The "Rainbow Warrior" and the sinking of SIEV X

- Media release by Tony Kevin, author of A Certain Maritime Incident: the sinking of SIEV X ( Scribe Publishing, Melbourne 2004), Canberra 9 July 2005

 

The story of Rainbow Warrior reminds us that the truth about state crimes does not remain hidden. Sooner or later, it floats to the surface. The truth about SIEV X will, too.

**

The 20th anniversary of the bombing of the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour will be marked tomorrow, Sunday 10 July 2005.

The bombing, carried out by French secret service agents, was an attempt to cripple the 1985 Greenpeace campaign against Pacific Island nuclear testing. The sabotage attack on the Rainbow Warrior resulted in its sinking, and the death of crew member Fernando Pereira, a freelance photographer (from BBC News 7 July)

There was also good coverage of the Rainbow Warrior story on ABC "PM" two weeks ago: "Former French PM criticises Rainbow Warrior bombing" – ABC "PM" , Monday 27 June 2005:

http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2005/s1401612.htm

And in today’s Canberra Times (but not carried on their website).

The similarities to the sinking of SIEV X are striking:

Both were acts of state terrorism, instigated or carried out by "civilised" Western countries against perceived national security threats, which actually involved innocent people as victims. In both cases , the threat perceptions were grossly exaggerated and disproportionate. French national security was no more seriously threatened by the Rainbow Warrior planned protest action than was Australian national security by a few thousand boat people fleeing from conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In both cases, the action instigated by national security agencies was violent, life-threatening and criminal. In the French case, direct criminal action by implanted French secret service agents masquerading ( rather badly, as it turned out) as tourists in NZ; in the Australian case, the covert setting-up, by an Australian AFP-DIMIA People Smuggling Strike Team, of an undercover people smuggling disruption program in Indonesia, operating through criminal saboteurs like Kevin Enniss, and through Indonesian police teams recruited, trained and paid for by the Australians, as mercenary disruption teams to disrupt and curtail asylum-seeker voyages to Australia. .

Only one person died on Rainbow Warrior, though it could have been many more, had the French bomb gone off a few minutes sooner while people were meeting on board the boat. On SIEV X, 353 persons died – mostly women and children. On a scale of killing, SIEV X is mass murder; Rainbow Warrior is not.

The French covert action against Rainbow Warrior was quickly uncovered and brought to world notice and condemnation, by an efficient and ethical NZ police force. The Australian Federal Police and DIMIA are in no hurry to expose whatever it is that their officials may have been guilty of in respect of the deaths of 353 people on SIEV X, by commission or by criminal negligence. Nor are the relevant Ministers (Ellison, Vanstone, Ruddock, Hill, and Downer). Nor is Prime Minister John Howard. New Zealanders, an ethical people, try to ventilate such things: Australians, it seems, prefer to sweep them under the rug.

France has apologised to New Zealand and admitted its fault . Reportedly, French senior officials have explained (on "background" to media) that they did not mean to kill anyone – they just wanted to immobilise the boat, so that it could not inconvenience the French nuclear tests program at Mururoa Atoll. The death was thus a case of accidental homicide, according to the French.

Two arrested French agents spent very little time in NZ jails. Australia reportedly helped other French agents involved to escape NZ criminal justice altogether, to New Zealand’s annoyance. (See today’s Canberra Times story). By comparison, SIEV X voyage organiser Abu Quassey is now serving a short sentence in his native Egypt for accidental homicide in the case of SIEV X, too, after Australian justice authorities allowed him to be returned from an Indonesian jail to to Egypt.

I believe that one day – maybe sooner than in 20 years - there will issue similar apologies from a future, more ethical, Australian government than the one we have now, for whatever it was that Australian national security agencies did in the case of the sinking of SIEV X and the deaths of 353 people.

 

Until then, we can be inspired by the Rainbow Warrior story. Here is a rare case where the good guys won. And, ironically, the French criminal secret service action put Greenpeace onto the world stage, as the world’s leading environmental action organisation.

One day, the words "SIEV X" – more even than Tampa, more than "children overboard" – will be the phrase that best recalls the ugly cruelty of the Howard Government’s border protection strategy to win the 2001 Australian federal election.

The story of Rainbow Warrior reminds us that the truth about state crimes does not remain hidden. Sooner or later, it floats to the surface. And the truth about SIEV X will, too.

Tony Kevin, Canberra 9 July 2005

Further inquiries: Tony Kevin 02 62956588 or 0414 822 171

 

e FRebch covert saxtion agaoint R W was quickly ujcovered by anerficiemt NXZ ppoce force anhd bougere yher saimiloweytiesere yher saimiloweyties

.