New Zealand must address past failures to restore Muslims' sense of safety and belonging
By the time I reach my 62nd birthday, I will finally be able to find out what happened in the lead-up to 15 March 2019. That’s because the majority of evidence collected throughout the royal commission of inquiry into the Christchurch mosque attacks will be suppressed for 30 years.
In fact, the government ministers, police, immigration and intelligence officials questioned throughout the entire process have been promised they would remain anonymous – shielded from public scrutiny until the year 2050. These decisions were made by the commission to protect confidentiality and national security.
If this sounds bizarre, it absolutely is. The purpose of the inquiry was to scrutinise the role of these agencies and examine whether or not they failed to protect the Muslim community from a threat that was months, if not years, in the making.
The 800-page report was publicly released on Tuesday after a 20-month investigation. It has concluded clearly and unequivocally that the government failed to protect Muslims, and that intelligence agencies placed biased and inappropriate scrutiny on the threat of “Islamic” extremism at the cost of monitoring the rise of rightwing activity.
The report outlines 44 recommendations to government, which include reforming gun laws, recognising hatecrime offences, setting up an oversight group that includes members of the Muslim community, implementing a transparent and publicly facing counter-terror policy and establishing a new national intelligence and security agency that can adequately address the threats to New Zealand.
The findings will come as a small relief to the many Muslim voices who spent years trying desperately to highlight these points to no avail. It marks the end of an inquiry marred by criticism and frustration from the community, who often felt sidelined and shut out of key decisions, unable to pose the questions they needed answers to, or be involved in deciding the terms of reference or scope of the commission.
The inquiry also included interviews with Rebecca Kitteridge, the director general of the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS), Andrew Hampton, the head of the government communications security bureau (GCSB), police commissioner Mike Bush and two of former prime minister Sir John Key’s key staff. These crucial interviews will not be made public and have been excluded from the report.
This means the individuals entrusted with keeping safe our most vulnerable communities will never have to answer publicly for the counter-terror policies that for years targeted the Muslim community. Nor the legislations passed under urgency to grant NZSIS and the GCSB sweeping powers to monitor individuals and stop them from flying overseas. Nor the questionable alleged tactics of security agents showing up at people’s doors to ask about their Facebook messages, offering cash payments to young Muslims to spy on their mosques or promising them pathways to citizenship, or the continued government and media scrutiny of a community that makes up less than 1% of the population that had no means of defending itself, neither in the public eye or in the privacy of their own mosques.
There are two individuals in particular who must be held accountable publicly: Kitteridge and Sir John.
Between 2014 and 2017, both were instrumental in shaping New Zealand’s counter-terror program, modelled closely after our Five Eyes partners in the US and Australia. In 2014, Sir John argued passionately for the need to grant intelligence bodies wider powers, and highlighted the threat of foreign fighters to New Zealand repeatedly and publicly. In 2015, he announced to media that “jihadi brides” were fleeing New Zealand’s shores to travel to Syria, a statement that later proved to be misleading. His government was accused of deliberately stoking fear and suspicion to justify passing laws under urgency. Kitteridge later reportedly apologised privately to a Muslim group (without using the phrase jihadi brides), but nothing public from her or the prime minister’s office was ever acknowledged.
In its submission to the inquiry, the Federation of the Islamic Associations of New Zealand accused the state intelligence bodies of “institutional Islamophobia”. For years its members knocked on the doors of the prime ministers’ office asking to be consulted on the legislations they knew would disproportionately impact their community. For years they went unheard.
Chillingly, in the report, they wrote: “We asked for help. We knew we were vulnerable to such an attack. We did not know who, when, what, where or how. But we knew.”
Just one month before the attacks, Kitteridge spoke to parliament’s intelligence and security committee. In a speech with close to 2,000 words focusing on the threat of Al-Qaida and Isis, only 12 were dedicated to the threat of far-right extremism: “Internationally the slow but concerning rise of rightwing extremism also continues.”
Since 15 March, a number of people have called me “prescient” for reporting on the rising rates of anti-Muslim attacks in New Zealand, the police refusal to collect hate-crime statistics, the intelligence community’s singular and obsessive focus on mosques and Muslims and their neglect of the rise of farright activity. It was all pointing towards an inevitable catastrophe, one we as a country were ill-prepared for.
If you grew up, as I did, attending a makeshift community mosque housed in an industrial warehouse or a rented suburban flat, you were well aware of just how vulnerable you were. That there were no real fire exits. That anyone could walk through the front doors armed with ill intentions and no one could stop them.
You watched the news reports about Isis, “jihadi brides” and homegrown terrorism and you knew everyone else was watching them too. You caught the bus the following morning and felt suspicious eyes burning into your neck. You walked into work and felt the discomfort whenever a highprofile incident occurred in Sydney or Paris. You joked darkly with your Muslim friends about how NZSIS was reading your messages. You curbed your anger each time a customs officer stopped you for hours, or promised you it was just a “random search”.
The experience of being a Muslim New Zealander has meant always carrying two conflicting truths in your stomach: that you were suspicious everywhere you went, and that hidden in the tall weeds of society were people who did not want you in this country, and who intended you harm.
The justice many of us had hoped for in the royal commission was an answer to the nagging question that plagued the Muslim voices who for years were banging on the doors of government, police, customs, immigration and NZSIS: why were we ignored
Kitteridge issued an apology to the Muslim community following the report’s release, but denied that NZSIS had been spying on them. It is a bizarre claim, contradicted by years of reporting, testimonials as well as the royal commission report itself.
It will be weeks before the scope and extent of this report is grasped fully. Its findings and recommendations are a vital step forward in addressing the mistakes of the past, and the changes needed to build transparent and representative state agencies that can protect every New Zealander. However, this cannot and should not be the end of the road, and transparency cannot be shirked in favour of a clean and easy process.
The prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, has promised accountability and vowed to implement the recommendations in the report. But is true accountability possible if the individuals who oversaw the country’s most powerful agencies are protected from the beginning, their testimonies and actions hidden from the light?
It’s hard not to draw parallels with another investigation that was taking place over the past year into the tragic White Island volcanic eruption that killed 22 people in December 2019. Released last week, that inquiry resulted in the prosecution of 13 parties, who will each have to fight in court for the right of name suppression. So why were the individuals questioned in the royal commission promised anonymity from the beginning?
The government now has to prove to the Muslim community it takes this sense of accountability seriously. It has to answer to the survivors and victims of the mosque shooting, who have today called on the government to “reconsider” the suppression order and to answer the questions left unanswered.
The Christchurch Muslim community, on their part, have responded with grace and gratitude, as they always have. Despite all they’ve endured, they step forward with openness and goodwill, resting on their faith as a guide and as a salve. It is now on the government to respond in kind, to build on the platform of kindness and unity they’ve rightly received praise for a concrete and transparent timeline of actions – actions that address the failures of the past and restore for Muslims the sense of safety and belonging we have been missing for too long.
The experience of being a Muslim New Zealander has meant always carrying two conflicting truths in your stomach