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MASSEY is published by Massey University, Private Bag 11-222, Palmerston North, New Zealand

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MASSEY has a circulation of 75,000.

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District Security Advisor
Harawira Craig Pearless
Masters in Management

Harawira Craig Pearless, who graduated from Albany this year with a Masters in Management in dispute Resolution, talks about his work in East Timor.

The moko is a work in progress. On each visit home it extends a little further. Those who know the visual language, the intricate koru and mangopare motifs, can read something of the man who bears it.

In East Timor, where Harawira Craig Pearless is a district security adviser with the United Nations, his moko-in-instalments fascinates the locals and the multi-national peacekeeping force alike. In the eastern end of East Timor, ‘moko’ is the indigenous word for tattoo. Other words such as ‘wai’ for water and ‘mate’ for death are identical to the Mäori words, linguistic proof that Polynesian origins lie in South East Asia.

“Everybody stops and looks. They asked me what it is called and from then on people called me Moko. It doesn’t matter if I’m in Dili or somewhere else people are always yelling out ‘Moko!’.”

Of Ngati Huia and Ngati Raukawa descent, Craig graduated this year with a Masters in Management majoring in dispute resolution. He had taken leave from the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) to do so. As a district security adviser with UNTAET, he is responsible for the “care and protection of UN property and personnel and investigation of ‘oversights’ by UN personnel”. Before his recruitment by the New York office of the UN, he was a soldier in the Territorial Force for 12 years and an award-winning policeman for 20 years in the Wellington and Gisborne regions where his speciality as an iwi liaison officer was making and keeping peace.

A wave of interest ripples through the crowd at the graduation ceremony in Auckland. Neighbour nudges neighbour. Ta moko looks magnificent and perfectly in place at this solemn, ceremonial occasion on this tall, noble-looking man dressed in gown and cap. And so it is that I am somewhat (privately) taken aback when Craig welcomes me to his Gisborne home for an interview two weeks later. He

is wearing civvies, common or garden slippers and black-rimmed glasses over ta moko. The twenty first century ordinariness of it all seems almost a desecration. We settle down for a chat over cups of tea and the local bakery’s best, set out by Craig’s wife, Ava. Four of their six children scamper round before going off to watch the school’s kapa haka group, and slowly, very slowly, ta moko begins to look at home on a loving dad immersed in his family on days off.

“This is for my grandchildren,” he explains to my inevitable question as to why he decided to go under the needley gun of ta moko artist Derek Lardelli. “This is to say we are still here.”

His motives for acquiring ta moko are political as well as personal. “A lot of people – high ranking army and air force people – approach me at different times and have a good look and say how great it is and that they are going to get one.

“I want to see ta moko back on the pae pae, the speaking platform on the marae. That’s the way it used to be; it was the norm. I think Once Were Warriors did a lot to set ta moko back. Okay, it alerted people that ta moko was here, but it also demonstrated that the gangs were the only group in Mäori culture that had maintained the moko. I want to see it worn by people in all walks of life.”

The symbol on Craig’s forehead is the sign of the hammerhead shark and signifies Tumatauenga, the god of war. Tumatauenga is commonly adopted by Mäori in the army as their guardian. At first this is incongruous – a warrior motif on a man whose role is to help bring a lasting peace to a nation ‘gutted’ by violence. But the peace in East Timor is one that has been arrived at by force and is still defended by arms.

Craig accepted the assignment to East Timor two years ago because he wanted to become involved in an international peace organisation. At the same time he started his Masters extramurally. For the first nine months, he wrote assignments with pen and paper in a tent and sent them home via “anyone going to Dili”. The UN eventually provided a computer and over the two years Craig funded five trips back to New Zealand for block courses.

“The easy thing about extramural study is that you get all the guides, you sit down with a calendar, you work out all the assignment due dates and then you get on with it. It’s a really flexible thing. I just fitted study in when I could – the books were always open on my desk.”

Craig’s day job begins at 6am with an hour-and-a-half of training. (He is into endurance sports, finishing the Independence Day Half Marathon in one hour and 45 minutes – no mean feat in tropical heat).

The first task of the day is to check overnight happenings and the day’s anticipated events with the local constabulary who maintain civil security – about 45 East Timorese police are supported by 20 UN civilian officers in Craig’s district of Maliana.

“I speak to Civil and Military Affairs, the army groups who liaise directly with the UN administration and the Australian military. I’ll find out about any incidents, the state of the road. If they say ‘we have this critical point here’ I advise our people that they can’t travel in that area. During the monsoon I find out what the rivers are doing. If the roads are impassable, I put travel restrictions on our people.

“Then it’s on to speak to the UN military observers at each border post. They are in constant contact with the Indonesians on the other side. Then I file a flash report on the general state of threat to Dili.”

The rest of the day could be taken up with the local guard force looking after the UN compound, or maintenance of the evacuation plan of UNTAET staff. If, for example, the Indonesians were seen to be massing on the border, Craig’s job would be to relocate the UN admin staff to Dili until things were sorted out by the peacekeepers. Craig has to know who is on his patch. When new people arrive, he must meet them in the place they are going to live and even find out where in the building they will sleep, in case they have to be taken out in a hurry. Another duty, relegated to the afternoon, is investigating the euphemistically named ‘UN oversights’.

Criminal activity is not unknown among the United Nations internationals. This might take the form or theft, illegal trade, or improprieties with local women, says Craig. Although many are earning seven or eight times what they would be in their own countries, they are still subject to tempations.

Craig deals with many groups involved in East Timor’s reconstruction. When the time came for a research paper on dispute resolution, he realised he had a bewildering array of conflicts and crimes being dealt with all around him from which to choose. He decided to focus on the reintegration of the East Timorese militia into their villages. The militias are a special group when it comes to repatriation. They are made up of about 40,000 East Timorese enticed into taking up arms by Indonesian promises of money, land and women. “The militia formed a power base in West Timor. They forcibly removed whole villages of people and put them in refugee camps.”

When the vote on independence went against Indonesia, the militia went on a spree of killing and destruction. Fifty thousand people died, a quarter of the population fled, and 95 percent of the country’s infrastructure was ruined. Many members of the militia turned against their neighbours, sometimes their own families.

Despite the record of carnage against their own, the UN and the East Timorese themselves know that militia members must somehow be disbanded, brought back to East Timor and resettled into normal village life. Somewhere along the line justice has to be applied and be seen to be applied if aggressor and aggrieved are ever to live alongside each other.

Craig sees this as a crucial challenge in the rebuilding of East Timor. According to the UNTAET website, the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor has been set up with the “dual goals of reconciliation and justice”. The Commission aims to seek “the truth regarding human rights violations in East Timor within the context of the political conflicts between 25 April 1974 and 25 October 1999”. It will “facilitate community reconciliation by dealing with past cases of lesser crimes such as looting, burning and minor assault by using a panel comprising a Regional Commissioner and local community leaders to mediate between victims and perpetrators to reach agreement on an act of reconciliation to be carried out by the perpetrator”.

Craig used his contacts among the local authorities to attend community reconciliation sessions of militia members being reintegrated into their villages. The basis of the reconciliation process was the traditional local dispute resolution method of ‘nahe biti boot’.

“Nahe biti boot is initiated by village katua (elders) on the request of a person with a grievance against people in another village. The katua organises an open meeting with the katua and villagers of the person on the other side of the dispute.

“Katua from each group, the disputants and their families and villagers meet to discuss matters until a resolution is reached agreeable to both parties. The katua and the community oversee the process and the administration of penalties. Katua have the authority to get things done and each side monitors the implementation to ensure penalties and corrective actions are carried out.”

Sounds ideal. But on the four occasions Craig observed nahe biti boot he could see that essential ingredients of the process were missing. At one session there was no one from the victim’s family or their village. In another, a militia man, who had confessed to the murder of two people, was to be integrated into his home village, even though the katua of the village of the man’s victims said he would not attend a nahe biti boot and warned that he would not be responsible for attacks on the former militia man if he ventured outside his village.

Craig understands that nahe biti boot was never meant to deal with serious crimes such as murder, kidnap or rape. Its province is disputes over land or resources. During their 500 years of domination by the Portuguese and Indonesians, the Timorese had resorted to the law courts of their former occupiers to deal with serious crimes, rather than using nahe biti boot or other less formal methods. According to the UNTAET website, this is reinforced by the Commission being set up to “complement the formal judicial process” because “serious crimes such as murder, rape or the organisation of systematic, widespread violence will be referred to the Office of the General Prosecutor”.

But it seems that on the ground the traditional system for resolving minor disputes is being used to deal with serious crime, because the judicial system cannot cope. Jails are overflowing and the courts are backlogged, says Craig.

“The militia man who had murdered two people had cut out their tongues and eaten them in front of their families. He returned to his village after his own katua reluctantly agreed to take him back as long as he remained in the village and did not visit public places, while the katua of the victim’s village had flatly refused to be involved and warned he would not be responsible for the militia member’s safety.

“My impression is that the UN civilian police involved in reintegration are eager to deal with cases as quickly as possible. There is no protocol for the civilian police or UN Human Rights staff for integrating militiamen. I think the police consider nahe biti boot too time-consuming and are not committed to any sort of lasting resolution.”

It worries him that people are being expected to live next door to someone who has committed hideous crimes against them and their fellows as if nothing has happened. He sees the process as being cosmetically applied, falling short of the aim of stopping the galling burr of perceived injustice forming and growing in this generation and poisoning the next.

“For people to have any hope of putting their worst experiences behind them, they need to see the offenders punished and remorseful. They need to feel they have been dealt with. There needs to be repair of the harm caused, if possible. In East Timor there are not enough resources or serious crimes investigators to deal with all the crime. The prisons and courts are backlogged. They appear to be dealing with the minor offenders and not the big players. Timorese militia leaders are just coming back, setting up and carrying on.

“When the UN backs off and the families of the victims see that nothing has happened to this guy, they are going to take the law into their own hands and dish out their own justice, and that comes at the end of a machete from what I’ve seen.”

The irony is, Craig believes, that the people, helped by their predominantly Catholic beliefs, have a strong will to forgive and put their trauma behind them. Simple processes of justice, if properly applied now, would have much success with a population who genuinely have no wish to be burdened forever by their past.

In mid-July Craig and I meet in the Albany campus café for an update. Craig has had his lips ‘filled in’ by Lardelli. They are blistered and have a metallic graphite-like sheen – from the lip salve Craig applies frequently because they are ‘bloody sore’. He is in Auckland to see about signing up for a PhD in October when his East Timor assignment finishes. He has two goals for the next phase of his education: to study policing of indigenous communities, and to provide a living, breathing role model on campus, particularly for young Mäori males whose achievements in tertiary education have yet to reach those of Mäori women.

The last part of ta moko –  the tattooing of Craig’s neck – will wait until he’s completed that PhD. No doubt it will catch public interest at some future graduation.