View from a darkened room (ii)

Exercises in futility

 



Alam Halfa exercise soldier

 

One of the more interesting pieces of news I came across this week was about Alam Halfa, a military exercise in the North Island, involving 1000 troops from NZ, Canada, Britain and the USA.
The exercise lasted for over a month and has been heavily publicised by the NZDF, including a video released on youtube, Ready for any terrain. The local news reports have emphasised the important help the army have received from people living in the areas where  it's taken place. As the report in the Manawatu Standard explained the main part was the '...counter-insurgency field exercise throughout Tararua and Wairarapa, which began on Monday.  
The week-long exercise sees soldiers integrated into the local community where they will work with civilian volunteers to remove insurgent forces from "Alpira", the name given to Tararua and Wairarapa.''

Whilst military exercises take place regularly, it is interesting that the key component of this one was counter insurgency, especially as the US military and Marine Forces were also involved. According to Colonel Parsons, the key focus in the training was how to separate insurgents from the communities in which they are '...interwined and co-ercing the population'.

I'm not suggesting that the whole point of the exercise is to plan how to deal with future unrest in New Zealand but you would have to be naïve not to accept that there is an element of that involved. The language used by Colonel Parsons and other participants shows the military mindset; anyone who is against whichever state the army are supporting, has to be an 'ínsurgent' who is 'coercing' the local and has no community backing. This is the charge they levelled against the Republican movement during the decades of war in the six counties of Ireland but of course it would never have lasted that long if they had no support.

The fact that there other countries involved in the exercise, in particular, the USA, should also remind us that New Zealand has taken part in the 'war on terror' as well as having its own strategic, imperialist aims. Nicky Hagar's book on the New Zealand presence in Afgjanistan, Other people's wars paints a grim picture of the country's involvement there. That of course wasn't the only war they have been involved in; successive NZ Prime Ministers have often been enthusiastic about joining in with big boys' adventures.

 

I was also intrigued by the name of the exercise, Alam Halfa, as this was the site of a World War II battle in Egypt close to El Alamein where the New Zealand forces suffered heavy losses at the hands of the Italians. It would be interesting to know why this was chosen as the name, as it culd hardly be seen as a good omen.

US Military base Harewood, Christchurch Airport

 

US Military base Christchurch

 

One of the downsides of emigrating to a new country in your late 40s is that there are many things that you just don't know; the kind of thing that you almost pick up by osmosis when you grow up in a country. One of these things was discovering that the USA has had  a military base in New Zealand since the 1950s and throughout the period when the two countries had a spat over New Zealand's nuclear free policy when the latter was expelled from ANZUS. Obviously it was more important to the US to keep its only base in NZ rather than move elsewhere; it also shows that though they were obviously miffed by the anti-nuclear policy, it never got in the way of the issues that really mattered to them.

The mystery of Dunedin

 

Prior to moving to Dunedin in 2010, I'd lived for the previous 20 years in London; the contrast between the two countries couldn't be greater. London has a densely located population of over eight Million whilst Dunedin can only boast 127,000; the latter is also much less densely populated. Apart from this, so many other factors are different, it is as if they are worlds apart.

 

Despite living here for almost 3 years, I still find it difficult to get a handle on the place. Not in geographical term of course; even I don't usually get lost driving around Dunedin anymore.

 

What I mean is that I don't really understand the city or the people. The self image of Dunedin is best expressed by this extract from the Tourism NZ website:

Dunedin offers all the facilities you would expect within a modern, thriving city, without the traffic jams and parking problems! Daily life is vibrant, positive and upbeat. Cafes, restaurants and bars compete for space with a fabulous mix of shops and entertainment venues.

Of course all cities like to boost themselves and Dunedin is no different, especially as Dunedin is fairly reliant on tourism, not least the thousands who visit every year via cruise ships. You could also include the thousands of thousands of students who study here as a type of tourist.

Whilst I like Dunedin and enjoy living here, I wouldn't describe the city as vibrant, positive or upbeat. There's relatively high unemployment as well as much underemployment with a lot of poorly paid part-time work being the only employment available. But it's not even that, bad as it is, that makes me wonder about Dunedin. It's the attitude of people living here that I find difficult to understand. Not everyone of course, probably only a small percentage but amongst some, there's a combination of sourness, lack of empathy and deference to authority that I've never come across anywhere else previously.

At first I thought it was just the paranoia of being in a new country and adjusting to a different type of life. Over time however, I began to realise it wasn't only me who thought like that and neither was it only immigrants. What really intrigues me is why this seems to be the case, is this just a Dunedin thing or is it nationwide and for how long has it been like that? I'll come back to this in the future after further research...