Sunday DRIVE

TVNZ show Sunday celebrates its 20th anniversary this month. Former reporter Ian Sinclair recalls some personal highlights.

Ninety-two-year-old Mohamed Diab came shuffling down an Israeli street with an unpleasant message for New Zealand. Plainly, neither the arthritic pain of stiff legs nor the blinding heat of a Middle Eastern sun, would stop this very determined elderly man from having his say. We sat down in the cool of a whitewashed Palestinian home. The sweet fragrance of a Turkish water pipe hung in the air.

Diab revealed he was probably the last survivor of an atrocity carried out by Kiwi soldiers on his village just after the end of World War I. Arabs remember it as the massacre of Surafend.

Diab showed us his ID card, with his birthdate of 1917, proving he was just a baby when the New Zealanders invaded his village. The murder of Kiwi trooper Leslie Lowry by an intruder triggered an orgy of revenge. Nearby Sarafand al-Amar (Surafend) became the victim.

The Kiwis were not convinced by the pleas of village leaders that they had no idea who was responsible. Time, they decided, to teach the Arabs a lesson. British and Australian troops were enlisted to prevent anyone from escaping. As the killing began, Diab’s elder brother carried him to safety in the bushes while the soldiers burnt houses and beat the men to death.

What Diab wanted was an apology from our government for the slaughter of his relations and neighbours. Adding insult to injury was the failure of the New Zealand Army to even measure the death toll. That was done by an Australian soldier, originally a policeman, shocked by the atrocity. He counted 137 corpses (although most estimates of the death toll range from 40-120).