Maire Leadbeater - from gunpoint to making the point

By PETER CALDER

On Wednesday afternoon, almost 24 hours after landing back in New Zealand after a spot of bother in Jakarta, Maire Leadbeater was looking rather drained.

Sitting in the lounge of her Grey Lynn home, the Auckland City councillor and evergreen activist shook her head as if willing her brain to work and tried to remember what she'd said at a council committee meeting that morning.

"I suppose I must still be jet-lagged," she said.

"I tried to raise an issue in the meeting and the words wouldn't come out right. I had to ask myself, "What did I just say?"'

But she wasn't blaming the dodgy brain function on her experience in the Indonesian capital, where she was one of 32 foreigners detained and threatened with imprisonment after armed police broke up a conference to which she was a delegate.

Her attendance was the last leg in a round-the-world trip that included visits to a daughter and a brother in England and a brief trip to France.

"I've been doing quite a lot of travelling and this just came at the end."

"This" was almost three days of being treated like a criminal in a country she had entered, legally and openly, to attend a meeting at which she was scheduled to conduct a workshop.

The Asia Pacific People's Solidarity Conference was not to express opposition to the Indonesian Government - although as a spokeswoman for the Indonesia Human Rights Committee and a longtime voice for the freedom of the East Timorese, Leadbeater's done her share of that. Rather, it was a a meeting of opponents of globalisation organised by a newly formed group called INCREASE - the Indonesian Centre for Reform and Social Emancipation.

And, cold comfort though it might have been, she saw no evidence that the breakup of the gathering was authorised at political level but was rather the work of police acting on their own initiative, driven by swaggering exercise of their summary power rather than the direction of malevolent authority.

"There was pretty strong evidence, from what I saw, that the police were acting as a law unto themselves without any accountability to civilian authority," she says.

"We had some very strong human rights lawyers helping us and one who was particularly strident, when the police were trying to lay down the law, said - it had to be translated for me: 'Look here, we have a civilian government. You take notice of me!'

"But that wasn't how the police were seeing it. They are living in the old days, in the Suharto-era mode."

Throughout the few days of the crisis, Leadbeater was at pains to underplay the impression that she was in peril and to emphasise the danger to the conference organisers and Indonesian delegates who would be left behind when her own difficulties were resolved. But she admits she was scared at times.

"When heavily armed police with tear gas grenades and rifles over their shoulders are barking orders at you and at each other and you don't even know who's in charge, that's a bit scary."

But, she says, she was confident that international pressure and consular support meant "we would be all right."

For all that, the events had "a huge emotional impact," she says.

"I have always read about things happening, but there's something different about seeing it at first hand. As repression always is, it's counterproductive because it galvanises opposition.

"Most of the people organising that conference are young people and their courage is amazing."

True to her tireless activist energies, the 55-year-old Leadbeater is optimistic that some good will emerge from the events of last weekend.

She predicts that the behaviour of the police - who at best turned a blind eye as thugs from the Muslim fundamentalist Ka'bah party, armed with machetes and knives, smashed up the conference venue - will cause "a bit of a shakeup."

That is occurring at international level - and Leadbeater says she's pleased Foreign Affairs Minister Phil Goff is "starting to ask some hard questions."

As well, the English-language Jakarta Post and some Indonesian-language papers had run editorials criticising the police.

Leadbeater's outspokenness while she was in Jakarta - she gave frequent telephone interviews to New Zealand media - attracted some criticism from Goff. who appeared to suggest that it was hampering diplomatic efforts to ensure her safety.

One letter-writer to the Herald criticised her "lack of gumption" in attending a conference in such a politically fragile country.

But Leadbeater says she regarded it as vital that she - and Goff - spoke out while the world media was paying attention.

"Maybe Phil Goff and I had a different opinion about the risk I was under. Maybe I was too sanguine. But sometimes our diplomacy with Indonesia - as when [New Zealand student] Kamal Bamadhaj was killed in the Dili massacre - has been too subtle to be seen.

"But I would like to turn the page now. I am really pleased that Phil Goff has been speaking out. There's a big moral responsibility on New Zealand, because I don't think we can expect a strong stand from Australia, whose Government is even more conservative than ours.

"There will always be a bit of tension between an activist and the Minister of Foreign Affairs but I was truly grateful for his support. Whatever difference we may have made in strategic assessment, today's today. Let's move on."

You could say political activism was in Maire Leadbeater's blood. Her mother, Elsie Locke, was a veteran peace campaigner and battler for women's rights, who died barely two months ago at her Christchurch home at the age of 88.

She founded the local arm of the Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament - an organisation in which Maire would become active in the 1970s - and the Family Planning Association and edited a feminist journal back in the days when not many people knew what the word feminism meant.

Her father, Jack, "a genial bloke with an amazing sense of humour," was a freezing worker "very active in union politics" and a life-long member of the Communist Party.

So it's tempting to remark that the events in Jakarta would have caused some small measure of satisfaction to Maire Leadbeater's mum, if she'd been around to see it.

"I talked about her quite a bit actually while I was in Jakarta," says Leadbeater with a sad smile. "When you are all cooped up together like that, some quite intimate friendships develop. So I like to think a bit of my mum went back to a few countries."



Even this much discussion about Marie Leadbeater's background clearly makes her uncomfortable. Though neither shy nor evasive, she gently resists profiling and would rather talk about the issues that exercise her.

Yet the persistence of her commitment remains intriguing. For many of her generation, political action - against sporting contact with South Africa or the Vietnam War - seems now like a whim of youth which didn't survive the complacencies of middle age.

Characteristically, perhaps, she explains it by saying she gets more out of activism than she puts into it. "I've had some amazing experiences which have enriched me."