Marie Leadbeater – I did not hear an uproar when Prime Minister Luxon announced he planned to reduce non-Pacific overseas aid spending. When one in ten of the global community live in extreme poverty and we only spend a miserly 0.27 percent of gross national income on overseas aid it is an outrageous suggestion. Too bad for the Nepalese when they suffer disasters caused by ice melt and global warming we rich countries are mostly responsible for.

So, it might seem like a good thing that Foreign Minister Winston Peters defended our overseas aid spending, but he did not state ethical or humanitarian reasons. Rather that aid helps to enhance our relationships in 'the very markets we need to grow our economy.'

I don't discern any ethics in his approach to diplomacy either. Peters rejects 'megaphone' diplomacy. That is nothing new, his predecessors used the same expression when they were seen to be fudging on human rights issues. In his final speech of the parliamentary term, he also said that we do still have an independent foreign policy but just not one that is 'loudly disagreeing with the United States.'

He could have added that our independence excludes 'loudly disagreeing' with Israel. By some inverse logic Mr Peters claims that our failure to recognise the state of Palestine is an example of an 'independent multi-directional foreign policy.' Surely this is Orwellian double-speak. Ditto for the government's decision to take a wait and see attitude on the question of genocide. The case brought by South Africa to the International Court of Justice is yet to reach final determination, but it is now a year since an independent Commission backed by the UN concluded that Israel was indeed committing genocide. And there is no ambiguity about our obligation under the Genocide Convention to take action to prevent genocide.

Winston Peters prefers quiet 'behind the scenes' talk but that kind of diplomacy usually shades into complicity. How else to describe the failure to take a stand when our own citizens are attacked as they attempt to ameliorate the suffering of Palestinian people? Hahona Ormsby, a member of the Global Sumud humanitarian aid team was among 430 activists who were kidnapped in international waters earlier this year and taken to Israel. Still showing the clear signs of the beating he endured in Israeli custody, he attended a Select Committee meeting in June where an incensed Minister Peters called him a liar.

During the long dark days of the Indonesian occupation of Timor Leste, successive Foreign Ministers found oblique ways to refer to human rights, while at the same time extending defence cooperation with the occupying power, Indonesia. No one could find the megaphone then, even on the occasions when one of our own was killed by the Indonesian military. In 1975 New Zealander Gary Cunninghman and his journalist colleagues were executed to prevent them revealing the truth about Indonesia's full-scale invasion. Sixteen years on fellow New Zealander, Kamal Bamadhaj, was trying to protect peaceful student demonstrators when he was shot in cold blood, one of the estimated 271 victims of the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre.

Then there is our Melanesian neighbour West Papua, which desperately needs a principled advocate to speak out against human rights atrocities and a hidden ongoing war. West Papua has been under Indonesian control since the 1960s, when the Dutch were forced to abandon their decolonisation plans after Indonesian military intervention and US manipulation. Indonesian control was 'legitimised' in a manifestly phony referendum in 1969, but the indigenous Papuan people have never stopped resisting using both peaceful means and armed struggle. The number of military deployed to West Papua is estimated at a staggering 56,000 Indonesian soldiers or one soldier per 100 civilians. That compares with a national ratio of one soldier per 696 civilians.

I am sure Minister Peters knows of the post-takeover death toll estimated at 100,000 to 500,000, the deadly clashes this year in the highlands, the tragic displacement of over 120,000 villagers, and the ongoing ecocide as the territory is stripped of forests, savannah and wetlands to make way for the President's much vaunted food and energy project.

However, Winston Peters has had a two convivial meetings recently with his Indonesian Foreign Affairs counterpart, Sugiono, one in Manila and the second here at the 13th Indonesia-New Zealand Joint Ministerial Commission (JMC) in New Zealand. They talked about strengthening defence cooperation through the establishment of a Navy-to-Navy Talks forum. This would complement our long-standing programme of sponsoring Indonesian officers to attend our six-month New Zealand Defence Force Advanced Command and Staff Course and facilitating other bilateral officer workshops and meetings.

Thankfully there have been standout moments in our history when we have taken an ethical and independent stand. Our anti-nuclear stand meant standing against the US, but it also meant taking bold initiatives with our neighbours – like putting forward a South Pacific nuclear weapon free zone at the UN with Fiji and Papua New Guinea back in 1975 and in 1996 successfully initiating a historic case to the World Court to achieve a determination concerning the illegality of nuclear weapons. There are other examples of independent action including our mediation support which helped to end the conflict in Bougainville in the late 1990s.

Acting independently didn't so much rely on a megaphone as on straightforward advocacy and on working with the international legal framework and with the UN. To be clear I refer to international law, put in place by democratic international decision-making, not the slippery self-serving concept of the 'rules-based order'. There is plenty of opportunity to take up the challenge again for the besieged people of Palestine and our neighbours in West Papua.

[Maire Leadbeater is one of Aotearoa's leading Human Rights Activist, she is the sister of Kieth Locke.]

Source: https://thedailyblog.co.nz/guest-blog-marie-leadbeater-an-ethical-independent-foreign-policy