Torture revelations mar national holiday

Today in New Zealand and Australia is ANZAC Day. The day commemorates New Zealanders killed in war and also honours returned servicemen and women. The date itself marks the anniversary of the landing of New Zealand and Australian soldiers – the Anzacs – on the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey in 1915. Red Poppy’s are worn as they are in other countries on Remembrance Sunday. The poppy has been the cause of controversy this year, being manufactured in Chinese sweatshops rather than by the disabled New Zealand workers who previously made the fund raising item.

poppy lGir1 17844

A much greater controversy is playing out however. NZPA reported this morning that the Green Party has called for an independent inquiry into claims prisoners in Afghanistan were tortured when New Zealand Special Air Service (SAS) soldiers handed them over to other forces. The present NATO war in Afghanistan is New Zealand's longest overseas military deployment, and Metro magazine recently broke the story that the SAS has been complicit in torture, handing prisoners over to the National Directorate of Security (NDS), an institution that Amnesty International describes as having “a persistent pattern of human rights violations perpetrated with impunity”.

Last month, former Defence Force head Jerry Mateparae was named as the new Governor-General, New Zealand's proxy head of state representing the British monarchy. The appointment of a Maori military leader was an important ideological act for the New Zealand state, reinforcing the idea of Maori integrating with Pakeha society though foreign military service. This idea is perpetuated though the place the Maori battalion in World War II plays in popular history. The idea of the Maori military hero, which has been seen again recently in the glorification of Waikato born SAS soldier Willie Apiata, is the continuation of the colonial myth of Maori as a “warrior race”

While the New Zealand civil war was still in living memory, Maori were recruited to fight overseas for the interests of the British empire. As Danny Keenan wrote in the New Zealand Herald today;

In 1899, James Carroll wanted to take a Maori contingent to Samoa to subdue a Samoan uprising. In 1900, Carroll asked that a native contingent be sent to the Boer War - it was wrong he said that "brown sons of Briton" should be denied their chance to transport their energy to Africa, thereby demonstrating their loyalty to Queen and Empire.

The history of Maori military resistance to British colonialism is overwritten in popular consciousness by the ANZAC day myth of nationhood- a nationhood that was forged apparently in the botched invasion of a another country half way around the world. Keenan goes on to write;

Those tribes which fought with the Crown in the 1860s later rushed to enlist in the Pioneer Battalion (and the later Maori Battalion). Those tribes which rebelled against the Crown, in defense of what they regarded as a Treaty right, did not. In 1915, Waikato Maori refused to enlist in the Pioneer Battalion, and were conscripted by way of punishment.

ANZAC day is an important day to remember New Zealand's history, but it should be remembered as it actually was, not as the powers that be would like to shape it.