“It started with a bang, and that was all,” so said a supporter of the Urewera Four during the five week trial of Tame Iti, Te Rangikaiwhiria Kemara, Emily Bailey and Urs Signer.
The trial ended last week with guilty verdicts on some firearms charges, not guilty verdicts on others, a hung jury on the lead charge of participating in an organised criminal group, and the Crown saying it will opt for a retrial on that lead charge.
For us the taxpayer who funded both sides of the trial, what has been achieved? Has justice been served. Has the Crown fulfilled its duty to us? Do we feel safer?
Difficult though it may be to face it, face it we must; the only thing that has been achieved by the most expensive criminal prosecution in the history of this country has been a widening of the divisions in our society. But we should not be surprised at that. The whole operation from beginning to end was symptomatic of how the Crown treats any people with a world view that is not based on it being sovereign in this country.
No people in Aotearoa (even Ngāti Kahu) have as long or staunch a history of independence as do Ngāi Tuhoe of the Urewera ranges. And amongst Ngāi Tuhoe, no individual has represented that independence more consistently and effectively then Tame Iti. So, again, we should not be surprised at the ferocity with which the Crown pursued his conviction. But neither should we be silent witnesses to it.
Even Paul Holmes, hardly an advocate for Māori sovereignty, roundly criticised the Crown’s action with regard to Ngāi Tuhoe specifically, and other world views generally. “The New Zealand government,” he wrote in the NZ Herald, “has always displayed a capacity for savagery and vindictiveness in their dealings with Tuhoe.”
Like Holmes, I too detect a level of spite in the Crown’s willingness to seek a retrial. If they (i.e. the Prime Minister and his Cabinet) had to pay for any of this out of their own pockets and not the pockets of us taxpayers, not only would there be no retrial, there would have been no trial period.
Sadly, there are plenty of local examples of that same savagery and vindictivenes. We see it in the way the Crown , the local Council and some developers treat anyone in the Far North who stands between them and what they want. Using our money, they buy, bully or bash any opposition into submission all the way up through the Courts. To what end? The same end as that achieved in the trial of the Urewera 4, deepened divisions.
It seems the rabbit hole down which common sense, goodwill and common cause in this country are rapidly disappearing is also getting deeper. But some people just want to keep digging.
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