Remembering our wars on Kiribati
Warwick Brunton
IN Kiribati, the locals call conjunctivitis ‘‘red eye’’. At the nursing school where I was a volunteer with Volunteer Service Abroad (VSA), tutors wore dark glasses when they returned to work after a bout of conjunctivitis. Staff meetings looked like something out of The Godfather. People without sunglasses constantly wiped their eyes with a handkerchief or cloth wrapped around one hand.
April 25 was a different sort of redeye day for expatriate New Zealanders and Australians.
Our High Commissions in Kiribati respectively take turns to organise the annual dawn service.
Anzac Day 2016 in Kiribati was the only time I have participated in such a commemoration in a country occupied by a wartime foe. Japanese troops occupied some islands of the then British colony of Gilbert and Ellice Islands, including South Tarawa, from December 1941. The last were liberated in August 1945.
The bus, full of soporific Australian and New Zealand volunteers, joined the crocodile of slowmoving cars along the badly potholed causeway and unsealed road through the thin ribbon of South Tarawa that ends at Betio.
It was too dark to spot the surviving Japanese concrete bunkers, pillboxes, bombproof Japanese command centre, and the gun emplacements that faced the Tarawa lagoon and tried to repel the return of British colonial power accompanied by American military might.
Cars and buses disgorged their silent IMatang (European) passengers in the gloom. We quietly made our way to the cemetery. There were no streetlights. Amid the shadows you could see the looming outline of another gun emplacement on the cemetery boundary.
We had to pick our way among the graves, many of them
unmarked — nothing like the orderly rows of Commonwealth war cemeteries in Europe. American remains have been sent back stateside for reinterment. A team of American forensic experts were still digging and identifying bone fragments in 2016.
A memorial at Betio commemorates 17 military coast watchers and five civilians who were beheaded by the Japanese on October 15, 1942, in reprisal for an attack on Tarawa by a lone American warship. They were all ‘‘British subjects’’ from New Zealand and Australia. The mass grave has never been pinpointed because much of Betio was pulverised by shellfire when the Americans landed in November 1943.
There is no memorial to the 780 IKiribati who were also British subjects and who died in the conflict.
The service had been publicised, particularly among the expatriate community, and was well attended. Curious IKiribati watched the strange ritual from the side lines. I stood nearby and alongside a Kiwi policeman who wanted to attend
before flying out later that day. He had been training local police to handle cases of domestic violence.
The screen behind the memorial cross played dawnlike images as a prelude. Three flagpoles flew the emblems of the three countries. The police honour guard, in full dress uniform and armed with Boer War rifles, marched on beside the memorial. The police band waited patiently.
Suited high commissioners waited to greet the president and first lady, whose impending arrival was announced by the siren of the police escort car. It was a particularly important day for the new president Taneti Maamau, who was to open his first parliament later that day. The order of service was so familiar. Expatriate Marist brothers provided the Christian element. The police band accompanied the singing of O God, Our Help and Abide With Me, though most participants knew the words by heart. In his address, our high commissioner emphasised the centennial of the RSA.
Wreaths were laid and a lone piper, having difficulty tuning his bagpipes because of the humidity, managed to play a throatlumping lament.
Buses were then laid on to transport everyone back to the New Zealand High Commission for a solid breakfast of toast, fried eggs, bacon, sausages, baked beans, tea and coffee.
Next followed the rum ration, which seemed to be an innovation following the recent law change in New Zealand. I drank my tot to honour Dad, Private Hugh Paterson Neilson Brunton, 45307, 19th Battalion, and those he engaged with as a soldier in North Africa and as a prisoner of war in Italy and Germany. Bless him, his comrades, victims, and those who risked their lives to help him during World War 2.
And bless his fiancee, my mum, who waited so hopefully for his return to New Zealand.
Then it was time to catch the bus to work, wearing a red poppy — a sign that for some of us in Kiribati, April 25 was more than a workday. As they dispersed, people smiled with satisfaction at how well the annual ceremony had gone once again.
Yes, Anzac Day in Kiribati was very familiar. ‘‘Lest we forget’’ had not been forgotten, but something was missing. How can we celebrate the peace while honouring the dead? How can we reach out to the delightful young Japanese and German volunteers?
They were conspicuous by their absence that Anzac Day, yet their service in the local hospital and schools showed they were every bit as dedicated to building friendship with the people and strengthening the infrastructure of Kiribati as those of us from Down Under.
Who remembered that Japanese aid built the Betio causeway after the war? Does our traditional view of Anzac Day embarrass them or leave them feeling out of place as we remember our side of wartime events?
And how could we engage the New Zealandeducated IKiribati family whose sons were itching to perform a haka had there been one and had they been asked. I hope that Anzac Day services in Kiribati have since shaken off the timewarp to become inclusive and to embody a commitment to peace. I am proud that my living tribute to Anzac Day could be achieved through Volunteer Service Abroad, an organisation that represents the best of New Zealand aid and builds the peace through respectful partnerships, working and learning together, crosscultural understanding, fairness, social justice and selfdetermination, and the power of volunteering.
Anzac Day 2016 also got me thinking about another war memorial in Kiribati. This stone memorial was raised by a Japanese friendship association in Kiribati to console the spirits of all those who died, ‘‘irrespective of nationality’’, in a Japanese air raid on a village on Butaritari Island.
That’s the kind of war memorial I prefer.