The Days the Raids Came

This article by Te Rangikaiwhiria was originally published in the book 'The day the raids came' - by the good people at Rebel Press

Go back to Sunday, 14 October 2007: the night before the raids. I had been in bed all day. I had hurt my back the day before, so I spent the whole day lying down. I was watching these undercover cars going past, wondering what the hell was going on out there. The day before our neighbours had been in a huge fight, and they had wrecked their place, so I assumed that the cops were looking at them. I was inside my caravan, parked just in front of Tuhoe Lambert’s house in Manurewa.
About 4.30 in the morning, I woke up to a couple of cars sitting outside; again, I assumed it was the neighbours because of the events that had taken place. Tuhoe and his wife Aida were awake. They always woke up at about 4.30 in the morning and had a cup of tea. I went back inside the caravan and lay down. More and more cars were arriving outside and parking down the street.
Where the caravan was situated, it was like a sound shell; I could hear everything. There was an enormous noise and a whole lot of shouting. I could hear the cops yelling at the neighbours. I thought they were raiding them; it seemed like a full-on bloody raid. But as their voices became clearer, I could hear that they were actually telling the neighbours to get back in the house. It took a minute or two before I suddenly realised: No, they are actually raiding me—raiding us. I stepped outside the caravan. In my initial shock, it seemed that the sky had been lit up with stars. It was, in fact, the police lights on the front of their guns that lit up the place; it was almost like standing in a glowworm cave.
Almost every corner of the property had guys with guns hanging over the fence. The cops were on the megaphone yelling for me to come out. As I was about to step out from behind the caravan there were armed officers on either side, right around in a semi-circle. The ones that were on my left were yelling that I had a gun in my hand, which was crap. It was one of those situations that either I stepped out and got nailed, or they would come around the corner and nail me. So I had this little thought to yell out that I had no gun. I thought that would ruin their day, and make things more difficult. I said about three or four times that there was no gun. ‘No gun. No gun. No gun,’ I said and then stepped out from behind the caravan.
At this point I was escorted out by armed men. They were not your average armed offenders. You see the AOS on TV all the time. These people were another level up. They were an elite squad brought in for this particular raid. They did the first part of the raid. They brought me out and lined me up against the fence outside. Then about five minutes later everyone who was in the house was brought out. There were quite a few people staying at the house because there had been a family gathering the night before. We ended up lining up right down the block, about half the street. We were placed down against the fence, handcuffed and forced to kneel down on the pavement. There was an armed officer standing behind each one of us with a rifle to our head.
Tuhoe’s partner, Aida, became very agitated because the younger people had firearms to the backs of their heads. She began to voice her opinion about that quite strongly. The police reaction of course was to try and shut everyone up, but they were unable to silence that kuia. It was obviously a distressing thing for everyone involved, but much more distressing to see children put through that process.
We were handcuffed with those little plastic cuffs. Then it started to rain quite hard. It was pouring down. Not only were we kneeling there against the fence with all the neighbours watching and dozens and dozens of very hyped-up crazy police behind us yelling and screaming, but it started pissing down rain. I was thinking, Gee, I wish I had put on a raincoat before coming out.
The cops then tried their separation techniques. They put us in different areas to try to coerce a quick confession or to achieve whatever they were trying do. I had seen this type of thing in the past. It had happened to other people. I had also been through something similar to this once before and had seen the type of destruction these cops can do. They are so amped up; they will go to any length to achieve what they want.
They were looking for firearms. They wanted to search the car. I could have sat back and said, ‘Stuff you, you’re not going to get anything from me,’ but they would just break everything—break the caravan, break the house, break the car. So when I was trying to explain where my car keys were, I said, ‘They are right there by my firearms licence.’ That is when the next big dialogue took place. One of the officers was quite adamant that there was no way I had a firearms licence. It occurred to me then that they had obviously mis-instructed these guys in order to get them so heightened and amped up, and oddly enough, almost shaking in their boots. It was kind of strange for me; really it should have been the other way around, and for part of the time, it was. I noticed the dissipation of their anxiety the moment that they realised that they had been misinformed. It was almost like letting the air out of a balloon. It was like night and day between two different events and the attitudes of the officers.
After that, they were exchanged out; the commando cops were pulled out and replaced with the ‘normal’ armed offenders squad. The second team of about 15 to 20 cops came in, and they were wearing the ‘normal’ armed offenders black garb. They maintained the scene until the detectives who had obviously ordered the whole thing turned up. Once they took over, the armed offenders were pulled out, and a whole lot of armed police in blue uniforms turned up. So there were three entirely different sets of police at the place.
At that point, I didn’t realise that a whole lot more people had been arrested. I thought someone must have complained to the cops because they saw one of my hunting rifles being loaded into or unloaded from my car. I hadn’t worked out exactly what was the purpose behind this entire masquerade, until I was questioned by one of the detectives, Hamish McDonald.
He said, ‘We are going to charge you with unlawful possession of firearms.’
And I said something along the lines of, ‘Unlawful possession? How is it possible that I can unlawfully possess firearms that I lawfully bought?’
The thought hadn’t really crossed my mind at the time that such a thing was possible, but apparently it was. That of course was all within the thinking that maybe someone must have complained.
Then McDonald said, ‘We also want to question you about terrorism.’
Then I thought, Whoa. Hang on. That’s not a neighbour complaining about a firearm being loaded into the car out of my gun vault. We are talking about the silly stuff now. It was then that I had to resign myself to the fact that this was going to be a long one; it was not going to be an in’n’out today event. They had gone beyond the issue of whether something was criminal or not, they had stepped into the political realm of silly irrationality and illogical absolutism.

So they trucked Tuhoe and I off down to the Wiri station first, and we sat in the cells there for a few hours. Then they brought us over to the Auckland central police station for another few hours. This was my first time in the cells, locked up in a police station. My main concern was for Uncle Tuhoe, making sure that he was all right. Obviously, the cops didn’t really give a shit about his health, and it wasn’t until a week later that the medicines he requires to keep him alive and kicking were afforded to him.
We eventually ended up in the cells where they hold prisoners before being arraigned in court. Only on seeing others who had been arrested that day, did I realise that this entire charade was linked into a much bigger police raid against activists from all genres.
As it unfolded, I began to see how enormous it was, just how far and how deep this craziness had gone.
 We were in the last slot of the day at court; it was close to 5 o’clock on the 15 th of October. They just read out the charges against us. I was listening to see where this terrorism charge had gone, but at that point we were just charged with unlawful possession of firearms. I didn’t really get how the whole terrorism accusation was being played out. I thought that if you are not charged with something, how the hell could they hold you?
We ended up being detained, ‘held on remand’ as they call it, on firearms charges. Normally, these are not charges for which people would be held in custody. We were taken back to Mount Eden prison, ACRP (Auckland Central Remand Prison), and put into individual cells, what some would call solitary confinement, for a day or two until they found places for us in one of the standard wings. The wing we were held in was strange. It isn’t the place they put your average person. It is a mixture of people being held on behalf of Immigration—I think Ahmed Zaoui was in that wing at one time—and there was an Iranian guy previous to us who had been held there because he refused to return to Iran. It is kind of a quasi-political wing that I never even really knew existed. We stayed there awaiting the decision of the solicitor general as to whether or not the terrorism charges were going to be laid.
 The next thing we tried to do was to notify our families that we were locked up. The prison authorities somewhere further up the chain were not allowing us to use the phones. That went on for two or three weeks. We were almost in the last week when we were finally able to get phone calls out, and I notified my family that I was being held in prison under the Terrorism Suppression Act (TSA).
 Later, we found out that they had been waiting for a police monitoring system to be installed in the phone system before we were allowed to make calls. The extent of the raids unfolded in front of me. I had met some of the people arrested in Operation 8 in the holding cells, and others were being transferred to the various Auckland prisons. We found out more as people turned up at court for hearings or were brought into the wing where we were being held.
Some of the lawyers were able to disclose exactly how wide the police operation had been. The enormity of it was just incredible: trying to get to grips with what the hell this thing had become was hard without even getting to the point of asking ‘Why?’ We just asked the same question over and over again, ‘How is this possible?’ 
The wing that we were in had a TV in almost every room, so we were able to see the news items coming in. The news was full of lots of very lazy articles, lazy journalism and a lot of sensationalism which is characteristic of the New Zealand…what do they call themselves? Journalists, hmm. Nevertheless, it did give us some indication of what was transpiring during this time, and of the protests and support we were receiving from those strong enough not to be taken for a ride on this little merry-goround. That was heartwarming.
We were also fortunate to receive care packages from John Minto and Matt McCarten’s team who had taken it upon themselves to try and get newspaper clippings together and send them in. We received huge piles of newspaper clippings of all of the articles that were written, all the incredible sensationalism and craziness that was going on in the newspapers.
 It is a completely different world inside the prison. It is not a place that you can change easily. A lot of activists might automatically take on a place like that just because they are there; however, if you really wanted to make a change in a place like that it would have to be a long-term project and a long-term commitment to try to deal with the many things that are wrong with that place. We had bigger fish to deal with, and that is what we attempted to stay focused on.
Someone told me early on in our detention, ‘Never forget you are in jail.’ It was a good lesson to learn. It doesn’t matter who you are, you could be the most persecuted person on earth—when you are sitting in jail amongst a whole lot of other guys, you are just another person wearing a funny set of blue overalls. You can’t ever forget that. But the inmates warmed to us.
Prisoners are very perceptive people, and after reading some of the media stuff surrounding our detention, some of them began to realise that they weren’t looking at the usual run of inmates. Many of them commented that they believed that we were people who were being stitched up because of our political beliefs, or for being a Tūhoe, or a Maniapoto or whatever. It was most evident on the day that the solicitor general announced that there would be no charges laid under the Terrorism Suppression Act. The place just literally erupted with cheers. The guards were running around, panicking, and thinking, What’s going on? You don’t see that much. That was important for us; we got a lot of support from those people, as well as from the guards and a lot of the hierarchy in there, too. I was actually doing my washing at the time the solicitor general’s decision was announced, and someone yelled out from one of the rooms urging us to, ‘come in, come in, come in…the guy’s giving his decision.’ We had been told that it was going to take literally months for the solicitor general to wade through 60,000 to 70,000 pages of crap and truckloads of gear and thousands of hours of video footage, so it was quite surprising to hear that the decision had been made so quickly. The solicitor general had only a week before, I think, been given all this material. It had only been a couple of days, perhaps a week, and then he came back with a decision. We weren’t expecting that. We were getting ready to sit in there for a long haul. You have to adjust your body clock, ‘Right, it’s going to be six months at least.’
Many of us had set our ‘timers’ and were resigned to a long haul before we could move to the next stage, that of making bail. Thus the news of the solicitor general’s decision then came as quite a surprise. I did not realise initially what the impact of his decision meant because it came so late in the day. It was after hours, and the lawyers were off for the day. As I said, I had already completely resigned myself to the fact that it was going to be a long haul. Funny thing was the night before I had been doing my washing and had finally gotten my own cell. I was actually in the process of moving rooms when the news item came on TV. When the next morning at 5 o’clock the door of my new single-bed cell was kicked open, I thought, What the hell’s that for? The guard said, ‘You are going over to court this morning. Pack your gear up, you’re getting bailed.’ The thought in my mind—and this is how easily you become incarcerated, you become institutionalised—was Oh, what? I just got my own room! And you’re kicking me out! That is the silly shit that goes through your head when you are in jail. It was a whirlwind exit. I was whisked out of jail over to the courtroom, bailed and walking out the door, a free man, in about an hour. It was just like changing planets. That little burst of euphoria, however, didn’t last long.
 I was on the way home driving from where my family had taken me out to dinner, when the news came on the radio that the police affidavit had been leaked to TV3. It was going to be the main item for that night. I was thinking, Ah, man. We are not even getting a reprieve. There was not even one day to celebrate our freedom before the next phase happened: defamation of our character, which I think was phase two of this whole thing. For the police, it became, ‘We can’t get them on terrorism, so we’ll just defame the crap out of them across the media,’ which it is what they spent the next two or three weeks dedicated to making sure happened. They made sure that everyone as far and wide as possible received the leaked contents of cherry-picked conversations from a year or so of intercepted conversations among a large number of people.
When we finally did get out, the bail conditions were pretty strict, not quite as bad as home detention, but close enough. We were only allowed out at certain times of the day. I wasn’t even allowed out of Auckland. They had bailed me to Auckland at that stage, and for those of us living outside of the Urewera, we were barred from going to Rūātoki. The very restrictive conditions were the curfew, and having to regularly check in at the police station. To those who have been through the system before, that would be normal, but for those of us who were first-timers, it took some getting used to. It was a major restriction that most of us were not allowed in Tūhoe country. Of all the people I would have wanted to go and console for what had happened to them—how the police had singled them out and terrorised them over that period of time when the state basically besieged their iwi land—it was them. The first thing I wanted to do was to go and console them, but I was not allowed to. If we went there, we would be arrested immediately.
 Then I began dealing with the reality of just how incredibly overthe-top their surveillance had been. Every aspect of what hundreds of people had said or done over the past few years had been documented right down to phone calls and emails. Had they had the ability to do so, they would have tried to read our thoughts. I found this all kind of ironic because on one hand, as the comedian Katt Williams so aptly stated, they couldn’t find Osama bin Laden in a cave with a big dialysis machine connected up inside. On the other hand, they knew every single thing that we had done, and that the people of Tūhoe had done over the past few years. If we blinked there was a record of it. It dawned on me just how paranoid these people were and how invasive that surveillance had been. I had to think to myself, Am I going to let that get to me? Am I going to think that every little shadow in the corner is the SIS or whoever continuing their surveillance? I wasn’t surprised by who was targeted in the raids. History is the best indicator of exactly how this would be played out.
One thing the government is wary of is people who still remember what it is like to be free. Going back to the Treaty and how that links into all this, the crown had procured, shall we say, sovereignty and governance by the power of the misunderstanding of language. Hobson wrote a treaty in Māori and the only way that the Pākehā at the time could understand it was through a translator whose name was Williams. Whether designed this way or not, it seems clear to me that when the Treaty was being discussed up north between Māori chiefs, Pākehā pre-Treaty landowners and Hobson and Co., Williams cherry-picked parts of the conversations of Māori chiefs and translated them for the Pākehā who were there. They only got the message that Hobson intended, and vice versa for the Māori who were there. Sovereignty and governance were procured through that method. Somehow the Pākehā thought that was going to last forever. Then the next generation of Māori came along and the crown realised, ‘Oh dash it all, old chaps. We’ve got to go do it all again. We’ve got to get the natives to cede sovereignty and governance to us again.’ So this time they brought in a big army to achieve the same goal. In the long run the most successful method they came up with was taking over the role of education: educating subservience into Māori, educating ignorance and orchestrating forgetfulness so that we won’t remember that in actual fact sovereignty and governance is with us, or just with people in general. The crown has been quite successful with that project at some levels.
 But at some point various Māori groups and individuals have been able to survive that onslaught of indoctrination from childhood. They have frightened what I would describe as the ‘middle management’ of the state with their ability to think like free people. Those people have in the past been killed or arrested or incarcerated because they have reminded the crown that each generation has to be negotiated with; this ‘agreement’ only lasts a generation, then the next one comes along, and we have our own mind about things. I think that is what a lot of Māori are saying today. It seems to me to be the deep-seated resentment within ‘te hiringa i te mahara.’ They are saying, ‘You have to negotiate with us; you will not negotiate with these people who you call leaders, those so-called tribal rangatira’ who seem to have been promoted into prominence by crown entities mostly based on their venal attitude towards Treaty issues, or their ability to further the cause of free-market extremism (for which the ‘Māori issue’ is often seen as an impediment), rather than from any real support amongst the hapū they are supposed to be representing. 
One of the most annoying aspects of Tino Rangatiratanga 150 years ago for the crown was that those chiefs and hapū that adhered to the idea just could not be manipulated using the usual array of methods that the powerful use to direct and conduct peoples and to secure consent to govern. The usual modus of the crown would be to get a lot of chiefs together, pay them some money, blankets, guns or whatever in order to get them to do a particular thing. Tino Rangatiratanga as a concept does not allow for unilateral decision-making. Ultimately, that is one of the reasons why Tino Rangatiratanga had to be undermined and removed as a social construct: because the chiefs themselves could not make decisions on their own even if they wanted to. If they did, it could lead to war. Often the case in Te Rohe Potae in the lead-up to the crown invasions was that various rangatira would discuss an idea put to them by a government representative who would be hoping that he would be able to convince them to give their permission to a particular action. He would be quick to learn, however, that no decisions were ever made at those meetings. That was the general rule. Each individual chief would go away and convey those ideas to their respective hapū. If the hapū decided they weren’t going to be a part of that idea then it was just tough bickies. The only way the crown could gauge their decision was by the following actions of that hapū after the fact.
 For some iwi, taking instruction from the crown was considered being ‘kūpapa,’ a traitor. Following the coat-tails of the crown in order to receive favour was to be kūpapa. That is how it was. For the crown, that was the most frustrating and annoying and enraging issue of what is termed Tino Rangatiratanga. If the crown was to make any headway in this country, then that practice and cultural structure needed to be destroyed: that belief in freedom and individual liberty and the autonomy of groups of people to make their own decisions had to be replaced with a degraded level of representational democracy which removed the right of the people to participate and to decide on every issue, let alone who would represent them. It rings warning bells for the crown when people remember what it was like to have that freedom, to have that autonomy as a people. The last thing the conductors of the Māori elite want is a devolution of power away from those they have become accustomed to manipulating, to the people they claim to represent. Tino Rangatiratanga is intrinsically the nemesis of the representative democracy that is the present-day form of democratic participation, or the perception thereof. Tūhoe have been struggling and continue to struggle for Mana Motuhake, for justice and for the return of land that was stolen off of them. When I say stolen, I don’t mean 150 years ago; the majority of Tūhoe land, some 500,000 acres, was confiscated from them between 1954 and 1979 when the state ‘renamed’ three-quarters of Tūhoe land (which it saw as crown land) as a national forest and gazetted it under a government act. There are a lot of Tūhoe people who remember that. It is not a memory that has been handed down through generations, generation after generation; those people are still alive and they remember the greatest confiscation that Tūhoe ever faced in terms of sheer land mass. It’s not a ‘genetic memory’ of any sort or a distant one; it is an actual memory: memories of crown agents entering their tribal areas and taking control over their land, right around them, like they were not even there.
 In my opinion the police pulled this little rabbit out of the hat because of the complacency and subservience that successive governments have been able to cultivate in this country. Each individual in this country really needs to take stock of that. Freedom and ignorance cannot live in the same house. That is one of the key components to this issue; people in this country have been deceived into thinking that you can be free and be ignorant at the same time. Ignorance gives permission to powermongers to escalate fear and then use it as a licence to remove freedoms. It doesn’t matter what the source of that fear is, whether it be the threat of international or domestic terrorism, gangs, drugs or the weather. With Tūhoe, the police and executive exploited the fear of terrorism.
 They have played that card and have now moved on to yet another fear. So today it’s the fear of gangs, or whatever the scapegoat of the day is. Whoever it is, that fear is exploited; fear is ramped up and legislation is passed that further removes freedoms and reinforces the state’s power to control and invade every aspect of a person’s life. This is part of the reason why a construct called ‘government’ must always be resisted, and why resistance is healthy: it attempts to keep these mongers of power in line, and it tries to preserve whatever vestiges of freedom that are left. What the future holds is anyone’s guess. Many people pretend to be visionaries but are mostly people who superimpose experience of past events to predict human patterns of future events. Tūhoe have been forced to focus on their past for the last 120 or so years due to the crown not wanting to part with its masses of stolen Tūhoe land. Eventually that issue will be solved one way or another, but in the meantime, and this runs true for all Māori, hapū and iwi, what is needed is a ‘no bullshit assessment’ of the present status of our people, whenua and culture. If we as a people are to seriously embark on such an endeavour it will come as a shock to many of us that the faux-comfortable certainties of the prevailing narrative are leading us down a track into a dead-end canyon. So it is somewhat exciting to me to hear discussions by Tūhoe of a hybrid construct they are working on called Interdependence. This concept shows movement on from the prevailing post-colonial narratives put forward by the likes of Ranginui Walker. It is in some way a recognition of the realities of the present and is intent on setting up a construct under which future Tūhoe generations can determine their own destinies. Rather than making assumptions of what that future may entail, it gives room to cherry-pick the best of our cultural constructs of the past while allowing for the rejection of present constructs, both internal and foreign, that are not helpful or are even destructive to the wellbeing of our people, land and cultures. For tribes embarking on this form of self-determination what are needed are in-depth comparative self-determination models of other indigenous peoples around the world. These can serve as conceptual guides to learn from and to prevent duplication of errors. There is considerable crossover in the history, culture and experiences of tribes like Tūhoe, Maniapoto and other tribes of Aotearoa with those of other countries around the world, some of whom have already embarked on systems of self-determination. In this way we return to the evolution of our cultures and our people. The unique gift economies that still exist and thrive in places like Te Urewera also flourish in the urban environment where many Māori now live. They are almost fully integrated into the city lifestyles of the under-, working and middle classes. This evolution is recorded in the wealth of kōrero in our whakapapa that have described us since the time of Te Kore. Through this connection, no one is invalid no matter how urbanised that person may be. One foot in Facebook and the other foot in the bush, so to speak… At this point, that evolution seems to be trapped in the suspended animation of fighting for justice against historical and recent state-sponsored crimes, resisting the culture of rampant destructive capitalism and being under the incantations of some of the false academic gods, many of whom have either advertently or inadvertently assumed the role of poropiti and have played the piper until their bank balances have travelled well into six-digit figures.
This I think has created a rift, two separate streams in Te Ao Māori. The key is to create a construct that has room for both streams without one trying to invalidate the other. I believe this is the concept behind what Tūhoe is embarking upon.
The outcome of the ‘terror trials’ remains to be seen. Nevertheless, I am excited about where Tūhoe is heading, and I hope to participate without hindrance again in their world as soon as we complete this little charade with the courts.