NZFF Review: He Toki Huna – NZ in Afghanistan (5 stars) + interview with Director

Thank God Maori TV help fund independent documentaries like this one.

We have been in Afghanistan longer than any other war and yet what exactly our troops have been doing there has been obscured by a NZDF who have manipulated a complaint mainstream media into believing half truths and falsehoods about what we’ve been up to.

The recent defamation case by award winning investigative journalist Jon Stephenson against the disinformation campaign waged against him by the NZDF to discredit his work ended in a hung jury. I wish every jury member could watch this documentary and recoil in horror at what their decision meant to journalism and democracy.

He Toki Huna gives a brief insight into the truth as Jon Stephenson investigates SAS killings that were spun in NZ as blameless mistakes. I had the opportunity to briefly interview Director  Professor Annie Goldson over the NZDF responding to the allegations in the documentary…

Annie – The Minister of Defence Johnathan Coleman, has rejected the claims in your documentary that the SAS were acting on their own and claims that the SAS were justified in returning fire when they are fired upon. What is your response to his assertions?

All I can say is that the Afghans we spoke to, including Mr Lal Mohammed, CEO of Shah Industries that runs Tiger International amongst other companies said that the Kiwis were 100% on their own. As did several eye witnesses. They grieve that there were no Afghan army or police present (as we were constantly assured by our Government they always were) as they feel the whole sad, ugly incident could have been resolved through a conversation and two families would still have their breadwinners. This is a conservative country, women find it hard to work — and the $10,000 payout is not going to last long. TI initially assumed our SAS were Americans as it is mostly the US that conducts the highly unpopular night raids (which incidentally function to increase the numbers of insurgents — as Ali Safi, an Afghan reporter in the film says, for every one Taliban killed, three or four are created which is surely an summary incident of the whole war on terror). The Kiwi SAS, to my knowledge, work as part of a general ready reaction force, working with the other US-led elite troops. In fact, too, which may not occurred to Dr Coleman, in documentary one always makes a small selection — Lal Mohammed goes on to say the two wounded guards were held for three or four hours before Kabul’s Police Chief and Dr Zia from NDS (Afghan army) arrived, discovered who the guards were and told the Kiwis to release them.

So Dr Coleman tells the story of cordons (again — there is another case of parallel and contradictory versions of events involving cordons in the film recalling the incident in Wardak which involved the death of Leon Smith and of Younus Khan, an elderly villager) which more or less gels with the “training and mentoring” role we have been told about.

Kay and I object to Dr Coleman’s assertion that our film is a “slur against the SAS”. Our film, scrupulously, does not attack soldiers and to my knowledge, soldiers like it. Jon, too, is very careful not to attack soldiers — it is the policy we object to, and that lack of transparency about the truth of what our troops have been doing on the ground. In fact, as Mike McRoberts says in the film he is sure many soldiers feel very uncomfortable in the role they find themselves but they can’t object, so the media needs to speak on their behalf. I’m assuming, unless someone has been hacking into our passworded film files, Coleman has not seen the film. He also claimed that the release of this information was to increase the box office for “Jon’s film”. It is not Jon’s film, he is an important character as the only journalist, a rigorous and meticulous one at that, who has spent substantial time on the ground — but we include many other voices, including that of Army Chief Dave Gawn, soldier Alpha Kennedy, journalist Mike McRoberts, Afghan journalists, Nicky Hager, historians and Afghans on the ground. I also think it was ironic that proponents of free market object to the desire to get people to a film — fundamentals of box office after all. Dr Coleman could gain perspective if he reflected on how little Jon has lived on, and on how tiny documentary budgets are (many makers use their own money to make their films, and don’t get paid at all).

The Minister says he would trust the NZDF over the word of Jon Stephenson, but with the NZDF embroiled in allegations of spying on Stephenson and a decade long record of manipulating the NZ media over what our troops are really doing in Afghanistan, is his faith misplaced?

As has been evident in the NZDF and Government’s attacks on Jon’s credibility, there has been no substantive error at all in his work. I’ve written elsewhere:
The torture allegations, botched raids etc are that Jon has written about is not the sort of news that the NZDF and the Government wanted New Zealanders to hear. For one, we may have broken with a fundamental tenet of the Geneva Convention, to which we are signatories. And second, they know that we New Zealanders are not particularly keen on war. Torture does not sit easily beside the media narratives we have been told about our involvement in Afghanistan. These have painted a rosier picture, focusing on reconstruction (the PRT building schools and hospitals in Bamiyan) and training and mentoring (the SAS in Kabul) rather on the realities of combat and death in a conflict that has dragged on endlessly, and has been difficult to comprehend, let alone to justify.

Thus, the authorities moved rapidly to close down these stories by discrediting Jon. In my opinion, Jon won a moral victory in the defamation suit he brought against the NZDF, although it ended up with a hung jury. Rhys-Jones had to admit Jon had visited the base in Kabul, met the Afghan military commander and so forth that he did not “make stuff up”.

As one news report pointed out it came out during the law suit, “Defense Force emails” were sent “suggesting the Defense Chief wanted …to quell calls for an inquiry into SAS activities in Afghanistan”. Does this mean the NZDF purposefully attacked Stephenson so we did not find out the truth about the conditions our SAS were placed under? Should we care? Well I imagine the SAS and their families would. But I suspect many of us would dislike the fact that prisoners that our troops had captured, innocent or not, could face torture or that innocent people were being killed in botched raids.

Do you believe our actions in Afghanistan warrant an investigation and would you go as far as suggesting our troops have breached the Geneva Convention and we may have committed war crimes?

That is not really my area of expertise: the allegations that our troops handed prisoners over to Afghan and US authorities known to torture suggests that. In many ways He Toki Huna does carry out a documentary investigation as far as it was able — not legal but historical and asking fundamental questions about the history of Afghanistan and the history of our involvement. As Donald Matheson says, the reasons for our involvement are complicated — was it to do with getting closer to our old, and estranged ally, the US? Did some think it might be good for trade? Was their a moral justification at least initially before “mission creep” set in? Did elements within the NZDF want soldiers to participate in a “real war”?

Why is it so important to support independent documentary making in NZ?

Documentary of course is a fantastic and age-old genre that provides audiences with a range of pleasures and knowledges and has had a strong tradition here. NZers like documentary. Increasingly one aspect of documentary culture has been to provide political analysis, critique and “point of view” positions on issues of the day. They are less hamstrung by conventions of “objectivity” and able to provide deeper context as well as artistry. Big budget successful theatrical films such as The Inside Job, or Dirty Wars, Taxi to the Dark Side provides content analyses that should be on TV every night but given they are not, the “documentary energy” if you like has found an outlet on the big screen, or on the “tiny screen”, displaced from where it probably should be — in people’s lounge rooms.