MUSLIMS TAKE STORY BACK MAINLANDER
Every victim of the mosque shootings in Christchurch has a different story, but recurrent messages emerged. Martin Van Beynen was at the sentencing of the gunman in the High Court at Christchurch.
He had not beaten them. He had killed and injured, but he had not shaken their faith. He had not made them too fearful to worship at their mosque and not generated the ugly discord or revenge attacks he had hoped.
The lone wolf killer was then, in the words of several victims, ‘‘the biggest loser’’.
Perhaps a 15-year-old who had lost her devoted father at the Masjid An-Nur (Al-Noor Mosque) put it best. ‘‘You are the only one who has lost everything,’’ she said.
Another said: ‘‘You sacrificed your life for 14 minutes of failure and for that you are 15th of March’s biggest loser.’’
The determination to tell the shooter, face to face, that he had not achieved his twisted goals was one of the main messages victims wanted to convey at the sentencing hearing of Brenton Harrison Tarrant, 29, in the High Court at Christchurch before Justice Cameron Mander this week.
It culminated in the severest sentence imposed in New Zealand under present law – life without parole.
The message grew stronger as the sentencing went on. On the first nervous day of the hearing, the victims were subdued, a little fearful of the shooter and apprehensive about the court process and the barrage of media coverage.
On the second day victims – perhaps emboldened by those who had gone previously and by the fact that media coverage did not hurt them – were ready to be bolder, blunter, more graphic and more pointed. They had, as Sara Qasem, whose joyful father Abdelfattah Qasem, 60, died in the hail of bullets at An-Nur, said, ‘‘snatched back’’ the story. A weight was lifting.
By the third day an extra 25 victims – originally the court allowed for 66 impact statements – wanted to tell the court about the impact of the slaughter on their lives. Most were happy to be identified, filmed and photographed. The shyness and reticence had gone and a measure of cathartic theatre was introduced.
Podium thumping, obscene gestures towards the gunman, shouted chants, incantations, pointing, lethal stares and mockery enlivened the courtroom.
The desired punishments – they usually included hell or death – became more colourful, the descriptions of the gunman’s personage more scathing. He was a nothing, a maggot, a rat, and ‘‘a piece of rotten meat’’.
But the message – gunman you have failed – was the same and Justice Mander was wise to let the victims vent. They had long been silent about the gunman, and the judge was not there to spare his feelings.
Towards the end, some victims decided to stop talking about their personal injuries and the impact on their lives.
‘‘I am not going to stand in front of you today and tell you what I have endured in the last 18 months because frankly we know you don’t carry a single bone of empathy,’’ said Feroz Ditta, who was shot twice in the leg at the Masjid AnNur.
‘‘Instead I’m here to tell you that on the 15th of March when you executed your great plan to tear down Muslims you failed and you failed utterly and miserably. You failed to snatch our faith from us, you failed to deter our spirits.
‘‘Instead, you strengthened our love for our religion, our love for our divine creator, for our beloved mosque. We will not stop praying. We will not stop devoting ourselves wholeheartedly to our faith,’’ he said.
As a result of the attacks, he was now greeted in the street with Salam Alaikum (Peace be unto you).
Hisham Alzarzour, who experienced war in Syria and with his wife Susan hoped for a more peaceful and secure life in New Zealand, said he had planned to read his statement.
He was shot in the hip and continues to suffer both the physical and mental effects of the shooting. But he did not want the gunman to hear about them.
He would tell him instead that, ‘‘you are a coward, and you will be in hell’’.
Justice Mander rammed home the message in his sentencing remarks. ‘‘Your crimes were met by unprecedented public outpouring of love and support for the people you targeted and the wider Muslim community.
‘‘Your design was to divide, but the public’s response was to stand with the people of their community – with their fellow New Zealanders – to demonstrate their unqualified repudiation of your hateful agenda. You failed, but the individual and personal cost of the lives lost and the grievous wounds inflicted are immense.’’
Sometimes the victims would thank the gunman, not only for making their faith stronger, their community more united and relations with other New Zealanders better but for creating martyrs. Muslims believe martyrs receive the highest place in heaven so the shooter had done their loved ones ‘‘the biggest favour’’, as one survivor put it. One told the story of a martyr arriving in heaven and seeing what he could expect, asked to be martyred another 10 times.
It was another way of saying they had experienced loss but their faith delivered compensations.
That is not to say all victims took the same approach. They came from different cultures and countries, had different levels of education and varying levels of confidence. Some were taxi drivers and welders, others were teachers, academics, engineers and computer specialists. The different cultures were reflected in the impact statements.
Bangladeshi victims tended to talk more about the financial catastrophe of losing an income earner, because of expectations that Bangladeshis earning abroad would support the wider family.
Mohammed Omar Faruk, 36, a welder, was planning to return to Bangladesh to start a business and reunite with his pregnant wife. His mother told the court he provided her only income, and she saw no future in her life. She worried about her daughter as it was customary for the bride’s family to pay for the food at the wedding.
‘‘Omar would have proudly helped me.’’
His widow, who is now living in New Zealand with the child he never saw, said she felt pressured to send more money to her husband’s family and felt ostracised.
The Malaysian victims were restrained, while those with links to Afghanistan more demonstrative.
The five sons of murder victim Matiullah Safi stood together as Jibran Safi delivered a confronting impact statement.
‘‘He has no love, no remorse and no compassion and I do not expect him to. He is a loner, a big fat loser – a coward and a pathetic human being. He does not deserve this platform that we have given him in the last two days.
‘‘You are a nobody. You will rot in jail alone.’’
As a final rebuke the brothers, in unison, shouted a defiant phrase from their religion.
The victims wanted their deceased loved ones to be remembered as successful and contributing to New Zealand, in marked contrast to the gunman who had brought only evil and would now be a huge burden on the taxpayer.
Maysoon Salama, mother of Ata Mohammad Ata Elayyan, who died at An-Nur, wept over the waste of her ‘‘amazing’’ son’s life. He was everything the gunman was not.
She recounted how her son was a Futsal champion and a member of national teams. He had a successful IT business employing others. ‘‘You took away not only the most amazing son but the best husband, father . . . and a pious Muslim,’’ Salama said.
Know the loss you have caused, read all his achievements, she told the gunman.
Some victims compared him to terrorists in the Middle East who claim they act in the name of Islam.
One victim said Islam was a continuation of the message of Abraham Moses and Jesus. It was a religion of peace.
Forces in the world were distorting the message and unfortunately among them were
Muslims. ‘‘They are not. They have been used as tools in this filthy game.’’
Hamimah Tuyan, whose husband died in hospital 48 days after the shooting and after 18 surgeries, said she had told her son the shooter was the same sort of radicalised and ignorant terrorist as those under the Isis banner.
It’s hard to see what the shooter could have said to offer even the most minuscule comfort. If the victims wanted to see remorse or regret they would be disappointed.
By the end of sentencing it was hard to believe the gunman, an essentially insignificant misfit whose demeanour matched his grey tracksuit outfit, could have perpetrated such devastation.
He was a changed man from his first court appearance when, kitted up like a medieval serf, he looked stocky and defiant.
Where he could once squat 500 kilograms, he now looked as if he would struggle to lift his lunch. What was everyone expecting? Not the pale, pathetic figure surrounded by enough security to contain a wild mob.
The failure of perpetrators of monstrous deeds to live up to mental pictures of their appearance is not an unusual phenomenon.
Dr Colin Aikman was a Department of External Affairs lawyer who attended the Nuremberg trials, held at the end of World War II to try Nazis who had played important roles in the Hitler regime.
Most of them looked like a very ordinary bunch of ‘‘old buffers’’ and ‘‘second rate’’ men. No-one came away from the trial of Anders Breivik, who slaughtered 77 of his fellow Norwegians on July 22, 2011, thinking they had seen an impressive, if evil, person.
It became clear, especially when details of the psychiatric and psychological reports were revealed during the last day of the sentencing, that like Breivik, the Christchurch gunman had been a social misfit who spent too much time playing video games and indulging his other obsessions.
He appeared to have no friends other than those he met online, and then they were only united by a hate-filled ideology that pandered to their racist tendencies.
It turned out he was one of those all too common social rejects who act out of spite at life itself as much as anything else.
The shooter claimed to have had a change of heart. Barrister Kerry Cook, who assisted the court by providing a counter-argument to the call for a life without parole sentence, described it as a ‘‘recalibration’’ of his beliefs.
This is what the shooter had told health assessors, but his inconsistency and failure to show any empathy or regret, other than that for his own ruined his own life, made them sceptical.
In the weeks preceding sentencing he had told a psychiatrist he was not thinking rationally or logically at the time of the attacks and was acting on delusional beliefs that he regarded as romantic, idealistic notions that his death would be in the name of a cause.
Justice Mander was circumspect. The shooter had been at pains to avoid being shot and, if depressed before the slaughter, the condition had not been debilitating.
‘‘As far as I am able to gauge, you are empty of any empathy for your victims. You have not displayed any discernable distress at your offending which you recollected to the health assessors in an abstract and unemotive fashion.
‘‘Stripped of your warped ideological and political trappings you present as a deeply impaired person motivated by base hatred for people you perceive to be different from yourself.’’
If there was one victim who seemed to have his measure, it was Tuyan. To help her two fatherless sons understand, she told them the ‘‘ignorant and radicalised man’’ was like the boy at their pre-school who didn’t know how to play with other children who did not speak the same language.
‘‘He fears the other children will take away his toys, and so he communicates and expresses fear by hitting them first.’’
‘‘You failed to snatch our faith from us, you failed to deter our spirits.’’