FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

New Zealand War Guilt

WELLINGTON (23 April 2011)

Anzac Day this year, nearly a century after the outbreak of the First World War, is an ideal opportunity for the New Zealand government to admit its war guilt and apologise to Germany, Turkey, Samoa, Iraq and Egypt, says Dr Stevan Eldred-Grigg.

Eldred-Grigg, well-known novelist and historian, is author of The Great Wrong War, the latest and most controversial history of New Zealand in the First World War. He says:

‘We are distant enough from the war now to think about what we did calmly. Kneejerk nationalism and the celebration of our war history as somehow heroic needs to come to a stop. New Zealand attacked five nations without any provocation. First our army invaded a wholly harmless Samoa. We then subjected its people to a clumsy and sometimes thuggish colonial rule for nearly half a century. Next we occupied Egypt. The people of Egypt nearly all opposed our occupation, but we rode roughshod over them for the rest of the war. At the end of the war, when hundreds of thousands of Egyptians marched for independence and democracy, we fielded our army to help suppress their protests. We invaded Turkey, which was in no way a threat to New Zealand. We helped a British invasion of Iraq and then, after the war, helped the British to control that country against the wishes of most of its people. Lastly, we invaded Germany. Germany, like the other four countries that we attacked, was no threat to New Zealand. New Zealand, backing Britain, behaved from the beginning of the war as though Germany was an enemy. Germany never declared war on New Zealand. We not only killed many thousands of German soldiers on the battlefields, we helped in the starvation blockade that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of German civilians.’

‘The government of New Zealand would be wise to take this opportunity of acknowledging that the First World War was a war in which we were not defending our own country but attacking aggressively and sometimes ruthlessly.’

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