Like Te Rohe Potae, Te Urewera is a place close to my heart, together with the people therein.
So today my thoughts goes out to Tuhoe and is mamae again to be reminded of the terrifying events that took place on their beloved whenua, for many, in front of their loved ones, kuia, koro, tamariki.
This report is about the police actions on the 15th of October 2007 in the Ruatoki area.
One only has to ask if there are no consequences to them, what is the point of all these laws that the police have broken.
Their actions are self-evident and many Tuhoe whanau have to live with the memories of those frightening hours their communities were besieged yet again by amped-up cops whose heads had been filled with movie styled stories of Al-Qaeda terror cells, catapults, cows, buses and napalm bombs, held a town of peaceful Tuhoe ransom as they set about to unwittingly prove that certain divisions within the police force consider themselves to be above oversight.
Even though I found the report to be dry, sterile, and at times heartless, it does clearly expose that the police analysis of the threat Ruatoki posed, (the police believed that the entire valley was in on a scheme of armed uprising against the state to overtake a piece of land that was already theirs…) was completed flawed, and they broke many laws in their actions on that day and in the years prior to the raids with illegal spying.
It however fails to connect the dots between the damage caused by the police actions to the community they were enacted on.
In fact I wonder if this report is of any real use to Tuhoe at all other than to reinforce what everyone already knows and perhaps as a legal basis for legal action.
This Waco styled approach and intention on the day was clear, as it has been said by many who it was a show of force to the people of Ruatoki and the wider Tuhoe communities, to create fear in their hearts in order to remind Tuhoe whose boss, so to speak.
I can personally attest to the way in which over-zealous state forces surrounded and dealt with those living in the whare I was resident at.
Those of Tuhoe Lamberts whanau that were dragged out of the house and made to kneel against the fence out on the road in the pouring rain for an hour while they watched their father be cuffed, interrogated and eventually dragged away.
Rifles were held against the back of the heads of all those terrified whanau there that day, with complete disregard of age, young and old alike.
After the four weeks heads up the crown's executive branch, and police were given to prepare their spin for today’s press release, John Key this morning defined the police conduct as being, "a little bit wrong".
The dictionary has a quite different definition for this.
The report is so late in coming that its recommendations of policy change have already allegedly been implemented some years ago by the cops, and laws amended to make what was illegal, legal, as is the common practice these days.
So for many that were victims of this, this report and its accompanied vacant apology from the police commissioner would be no more than a painful reminder of this yet unresolved crime committed by the state against the people of Tuhoe.
Taku aroha tonu e te iwi o Ngai Tuhoe, me mau tonu raa koutou i te kawau maro.
Te Rangikaiwhiria Kemara
