In his book, The Book of Forgiving, written with his daughter, Mpho, he identifies five things that forgiveness is not. He oversaw the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa following the collapse of the apartheid regime. Bishop Desmond Tutu perhaps knows more about the act of forgiveness and the power that it has than anyone on the planet. Lets first be clear about what forgiveness is not. However, the bigger question is the role of forgiveness in the advocacy and activism of social justice campaigners. Whether Wilcox is able to forgive Kister for these loses is up to him and his conscience. Peter Wilcox remarked that he “did not think it was for me to forgive.” Certainly Wilcox did not lose a father, as Marelle did (she was 8 years old at the time), but he did lose a friend, a colleague, and he did lose a ship. The question now for those of us involved in social justice issues, especially for those of us who had connections (even tenuously) with this act of state terrorism, becomes: can we accept Jean-Luc Kister's apology and can we forgive him? The apology may be thirty years in the coming, but as Peter Wilcox, the captain of the Rainbow Warrior that fateful night, commented, “it seemed sincere to me. In those interviews Kister said that “…it is time for me to express my profound regret and my apologies.” He went on to say that he wanted to apologise to the family of the man (Fernando Pereira) that was killed in the blast, “especially to his daughter Marelle.” Now, thirty years later, one of those remaining ten agents, Jean-Luc Kister, has spoken to the French investigative organisation, Mediapart, and on New Zealand television for the first time. But another ten French agents were never captured and never brought to justice. It quickly became apparent that this was the work of French agents and two of them, Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur, were caught and tried. This was not an example of the type of world I wanted. I was shocked, dismayed, angry and devastated. On the morning of 11 July 1985 we awoke to the news that the Greenpeace flagship, Rainbow Warrior, had been blown up and sunk in Auckland Harbour.

NFIP was one of a number of organisations campaigning against nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific, along with groups such as Greenpeace, Friends Of the Earth (FOE), Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), the Peace Squadron and others. In 1985 I was actively involved with the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement in Aotearoa (New Zealand).

Peter wilcox greenpeace