republished here with permission.
Despite calls from women’s groups urging the government to implement policies to address the underrepresentation of women in politics, the introduction of temporary special measures (TSM) to increase women’s political representation in Fiji remains a distant goal.
This week, leader of the Social Democratic Liberal Party (Sodelpa), Cabinet Minister Aseri Radrodro, and opposition MP Ketal Lal expressed their objection to reserving 30 percent of parliamentary seats for women.
Radrodro, who is also Education Minister, told The Fiji Times that Fijian women were “capable of holding their ground without needing a crutch like TSM to give them a leg up”.
Lal called the special allocation of seats for women in Parliament “tokenistic” and beneficial to “a few selected individuals”, as part of submissions to the Fiji Law Reform Commission and the Electoral Commission of Fiji, which are undertaking a comprehensive review and reform of the Fiji’s electoral framework.
Rabuka said it devalued “the dignity of women at the highest level of national governance.”
“This specific issue makes me wonder at times. As the percentage of women in population is approximately the same as for men, why are women not securing the votes of women? Or more precisely, why aren’t women voting for women?” he said.
Doubled down
The Prime Minister doubled down on his position on the issue when The Fiji Times asked him if it was the right time for Fiji to legislate mandatory seats for women in Parliament as the issue was gaining traction.
Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka . . . “Why aren’t women voting for women?” Image: Fiji Parliament
“There is no need to legislate it. We do not have a compulsory voting legislation, nor do we yet need a quota-based system.
However, Rabuka’s Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs and Deputy Speaker Lenora Qereqeretabua holds a different view.
Qereqeretabua, from the National Federation Party, said in January that Parliament needed to look like the people that it represented.
“Women make up half of the world’s population, and yet we are still fighting to ensure that their voices and experiences are not only heard but valued in the spaces where decisions are made,” she told participants at the Exploring Temporary Special Measures for Inclusive Governance in Fiji forum.
She said Fiji needed more women in positions of power.
“Not because women are empirically better leaders, because leadership is not determined by gender, but because it is essential for democracy that our representatives reflect the communities that they serve.”
Lenora Qereqeretabua on the floor of Parliament . . . “It is essential for democracy that our representatives reflect the communities that they serve.” Image: Fiji Parliament
‘Shameless’ lag
Another member of Rabuka’s coalition government, one of the deputy prime ministers in and a former Sodelpa leader, Viliame Gavoka said in March 2022 that Fiji had “continued to shamelessly lag behind in protecting and promoting women’s rights and their peacebuilding expertise”.
He pledged at the time that if Sodelpa was voted into government, it would “ensure to break barriers and accelerate progress, including setting specific targets and timelines to achieve gender balance in all branches of government and at all levels through temporary special measures such as quotas . . . ”
However, since coming into power in December 2022, Gavoka has not made any advance on his promise, and his party leader Radrodro has made his views known on the issue.
Fiji women’s rights groups say temporary special measures may need to be implemented in the short-term to advance women’s equality. Image: RNZ Pacific/Sally Round
Fijian women’s rights and advocacy groups say that introducing special measures for women is neither discriminatory nor a breach of the 2013 Constitution.
In a joint statement in October last year, six non-government organisations called on the government to enforce provisions for temporary special measures for women in political party representation and ensure that reserved seats are secured for women in all town and city councils and its committees.
“Nationally, it is unacceptable that after three national elections under new electoral laws, there has been a drastic decline in women’s representation from contesting national elections to being elected to parliament,” they said.
“It is clear from our history that cultural, social, economic and political factors have often stood in the way of women’s political empowerment.”
Short-term need They said temporary special measures may need to be implemented in the short-term to advance women’s equality.
“The term ‘temporary special measures’ is used to describe affirmative action policies and strategies to promote equality and empower women.
“If we are to move towards a society where half the population is reflected in all leadership spaces and opportunities, we must be gender responsive in the approaches we take to achieve gender equality.”
The Fijian Parliament currently has only five (out of 55) women in the House — four in government and one in opposition. In the previous parliamentary term (2018-2022), there were 10 women directly elected to Parliament.
According to the Fiji Country Gender Assessment report, 81 percent of Fijians believe that women are underrepresented in the government, and 72 percent of Fijians believe greater representation of women would be beneficial for the country.
However, the report found that time and energy burden of familial, volunteer responsibilities, patriarchal norms, and power relations as key barriers to women’s participation in the workplace and public life.
Fiji Women’s Rights Movement (FWRM) board member Akanisi Nabalarua believes that despite having strong laws and policies on paper, the implementation is lacking.
Lip service
Nabalarua said successive Fijian governments had often paid lip service to gender equality while failing to make intentional and meaningful progress in women’s representation in decision making spaces, reports fijivillage.com.
Labour Party leader Mahendra Chaudhry said Rabuka’s dismissal of the women’s rights groups’ plea was premature.
Chaudhry, a former prime minister who was deposed in a coup in 2000, said Rabuka should have waited for the Law Reform Commission’s report “before deciding so conclusively on the matter”.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The US District Court for the District of Columbia has granted a preliminary injunction in Widakuswara v Lake, affirming the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) was unlawfully shuttered by the Trump administration, Acting Director Victor Morales and Special Adviser Kari Lake.
The decision enshrines that USAGM must fulfill its legally required functions and protects the editorial independence of Voice of America (VOA) journalists and other federal media professionals within the agency and newsrooms that receive grants from the agency, such as Radio Free Asia and others with implications for independent media in the Asia-Pacific region.
Journalists, federal workers, and unions celebrate this important step in defending this critical agency, First Amendment rights, resisting unlawful political interference in public broadcasting, and ensuring USAGM workers can continue to fulfill their congressionally mandated function, reports the News Guild-CWA press union.
“Today’s ruling is a victory for the rule of law, for press freedom and journalistic integrity, and for democracy worldwide,” said the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) national president Everett Kelley.
“The Trump administration’s illegal attempt to shutter Voice of America and other outlets under the US Agency for Global Media was a transparent effort to silence the voices of patriotic journalists and professionals who have dedicated their careers to spreading the truth and fighting propaganda from lawless authoritarian regimes.
“This preliminary injunction will allow these employees to get back to work as we continue the fight to preserve their jobs and critical mission.”
President Lee Saunders of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees AFSCME), the largest trade union of public employees in the United States, said: “Today’s ruling is a major win for AFSCME members and Voice of America workers who have dedicated their careers to reporting the truth and spreading freedom to millions across the world.
Judge’s message clear
“The judge’s message is clear — this administration has no right to unilaterally dismantle essential agencies simply because they do not agree with their purpose.
“We celebrate this decision and will continue to work with our partners to ensure that the Voice of America is restored.”
“Journalists hold power to account and that includes the Trump administration,” said NewsGuild-CWA president Jon Schleuss. “This injunction orders the administration to reverse course and restore the Congressionally-mandated news broadcasts of Radio Free Asia, Voice of America and other newsrooms broadcasting to people who hope for freedom in countries where that is denied.”
“We are gratified by today’s ruling. This is another step in the process to restore VOA to full operation.” said government accountability project senior counsel David Seide.
“VOA is more than just an iconic brand with deep roots in American and global history; it is a vital, living force that provides truth and hope to those living under oppressive regimes.” Image: Getty/The Conversation“Today’s ruling marks a significant victory for press freedom and for the dedicated women and men who bring it to life — our clients, the journalists, executives, and staff of Voice of America,” said Andrew G. Celli, Jr., founding partner at Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel LLP and counsel for the plaintiffs.
“VOA is more than just an iconic brand with deep roots in American and global history; it is a vital, living force that provides truth and hope to those living under oppressive regimes.
“We are thrilled that its voice — a voice for the voiceless — will once again be heard loud and clear around the world.
Powerful affirmation of rule of law
“This decision is a powerful affirmation of the rule of law and the vital role that independent journalism plays in our democracy. The court’s action protects independent journalism and federal media professionals at Voice of America as we continue this case, and reaffirms that no administration can silence the truth without accountability,” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, co-counsel for the plaintiffs.
“We are proud to be with workers, unions and journalists in resisting political interference against independent journalism and will continue to fight for transparency and our democratic values.”
“Today’s decision is another necessary step in restoring the rule of law and correcting the injustices faced by the workers, reporters, and listeners of Voice of America and US Agency for Global Media,” said former Ambassador Norm Eisen, co-founder and executive chair of the State Democracy Defenders Fund.
“By granting this preliminary injunction, the court has reaffirmed the legal protections afforded to these civil servants and halted an attempt to undermine a free and independent press. We are proud to represent this resilient coalition and support the cause of a free and fair press.”
“This decision is a powerful affirmation of the role that independent journalism plays in advancing democracy and countering disinformation. From Voice of America to Radio Free Asia and across the US Agency for Global Media, these networks are essential tools of American soft power — trusted sources of truth in places where it is often scarce,” said Tom Yazdgerdi, president of the American Foreign Service Association.
“By upholding editorial independence, the court has protected the credibility of USAGM journalists and the global mission they serve.”
A critical victory
“We’re very pleased that Judge Lamberth has recognised that the Trump administration acted improperly in shuttering Voice of America,” said Clayton Weimers, executive director of Reporters Without Borders (RSF) USA.
“The USAGM must act immediately to implement this ruling and put over 1300 VOA employees back to work to deliver reliable information to their audience of millions around the world.”
While only the beginning of what may be a long, hard-fought battle, the court’s decision to grant a preliminary injunction marks a critical victory — not just for VOA journalists, but also for federal workers and the unions that represent them.
It affirms that the rule of law still protects those who speak truth to power.
To learn more, RNZ Pacific spoke with Australian National University academic Dr Thiago Oppermann, who has spent many years in both Bougainville and PNG.
James Marape (second left) and Ishmael Toroama (right) during joint moderations talks in Port Moresby last month. Image: Autonomous Bougainville Government
Don Wiseman: We’ve had five-and-a-half years since the Bougainville referendum, but very suddenly in the last couple of months, it would seem that Bougainville is picking up pace and trying to really make some progress with this march towards independence, as they see it.
Are they overplaying their hand?
Dr Thiago Oppermann: I do not believe that they are overplaying their hand. I think that the impression that is apparent of a sudden flurry of activity, arises partly because for the first two years after the referendum, there was a very slow pace.
One of the shortcomings of the Bougainville Peace Agreement (BPA) was that it did not set out a very clear post-referendum path. That part of the process was not as well designed as the parts leading to the referendum, and that left a great deal of uncertainty as to how to structure negotiations, how things should be conducted, and quite substantial differences in the views of the Papua New Guinean government and the ABG (Autonomous Bougainville Government), as to how the referendum result would be processed further.
For instance, how it would it need to be tabled in Parliament, what kind of vote would be required for it, would a negotiation between the parties lead to an agreement that then is presented to the Parliament, and how would that negotiation work? All these areas, they were not prescriptive in the BPA.
That led to a period of a good two years in which there was very slow process and then attempts to get some some movement. I would say that in that period, the views of the Bougainvilleans and the Papua New Guineans became quite entrenched in quite different camps, and something I think would have to give eventually.
Why the Bougainvilleans have moved towards this point now, I think that it bears pointing out that there has been a long process that has been unfolding, for more than two years now, of beginning the organic process of developing a Bougainvillean constitutional process with this constitutional development committees across the island doing a lot of work, and that has now borne fruit, is how I would describe it.
It happens at a point where the process has been unblocked by the appointment of Sir Jerry Mataparae, which I think sets a new vigour into the process. It looks now like it’s heading towards some form of outcome. And that being the case, the Bougainvilleans have made their position quite clear.
Sir Jerry Mateparae (middle) with representatives of the PNG and Bougainville governments at the second moderation in April 2025. Image: ABG
DW: Well, Bougainville, in fact, is saying it will be independent by 1st September 2027. How likely do you think that is?
TO: I think there’s a question that comes before that. When Bougainville says that they will be independent by such a date, what we need to first consider is that the process of mediation is still unfolding.
I think that the first thing to consider is, what would that independence look like, and what scope is there within the mediation for finding some compromise that still suits Papua New Guinea. I think that there’s a much greater range of outcomes than people realise within this sort of umbrella of independence, the Bougainvilleans themselves, have moved to a position of understanding independence in much more nuanced terms than previously.
You might imagine that in the aftermath of this fairly brutal and bitter civil conflict, the idea of independence at that time was quite a radical cut towards “full bruk loose” as they say.
But the reality is that for many post colonial and new states since World War Two, there are many different kinds of independence and the degree to which there remains a kind of attachment with or relationship with the so called parent colonial country is variable, I should add.
I do not want to digress too much, but this concept of the parent colonial country is something that I heard quite a lot of when I was studying the referendum itself. Many people would say that the relationship that they had to Papua New Guinea was not one of enmity or of like running away, it was more a question of there being a parent and Bougainville having now grown up to the point where the child, Bougainville, is ready to go off and set up its own house.
Many people thought of it in those terms. Now I think that in concrete terms that can be articulated in many different ways when we think about international law and the status of different sovereign nations around the world.
DW: If we can just look at some of the possibilities in terms of the way in which this independence might be interpreted. My understanding is, for Bougainville it’s vital that they have a degree of sovereignty that will allow them to join organisations like the United Nations, but they’re not necessarily looking to be fully independent of PNG.
TO: Yes, I think that there would be like a process underway in Bougainville for understanding what that would look like.
There are certainly people who would have a view that is still more firmly towards full independence. And there will be others who understand some type of free association arrangements or something that still retains a closer relationship with Papua New Guinea.
I do not think many people have illusions that Bougainville could, for instance, suddenly break loose of the very deep economic connections it has with Papua New Guinea, not only those of government funding, but the commercial connections which are very, very deep. So suddenly making that disappear is not something people believe it’s possible.
But there are many other options that are on the table. I think what Bougainville is doing by having the announcement of the Independence Day is setting for Papua New Guinea saying, like, “here is the terms of the debate that we are prepared to consider”. But within that there is still a great deal of giving and taking.
DW: Now within the parliament in PNG, I think Bougainville has felt for some time that there hasn’t been a great deal of understanding of what Bougainville has been through, or what it is Bougainville is trying to achieve. There’s a very different lineup of MPs to what they were at the turn of the century when the Bougainville Peace Agreement was finalised. So what are they thinking, the MPs from other parts of the country? Are they going to be supportive, or are they just thinking about the impact on their own patch?
TO: I am not entirely sure what the MPs think, and they are a very diverse bunch of people. The sort of concern I think that many have, certainly more senior ones, is that they do not want to be the people in charge when this large chunk of the country secedes.
I think that is something that is important, and we do not want to be patronising the Papua New Guineans, who have a great deal of national pride, and it is not an event of celebration to see what is going on.
For many, it is quite a tragic chain of events. I am not entirely sure what the bulk of MPs believes about this. We have conducted some research, which is non randomised, but it is quite large scale, probing attitudes towards Bougainvillean independence in 2022, around the time of the election.
What we found, which is quite surprising, is that while, of course, Bougainville has the highest support for independence of any place in Papua New Guinea, there are substantial numbers of people outside Bougainville that are sympathetic to Bougainvillean independence or sympathetic towards implementing the referendum.
I think that would be the wording, I would choose, quite large numbers of people. So, as well as, many people who are very much undecided on the issues. From a Papua New Guinean perspective, the views are much more subtle than you might think are the case. By comparison, if you did a survey in Madrid of how many people support Catalan independence, you would not see figures similar to the ones that we find for Papua New Guinea.
DW: Bougainville is due to go to elections later this year. The ABG has stated that it wants this matter sorted, I think, at the time that the election writs are issued sometime in June. Will it be able to do this do you think?
TO: It’s always difficult to predict anything, especially the future. That goes double in Papua New Guinea and Bougainville. I think the reality is that the nature of negotiations here and in Bougainville, there’s a great deal of personal connections and toing and froing that will be taking place.
It is very hard to fit that onto a clear timeline. I would describe that as perhaps aspirational, but it would be, it would be good. Whether this is, you know, a question of electoral politics within Bougainville, I think there would be, like, a more or less unanimous view in Bougainville that this needs to move forward as soon as possible. But I don’t know that a timeline is realistic.
The concerns that I would have about this, Don, would be not just about sort of questions of capacity and what happens in the negotiations in Bougainville, but we also need to think about what is happening in Papua New Guinea, and this goes for the entire process.
But here, in this case, PNG has its hands full with many other issues as well. There is a set of like LLG [Local Level Government] elections about to happen, so there are a great deal of things for the government to attend to. I wonder how viable it is to come up with a solution in a short time, but they are certainly capable of surprising everybody.
DW: The Prime Minister, James Marape, has said on a number of occasions that Bougainville is not economically ready or it hasn’t got the security situation under control. And my understanding is that when this was raised at the last meeting, there was quite a lot of giggling going on, because people were comparing what’s happened in Bougainville with what’s happening around the rest of the country, including in Southern Highlands, the province of Mr Marape.
TO: I think you know for me when I think about this, because I have worked with Bougainvilleans for a long time, and have worked with Papua New Guineans for a long time as well. The sense that I have is really one of quite sadness and a great missed opportunity.
Because if we wind the clock back to 1975, Bougainville declared independence, trying to pre-empt [the establishment of] Papua New Guinea. And that set in train a set of events that drastically reformed the Papua New Guinean political Constitution. Many of the sort of characteristic institutions we see now in Papua New Guinea, such as provinces, came about partly because of that.
That crisis, that first independence crisis, the first secession crisis, was resolved through deep changes to Papua New Guinea and to Bougainville, in which the country was able to grow and move forward.
What we see now, though, is this sort of view that Bougainville problems must all be solved in Bougainville, but in fact, many of the problems that are said to be Bougainville problems are Papua New Guinea problems, and that would include issues such as the economic difficulties that Bougainville finds itself in.
I mean, there are many ironies with this kind of criticism that Bougainville is not economically viable. One of them being that when Papua New Guinea became independent, it was largely dependent on Bougainville at that time. So Bougainvilleans are aware of this, and don’t really welcome that kind of idea.
But I think that more deeply there were some really important lessons I believe that could have been learned from the peace process that might have been very useful in other areas of Papua New Guinea, and because Bougainville has been kind of seen as this place apart, virtually as a foreign nation, those lessons have not, unfortunately, filtered back to Papua New Guinea in a way that might have been very helpful for everybody.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. The transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Pope Francis has died on Easter Monday, aged 88, the Vatican announced. The head of the Catholic Church had recently survived being hospitalised with double pneumonia.
“Dear brothers and sisters, with deep sorrow I must announce the death of our Holy Father Francis. At 7:35 this morning, the Bishop of Rome, Francis, returned to the house of the Father.”
There were many unusual aspects of Pope Francis’ papacy. He was the first Jesuit pope, the first from the Americas (and the southern hemisphere), the first to choose the name “Francis” and the first to give a TED talk.
He was also the first pope in more than 600 years to be elected following the resignation, rather than death, of his predecessor.
From the very start of his papacy, Francis seemed determined to do things differently and present the papacy in a new light. Even in thinking about his burial, he chose the unexpected: to be placed to rest not in the Vatican, but in the Basilica of St Mary Major in Rome – the first pope to be buried there in hundreds of years.
Vatican News reported the late Pope Francis had requested his funeral rites be simplified.
“The renewed rite,” said Archbishop Diego Ravelli, “seeks to emphasise even more that the funeral of the Roman Pontiff is that of a pastor and disciple of Christ and not of a powerful person of this world.”
Straddling a line between “progressive” and “conservative”, Francis experienced tension with both sides. In doing so, his papacy shone a spotlight on what it means to be Catholic today.
The Pope’s Easter Blessing Video: AP
The day before his death, Pope Francis made a brief appearance on Easter Sunday to bless the crowds at St Peter’s Square.
Between a rock and a hard place Francis was deemed not progressive enough by some, yet far too progressive by others.
His apostolic exhortation (an official papal teaching on a particular issue or action) Amoris Laetitia, ignited great controversy for seemingly being (more) open to the question of whether people who have divorced and remarried may receive Eucharist.
He also disappointed progressive Catholics, many of whom hoped he would make stronger changes on issues such as the roles of women, married clergy, and the broader inclusion of LGBTQIA+ Catholics.
The reception of his exhortation Querida Amazonia was one such example. In this document, Francis did not endorse marriage for priests, despite bishops’ requests for this. He also did not allow the possibility of women being ordained as deacons to address a shortage of ordained ministers. His discerning spirit saw there was too much division and no clear consensus for change.
Francis was also openly critical of Germany’s controversial “Synodal Way” – a series of conferences with bishops and lay people — that advocated for positions contrary to Church teachings. Francis expressed concern on multiple occasions that this project was a threat to the unity of the Church.
At the same time, Francis was no stranger to controversy from the conservative side of the Church, receiving “dubia” or “theological doubts” over his teaching from some of his Cardinals. In 2023, he took the unusual step of responding to some of these doubts.
Impact on the Catholic Church In many ways, the most striking thing about Francis was not his words or theology, but his style. He was a modest man, even foregoing the Apostolic Palace’s grand papal apartments to live in the Vatican’s simpler guest house.
He may well be remembered most for his simplicity of dress and habits, his welcoming and pastoral style and his wise spirit of discernment.
He is recognised as giving a clear witness to the life, love and joy of Jesus in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council – a point of major reform in modern Church history. This witness has translated into two major developments in Church teachings and life.
Pope Francis on respecting and protecting the environment. Image: Tandag Diocese
Love for our common home The first of these relates to environmental teachings. In 2015, Francis released his ground-breaking encyclical, Laudato si’: On Care for Our Common Home. It expanded Catholic social teaching by giving a comprehensive account of how the environment reflects our God-given “common home”.
Consistent with recent popes such as Benedict XVI and John Paul II, Francis acknowledged climate change and its destructive impacts and causes. He summarised key scientific research to forcefully argue for an evidence-based approach to addressing humans’ impact on the environment.
He also made a pivotal and innovative contribution to the climate change debate by identifying the ethical and spiritual causes of environmental destruction.
Francis argued combating climate change relied on the “ecological conversion” of the human heart, so that people may recognise the God-given nature of our planet and the fundamental call to care for it. Without this conversion, pragmatic and political measures wouldn’t be able to counter the forces of consumerism, exploitation and selfishness.
Francis argued a new ethic and spirituality was needed. Specifically, he said Jesus’ way of love – for other people and all creation – is the transformative force that could bring sustainable change for the environment and cultivate fraternity among people (and especially with the poor).
Synodality: moving towards a Church that listens Francis’s second major contribution, and one of the most significant aspects of his papacy, was his commitment to “synodality”. While there’s still confusion over what synodality actually means, and its potential for political distortion, it is above all a way of listening and discerning through openness to the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
It involves hierarchy and lay people transparently and honestly discerning together, in service of the mission of the church. Synodality is as much about the process as the goal. This makes sense as Pope Francis was a Jesuit, an order focused on spreading Catholicism through spiritual formation and discernment.
Drawing on his rich Jesuit spirituality, Francis introduced a way of conversation centred on listening to the Holy Spirit and others, while seeking to cultivate friendship and wisdom.
With the conclusion of the second session of the Synod on Synodality in October 2024, it is too soon to assess its results. However, those who have been involved in synodal processes have reported back on their transformative potential.
Archbishop of Brisbane, Mark Coleridge, explained how participating in the 2015 Synod “was an extraordinary experience [and] in some ways an awakening”.
Cardinals use a centuries-old voting process to elect a new pope, complete with smoke signals to indicate the outcome. And the next papal conclave will be the most diverse in Catholic history.
— The Conversation U.S. (@ConversationUS) April 21, 2025
Catholicism in the modern age Francis’ papacy inspired both great joy and aspirations, as well as boiling anger and rejection. He laid bare the agonising fault lines within the Catholic community and struck at key issues of Catholic identity, triggering debate over what it means to be Catholic in the world today.
He leaves behind a Church that seems more divided than ever, with arguments, uncertainty and many questions rolling in his wake. But he has also provided a way for the Church to become more converted to Jesus’ way of love, through synodality and dialogue.
Francis showed us that holding labels such as “progressive” or “conservative” won’t enable the Church to live out Jesus’ mission of love – a mission he emphasised from the very beginning of his papacy.
The Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa has appealed to Foreign Minister Winston Peters askingto New Zealand initiate a call for an internationally enforced “no-fly” zone over Gaza.
PSNA co-chairs John Minto and Maher Nazzal said in a statement this would be a small but practicable step to “blunt Israel’s continuing genocidal attacks” on Palestinians.
“Gaza is recognised under international law, and by the New Zealand government, as part of the illegally Occupied Palestinian Territory,” they said.
“As such, Israel’s intrusion into Gaza airspace is illegal, and is elevated to a war crime when its aircraft attack Palestinian civilians there to further what the International Court of Justice has described as a ‘plausible genocide”.”
Minto and Maher said the United Nations had repeatedly said there were no safe places in Gaza for Palestinian civilians, where even so-called “safe zones” were systematically attacked as Israel “terrorised the population to flee from the territory”.
“Suggestions for a no-fly zone have been made in the past but there has never been a better time for a concerted international effort to enforce such a zone over Gaza,” said Minto.
“In the week leading up to Anzac Day there is no better time for New Zealand to stand up and be counted.
“New Zealanders from past conflicts, including in that very region in 1917 and 1918, have died in vain if today’s politicians refuse to speak out to end the death and destruction in Gaza.”
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Part one of a two-part series: On the courage to remember
COMMENTARY:By Eugene Doyle
The first demonstration I ever went on was at the age of 12, against the Vietnam War.
The first formal history lesson I received was a few months later when I commenced high school. That day the old history master, Mr Griffiths, chalked what I later learnt was a quote from Hegel:
“The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn the lessons of history.” It’s about time we changed that.
Painful though it is, let’s have the courage to remember what they desperately try to make us forget.
Cultural amnesia and learning the lessons of history Memorialising events is a popular pastime with politicians, journalists and old soldiers.
Nothing wrong with that. Honouring sacrifice, preserving collective memory and encouraging reconciliation are all valid. Recalling the liberation of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) on 30 April 1975 is important.
What is criminal, however, is that we failed to learn the vital lessons that the US defeat in Vietnam should have taught us all. Sadly much was forgotten and the succeeding half century has witnessed a carnival of slaughter perpetrated by the Western world on hapless South Americans, Africans, Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans, and many more.
Honouring sacrifice, preserving collective memory and encouraging reconciliation are all valid. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
It’s time to remember.
Memory shapes national identity As scholars say: Memory shapes national identity. If your cultural products — books, movies, songs, curricula and the like — fail to embed an appreciation of the war crimes, racism, and imperial culpability for events like the Vietnam War, then, as we have proven, it can all be done again. How many recognise today that Vietnam was an American imperial war in Asia, that “fighting communism” was a pretext that lost all credibility, partly thanks to television and especially thanks to heroic journalists like John Pilger and Seymour Hersh?
Just as in Gaza today, the truth and the crimes could not be hidden anymore.
How many recognise today that Vietnam was an American imperial war in Asia? Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
If a culture doesn’t face up to its past crimes — say the treatment of the Aborigines by settler Australia, of Māori by settler New Zealand, of Palestinians by the Zionist state since 1948, or the various genocides perpetrated by the US government on the indigenous peoples of what became the 50 states, then it leads ultimately to moral decay and repetition.
Lest we forget. Forget what? Is there a collective memory in the West that the Americans and their allies raped thousands of Vietnamese women, killed hundreds of thousands of children, were involved in countless large scale war crimes, summary executions and other depravities in order to impose their will on a people in their own country?
Why has there been no collective responsibility for the death of over two million Vietnamese? Why no reparations for America’s vast use of chemical weapons on Vietnam, some provided by New Zealand?
Vietnam Veterans Against War released a report “50 years of struggle” in 2017 which included this commendable statement: “To VVAW and its supporters, the veterans had a continuing duty to report what they had witnessed”. This included the frequency of “beatings, rapes, cutting body parts, violent torture during interrogations and cutting off heads”.
The US spends billions projecting itself as morally superior but people who followed events at the time, including brilliant journalists like Pilger, knew something beyond sordid was happening within the US military.
The importance of remembering the My Lai Massacre While cultural memes like “Me Love You Long Time” played to an exoticised and sexualised image of Vietnamese women — popular in American-centric movies like Full Metal Jacket,Green Beret, Rambo, Apocalypse Now, as was the image of the Vietnamese as sadistic torturers, there has been a long-term attempt to expunge from memory the true story of American depravity.
The most infamous such incident of the Vietnam War was the My Lai Massacre of 16 March 1968. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
All, or virtually all, armies rape their victims. The US Army is no exception — despite rhetorically jockeying with the Israelis for the title of “the world’s most moral army”. The most famous such incident of the Vietnam War was the My Lai Massacre of 16 March 1968 in which about 500 civilians were subjected to hours of rapes, mutilation and eventual murder by soldiers of the US 20th Infantry Regiment.
Rape victims ranged from girls of 10 years through to old women. The US soldiers even took a lunch break before recommencing their crimes.
The official commission of inquiry, culminating in the Peers Report found that an extensive network of officers had taken part in a cover-up of what were large-scale war crimes. Only one soldier, Lieutenant Calley, was ever sentenced to jail but within days he was, on the orders of the US President, transferred to a casually-enforced three and half years of house arrest. By this act, the United States of America continued a pattern of providing impunity for grave war crimes. That pattern continues to this day.
The failure of the US Army to fully pursue the criminals will be an eternal stain on the US Army whose soldiers went on to commit countless rapes, hundreds of thousands of murders and other crimes across the globe in the succeeding five decades. If you resile from these facts, you simply haven’t read enough official information.
Thank goodness for journalists, particularly Seymour Hersh, who broke rank and exposed the truth of what happened at My Lai.
Senator John McCain’s “sacrifice” and the crimes that went unpunished Thousands of Viet Cong died in US custody, many from torture, many by summary execution but the Western cultural image of Vietnam focuses on the cruelty of the North Vietnamese toward “victims” like terror-bomber John McCain.
The future US presidential candidate was on his 23rd bombing mission, part of a campaign of “War by Tantrum” in the words of a New York Times writer, when he was shot down over Hanoi.
The CIA’s Phoenix Programme was eventually shut down after public outrage and hearings by the US Congress into its misdeeds. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
Also emblematic of this state-inflicted terrorism was the CIA’s Phoenix Programme, eventually shut down after public outrage and hearings by the US Congress into its misdeeds. According to US journalist Douglas Valentine, author of several books on the CIA, including The Phoenix Program:
“Central to Phoenix is the fact that it targeted civilians, not soldiers”.
Common practices, Valentine says, quoting US witnesses and official papers, included:
“Rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes, or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electrical shock (“the Bell Telephone Hour”) rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body, like the tongue; “the water treatment”; “the airplane,” in which a prisoner’s arms were tied behind the back and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling, suspending the prisoner in midair.”
No US serviceman, CIA agent or other official was held to account for these crimes.
Tiger Force — part of the US 327th Infantry — gained a grisly reputation for indiscriminately mowing down civilians, mutilations (cutting off of ears which were retained as souvenirs was common practice, according to sworn statements by participants). All this was supposed to be kept secret but was leaked in 2003.
“Their crimes were uncountable, their madness beyond imagination — so much so that for almost four decades, the story of Tiger Force was covered up under orders that stretched all the way to the White House,” journalists Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss reported.
Their crimes, secretly documented by the US military, included beheading a baby to intimidate villagers into providing information — interesting given how much mileage the US and Israel made of fake stories about beheaded babies on 7 October 2023. The US went to great lengths to hide these ugly truths — and no one ever faced real consequences.
The US went to great lengths to hide these ugly truths. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
Helicopter gunships and soldiers at checkpoints gunned down thousands of Vietnamese civilians, including women and children, much as US forces did at checkpoints in Iraq, according to leaked US documents following the illegal invasion of that country.
The worst cowards and criminals were not the rapists and murderers themselves but the high-ranking politicians and military leaders who tried desperately to cover up these and hundreds of other incidents. As Lieutenant Calley himself said of My Lai: “It’s not an isolated incident.”
Here we are 50 years later in the midst of the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza, with the US fuelling war and bombing people across the globe. Isn’t it time we stopped supporting this madness?
Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington, New Zealand. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at his public policy website Solidarity and is republished here with permission.
Next article: The fall of Saigon 1975: Part two: Quiet mutiny: the US army falls apart.
Palestinians have always been passionate about learning. During the Ottoman era, Palestinian students travelled to Istanbul, Cairo, and Beirut to pursue higher education.
During the British Mandate, in the face of colonial policies aimed at keeping the local population ignorant, Palestinian farmers pooled their resources and established schools of their own in rural areas.
Then came the Nakba, and the occupation and displacement brought new pain that elevated the Palestinian pursuit of education to an entirely different level.
Education became a space where Palestinians could feel their presence, a space that enabled them to claim some of their rights and dream of a better future. Education became hope.
In Gaza, instruction was one of the first social services established in refugee camps. Students would sit on the sand in front of a blackboard to learn.
Communities did everything they could to ensure that all children had access to education, regardless of their level of destitution. The first institution of higher education in Gaza — the Islamic University — held its first lectures in tents; its founders did not wait for a building to be erected.
I remember how, as a child, I would see the alleys of our neighbourhood every morning crowded with children heading to school. All families sent their children to school.
When I reached university age, I saw the same scene: Crowds of students commuting together to their universities and colleges, dreaming of a bright future.
This relentless pursuit of education, for decades, suddenly came to a halt in October 2023. The Israeli army did not just bomb schools and universities and burn books. It destroyed one of the most vital pillars of Palestinian education: Educational justice.
Making education accessible to all Before the genocide, the education sector in Gaza was thriving. Despite the occupation and blockade, we had one of the highest literacy rates in the world, reaching 97 percent.
The enrolment rate in secondary education was 90 percent, and the enrolment in higher education was 45 percent.
One of the main reasons for this success was that education in Gaza was completely free in the primary and secondary stages. Government and UNRWA-run schools were open to all Palestinian children, ensuring equal opportunities for everyone.
Textbooks were distributed for free, and families received support to buy bags, notebooks, pens, and school uniforms.
There were also many programmes sponsored by the Ministry of Education, UNRWA, and other institutions to support talented students in various fields, regardless of their economic status. Reading competitions, sports events, and technology programmes were organised regularly.
At the university level, significant efforts were made to make higher education accessible. There was one government university which charged symbolic fees, seven private universities with moderate to high fees (depending on the college and major), and five university colleges with moderate fees.
There was also a vocational college affiliated with UNRWA in Gaza that offered fully free education.
The universities provided generous scholarships to outstanding and disadvantaged students.
The Ministry of Education also offered internal and external scholarships in cooperation with several countries and international universities. There was a higher education loan fund to help cover tuition fees.
Simply put, before the genocide in Gaza, education was accessible to all.
The cost of education amid genocide Since October 2023, the Zionist war machine has systematically targeted schools, universities, and educational infrastructure. According to UN statistics, 496 out of 564 schools — nearly 88 percent — have been damaged or destroyed.
In addition, all universities and colleges in Gaza have been destroyed. More than 645,000 students have been deprived of classrooms, and 90,000 university students have had their education disrupted.
As the genocide continued, the Ministry of Education and universities tried to resume the educational process, with in-person classes for schoolchildren and online courses for university students.
In displacement camps, tent schools were established, where young volunteers taught children for free. University professors used online teaching tools like Google Classroom, Zoom, WhatsApp groups, and Telegram channels.
Despite these efforts, the absence of regular education created a significant gap in the educational process. The incessant bombardment and forced displacement orders issued by the Israeli occupation made attendance challenging.
The lack of resources also meant that tent schools could not provide proper instruction.
As a result, paid educational centres emerged, offering private lessons and individual attention to students. On average, a centre charges between $25 to $30 per subject per month, and with eight subjects, the monthly cost reaches $240 — an amount most families in Gaza cannot afford.
In the higher education sector, cost also became prohibitive. After the first online semester, which was free, universities started requiring students to pay portions of their tuition fees to continue distance learning.
Online education also requires a tablet or a computer, stable internet access, and electricity. Most students who lost their devices due to bombing or displacement cannot buy new ones because of the high prices. Access to stable internet and electricity at private “workspaces” can cost as much as $5 an hour.
All of this has led many students to drop out due to their inability to pay. I, myself, could not complete the last semester of my degree.
The collapse of educational justice A year and a half of genocide was enough to destroy what took decades to build in Gaza: Educational justice. Previously, social class was not a barrier for students to continue their education, but today, the poor have been left behind.
Very few families can continue educating all their children. Some families are forced to make difficult decisions: Sending older children to work to help fund the education of the younger ones, or giving the opportunity only to the most outstanding child to continue studying, and depriving the others.
Then there are the extremely poor, who cannot send any of their children to school. For them, survival is the priority. During the genocide, this group has come to represent a large portion of society.
The catastrophic economic situation has forced countless school-aged children to work instead of going to school, especially in families that lost their breadwinners. I see this painful reality every time I step out of my tent and walk around.
The streets are full of children selling various goods; many are exploited by war profiteers to sell things like cigarettes for a meagre wage.
Little children are forced to beg, chasing passersby and asking them for anything they can give.
I feel unbearable pain when I see children, who just a year and a half ago were running to their schools, laughing and playing, now stand under the sun or in the cold selling or begging just to earn a few shekels to help their families get an inadequate meal.
About optimism and courage
For Gaza’s students, education was never just about getting an academic certificate or an official paper. It was about optimism and courage, it was a form of resistance against the Israeli occupation, and a chance to lift their families out of poverty and improve their circumstances.
Education was life and hope.
Today, that hope has been killed and buried under the rubble by Israeli bombs.
We now find ourselves in a dangerous situation, where the gap between the well-to-do and the poor is widening, where an entire generation’s ability to learn and think is being diminished, and where Palestinian society is at risk of losing its identity and its capacity to continue its struggle.
What is happening in Gaza is not just a temporary educational crisis, but a deliberate campaign to destroy opportunities for equality and create an unbalanced society deprived of justice.
We have reached a point where the architects of the ongoing genocide are confident in the success of their strategy of “voluntary transfer” — pushing Palestinians to such depths of despair that they choose to leave their land voluntarily.
But the Palestinian people still refuse to let go of their land. They are persevering. Even the children, the most vulnerable, are not giving up.
I often think of the words I overheard from a conversation between two child vendors during the last Eid. One said: “There is no joy in Eid.” The other one responded: “This is the best Eid. It’s enough that we’re in Gaza and we didn’t leave it as Netanyahu wanted.”
Indeed, we are still in Gaza, we did not leave as Israel wants us to, and we will rebuild just as our ancestors and elders have.
Refaat Ibrahim is a Palestinian writer from Gaza. He writes about humanitarian, social, economic and political issues related to Palestine. This article was first published by Al Jazeera and is republished under Creative Commons.
Back in 1982, a young Mel Gibson starred as a foreign correspondent who was dropped into Jakarta during revolutionary chaos in The Year of Living Dangerously. The 1967 events the movie depicted were real enough, but Mel Gibson’s correspondent Guy Hamilton was made up for what was essentially a romantic drama.
There was no romance and a lot more real life 25 years later in Balibo, another movie with Australian journalists in harm’s way during Indonesian upheaval.
Anthony La Paglia had won awards for his performance as Roger East, a journalist killed in what was then East Timor — now Timor-Leste — in December 1975. East was killed while investigating the fate of five other journalists — including New Zealander Guy Cunningham — who was killed during the Indonesian invasion two months earlier.
The Correspondent has a happier ending but is still a tough watch — especially for its subject.
Met in London newsrooms
I first met Peter Greste in newsrooms in London about 30 years ago. He had worked for Reuters, CNN, and the BBC — going on to become a BBC correspondent in Afghanistan.
He later reported from Belgrade, Santiago, and then Nairobi, from where he appeared regularly on RNZ’s Nine to Noon as an African news correspondent. Greste later joined the English-language network of the Doha-based Al Jazeera and became a worldwide story himself while filling in as the correspondent in Cairo.
Actor Richard Roxburgh as jailed journalist Peter Greste in The Correspondent alongside Al Jazeera colleagues Mohammed Fahmy and Baher Mohammed. Image: The Correspondent/RNZ
Greste and two Egyptian colleagues, Baher Mohamed and Mohamed Fahmy, were arrested in late 2013 on trumped-up charges of aiding and abetting the Muslim Brotherhood, an organisation labeled “terrorist” by the new Egyptian regime of the time.
Six months later he was sentenced to seven years in jail for “falsifying news” and smearing the reputation of Egypt itself. Mohamed was sentenced to 10 years.
Media organisations launched an international campaign for their freedom with the slogan “Journalism is not a crime”. Peter’s own family became familiar faces in the media while working hard for his release too.
Peter Greste was deported to Australia in February 2015. The deal stated he would serve the rest of his sentence there, but the Australian government did not enforce that. Instead, Greste became a professor of media and journalism, currently at Macquarie University in Sydney.
Movie consultant
Among other things, he has also been a consultant on The Correspondent — now in cinemas around New Zealand — with Richard Roxborough cast as Greste himself.
Australian professor of journalism Peter Greste …. posing for a photograph when he was an Al Jazeera journalist in Kibati village, near Goma, in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo on 7 August 2013. Image: IFEX media freedom/APR
“I eventually came to realise it’s not me that’s up there on the screen. It’s the product of a whole bunch of creatives. And the result is … more like a painting rather than a photograph,” Greste told Mediawatch.
“Over the years I’ve written about it, I’ve spoken about it countless times. I’ve built a career on it. But I wasn’t really anticipating the emotional impact of seeing the craziness of my arrest, the confusion of that period, the claustrophobia of the cell, the sheer frustration of the crazy trial and the really discombobulating moment of my release.
“But there is another very difficult story about what happened to a colleague of mine in Somalia, which I haven’t spoken about publicly. Seeing that on screen was actually pretty gut-wrenching.”
In 2005, his BBC colleague Kate Peyton was shot alongside him on their first day in on assignment in Somalia. She died soon after.
“That was probably the toughest day of my entire life far over and above anything I went through in Egypt. But I am glad that they put it in [The Correspondent]. It underlines … the way in which journalism is under attack. What happened to us in Egypt wasn’t a random, isolated incident — but part of a much longer pattern we’re seeing continue to this day.”
Supporters of the jailed British-Egyptian human rights activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah take part in a candlelight vigil outside Downing Street in London, United Kingdom, as he begins a complete hunger strike while world leaders arrive for COP27 climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in 2022. Image: RNZ Mediawatch/AFP
‘Owed his life’
Greste says he “owes his life” to fellow prisoner Alaa Abd El-Fattah — an Egyptian activist who is also in the film.
“There’s a bit of artistic licence in the way it was portrayed but . . . he is easily one of the most intelligent, astute and charismatic humanitarians I’ve ever come across. He was one of the main pro-democracy activists who was behind the Arab Spring revolution in 2011 — a true democrat.
“He also inspired me to write the letters that we smuggled out of prison that described our arrest not as an attack on … what we’d actually come to represent. And that was press freedom.
“That helped frame the campaign that ultimately got me out. So, for both psychological and political reasons, I feel like I owe him my life.
“There was nothing in our reporting that confirmed the allegations against us. So I started to drag up all sorts of demons from the past. I started thinking maybe this is the universe punishing me for sins of the past. I was obviously digging up that particular moment as one of the most extreme and tragic moments. It took a long time for me to get past it.
“He’d been in prison a lot because of his activism, so he understood the psychology of it. He also understood the politics of it in ways that I could never do as a newcomer.”
“Unfortunately, he is still there. He should have been released on September 29th last year. His mother launched a hunger strike in London . . . so I actually joined her on hunger strike earlier this year to try and add pressure.
“If this movie also draws a bit of attention to his case, then I think that’s an important element.”
Another wrinkle
Another wrinkle in the story was the situation of his two Egyptian Al Jazeera colleagues.
Greste was essentially a stranger to them, having only arrived in Egypt shortly before their arrest.
The film shows Greste clashing with Fahmy, who later sued Al Jazeera. Fahmy felt the international pressure to free Greste was making their situation worse by pushing the Egyptian regime into a corner.
“To call it a confrontation is probably a bit of an understatement. We had some really serious arguments and sometimes they got very, very heated. But I want audiences to really understand Fahmy’s worldview in this film.
“He and I had very different understandings of what was going … and how those differences played out.
“I’ve got a hell of a lot of respect for him. He is like a brother to me. That doesn’t mean we always agreed with each other and doesn’t mean we always got on with each other like any siblings, I suppose.”
His colleagues were eventually released on bail shortly after Greste’s deportation in 2015.
Fahmy renounced his Egyptian citizenship and was later deported to Canada, while Mohamed was released on bail and eventually pardoned.
Retrial — all ‘reconvicted’
“After I was released there was a retrial … and we were all reconvicted. They were finally released and pardoned, but the pardon didn’t extend to me.
“I can’t go back because I’m still a convicted ‘terrorist’ and I still have an outstanding prison sentence to serve, which is a little bit weird. Any country that has an extradition treaty with Egypt is a problem. There are a fairly significant number of those across the Middle East and Africa.”
Greste told Mediawatch his conviction was even flagged in transit in Auckland en route from New York to Sydney. He was told he failed a character test.
“I was able to resolve it. I had some friends in Canberra and were able to sort it out, but I was told in no uncertain terms I’m not allowed into New Zealand without getting a visa because of that criminal record.
“If I’m traveling to any country I have to say … I was convicted on terrorism offences. Generally speaking, I can explain it, but it often takes a lot of bureaucratic process to do that.”
Greste’s first account of his time in jail — The First Casualty — was published in 2017. Most of the book was about media freedom around the world, lamenting that the numbers of journalists jailed and killed increased after his release.
Something that Greste also now ponders a lot in his current job as a professor of media and journalism.
Ten years on from that, it is worse again. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) says at least 124 journalists and media workers were killed last year, nearly two-thirds of them Palestinians killed by Israel in its war in Gaza.
The book has now been updated and republished as The Correspondent.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Peaceful protesters in Aotearoa New Zealand’s largest city Auckland held an Easter prayer vigil honouring Palestinian political prisoners and the sacrifice of thousands of innocent lives as relentless Israeli bombing of displaced Gazans in tents killed at least 92 people in two days.
Organisers of the rally for the 80th week since the war began in October 2023 said they aimed for a shift in emphasis for quietness and meditation this spiritual weekend.
“This is dedicated to the Palestine Prisoners’ Day and those who have died, innocent of any crime — women, children, journalists, patients, friends, healthcare workers, those buried under rubble, non-military civilians,” said Kathy Ross of Palestinian Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).
“All those starving and needing our help,” she added.
The organisers created a flowers and candles circle of peace with hibiscus blossoms in an area of Britomart that has become dubbed “Palestinian Corner”.
Placards declared “Free all Palestinian prisoners — all 10,000 people” and “Release the Palestinian prisoners.”
Palestinian fusion dancer and singer Rana Hamida, who last year sailed on the Freedom Flotilla boat Handala in an attempt to break the Israel siege of Gaza, spoke about how people could keep their spirits up in the face of such terrible atrocities, and sang a haunting hymn.
Calmness and strength
She also described how the air and wind could help protesters seek calmness and strength in spite of storms like Cyclone Tam that gusted across much of New Zealand yesterday on Good Friday causing havoc.
She spread her arms like wings as Palestinian flags fluttered strongly, saying: “The wind is now blowing in exactly the right direction.”
The Palestinian “circle of peace” at today’s spiritual vigil on Easter Saturday in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Image: Asia Pacific Report
Another PSNA organiser, Del Abcede, spoke about the incarceration of Palestinian paediatrician Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, who was kidnapped by the Israeli military last December 27 — two days after Christmas – and has been held in detention without charge and under torture ever since.
“The reason why he was arrested is because he would not leave his hospital or his patients,” she said, adding that he had been held incommunicado for a long time.
“I want to dedicate a special honour and prayer for him and I hope that he will be released soon.”
Beaten in prison
Dr Safiya is suffering from a serious eye injury as a result of being beaten in Israeli prison, his lawyer has revealed to media.
According to lawyer Ghaid Qassem, Dr Abu Safiya has been classified by Israeli authorities as an “unlawful combatant” but has not yet been charged or received any court trials.
Despite a global campaign calling for him to be released from prison, Israeli authorities have continued to interrogate and torture Dr Abu Safiya.
Vigil organisers Kathy Ross (left) and Del Abcede speaking at the prayer vigil for Palestine today . . . courageous Dr Hussam Abu Safiya is pictured on the placard. Image: Asia Pacific Report
Another speaker at the vigil, Dr David Robie, said he had been a journalist for 50 years and he found it “shameful” that the Western media — including Aotearoa New Zealand — failed to report the genocide and ethnic cleansing truthfully, and in fact was normalising the “horrendous crimes”.
He called for silent prayer for the at least 232 Gazan journalists killed — many along with their entire families — who had been courageously reporting the truth to the rest of the world.
Banners at the vigil referred to “Jesus [was] Palestinian – born in Bethlehem” and “Let Gaza live”. One placard declared “Jesus was an anti-imperialist Palestinian Jew who preached (and practised) radical love for all – not a violent bully bigot”.
Other vigils and protests took place across New Zealand at Easter weekend, especially in Ōtautahi Christchurch.
Journalist Dr David Robie speaking about how Western media has been “normalising” genocide and calling for prayer for the killed Gazan journalists. Image: Bruce King
‘Violating’ religious status quo
Meanwhile, in Jerusalem reports were emerging that Israelis were “taking pride in violating the status quo” with religious traditions at Easter.
A protester carrying her placard proclaiming Jesus as an “anti-imperialist Palestinian Jew” who preached love for all. Image: Asia Pacific Report
Xavier Abu Eid, a political scientist and former adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) from occupied East Jerusalem, explained on Al Jazeera that Jerusalem, “has a very central place” in the history of Palestinian Christians.
“We have to … understand what the Israeli occupation is doing to all Palestinians, because there is a concept. … It’s called the status quo. It’s understood and it’s under a very old agreement, centuries or older than the state of Israel,” he said.
Under the status quo, “the status of Christian and Muslim holy sites, including Al-Aqsa Mosque, for example, and the Holy Sepulchre, would be respected,” Dr Eid explained.
Despite this, he said, “Israeli government officials are taking pride in violating the status quo of Al-Aqsa Mosque compound by allowing Israeli settlers to pray in Al-Aqsa Mosque”.
He said the Israeli authorities are also trying to “turn the Mount of Olives, a very important place for this [Easter] celebration, into an Israeli national park”.
“So you’re talking about a community that feels under threat, not just from a national point of view with the Israeli government, pushing for ethnic cleansing and annexation, but also from the traditions that religiously we have kept here for generations,” he noted.
The UN Palestine relief agency UNRWA reports that after 1.5 years of war in Gaza, at least 51,000 Palestinians have been killed, 1.9 million people have been forcibly displaced multiple times, and the Israel military has blocked humanitarian aid from entering the besieged enclave for seven weeks.
A “Jesus was born in Bethlehem” banner at today’s Britomart vigil for Palestine. Image: Asia Pacific Report
This week Cambodia marks the 50th anniversary of the fall of Phnom Penh to the murderous Khmer Rouge, and Vietnam celebrates the fall of Saigon to North Vietnamese forces in April 1975.
They are being commemorated very differently; after all, there’s nothing to celebrate in Cambodia. Its capital Phnom Penh was emptied, and its people had to then endure the “killing fields” and the darkest years of its modern existence under Khmer Rouge rule.
Over the border in Vietnam, however, there will be modest celebrations for their victory against US (and Australian) forces at the end of this month.
Yet, this week’s news of Indonesia considering a Russian request to base aircraft at the Biak airbase in West Papua throws in stark relief a troubling question I have long asked — did Australia back the wrong war 63 years ago? These different areas — and histories — of Southeast Asia may seem disconnected, but allow me to draw some links.
Through the 1950s until the early 1960s, it was official Australian policy under the Menzies government to support The Netherlands as it prepared West Papua for independence, knowing its people were ethnically and religiously different from the rest of Indonesia.
They are a Christian Melanesian people who look east to Papua New Guinea (PNG) and the Pacific, not west to Muslim Asia. Australia at the time was administering and beginning to prepare PNG for self-rule.
The Second World War had shown the importance of West Papua (then part of Dutch New Guinea) to Australian security, as it had been a base for Japanese air raids over northern Australia.
Japanese beeline to Sorong
Early in the war, Japanese forces made a beeline to Sorong on the Bird’s Head Peninsula of West Papua for its abundance of high-quality oil. Former Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam served in a RAAF unit briefly stationed in Merauke in West Papua.
By 1962, the US wanted Indonesia to annex West Papua as a way of splitting Chinese and Russian influence in the region, as well as getting at the biggest gold deposit on earth at the Grasberg mine, something which US company Freeport continues to mine, controversially, today.
Following the so-called Bunker Agreement signed in New York in 1962, The Netherlands reluctantly agreed to relinquish West Papua to Indonesia under US pressure. Australia, too, folded in line with US interests.
That would also be the year when Australia sent its first group of 30 military advisers to Vietnam. Instead of backing West Papuan nationhood, Australia joined the US in suppressing Vietnam’s.
As a result of US arm-twisting, Australia ceded its own strategic interests in allowing Indonesia to expand eastwards into Pacific territories by swallowing West Papua. Instead, Australians trooped off to fight the unwinnable wars of Indochina.
To me, it remains one of the great what-ifs of Australian strategic history — if Australia had held the line with the Dutch against US moves, then West Papua today would be free, the East Timor invasion of 1975 was unlikely to have ever happened and Australia might not have been dragged into the Vietnam War.
Instead, as Cambodia and Vietnam mark their anniversaries this month, Australia continues to be reminded of the potential threat Indonesian-controlled West Papua has posed to Australia and the Pacific since it gave way to US interests in 1962.
Russian space agency plans
Nor is this the first time Russia has deployed assets to West Papua. Last year, Russian media reported plans under way for the Russian space agency Roscosmos to help Indonesia build a space base on Biak island.
In 2017, RAAF Tindal was scrambled just before Christmas to monitor Russian Tu95 nuclear “Bear” bombers doing their first-ever sorties in the South Pacific, flying between Australia and Papua New Guinea. I wrote not long afterwards how Australia was becoming “caught in a pincer” between Indonesian and Russian interests on Indonesia’s side and Chinese moves coming through the Pacific on the other.
All because we have abandoned the West Papuans to endure their own “slow-motion genocide” under Indonesian rule. Church groups and NGOs estimate up to 500,000 Papuans have perished under 60 years of Indonesian military rule, while Jakarta refuses to allow international media and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to visit.
Alex Sobel, an MP in the UK Parliament, last week called on Indonesia to allow the UN High Commissioner to visit but it is exceedingly rare to hear any Australian MPs ask questions about our neighbour West Papua in the Australian Parliament.
Canberra continues to enhance security relations with Indonesia in a naive belief that the nation is our ally against an assertive China. This ignores Jakarta’s deepening relations with both Russia and China, and avoids any mention of ongoing atrocities in West Papua or the fact that jihadi groups are operating close to Australia’s border.
Indonesia’s militarisation of West Papua, jihadi infiltration and now the potential for Russia to use airbases or space bases on Biak should all be “red lines” for Australia, yet successive governments remain desperate not to criticise Indonesia.
Ignoring actual ‘hot war’
Australia’s national security establishment remains focused on grand global strategy and acquiring over-priced gear, while ignoring the only actual “hot war” in our region.
Our geography has not changed; the most important line of defence for Australia remains the islands of Melanesia to our north and the co-operation and friendship of its peoples.
Strong independence movements in West Papua, Bougainville and New Caledonia all materially affect Australian security but Canberra can always be relied on to defer to Indonesian, American and French interests in these places, rather than what is ultimately in Australian — and Pacific Islander — interests.
Australia needs to develop a defence policy centred on a “Melanesia First” strategy from Timor to Fiji, radiating outwards. Yet Australia keeps deferring to external interests, to our cost, as history continues to remind us.
Ben Bohane is a Vanuatu-based photojournalist and policy analyst who has reported across Asia and the Pacific for the past 36 years. His website is benbohane.com This article was first published by The Sydney Morning Herald and is republished with the author’s permission.
The Trump administration has issued a new executive order opening up vast swathes of protected ocean to commercial exploitation, including areas within the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument.
It allows commercial fishing in areas long considered off-limits due to their ecological significance — despite overwhelming scientific consensus that marine sanctuaries are essential for rebuilding fish stocks and maintaining ocean health.
These actions threaten some of the most sensitive and pristine marine ecosystems in the world.
Condeming the announcement, Greenpeace USA project lead on ocean sanctuaries Arlo Hemphill said: “Opening the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument to commercial fishing puts one of the most pristine ocean ecosystems on the planet at risk.
“Almost 90 percent of global marine fish stocks are fully exploited or overfished. The few places in the world ocean set aside as large, fully protected ocean sanctuaries serve as ‘fish banks’, allowing fish populations to recover, while protecting the habitats in which they thrive.
“President Bush and President Obama had the foresight to protect the natural resources of the Pacific for future generations, and Greenpeace USA condemns the actions of President Trump today to reverse that progress.”
President Trump signs executive order on Pacific fisheries Video: Hawai’i News Now
Slashed jobs at NOAA
A second executive order calls for deregulation of America’s fisheries under the guise of boosting seafood production.
Greenpeace USA oceans campaign director John Hocevar said: “If President Trump wants to increase US fisheries production and stabilise seafood markets, deregulation will have the opposite effect.
The Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument . . . “Trump’s executive order could set back protection by decades.” Image: Wikipedia
“Meanwhile, the Trump administration has already slashed jobs at NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] and is threatening to dismantle the agency responsible for providing the science that makes management of US fisheries possible.”
“Trump’s executive order on fishing could set the world back by decades, undoing all the progress that has been made to end overfishing and rebuild fish stocks and America’s fisheries.
“While there is far too little attention to bycatch and habitat destruction, NOAA’s record of fisheries management has made the US a world leader.
“Trump seems ready to throw that out the window with all the care of a toddler tossing his toys out of the crib.”
‘Slap in face to science’ Hawai’i News Now reports that a delegation from American Samoa, where the economy is dependent on fishing, had been lobbying the president for the change and joined him in the Oval Office for the signing.
Environmental groups are alarmed.
“Trump right here is giving a gift to the industrial fishing fleets. It’s a slap in the face to science,” said Maxx Phillips, an attorney for the Centre for Biological Diversity.
“To the ocean, to the generations of Pacific Islanders who fought long and hard to protect these sacred waters.”
Republished from Greenpeace USA with additional reporting by Hawai’i News Now.
The executive orders, announced on April 17, 2025, are detailed here:
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![To President Trump, the USAGM [Voice of America] has become a promoter of "anti-American ideas" and agendas](https://asiapacificreport.nz/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/VOA-TConv-680wide-300x215.png)
