Haka dances, men with tattooed faces draped in traditional feather coats or wielding ceremonial wooden weapons, horsemen waving flags: around 35,000 people, according to the police, demonstrated on Tuesday November 19 in Wellington for the rights of the Maori and against a proposed revision of New Zealand's founding treaty. The multicolored procession converged calmly towards Parliament, where the controversial text must be debated.
Many protesters arrived in Wellington after a walking (protest march) of nine days which began hundreds of kilometers away, at the northern tip of New Zealand.
The bill criticized by protesters aims to reinterpret the Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840 between New Zealand's Maori and European settlers to establish peace and considered the country's founding document. Proposed by a minority party in the ruling coalition, this text has virtually no chance of being adopted, not even being supported by the other coalition parties.
Its promoter, David Seymour, is a libertarian who has long opposed policies favoring Maori – who are statistically more likely to die young, live in poverty or be incarcerated than the rest of New Zealanders. His initiative sparked the biggest protests in New Zealand in decades.
A community of 900,000 members
Critics of the plan, including some of the country's most prominent lawyers, see it as an attempt to deprive the 900,000 members of the Maori minority of long-won rights and to sour race relations. The very fact of having formulated such a proposal threatens to “dividing New Zealand in a way I’ve never seen in my adult life”said former Conservative Prime Minister Jenny Shipley.
“We will not accept unilateral modification of a treaty which binds two parties”declared for his part Ngira Simmonds, one of the main advisors to the Maori queen of New Zealand.
The law was supposed to be debated in Parliament on Thursday, but the session was interrupted when Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, a 22-year-old Māori Party MP, stood up, tore the bill in two and began A he will diea traditional song dance practiced by Maori during conflicts to impress their opponents. Other members of her party immediately joined her.
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