New Zealand asks: how did we miss the threat of the far right? | News from the world

While the alleged killer is in a secluded maximum security cell on the outskirts of Christchurch, many New Zealanders are wondering how a right-wing extremist, who would have ambaded an arsenal of military-grade weaponry, n & # 39; 39 has not been detected for so long.

Hidden in a wooden bungalow in the seaside town of Dunedin, the alleged gunman was an active member of the local shooting club and shot at a gym in South Dunedin. He was calm, but not lonely, and did not seem to have made any effort to hide his obsession with military-grade weapons.

Muslim badociations in New Zealand have expressed their desperation that no one in the government has taken into account the rise of racism and violence against their communities over the last five years, particularly on the island of New Zealand. South, dominated by the Pakeha (Europeans from New Zealand). Historically, the North Island has a much higher Maori, Pasifika and Asian community.

Jarrod Gilbert, a sociologist and criminal justice and gang specialist, lives in Christchurch and teaches at the University of Canterbury. He states that Christchurch and the South Island in the wider sense have a long history of white supremacism "skinhead" dating back to the 1970s.

Gilbert explains that early versions of the Right Right in the 1990s were far more visible than today's isolationists; they were "thugs" at the corner of the street, shouting insults to people of color. While the number of traditional skinheads has decreased in the region, he said that the number of right-wing "bedroom" members was swollen, emboldened by the election of world leaders of the extreme right and by the reluctance of some to repress their distorted ideology. and violence. According to experts, the number of active right-wing members in New Zealand hovers around 250.

"The right-hander [Brenton] Tarrant is an entirely new phenomenon, "said Gilbert.

"They exist in the bedrooms, on the Internet forums and their communities are not in a specific geography, they are international.

"This is the problem we are facing. When thugs were hanging around the corner in broad daylight, they were pretty easy to quantify. Online communities are impossible to estimate and determine the magnitude of the threat. "

Gilbert described the gunman as a person "radicalized online and around the world," saying, "It was not so much a local problem, but a local international problem."

New Zealand Race Relations Commissioner Susan Devoy wrote the day after the attack that Muslims faced "hatred, abuse and extremism" in the country for years.

In the Spinoff case, she wrote that police should monitor white supremacists "as closely as they watch other extremists or criminals".

"Do not tell me that March 15 was a surprise. Because hate lives in New Zealand. And yesterday, he walked the streets of Christchurch with an automatic weapon. "

Although the shooter from Christchurch claimed to belong to no group, the country has a history of activism and extreme right-wing violence.

Paul Spoonley, far-right political expert at Mbadey University in New Zealand, estimates that "there could be between 200 and 250 active members of far-right groups in the country, including the New Zealand National Front, Dominion Movement and Right Wing Resistance.

In 2017, members of the National Front – a white nationalist group – clashed in front of Parliament in Wellington, while a group of students from Auckland University, the University of Auckland. The European Students Association was accused of promoting material "typical of white supremacist nationalist groups".

More recently, the Dominion movement, a "youth-oriented fraternity of nationalists", which shares ideological similarities with the European identity movement, has been active in the country.

Another group, Right Wing Resistance, was founded by former National Front leader Kyle Chapman in 2009. The group organized "crime watch patrols" in Christchurch. Chapman has boasted that the city was at the center of a revival of "white pride". .

Following the Christchurch attack, Spoonley criticized New Zealand's complacency at the risk of violence from the far right, saying that the gathering of information about groups in the country was limited.

"I'm counting on what I can gather informally [but] I have to admit that this approach is soft to the touch, "he said.

"So, when you ask me how many people are involved or how these groups are organized, we can only guess, there is very little monitoring of their activities.

"We were all surprised by this."

According to Spoonley, Christchurch has always been the center of the New Zealand far right. In the late 1980s, his research found more than 70 far-right groups, many of them based in the city, made up of a mix of skinheads, neo-Nazis and extremist nationalists.

And the city has a history of violent crime badociated with the far right. In 1989, a skinhead named Glen Mcallister shot innocent bystander Wayne Motz before going to the local police station and killing himself. At his funeral, two skinheads waved a swastika flag over his grave.

Spoonley explained that the demographics of the city had changed since the devastating earthquakes of 2011 because of the role played by migrant communities in its reconstruction, but that these far-right groups still had "factions" in the city.

Yet Paul Buchanan, security expert at 36th Parallel, said that it would have been almost "impossible" for the police or security services to identify the alleged gunman in advance because he had planned his attack in an "absolute secret" and it is understood that he was not a suspect. member of one of the white supremacist groups active in New Zealand.

However, Buchanan said, New Zealand security agencies have investigated and infiltrated the Muslim community, animal rights groups and environmental organizations, while the deadliest man in New Zealand was aligning a goal in a brown pen at the bottom of the country and achieved his goal.

"In the threat panorama, the lady at the top of a tree preventing a forest tractor from shooting her down is probably a little less disturbing than a skinhead."