Friday, November 16, 2007

Center of the Arc.

Radio Australia's article comments on the recent inquest held in Sydney regarding the matter of a 32-year old murder case that happened in East Timor. As it is relatively easy for the report to point an accussing finger at the Indonesian soldiers. The excerpt of the article:

AUSTRALIA: Indonesian troops 'deliberately' killed journalists: inquest - 16/11/2007

A Sydney inquest into the deaths of five Australian-based journalists in the East Timorese village of Balibo, 32-years ago has found they were deliberately shot or stabbed to death by members of the Indonesian military during the invasion of East Timor. The coroner says the motive for murder was to to stop the five men revealing that Indonesian forces had been key to the attack on Balibo.


Reporters Sans Frontier website article also contributes to the inquest storyline and claims that the Australian Government covered up the incident. The excerpt:


Australian government alleged to have covered up murders of five journalists in Balibo

As a Glebe Coroner’s Court inquest into the murders of cameraman Brian Peters and four other TV journalists in the East Timor town of Balibo on 16 October 1975 draws to a close, Reporters Without Borders today called on deputy state coroner Dorelle Pinch to use all possible national and international police and judicial mechanisms to arrest those responsible.

The press freedom organisation said the responsibility of Australian officials in concealing the circumstances of their deaths should also be established and sanctioned.

"Sufficient evidence has been produced during this inquest to affirm that the Australian government, by its silence and its half-truths, covered up the murders of Peters and his colleagues that preceded the Indonesian army’s invasion of East Timor," Reporters Without Borders said.

"It is therefore now necessary that those who stayed silent for 32 years should now stop covering up the mistakes made at the time by diplomats and officials," the organisation added. "We also ask coroner Pinch to ensure that all the remaining sessions are open to the public."

The 17 May session saw testimony from several former Australian diplomats and foreign ministry officials who held posts at the time. James Dunn, the former consul in the Timorese capital of Dili, said that as soon as he arrived on the island on 8 October 1975, a Fretilin spokesman told him the Indonesian army had occupied Batugade, near Balibo.

Dunn immediately contacted the journalists to warn them that they were in imminent danger. Shortly after they were killed, he went to Canberra and wrote a note to the foreign minister telling him that the Indonesian army had been aware of their presence in Balibo and decided to kill them so that Indonesia’s lies would not be exposed.

Alan Renouf, the former head of Australia’s department of foreign affairs, confirmed Dunn’s testimony and said "the Indonesian army had good reason to kill the journalists." He also said that he had waited 32 years to be able to say that he regarded the killing of the five journalists as "revolting, quite unnecessary, cold-blooded and really merciless."

After the court was read message intercepts dated 13 and 15 October 1975 with then Australian ambassador to Indonesia Richard Woolcott’s details of the Indonesian invasion plan, Renouf acknowledged that he must have read the intercepts at the time. He said he learned of the journalists’ deaths less than 12 hours after the event and notified the foreign minister. He also accused then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam of giving the Indonesians "carte blanche" to invade East Timor.

Woolcott said it was "obvious that Indonesia intended to turn East Timor into its 27th province." He said he had not been aware of the journalists’ presence in Balibo and learned of their deaths on 17 October 1975 from ABC radio. He received confirmation at a meeting on 12 November 1975 with Gen. Yogo, the head of the Indonesian intelligence agency BAKIN, who gave him four boxes containing the ashes of the journalists and some of their personal effects.

Woolcott said he organised their burial after getting the agreement of the victims’ families. But in a statement read to the court on 18 May, Peters’ sister, Maureen Tolfree, said none of the families had given their agreement to a burial in Jakarta. She added that she was arrested by members of the Indonesian security services, questioned and then sent back to London two days before the burial. Evidence was given showing that the relevant page had been torn from the register of the Jakarta cemetery where the remains were buried on 12 December 1975.

An Australian department of foreign affairs report on the deaths of the journalists in Balibo was read to the court during the 14 May session. The last chapter was about the death of Darwin-based reporter Roger East on 7 December 1975 in Dili, where he had gone on assignment for the Australian Associated Press to investigate the deaths of the journalists in Balibo.

The report said East’s murder was directly linked to the deaths of the Balibo five. Reporters Without Borders therefore calls on the Australian judicial authorities, in particular, those of Northern Territory, where East lived, to reopen the inquiry into his death.



Legendary Journalist, John Pilger analyzes the East Timor situation in his documentary: "Death of A Nation" posted below:




What most media outlets seem to have missed, is the culpability of Australia's Foreign Policy, which has left blood on their hands of both the US, UK and Australian Governments, according to the article titled "Blood On Our Hands" published by the Guardian Unlimited. The excerpt:



Blood on our hands


More than 200,000 people have been killed since Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975. For decades, the British government was complicit in these killings. All that was supposed to change in May 1997. Instead, it's been business as usual. John Pilger reports on the sham of Labour's ethical foreign policy

Monday January 25, 1999
Guardian Unlimited

It was Primo Levi who said the worst moment in the Nazi death camps was the recurring fear that people would not believe him when he told them what had happened, that they would turn away, shaking their heads. This same fear is written on faces in East Timor: in the diffidence long cultivated for the Indonesians, and in the eyes of children forced to sing as the flag of their parents' executioners is raised and of women, in the 'villages of the widows', who stand every sunrise before the black crosses that litter the island.

Article continues
Look at the dates on these crosses, and they reveal the extinction of whole families, wiped out in the space of a year, a month, a day: 'R.I.P. Mendonca [the surname]... Filismina, Adalino, Alisa, Rosa, Anita': all murdered on the same June day. Having travelled clandestinely through the hinterland of East Timor, I did not meet a single family that had not lost at least five members to the genocide.

Even in the age of mass communication, few images or reports reached the outside world when the forces of General Suharto invaded the Portuguese colony on December 7, 1975. The only foreign journalist to remain behind, a remarkably brave Australian called Roger East, was handcuffed and dragged to the seafront where he was shot in the face, his body thrown into what people now call the Sea of Blood.

In the first three months, some 60,000 people died resisting the invasion, or were slaughtered. Or they died in concentration camps, where many starved to death. The role of the American, British and Australian governments in this crime was crucial. The CIA's senior operations officer in Jakarta at that time was C Philip Liechty, whom I found, in retirement, in Washington.

'Suharto was given the green light by President Ford and [Secretary of State] Kissinger to do what he did,' he told me. 'There was discussion in [signals] traffic with the State Department about the problems that would be created for us if the public and Congress become aware of the level and type of military assistance that was going to Indonesia at that time. The decision was taken to get the stuff on the high seas before someone pulled the chain. Most of it went straight into East Timor and was used against non-combatants... 200,000 people died.'

The British, who saw Suharto's fascist new order as an 'investors' paradise', were Washington's principal accessories. Tipped off that the invasion was coming, the British Ambassador in Jakarta, Sir John Archibald Ford, cabled the Foreign Office: 'It is in Britain's interests that Indonesia absorb the territory as soon and unobtrusively as possible and when it comes to the crunch we should keep our heads down.'

Philip Liechty's estimate of 200,000 dead, now regarded as conservative in demographic studies and representing at least a third of the population, was quickly covered up in Whitehall. 'No one knows the truth,' said Foreign Office statements and letters written for ministers and MPs, 'and we cannot help but suspect [the figures] to be exaggerated.'

At Foreign Office briefings, journalists were assured there was 'no story' in East Timor, and the British press by and large reflected this. One of the few to break the silence was David Watts of the Times. When his report, headlined 'Indonesia accused of mass murder in East Timor', was published in 1977, he was called to the Foreign Office and asked to explain his interest. 'It was obvious,' he told me, 'that I was being warned off the story.'

Operating from a spy base near Darwin, Australia, set up by British intelligence and run by Australia's Defence Signals Directorate (DSD), both MI6 and the CIA knew almost everything the Indonesians were planning. On September 17, 1975, the CIA reported to Washington: 'Jakarta is now sending guerrillas [to East Timor] to provoke incidents that provide the Indonesians with an excuse to invade.' The outside world was told nothing.

However, an enterprising young Australian journalist, Greg Shackleton, had been listening to the fears of the East Timorese and in October 1975 set out for the port town of Balibo with his crew from Channel 7 Melbourne. He was joined by Malcolm Rennie and his crew from Channel 9. There were five of them: Rennie, aged 28, and his cameraman, Brian Peters, 29, were Britons. They waited in a house with 'Australia' painted in large red letters on the wall.

Peters wrote a letter to his sister, Maureen Tolfree, in England, describing his terror as they waited for the Indonesians. He wondered if he would have the courage to film. When the Indonesian special forces landed, Peters and the others were lined up and shot and stabbed to death by Indonesian soldiers and their bodies burned. Australian government documents, leaked last year, disclosed that a senior Australian official in Jakarta was given a detailed briefing of the Indonesian operation three days before it happened, but no attempt was made to warn the journalists of the grave danger that awaited them. There can be little doubt that the British government was complicit in this.

Both the British and Australian governments made no public protest about the killing of their citizens, effectively giving Suharto the go-ahead for a full-scale invasion. The families of Peters and Rennie received no official notification of the deaths. Maureen Tolfree says that the Foreign Office later claimed to have phoned her father - who did not have a phone. 'It was as if my brother never existed,' she said. When she first heard about her brother's death through the Australian press, she flew to Jakarta, hoping to collect his remains. At Jakarta airport, she was taken to a room where she received a telephone call from a British or Australian embassy official - she cannot say which - who told her that if she remained in Indonesia, her safety could not be guaranteed.

Nineteen years later, in 1994, she was called to the Foreign Office and casually handed an envelope of photographs said to have been taken at the funeral of the journalists in a Jakarta cemetery. None of the families had been invited to or had known about this 'funeral', which was attended by senior Australian and British officials in dark glasses.

In 1977, with the East Timorese cut off from the world and fighting for their existence, David Owen, foreign secretary in the Callaghan government, approved the sale of the first Hawk fighter-bombers to the East Timor Indonesian dictatorship. Owen said the reports of killings in East Timor had been 'exaggerated' and that the 'most reliable' figure was 10,000 and, anyway, 'the scale of fighting had been reduced'. The opposite was true. As Owen concluded the deal, a letter written by a Portuguese priest in hiding in East Timor reached Lisbon. 'The invaders,' he wrote, 'have intensified their attacks from land, sea and air. The bombers do not stop all day. Hundreds died every day. The bodies of the victims become food for carnivorous birds. Genocide will come soon. . .'

At that time, a young Scottish Labour MP, Robin Cook, was making his name as critic of the arms trade. In two long articles in the New Statesman in 1978, entitled 'Britain's arms bazaar' and 'The tragic cost of Britain's trade', Cook lamented that 'wherever weapons are sold there is a tacit conspiracy to conceal the reality of war', and 'it is a truism that every war for the past two decades has been fought by poor countries with weapons supplied by rich countries'. He attacked 'those governments who are so unpopular they only stay in power by terrorising their civilian population'. He singled out the dictatorship in Indonesia and the 'particularly disturbing' sale of British Hawk aircraft.

Sixteen years later, now on Labour's frontbench, Cook seemed to have lost none of his spark. Lambasting the Tory trade minister, Richard Needham, for selling more Hawks to Indonesia, he said: 'He will be aware that Hawk aircraft have been observed on bombing runs in East Timor in most years since 1984.' And now it was a sunny spring day in May 1997 and Robin Cook, the new Foreign Secretary, was the main attraction at a Mandelson-inspired media event at the Foreign Office. As the unctuous images of a video display juxtaposing Tony Blair and Nelson Mandela faded, Cook declared: 'We will not permit the sale of arms to regimes that might use them for internal repression or international aggression. We shall spread the values of human rights, civil liberties and democracy which we demand for ourselves.' Human rights, he emphasised, would be at the 'heart of British foreign policy'.

The announcement was, of course, at odds with the historical record, which shows that since 1945 Tory and Labour governments have had almost identical foreign policies, none of which have upheld human rights. On the contrary, in serving what are known as 'British interests', they have played a significant part in some of the century's worst abuses of human rights. What is more, it was Labour that had set up the Defence Sales Organisation at the Ministry of Defence, specifically to boost the arms trade.

Today, Britain is the world's second biggest arms dealer, with a majority of its arms going to countries either in a state of war-preparedness or with an undisputed record of 'internal repression'. One of the most important clients, Indonesia, was clearly the test for the new 'ethical' policy.

Instead, under Labour, the cover-up has deepened. Around the time Cook was making his 'mission statement', the new government gave the go-ahead for the export of Alvis 'riot control' vehicles and Tactica water cannon to Jakarta. These have been subsequently used on pro-democracy demonstrators, who are sprayed with a dye that causes vomiting and identifies them to the secret police. When they are arrested, many 'disappear'. Seven other consignments of weapons, ammunition and equipment were secretly approved. 'Details cannot be released due to their commercial confidentiality,' intone Blair's ministers in Parliament. Or: 'Acquiring the information would incur disproportionate costs' - exactly what the Tories used to say.

For his part, Cook flew to Jakarta and presented Suharto with 'a deal on human rights' that included 'a series of lectures on non-violent crowd-control given by senior British police officers'. This would have been hilarious were it not for the fact that Indonesia's Kopassus special forces, (a kind of Waffen-SS and the people who murdered the journalists), were then conducting 'Operation Finish Them Off' in East Timor, using one of the most sought-after British exports, rapid-firing machine guns made by Heckler and Koch, a subsidiary of British Aerospace.

Last week, on his pathbreaking Channel 4 show, the satirist Mark Thomas revealed a conversation he had recorded with Paul Greenwood, a director of Pains Wessex, manufacturers of CS gas, who said: 'The UK government don't care. I've had the DTI [Department of Trade] down... and I've spoken about it, and I said I can take the order [here] and get somebody else to make it and ship it, [and they said] yeah, that's fine. . . Just as long as we're not shipping it in the UK, they don't give a toss.'

The truth is that the Blair government has secretly approved 64 new arms contracts to the Indonesian dictatorship. These include small arms, ammunition, bombs, torpedoes, rockets, missiles, mines, riot-control agents, aircraft. Moreover, arms manufacturers are more likely to have their export licences approved under Labour than they were under the Tories. Fewer than one per cent of applications were turned down between August 1997 and August 1998.

As I recall, Tony Blair went to Dunblane following the massacre there and shed a tear on television. He subsequently banned the sale of hand guns in this country, while his government secretly approved their export to other countries, where these British weapons have been used in the equivalent of Dunblane many times over.

The present military regime in Jakarta, which replaced Suharto but is basically the same, has offered the East Timorese 'autonomy'. This is a trap, recognised as such by the thousands of angry young people who have bravely come out to demonstrate their opposition in East Timor. They must also sense that the 'international community' is preparing one of its famous 'comprehensive solutions' for the troublesome territory. The UN representative has talked about giving the territory a status similar to that of Hong Kong, as if Hong Kong was free. Meanwhile, the 'ethical' British government swims with the current of this incipient betrayal of a people's great suffering and resistance, claiming to be furthering a 'peace process' while actually protecting the interests of its merchants of death. This time, they ought not to be allowed to succeed.


Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer may be touting his foreign policy as a success, in an article seen on the ABC website(including video); one thing that is surely has become a success is the proverbial "blow back" effect of such imperial excursions originating from the tangents of the arc of instability; largely a living testimony of Australia's hegemonic conquests, since the center of the drawn arc lay in Canberra.

Downer not afraid to stand up to Solomons PM

Posted Thu Nov 15, 2007 5:34pm AEDT

Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer says Australia has to be tough in dealing with the Prime Minister of Solomon Islands, Manasseh Sogavare. Mr Downer says Mr Sogavare has been hostile and a great obstacle to the Australian-led RAMSI, the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands.

"The reason RAMSI stays is it's supported massively by the people of Solomon Islands, and it's supported by them because it works. $800 million that's cost us," he said. "It's been a great success for Solomon Islands and a great obstacle from Prime Minister Sogavare.

"So I don't have a problem having an argument with Prime Minister Sogavare if at the end of the day I'm going to help the people of the Solomon Islands." The Government has advocated a tough line on the South Pacific, while Labor has called for new partnerships.

Federal Opposition defence spokesman Robert McLelland says Australia should be doing much better in the region. "[We should] genuinely sit down in partnership with them and to develop programs in partnership with our neighbours," he said.

Mr McLelland says the islands of the arc of instability is also Australia's arc of responsibility.


One interesting article was the area of Signal Intelligence (SIGINT for spooks) and the use of Echelon in gaining information from the South Pacific. One particular account from a European Union research on ECHELON confirms that New Zealand have been actively spying on friendly South Pacific nations- Fiji included.

The excerpt of the entire testimony:

Nicky Hager Appearance before the European Parliament ECHELON Committee

23 & 24 April 2001


Chairman:

Mr Hager, you have the floor.


Nicky Hager

Good morning. I am very pleased to be with your committee, and I think I should have to appear here as one of the people who produce the information about Echelon. I think it's very important that you have the opportunity to challenge me and question me so that as a committee you can feel confident about the information I provided to your work. But also it was very useful for me to hear your discussion yesterday, as it is now clear to me what I should be talking about, the stage you are at with your work. I had written quite a lot of notes, but I will change some of what I was going to say to you. The questions which yesterday seemed to be on everyone's mind were about what you can, as a European Parliament committee, reasonably include in your report, what you can think is true and what is not, and also about what exactly you can do about this issue. So that's what I would like to talk about today. I'll also, of course, talk about the Echelon system itself, but I won't go into huge detail on it, because I don't want to use up your time repeating things which have already been provided in your papers, but I am very keen when I finish for people to be able to question me and question my sources.

Listening to the talk yesterday the things which I would particularly like to cover today about what you as a committee can believe on the subject and particularly the question of how much proof is enough before you can say, Echelon exists, these kinds of systems exist, and move on from there.

The next thing that struck me yesterday is that I felt, at least from that discussion, this committee has got too caught up in the question of whether Echelon has been used in the one narrow area of monitoring of European companies to the advantage of United States companies. And so some of what I am going to say today is going to be about broadening the inquiry in terms of what I saw as your terms of reference to look more generally at the kind of interception against Europeans. That feels to me that you have been too focused down on that one yes or no to competitive and commercial spying. I also (thought) about the foreign relation context of the spying by the American/British/New Zealand/Australia/Canada alliance putting that in a foreign policy context, and then I'll move on - this is what I had not intended to do, but because of the stage of your inquiry - I'll move on to what I think some specific recommendations could be, the kind of things that could be adopted by a Committe like yours, hopefully not just to your region but to the rest of the world.

But I'll start by introducing myself. I began to be a researcher 20 years ago when I left university. I first worked for a government science organisation. I developed a personal interest in defence and have for some years been a writer and a critic of defence policy in my country. But in the middle of the 1990s, while I was looking at different defence subjects, I stumbled across information about our member of this signals intelligence alliance, an organisation - you'll forget the name straight away, it's a forgettable name - it's called the Government Communication Security Bureau (GCSB). That is the New Zealand equivalent of the National Security Agency or the British GCHQ.

At that stage I would not have found more than one or two politicians in our entire parliament who even knew the name GCSB, even though it is by far our largest intelligence organisation, it was completely invisible. After that there ended up being 12 years of my life where I was probing deeper and deeper in that organisation. Initially I had no inside sources, but I had some lucky breaks, particularly - and this is probably what drove me on with the research - I discovered that I could find out a lot of information about the inside of the organisation from public sources.

What I discovered was that this most secret of intelligence organisations had assumed that it would always be secret and so they had hidden the names of their staff and details of their internal structures within all sorts of government records that were not confidential, and by searching very methodically through all sorts of our government records I was able to get full lists of everyone who worked in this most secret intelligence organisation and all the past people who had worked there, and look through different records and find details of all their overseas postings and where they had gone and been trained in the oversees agencies. And overall after a while I got a 40-year picture of where in New Zealand's most secret intelligence people had been posted in this country and that country and trained in this particular city and started as an outsider to get a sense of this organisation. Lists of names, though, were the key for me, because I live in a small country, our capital city, where I live, is only 150.000 people. And within that city and with the knowledge of all the people who worked in the agency and all the people who had worked there I started to be able to locate people who might be prepared to talk to me.

And about in 1990, after a few years of gradually picking away at this job, I started to interview people who had worked and were working inside the intelligence organisation. For the next five years I lived a slightly strange and secret life, because I had a large number of secret interviews with different staff. These are people who, if they were caught talking to me, would have lost their jobs and probably their careers would have ended. So we had to meet very secretly and privately, I had to hide my interview notes, but gradually over the next 5 years I built up about several hundred of pages of interview notes.

Further characteristics of these intelligence agencies is that they are very compartmentalised. The person working in this office quite likely doesn't have much idea at all of what the people would do in the office next door, and they probably have no idea of what happens in the floor below them in the building or in other facilities. And so to build up a picture of what was happening I had to locate people in all different parts of the organisation who were prepared to talk to me. And there is something about the easygoing or casual character of New Zealanders that meant that I was able to find a large number of people who would speak to me, and I could win their trust and they provided me, as I say, with very secret information about the organisation.


" My sources were intelligence officers working in the south of the South Pacific, and their targets were within the Pacific."


Although my research was about a New Zealand agency, that is, one agency in the south of the South Pacific, what I very quickly started to learn as these people told me the details of their jobs, was that in fact I was learning about not a New Zealand operation but a five-country operation. I was learning detailed information which was giving an insight into the United States and the British and the Canadian and the Australian agencies just as much.



It quickly became clear to me that the technical systems they were using and the targetting lists and the regulations and manuals, the intelligence distributions systems, all the different specific parts of their work were not New Zealand systems, they had another agency's name on the manuals, and the target lists came from the NSA, and so finding out that New Zealand was actually a little window into finding out about the whole alliance.

Likewise, the officers who I was talking to had been trained in London, in Washington, in Canberra, and the new equipment that they were installing had been planned in five-nation working groups, usually in Washington, and a lot of the specific intelligence operations, I came to learn, were joint operations where two or more of the agencies were working together. And so that meant that even though it's a strange thing that international systems should be exposed from a far-flung country like New Zealand, because these people were prepared to talk to me they gave me an opportunity to find out about international networks.

It was during an interview with one of the operations division staff in the early 1990s that I first heard about the Echelon system and I first heard that word Echelon, which I had never heard before, of course. I had a series of interviews with that officer and then other staff where I built up the description of Echelon which I have got in my book and which you have seen many of the details of in the STOA reports and other reports which have been presented to this committee. As I said, I really invite you to question me when I finish about any doubts you have about whether my information is solid or the details of the system to dispell any questions that there are about whether the system exists and also about the capabilities and limitations of the systems. I should say that it is very important that we should discuss not only the power of a system like Echelon, but also what its limitations are.

The reason we should look at the limitations is that there has been many exaggerated second-hand accounts of what I and other people have written about Echelon. In my view they give an air of unreality to the subject of Echelon and intelligence. In my opinion it is in the interest of the intelligence agencies that when the public talks about intelligence it all sounds very vague and rather akin to talking about flying saucers or something and not really the real world, it suits their interest. It is very much in the interest of people like us here, people with a serious interest in the subject, to be able to be as precise and factual as possible, as it is only in that way that we can get proper public scrutiny and questioning of what is going on.

I want to begin by mentioning the limits of my knowledge of the subject, because there is, of course, a great deal that I don't know. My sources were intelligence officers working in the south of the South Pacific, and their targets were within the Pacific. I have no knowledge of specific operations in this part of the world. I don't know about which particular companies or agencies or organisations in Europe have been spied upon. The most I have ever heard about Europe was intelligence officers talking about their knowledge of an interaction with their sister facilities, like the one at Morwenstow in Britain, which they were working in parallel with, but I don't know the specific details. What I can provide you with today is a detailed understanding of the world-wide systems which work just as much in Britain and the US as they do in New Zealand, and an understanding from my years of work on this about the scale of the interception and the specific kinds of targetting which happen in our part of the world, which I think which will be quite closely mirrored in your part of the world. But I want to be clear about that if you will ask me whether somebody has been spying on Boeing or this company or that company, I haven't got the faintest idea, it is not worth asking me.


" The point is, this statement was completely untrue, in fact it utterly turned the truth on its head, because the main work of the GCSB was to routinely and continuously monitor all the nations of the South Pacific, that is the nations from French Polynesia in the east across to the Salomon Islands in the west and every country in between, except for Australia, of course, that's countries with names like Fidji, Tonga, Kiribati and Tuvalu.
"

The first question then which I want to discuss with you in detail is the question of what in this highly secretive subject your committee can reasonably believe and what you should doubt, that central issue when you are studying a highly secretive thing.

And I want to tell three brief stories from my part of the world, the first one comes from June 12, 1984, when our then Prime Minister, Robert Muldoon, first admitted to the New Zealand Parliament that our agency, the GCSB, existed. He told the Parliament that this organisation existed, but he reassured the members of parliament that "it does not monitor New Zealand's friends in the South Pacific". The same statement was made by two future prime ministers over the following decade.

This was part of the world-wide division of responsibilities between the UKUSA group, and New Zealand got their particular slice of the Pacific to do. I have interviewed people whose whole job was monitoring those friendly countries of New Zealand in the South Pacific, and yet every prime minister had told Parliament that they did not do that.

The second story is from 1995, when the world was told by angry US spokespeople and New Zealand and Australian politicians that New Zealand's intelligence ties had been completely cut with the United States as a retaliation against New Zealand's ban on port visits by US nuclear-armed ships. Like everyone else I believed those statements at the time, it did not seem that they would be wrong. But it turned out that they were also completely untrue. Since then I have interviewed the people who worked inside these most secret agencies at the time, who were watching the intelligence come from the US every day, and they say that apart from a few weekly digests which stopped for several months, the vast bulk of the intelligence from the US and the cooperation continued completely unimpeded. Once again, the public had been completely mislead - and the New Zealand Parliament.

The final example is from later in the 1980s when our then Prime Minister, David Lange, had the job of approving and signing the funding for a new intelligence base, the Waihopai base, New Zealand's Echelon station in this part of the network. He said that the reason why New Zealand had had to set up the station was because we had been cut off from US intelligence and we needed to set up an independent operation to help New Zealand. He said, "For years there has been concern about our dependence on others for intelligence, being hooked up to the network of others and all that implies. This Government is committed to standing on its own two feet." David Lange believed that statement when he made it, but like in the other examples, it was completely untrue. The Waihopai station had been designed from before his government was elected, and it actually represented the greatest integration of New Zealand into the intelligence alliance which there had been to date. It was the exact opposite of becoming more independent.

When years later I quietly took the draft of my book to David Lange and asked him to read it before it was published, and sat in his office with him through two long sessions while he read through the thing, he was so annoyed at the extent to which he had been mislead over that and other subjects, that he agreed to write the foreword to the book. So, the foreword to this book is by that former prime minister. So, that is three pretty fundamental untruths, one was about the targetting, one was about the alliances New Zealand was part of, and one was the degree of independence of our intelligence service, that they were quite willing to mislead the public.

I think there is a very important point or lesson in this for your committee. If the GCSB staff had not risked their careers, their jobs, to talk to me, New Zealand intelligence chiefs and politicians would very likely still be telling New Zealanders and the world that our GCSB does not spy on our friends in the South Pacific, we have been cut off from American intelligence, the Waihopai stations is there to be independent, and they could have kept doing it, because no one could have contradicted it. The point is, these lies, this misleading of the public is standard practice in the intelligence world, and the people who do this misleading are not bad people. Within the intelligence agencies senior staff believe sincerely that the secrecy of their operations are of paramount importance. They feel completely justified in misleading the public and their own governments and European Parliament committees when they need to, if that is what is required to protect their operations and stop political interference and what they believe are important long-term relationships.

What I found when working on the subject is that much of what passes for fact in the news media and the debates about intelligence is actually more or less fiction, it is mistakes or it is half-truths, which the intelligence agencies have allowed or encouraged the public to repeat year after year in their ignorance. I have talked to senior retired intelligence officers who have earnestly argued the need for the secrecy and deception. The relevance of this for your committee is obvious, if you don't want to be deflected from your job, then what I'm saying is, you must not take it seriously when you get the standard denials about Echelon and other subjects. Of course, they are going to deny it. No US or British spy agency is ever going to confirm that they intensively monitor European nations, and so the denials and the evasions that they make cannot be taken seriously. Any deception - so-called - is what they would see as necessary protection of important operations and intelligence relationships. When, for instance, the CIA director talked about there only being spying in Europe to track down bribery - that old story - that might be true, but equally it might not be true. Another example on this, the people I interviewed - and these were the people who saw thousands of intelligence reports a week coming from the US across the wire and to our intelligence agencies - said to me that the standard sort of good spying examples that people hear about in public is things like terrorism, transport of weapons and so on. In other words, the targets that the public hears about are not the real targets of these systems generally. Those targets like terrorism and weapons transport are used as a cover for the traditional areas of spying, the predominant areas of spying, which are political, diplomatic, economic and military. This is a point I want to come back to with you. In summary, what I am saying is that intelligence agencies routinely and continuously see it as their duty to mislead their publics and even their politicians, and they may also tell you the truth when it serves their interests, but this of no help to your committee, as you are probing a subject which they don't want to be probed.

Moving on to the foreign policy implications, what I found in my research is that very secret intelligence activities allow there to be a gap between public policies, that's what the governments say their foreign policies are and what the ministers say in their speeches, and what is actually doing in their secret operations. In our region this is shown graphically by the example I gave of who is targetted. In public, New Zealand is a benevolent friend, the big brother of all those South Pacific nations that helps them out in all sorts of ways, and it is a strong supporter of the regional organisations in the UNO area. Yet secretly, all of those South Pacific countries are spied on to a devestating effect.
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I have spoken to the officers who using the Echelon capabilities have monitored each of the Prime Ministers of those countries - this is an important list, because I think it has exact parallels in Europe - they monitor the Prime Ministers of each of those countries, our friends in the South Pacific, they monitor the rest of the ministers, they monitor the Prime Ministers' departments and the other government departments, they monitor the leaders of the opposition and opposition politicians and groups, they monitor the police forces, particularly in Fidji, which is the centre of the South Pacific, they monitor the main regional organisations such as the Pacific Islands Forum, they monitor all the UN organisations, they monitor all the politics and organisations of the South Pacific. "
All of this intelligence is distributed automatically to the US spy agencies which have an interest in our regions and to the other allies. The GCSB, our agency, even helped to spy on East Timor during a period when publically our politicians and the vast majority of our public supported East Timor independence. At the same time privately our intelligence officers were helping the US and Australia spy on the East Timor people at a time where that intelligence was being funneled through to the Indonesian military. The point I am making is, because these operations are so secret and can stay secret for decades on end, it is possible to have a completely separate private policy to the public forum policy.





The reason New Zealand conducts this comprehensive spying against its friendly neighbouring countries is not because it needs this covert intelligence. Indeed, in my interviews with New Zealand intelligence staff and diplomats they regard more traditional sources of diplomatic intelligence as being much more useful to them, this is intelligence like diplomats building up friendships and contacts in key parts of governments and other organisations, it is cocktail parties, it is the intelligent reading of newspapers and so on, at least in our country. The analysts and the politicians find that intelligence much more useful in practice than these bits of covert eavesdropped information. So the reason New Zealand conducts all this covert monitoring is simply because it is diligently and thoroughly performing its duties within the UKUSA alliance. There are quite deep-seated fears held by our senior intelligence officials that if they don't play their part fully in the alliance, New Zealand may be left out, or gradually frozen out of it. They believe they are acting in the best long-term interest of New Zealand when they are betraying our small and distinctly vulnerable little neighbouring countries in the short term.

I think there are obvious parallels between this New Zealand experience and Europe, the same division of responsibility for world-wide monitoring that gave New Zealand the South Pacific, which gives Australia a part from where we are and that ends up in south east Asia, and it give Britain the task of spying on Western Europe. As I told you, I don't know the specific targettings in Europe, but based on my experience of what happens in Australia and New Zealand, I have no doubt at all that the same kind of large-scale and comprehensive monitoring of European nations happens as goes on in the South Pacific, and again I say, prime ministers and other ministers and government departments and all the rest of it.

The spying systems that we are talking about except where there is sufficiently powerful encryption have the capability to monitor the whole of governments, regional and international organisations, non-government organisations, companies and individuals throughout Europe. And since secrecy and deniability keep those operations invisible, there is no reason for the US and Britain to deprive themselves of the interesting intelligence that can be gathered that way. So, what I am saying is, this secrecy allows Britain to maintain a public policy of loyalty to the European Union, while secretly continuing a completely incompatible defence intelligence relationship in support of its older transatlantic relationship. As in New Zealand, the British intelligence chiefs would be very reluctant to risk their special relationship by refusing to cooperate and monitoring the rest of your countries. I imagine, some people might say at this stage that the US and Britain are hardly going to spy on their NATO allies, and so I refer to the Pacific experience on this, because I think it is again very illuminating. What I see in the Pacific is that the US in cooperation with the rest of UKUSA have been perfectly happy to spy on close allies and trading partners. During the 1980s and 90s about half of the total workload of analysts working inside our spy agency, the GCSB, the people I was interviewing were involved in spying on two countries, that is France and Japan within the South Pacific. In the case of Japan, this is despite of being the key trading partner for New Zealand and of being a very close intelligence ally of the US. The GCSB put major resources into monitoring all Japanese embassies in our region. This was not conducted because New Zealand had a problem with Japan or a conflict or had a special need for this intelligence, it was merely because Japanese diplomatic intelligence, code-named JAD-intelligence, was a priority for the NSA, and the NSA had asked the other four allies around the world, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, to take one part of the world's Japanese embassies, in other words, five countries between them were spying on all the Japanese embassies in the world. We were being provided with the codes to break them during the intercepting and sending the results back to Washington. The same goes for France. Publically it is an ally of the US and Britain, but privately these two nations' SIGINT agencies asked New Zealand, the GCSB, as a special project to monitor French nucear testing in the South Pacific. And so from the early 80s through to 1996 when it ended, one of the three main analysis units within our GCSB was devoted to French intelligence, spying on them in New Caledonia and in French Polynesia. The purpose, according these GCSB staff, the reason why they had been asked to do this by Britain and the US was because those two nuclear weapon nations wanted to keep an eye on France's nuclear weapon development. And so this is the point I am making. Public alliances between countries don't seem to make any difference to secret intelligence operations. It would be naive to assume that friendly NATO allies and so on aren't using the resources they have got for continuous spying.

In my opinion - this is none of my business -, but in my opinion there is tension in Britain, or between Britain and the rest of the European Union. The British government will probably be able to just avoid your current inquiry just by not participating or keeping its head down. My feeling is that there is a tension or a pressure which is going to mean that eventually Britain, if these issues get more publicized, or as these issues get more publicized, Britain is going to have to make a choice, and if there is one weak point in that 50-year-old UKUSA alliance, it is Britain and it's Britain's split loyalties between its responsibilities to spy on Europe and its position within the EU. It seems to me that that relationship, which was born in the Second World War and in the Cold War, is going to come more and more under pressure in the years and decades ahead, and that is where we are going to see the first change in this, I think. The only countries within the UKUSA alliance which are not spied on, are each other, there are specific regulations which stop Canada spying on Britain or New Zealand spying on Australia. I know that the GCSB staff in New Zealand strictly follow that regulation, they never broke it, although there is evidence that some of the larger allies are not so scrupulous.

So, in summary for this part, what I am trying to communicate not from first hand experience but a very detailed experience in the Pacific, is that I think your committee should be conscious of the scale and the comprehensiveness of the spying which is likely to be occurring in Europe, and by which I am saying political, diplomatic, economic and military surveillance. And this is a surveillance which will be affecting the rights of governments and regional and international agencies and companies and community groups and citizens. What I am saying is that it is just not credible to suppose that the scope in the intensity of monitoring which New Zealand does in its part of the world against its friendly neighbours and trading partners and which Australia does in the South East Asian region against its neighbours and its trading partners and other friendly countries is not also occurring when Britain has a traditional role of spying in this part of the world on its friendly neighbours, EU partners and trading partners.

The next point that I would like to move on to is that I really think it would be a terrible shame if your committee was to waste, or to focus too much of its attention on the single issue of a certain kind of economic intelligence which has to do with competition between companies of different countries. I think part of the reason that it's here this way is because of the way that the Echelon issue arose in Europe. It has really been a news media driven issue for a while. Until the creation of your committee it was the news media that was pushing it, and the principle interest seemed to be in these questions of whether this or that large contract or deal had been won by an American corporation as a result of SIGINT. But as I am saying, while I am about to talk about the extent to which I think that is true, I think it seriously skewed the debate. It would be a pity if your committee, which has got much wider terms of reference on that, it is to do with spying on the whole of Europe, it would be a pity if you got sort of sucked down into that simple question of whether or how much is that kind of competitive intelligence being collected. I think it would be a waste of the opportunity that you have got before you.

At the risk of stating the obvious, I think it is worth referring to the function of intelligence gathering, just to broaden and confirm what I was just talking about. A world power such as the US and a regional power like Britain have numerous obviously diplomatic and economic and military and ideological and domestic political interests that they are pursuing at once, a whole diversity, and often conflicting ones as well. And so, knowing how other countries' delegations intend to act in this or that international negociation or understanding the political factions within the government, which has policies differering from them at a particular time on a particular issue, or giving advance warning of particular political issues or political protests, or gaining inside knowledge of other countries' economic planning or commodity prices, all this kind of things can be of assistance to a country as it works to pursue its national interests. These are the kinds of intelligence which are gathered through normal diplomatic reporting, and they are also the sorts of activities which you gather with using secret intelligence assets such as the Echelon system and its sister systems. Seen like this, and ignoring the fiction that intelligence gathering is only directed against threats or enemies, it is entirely unexceptional to conclude that systems like Echelon will be used for a wide range of European monitoring.

Having given this caution, I will just say a couple of words about commercially valuable intelligence, because commercially valuable intelligence is, in my direct experience of interviewing people, at least in the South Pacific and the Pacific part of what they monitor. According to my sources, commercial intelligence is actively sought by our GCSB, or was being 5 years ago as exchange between the UKUSA allies. At the time of my interviews, economic intelligence in the Pacific was not the main, but it was still a regular target. I can recall being told various economic intelligence stories on specific subjects. One was on cope and deals to do with Japan, another was to do with collecting intelligence on meat sales, which is very important for New Zealand, a third was a more general one on intelligence to do with oil prices, and the fourth was a very specific issue of a particularly large Japanese development project in the South Pacific where there was potential for New Zealand companies to win contracts. In other words, there were both macro-level and micro-level economic intelligence being collected.

In the case of New Zealand, the intelligence staff told me that the commercial, that the micro-level intelligence collecting was becoming less and less, and there was a reason for that. In New Zealand, the intelligence has never been shared with large companies like private forestry companies or something. But is was regularly shared with large state commercial trade organisations. But New Zealand has been through the same process of privatisation and foreign investment that other countries have had. And so, the intelligence liaison staff found harder and harder to decide who they should give intelligence to. Basically, they did not know whether they should be providing intelligence to, it might be a Japanese-owned company working in New Zealand or a New Zealand-owned country producing its goods in China, and so more and more they stopped doing it. However, prior to that stage - this is in contradiction to something that Jim Bamford said yesterday, he said, you have to have these people with above top secret clearances to get the intelligence, and that is exactly what is happening in New Zealand, in key areas, like, one was our dairy board, I remember, which is our largest exporting organisation in New Zealand, another was Telecom, before it was privatised in New Zealand, they were specially indoctrinated, as I call it, special above top secret cleared offices within all those organisations, who had the job of receiving SIGINT. That was routine and unexceptional, and New Zealand being furthest away from the commercial business of the world, if it was happening there, I would find it inconceivable if it wasn't happening elsewhere. In addition, and I would suggest more important, other staff described the intelligence that they were getting from the NSA, and they told about the fantastic amount of intelligence that was arriving for example monitoring international trade meetings. And I would suggest that rather than getting caught up in whether this or that private company has been disadvantaged in terms of one country gaining advantage over another, monitoring of delegations in international trade meetings is a far more important topic. From my sources, they said that whenever there was a GATT meeting or another major international meeting, there were hundreds of reports of the monitoring of the different delegations which were arriving in New Zealand and being shared between the UKUSA partners, and I have absolutely no doubt about that, because I have talked to people who saw it coming from the NSA.

Moving along, I would like to talk a bit about the issue of proof, which I think is obviously bearing hard on your committee. I have cautioned you about accepting denials by intelligence agencies and their governments. I am saying, you can't trust them if it suits their interest not to tell you the truth. And someone could reasonably reply, why should you accept information from people like me, so I would like to answer that question now. I faced the problem with proof continuously right through the process of researching and writing the book. The problem is that it is completely unreasonable to expect individual intelligence officers to go on the record, to put their names to information when they would suffer such retaliation they probably would be unemployed for the rest of their lifes. It is just too hard to expect someone to do that. The problem with that is that without those people, information can be dismissed as hearsay. How do you know, that it's right? My solution to that problem was to collect so much detail about the secret operations, that was not just to say, who you were spying on, but where does the spying occur, in which room do they do it, which parts of it, and what's the name of the manual that you work from, how do the particular systems work, who do you distribute which kind of intelligence to, and what does the manual look like that tells you who to distribute what intelligence to whom, what are the code names, even what is the internal layout of your secret facilities. In other words, the reason why I gathered that huge pile of specific detail is that I hoped that by doing that it would mean that somebody who looked at the general findings of the book could feel credibility that it had not come from my imagination, because I believed in flying saucers, but because it had actually originated in the sources who were talking to me.

At the end of the process, I believe that any reasonable person who looks at my book and looks at the detail, just like Jim Bamford was saying, with his hundred pages of references in the back of his, I think that anyone who looks through the book and sees the specific parts of it will feel confident that the information could have only come from a wide range of inside sources. I have brought several copies of the book with me, and if any of you here would like to take a copy away, I will happily give you one, not because I expect you to read it word for word at this stage, but because I really hope that you can feel reassured that it is not a work of fiction.

Also I should mention David Lange, the former New Zealand Prime Minister who I allowed to look at the book, who when he wrote a foreword to it, after overseeing this organisation as Prime Minister for 5 years, wrote, "an astonishing number of people have told him things that I as Prime Minister in charge of the intelligence services was never told". The information about Echelon which is in my book, which I was told about in New Zealand, is reinforced by various other credible sources, you got Jim Bamford yesterday, and his books on this tell the same story from different sources, you got Duncan Campbell's sources, particularly Margaret Newsham, the woman who worked at Menwith Hill who provided the early 1980s details of the expansion of Echelon at that stage, the technical details, and of course there is the US government documents which Jeffrey Richelson has uncovered in the US. What I am saying is that I hope that this information put together will allow your committee to decisively move beyond the question of whether Echelon exists. It will be a great shame if there is still an "if" hanging over this at the end of your enquiry, and I believe you will be making a contribution to your national parliaments and to the public, not just in Europe but the rest of the world, if as a parliamentary committee you can take us beyond the whether stage of the discussion of Echelon into acknowledging its existence and allowing the next stage of the debate to happen, which is what we do about it.

Now we'll talk about some of the technical details of Echelon before I finish, and as I said I am not going to take you right through the whole story of how it all works, because you have covered that over many months, but I am happy for you to question me on details at the end if you want. But I'll say a view things. As other people have said to the committee, Echelon does not somehow magically allow spying on all of the communications of the world, that's the kind of fairy tale end of the story about this. It is a real system, it's designed and upgraded by real people, and therefore it's fallible, and it's limited. These people are continuously working to increase its reach and efficiency and keep up with new developments in communications technology, for instance in our GCSB in the early 90s, there was a lot of work to automate the interception of e-mail, because they had trouble at first before they got it right.

Secondly, the computers and the other electronic equipment in Echelon is not omnipotently powerful, they cannot do everything everywhere all the time. It is part of the job of the analysts who work on this system to manage the Echelon capabilities to the greatest efficiency, this means that there are people whose job it is to analyze for instance all the different channels going up and down to a satellite, which ones are just cable TV, which ones are between countries where it is not very interesting, which ones are most rich in intelligence, and then they focus the Echelon capabilities against those which will yield the most intelligence. This is purely for not to overload the system with junk and to get the greatest efficiency out of it. But that means that they are not spying on everyone, they are focussing the resources on the places where they will get the most of the desired intelligence. Also, it is worth repeating that Echelon is mainly concerned with communications between countries. In some parts of the world they are also able to monitor communications within countries, but the NSA, the GCHQ in Britain, our agency, they are foreign intelligence organisations, and so by definition and in fact, most of their work is international communications. Having said this, the aim of the Echelon system, the purpose of it and the parallel systems it works with is to be able to monitor any international communications of interest anywhere in the world, that is its purpose, it's a global system, and it's very powerful. It lives up to many, if not all of the fears that the public has about its reach. Unlike traditional notions of spying, where we imaging one person's telephone being tapped or whatever, Echelon operates by targetting whole components of the world's telecommunications networks. It doesn't intercept one phone, it intercepts all the communications through one satellite or huge quantities of information being moved by microwave between countries. They are processing them by searching them by keywords and through the dictionary computers, it is industrial scale spying. And it has been made possible by developments in computer processing, which nowadays provide spying capabilities which are thousands or millions of times bigger than the capabilities of spying which most imagine is tapping telephones and things.

I learned about Echelon, of course, from New Zealand's contribution to it. The Waihopai station, which was opened in 1989, intercepted first one, now both of the main INTELSAT, the main civilian telecommunications satellites above the Pacific, which have tens of thousands of simultaneous faxes and e-mails and phone calls going through them. It is capturing millions of individual communications a week, and it's a small station in the network. The Australian station, which in your papers has been said is not called an Echelon station, but in my understanding is just as much an Echelon station als the New Zealand one, was built at the same stage, it was planned in the same international intelligence working groups in the early 80s, and whereas New Zealand spies on the two Pacific INTELSAT satellites, it spies on the Indian Ocean and some Asian satellites, in other words, covering two different parts of the world-wide communication system. Our intelligence staff have also described the close collaboration, like sharing information and joint projects with the Yakama satellite interception station in the North West United States, which has the colourful code name of "Cowboy", it sits in the deserts out there, and they also worked closely and some of them in the since dismantled British satellite interception station in Hong Kong, which had the equally colourful code name of "Geranium". And further afield, as I said, they talked about their more distant contacts with sister agencies like the one at Morwenstow. Thus, according to my knowledge, and this is from my sources, Echelon is a network of interception stations monitoring civilian telecommunications satellites. As far as I know from the people who described it to me, Echelon is about the satellite part of this world-wide interception.

There are other components of the UKUSA alliance's surveillance network which cover rather large parts of the world's telecommunications except for microwave networks. They operate in exactly the same way as the Echelon stations I am talking about. They capture millions of messages, might be microwave or undersea cable, they use dictionary type computers to search for keywords, but I'm not sure whether they are actually covered by the code name Echelon, because that work isn't done in New Zealand. However, I see that this is a completely minor point, it is a semantic point, as these various components of the global network of Echelon or Echelon-like interception stations work together to try to provide the global capability for which those systems were designed.

Yesterday in the discussion I thought there were a few technical things which weren't quite correct, so I'll just cover them. The first one is to say that the UKUSA countries cooperate in Echelon, but they don't cooperate in Echelon because of the needs of Echelon, that the US needed Australia or New Zealand. The UKUSA relationships go right back, according to my sources, to 1948 and they were forged in the Second World War. The reason why that particular group of countries work together on Echelon is because they have been cooperating in that intelligence alliance right through the Cold War since the 40s and even before in WW II.

Yesterday there was some confusion, I thought, about in a station like the British station at Morwenstow, what proportion of that work is British, what proportion is American and so on. So, I'll explain this very carefully, this is something which I understand very well from New Zealand. In the New Zealand station, the Waihopai station, there were lots of different subjects which the computers were searching for at once, one obviously would have been Japanese diplomatic intelligence for example, and that had its particular code numbers, the four number code that Jim Bamford talked about as 1234. There is certain search groups like that, and because New Zealand has the job within the alliance of spying on the South Pacific area, most of the code words in the Echelon system for spying on the South Pacific have been entered by New Zealand, and the messages which are captured by those keywords are sent to Wellington, not to Washington, because it's a New Zealand list of keywords. And then in Wellington the analysts look through the thousands of messages which have been selected by the computers. As Jim Bamford was saying, they pick out the ones which seem to be most interesting intelligence-wise, they translate them, they write them into the standard UKUSA intelligence reports, and then they send those off, not the raw intelligence, but they send those off to the CIA and NSA and Britain and so on around the world. But also in the Waihopai station or the other stations, it is not only the home countries' lists, but there are quite separate lists of American, Australian and Canadian and British targets as well. In other words, one country's facility can be used to gather intelligence, which is then be distributed to the other agencies which have responsibility for those other subjects. And in the case of the New Zealand station and the Australian one, in both cases most of the keywords are not New Zealand ones or Australian ones, they are American lists. If there is a subject which is captured by an American list, those ones are never seen by New Zealanders or Australians, they go straight to NSA in Washington, and it is up to them whether they choose to share their intelligence later with New Zealand. Jim Bamford was sligthly wrong on this yesterday, it is not like all the intelligence goes into one big data base and everybody can look around it and find what they want to. It is very structured and hierarchical the way that the Americans set this up, and basically the idea was that there was a world-wide network which the US had access to the capabilities of all of, and if they wanted to share that intelligence back with the individual countries, that was their choice.

So, based on that and coming back to you part of the world, if you look at Britain, there are three distinct roles that British-based facilities have for spying on Europe. The first one, and the most important of these, is the British station - not the most important, but a major one - is Morwenstow in Cornwall. I hope you have seen photos of it, if you go there, you can see the satellite dishes, some of them face out to the Atlantic, but most of them are directed up towards satellites which are sitting above Europe or above the Middle East or the Indian Ocean INTEL satellites. When you are used to these things, you can read it very clearly. And what happens at that station then is, at that satellite interception station there are some lists of targets which are British ones, and there are some lists of targets which are US ones. Britain has got not control at all and does not even see the intelligence which is collected at Morwenstow, which is according to US keywords, because that goes direct to Washington.

So, this is the first two types of spying, one is the spying that Britain does itself as the country in the alliance which has been delegated spying on Western Europe, there are British keywords in these systems, there is also the British facilities for spying on microwave netwoks and undersea networks, and likewise, they will have lists of British keywords for gathering intelligence on European topics, it's its delegated role.

And the second kind of spying is within those British-run, British-staffed facilities, there is also the list of US keywords, and that is a completely separate area of spying which Britain has no control of, they handed the sovereignty of that to the US, and their intelligence goes straight to Washington.

And the third area, which I know much less about, is completely US-run facilities like the one at Menwith Hill, which Jim Bamford said yesterday was directed primarily at the Soviet Union and Russia now. I would personally think it is most unlikely it doesn't do European spying as well, but I have no evidence for that.

Now I want to move to my final area, and that has to do with what you as a committee can do about this. This is what said this morning, because it seems to me it would be a great waste to have the investigation and not look in great detail what can be done about it. It is easy with something as big as a subject like intelligence and signals intelligence and Echelon, for people to conclude that there is nothing that can be done about it, that it's too big, that the spying occurs from other countries, it is not covered by national laws, and it's kind of like you have to accept it as a way of life. What I would like to urge is that we all see this discussion of Echelon and intelligence as being at the very beginnings of the discussion. I mean, we are living in an electronic age, most people in our countries have only been using the Internet for a handfull of years, if they are at all. The people who use these new types of electronic communications for all of their daily lives now more and more have only had a year or two, if ever, that they have heard about how vulnerable these systems are to interception. In other words, we can't expect that, when the communications technology is so new and the spying capabilities have been so secret, that the publics and the governments and the parliaments of the world will already have come to grips with these issues. In fact, we are only at the very start of the process of countries coming to grips with these issues. It is very important to see it that way, I think, because otherwise it looks discouragingly large. I think we should realize the stage that we are at with this. And so the things that I want to suggest to you are to do with the way that your committee can play a role in seriously advancing the public and the nations of the world towards where we can control these systems and regain privacy in the electronic age, which is the basic issues underlying us here. In other words, we have entered the electronic age, but every new kind of technology takes human beings' and public's time to learn about them, understand their implications and learn to control them. People are still learning to control the different kinds of weapons that are being built up, we are learning to control the environmental effects of technology. Likewise, these systems are so new that, of course, we are just at the beginning of figuring out how we deal with them.

Probably one of the main things I want to say to you today is about the importance of the role that your committee will play here. And I have specific recommendations that I would like to propose to you. In the case of New Zealand, I told you, the dominant attitude within our intelligence services and our foreign affairs establishment to do with intelligence and subjects like Echelon is one of deference to the US, but also a great insecurity. The point I am making here is that countries like New Zealand believe they are in no position to challenge something like Echelon. My book has been completely ignored by the New Zealand government and subsequent governments, not because there aren't politicians who are interested in it, but because their officials advised them strongly not to challenge their relationship with the US. And this inequality of power, I suspect, exists throughout the world, which means that most countries, however they feel privately, do not feel in a position to question or challenge the US and its allies or Russia or India, or whatever the country may be which has systems like this, because many of the large systems do, when those countries trespass on their governments and on their national interests with these things. This is what puts your committee in such a unique position compared to countries like mine, because the EU is uniquely powerful and independent enough to actually be able to have a committee like this. There will never be a temporary committee on Echelon in New Zealand, I am certain of that, and there won't be a committee like this in the British or Australian parliaments either. And so, what I believe is that your deliberations and the conclusions that you will reach here are going to play a role, and they are going to help people in coming to terms with these issues right around the world.

The other thing I will just mention on this is, putting your work into a historic context, your one-year committee with its limitations and so on is still the first time in 25 years since the US Church Committee had its hearings in the wake of the Watergate scandal and those other things Jim Bamford talked about yesterday. There has been a series of investigations of the activities of the US intelligence services and their allies. It is worth taking note of how rare these opportunities are in history. The extreme circumstances which lead to the Church Committee investigating the CIA and NSA are unlikely to occur again in our lifetimes. Likewise, the major leaks which I have got in New Zealand and which Jim Bamford has gathered and which Duncan Campbell has gathered and so on are very rare in the intelligence world. The usual state of affairs with intelligence discussions is that there is no solid information and there is no serious debate. And so, you have got an opportunity now which I plead with you not to be deflected from, because it will not come again for a long time.

What do I think can be done? Putting the view that we are at the first stages of countries in the world coming to terms with privacy in the electronic age or national sovereignty in this electronic age, the first stage, I believe, and I think this should be reflected in your recommendations, is a stage of public education and awareness. With any new technology and developments, you can't get specialists and the public starting this dabate and working out options to deal with this and learning how to cope with them and live with those developments until people at least know about them. And of course, these systems have been completely secret for decades, in the case of Echelon for two or three decades. And so I would urge you to have specific recommendations about resources and activities to help inform the publics of your member states and your parliaments. I don't think that's a soft thing or a small thing to come out of this committee, it is exactly what is needed at the moment in my opinion.

We next move on to what can be done about it. As I said, it is easy to think that because the spying goes on from countries which are not on the territory where the spying is going, that they can't be controlled by law. Of course, there are all sorts of opportunities, my apologies to the British people here, but there are all sorts of opportunities for pressure on Britain as a kind of leverage to move this issue. But that is not what I want to talk about now. I want to put out a model to you of how I think that this issue can be advanced over the next 10-20 years, which I see you at the beginning of the process of. And I want to put an analogy to you of a similar situation from a completely different sphere, and that is the sphere of control of the oceans and the law of the sea. There was a time when it was impossible for a single country, and especially not powerful country, to control its sea resources, countries that had to go out and start shooting at other countries' fishing boats and blow them up, and so the oceans were sort of uncontrollable outside the territorial waters of different nations. And if one country on its own or a small number of countries on their own had wanted to deal with that, they could not have got away with it, the more powerful countries would have simply asserted their rights, asserted their presence, and continued to use whatever seas they wanted. And yet, over a period of about a decade, the law of the sea was evolved, which has completely changed the way that it operates, and it wasn't promoted by the most powerful countries in the world, rather the initiative came from very small countries, but at the end of the process, their countries controlled huge resources in their exclusive economic zones, there are very strict rules, and of course, there are also exceptions to those rules where they are required, for example, innocent passage and ships into straits and so on. And what I'd like you to do is to suggest that you see, if you agree with me, and promote the idea that there is possibility for international cooperation in developing laws and conventions like the law of the sea as a way of developing, a way of controlling surveillance in the electronic age, in other words, of countries being able to pursue, being able to protect their sovereignty, their privacy in the electronic age, just as coastal nations would try to protect their sea resources in an age where there was no control over that. I can foresee a day when there is regional and international collaboration between countries, for example to develop secure communications networks, whole networks, that means not just you or I having an encryption system in our computer, this is the earliest, most fumbling days of trying to have secure communications at the moment. But it is taken for granted, people would not pay their phone bills unless they were assured by the state regulatory organisation that their phone company was abiding by the regulations and standards which should be set for secured communications. One country can't do it on its own, you can't have France decide that it wants to have secure communications with other countries unless the other countries communicate as well, which is why I see it as being a matter of regional cooperation and international cooperation. And there is stings in this, and again there is potential recommencations in this for you. The first is that there is ongoing education about the routine use of encryption and how individuals and companies, organisations, governments and regional organisations of different sorts can use encryption. That educational net is just the same as education, for example, on not leaving suitcases unattended at airports or whatever, that you just teach this as part of the routine way that the world is run.

The next stage after that is that government organisations work together to promote standards for communications protection. At the moment, exactly the opposite is happening. The United States and Australia are working in places like the International Telecommunications Union to get standards put in the very way that the telecommunications systems are designed, the particular hardware and software, which makes it easier to intercept, but there is no reason why a coalition of countries can't be working over the years towards laws and regulations which provide secure communications across different countries, and that there are standards for that. Obviously, just as the law of the sea has to set limits on the state sovereignty it provides. Just in the same way, although I am proposing and envisaging international agreements on communications protection, you would still have to have some exceptions for them, and that would be, for example, monitoring serious terrorism or something if that was genuinely a problem.

So, in terms of specific recommendations, just to finish off here, I would like to propose to you that this committee state or propose or will present a vision or goals about how there could be a future regime of communications protection and privacy. It won't happen next year, it won't happen in 5 years, but that that is the objective towards which we are working, and which I think is completely realistic once these issues have been known. I would also like to, as a specific suggestion, say that this committee could recommend that the European Parliament and the member states put serious resources to the preparation of research papers on how exactly you would develop new system for protecting privacy and communications across Europe and the rest of the world, covering such things as the technical issues and the laws and regulations required in the systems of cooperation that would be needed between nations. In other words, what I am saying to you is, I think that far from it being a position of powerlessness because these intelligence operations occur from other countries, it is just a matter of us being at the beginning of the process, and it's quite possible for people and their institutions like their parliaments to move towards thoroughly controlling this new technology.

Thank you.

Chairman

(opens the debate)

Question from Rapporteur

Nicky Hager

I'll answer the questions backwards and come to the one of proof last. On the footprints of the satellites, there is no need at all for New Zealand in the network. All of this monitoring which happens in New Zealand could happen in Australia as well, and the reason that it happens in New Zealand is - and I am more speculating here than knowing - is the same reason as it happens always, they are just sharing between the 5 allies, it is a sharing of the workload. The reason why the analysis of the South Pacific happens in New Zealand is more rational in that New Zealand analysts will understand the South Pacific situation, the names of the politicians, the issues and so on better than some pasty-faced analyst sitting in Washington D.C.. So there is a practical purpose for that, but you are quite right, there was no technical need for there to be a station in New Zealand, it was burden-sharing rather than the technical necessity.

As for the number of communications captured in New Zealand and how many analysts there are, these systems are not very labour-intensive. The number of analysts involved in Wellington is about a dozen looking at all this intelligence, or less than 20, the reason being that most of the sorting is done electronically, it is done by computers, and there is somebody writing up reports on what is gathered at the end of that process.

What does New Zealand know of other countries' dictionaries, that means the lists put into a New Zealand station? That is a good and a crucial question, I had an argument about this not long ago with a senior GCSB person. In practice, New Zealand officers receive the lists from the foreign agencies, and a person called the dictionary manager has the job of inputting the foreign key words and directions into the New Zealand systems. And so at least at their junior level, someone has seen all the directions which are arriving. However, the more important points here is - two points - the first one is that New Zealand has never refused a request to put keywords in there for the simple reason of that inequality of size within the alliance, they wouldn't be prepared to do that, because they would get trouble. And I would assume that the same applies in Britain in most cases, that if they received a request - except they would not put it in if it said, spy on the Queen, but they wouldn't be asked to do that, but, otherwise, I think they would.

But more important to this is, there is another level, they see the keywords that go in there - they couldn't have the name of our Prime Minister or something in it - but we don't see the intelligence which comes out of the system. In other words, we have no control over that. The most which happens - this is a debate I had with one of the senior intelligence people - I said, you don't do any monitoring of what goes out, and he said, yes, we do, people look at it once a month. And what he was actually talking about was that they do quality control, they check that the messages aren't jumbled together, that there isn't too muck background noise and things, but they don't actually have a political oversight of it. They don't say, this particular fishing agreement information from this particular country might really hurt them if we gave it to the US, we won't do it, there is no direct oversight like that at all, everything goes, and we don't even see what goes.

On the subject of proof - which, as I said, is one of the key things that your report hinges on, I know - I haven't worked in these facilities, I can't bring someone before you here who has worked in these facilities, and even if I did, how would you know they are telling the truth? The great thing about secret operations is that they are deniable. Even where it is completely non-credible, where something is proven to a high degree, it can still denied, because it is so secret, and I can't bring you the filing cabinet here to show you the planning documents and so on. Which brings me back to the point which I have already made, you have to judge for yourselves how credible you think the sources are. But to be completely deterred by the inherent nature of intelligence means, you may as well not have a committee, if you are going to be deterred by the lack of solid proof and people on the record who are sworn on bibles and things. I believe that someone who looks through my book will feel comfortable with the depth of the knowledge in there, and as I have said, it has been collaborated, it has been confirmed by quite independent sources of other people's work at other times. And so even if there were some details, I imagine, where people have got things wrong, which undoubtedly happens in any research specifics, I think you can be absolutely, one hundred percent sure and completely behind doubt as to where these systems exist, which countries are involved and what the general targettings are and code names and things. That much at least you should take as solid.

Questions from VP Di Lello, Krivine, Newton-Dunn, Vattimo, von Bötticher, Dybkjaer

Nicky Hager

The first question was about what private individuals can do, and I actually think, this is a much less discouraging subject than the questioner did, but the first thing, I think, we should say about private individuals is that it is important that people are educated about systems like Echelon and what they can do, so that they can start to take preparation. But it is also important that we educate our publics, people in our countries about what the system can't do, because one of the main effects of a discussion of something like Echelon on ordinary people and publics in different countries is that people have huge and unrealistic and unnecessary fears about them. And one of the tasks of an investigation like this should be to reassure people that for example what they saw in that film "Enemies of the State" is not something that they should worry about, because it is not our job to create paranoid and unhappy people. Most people have very little to fear from these systems, and educating about their true nature is as much about reassuring and reducing fear as it is about creating protection. I think, it's a really serious side of this.

As to what people can do, though, the first stage is that people understand how vulnerable their communications are nowadays. When you send an e-mail now, or use a cell phone, it's like sending postcard with your private messages written on the back, or it's a little like writing a message on a piece of paper and pinning it on the outside of your house, it is very vulnerable to people. And so, ordinary people need to become aware of what they just naturally should do to protect their communications, and just like somebody seals the back of an envelope before they post it, in the same way they use encryption.

To lots of people at the moment, encryption sound like something technical, something that they could never do, and that it's for people who understand computers. One day, I assure you, I guarantee this, good, strong encryption will be as automatic as sealing an envelope. It is just that it's new and people are not used to it at the moment. And as for cost, in terms of what can specifically be said to people, anybody can download programmes from the Internet for free, for their internet, for their e-mail at the moment, and before long for their telephone calls, which organisations like the NSA cannot break. Technology doesn't always solve the problems of technology, but in this case, it really does seem that encryption can provide a huge amount of privacy in the electronic age once people learn about it and understand it. A practical thing that can be done for ordinary people or groups who feel subject to surveillance, is that they learn to routinely use encryption for their electronic communications. And once you have done it for a little while it's just the same as being able to type a letter on the computer rather than writing on a page, you just get used to it.

Next question, why have there been no individual complaints, why have no organisations taken this up? My opinion on that is, because it's all so new that people haven't caught up with it. The reason why individuals and specific companies haven't, is because it is also secret and that you could never ever prove it. Your committee is only one step, but it's really a very important step in moving along public understanding. There will be more complaints, they will be challenged more.

The other question was, do I have proof that the NSA and the other UKUSA allies pass on intelligence to other countries to buy their silence, for example maybe in that case of Spain. I do have proof in the case of New Zealand that in particular conflicts or particular international issues, the US has made a big deal of whether or not it supplies specific intelligence to the New Zealand agencies. I'll give you an old example, I talked to someone who was very senior in our intelligence services during the Vietnam war, and he said that, the providing and the withholding of information was an important part in the way that the US managed New Zealand and tried to keep its support for the war. I don't know for Europe, but there is a very credible suggestion that the slective and occasional provision of intelligence on Kosovo or something within a coutry is used to buy cooperation from other countries for these systems. But remember, that's not the end of the subject, because all countries do gather something from intelligence collection. But if you are only getting the benefits but none of the costs, of course you'll do it. The cost for a country, say European country, for cooperating in these systems, is the dissatisfaction of its own citizens at their being intercepted, that this is out of control. And so once that is publicized, it becomes much harder to quietly accept the advantages and collaborate in it.

That more practical question whether there was a British station in Hong Kong, of course I was talking about a station that was there before the change, and it was removed before the date. There was some publicity that the operation has been moved to Australia, my personal feeling is that most of it is happening from the American base in Japan now.

How can Brits exercise leverage on this? I was actually, I must admit, talking about other European countries putting pressure on Britain, but my personal opinion is that today it is only secrecy which allows the British government to maintain two such incompatible positions at once. And that the more publicity there is, outside or within the British parliament and elsewhere of this, that sooner or later something will have to change, because they are such incompatible positions.

Does interception happen in terms of the contents or the sender where it has been coming from? When they intercept a message from a particular organisation, is it because that there is a subject word in there, or was it because of the name of the person? The answer is, both. There are people whose jobs it is to get the directions from the government or from the foreign affairs ministry or from defence of what they are interested in collecting intelligence on at the time, and a person's whole job is to think up the words, it's like an internet search, you are trying to find out information on policing in Peru, and you put Peru and policing in as your first search, and you get 20 million things and then you narrow it down a bit and so on. It is precisely the same activity, there is analysts whose job it is to look at the request which has come, look at the newspapers or reports on that country and get the names of individuals that might be put in. As Jim Bamford was saying, we might look up the phone number of the individual you're after and use a fragment of their phone number or their e-mail address. So, it could be the person's address or phone number or the content of what they might be talking about, and in fact both of those are used. And over time, the same analysts get one copy of all the intelligence which is coming in or the thing they work on, and they see how well their selection of key words is going, and if they get a word in which is getting too much junk, intelligence they don't want, they might take that word out or stick in an extra qualification to get a richer supply of intelligence. So, that is basically what they do.

Could I be more precise about legislative proposals? It is quite within the powers of this parliament, but in particular the national, the member parliaments, to introduce laws which required telecommunications companies, the providers - this might be internet service providers or in particular the telecommunications companies - legislation which required by law that the telephone company guarantee the privacy of someone's communications while they pass through their networks. It's legally possible, and it's technically possible. If one country were to do that, say within the European Union, if one or two countries did that first and there was specific legislation, eventually there would be more countries, it would start to open a crack which would allow other countries to do the same.

Who in the New Zealand government is authorized to propose keywords? At the level of politicians, there are no countries that are ever allowed to know in detail what happens in the intelligence agencies. There would be no politician in the world who'd have any idea what those specific keywords are. That happens within very secret high-security indoctrinated staff who make those decisions, while the politicians can say, we want more intelligence about this crisis, that meeting, that issue. They will never get down to the level of keywords, that is done by the intelligence staff.

As for who my sources are, I have a wide range of sources, but the main people who are relied on were people who had worked for a long time in specific parts of our equivalent of the NSA, and what I would do with them as I had an initial interview where I won their confidence, I would let them say everything they could think of and I'd go and read their notes and come back for maybe four or five other interviews and just pursue with them all the various details, who they worked with and what the manuals were that they worked from and where they got trained and all the different parts of the story. And then, as sort of a discipline, I would offer them at the beginning that I did a draft of their information and took it back to check with them, which gave them confidence over what I was using, but also allowed them to find mistakes for me. In all I interviewed about 50 people, but some of them were in the military organisations, because our military does signals intelligence missions, and some of them were politicians or former Prime Ministers and various things like that. But the majority of those were people who had actually worked in the signals intelligence organisation.







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Thursday, November 15, 2007

What Worries You, Masters You!

Fiji Sun's new Editor is already showing his true colors, as belligerently displayed in his last job as the former Fiji Times Editor. Sun Fiji News Ltd. shareholders include C J Patel and Co Ltd, Vinod Patel and Co Ltd and Fijian Holdings Ltd.

Kakaivalu biased political stance, obviously slanted towards the SDL party, may have prompted to him to establish a flawed position (since the article bears no author's name)about the Peoples Charter and the amendment of the 1997 Constitution.

The excerpt of the Fiji Sun article:

The constitution and the People’s Charter
Last updated 11/16/2007 8:58:01 AM

The new vehicle for the way forward for Fiji is the Peoples Charter.
Military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Mosese Tikoitoga in a media statement said the military would force changes in the charter for the people to see better future leaders of the country. He also said the military remained firm on its stand that politicians seeking to contest the next general election would see what the charter will have on them.

So we must expect changes in the Charter. In his address at the 68th United Nations General Assembly in New York Interim Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama told delegates that “Fiji’s situation is not only complex; its problems are deep rooted”. There are no quick fixes. The country now he says is at a very critical cross-road; its situation could escalate into more serious deterioration and instability. It is imperative that any such greater disaster or civil strife is averted.
[Bainimarama] urged the international community to help develop for Fiji a political and governance framework that would be truly democratic, accountable, inclusive, equitable, and non-racial and which unified Fiji’s diverse communities as a nation.
The Peoples Charter is the Government’s vehicle for this and will tackle the challenges at three levels and they are:


  • to restore stability, law and order and confidence;

  • to strengthen institutions for good governance including transparency and accountability and an independent and effectively functioning judiciary;
  • to carry out major reforms in the economy

PM Bainimarama said at the UNGM: “The Peoples Charter, once formulated and adopted will provide the strategic framework or fundamental foundation within which the interim government and also successive elected governments will be expected to operate. “In the current absence of an elected parliament, there is the issue of legitimacy and mandates. To deal with this, the interim government is willing to consider putting the draft Peoples Charter to a referendum to get the mandate of the people for the fundamental changes, including changes to the Constitution of Fiji, as may be considered necessary.”

At the Pacific Islands Forum held in Nuku’alofa, Tonga the PM said: “To address our fundamental problems that have besieged Fiji and help us realise our vision, my government has launched a major national initiative which will see the establishment of a 40-member National Council for Building a Better Fiji (NBBF) and the proposal to develop the “Peoples Charter for Change and Progress (PCCP). Through the PCCP a broad cross section of Fiji’s people will be fully engaged through consultation and participation to develop a comprehensive agenda of action and measures to address in a systematic and comprehensive fashion the long outstanding fundamental challenges. It will then provide strategic framework for successive governments.”

Already there is opposition to the charter. The ousted Laisenia Qarase-led Soqosoqo Duavata ni Lewenivanua Government has strongly opposed the move. In an interview Mr Qarase said: “The SDL Party’s stand against the proposed People’s Charter for Change and Progress remains. We are opposed to the charter for very good reasons, some of which are:

- the preparation of a charter, if necessary, should be left to an elected government
- the interim regime lacks the popular mandate necessary to prepare such an important document
- the proposed charter cannot bind future elected governments
- the legality of the charter would be questionable
- the charter cannot supersede the Constitution which remains the supreme law of the land
- the rights of indigenous Fijians are excluded from the charter.


We should accept changes in the new Charter. The question that we need to ask is: How will the People’s Charter merge into the constitution? Pacific Island Forum leaders have given their support to Mr Bainimarama for the changes.

However, speaking on behalf of the Pacific leaders Tongan Prime Minister Feleti Sevele said: “I think we have made it quite clear that Fiji will continue on the existing constitution and the laws ... Anything beyond that is not acceptable.”
He made this comment after the Fiji PM said his government might change the constitution before the election.

From the outset we can confirm that some changes that have to be made will not be in accordance with the constitution thus making it unconstitutional. One change is the removal of the communal voting system which will end communal seats in the next parliament.

Communal seats date back to the early 1900s. In 1904, the British colonial authorities reserved seven seats in the Legislative Council for European voters; in 1929, provision was made for wealthy Indians to elect one representative also. Indigenous Fijians were represented by nominees of the Great Council of Chiefs and did not vote directly for their representatives until 1966.

In the 1960s, the Indo-Fijian dominated National Federation Party (NFP) began to press for universal suffrage on a common voters’ roll. Indigenous Fijian leaders opposed this demand, fearful that it would favour Indo-Fijians, who then comprised more than half of the country’s population. As a compromise, a number of national constituencies were established, allocated ethnically but elected by universal suffrage, but 25 of the 36 seats in the Legislative Council remained communal.
In the 1970 Constitution leaders then agreed to establish a 52-member House of Representatives with 27 communal and 25 national constituencies. Indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians were each allocated 12 communal constituencies; minority groups were allocated 3.

After the 1987 coup and with the abrogation of the 1970 Constitution a new 1990 constitution was put in place. It made all parliamentary seats communal, with a built-in indigenous majority. 37 seats were allocated to indigenous Fijians and 27 to Indians, despite the near parity of their population numbers at that time. 5 seats were assigned to minority groups. The 1990 constitution was revised again in 1997-1998. Again the communal seats were retained with 23 seats allocated to indigenous voters, 19 to Indo-Fijians, 1 to Rotuman Islanders, and 3 to minority groups; the remaining 25 represented open constituencies.

The new change will have to be made but we need to answer this question: How can this change be done when we don’t have a parliament with the 1997 Constitution still intact? Amendments or changes to the constitution can only be done in parliament. Can it be done through a referendum? The constitution is silent on referendum so the outcome if the interim government goes ahead with it will be unconstitutional.

Commenting on the matter New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark said and I quote - “I don’t think the commodore himself has a clear idea of how these changes can be accomplished in a constitutionally credible manner.”

The process forward in Fiji she said had to be credible. That rules out, I must admit, any changes to the constitution. The problem now faced by the interim government in moving the country forward has been created by the Prime Minister when he dissolved parliament when he had executive authority with him after the 5th December military bloodless coup.

PM Clarke said: “This is the problem when you close down your parliament and act in a way that is clearly unconstitutional and illegal and finding a pathway back from that is tortuous.” So what is the way out now to make the Peoples Charter work?
We know for the fact that the constitution cannot be changed or amended without a parliament.
The charter if passed, will be a dictatorial document as it will force successive governments to adhere to something that they do not support.
What will happen if a new government throws out the Charter because it is not part of its manifesto? Will the military come in again with their guns and take over power?
To make it work the only other option is to abrogate the 1997 Constitution but this as PM Clark had said, it would be tortuous.

Another question that we need to ask is: What will be the new course taken by the interim government if the people through the referendum reject the Charter?


Although, the Fiji Sun Editor raises some serious questions about the amendments to the 1997 Constitution; the Constitution has provision for it to be amended, however under the Parliament. However, since there is no Parliament, the proposed referendum, may rest the matter of legitimacy for good because referendums are more of a direct democracy than Parliament. Since a referendum was not called in the establishment of all 3 Fiji constitutions, 1970, 1990 and 1997 respectively; all have failed the nation. Perhaps a referendum was the missing link. What if the people choose not to have the People's Charter inquires the Fiji Sun Editor? What if they do, retorts S.i.F.M.

The purest form of democracy in Fiji may in fact be unconstitutional. So what is better, 100% octane democracy or Constitutionalism which may in fact be a watered down version of democracy?

In a paper by Constitutional Expert Yash Ghai and Jill Cottrell titled "Constitution Making in Fiji: Context and Process" highlights the hindered process called democracy, when the timing and sequence of events are called into question:

A quick count of individual submissions (relying on names 18) indicates that presentations were made by 114 Fijians, 88 by Indo-Fijians and 21 others. Among the organizations that made submissions, local churches clearly predominated. It is clear that many of the views presented were orchestrated. A bit like an Amnesty International campaign, standard forms of presentation were made available by political parties and other groups for their members to sign and submit. Lal wrote of a submission by the Arya Samaj ‘which will be repeated – worse, read word for word – countless times in the days and weeks ahead’. 19

But by no means all were of this type. The speed with which the commission embarked on tours around the country and overseas was only possible because it made no attempt to undertake any form of civic education (neither its deadline nor resources allowed any other option). Although the level of literacy in Fiji is relatively high, and the previous few years had been very political so there was probably a high degree of awareness of the broad concept of a constitution, the population at large was almost certainly uninformed about the details of the constitutions which had prevailed in the country, and certainly of the options.

Indeed,the events of the previous 6-8 years would almost certainly have led the ordinary person to think merely in terms of the system of government and electoral systems - in other words of the question of how the constitution could prevent (for Fijians) or not obstruct(for Indo-Fijians) the coming to power of another ‘Indian dominated’ Government.

It is easy to criticise the commission for lack of civic education, as we do ourselves. But we must remember the constraints of resources and time over which it had no control. We should also note that the commission was under some pressure to dispense even with public hearings (including from both Reddy and Chaudhry), on the grounds that there had been sufficient articulation of constitutional options and presentation of submissions to previous commissions.

Fiji as a society has come to an important political junction. The calls for Fiji to return to democracy by the international community has been heard before, first in 1987 and then again in 2000. On both occasions, Fiji followed the garden path of legalities that twist and turn. The question that is often trivialized is whether, the path used in 1987 and 2000 actually brought Fiji back to the direct democracy-the purest form?

While Fiji Sun Editor quotes from the New Zealand Prime Minister, Helen Clark on the subject of Constitutionalism:
“This is the problem when you close down your parliament and act in a way that is clearly unconstitutional and illegal and finding a pathway back from that is tortuous.”


Sadly, the Fiji Sun editor either neglects the fact or selectively omits that New Zealand does not have a constitution. New Zealand's supreme law is a collection of statutes (Acts of Parliament), Treaties, Orders-in-Council, Letters patent, decisions of the Courts and unwritten constitutional conventions. There is no one supreme document — the New Zealand constitution is not codified or entrenched. It would appear, that Clark or the New Zealand Government as a whole should be the last to talk about unconstitutional matters, as an article published by International Herald Tribune outlines.

In addition, Fiji Sun Editor quoted Tonga's Prime Minister, Feleti Sevele:

“I think we have made it quite clear that Fiji will continue on the existing constitution and the laws ... Anything beyond that is not acceptable.”


With all due respect to the Tongan Prime Minister, it is beyond the pale for a Country ruled by a monarchy to place any caveats on a democratic country that was torn by racial inequities and eroded by the ingrained corruption, compounded by a civil service run on Ethno-nationalistic paradigms.

It is also reprehensible for Tonga or her Prime Minister to comment on Fiji's multi-racial society when, their own nation places a quota on the number of person of Indian heritage living within their borders. Has this form of ethnic cleansing, ever been addressed by these egalitarian nations. Or does this just underscore the depth and width of hypocritical reasoning by people; who are willing to turn a blind eye to these nuances in good governance for their political agendas.

The Scottish Philosopher, John Locke who published "The Second Treatise of Civil Government" in 1690 is perhaps more knowledgeable and enlightened than Helen Clark. Locker lays out guiding legal principles and logic which Fiji as a society should examine, at this political juncture. The 19th and final chapter is titled "Of the Dissolution of Government" and present some justifications for Unconstitutional acts.

Sec. 211. HE that will with any clearness speak of the dissolution of government, ought in the first place to distinguish between the dissolution of the society and the dissolution of the government.

Sec. 214. First, That when such a single person, or prince, sets up his own arbitrary will in place of the laws, which are the will of the society, declared by the legislative, then the legislative is changed:

for that being in effect the legislative, whose rules and laws are put in execution, and required to be obeyed; when other laws are set up, and other rules pretended, and inforced, than what the legislative, constituted by the society, have enacted, it is plain that the legislative is changed.

Whoever introduces new laws, not being thereunto authorized by the fundamental appointment of the society, or subverts the old, disowns and overturns the power by which they were made, and so sets up a new legislative.

Sec. 220. In these and the like cases, when the government is dissolved, the people are at liberty to provide for themselves, by erecting a new legislative, differing from the other, by the change of persons, or form, or both, as they shall find it most for their safety and good: for the society can never, by the fault of another, lose the native and original right it has to preserve itself, which can only be done by a settled legislative, and a fair and impartial execution of the laws made by it.


Sec. 240. Here, it is like, the common question will be made, Who shall be judge, whether the prince or legislative act contrary to their trust? This, perhaps, ill-affected and factious men may spread amongst the people, when the prince only makes use of his due prerogative. To this I reply, The people shall be judge; for who shall be judge whether his trustee or deputy acts well, and according to the trust reposed in him, but he who deputes him, and must, by having deputed him, have still a power to discard him, when he fails in his trust?

If this be reasonable in particular cases of private men, why should it be otherwise in that of the greatest moment, where the welfare of millions is concerned, and also where the evil, if not prevented, is greater, and the redress very difficult, dear, and dangerous?



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Monday, November 12, 2007

Fiji Water's Carbon Trade- A Can of Worms?

The issue of trading carbon off-sets has forced Fiji Water to come clean with their proposal, amid the mass hysteria of their shipping practices.
Blog-TerraPass comments on Fiji Water's environmental track record.
"Understand that the carbon community holds Fiji Water in roughly the same regard they do Hummers. That is, with a disdain that borders on the irrational[...]"

The issue of carbon foot print is a contenscious issue also facing California's jet-setting Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger according to Sacramento Bee article. Excerpt of Sacbee article:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger crisscrosses the globe in a private Gulfstream 400 jet, advocating environmental virtues after signing a significant global warming reduction bill last year. He says he offsets his plane's greenhouse gas damage by financing projects that reduce carbon emissions elsewhere.

But the governor refuses to reveal how much money he has spent on emissions credits, making it impossible to determine how much he has reduced his carbon footprint. The governor also refuses to say how many hours he has flown.

"As is the case with most public officials, personal and financial details of their life are often kept private," said Schwarzenegger press secretary Aaron McLear. "It's important that a public official is able to have some kind of a private life, and that's why we have a policy not to discuss his private financial life."

Schwarzenegger's Gulfstream 400 plane emits as much as 4.9 metric tons of carbon dioxide per hour, according to the online luxury journal Helium Report, roughly the equivalent of what a small passenger car produces in one year over the course of 8,000 miles.


New York Times article excerpt:

[...]The Fiji Water Foundation, led by Lynda and Stewart Resnick, Fiji’s owners, has also pledged money to protect the Yaqara Valley watershed, the main source of Fiji Water, and to preserve the Sovi Basin, a vast lowland rainforest owned by native Fijians that is home to many plant and animal species.


The Yaqara is important to Fiji Water, but the Sovi Basin is important to all of Fiji,” said Glenn T. Prickett, a senior vice president of Conservation International, a nonprofit group that has been helping Fiji Water devise and carry out its programs. “The Fijians are poor people, and without this money, logging would be their only economic alternative”[...]

The question of who actually benefits from the carbon offsets; is something the displaced native landowners have to ask themselves.

Although, Conservation International Vice-President was correct in stating that most of Fiji's native inhabitants are poor. It is also worthwhile to pursue the parameters of that statement carefully because it infers erroneously that, Fiji Water's carbon trading plan will converted to cash and bundles will be handed out to "the people" as if it grew on trees. Whether it is the citizens of Fiji or the native owners of Yaqara; both segments should not bank their hopes or prayers on corporate trickle down economics.
How many native landowners or Fiji Citizens are part of this Fiji Water Foundation? Is the entity more of a convenient tax deduction vehicle; recognized by the IRS and not Fiji's Inland Revenue agency, because Fiji does not have double taxation agreements with the U.S Government according to a website that publishes an alphabetical list of countries that have maintained tax treaties with the US.

In fact, Fiji Water does not pay royalties(using volumetric standards) directly to any landowning unit. The ownership of Yaqara is also in question and appears to be one of those blotches on the conscious of Fiji Water and the Government.

The issue of ownership of Yaqara has been addressed by a post by S.i.F.M.

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Thursday, November 08, 2007

The Lady Is A Tramp.



Fiji Times article quotes from the Rewa Paramount Chief, who was part of a church delegation visiting the Chair of the People's Charter, Archbishop Petero Mataca. The excerpt of the Fiji Times article:



Sorry: Ro Teimumu

Friday, October 26, 2007

REWA high chief Ro Teimumu Kepa has admitted to being a part of the delegation of concerned Catholic church members who visited Archbishop Petero Mataca.

The visit was to ask Archbishop Mataca to step down as the co-chair of the National Council on Building a Better Fiji. Ro Teimumu had earlier denied being part of the delegation that visited Archbishop Mataca.

"Yes, I was a part of the delegation but I did not want to say anything at first because I did not want to make it a public issue," she said.

"But now that the Archbishop has made a statement with regards to the meeting and the issue that was discussed, I felt it was time for me to say that I was a part of the delegation. "I really want to apologise for denying my presence at the meeting to the reporter who had called me and asked me about it."

Ro Teimumu, Ratu Suliano Matanitobua and Kenneth Zinck visited Archbishop Mataca. When asked if there was a possibility of a split in the Catholic church after the decision by the Archbishop, Ro Teimumu did not directly say there was a split but admitted there were a lot of people with strong feelings about the Archbishop's decision.

Raiwaqa parish priest Father Kieran Maloney said he strongly disagreed with Archbishop Mataca's decision to co-chair the National Council. He said the acceptance was disgusting but not surprising.

"We really want to urge people to continue to attend church because it is for the people too and not only for the Archbishop.

"The church is for us and we should continue to go to church and pray for the church and its leadership," said Ro Teimumu.


The failed defamation campaign against Archbishop Mataca, has forced those in the shadows to drag out the indigenous rights issue, in a feeble attempt to rekindle the flames of dissatisfaction in the minds of the ignorant. Their spin doctoring poorly and speculatively paints the People's Charter as a clear and present danger to the indigenous Fijian race. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Fiji Times article covers the opinion of the Aristocrats in the Rewa province. This comes in the wake of another Fiji Times article quoting from representatives from Somosomo Taveuni warning the teams for the People's Charter stating that, the village was off limits.

The excerpt:


Somosomo bans People's Charter teams

1635 FJT
Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Update: 4.35pm THE chiefly clan of Lalagavesi, Somosomo will not allow any teams conducting awareness programs on the People's Charter into Somosomo.

Traditional spokesman Epeli Matata said the teams may visit other villages on Taveuni but the chiefly village of Somosomo would be out of bounds for them.

The military has been holding awareness programs on the People's Charter.



Charter anti-Fijian: Rewa

Friday, November 09, 2007

REWA, one of Fiji's three largest provinces, yesterday rejected the proposed People's Charter on Building a Better Fiji largely because it disagreed with efforts to ignore the existence of indigenous Fijians.

Ro Dona Takalaiyale, the leader of the Sauturaga clan and spokesman of the Rewa Bose Vanua, issued Rewa's position in a statement yesterday. Ro Dona described the charter as "a creation of non-racial Fiji and written by two foreigners without input from Fijians or their elected representatives".

Ro Dona also voiced concerns about the interim Prime Minister Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama's public statements about his desire to abolish all communal seats through the People's Charter.

"Also Lt-Col Mataitoga's statement that Affirmative Action will be abolished under the charter. Also the charter is inconsistent with the UN Declaration on Rights of Indigenous People's Article 3-5 where indigenous people are entitled to participate in the political life of the state. "It is inconsistent with the 1997 Constitution where race is recognised as an integral element of the nation of Fiji," he said.

Ro Dona said the Bose Vanua also resolved to boycott any referendum or election that will be influenced by the Charter.

Commenting on the review of the Great Council of Chiefs, Ro Dona said the vanua remained steadfast in its support of the suspended GCC's stand that the interim Government was illegal and that its actions including the review of the GCC were illegal and unconstitutional.

"The Bose Vanua resolves that it will not accept the outcomes of the review of the GCC by the interim Government-appointed committee and that it would not participate in any reconstituted GCC arising out of the recommendations of the committee," he said.

Earlier this month, Ro Filipe Tuisawau, the nephew of Rewa paramount chief Ro Teimumu Kepa, warned the indigenous population to be wary of the People's Charter because it would not allow for indigenous issues to be raised in Parliament.

He said this would greatly affect the indigenous people.

It appears that the Fijian aristocracy have launched another mis-information campaign; to shore up support for their version of social slavery. While calling for Fiji's rapid return to democracy- a farcical suggestion because all right thinking people understand that, Chief's involvement in Democracy is an oxymoron.

It is also amusing to read the concerns about indigenous rights being undermined by the People's Charter; as if the aristocracy had been given a monopoly to exclusively comment of matters pertaining to all indigenous issues. It was this monopoly that reared its ugly head in Fiji post 2000 coup, when the Paramount chief of Rewa, Ro Teimumu Kepa paid a social call with George Speight and the Rebels holed up in Fiji Parliament; while dismissing any notion to visit hostages, who were still held in nearby meeting rooms within the Parliamentry complex. It was this monopoly of Fijian chiefs that indirectly formented the riots in downtown Suva both in 1987 and 2000.





Ro Dona described the charter as "a creation of non-racial Fiji and written by two foreigners without input from Fijians or their elected representatives". Ro Dona raises the issue of the 1997 Constitution and selectively omits that that document was written and compiled by two foreigners as well. It is also the high water mark of hypocrisy, not to question the formation of the Great Council of Chiefs, an aristocratic entity imported by the British. Of course, anything foreign that does not erode the cultural exuberance of the Chiefs is kept on a pedestal; while anything progressive and visionary like the People's Charter is denounced, ridiculed and disdained by the same layer of despots.


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Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Just the Facts Maam!

Fiji's former Chief Justice, Sir Timoci Tuivaga, whose correspondence to the Editor of Fiji Sun, reveals much of his sinewy characteristics to obfuscate. The excerpt of the letter:

Misleading report
Fiji Sun 11/7/2007 7:25:44 AM

In Dr. Brij Lal's series of articles entitled "The process of political readjustments - the aftermath of the 2006 coup," he made a bad error of fact in relation to myself as Chief Justice and two other judges concerning the abrogation by the military of the 1997 Constitution on 29 May 2000.

Dr. Lal wrote
"Another institution similarly embroiled in controversy after the coup was the judiciary. The causes of the division in it go back to the aftermath of George Speight's attempted coup in May 2000. Differences arose in the judicial ranks over the Chief Justice Timoci Tuivaga's advice supporting the military's proposal to abrogate the 1997 Constitution to resolve the impasse. In this stance he was reportedly supported by two fellow judges Michael Scott and Tuivaga's successor as Chief Justice, Daniel Fatiaki."


The above statement is misleading in that I gave no such advice as alleged by Dr. Lal. How he attributed to me something that never occurred is most surprising from a normally perceptive and careful political and social analyst.
The military's action regarding the 1997 Constitution which was entirely unilateral caught everyone by surprise. The chronology of events during the May 2000 political crisis does not bear out the unfortunate statement made by Dr. Lal. If I may say so, it is always in the interest of factual reporting that historical records should not be rehashed for whatever reason by public commentators.



With all due respect to the Chief Justice Emeritus; How, When and Where the historical record is rehashed, is simply not his prerogative to make. Nor is he in any position to dictate how history views his derailed train of decision making.

Amnesty International article contradicts Tuivaga's recollection of history:

Chief Justice Timoci Tuivaga, who had blamed the Constitution for Fiji’s ongoing political instability and urged substantial amendments, retired in September. He was replaced by Daniel Fatiaki who was appointed Chief Justice despite controversy over his role, with Timoci Tuivaga, in the drafting of post-coup emergency decrees which purported to abolish the Supreme Court and the Constitution. In November, the government nominated Timoci Tuivaga for the International Criminal Court. The Chief Justice and non-governmental organizations in Fiji had supported Indo-Fijian High Court judge Nazhat Shameem’s nomination.


A reknown legal mind, the late Sir Vijay Singh raises serious questions in an article published in the Journal of South Pacific Law, regarding Tuivaga's decisions after the 1987 coup in Fiji. This is an excerpt:

A DIMINISHED JUDICIARY*
By Sir Vijay R Singh**

Despite the Chief Justice Sir Timoci Tuivaga's explanations, judges, lawyers and lay persons at home and abroad remain profoundly perturbed at his enthusiastic engagement in politically charged extra-judicial business. Judicial independence is far too important a public interest issue not to be publicly discussed when the occasion demands, lest silence induced by tact or timidity be misconstrued as acceptance of the unacceptable. A judge who strays beyond his judicial functions cannot escape public scrutiny and criticisms of his extra-judicial activities.

In 1987, all superior court judges had courageously demonstrated their commitment to uphold the constitution and the rule of law and endured harassment of all kinds. Judge Kishor Govind was imprisoned at Naboro and Judge Rooney held under house arrest for days. All eventually resigned rather than serve under a military regime. Sir Timoci Tuivaga CJ was one such judge but although he was later recalled to the bench, we lost most of the others for good. They deservedly stood high in universal pubic esteem. But sadly, the CJ's recent conduct has caused much dismay. Sir Timoci advised the President on the Constitution's provisions that he could invoke to dismiss the Coalition government. The President acted accordingly.

At issue is not the correctness of the advice -- although that, too, is highly questionable -- but the propriety of judges acting at all as the President's legal counsel. The entirety of the legal profession in the public and private sector, and talent abroad, was available to the President. The severely denounced decision of Australian Chief Justice Garfield Barwick to advise Governor General John Kerr how to dismiss Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in 1975 should have been a salutary signal to any judge not to follow a disreputable precedent. But the Chief Justice did just that, and he cannot evade the consequential commotion.

An even graver grievance concerns the CJ's draft of a decree for the military to promulgate that purported to re-establish the judiciary, and in the process, also to abolish the Supreme Court. This was far from being a benevolent involvement, as Sir Timoci would like us to believe, because implicit in his drafting of the decree were hazardous assumptions of great constitutional and political significance. Firstly, that the military had at that point in time acquired the authority in law to rule by decree, and secondly and accordingly, the judiciary and the constitution from which it drew its authority, went out the window together when the military claimed to have 'wholly removed' the constitution.

Also, for about a hundred years the Privy Council in London had been our final court of appeal and, after the establishment of the Fiji Court of Appeal, the highest of our three superior courts structure. Until, of course, a lieutenant colonel deposed the Queen in 1987 and thereby severed our access to Her Majesty's Privy Council.

To fill the void, the Supreme Court of Fiji was created but the decree Sir Timoci helpfully draft abolished the Supreme Court. Neither the military nor the CJ has claimed paternity of this eccentricity -- that amputation of the highest of our courts was essential surgery to successfully address our afflictions, the foremost of which then were the safe release of the hostages and the restoration of law and order.

The military, for its part, sought to distance itself from this most peculiar prescription for the treatment of our ills. It published a statement two days after the decree, assuring all that "the judiciary has not been tampered with" (Sunday Times 11 June p.25).

Weighty questions inevitably arise. Did the military make the incorrect statement because it did not know that the CJ drafted decree had in fact abolished the Supreme Court? And that thereupon Lord Cooke, Sir Gerard Brennan, Sir Moti Tikaram, Sir Keith Mason and Mr Justice Toohey had been summarily dismissed? Also, that the CJ had installed himself as a judge of the Court of Appeal?

The military's unawareness of these and other aspects of the decree may explain its incorrect statement, but that excuse will inevitably transport the CJ to even a lower and more perilous perch. Was he less than frank with Commodore Frank Bainimarama and kept him in the dark of the decree's important provisions?

Whose agenda required the Supreme Court's abolition -- the military's or Sir Timoci's opposition to the Court, and why? If the military's, why did the CJ not seek the Law Society's support to preserve the long established judicial system, instead of completely ignoring the legal profession while he collaborated with the military?

Did Sir Timoci's adventures cause or contribute to the resignations of Justices Jai Ram Reddy as President of the Court of Appeal and Ratu Jone Madraiwiwi as a High Court judge? And might we not lose more judges who find the CJ's modus operandi unacceptable, as shown up in Judge Anthony Gates's ruling last week in a matter when Sir Timoci tried to have a case in which he is a defendant assigned to a judge of his selection?

And crucially, what, in Sir Timoci's view, is the source of his present claim to be the Chief Justice? Is it the Constitution that he was sworn to uphold, or the military decree that he obligingly drafted to restore his and other judicial offices? The two propositions are mutually exclusive; they cannot reside under the same roof at the same time. Sir Timoci cannot escape these and other disquieting questions -- all products of his questionable conduct in office.

In his typically understated fashion, Peter Knight, then Law Society President, had observed: "The Chief Justice had other options open to him." Expediency, arbitrary decision-making, acting as the executive's legal counsel and the military's legal draftsman were not in Mr Knight's contemplation. Sic transit gloria.



*This article first appeared in the Fiji Times of October 17, 2000.

** Sir Vijay R Singh

Sir Vijay Singh's read law in London and is a Barrister of the High Courts of England, Australia and Fiji. He was a Minister in Ratu Mara's pre and post-independence governments and also Attorney General and Speaker of the House. Sir Vijay is presently in private practice in Suva.




Even the Wikipedia article on Sir Timoci Tuivaga, actively corrects his own account of the events. The excerpt:

Coup controversies

Tuivaga upheld the independence of the judiciary in the wake of the two military coups that rocked Fiji in 1987. His actions in a later coup in 2000, however, generated much controversy. Together with two other judges, Michael Scott and Daniel Fatiaki (who later succeeded him as Chief Justice), Tuivaga advised the then-President, Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, to abrogate the Constitution, as requested by the Military. Mara refused and resigned on 29 May.

An Interim Military Government, headed by Commodore Frank Bainimarama took power, abrogated the Constitution, and promulgated the Administration of Justice Decree, which Tuivaga had drafted. This decree abolished the Supreme Court, made the Chief Justice the President of the Appeal Court (of which, according to the constitution, he had previously been barred from membership). Another decree extended the retirement age of the Chief Justice from 70 years to 75. Fiji Law Society President Peter Knight condemned Tuivaga's actions, saying, "The eyes of the profession, the nation and the world are upon the judiciary.

It cannot be seen to openly condone criminal activity. It should as a matter of record that it will continue to occupy and function in its judicial role in the same uncompromising manner as it had done prior to 19th May." (These changes to the judiciary were subsequently reversed by a High Court decision to reinstate the Constitution on 15 November 2000. This decision was upheld by the Appeal Court on 1 March 2001).

Tuivaga was subsequently sued by members of the deposed government of Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry for his role in abrogating the constitution, which all judges were bound by oath to uphold.

In an interview with the Daily Post on 15 June 2000, Tuivaga defended his role, saying it was not an endorsement but a practical acknowledgement of "reality." "While a de facto government is in place it is impossible for me as Chief Justice not to acknowledge its actual existence as a matter of political reality," he said. The Interim Military Government, which he called "the only viable alternative government," needed to be recognized, he said, given the "situation triggered by the state of insurrection in the country which so far has proved insidiously intractable".

These changes to the judiciary authorized by the decrees that Tuivaga had drafted were subsequently reversed by a High Court decision to reinstate the Constitution on 15 November 2000. This decision was upheld by the Appeal Court on 1 March 2001. That year, he turned 70, the retirement age mandated by the restored Constitution. On 1 August 2002, Daniel Fatiaki succeeded him as Chief Justice.

Failed ICC candidacy

Following his retirement as Chief Justice, the Fijian government nominated Tuivaga as Fiji's candidate for a position on the new International Criminal Court (ICC). His role in the 2000 coup came back to haunt him, and the Fiji Law Society strongly criticized his nomination. In what the Fijian government saw as a humiliation, he was forced to withdraw his nomination during the balloting on 9 February 2003, when Samoan candidate Tuiloma Neroni Slade outpolled him.

Reconciliation and Unity Commission


In May 2005, Tuivaga spoke out in favour of the government's proposed Reconciliation and Unity Commission, which would, if established, have the power to compensate victims of offenses related to the 2000 coup, and amnesty to its perpetrators, subject to presidential approval. Tuivaga cautioned, however, that the workability of the arrangement would depend on the good will of the parties involved.

On 26 May 2005, the Rev. Akuila Yabaki of the Citizens Constitutional Forum expressed concern at reports that Tuivaga might be appointed to chair the proposed commission, reports downplayed by both Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase and Opposition Leader Mahendra Chaudhry.

Under investigation

In the wake of the military coup which deposed the Qarase government on 5 December 2006, Interim Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum announced on 22 January 2007 that there would be an inquiry into allegations concerning the role of the judiciary in the events of 2000. It was reported that Tuivaga might be subject to the inquiry. [1] In a letter to the Fiji Sun on 23 January, Tuivaga expressed surprise, saying that the Constitution of Fiji makes no provision for investigating retired members of the judiciary.




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Monday, November 05, 2007

Ballu Kahn lively figure in business, politics

Ballu Khan has been a controversial figure in Fiji business and political circles since winning a US$9.2 million ($12 million) contract in 2004 to supply a new computer system and maintenance services to the Native Lands Trust Board, which administers indigenous land holdings throughout the island nation.

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Wednesday, October 31, 2007

The Measure of a Republic in Fiji.


Wikipedia definition of a Republic includes the different types:- A republic is a state or country that is not led by a hereditary monarch, where the people of that state or country (or at least a part of that people)have impact on its government, and that is usually indicated as a republic.

Fiji is amid many changes. According to the latest census data, the population of persons with Indian heritage have dropped, according to the Fiji Times article. However, an article by Micheal Field titled "Census reveals Indians fleeing Fiji" in Stuff online Magazine frames the census data in negative conotations. Judging from the sensationalism used by Field, the actual census data does not denote that anyone is "fleeing" and it appears to be another concoction derived from Fiji's census data that was not fully released by the Bureau of Statistics.


Fiji Times article quoted from two chiefs from the Rewa Province who took issue to the recent remarks made by the Interim Prime Minister in article that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH)regarding the Methodist Church of Fiji and their epoch of hatred preached from the pulpit.
The following is an excerpt of the SMH article:

Rumblings of a revolution

October 27, 2007


F

iji has never had a coup like this one. As it turns into a revolution against the country's chiefly and church establishment, Hamish McDonald talks to its leader. The grandly titled King's Highway leads from Fiji's capital into the hinterland of Viti Levu, but on leaving the lowlands it abruptly degrades to a muddy, potholed dirt road, winding between jagged mountains covered in vivid green trees and scarlet flowers.

On Sunday, up by a little village of corrugated-iron houses, a man we'll call Iona (Jonah) is walking back from church, dressed in a pale blue shirt and tie and grey lava-lava kilt. He seizes the chance of a lift back to Suva.


Inside his ramshackle house, Iona grabs clothes from trunks around the furniture-free matting floors, thrusts them into a sports bag, and we set off. Iona introduces himself as a farmer and Methodist lay preacher: "The Holy Spirit has sent you here today," he declares. "Amen. Hallelujah."

On the road down, through the shabby rice-milling town of Nausori, and then over a bowl of kava at the tin shanty on Suva's fringes occupied by his ailing 73-year-old father and some younger relatives, Iona talks about how Fiji's big events have affected people like him.

There was the coup attempt in May 2000 by the young failed businessman George Speight, who held the Indo-Fijian prime minister, Mahendra Chaudhry, and others hostage for 56 days, until outmanoeuvred and outgunned by Fiji military's commander, Commodore Voreqe (Frank) Bainimarama.

Then came a new government under Laisenia Qarase (pronounced "nGarasay"), at the head of a party representing the taukei or ethnic Fijians, the Soqosoqo Duavata ni Lewenivanua, or SDL, and after six years, a spectacular falling out with Bainimarama, who seized power.

Iona kept growing his cassava and taro on the plot of land allotted to him by his local chief, tribal land he is not free to sell, and seeking the will of the Holy Spirit in what was happening around him.

To him and his family, Qarase was a good prime minister. "He helped the poor. When there was flooding, Qarase gave money to replace the houses, and gave a small pension to my father," Iona says. "I don't think he ever steals, but maybe the money he gave out to the poor was not properly put down in the books."

Both Speight and Bainimarama come from Iona's province on Viti Levu's eastern side, Tailevu. The coup leader, now serving a life sentence on an island off Suva, gets a tick from Iona. "George would always give a cow for a big festival up in the province," he says. "He should get a pardon, because what he did was to help the poor people."

Iona and his family don't like what Bainimarama is doing and don't like the support he is getting from many Indo-Fijians such as Chaudhry, who joined the interim government as finance minister. "Indians are idol worshippers," he says.

They especially don't like the commodore's abrupt dismissal five months ago of the Great Council of Chiefs, the pinnacle of a traditional authority structure nurtured by the British that has some important constitutional powers, notably appointing the head of state, the president.

"He want to demolish all that system," says cousin Tevita, studying at a Methodist theological college. "He himself does not know what to do," Tevita adds. "He's relying on secret outsiders. They keep texting him on mobile phones and all."

So far, this view from the bottom, with its mix of patronage and conspiracies, hasn't counted much. Bainimarama's obstacles have mostly come from Fiji's institutions - the chiefs' council, the political parties, the legal system, some churches, the mostly Australian-owned newspapers, the human rights groups.

But the day that the grassroots voice will decide has suddenly grown closer, since Bainimarama agreed at a meeting with South Pacific leaders in Tonga on October 17 to hold elections for a new civilian government by the end of March 2009 and to abide by the result.

All settings unaltered, Qarase would probably sweep back in. He remains popular with ethnic Fijians whose vote is given extra weight in Fiji's electoral system. The ousted chiefs and Methodist leaders support him. Despite trawling through the files, Bainimarama's men have not found any corruption to pin on him.

But if Bainimarama has his way the settings will be altered. Pacific leaders pressed him to commit to holding the elections under Fiji's existing constitution and laws, but he didn't. Instead, as Bainimarama spelled out in an interview with the Herald this week, he hopes to sweep away the entire structure of racial-based voting that has ruled Fiji since independence in 1970.

"The countries that are urging us to return to democracy - I don't know if they understand how unfair the system has been over the last 20 or 30 years," Bainimarama says.


""Fijians live in a democracy with a mentality that belongs to the Fijian chiefly system. They decide for us who to vote for, our church talatalas [ministers] decide for us who to vote for. These are the Fijians living in the villages and rural areas. The provincial [chiefly] councils dictate for us who to vote for and we go along with that." "


Instead of voters having two votes, one for a general all-races constituency and one for a closed communal constituency, Bainimarama wants a single vote for all in multiracial constituencies.

"The common roll is the way to go," he says. "It takes away the race card."

He hopes the panel he co-chairs with the Catholic Archbishop, Petero Mataca, to draw up a "people's charter" will back this. Communal seats? "I am hoping they will do away with them altogether," he says.

Since most of the commodore's opponents, including the Methodist Church (sometimes called 'the taukei movement at prayer'), are boycotting the charter, there is a fair chance that it will do just that.

As Qarase observed this week, while waiting at his Suva house for a reply to his request for a meeting with the commodore: "I have a feeling that this guy, when he wants something, he must get it right or wrong."

But how to make it legal? Under the existing constitution, which Bainimarama has said is still in force, the only mechanism for amendment is by two-thirds vote of the House of Representatives, dissolved by order of the 86-year-old President, Josefa Iloilo, after the December coup.






"Parliament is not going to sit, that's for sure, so take away that option," says Bainimarama. "There's talk of referendum, we can do it through referendum. We have not stopped discussing how we can do it … there has to be some changes to the constitution because of the electoral reform, there has to be amendment."

The precise way then? "I leave that to the legal people," he says.

The chief legal person is the Attorney-General, Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, an Australian-trained lawyer formerly with the law firm Minter Ellison in Sydney, who lost his permanent residency in Australia as part of Canberra's "targeted sanctions" against Bainimarama and associates, including any identifiable soldiers.

Sayed-Khaiyum won't be specific ahead of the charter, but says a referendum can carry great weight. Fiji's first constitution in 1970 was negotiated with London "by a handful of leaders" and then simply promulgated, he notes. The army coup leader Sitiveni Rabuka's 1990 constitution, from which the present one is derived by amendment, was "shoved down our throat at midnight".

A referendum and the eventual elections will be battles for the mind of Fijians such as Iona, with the traditional chiefs and many of the preachers ranged against Bainimarama.

In coming weeks, Bainimarama will fire his next salvo at recalcitrant chiefs, with a dossier detailing how they have played politics, and creamed off rents on traditional lands. With about half the Fijians drifting away from ancestral villages to the towns, the hold of the chiefs on them may be weakening anyway.

The commodore is equally scornful of the Methodist leadership, whose flock includes 80 per cent of ethnic Fijians and who have rejected the charter, calling for an immediate return to elections.


"They had been "sowing the seeds of [racial] hatred" since they backed Rabuka's coup, and were part of a traditional conspiracy of power against ordinary Fijians. "The chiefs, the politicians and the talatalas keep them suppressed so that they can take advantage of them every now and then," Bainimarama says.
"


He will fight them on Christian principles. "You know it's very easy to tell the people in the villages, who go to church every Sunday, and the first thing you are taught there is love," he says. "And if you don't love your neighbour, what's the use? But they will understand that."

The fourth arm of Fijian supremacy used to be the military, which has just 15 Indians among its 3527 full-time members (thanks to its rigorous physical standards and low pay, not any exclusion policy, insists a spokesman, Lieutenant-Colonel Mosese Tikaitonga).



Bainimarama - and other officers contacted - insist the military has done a 180-degree turn since supporting Rabuka. "When 1987 came around we thought Rabuka was it, until we realised that the people who had backed Rabuka did it for their own interests," he says.

Whether the standing of the army can help carry the debate remains to be seen. In the first months after the coup, soldiers cracked down on dissenters and petty criminals, with at least two dead from barrack-room bashings and humiliations. The troops returned to bases in May, and incidents have abated, but the lesson lingers.

"People keep inside what they think of this government, because they are very frightened," Iona says.

The Methodist Church is not not lying down. Its head of "Christian citizenship", Mamasa Lasaro, says none of Bainimarama's charges against Qarase or the chiefs have been proven. Fiji was no more or less corrupt than any other comparable country.

The church had set up branches for its minority of non-Fijian believers and was trying to engage with a multicultural reality. "We are struggling,' he admits. "But to say we are very racial, we are very communal - it's quite unfair."

Levelling the playing field could take generations, he says. "I think that is a very superficial view by a few army officers," Lasaro says, "because on the ground there is a feeling of insecurity. On one side the Fijians are very insecure about their identity and their destiny in their own country."

The constitution can also fight back, with Qarase's case for reinstatement coming before Fiji's highest court in March. And once it gets to open politics, Qarase's SDL will not hesitate to play the accusation that December was an "Indian coup", with Chaudhry the Machiavelli behind Bainimarama. "He was very much part of the planning process," Qarase says.

One of the commodore's red-line issues leading to the coup - Qarase's attempt to legislate ethnic Fijian ownership of inshore fishing grounds, known as qoliqoli - is also susceptible to counter-charges of alien influence against native Fijian interests.

"I think he was very much influenced by a few people in the tourist industry," Qarase says.

For his part, Bainimarama thinks the military is the only entity that can bring change. "No other entity that has an influence with the Fijians is professional and apolitical like us," he says.

As for any external influence over the Qoliqoli Bill, it had come from the Maori figure and New Zealand Foreign Minister, Winston Peters, he says. Peters had told Bainimarama he had personally headed off similar legislation because he foresaw "Maori killing Maori" over it.

Bainimarama throws up his hands at the idea Fijians need "generations" of protection. "They want us to remain in that shell, because they can take advantage of that," he says. "We should come out of this shell and think for ourselves, and do things that are right. And one of them is to recognise that another race is in Fiji. That's the only way forward.

"It's a revolution, but it needs to be done in Fiji … we were heading back into our cannibalistic days. We were going to get rid of the Indians and we would be just left on our own. And that would be worse for everyone."




This is an excerpt of the Fiji Time article:


Attack on church upsets chief

Thursday, November 01, 2007

REWA chief Ro Filipe Tuisawau described comments by interim Prime Minister Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama about the church and chiefs as inciteful and would definitely burn whatever bridges left between chiefs, church, the vanua and the interim regime.

Ro Filipe, the nephew of the Roko Tui Dreketi Ro Teimumu Kepa said, "we are just plain sick and tired of his childish and immature comments and shows that once again he is not of national leadership material."

He was reacting to Commodore Bainimarama's observations in an Australian newspaper that the church had been "sowing the seeds of hatred" since they backed Sitiveni Rabuka's coup, and were part of a traditional conspiracy of power against ordinary Fijians. "The chiefs, the politicians and the talatalas keep them suppressed so that they can take advantage of them every now and then," Commodore Bainimarama said in the article.

"The words of a leader must heal and build bridges but this leader destroys and hurts with his words and actions. We can only pray that this nightmare ends soon," Ro Filipe said.

"Despite the insults and hurt, all should be thankful that the Fijian chiefs and people have chosen to respect the rule of law. "As for the Charter, it cannot be a people's Charter because it did not originate from the people. The regime leader has publicly stated that the Fijian communal seats will be abolished and that the Charter structure will be used to achieve that. No right thinking Fijian must ever support this Charter which in the long term will make Fijians political refugees in their own land."


Although, the chiefs are entitled to their opinion however flawed it maybe; the truth of the matter may rest with the experience of Citizens Constitutional Forum (CCF) head, Rev. Aquila Yabaki as outlined in a Fiji Village article. The excerpt of the Fiji Village article:

Yabaki agrees with Interim PM
Former Methodist Church Minister, and CCF Executive Director, Reverand Akuila Yabaki said he agrees with the statement made by Interim Prime Minister, Commodore Frank Bainimarama said the Methodist Church leadership in Fiji has been sowing the seeds of racial hatred in the country since they backed Rabuka's coup in 1987.

Reverand Yabaki said the church leadership supported the last two coups by Rabuka and George Speight, but the big question is why they have changed their stance on the events of December 5th last year.

Reverand Yabaki said he was part of the church leadership in 1987, but he was told to go after he opposed the military coup. Bainimarama said the Methodist leadership was part of a traditional conspiracy of power against the ordinary Fijians and the chiefs, the politicians and the church talatalas keep the ordinary Fijians suppressed so that they can take advantage of them.



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Wednesday, October 24, 2007

A Sporting Kick In The Shins For New Zealand Soccer- Is Rugby Next?

The issue of travel visas for sports has come home to roost in Wellington as a New Zealand Herald article suggests, following the canceled soccer match in North Harbour by the game's ruling organization FIFA.
An opinion article in the Manawatu Standard describes the unintended consequences of such boisterous diplomatic posturing by the Foreign Minister, Winston Peters. If soccer world cup qualifiers where so cavalierly trivialized by the New Zealand Government, perhaps the economic impact report of the 2003 Rugby World Cup in Australia should be a stark reminder of the ripple effects of involving sports and petty politics; displayed recently by the New Zealand Government.

Fiji opposition an own goal
Manawatu Standard | Wednesday, 24 October 2007

Isn't it wonderful how our money can be spent on our behalf by politicians?



New Zealand Football is in line for compensation from taxpayers, possibly to the tune of half a million dollars, because Winston Peters decided he had an issue with Fiji's goalkeeper's father-in-law.

The goalkeeper's offence was being married, or possibly engaged, to a fairly lowly army officer in a country where there is a non-democratic government.

The same Mr Peters, and his Prime Minister, were recently in Europe watching the rugby World Cup, in which a team from Fiji was competing and doing rather well. The country's rugby side had had long links with the Fiji army, but that seems to have been ignored by our pious politicians.

And a cabinet minister is free to holiday in Cuba, which is as undemocratic as it is possible to be, without anyone batting an eye. And what about Tonga? Their move to democracy is half-hearted, yet there is no talk of banning sporting contact with that nation.

Then there is China. Our politicians are busy grovelling and greasing in a bid to establish a free-trade deal, but when did the residents of China last see a ballot box?

Now that the All Whites' home game against Fiji has been moved to Sydney, due to Mr Peters' meddling, what sanctions will our government propose to punish Australia for allowing the hated goalkeeper into their country? A ban on Kiwis holidaying on the Gold Coast, perhaps?

And if the game is going to be played anyway, what will have been achieved by the original ban apart from a big bill for New Zealand's taxpayers and the loss of home advantage for a sporting side fighting to win a place in the next Football World Cup?

Let us hope there is more astute thinking around these issues if Fiji hasn't returned to a form of democracy approved of by our politicians by the time the Rugby World Cup rolls around. If those in Wellington start banning players because it doesn't approve of their relatives' occupations, or their country's type of government, then the compensation bill in 2011 could make the Fiji football fiasco look like chicken feed.

The recent RWC grossed $NZ495m, with half of that going as profits to the IRB. That sort of money as compo would give taxpayers a serious headache if our meddling politicians choose to disrupt that tournament.




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