SJP: Letter sent to Te Papa

Te Papa, PO Box 467, Wellington, New Zealand
Dear Seddon Bennington, Chief Executive of Te Papa,

On behalf of the over two hundred members of Auckland University Students for Justice in Palestine we are writing to inform you of our extreme concern in the amoral attitude
‘Te Papa’, Our Place, presents to the public through its hosting of the annual arms trade conference in 2006, not once, but for the fourth time.

Hosting this conference presents a message that Te Papa, Our Place, is supportive of the transfer of advanced military technology to active rogue states that continue to ignore international law and conventions. The recent massive Israeli violence against Lebanon - condemned by the majority of the international community, including New Zealand– is only the most recent and well publicized action whereby sophisticated weaponry was used to perpetrate crimes against humanity in direct contradiction to numerous UN resolutions, without respect to international opinion or law. The United States internationally condemned attack on Iraq is another recent example.

It is abhorrent that our national museum is being used to show off the weapons and related products of New Zealand’s war profiteers and their invited guests. The fact that Te Papa is hosting guests like American corporation Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest weapons manufacturer, is quite frankly disgusting. Students for Justice in Palestine has a broad membership base, including many students from nations that have been at the receiving end of the technology that will be on show in October at Our Place.

Numerous Palestinian members of our organisation have family and friends who continue to face the consequences of Israel’s brutal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, an occupation in direct contravention of numerous UN conventions calling for an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories. These civilians face an occupying army that on a daily basis kills, maims and injures unarmed civilians in occupied Palestine. Unfortunately, an Auckland company, Oscmar International, is directly implicated in the training of this occupying army. Oscmar has been exporting military training simulators to some of the worst human rights violators in the world for many years. Oscmar’s training simulators are used by the nation which holds the record for breaking the most United Nations resolutions, and also the nation who has broken the second-largest amount of United Nations resolutions. Needless to say then that both the Israeli “Defence” Force and the United States Army are among the customers of Oscmar. The US military continues to maintain the brutal occupation of Iraq that has left at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead according to British medical journal Lancet. Even though New Zealand’s Prime Minister Helen Clark called the US led invasion “wrong”, our national museum provides the conference facilities for a company that trains the soldiers that occupy Iraq against the wishes of the vast majority of the Iraqi people.

We also have members from Afghanistan who have had friends and family killed by the United States, using components made by Auckland company Rakon in guided missiles in the US aerial bombing campaign that left at least 3,000 innocent Afghani civilians dead as the Bush administration took misguided revenge following the 9/11 terror attacks.

Without doubt, we believe that no viable case can be made for our national museum hosting this conference. We feel a collective shame at the use of Te Papa as the venue for the 2006 Weapons Industry conference and strongly urge you not to allow New Zealand’s arms dealers to hold their conference there this year. We feel that should you allow the weapons conference to take place, our silence may be mistaken for complicity in the war profiteering of these corporations. Therefore, we would be obligated to take action ourselves to halt the conference, and thus your complicity and ours in the global arms trade.

The tides are turning against war and all those who profit from it, and soon few New Zealanders will feel comfortable in remaining silent and thus complicit, in the criminal actions that are taking place in the world today. We are not suggesting that you are ‘either with us or against us’ - we credit you with intelligence, and moreover, recognize the complexity of this situation. However we ask you to consider the facts of New Zealand’s involvement in the global arms trade. Ultimately we hope you will consider the humane option of working with us to make the world, and of course Te Papa – Our Place, a safer and more humane environment for ourselves and our children. Small steps can mean big things; and the choice you make in the coming months may mean considerable things to people in places like Palestine and Afghanistan. What price Te Papa has put on selling out values of solidarity, justice and peace to the annual Weapons conference we know not, but we do ask that you consider how that money was made and who had to die for it to pass into Te Papa’s and your hands.

Thank you sincerely; we look forward to hearing from you.

Mustafa Al ZaqZouq

Sahar Ghumkhor

Miriam Pierard

Omar Hamed

Joseph Smith

On behalf of Auckland University Students for Justice in Palestine.