NZ Duplicity-Member of Fiji I.G, allowed into NZ to see sick wife.

Pramesh Chand, the military-appointed head of Commodore Voreqe (Frank) Bainimarama's interim government in Fiji, is in Auckland to tend to his sick wife. None of the members of Cdre Bainimarama's interim government have been allowed to visit New Zealand since Cdre Bainimarama seized power in a bloodless coup last December.



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However, the most recent travel ban was also placed on a group of Scouts representing Fiji to the annual Jamboree held in New Zealand.

New Zealand Herald's Editorial published in Dec. 22nd 2007, slammed the New Zealand Government's gross inconsistency in applying these travel sanctions.

The excerpt:

Editorial: Excluding Fijian kids an affront to common sense
5:00AM Saturday December 22, 2007

Let the children come.

The group of 10 Fijian Scouts and Guides being kept from coming to New Zealand because of someone's interpretation of the sanctions applied by this country against the military regime must be allowed to attend their jamboree.

This cannot, surely, have been a Government decision, nor even a conscious one taken by senior officials. No doubt the Fijian Scouting movement did receive an indication that applications for their charges to visit here would be problematic. How formal and how definitive was that hint?

The detail does not matter. The fact that any issue has arisen over these children attending an international jamboree breaks the Government's newly minted "Law of Common Sense".

Around 50 Fijian children will be allowed here, so presumably the 10 outcasts have relatives in the military. To use children as young as 10 to score diplomatic points against their parents is beneath all standards to which New Zealand should aspire.The sanctions against members of the regime and their families have been inconsistently applied in any case.

Bizarrely, a serving Education Minister from the Bainimarama Government has visited this country for a conference, with the blessing of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its minister, Winston Peters. In that case the multilateral benefits on education throughout the Pacific were held to be more important than the bilateral relationship.

A Government minister can come, but his colleagues' kids cannot? Keeping 10 children from an international camp in Christchurch - especially Scouts and Guides seeking to become, in the words of their Scouting leader, "good citizens of the planet" - is silly, not serious. It demeans the sanctions and lessens New Zealand in the eyes of our wider Pacific neighbours.

Stuff Magazine published the slanted perspective by Dominion Post's foreign correspondent, Micheal Field. The excerpt:

Bainimarama supporter allowed into NZ
By MICHAEL FIELD - The Dominion Post | Friday, 28 December 2007

A key figure in Fiji's coup regime is in New Zealand tending his sick wife, just a week after 10 Scouts were excluded on the grounds of their relationship to the military. The military-appointed head of the Prime Minister's Office, Pramesh Chand, is in Auckland, according to Fiji media, on compassionate and humanitarian grounds after his wife became ill.

Mr Chand, the former South Pacific trade commissioner based in Auckland, assumed his key role just days after military commander Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama overthrew the elected government of Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase in December 2006.

An Indo-Fijian, Mr Chand has been a strong and outspoken supporter of Commodore Bainimarama, and as recently as last week was condemning New Zealand for its sanctions. News of Mr Chand's entry represents a significant departure from the rules, as his role has been as a key aide to the military, and symbolic of the Indo-Fijian support for the coup.

[Chand] told the Fiji Times he was granted a visa on compassionate and humanitarian grounds and was happy the New Zealand Government was understanding of his situation. Mr Chand said his case was a genuine one as he had to be with his wife, who was taken to hospital as an emergency case. "She was taken in, but was not admitted, and she is now recuperating at home."

[Chand] would not divulge his wife's medical condition, but said she was recovering well. Mr Chand is due to return to Fiji tomorrow. Yesterday, the Fiji Times, one of the strongest critics of the military regime, attacked New Zealand over its "flip-flop" policy, saying it had prevented Scouts' entry, yet had allowed entry to a military-appointed cabinet minister.

"New Zealand must decide once and for all whether her borders are open or closed to the interim regime."

Field's article trivializes the inconsistency factor and also introduces Pramesh Chand as an Indo-Fijian, as if that fact was central to the storyline. Furthermore, Field fallaciously adds that Chand is a symbol of Indo-Fijian support for the 2006 coup. Field's conclusion has fallen victim to the dangerous logical trap known as "Post hoc ergo propter hoc" or coincidental correlation and further erodes his integrity as an objective writer.

The excerpt of Fiji Times Editorial of Thursday Dec. 27th 2007:

Ban all or nothing
Fiji Times Thursday, December 27, 2007

NEW Zealand's travel ban on people linked to the events of December 2006 is a joke. Last week, nine scouts mere teenagers were told not to bother applying for a visa to go to New Zealand to represent the country at a jamboree. These young people were forced to bear the brunt of our neighbour's anger over their parents' involvement in the overthrow of a legally-elected government.

This newspaper does not condone the events of 2006 nor does it support the rape of democratic processes which are designed to serve every citizen of this country. At the same time, we will not be silent over the treatment of innocent children. We know of their plight merely because it is a high-profile case and involves an international event.

There must be many children and families who have faced similar censure in the 12 months since December 2006. They are unlikely to come forward because of the shame associated with the travel ban.New Zealand's diplomatic mission here will not say how many of Fiji's citizens have been refused entry to that country on the basis of their relationship to members of the military or the interim regime.

When the smart sanctions were introduced after the military overthrew Laisenia Qarase's government, the system was seen as a tool with which to hit back at soldiers and those who intended to join the regime. Since the sanctions were introduced, New Zealand has banned a group of scouts and a soccer player. The soccer player was not related to a soldier. He was the fiance of the daughter of a soldier.

At the same time, New Zealand has flung wide her doors to a minister in the interim Government. The excuse? The meeting he attended was a regional event and would benefit and develop the education system here.These are fine sentiments. But would not the same argument work in the case of the scouts?

By mixing with their peers, would they not be enriched by the experience? Would the experience not help mould them into better individuals. Now we find out that the permanent secretary in the Prime Minister's Office, Parmesh Chand, has been allowed into New Zealand. The excuse? Medical reasons.

Again, a fine sentiment, but why Mr Chand and his family and not the boy scouts or the national team goalkeeper?

New Zealand cannot continue to play flip-flop politics with Fiji and other Pacific states. If it wants to ban people involved in the events of 2006 and the interim administration, go ahead. But there can be no grey areas in the ban. It must be all or nothing. If New Zealand decides to choose who is or is not banned on a case by case basis, the ban is an exercise in hypocrisy.New Zealand must decide once and for all whether her borders are open or closed to the interim regime.

Deposed PM misused Taiwan funds: Auditor General's report

Fiji's Auditor General has highlighted the misuse of Taiwanese funds by the Prime Minister's office in his latest report, adding it did not comply with financial regulations.

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Fijian children barred from NZ dream trip

Ten Fijian children aged 10 to 13 have been banned from attending a New Zealand jamboree because their families have links to Fiji's military.About 50 Fijian Scouts and Guides are coming to Christchurch for New Zealand's 18th international jamboree, but 10 of their friends did not apply for visas…

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Need for more dialogue on Lands Issue in Fiji: CCF

There needs to be more dialogue between landowners and tenants to address the issue of land problems, says the Citizens Constitutional Forum.

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Fiji In Color

A pictorial essay by Shifting Baselines blogger, Jennifer Jacquet on the scenes of Fiji's capital, Suva.

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Natadola landowners unhappy

Landowners of Sanasana village, Nadroga, the site of Fiji’s multi-million dollar Natadola tourism project say they do not want Ratu Osea Gavidi to be their spokesman regarding the development.

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The Wheels of Justice- Hate Crime Against Fiji Immigrant.

In a follow up to the S.i.F.M posting, a story of a Fiji immigrant who was killed in an alleged hate crime at Sacramento; which was heard in a preliminary hearing held in the Sacramento County court house.
Satendar Singh's death sent shock waves through Sacramento, which is reflected in the atmosphere in his vigil. The event wove together the fabric of Sacramento society, most from varying stations of life. Youtube video of the Singh's vigil is posted below.



What is disappointing that no Fiji contingent(irrespective of race) attended the vigil in an official capacity, probably because of the person's perceived sexual orientation.

Several news outlets covered the story, among the articles: Sacramento Bee, San Jose Mercury News, Fiji Live.

This video of the events before the attack was captured in released video from a CBS affiliate in Sacramento. Another perspective of the case was covered by KCRA an NBC affiliate, in a Youtube video posted below.



Both Prosecutor and Defense, argued that the video supported their version of events. Defense attorney avoided the term "Hate Crime" and according to her interview in the KCRA report likened Singh's assault, as a derivative of a drunken brawl.

The reason why the defense team is not denoting the term" Hate Crime" because it will open up doors for a Federal Court hearing which does not take "Hate Crimes" lightly and furthermore the penalties associated are more harsh and convicted felons must serve 85% of the prison term, as opposed to the State of California's "Determinate Sentencing" guidelines which allow a "judge broad discretion to select any sentence between two end points in the statutory range" according to Vikram Amar, a Professor of Law at University of California, Hastings College of Law at San Francisco in this legal analysis on a recent U.S Supreme Court case, which may close that particular window of discretion, afforded to the Judge.





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Qarase against dual citizenship

Ousted Fiji Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase says former Fiji residents should not be granted dual citizenship because they can not be loyal to two countries.The issue of dual citizenship has been raised a number of times during the Qarase Government’s reign from 2001 to 2006 but it has been opposed.

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2008 Budget pro-poor, says Academic

Dr. Sukhdev Shah says that Budget 2008 is not anti-poor (contrary to comments by ousted Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase) and is the “best budget we can have under the situations.”

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Govt would have bankrupted Fiji: Academic

An academic believes that the Fiji economy would have bankrupted in next three to five years if the Qarase government had continued in power.

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Two Sides of the Coin- Fiji Coup Anniversary.

In the first anniversary of Fiji's forth coup, two different opinion articles from two New Zealand journalists commenting on the same event, are seemingly polar opposites in terms of context.

One from self-declared Pacific expert, Micheal Field appearing on Stuff website. Judging from the syntax of Field's opinion, it can be summed up that he sure has a large axe to grind.

The quotes used by Field are overwhelmingly from the same political segment and none sourced from the average Josefa.

The excerpt of Field's opinion article:

History repeats as coup eats its own
The Dominion Post | Wednesday, 05 December 2007


On the anniversary of Fiji's latest coup, Michael Field takes a personal look at the year since Voreqe Bainimarama seized power. Just to the west of Suva last month three cars were pulled over by police. That's not uncommon in Fiji, where police routinely stop cars to extract bribes. But this time it was different.

Eleven people were taken to Delainavesi police station. Witnesses remember another car, which delivered "civilians" to the station. But this was Fiji – the "civilians" were soldiers, one of them a sergeant in the Republic of Fiji Military Forces (RFMF) who had thumped me in the back last year.

Agnes Bulatiko, who had been in one of the cars with her partner, Ballu Khan, a Suva IT businessman, remembered how they singled him out, fists smashing into his face. "Then the room filled with officers punching him. It was terrifying."

At first the military were open about that. "He was resisting arrest, that's why he got the beating," Lieutenant-Colonel Mosese Tikoitoga said.

Mr Khan survived but, in other incidents, Tevita Malasebe, Nimilote Verebasaga and Sakiusa Rabaka were beaten to death by the RFMF.

Behind Fiji's tourist bula-smile image lurks an explosive violence. I'd seen it up close during George Speight's 2000 coup when a group of rebel soldiers mercilessly pounded a man sitting beside me.

It's the irrationality of it that makes Fiji so dangerous.

My first experience of Fiji's self- declared leader Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama came when, during Speight's coup, he declared martial law.

A Melanesian from the chiefly island of Bau, he had, earlier that day, forced President Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara – a rival Polynesian chief – out of office. A couple of weeks later he hand-picked banker Laisenia Qarase as premier. The elected prime minister, Mahendra Chaudhry, then a hostage of Speight, was not allowed back.

Commodore Bainimarama has risen through the ranks from seaman in spite of his rather basic education. His military career was modest, the high point his serving as a sub-lieutenant on the Chilean sailing ship Esmeralda, circumnavigating South America. Unlike 1987 coup leader Sitiveni Rabuka, Commodore Bainimarama never served under fire, till the day in 2000 when his own soldiers tried to kill him. Humiliatingly, he survived by jumping out a window and scrambling down a bank.

Eight soldiers died that day, five of them after they had surrendered to loyalists. They were tortured to death.

In 2001 elections were held and Mr Qarase was sworn in. Commodore Bainimarama felt betrayed, believing Mr Qarase had promised not to become a politician. It was the start of bitter personal animosity that was as much to do with the later coup as any declarations over corruption and cleanups.

Just before elections in March 2006 the commodore was talking of "Qarase and his cronies" and saying indigenous politics was "dirty politics – at its worst it is cannibalistic". When Mr Qarase won again Commodore Bainimarama called a press conference to say democracy wasn't about numbers of votes on election day. He was so angry when I questioned his view that I feared he might hit me.

Commodore Bainimarama seldom takes questions now, feeling threatened by the insubordination of the lower castes. Tensions grew, in part over a couple of parliamentary bills that would have given indigenous villages control over the seabed and foreshore and another that would have given amnesty to those behind Speight's coup.

Toward the end of last year he flew to Wellington for a reunion with part of his family serving with the New Zealand Army. At Auckland airport, acting as though he was still in Fiji, he gave Mr Qarase two weeks to quit, or else. He was good to his word and, citing rampant corruption and the "doctrine of necessity", he took over, announcing a "cleanup" of government.

Two days before, late at night, soldiers had driven through Suva residential streets to fire mortars into the harbour in a surreal operation to fend off Australian warships and special forces soldiers they believed threatened them.

The coup came on a brilliantly mellow morning; suddenly the green, flak- jacketed soldiers were everywhere downtown. Oddly though, few had magazines in their weapons.

A YEAR ON, Commodore Bainimarama is yet to bring any corruption prosecutions and his doctrine has yet to be tested in court. Fiji's economy has dived, the court system plunged into disarray, people have been detained and beaten and media freedoms curtailed.

The intellectual bankruptcy of the coup was illustrated at the recent Pacific Forum in Tonga where Commodore Bainimarama, under pressure from Australia and New Zealand, agreed to elections by March 2009. He then told Fiji media that he would not let Mr Qarase's people stand. Commodore Bainimarama's single riskiest move since his coup has been to send his soldiers to close the Great Council of Chiefs (GCC), crushing traditional leadership.

Suva is an intimate town: Commodore Bainimarama lives right next to the official residence of the New Zealand high commissioner. But the relationship is not neighbourly and on June 14 high commissioner Michael Green was expelled.

At an All Blacks v Fiji game a couple of weeks earlier the military strongman had been outraged when Mr Green was given guest of honour status. "The rugby union has done this country a disservice. Out of 800,000 people in Fiji, they went and nominated the enemy of the day in a Kiwi to be chief guest."

I flew to Nadi to cover the expulsion, only to be detained for the night in what they called the "black room" at the immigration detention centre. Immigration Director Viliame Naupoto told local media I "wanted to resist", something Mr Khan was supposed to have done.

Previous Fiji governments had also banned me. Several sources have said this ban followed a story outlining how Commodore Bainimarama's coup had been a Muslim coup. Those who have done the best out of the regime overthrow all belong to a small Suva Muslim group, and the key intellectuals behind it include one advocating the removal of indigenous land protection.

Former vice-president Ratu Joni Madraiwiwi warned that among the indigenous there was "a sense of festering resentment" building. Though the coup was multi-ethnic in character, it looked like a counter-coup staged by Mr Chaudhry.

"The government is unfortunately perceived by many in the Fijian heartland as the handmaiden of Mr Chaudhry. Many Fijians are convinced this was an Indo-Fijian coup. Still others think it was a Muslim coup because of the association with a few prominent Muslims. These perceptions, even if mistaken, pass for reality from which conclusions are drawn," Ratu Madraiwiwi said.

Mr Khan is Muslim and, as the coup has worn on, it has become clear that the minority groups who at first prospered are discovering revolutions, even Fijian ones, tend to eat their own.

The indigenous majority has been alienated by the coup. The RFMF is almost completely indigenous but it has always claimed its training removed the vanua or clan from soldier. Ratu Madraiwiwi says Fijians have realised that the best place for the military in future is in the barracks.

"There being no external security threats as such, the military is now a law unto itself. Any meaningful attempt to prevent any further coups must deal with this issue. If not we are destined to travel this weary path repeatedly in the future, periodic hostages to the messianic ambitions of one military officer after another."

Fiji is afflicted with a sense that more is to come. Everything seems incomplete and many a scenario is offered; very little is optimistic.

* Fairfax correspondent Michael Field has covered Fiji politics since 1976 and wrote Speight of Violence: Inside Fiji's 2000 coup. He is barred from entering Fiji.

The other opinion article published by the New Zealand Herald, appears to be exceedingly fair and balanced in comparison and quotes from a wider spectrum of people than Field.

This is the excerpt of Angela Gregory's opinion piece:

Time to rebuild bridges
5:00AM Saturday December 01, 2007
By Angela Gregory


Mahesh Prasad lives in a tin shack with 6 members of his family.

Photo / Dean Purcell
Fiji coups

Shalesh Vinay has met Helen Clark, has even had his photo taken with her, and thinks she's a nice person. But he can't stand her politics. The 33-year-old hotel worker from Fiji's Coral Coast, north of Suva, has lost half his income since last December's coup.

He accepts coup leader Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama should take some of the blame. But the focus of his resentment is the ongoing travel advice maintained by New Zealand of security risks to tourists in Fiji. "The travel advisories have been too harsh. To be honest, I blame Helen Clark. I think she is punishing ordinary Fijians, the poor people, when it is a government-to-government issue."

Vinay served Clark when she attended a 2002 Pacific Forum retreat at the Lagoon Resort in Pacific Harbour, operated by New Zealand couple Jim and Heather Sherlock. The resort has had only about 19 per cent occupancy this year compared with an average 65 per cent occupancy in previous years.

The Sherlocks have had to cut back staff hours, with some workers getting only $75 a week. They say they weren't as severely affected by the 2000 coup, as the travel warnings were not maintained for so long.

Like the Sherlocks, Brad Johnstone, a former All Black and former coach for the Fiji national rugby side who runs the Funky Fish budget resort in the Mamanuca Island group, also blames the ongoing travel advisories and "continuing negative press for a big drop in business". He says the Fijian Backpackers' Association normally runs at 80 to 100 per cent capacity all year but in the past year occupancy has fallen off to 40 per cent at times.

Johnstone says New Zealand should be helping to get a political system in place in Fiji where elections are not based along racial lines. "The country will not be able to prosper until Indians living here feel Fijian ... I'd love to see my country get in behind Fiji."

The Sherlocks' staffer Vinay lives in the rural area of Nakaulevu where he supports his wife, daughter, parents, grandfather and uncle. He has worked in tourism since he was 21 and has skills as a barman, cook and waiter.

Before the coup he used to pick up extra jobs, but they have now dried up. His wife, Irene Resma, had worked as a cook in the Pacific Harbour village but the restaurant closed after the coup because there were too few customers.

Vinay has to pay the mortgage on the family land, electricity and water bills for three houses, groceries for seven and medical expenses for his father who is a heart patient. "It's too much for me ... we are really struggling. I have to do my budget carefully - I can't spend one dollar unwisely, so no new clothes or presents."

Vinay reads the newspaper every day but says there is no good news in it for him. "We don't understand politics. All we understand is money in our pockets to feed our family." Despite the bleak outlook he supports Bainimarama who has "done some good things", like moving towards a multi-racial Fiji.

In the slums of Suva, dogs rummage through roadside rubbish not cleared for weeks, children who should be at school play on water pipes crossing polluted streams and taro grows between tin shacks and old car wrecks. A man sits behind a car wash sign with a bucket and hose but no customers.

There are about a dozen squatter settlements scattered around Suva, many populated by Indians displaced from the sugarcane-growing areas after the Native Land Trusts Board discouraged the renewal of land leases.

Living in a tin shack perched on an unstable mud bank is Mahesh Prasad with five of his children - the youngest aged 12 - and a grandchild. Up rickety wooden steps he sits on patchy linoleum with a bowl of kava, ready to serve his visiting brother.
[Prasad]once worked the sugarfields at Rakiraki but "the natives" took back the land. Only his two daughters have jobs, both working for the Government. Prasad has had odd jobs like tiling and building maintenance but it's been hard to get work since the coup.

New Zealand should be more understanding, he says. He wants his sons to work in New Zealand to boost the family income. "Can you help us?" he asks, unaware the New Zealand Government has taken Fiji off a list of Pacific countries that can use a new temporary visitor workers scheme.

About a kilometre away down Ratu Dori Rd, "no squatting" and "no planting"signs have been erected in anticipation of a new housing development.

Living at number 17 is indigenous Fijian Fulori Sicinilawa who has been squatting there for seven years with her brother, aunt and husband. Her husband has a job doing deliveries, the others are unemployed. Now all the residents have been told to get out with just a week's notice. "There are not enough jobs in Suva,"she says.

"This land is going to be vacated for new housing, we have to pull out our cassava and taro ... we don't know where we are going." A friend, Akisi Lewatu, says she has no job and stays at home and looks after her two children aged five and 16. "I blame the Government."

Another woman says she knows nothing about the Government and is nervous sharing her views with a reporter. "I only eat and rest. I don't know anything." She votes in national elections but claims to have no interest in politics. "I don't feel I know enough. Sometimes I listen to the news but I don't want to think about it. We mind our business."

Mark Hirst, president of the Fiji-New Zealand Business Council in Suva says jobs in construction and tourism have declined dramatically. Hirst believes tourism might not have been hurt so much but for the reaction from New Zealand and what he calls misleading media portrayal of soldiers on the streets eight months after the coup.

"They made it look worse than it was ... you'd have had to come to Fiji before to know there is no risk."

His vice-president, Bevin Severinsen, is also disappointed at how New Zealand is treating a close trading partner to which it sells far more than it imports back.
New Zealand should try to repair relations and start building bridges, he said.

"It's now a year on. It's time we sat down and start to find ways to get the show on the road."

Severinsen sees New Zealand adopting a hardline, black and white foreign policy to Fiji "yet other things we do are grey". Though not supporting the coup Severinsen believes the end result is the "best thing that could have happened".

"It is probably the first time in Fiji's history that the country has seriously committed to trying to rid itself of all things which affect a developing country ... like corruption, a massively oversized public service and poor performing infrastructure."

Whether the new administration succeeded remained to be seen "but at least they show resolve". "Frank [Bainimarama] is a dictator but he should be applauded for trying to do the right thing. I believe a lot of people are warming to him."

Severinsen concedes the beating by military and police of Ballu Khan, a New Zealand citizen, over an alleged assassination plot was unhelpful but that such behaviour went on before the coup. He is critical of the travel blacklists imposed by countries including New Zealand against those in the interim Government and their families.

The travels ban were extended, following the expulsion of the New Zealand High Commissioner Michael Green in June, to cover all those appointed to head government departments and agencies, or placed on statutory boards, and their immediate family members.

Severinsen says it is putting off genuine people with good intentions to help get Fiji back on its feet. He says the business council has had dialogue on many levels with the new administration and found it very accessible, more so than the former regime.

Caz Tebbutt, president of the Fiji-Australia Business Council, has no issue with sanctions but says some can be counterproductive. "What we like to ask is for politicians overseas to understand the punitive impacts on the private sector ... businesses here have taken a battering this year."

He said Fiji's neighbours should adopt the 24-hour rule. "Stop and think, because once sanctions are put on, they are hard to take off." But Ulai Taoi, president of the Fiji Indigenous Business Council, believes the stance of New Zealand and Australia is correct, although many Fijian-owned businesses have been badly hurt. Turnover has halved at his office supplies company.

Taoi, who was roughed up in a military cell after being accused of creating anti-Bainimarama blog sites, says: "This is the fourth coup. I am concerned this will never end, it is something the military has picked up and will wield every now and then."

Local media tried to position Fijians against New Zealand but he believed grassroots Fijian resentment remained targeted on the military takeover.

Gregory's other article "Post Card from Fiji" is also a good read.




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Fiji Interim Minister Wins Defamation Case Against Fiji Times Ltd.

The Suva High Court has ordered the Fiji Times newspaper to pay the interim cabinet minister, Lekh Ram Vyashnoi, nearly 19-thousand US dollars in damages for defamation. The award is for articles and letters to the editor published in the Fiji Times between 1999 and 2003.

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The High Life Vs National Priorities.

Fiji Times(FT) editorial of Friday November 30th regarding the issue of the official residence of the Prime Minister is convoluted, illogical and abhorrent. This is in reaction to the story, that the preliminary costs for the proposed residence, exceeded F$1 Million; as reported in a FT article.
The excerpt of the FT article:

$6.4m burden

MARY JOHNS
Friday, November 30, 2007

PREPARATORY work on a new official residence to house prime ministers would have cost more than $1million, former Government officials confirmed yesterday. And files in the Prime Ministers Office show that around $6.4million would have been spent on the total project.

Close to $500,000 in consultancy fees should have paid in May this year. Interim Prime Minister Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama said the proposed home was unnecessary.

He also accused deposed prime minister Laisenia Qarase of spearheading the plan for the official residence. When approached last night Mr Qarase said: "I've never seen the plan. There was nothing authorised. Who was the architect?"

Documents released by the interim administration office showed that taxpayers would have paid $1.5million for an official residence for the head of government. Located on 2.4 hectares of State land at Muanikau, the proposed home would have been the centerpiece of a traditional-style homestead.

Additional costs included:

- $1.4m public entertainment area and $850,000 for a block fence around the property;

- $140,000 for a driveway, according to estimates by the Public Works Department;

- $200,000 on mechanical services;

- $120,000 for the maintenance of existing quarters which would become part of the complex; and

- the swimming pool with associated change room and pump room was estimated to cost $400,000. Planners allocated $120,000 for a standby pump and generator, $150,000 for a security system, $70,000 for a garage and $150,000 for site works.

Other estimates were:

- $25,000 for a guardhouse;

- $130,000 for a bure or shed;

- $90,000 for landscaping'

- $100,000 for water and sewerage system;

- $15,000 for a water tank; and

- $75,000 for solar system.

Former chief executive officer in the Prime Minister's Office Jioji Kotobalavu said no one could estimate the cost of the project. "The design works were not done," he said. "If anyone wants proof, it's in the 2007 Budget because there was $1m allocated for the site preparatory works because the land is swampy. The residence was not for Mr Qarase personally and it should not be misconstrued."

Mr Kotobalavu said the Prime Minister's official residence on Richards Road leaked, was rat-infested and not suitable for a prime minister. He said plans had been made to hold a public competition for architects to design the official residence because the house would belong to the people of Fiji.

The interim administration said the plans for the home were made at a time when the country could not afford such a project. Fiji is the only country in the Pacific that does not have an official residence for the Prime Minister.

Reactions to the FT article was in their web site's "Have Your Say" column.
Below are selected posts, which are overwhelming against the project:

Ratu Peni Gavidi of Suva, Fiji (3 hours and 4 minutes ago)
Its not whether Qarase as PM should have an official residence. It is a matter of principle. To spend such a huge amount on a house when the country is swimming in poverty, is it just? Even Prime Ministers of some of the most wealthy nations dont have residences that Qarase wanted for himself.

A Prime Minister should be seen as being careful with the citizens money and not to impress his family and friends and the rest of the world how lavish is his lifestyle. Qarase if he wanted to could have spent far less to repair his leaky roof if he wanted to.
He was not living in a tent, but because he has access to peoples' money, he didnt give two hoots to improve the lives of the general population.His personal living is all that mattered. Those seeking corruption evidence should seal their lips as this is one of them. Its flagrant disregard for citizens money. Keep going Frank!!


prem singh of papatoetoe auckland (4 hours and 47 minutes ago)
What a stupid suggestion that it was for fijian people.How many ordinary fijians have seen houses like that?yes in dreams.Another coverup by LQ.Just lies after lies.Why cant they admit it was for LQ.

Don't they have guts? Why drag all common people to hide behind.Have some guts and face the pain. good on the present govt.keep the pressure on and let all common fijians see for themselves what was done behind their backs.God is always fair and he will help.look after the poor and their blessings are more than anything to fight crime.God Bless.


alisi waqa of Suva (4 hours and 50 minutes ago)
What more do you nexpect from Qarase? Increased VAT,controversial bills to appease communal bigots,religious bigotary,institunalised discrimination,on going plots against the Fijian Army,hoodwinking the masses ..the list can go on and on

We know that Corruption and explotation are close cousins.


vulagi of United States (4 hours and 52 minutes ago)
Please no Official Residence for PM because they don't last.Divert that money to help the poor.Eveyone should sacrifice inorder to archive our goal ie A Better Fiji for Everyone.I beg you leaders just live in your residence during this hard times and don't use big pajeros for official car. The cost of those expensive vehicles could boost the schoolarship fund at PSC to educate more doctors.

Other cost breakdowns for the project was outlined in a Fiji Village article.

The excerpt of the Fiji Village article:

Qarase denies claims
The plans for the Official Prime Minister's home to be built by the Qarase led government has been made public with estimates of the costs for the construction of the official residence.

Plans that were prepared for the proposed new residence back in November 2006 have been revealed with estimates for the construction of the home and various facilities.

The total amount stands at $6.44 million dollars. The estimates include $1.4 million for the construction of a 892.5 square meter Public Entertainment area, a semi private residence costing $1.52 million dollars, a swimming pool valued at $400,000, a $130,000 bose vakatunuloa or meeting house, a $140,000 driveway and car parking area, a $150,000 security system, a stand by generator and pump worth $120,000, consultancy fees amounting to $585,500, mechanical services amounting to $200,000 and a 1,675 meters block work boundary fence valued at $850,000.

The design plans were made in November 2006 and the estimates are based on requested forwarded in September last year. There was no approved plan in place for the official house to be built so I do not know why there is a lot of fuss over the plan to build an official residence for the Prime Minister.

Speaking to Village news, Ousted Prime minster, Laisenia Qarase said that the Interim Prime Minister should realize that plans were not even drawn up for the new residence. Qarase also revealed that the house would not be his personal property but an assets of the Government and the Interim Administration should consider carrying this out.

Former Permanent Secretary in the Prime Minister's office, Jioji Kotobalavu has clarified that proper planning for the official residence of the Prime Minister was not complete last year.

[Kotobalavu] told Village News this morning that a piece of land was identified and one million dollars was allocated in this year’s budget by the ousted SDL government for initial works at the site. [Kotobalavu] said the 6.4 million dollars highlighted for the complex could only be an estimate.

This is the excerpt of Ft editorial:

A home for us all

EDITORIAL COMMENT
Friday, November 30, 2007

THE nation must provide the prime minister with an official residence commensurate with the position of head of government. Recent revelations show that the last official home of the prime minister was in a deplorable state during its occupancy.

The roof leaked and the residence failed to meet Occupational Health and Safety standards. It was not possible for the head of government to host dignitaries, let alone international guests, at the official home.

There is little wonder that the Richards Road facility did not meet standards expected of a prime minister's domicile. The archaic colonial structure was at various stages in its history a minister's home, the headquarters for a regional broadcasting organisation and the residence of functionaries within the colonial service.

No prime minister of Fiji should have to put up with the indignity of living in a leaking home. No head of government should be forced to host guests outside of the official residence just because the home is less than dignified.

The Governor of the Reserve Bank, several heads of diplomatic missions and chief executives of large multinational companies have better homes than the quarters provided for the prime minister.

Commodore Frank Bainimarama is fortunate that he wears two hats for his hat as commander of the army affords him better accommodation than his predecessor in the Prime Minister's Office.

The fact remains, however, that there is no official residence for the prime minister. Before Fiji elects its next government, the nation must build a new home for the person who will lead the nation.

The residence must be a place where international heads of state can be entertained in comfort and style. It should also be a resting place for someone shouldered with the burdens of State.

This is a home which belongs to the people of Fiji, not the incumbent, and it must reflect the dignity of all the people of this multicultural nation. At the same time consideration must be given to security and the need to host large functions which involve members of the public.

As the interim government takes the country towards democracy, it must not forget that the time will come for an elected head of Fiji. That person, like the President, must have a home of which we can all be proud.

For certain the FT Editorial's flawed concept of providing an official residence for the deposed PM borders on 'keeping up with the Jones'. Especially so, when the Editorial compares the size of the Reserve Bank Governor's house with the current PM's residence at Richards Rd.

If, the roof of the Richards Road property is leaking as the FT editorial claims and was declared non-compliant using the Occupational Health & Safety standards; then by all means the roof should be replaced, but certainly not the entire house.

When the most of Fiji are coming to terms with the repeated water cuts, simply because of the aging infrastructure and when down-stream water pipes are literally bursting at the seams; it seems more prudent to fix the problem that affects the majority of people than considering to build a palace for a single person. Of course, prudent thinking is not the strong suite of the FT Editor, for even cordoning such extravagance and wasteful spending.


Fiji Times article even interviews the Divisional Engineer Water Engineer. This is the excerpt:

Engineer reveals cause of water woes

Friday, November 30, 2007




Image (L)Divisional water engineer, Samuela Tubui in Wailoku yesterday

THE Waila and Tamavua reservoirs have 140 mega liters of water more than enough to cater for the 350,000 people living in the Suva-Nausori corridor, says acting Divisional Water Engineer Samuela Tubui.

Mr Tubui said the problem was not the lack of water but the ability to get that water to homes. In the past three weeks, residents at Cunningham have had their supply cut at night while residents of Nasinu have suffered disruptions since Saturday. Not all of them have had water carted to their homes because of the large area affected.

Mr Tubui said the main problem was the leaks in pipes and the breakdown of water pumps at the various pumping stations.

"We are in the process of buying two new pumps for the Savura and Waimanu pumping station and this is an effort to prevent prolonged water cuts like the one experienced over the past week," he said.

Mr Tubui said they had repaired the damaged and leaking pipes and water supply to affected areas had been restored. "The past few days had been very challenging for us because the pump at the Waila pumping station had a breakdown but that has been fixed."

Mr Tubui said the two new pumps, estimated to cost $230,000 each, would help the existing water pumps at Savura and Waimanu pump water to homes and ease the pressure. He said another project that was ongoing was the rehabilitation of Tamavua and Waila stations.

"The main idea behind this project is to improve the efficiency of the service provided by the two stations," he said.
End of story

It is obvious that the Fiji Times Editor places more value in the construction of a new PM's residence than, providing solutions to the plight of the ordinary people who have been plagued by reoccurring and unending water problems.
The rationale employed by the FT Editor is called 'living beyond your means' and the Editor should be ridiculed for placing the luxury of the deposed PM, well above the needs and concerns of the entire nation.

Labelling the proposed PM's residence as a "Home For Us All" is misleading, as well as grossly insulting to the intelligence of the grassroots, most of whom still resort to drinking water from wells and wash their clothes in the nearby rivers and streams.

While it is acknowledged that, the Head of State should have a residence worthy of entertaining diplomatic visitors; then it is logical to have those State functions held at the President's house, since he is the head of State, not the Prime Minister.

The President official residence is relatively large enough to cater for those functions as it did during the past held garden parties, so why waste valuable resources to build another Ivory tower, when there are other avenues available that may be more feasible and cost-effective.




Seed Newsvine









Club Em Designs

Fiji's Giant Leap Forward- A Threat To The Elite Minority?

Differing views on the matter of Fijian Affairs Department and its impact on the lifestyles of native commoners. One such view was detailed in a Letter to Fiji Sun Editor.

Fijian progress
Last updated 11/28/2007 8:21:17 AM

It is important to have a clear view of Mahendra Chaudhry’s perceptions (FS 26/11) relating to the position of the Fijian people given that he wields a lot of power in the interim government.

This is because I think his thinking that compartmentalisation is delaying Fijian progress” needs to be debated widely because it has been proved over time to be quite untrue. I also think that the rest of the community are largely no better than the Fijian community itself given the fairly advanced civilisation from which they all emanate.

In fact I think the giant forward steps that the Fijian people have achieved in the 133 years since when Fiji was ceded to Great Britain are so large that it is quite frightening. Even more so is the progress we have achieved can only be viewed as “a steep climb” in a proverbial progress graph.

Now, tamper that with the fact that the Fijian people are poised to reach the million mark in their numbers in several years from today. Yes we have progressed, and how much of that progress can be attributed to what Mr Chaudhry sees as “compartmentalisation” is interesting.

In fact the use of that term misleads somewhat because in reality what has happened can be better described as “incubation”. And let us face it, it has paid off handsomely for a race of people who needed to catch up in a modern world that is galloping faster today than it did yesterday and even more so tomorrow.

Perhaps Mr Chaudhry is questioning the rate of that progress. So the question we would have to address is how much faster really could the Fijian people grow, without destroying the fabric of their own society?

While it is relatively easy for Naigulevu to point fingers at the Interim Minister for Finance regarding the policy, much can be said of the reluctance of some elite Fijians to remove the yoke of oppression and compartmentalization which has served Naigulevu and people of his ilk quite well.

Although, Naigulveu claims the compartmentalization is in fact a period of "incubation"; begging the question, of the need for an unending incubation period. If a segment of the population is perpetually in incubation, it ceases to become a cocoon of protection, but lingers dangerously as an incinerator for aspirations. A death sentence to the native commoner's hope for social mobility

Another correspondence also commends the initiative of removing vestiges of colonialism, which Fijian Affairs Board is an icon of. The letter to the Fiji Daily Post Editor outlines those points:

Downgrading ministry
28-Nov-2007

Sir,

WHILE we are all concerned about such move, we should remain positive that the change will bring about the desired benefits and peace among the Fijian community.

Let’s hope that the Interim Government will explain in details as to why such action has been made and its benefit to the Indigenous people. There is nothing to be worried about.

Laisenia Qarase’s brainwashing tactics has a purpose and that is to incite uncertainty in the hearts of the indigenous Fijians especially in giving “half-cooked” information to the people at village grassroots level. Don’t allow this good initiative by the Interim Government to shake us. Dialogue is the way to solve sensitive issues that affect the Fijian people.

The Interim Government has a combination of people who do feel for the heartaches, struggles and difficulties we encounter.

They are trying to build on from what we currently have. The Prime Minister and his Cabinet are mere people whom we can easily talk to and ask for an explanation for the unexpected downgrading of the Fijian Affairs Ministry to Department of Indigenous Affairs. Certainly, the Fijian Affairs Act is still there and it cannot be removed or amended without our consent. Also, it is believed that all institutions remain intact.

Let’s all pray for the indigenous community as we may have felt sad from the surprising news. It will definitely take time for us to understand what’s happening and where we are going. Definitely we are going through “self-help” direction where there will be no more “spoon-feeding”.


Maika Moroca
Fiji Labour Party(Secretary-Fijian Wing)

An article published in the Fiji Sun, questions the need for handouts for indigenous Fijians; which indirectly creates a dependency mentality and undermines the native commoner in seeking a new destiny in the era of IT, cellphones and Supercomputers.

Don’t depend on hand outs: Fijians told
Last updated 11/28/2007 8:13:53 AM

A former politician believes indigenous Fijians should learn how to be more self-reliant and not to depend so much on hand outs.

Former Party of National Unity member and Labour minister, Meli Bogileka said it would make a lot of difference if indigenous Fijians were encouraged to set up their own businesses which could start from selling vegetables to running a tourist driven business.

"We are all proud of being called indigenous Fijians because we are indigenous on this land but we have to also adjust ourselves to changes that are happening around us," he said. "For example technology is changing very fast."

Mr Bogileka said there was no reason to panic because more people were alarmed by the change in name of the Ministry of Fijian affairs to the Department of Provincial Development and Indigenous and Multiethnic Affairs.

"If it can bring about good changes to the indigenous Fijians than it should be encouraged but there is no reason to panic," said Mr Bogileka.
"I believe the old system used will still be the same and the rights of the indigenous people will be intact."

The country had been through 35 years under Fijian-government rule and questions should be asked whether the indigenous Fijians had benefited from it or still lived as one of the poorest people in the country.

Mr Bogileka said one industry to be encouraged for indigenous people is the tourism industry because they are naturally gifted for that. The hospitality, smile and friendliness was already there and there was no need to politicize things and be self pitying.

Fiji Times Editorial of Monday November 26th 2007, regarding the issue of relegating the Ministry of Fijian Affairs to Department status; may be an opinion well entrenched and intertwined with a premise flaunted by the SDL party:

"Many Fijians will see the downgrading of their ministry as a reflection of how the interim Government perceives the indigenous community and their concerns, interests and rights. And, by extension, it will also reaffirm their belief and suspicions of the interim Government's opinion of the Great Council of Chiefs.

It will also reaffirm the suspicions of many indigenous Fijians that this coup is supported by non-Fijians and aims to water down the powers and interests of their community".

Although, the issue of downgrading of status may be a concern from some indigenous quarters; it trivializes an interesting precedent for the nation as a whole, called 'the greater good'.

This is the entire excerpt of the Fiji Time Editorial:

Indigenous affairs

FT EDITORIAL COMMENT
Monday, November 26, 2007

THE downgrading of the Ministry of Fijian Affairs to a department will not go down well with the indigenous community. Already we are beginning to see signs of Fijian chiefs and individuals stirring and murmuring against the interim Government's decision to convert the Ministry of Fijian Affairs to the Department of Indigenous Affairs, Provincial Development and Multi-Ethnic Affairs.

This department, under the portfolio of the Prime Minister, will most likely have a State minister and will cover the affairs of the indigenous people as well as the Indians, part Europeans and everyone else who falls under the multi-ethnic banner.

Many Fijians will see the downgrading of their ministry as a reflection of how the interim Government perceives the indigenous community and their concerns, interests and rights.

And, by extension, it will also reaffirm their belief and suspicions of the interim Government's opinion of the Great Council of Chiefs. It will also reaffirm the suspicions of many indigenous Fijians that this coup is supported by non-Fijians and aims to water down the powers and interests of their community.

Since December 5, 2006, indigenous affairs have been subjected to a whirlwind of change starting from the top the council of chiefs going all the way down to land.
The GCC was suspended by the interim PM after the chiefs refused to endorse the President's choice with the blessing of Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama for Vice-President.

Like an errant child, the council was punished with a review commissioned by the ministry to look into functions and its membership.

And the changes haven't ended there. As announced in the 2008 Budget, the Ministry of Lands will receive a mandate from the People's Charter to conduct land reforms including a review of ALTA.

As the leader of the interim Government, Commodore Bainimarama needs to explain why he downgraded the Ministry of Fijian Affairs to a department. While his motives appear unclear at that stage, he owes the people, especially the indigenous community, an explanation.

He must also be prepared to face the backlash of his decision and there will be backlash from individuals, provincial councils and chiefs and he should not ignore the concerns of the indigenous community.

They deserve to know why.

It is also concerning that, the Fiji Times Editor actively preys on the fears of the indigenous community as seen during the pre-2000 coup days. An independent analysis of the Fiji Times reportage before the 2000 coup confirms this.

It is somewhat disingenuous for the publication not to balance the editorial with the justifications of not having a separate Ministry for Fijian Affairs or even raise factual examples and outline how the Ministry of Fijian Affairs have failed the indigenous community on many levels and on many occasions.

Nor does the Fiji Times Editorial even factor in the gross and willful incompetence of the Ministry of Fijian Affairs and their culpability of not facilitating audits for the accounts from the various Provincial Councils, in decades. The issue of FAB audits were addressed in an earlier S.i.F.M post titled "Few and Far Between".

One of the biggest omissions was the analyzing exactly, what will the indigenous grassroots derive from the status quo.

The editorial further inquires erroneously of the motives of the Interim Government:

"As the leader of the interim Government, Commodore Bainimarama needs to explain why he downgraded the Ministry of Fijian Affairs to a department.

While his motives appear unclear at that stage, he owes the people, especially the indigenous community, an explanation."

For a person not well informed with Fiji politics but pretends to be, should not belittle themselves any longer, by believing in Qarase's self-aggrandizement.

To suggest or think that the Fiji Times Editorial was an altruistic or a benevolent defence over the Ministry of Fijian Affairs issue, simply due to their moral and holier-than-thou position would be a gullible reaction at worst.
At best: acknowledging that the only time Fiji Times profit increases is, by the sensationalism done in over magnifying divisive issues that intends to separate and divide segments; rather than amplify the common threads of society that binds people.

It seems rather juvenile for the Fiji Times to ignore the radical paradigm shift announced by the Interim Prime Minister, regarding the clean up of colonial era, native Fijian institutions, which have been extorting the livelihood of the native commoner under the guise of Fijian culture.

Fiji Times seems to go out of their way to quote the xenophobic SDL party and their point guard Laisenia Qarase. Yet, the Fiji Times have also demonstrated their pathetic and inadequate initiative to decipher Qarase's rhetoric/ lip service that have left the common native perpetually enslaved within a fiefdom, constantly bombarded with ingrained fears and warnings alluding that, foreigners will invade and pillage their land. A synonym for the 'fortress mentality', elongating the social slavery of the common native of Fiji.

Laisenia Qarase vigorously defends the Ministry of Fijian Affairs status quo:

"Mr Qarase said indigenous Fijians were not ready to stand on a level playing field with other races and needed to be treated as separate and distinct in identity.

“I don't think the Fijian people are ready for that independence. I think the Fijian people are proud of their culture and traditions and their institutions,” he said.

What facts does Qarase base his opinions on? Does he speak for all native Fijians? Was there an accurate opinion poll which Qarase was referring to, or is this more of an opinion rather than fact?

Mr Qarase also hit out at interim Finance Minister Mahendra Chaudhry for removing the tax free status of the Fijian Trust Fund. He said the FTF was established to fund the operations of the Great Council of Chiefs and other activities for the general good of indigenous people.

He said the village, tikina, provincial councils along with the Fijian Affairs Board, Native Land Trust Board and GCC were part of the “Fijian psyche”.

“I think it would be a sad day if Fijian thinking moves away from that position because I'm very proud of being a Fijian. I want a separate identity for Fijians,” said Mr Qarase.

“We are an ethnic group different from other ethnic entities and all ethnic entities are proud of their identities,” he said."

What Qarase's rhetoric fails to address is, detailing exactly how much monetary rewards are actually reaching the lowest common denominator; which he claims are the benefactors of the Fijian Trust Fund?

Clearly, the "Fijian Psyche" is the actual cream from this Trust Fund that, had been funneled into exuberant projects like the new Great Council of Chiefs complex, financed along with state loans that were subsequently converted mysteriously to grants. This grant has also been questioned by the Interim Prime Minister, in an article in Fiji Village.

Bainimarama Questions $20M Grant
Interim Prime Minister Commodore Frank Bainimarama has today clarified that the tax benefits have been taken away from the Fijian Holdings Unit Trust and the Fijian Trust Fund in the 2008 budget because only the elite Fijians have been benefitting from these institutions for years.

Bainimarama has rejected suggestions by terminated Great Council of Chiefs Chairman Ratu Ovini Bokini that this decision will affect the handing out of scholarships.

He said a transparent process will always be followed for the scholarship awards but his main concern is the Laisenia Qarase government's decision a few years ago to convert the $20 million loan to a grant for the shares bought in Fijian Holdings.
Bainimarama said the $20 million which was not paid back was taxpayer’s money and the ordinary Fijians did not benefit from that decision.

He also questions Ratu Ovini on the personal loans that were given out to certain individuals through the FAB.

This conversion (under the Deuba Accord 2000)was made under Qarase's 2001 Interim administration that, failed to relinquish the reins of power to the 1999 elected People's Coalition; an act which Qarase now demands from the 2007 Interim Fiji Government. An article published in 2001, outlines this dichotomy in the 20 million grant.

The excerpt of the article:

FIJIAN HOLDINGS LTD: WHY AN INDEPENDENT INQUIRY IS NEEDED, AND THE ROLE OF THE FIJI DEVELOPMENT BANK IN FINANCING SHARES IN FIJIAN HOLDING?

ON THE 13TH JULY 2000 THE INTERIM PRIME MINISTER MR LAISENIA QARASE PRESENTED TO THE GREAT COUNCIL OF CHIEFS A BLUEPRINT FOR THE PROTECTION AND ADVANCEMENT OF INDIGENOUS FIJIANS AND ROTUMANS.

THE BLUEPRINT INCLUDED A DECISION TO CONVERT THE $20 MILLION INTEREST-FREE LOAN TO THE FIJIAN AFFAIRS BOARD TO A GOVERNMENT GRANT ON THE FOLLOWING CONDITIONS;

1. TRANSFER OF $1 MILLION 'B' CLASS SHARES HELD BY THE FAB IN FIJIAN HOLDINGS LIMITED TO EACH OF THE 14 PROVINCES. 2. BALANCE OF $6 MILLION TO REMAIN WITH FAB [AS EQUITY IN FHL]

FIJIAN HOLDINGS WAS PRIMARILY CREATED TO INCREASE EQUITY PARTICIPATION BY THE PROVINCIAL COUNCILS AND FIJIAN INSTITUTIONS IN SUCCESSFUL COMPANIES. THE $20 MILLION GOVERNMENT LOAN, ANNOUNCED IN THE DEUBA ACCORD IN 1987, WAS INTENDED BY THE COUNCIL OF CHIEFS TO BOOST THE OWNERSHIP OF THE 14 PROVINCES IN FIJIAN HOLDINGS.

IT WAS STATED IN THE SENATE IN 1993 THAT ACCORDING TO THE 1992 ANNUAL REPORT OF FIJIAN HOLDINGS, FIJIAN HOLDINGS WAS DOMINATED BY LIMITED LIABILTY COMPANIES OWNED BY GROUPS OF INDIVIDUALS WHICH HELD BY SIMPLE PROPORTIONING 70 PER CENT OF FIJIAN HOLDINGS WHILE THE 14 LPROVINCIAL COUNCILS AND THE NATIVE LAND TRUST BOARD AND FIJIAN AFFAIRS BOARD HELD 30 PER CENT.

IT WAS ALSO STATED IN THE SENATE IN 1993 THAT WHILE 1 PROVINCIAL COUNCIL'S SHARE IN FIJIAN HOLDINGS WAS $50,100 THREE FAMILY PRIVATE COMPANIES IDENTIFIED WITH THAT PROVINCE HELD A TOTAL OF $450,000 SHARES.

IN 1984 THERE WERE NO PRIVATE COMPANIES IN FIJIAN HOLDINGS BY JUNE 1992 THERE WERE 27 PRIVATE COMPANIES.

IN THE MAJORITY OF CASES THERSE PRIVATE COMPANIES WERE ABLE TO SECURE FINANCE TO BUY THE SHARES FROM THE FIJI DEVELOPMENT BANK. SEVERAL INDIVIDUALS AND FAMILY OWNED COMPANIES WHICH OWNED SHARES IN FIJIAN HOLDINGS WERE NAMED IN THE SENATE IN 1993. THEY INCLUDED MR LAISENIA QARASE WHOSE FAMILY COMPANY Q-TEN INVESTMENTS LIMITED OWNED 200,000 SHARES, AND MR SITIVENI WELEILAKEBA WHOSE FAMILY COMPANY STIKS INVESTMENT LIMITED OWNED 150,000 SHARES. THESE TWO NAMES WERE HIGHLIGHTED BECAUSE AT THE TIME MR QARASE WAS MANAGING DIRECTOR OF THE FIJI DEVELOPMENT BANK A MEMBER OF THE BOARD OF FIJIAN HOLDINGS, AND FINANCIAL ADVISER TO THE FIJIAN AFFAIRS BOARD MR WELEILAKEBA WAS APPOINTED CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER IN 1991.

THE 1998/9 ANNUAL REPORT OF FIJIAN HOLDINGS DISCLOSES THAT MR WELEILAKEBA'S FAMILY COMPANY OWNS 10,000 SHARES AND THAT IN 1998 THE COMPANY HELD 100,000 SHARES. ATTEMPTS TO VERIFY DETAILS OF THE OWNERSHIP OF Q-TEN INVESTMENTS, STIKS INVESTMENTS AND STIKS HOLDINGS AT THE OFFICE OF THE REGISTRAR OF COMPANIES WERE UNSUCCESSFUL. THE OFFICE HAS BEEN INSTRUCTED NOT TO REVEAL THE DETAILS UNLESS A REQUEST IS MADE IN WRITING STATING THE PURPOSE OF THE ENQUIRY. INFORMATION ABOUT REGISTERED COMPANIES IS NORMALLY READILY AVAILABLE TO THE PUBLIC.

QUESTIONS

1. WHY WERE PRIVATE COMPANIES ALLOWED TO BUY SHARES IN EXCESS OF THE SHARES HELD BY THE PROVINCIAL COUNCILS?

2. WHY WAS THE FAMILY COMPANIES OF THE CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER AND THE MANAGING DIRECTOR OF THE FIJI DEVELOPMENT BANK ALLOWED TO BUY SHARES IN EXCESS OF THOSE HELD BY THE PROVINCIAL COUNCILS?

3. WHAT ADVICE DID MR QARASE GIVE THE FIJIAN AFFAIRS BOARD ON THE ALLOCATION OF SHARES TO PRIVATE COMPANIES?

4. WHEN THE COUNCIL OF CHIEFS APPROVE INDIVIDUALS AND FAMILY COMPANIES BUYING SHARES?

THIS PATTERN OF PRIVATE COMPANY OWNERSHIP CONTINUES TODAY. FAMILY COMPANIES OWN MORE THAN 2.2 MILLION SHARES IN FHL. THE PROVINCIAL COUNCILS OWN 1.9 MILLION [MASTER LIST OF SHAREHOLDERS DATED SEPT 1998] IN THE FHL'S TOP TWENTY LIST OF SHAREHOLDERS OF FIJIAN HOLDINGS DATED 31ST JANUARY 2000 ONLY FOUR PROVINCIAL COUNCILS OWN MORE THAN 100,000 CLASS 'A' SHARES.

THE TOP TWENTY SHAREHOLDERS

UNDER STOCK EXCHANGE LISTING RULES FIJIAN HOLDINGS ARE OBLIGED TO PROVIDE TO THE EXCHANGE A LIST OF THE TOP TWENTY SHAREHOLDERS. THERE APPEAR TO BE SOME DISCREPANCIES IN THE LIST PROVIDED BY FHL.

ACCORDING TO THE REGISTRAR OF COMPANIES TWO OF THE COMPANIES ON THE LIST NO LONGER EXIST. THEY ARE CICIA PLANTATION CO-OP SOC. LTD AND VATULELE ISLAND HOLDINGS LIMITED WHICH HAVE BEEN DEREGISTERED.

[IT IS IMPORTANT TO MAKE THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN SHAREHOLDERS HOLDING 'B' CLASS SHARES, AND SHAREHOLDERS HOLDING 'A' CLASS ORDINARY SHARES. 'A' CLASS SHARES ATTRACT A MUCH HIGHER DIVIDEND THAN 'B' CLASS SHARES AND THEY CARRY VOTING RIGHTS WHICH CLASS 'B' SHARES DO NOT. THE DIFFERENCE IS ILLUSTRATED IN FIJIAN HOLDINGS 1999 ANNUAL REPORT. 'A' CLASS SHARES ATTRACTED AN INTERIM DIVIDEND OF 10 PER CENT AND A PROPOSED FINAL DIVIDEND OF 10 PER CENT [TOTAL DOLLAR AMOUNT &2,092,930] THE ORDINARY 'B' CLASS SHARES HELD BY THE FIJIAN AFFAIRS BOARD ATTRACTED A PROPOSED DIVIDEND OF 5 PER CENT [TOTAL DOLLAR AMOUNT $1,000,000]

THE TOP TWENTY SHAREHOLDERS

1. THE MAJORITY SHAREHOLDER IN FIJIAN HOLDINGS IS THE FIJIANS AFFAIRS BOARD WHICH OWN 20,329,855 SHARES OF CLASS 'B' SHARES [66.7 PER CENT OF THE TOTAL SHAREHOLDING]

2. THE SECOND LARGEST SHAREHOLDER IS THE NATIVE LAND TRUST BOARD WITH 893,501 SHARES.

3. THE THIRD LARGEST GROUP OF SHAREHOLDERS WITH MORE THAN 100,000 SHARES EACH ARE AS FOLLOWS;

CICIA PLANTATION CO-OP SOC LT 400,000[finance from FDB] RATU SIR K MARA EDUCATION TRUST FUND 300,000 TAILEVU DAIRY FARMERS CO-OP 300,000 BA PROVINCIAL COUNCIL 206,917[finance from FDB MACUATA PROVINCIAL COUNCIL 203,614 MAVANA INVESTMENTS LIMITED 200,000[finance from FDB] MUALEVU TIKINA HOLDINGS LTD 200,000[finance from FDB] VANUA KO LOVONI INVESTMENT LIMITED 179,805[finance from FDB] DUAVATA HOLDINGS LTD 150,000 BUA PROVINICIAL COUNCIL 137,102[finance from FDB] RARA O NAKELO HOLDINGS LTD 117,616[finance from FGDB] MALOMALO TIKINA HOLDINGS LTD 107,111 MOALA TIKINA COUNCIL 101,005[finance from FDB] VUKICEA INVESTMENT LTD 100,000[finance from FDB] NAQARANI HOLDINGS LIMITED 100,000[finance from FDB] VATULELE ISLAND HOLDINGS LIMITED 100,000[finance from FDB] MUNIA HOLDINGS LIMITED 100,000[finance from FDB] DOGOTUKI TIKINA COUNCIL 100,000[finance from FDB]

ON INFORMATION SUPPLIED BY THE REGISTRAR OF COMPANIES THE BREAKDOWN OF OWNERSHIP OF THE PRIVATE LIMITED LIABILITY COMPANIES IS AS FOLLOWS;

1. MAVANA INVESTMENTS LIMITED - 200,000 SHARES [FHL]

MAVANA INVESTMENTS LIMITED IS OWNED BY A NUMBER OF INDIVIDUALS. THE MAJORITY OF THE SHARES ARE OWNED BY THE MAVANA VILLAGE FUND - 108,500 SHARES. Q-TEN INVESTMENTS IS OWNED BY THE FAMILY OF MR LAISENIA QARASE.

2. KO LOVONI INVESTMENT LTD - 179,805 SHARES [FHL]

THE DIRECTORS OF VANUA KO LOVONI INVESTMENT LTD ARE DESCRIBED AS VILLAGERS FROM VARIOUS VILLAGES IN OVALAU. THE COMPANY WAS REGISTERED ON 6TH MAY 1993. ACCORDING TO DOCUMENTS FROM THE REGISTRAR OF COMPANIES VANUA KO LOVONI INVESTMENT LIMITED OWES THE FIJI DEVELOPMENT BANK A TOTAL OF $199,188.65.

3. VUKICEA INVESTMENTS LIMITED - 100,000 SHARES [FHL]

VUKICEA INVESTMENTS LIMITED WAS REGISTERED ON 16TH OCTOBER 1992. IT IS WHOLLY OWNED BY THE VUKICEA FAMILY OF CICIA, LAU. A DEBENTURE OF $80,000 WAS REGISTERED BY THE FIJI DEVELOPMENT BANK OF 30TH NOVEMBER 1993. THE MEMORANDUM OF ASSOCIATION DETAILING THE PURPOSE OF THE COMPANY WAS WITNESSED BY MR SITIVENI WELEILAKEBA, THE CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER OF FIJIAN HOLDINGS.

4. MUNIA HOLDINGS LIMITED - 100,000 SHARES [FHL]

THE DIRECTORS OF MUNIA HOLDINGS LIMITED ARE KAMELI VOSA AND SOLOMONE VOSAICAKE. THE COMPANY WAS REGISTERED ON 9TH DECEMBER 1989. A DEBENTURE OF $80, 000 WAS REGISTERED BY THE FIJI DEVELOPMENT ON 26TH FEBRUARY 1995.

5. VATULELE ISLAND HOLDINGS LIMITED - 100,000 SHARES [FHL]

THE COMPANY WAS FORMED ON 11TH DECEMBER 1993. ITS DIRECTORS ARE VILLAGERS FROM VALUTLELE. THE REGISTRAR WROTE TO THE COMPANY ON 11TH DECEMBER 2000 STATING THAT HE HAD REASONABLE CAUSE TO BELIEVE THAT THE COMPANY WAS NOT OPERATING FOLLOWING A FURTHER LETTER ON 10TH APRIL 2000 THE COMPANY WAS REMOVED FROM THE COMPANIES REGISTER.

6. MALOMALO TIKINA HOLDINGS LTD - 107,111 SHARES [FHL]

THE DIRECTORS OF THE COMPANY ARE RATU SAMUELA NAULAGO AND RATU MESULAME VOSAILAGI, BOTH FARMERS OF SIGATOKA. THE COMPANY WAS FORMED ON 12TH DECEMBER 1994.

WE WERE ADVISED BY THE OFFICE OF THE REGISTRAR OF OCMPANIES THAT DETAILS OF THE TIKINA HOLDING COMPANIES IN THE TOP TWENTY WERE AVAILABLE THROUGH THE FIJIAN AFFAIRS BOARD BY WRITTEN REQUEST.

THE FAMILY OWNED COMPANIES WITH SUBSTANTIAL SHAREHOLDING IN FIJIAN HOLDINGS AS LISTED BY THE COMPANY IN 1998 ARE;

1. KINGFISHER ENTERPRISES 77,508 [finance from FDB]

2. KJY INVESTMENT LIMITED [KONISI YABAKI] 50,000 [finance form FDB]

3. LANA INVESTMENT LTD [RATU N. LALABALAVU] 95,000 [finance from FDB]

4. MB INVESTMENT LIMITED [M BULANAUCA] 100,000 [finance from FDB]

5. MARKIN INVESTMENT [ISIKELI TAOI] 100,000 [finance from FDB]

6. MEPSAN INVESTMENT [PECELI MATANITOBUA] 67,932 [finance from FDB]

7. NABUABUA HOLDINGS 100,000 [finance from FDB]

8. RABULI INVESTMENT [MEREANI RABULI] 50,000 [finance from FDB]

9. RAFIRE LINVESTMENT [M. RABUKA] 100,000 [finance from FDB]

10. SAKIANA INVESTMENT 50,000

11. TAOI INVESTMENT [J VITUSAGAVULU] 150,000

12. TUKULA HOLDINGS [SIR JOSAIA TAVIQIA] 100,000 [finance from FDB]

13. VENSALISI INVESTMENT 50,000

14. YALIMAIWAI INVESTMENT [ANARE BULA] 100,000 [finance from FDB]

15. 5X INVESTMENTS 100,000 [finance from FDB]

16. BAKANI INVESTMENT 100,000

17. BARAVI ASSOCIATES 50,000

18. FJ JAMNOVIS INVESTMENT 100,000 [finance from FDB]

19. I WAQA & COMPANY 80,000

20. JAY TEE INVESTMENT [S TABAKANACA] 100,000 [finance from FDB]

21. KB INVESTMENT 100,000 [finance from FDB]

THE MAJORITY OF COMPANIES BOUGHT THEIR SHARES BETWEEN DECEMBER 1991 AND MAY 1993.

QUESTIONS

1. WHAT IS THE FULL EXTENT OF LOANS MADE BY THE FIJI DEVELOPMENT BANK TO INDIVIDUALS AND FAMILY COMPANIES TO BUY SHARES IN FIJIAN HOLDINGS?

2. ON WHAT TERMS WERE THESE INDIVIDUALS AND COMPANIES GIVEN LOANS BY THE FIJI DEVELOPMENT BANK?

3. WERE THE PROVINCIAL COUNCILS INFORMED THAT THEY COULD BUY SHARES ON SIMILAR TERMS?

ON 26TH MAY 1995 SUBSANTIAL LOTS OF SHARES WERE ISSUED TO THE PROVINCIAL COUNCILS. ACCORDING TO THE COMPANY'S SHARE REGISTER DATED 30TH SEPT 1998.

BA PROVINCIAL COUNCIL 34,801 SHARES

BUA PROVINCIAL COUNCIL 87,002 SHARES

KADAVU PROVINCIAL COUNCIL 43,501 SHARES

LAU PROVINCIAL COUNCIL 17,401 SHARES

LOMAIVITI HOLDINGS 52,201 SHARES

MACUATA PROVINCIAL COUNCIL 87,002 SHARES

NADROGA/NAVOSA PROVINCIAL COUNCIL 17,400 SHARES

NAMOSI PROVINCIAL COUNCIL 35,671 SHARES

RA PROVINCIAL COUNCIL 8,700 SHARES

REWA PROVINCIAL COUNCIL 43,501 SHARES

SERUA PROVINCIAL COUNCIL 87,002 SHARES

TAILEVU PROVINCIAL COUNCIL 52,201 SHARES

A SUBSTANTIAL NUMBER OF OTHER SHARES WERE ALSO ISSUED ON 26TH MAY 1995 TO MATAQALI, TIKINA AND VILLAGE BASED COMPANIES.

MATAQALI

1. DROVALAU INVESTMENTS 16,743

2. ERENAWAI HOLDINGS 16,743

3. MATAITINI DEVELOPMENT 16,743

4. MATAQALI NATABUTALE 16,743

5. NABAIKPAODI HOLDINGS 16,743

6. NATURUBU TIKINA HOLDINGS 16,743

7. TOKATOKA VUWAI HOLDINGS 16,743

8. TUBANAWAI HOLDINGS 16,743

9. VALELEVU HOLDINGS 16,743

10. DOROKAVU HOLDINGS 16,578

11. RUKURUKU INVEST CO. [RAVUAMA BAISAGALE] 50,000 [finance from FDB]

TIKINA

1. BURETA TIKINA HOLDINGS 26,101 [finance from FDB]

2. CICIA TIKINA HOLDINGS 33,104

3. DREKETI TIKINA INVESTMENTS 17,400

4. MALOMALO TIKINA HOLDINGS 87,000

5. MOALA TIKINA HOLDINGS 34,475 [finance from FDB]

6. MAULEVU TIKINA HOLDINGS 77,508 [finance from FDB]

7. NAMUKA TIKINA COUNCIL 17,400

8. NAWAIDINA INVESTMENTS 17,400

9. RARA O NAKELO 117,616 [finance from FDB]

10. UDU TIKINA COUNCIL 17,400

11. VANUA O SABETO 17,400

12. VATULELE ISLAND HOLDINGS 78,410 [finance from FDB]

VILLAGE

1. AROVUDI VILLAGE DEVEL CO. 16,045

2. DALICONI INVESTMENT 16,142

3. DELADAMANU INVEST HOLDINGS 16.142

4. LOMATI VILLAGE INVESTMENT 44,716

5. MAULEVU KORO INVESTMENT 73,290

6. MUNIA HOLDINGS 16,142

7. NABUKEBUKE HOLDINGS 75,990 [finance from FDB]

8. NAKABEA INVESTMENT 16,142

9. NAMUKA-I-LAU 73,290 [finance from FDB]

10. NAYAVU VILLAGE 16,142

11. TARUKUA VILLAGE 25,516 [finance from FDB]

12. TAWAVA INVESTMENTS 36,645 [finance from FDB]

QUESTIONS

1. ON WHAT BASIS WERE SHARES IN FIJIAN HOLDINGS ALLOCATED TO THE PROVINCIAL AND TIKINA COUNCILS IN 1995?

2. HOW WERE THE SHARES TO THE PROVINCIAL AND TIKINA COUNCILS FUNDED

3. WHAT CRITERIA DID THE FIJI DEVELOPMENT BANK USE IN FUNDING THE PURCHASE OF SHARES?

4. WHAT DIVIDENTS HAVE THE PROVINCIAL AND TIKINA COUNCILS RECEIVED SINCE 1995?

THE NEED FOR AN INQUIRY

WHAT IS CLEAR FROM THE HISTORY OR SHARES OWNERSHIP IN FIJIAN HOLDINGS IS THAT THE $20 MILLION LOAN FROM GOVERNMENT WAS NOT USED TO BENEFIT THE FIJIAN PEOPLE AS THE GREAT COUNCIL OF CHIEFS HAD INTENDED. THE DOMINANCE OF INDIVIDUALS AND PRIVATE FAMILY COMPANIES BENEFITED A FEW WHO HAD ACCESS TO FINANCE FROM THE FIJI DEVELOPMENT. QUESTIONS NEED TO BE ASKED AS TO WHY THIS WAS ALLOWED TO HAPPEN. WHAT ROLE DID MR QARASE PLAY AS MANAGING DIRECTOR OF THE FIJI DEVELOPMENT BANK IN FACILITATING LOANS TO INDIVIDUALS AND PRIVATE COMPANIES TO PURCHASE SHARES IN FIJIAN HOLDINGS OF WHICH HE WAS A BOARD MEMBER? WAS FINANCE FROM THE FIJI DEVELOPMENT BANK MADE AVAILABLE TO THE 14 PROVINCIAL COUNCILS AT THE SAME TIME THAT IT WAS BEING OFFERED TO INDIVIDUALS AND FAMILY COMPANIES? IS THE LIST OF THE TOP TWENTY SHAREHOLDERS A TRUE AND ACCURATE PICTURE OF THE CURRENT OWNERSHIP OF FIJIAN HOLDINGS? THESE AND OTHER QUESTIONS NEED TO BE ANSWERED BY AN INDEPENDENT INQUIRY.

THE DECISION BY THE INTERIM GOVERNMENT TO TRANSFER $I MILLION CLASS "B" SHARES IN FIJIAN HOLDINGS TO EACH OF THE PROVINCE WILL BE OF MINIMUM BENEFIT TO THE MAJORITY OF THE FIJIAN PEOPLE. THE ANNUAL DIVIDEND TO EACH PROVINCE FOR ITS "B" CLASS SHARES WILL BE IN THE VICINITY OF $50,000.

IF THE ORIGINAL LOAN OF $14 MILLION HAD BEEN GIVEN TO EACH PROVINCE IN THE FORM OF A LOAN TO PURCHASE ONE MILLION CLASS 'A' SHARES, THE TOTAL MARKET VALUE OF THEIR HOLDING TODAY WOULD BE $38.5 MILLION AND THEY WOULD HAVE HAD THE BENEFIT OF HIGH DIVIDENDS WHICH WOULD HAVE ADEQUATELY COVERED THEIR REPAYMENTS.

Inextricably, Qarase provides little to no evidence in detailing how the Fijian Trust Fund empowers the native commoner or explain how it improves their lifestyle which has been more or less, alienated from the rest of Fiji's community via a political policy.

Nor does Qarase explain the financial revenue derived from the flagship company of the elite natives called Fijian Holdings. Fijian Holdings had been touted as the premier ethnic block investment company, the truth is that Qarase and his cronies own more Class A shares than the shares of villages, Tikinas and Provincial Councils put togther.

The minority elite layer via their fictionally named companies, enjoy more spin-offs, royalties and status than the majority of native people, which the company proports to represent. So much for the fallacy of a 'Fijian Pysche'.

The actual explanation given by the Fijian elites to the ignorant masses regarding their monetary rewards, can be equated with number fudging, fuzzy maths and trickle down economics.

The saddest day in Fiji occurred, when these cultural abusers and ethno-nationalists, sought to defraud native commoners in collusion with the existing native institutional framework for political mileage, whilst ignoring the pleas of the common native person whose ancestral land was leased out by the Native Lands Trust Board(NLTB) without succint approval, prior negotiations or sufficient compensation.




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Club Em Designs

Fiji: 'A Good Coup?'

One year into the coup, the verdict is still out. There remains considerable support for the current military leadership, which has brought stability and has led a deliberate attempt to lessen ethnic tensions.

read more | digg story

Australia's Foreign Minister Cracks The Colonial Whip.

Last Thursday’s foreign policy debate between Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and his Labor counterpart, Robert McClelland, witnessed virtually the only mention, in the course of the six-week election campaign, of the Howard government’s predatory activities in the South Pacific.

read more | digg story

Fiji Netball Manager Sparks Debate on Double Standards by New Zealand.

More controversy has blown up over a Fijian with military linkswho has been let into New Zealand. Tabete made no secret about her arrival in New Zealand just over a week ago, disappointed over the banning of her star player who is married to a military man.

read more | digg story

The scrutiny on Alice Tabete stems from the misappropriation of funds, which was covered by an earlier S.i.F.M post. Tabete's Auckland based lawyer, Frances Joychild also commented on the case in an interview with Niu FM.

It also seems that, to get an entry visa into New Zealand one must be facing prosecution, with regards to the shifty visa sanctions enforced by the New Zealand Government; which targeted members of Fiji's Armed Forces and their relatives.

These same visa sanctions was deplored by Soccer's ruling body (FIFA), when a member of the Fiji Soccer team was refused entry to play in a World Cup qualifying match in New Zealand, because his father-in-law was in the Fiji Army. The same criteria was also leveled at one player from Fiji Netball's team to the Netball World Championship held in New Zealand recently.

However, that same criteria was obviously wavered for the Fiji Netball President, whose son is also in the Fiji Army. Tabete's case is perhaps the greatest blunders of consistency, made by the New Zealand Government; implying to the world that it would treat suspects of corruption with kid gloves and drop the hammer on innocent individuals.

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.

"

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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