The ceremony to consecrate a memorial to the 'unknown warrior' was cynicism in action.

It wasn't just about the Government shoring up the veteran vote after attacks on its handling of the military. It was also about it creating a facade of patriotism, a smokescreen to hide the sell-off of our sovereignty, with the loosening of restrictions over foreign ownership of Aotearoa.

At the same time, there was something very genuine in the response of ordinary New Zealanders to the ceremony. It was hard not to be moved.

I used to scorn ANZAC Day commemorations and military monuments. I saw no reason to glorify the slaughter of war, mostly waged to maintain the wealth of the elite. I thought it made it all seem too tidy, too sanitised, too remote from the reality of war.

Until my girlfriend of the time took me to meet her grandfather. He was a charming gentleman, still fine looking and sharp. He had been in Italy for the Allied invasion, lost friends and killed other people. Unlike some veterans, he wanted to talk about it, so much so that his family had heard about it more than they wanted to. It being new to me, I liked to listen.

He talked about kids he had known, fine young men who never came home. He talked about how the world had changed since then, in ways he didn't much like. He cried, this proud old man, as he remembered the war.

He told me a story about fighting house-to-house, seeing some movement in a cellar, lobbing in a grenade. When they went in, they found the remains of an Italian family that had been hiding down there. All dead. He still carried that guilt, and would carry it to the end of his days.

I started going to ANZAC Day memorials after that. I wanted to show my respect for him, and for all the young men whose innocence was stripped away by the evil of those times. To those people who lived through a hell I can scarcely imagine, not just the soldiers, but also the civilians: women, children, and elderly.

I also go to remember the conscientious objectors and mutineers. Those who refused to fight and were murdered by the state as a result, or left tied to a post in no-man' s land. Those who were persecuted for daring to speak out against war, especially the 'Great War' that our unknown soldier died in, a 'fratricidal war' between the European nobles for control of Africa and the other colonies, according to Marcus Garvey.

This monument is not to an 'unknown warrior' but to a soldier. Probably conscripted, possibly unwilling. Warriors are ordinary members of society who, when they are not fighting, plant crops and build houses and do the other things of normal life. They fight because they choose to, and because they are persuaded to follow a war leader. Soldiers are professional killers. They have no other job. They have no other choice but to fight and maybe die.

The bodies left in foreign soil, represented by this unnamed man disinterred and brought home, were soldiers not warriors. They represent all the dead this country has left overseas, fighting other people's wars. This memorial gives New Zealanders a chance to grieve their dead who have no graves, to remind ourselves of the terrible tragedy that is war, and to bring these ancestors, people who helped forge our self-perception as a nation, back home.

Do you think war memorials are a good thing?

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The current debate over whether Fouzya Salim and Feraiba Razamjoo should be required to remove their veils in court is an inevitable tension arising from immigration. The question of how far incoming and receiving cultures accommodate to each other is not simply resolved. Let’s remember that the last major wave of immigrants deal with it by killing lots of tangata whenua, stealing most of their land and attempting to annihilate their culture.

There are no simple solutions to these matters, but there seems to be a general demand for simplistic answers. Brian Rudman’s column in Friday’s Herald (29.10.04), and Professor Bill Hodge’s appearance on Agenda on Saturday both demonstrated the tendency for even intelligent people to oversimplify the issues.

My view is that ultimately the court will decide that the veils must be removed. The emphasis on formal procedural fairness in our justice system will, I think, require it. Still, there are a number of aspects to the case that concern me.

The first, and least important, is that the clamour to force the women to remove their veils seem based as much on assumptions of cultural superiority as on the facts of the actual case. As in France, where muslim girls are forbidden to wear headscarves at school, the objective seems to be to force muslim women to do away with manifestations of their ‘backward religion’, and to make them realise that they are being oppressed.

I am no fan of the burka. It does seem to me, though, that muslim women have the right to determine for themselves where the sharp end of their struggle for equality manifests. I suspect that New Zealander’s antipathy to the burka is as much about its ‘otherness’ as about our concern for the difficulties experienced by muslim women, whether in Afghanistan or in Aotearoa.

Secondly, if muslim women are required to remove their veils against their will, this is likely to make women from those cultures averse to participating in judicial proceedings. If women are discouraged from seeking the help of police when suffering domestic or other violence, for example, because they face an additional humiliation in court, how does this serve justice?

Lastly, I sympathise with the defence lawyers, who claim that their clients are disadvantaged by not being able to see the demeanor of the witnesses for the prosecution. However I wonder how Colin Amery expects himself, or a judge or jury, to assess the facial demeanour and bodily language of a woman who has been forced by the court to do what I can only guess is their equivalent of being stripped naked in front of strangers.

In addition, even without their embarassment, these women come from a culture so alien to Mr Amery and the judge that women are required to wear veils. I doubt the judge or jury will have any idea what their facial gestures might mean. Most Pakeha New Zealanders have enough trouble understanding the body language of Samoans, never mind Afghanis.

As I stated at the beginning, I think that in the interest of formal procedural fairness, that ultimately the court will have to decide that the women testify without a veil. If so, I hope that a way can be found to humiliate them as little as possible. I also wish that our collective discussions of such matters was a little less self-satisfied.

Do you think Muslin women should be required to remove veils in court?

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