KEY POINTS:
The war on terror has robbed the word "terrorist" of much of its power. Since the US-led coalition invaded a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 terrorist attacks and turned out not to have any weapons of mass destruction anyway, the currency of the debate has become cheapened. The real terrorists remain, with sporadic exceptions, unmolested by international efforts to root them out; the wrath of the free world is, instead, visited on misguided nobodies, depriving them of legal rights and human dignity as they sweat in confinement in Guantanamo Bay. Meanwhile, arrogant and unsmiling immigration goons demand that blue-rinsed grandmothers remove their shoes and decant their skin cream into small bottles if they want to go to Disneyland.
Such misplaced initiatives come to mind when considering the events of the past week, in and around the Tuhoe settlement of Ruatoki, and in a variety of towns and cities throughout the North Island. The police have been scrupulous not to use the words "terrorist" or "terrorism" to describe the activities of the people targeted in their raids and searches; the charges so far laid have been under firearms legislation. But the shadow of the Terrorism Suppression Act enacted after the 9/11 attacks loomed large over the actions and their court sequels.
Notably, and disturbingly, judicial proceedings have almost all been held in secret: the identities of most of those arrested; the nature of the evidence against them (laid, let us remember, under legislation devised before the word "terrorist" existed); and even the discussion of the reasons that bail has been granted or denied; all remain behind a shroud of secrecy.
That being so, it would be idle and indeed unwise to speculate on what cards the police hold. But it is not too early to say that, when the time comes to lay them on the table, they had better add up to a winning hand. If the world is growing sceptical of the use of the epithet "terrorist" to classify those who express dissent, we in New Zealand are downright suspicious of it. The only time it has been appropriately used within this jurisdiction was to describe state-sponsored murder when the Rainbow Warrior was bombed. Sooner or later, and it would be much better sooner than later, the police need to explain why they responded with such a chilling display of force against people allegedly in breach of firearms laws.
What is already plain is that the police actions have hugely alienated Tuhoe in particular and Maori in general. The fact that the police roadblock near Ruatoki was set up beside the "confiscation line", which marked the boundary of the land grab in the 1860s, would have been bleakly resonant for the community stunned by the show of police force.
That community is, by any sober judgement, one of the country's most alienated, dispossessed and economically disadvantaged. Time will tell whether the rage that bubbles beneath its surface deserves being characterised and treated as a dangerous insurgency. But whatever is revealed when the police show their hand, it would be good to think that other arms of the state thought it worth reaching into the heart of Tuhoe, with the intention of making life better, and not just of carting off troublemakers.
