The Demonstrators

Some of them behaved in a way which must have precipitated the use of force on the part of the police. That may sound like a fairly involved way of saying that some demonstrators 'asked to be arrested', but in fact that isn't what I mean. Those demonstrators who threw paint and flour in Parliament Grounds on Thursday night may or may not have been arrested. One of them, Howard Moses (who two members of the Salient staff saw throwing material), was certainly not arrested. And yet those actions undoubtedly contributed to the heightened tension of an atmosphere in which several people were subsequently arrested for hitting, with the flat of their hands, the side of a bus which had nearly run them down. And, on Friday night, several people saw one group of demonstrators shove another group into the police ranks—an action which, some reports go on to suggest, led directly to some of the 34 arrests made that night.

In fact, therefore, those demonstrators who behaved violently or provoked the police as often as not caused the arrests of others who were content to protest peacefully. More importantly, however, they nearly succeeded in directing the protest movement away from its initial object, the All Black Tour of South Africa, Rhodesia and South West Africa, to an irrelevant and largely unreal issue—that of alleged police 'brutality'. The Thursday night demonstration had at times too much of the character of an anti-police demonstration rather than an anti-Tour protest, and the situation was in danger of disintegrating altogether. Friday night and Saturday, however, saw a fresh assertion of the clearly anti-racist and essentially non-violent character of earlier demonstrations and the self-fulfilling prophecies of the Progressive Youth Movement and other opportunist fringe elements were effectively nullified. A few troublemakers were still in evidence—those lionhearted characters who wandered along the fence shouting "Fascists!" or "Pigs" or, occasionally, "Fascist Pigs!" at policemen who gazed back at them with a degree of contempt which I shared fully. Or those protesters who refused to move off once the plane had left, when told to do so by the police and asked to do so by Tom Poata ("don't let the police provoke you . . . they will try to provoke you but don't let them do it . . . just disperse quietly and don't give them an excuse to arrest you . . .") But the people mouthing the simplistic polarities—"we (demonstrators) good; they (police) bad"—had been effectively shut up by an overwhelming vote the night before against violence and for a peaceful protest.

The end—as the plane took off and there was clearly nothing anyone could do to stop a small group of New Zealanders (but with the moral support of what I believe to have been the majority of New Zealanders, including Maoris) from furthering this nation's involvement in racism—was sad. It was honest though, and our means—a peaceful and honest assertion of what our consciences told us was right—did not belie our ends.