Remembering environmental campaigner Steve Sawyer, 1956-2019

Steve Sawyer, Rongelap campaigner with the original Rainbow Warrior which was bombed by French secret service agents in July 1985 in Auckland, aboard the new Rainbow Warrior during the ship’s first visit to New Zealand. © Nigel Marple/Greenpeace

A tribute to STEVE SAWYER by former Rainbow Warrior captain PETER WILLCOX, who was skipper at the time of the Rongelap evacuation and the French bombing in 1985.

I MET Steve in 1981 in New Bedford, Massachusetts, on the first Rainbow Warrior. I was answering a job advert he had placed in the National Fisherman. We spoke in his cabin for a while, and then went to the mess to meet the crew.

One of the things Steve liked about the manager’s job on the RW was that he got to do real physical work as well as intellectual organising. The crew was all giving him a hard time about his painting technique. It seems the day before, Steve, while climbing down into an inflatable (not a rhib by a long shot), had stepped directly into a five-gallon bucket of paint.

That he took the ribbing good-naturedly and laughed with everyone else was to me an excellent sign of life on board that ship.

Steve was the first guy I ever worked for who was younger than I. I was 28, and he 25 in 1981. But I learned fast not to mess with him. He could argue you into a corner quickly, and he did not suffer fools.

This week in history - the Rainbow Warrior bombing as told to ABC's Nightlife

Journalist, media educator and author David Robie ... Rainbow Warrior bombing reflections
after 33 years. Image: PMC

Pacific Media Watch Newsdesk
PACIFIC environmental and political journalist David Robie has recalled the bombing of the original Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior 33 years ago in an interview with host Sarah Macdonald on the ABC’s Nightlife “This Week in History” programme.

Dr Robie, now professor of journalism and director of the Pacific Media Centre at Auckland University of Technology, wrote the 1986 book Eyes Of Fire: Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior that has been published in four countries and five editions.

LISTEN: Terrorism in Auckland in 1985

Rainbow Warrior bombing should have led to French Watergate

Fernando Pereira going ashore at Rongelap Atoll in May 1985. Photo: © David Robie

ANALYSIS By David Robie

THE unmasked French bomber who sank the Rainbow Warrior 30 years ago had some revealing comments during his interviews with the investigative website Mediapart and TVNZ’s Sunday programme, none more telling than “the first bomb was too powerful, it should have ended as a Watergate" for French President François Mitterrand”.

"The last secret of the Greenpeace affair" proclaims
the French investigative website Mediapart.

Mitterrand stayed in office for 14 years - a decade after the bombing and before he finally stepped down when his second presidential term ended in May 1995, the year that nuclear tests ended.

The bomber, retired colonel Jean-Luc Kister, added that had Operation Satanique involved the United States, “more heads would have rolled”.

But while the “innocent death” of Portuguese-born Dutch photographer Fernando Pereira has clearly played on his conscience for all these years, Kister’s sincere apology wasn’t without a hint of trying to rewrite history.

The claim that the secret sabotage operation never meant to kill anybody is unconvincing for anybody on board the Rainbow Warrior on that tragic night of 10 July 1985 when New Zealand lost its political innocence and the crew lost a dear friend.

NZ documentary exposes litany of state injustices against the Tūhoe, but also offers hope

Pacific Media Watch contributing editor Alistar Kata's report on an incisive new documentary.

INVESTIGATIVE journalist Kim Webby’s incisive and compassionate new documentary, The Price of Peace, about Tūhoe campaigner and kaumatua Tame Iti and the so-called “Urewera Four” won a standing ovation at its premiere during the NZ International Film Festival this week.

It deserved this - and more. Webby has crafted arguably the most brilliant film portrayal of race and cultural relations in New Zealand in contemporary times. She has examined a criminal case of national interest to explore biculturalism and justice in general, and specifically the litany of injustices imposed on the Ngāi Tūhoe people for generations.

And Webby has exposed the hypocrisy and myth making over both the Tūhoe case of justice and the disturbing facets of the current political orthodoxy around state surveillance.

The 87-minute film – made over a period of seven years - is essentially about the trial of the Urewera Four and its aftermath following the notorious “terror” raids in Te Urewera in 2007.

It portrays a striking and polarised duality about how mainstream New Zealand viewed the arrests and the people who were brutalised by this masked “swat” team-style attack on a peaceful and laid-back community.

Rainbow Warrior reflections - new Eyes of Fire on way

Flashback: David Robie presents Eyes of Fire to PM Ham Lini in August 2006.
Vanuatu Daily Post story

CAFÉ PACIFIC offers a bit of nostalgia. In just over a couple of months, New Zealand and the Pacific will be marking the 30th anniversary of the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior in an outrageous case of state terrorism by French secret agents in Auckland's Waitemata Harbour on 10 July 1985.

Dutch photojournalist Fernando Pereira was killed as part of the double-bomb plot. An unwarranted attack on a peaceful environmental ship.

The word is that there will soon be a fresh new (fifth) edition of David Robie's book Eyes of Fire. Out of a dozen books or so to surface out of the l'Affaire Greenpeace, David's was the only one written by somebody actually on board. There will be new content and new pictures.

The publishers, Little Island Press, also have a surprise package planned. More about that later.

#JeSuisCharlie : Cartoonist Plantu explains why taunting world leaders is essential

CAFÉ PACIFIC has been prompted with this column about Plantu and an interview he did last year before this week’s barbaric attack on the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo leaving 12 cartoonists, media people and a couple of policemen dead. And that's without adding the latest double siege casualties).

Queries in response to an earlier blog posting with questions by Robert Atack and others on whether Charlie Hebdo ran any cartoons about the Rainbow Warrior bombing by French secret agents in 1985 have not been answered here definitively.

Robert asked: “Did [Charlie Hebdo] ever publish any Rainbow Warrior cartoons?”

And then added in his next posting 37 minutes later: “This might be an opportune time to lay a [wreath] for Fernando Pereira. The freelance Dutch photographer, of Portuguese origin, who drowned when French Intelligence (DGSE) sabotaged and sank the Rainbow Warrior ship, owned by the environmental organisation Greenpeace, on 10 July 1985.”

An infamous example of state terrorism three decades ago this July!

A ‘dirty war’, NZ military cover-up and the vindication of a journalist

 Trailer for the Jeremy Scahill film Dirty Wars about the hidden truth over America's covert wars.

INDEPENDENT investigative journalist Jon Stephenson called it a “moral victory”. The Herald on Sunday described it as a “vindication” in an editorial.

And for many New Zealand journalists it was a humiliation of the military even before the defamation case was over.

Although the jury couldn’t make up its mind on whether it was defamation, the NZ Defence Force chief, Lieutenant-General Rhys Jones, had already conceded the factual issues, the smear webpage against Stephenson had been removed and the military had pledged to make public statement accepting the journalist’s version of events in his reports of New Zealand’s role in the “dirty war” in Afghanistan.

An independent journalist had taken on the might of the Defence Force with its battery of lawyers and legal resources – and won.

Jon Stephenson’s credibility was intact, the Defence Force’s credibility in tatters. But at what price?

Rainbow Warrior, state terrorism and 'paranoid' French politicians

 Total Recall interview with David Robie by programme host Sam Bloore.

Thanks to Pacific Media Watch:

PACIFIC MEDIA CENTRE director Professor David Robie has spoken out about the 1985 Rainbow Warrior state terror attack in a recent interview on the Newstalk ZB programme Total Recall.

July 10 marked the 28th anniversary of the French attack, which Professor Robie wrote about in his 1986 book Eyes of Fire and also Blood on their Banner on Pacific independence struggles in 1989.

"The whole attack was outrageous in the first instance. It's just inconceivable that an attack like that could have been launched against a major nation in the world, a peaceful nation," Dr Robie said.

"It's bad enough that they did that, but then the French government at the time also blackmailed New Zealand over trade."

Dr Robie was on the Rainbow Warrior voyage more more than two months as a journalist, but had left the ship three nights before it was bombed in Auckland's Waitemata Harbour.