Peace movement hits back

Press, 30 July 1986, Page 9

Peace movement hits back

Accusations that the anti-nuclear movement in New Zealand is Com-munist-inspired are wild, untrue and lack proof, according to the secretary of the New Zealand Nuclear-Free Zone Committee, Mr Larry Ross. He was referring to Air Vice-Marshal I. G. Morrison’s comments printed in “The Press” of Saturday, July 26. Mr Ross said that a 1984 report on New Zealand’s anti-nuclear movement to the United States State Department showed such claims were unfounded.

The investigation by United States Admiral Lloyd Vasey and Professor Henry Albinski was

reported in the “New Zealand Times” in January last year. “Their report said the New Zealand peace movement has very little pro-Soviet sentiment and politically insignificant Communist parties,” Mr Ross said this week.

The report said: “Soviet diplomatic and consular missions in Australia and New Zealand, despite their believed efforts to maintain contacts with dissident opinion, are not thought to have organised or to have sustained indigenous dissent “The sense of disquiet even of dissent is increasingly to be found

not only among the easily labelled political radicals but among members of the traditionally minded middle class.” Mr Ross said New Zealand had more than 350 autonomous peace groups which held a spectrum of opinions.

“Some condemn the Soviet Union for invading Afghanistan and persecuting the Moscowbased peace group, ‘Group of Trust’,” he said. “Sometimes the Soviets earn a word of praise for their proposed unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing, especially with the completion by the United States of its eighth nuclear test

during 1986. “Roger Foley, who did weeks of investigation into the peace movement, said that there appeared to be no orchestration or ideological basis for all groups. “The one peace group which appears to be ‘soft on Moscow’ is the numerically small New Zealand Council for World Peace. Other peace activists deliberately keep council members at arms length.”

Air Vice-Marshal Morrison did not acknowledge the risk of human extinction, from the accelerating nuclear arms race, in his article,

Mr Ross said. “He has also not recognised that the nuclear Powers have made no progress in reducing this threat,” he said. “Wars and international tension have increased. The non-nuclear Powers must take charge of their own destiny, distancing themselves as fast as possible from the nuclear States that threaten the world.

“We must create the right climate for actual disarmament steps by the nuclear States. Creating nuclear weapon-free zones is one step towards reducing potential nuclear battlefields.”