Aupito William Sio recalled the terrifying day during his childhood when police officers holding German shepherd dogs turned up at his family home before dawn and shined flashlights into their faces while his father stood helpless.
Now the New Zealand minister for Pacific peoples, Sio and New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern yesterday announced that the government would formally apologize for an infamous part of the nation’s history known as the Dawn Raids.
It is when Pacific Island people were targeted for deportation in the mid-1970s during aggressive home raids by authorities to find, convict and deport people overstaying their visa.
Photo: New Zealand Herald via AP
The raids often took place very early in the morning or late at night.
Sio became emotional as he and Ardern discussed the apology at a news conference.
“We felt as a community that we were invited to come to New Zealand. We responded to the call to fill the labor workforce that was needed, in the same way we responded to the call for soldiers in 1914,” Sio said.
However, the government then turned on the Pasifika community when it felt those workers were no longer needed, he said.
Ardern said that at the time, people who did not look like white New Zealanders were told they should carry identification to prove they were citizens and were often randomly stopped in the street, or even at schools or churches.
Pacific people were often dragged before the courts in their pajamas and without proper representation, she said.
“Not only were they targeted, they were targeted using a process and a practice that was really dehumanizing, that really terrorized people in their homes,” Ardern said.
“The raids, and what they represented, created deep wounds, and while we cannot change our history, we can acknowledge it and we can seek to right a wrong,” Ardern said.
The formal apology is to be issued at a commemoration event on Saturday next week in Auckland.
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