An Eloquent Silence: Reflections on the “termination” of Operation Eight

The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea. – Mao Zedong

WHY DID THE POLICE treat Ruatoki as if it was a village in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province? Was there no one in the Special Tactics Group with the wit to realise that their “termination plan” for Operation Eight was guaranteed to gift their opponents a decisive “hearts and minds” propaganda victory – no matter how many people were arrested? And that the imagery of togged-up police officers carrying automatic weapons and wearing masks would be all anyone ever remembered about the events of 15 October 2007?

Just imagine if, instead of the scary “Ninjas”, a couple of cops in their shirtsleeves had wandered up to the targeted properties, and asked in a friendly way, if Mr Iti – or whoever – was around. No illegal road-blocks, no illegal searches, seizures or detentions, just eighteen low-key arrests, followed by a smaller number of equally low-key, judicially-warranted property searches. What would we have remembered about the 15/10/07 if the fictional inspiration for Operation Eight had been Foyle’s War rather than NCIS-LA?

The answer, of course, is that we would have remembered why eighteen people had been arrested on 15/10/13 rather than how they were arrested. And there would have been minimal “collateral damage” as they were being arrested.

What the Police appeared to forget in the planning of its termination was that Operation Eight was a political as well as a law enforcement operation. How it looked mattered as much – if not more – than what it ultimately achieved. If New Zealand is ever to evolve an effective anti-terrorist policing capability, the full confidence and active co-operation of the wider community is an indispensable precondition. To win the community’s trust, anti-terrorist policing needs to present a wise and fatherly face – not Bushmaster rifles and balaclavas.

So, why didn’t the Police Commissioner, Howard Broad (whose wise and fatherly face was perfect for the job) just tell the Special Tactics Group to stay back until it was clear they were needed? Why didn’t he leave the job to a couple of constables in shirtsleeves?

The Police Association would no doubt bark back: “Because those constables might have been confronted by people bearing semi-automatic weapons! Because you don’t send constables, unprotected, into situations in which there is even a remote possibility that firearms might be involved – and Howard Broad had been told that firearms were involved!”

To which an utterly ruthless anti-terrorist commander might respond: “So much the better. Nothing could be more conducive to getting the whole community on side that a couple of young constables shot down in the line of duty by a bunch or murderous terrorists. After an incident like that, the public would be positively begging for Bushmasters and body-armour.”

Which is fine – providing you’re not the young constables.

But the need to take reasonable precautions to protect the health and safety of police personnel still doesn’t explain the road-blocks and the “unlawful, unreasonable and unjustified” treatment of Ruatoki residents. Why did so many Tuhoe “civilians” feel that they were viewed by the Police as “suspects”?

To answer that question, you’d need to examine the two-years Operation Eight was in play, and what the Police anti-terrorist specialists believed they were dealing with.

According to the Independent Police Conduct Authority’s (IPCA) report:

“The information which STG relied upon in formulating the plan included the following:

• the targets possessed numerous weapons including “heavy calibre military style semi‐automatic weapons” and were part of a group actively training in military tactics;
• they had received training in the use of rudimentary explosives and incendiary devices;
• intelligence suggested they were prepared to “die for their cause” and use lethal force to achieve their purpose, including sleeping with weapons under their beds to be better prepared for any attack on them;
• the intention of this group was to achieve “an independent Tūhoe nation within the Urewera area”;
• the area where the training camps were situated was rural and some distance from comprehensive medical facilities;
• not all attendees at the training camps had been identified by Police;
• intelligence suggested there was an unknown “local group” in the area who could pose a threat to Police; and
• the feelings of the community towards the participants in the training camps were largely unknown and thus it was stated that “the existence of sympathisers and supporters for their cause cannot be discounted”.

This latter point, about the “feelings of the community towards the training camps” is crucial to the way events unfolded on 15 October 2007.

The senior officers in charge of Operation Eight clearly harboured serious misgivings about the allegiances of the Ruatoki community – up to an including the local police. Why else were the two Iwi Liaison Officers kept out of the operational loop? Had these officers been trusted to keep the existence of Operation Eight’s massive surveillance exercise secret they would have played a pivotal role in its execution. Was this evident lack of trust attributable to the liaison officers’ apparent failure to inform their superiors that military training was taking place in the hills above the Ruatoki settlement?

Anybody who has grown up in a small rural community will tell you that it’s absolutely impossible for strangers to turn up and not be noticed. Introduce an ethnic element to the equation and the difficulties become insuperable.

Ruatoki is a Tuhoe settlement. The idea that several dozen young Pakeha could make repeated visits to the village without being seen – and without questions being asked – is risible. Even harder to miss would be the sound of automatic gunfire echoing around the hills. The odd whip-snap-crack of a hunting rifle up in the bush might go unremarked. But the coincidence of young Pakeha heading into the hills and the discharging of hundreds of rounds of ammunition from multiple firearms most certainly would not.

“Why did nobody from Ruatoki tell us about any of these things?” That’s the question the officers in charge of Operation Eight must have asked themselves.

And their anti-terrorist experts, if their extensive training in the United States and the United Kingdom was worth a damn, would have replied: “Because this is a classic example of Mao Zedong’s principles of guerrilla warfare in action. Mao told his followers that: ‘The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.’ Tame Iti and his merry militia are the fish, the people of Ruatoki are the sea.”

Certainly, this is the sort of thinking which the IPCA report reveals: “[I]t was stated that “the existence of sympathisers and supporters for [the suspects’] cause [could not] be discounted.”

The Police approached Ruatoki as if it was hostile territory because that is how they had come to think of it. Their intelligence suggested that armed individuals were contemplating some form of insurrectionary uprising, and Ruatoki’s failure to report their presence had convinced Police that at least some (perhaps most) of the inhabitants of the village supported the aims and objectives of the visitors.

What happened on 15 October 2007 was, therefore, a tragic recapitulation of the misperceptions, over-reactions and outright assaults that have stained the Crown’s relationship with the Tuhoe people for more than 150 years. The Police’s failure to grasp the history of the place and the people they were dealing with caused them to make assumptions and assessments about the little community they were “locking down” that were as wrong as they were counter-productive.

Had the Police been able to place themselves in the position of Tuhoe, an iwi which, although it never signed the Treaty of Waitangi, has, over the course of one-and-a-half centuries, seen its lands unjustly confiscated; its villages and crops laid waste; its people killed and displaced; and its every attempt at securing from the Crown some semblance of justice and self-determination ruthlessly extinguished by a mixture of legal chicanery and armed force; then Ruatoki’s silence over the gunfire in the hills may have been understood differently.

Two groups of masked and armed Pakeha had dealings with Ruatoki between 2005 and 2007. In distinguishing those who came to help, from those who came to harm, who, in the light of the IPCA’s report, would be brave enough to say that Tuhoe got it wrong?