Is New Zealand at risk of forgetting March 15?

Friday marks the fifth anniversary of the Christchurch terror attack.

In the morning, the families of the victims will gather at the cemetery for a private service. They’ll have a private prayer at the mosque after that, with a handful of notables like former mayor Lianne Dalziel in attendance.

The Friday call to prayer will then be broadcast on RNZ ahead of usual Friday prayers at the masjid.

In Islam, the Jummah or Friday prayer is the most important one of the week. When the terror attack unfolded on March 15, 2019, it was a Friday. Now, on the fifth anniversary of that atrocity, March 15 once again falls on a Friday.

“It is so special this year because it’s coming on the same day. It is a very special day for Muslims. Everyone, most of the time, will leave our work, our everything, to have this prayer,” Maha Galal, chair of the March 15 Whānau Trust, told Newsroom.

The Prime Minister will hold a private meeting with the families of the shaheed, before a more public event at which he and some community members are set to give speeches.

Friday also marks the start of the third annual Unity Week in Christchurch, organised by seven women who lost loved ones during the attack. Every year, Unity Week runs from March 15 to March 21 (the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination), featuring art exhibitions, community walks, a peace picnic and more.

Outside of Christchurch, however, there are relatively few formal plans to mark the fifth anniversary of the nation’s worst terror attack.

“I mention to people that [Friday is the fifth anniversary] and I get a reaction where people go, ‘Wow, five years, can’t believe it,'” Dalziel, who was Christchurch’s mayor when the attack occurred, told Newsroom.

“When it’s raised with people in that context, they do remember. But the further the distance from Christchurch, the particular day perhaps doesn’t [invoke a response] unless someone draws it to your attention.”

Last year, then-Prime Minister Chris Hipkins didn’t travel down to mark the occasion with the community on March 15. He met with family members two weeks earlier and his office said at the time that the shaheed families had expressed a desire for a private ceremony, but some community members were offended that Hipkins only sent a prerecorded video message on the day.

Stop the average Wellingtonian or Aucklander on the street on Friday and ask them whether it’s an important day and they’ll probably not think of the terror attack anniversary. For an event that was greeted with a national outpouring of grief and love and support, at every mosque and in every community, March 15 seems to have faded in salience for the general public ever since.

It would have been difficult to imagine, on March 16 or 17, 2019, when bouquets of flowers and other tributes carpeted the footpath outside mosques in Wellington, Hamilton, Auckland, Dunedin and elsewhere, that some people might overlook the attack’s anniversary just five years later.

Guled Mire was a prominent advocate for the Muslim community in the immediate aftermath of the attack. He left for the United States on a Fulbright scholarship in early 2021 and returned two years later to what felt like a completely different country.

“I had perhaps underestimated really what was happening back home during that period. It’s a country that has not just moved on but was turning a blind eye and indifference became the norm.”

RNZ’s Mediawatch programme noted the fourth anniversary received a “muted” media response. That’s an understatement, Mire said.

“It was absolute silence. The Press, the Christchurch paper, did not even mention that anniversary on the day until page seven. It was nothing,” he said.

“I had always known that the initial unity was fading slowly. It was really sad just to see that was the trajectory.”

Partly, this is yet one more side effect of the Covid-19 pandemic. The initial anniversary event was cancelled with a day’s notice in March 2020, amid concerns that a mass gathering could spark an outbreak. In 2021 the borders were closed, preventing many family members of the shaheed from attending anything, while in 2022 gathering restrictions were still in place under the traffic light system.

By the time the fourth anniversary of the attack rolled around last year, affected communities had developed their own ways of marking the day with little public attention.

Mire believes it’s also a continuation of the Islamophobia that motivated the attack in the first place.

“If the victims of March 15 were not Muslims, would I be having this conversation right now? Absolutely not. We see all around the world in which events of terror and tragedy are marked and remembered.”

Even in New Zealand, big anniversaries of distant events like the Mt Erebus disaster (1979) or the sinking of the Wahine ferry (1968) receive media stories and government commemorations.

Then there’s the wishes of the communities themselves. No one wants to mark one of the worst days in their lives under the spotlights of the nation’s television cameras. Galal said that planning the March 15 commemorations requires a careful balance between private and public elements.

“It’s quite hard. It’s so hard to have this emotional moment shared with others. So the time mourning in private is really special for them, but they do really need the support from the community,” she said.

That doesn’t mean there’s no role for public participation. In 2020, Christchurch City Libraries distributed paper bunting flags to schools and libraries so people could write messages of support, of mourning and of love.

In the end, more than one kilometre of bunting was produced and hung in central Christchurch. A similar activity was arranged ahead of the start of the coronial inquest into the attack late last year.

Galal said the broadcast of the Adhan, or call to prayer, more widely in New Zealand could also be part of how we routinely mark the anniversary of March 15.

“For five years now, we every year [ask] the Ministry of Ethnic Communities and the Prime Minister’s Office, saying ‘We would very much appreciate if the Adhan would be heard in all of New Zealand every year at this time, to acknowledge the souls that we have lost,'” she said.

“In 2020, all of the churches, at the time of the Adhan, they send out the Adhan on the church microphone, which was really great support to us. I’m not sure if you know what the Adhan means for us. To listen to the Adhan in the whole of New Zealand, at that time, it made a huge difference for all of us. It’s something nice to have and makes awareness that there is Islamophobia here and we have to work on that to make the change needed.”

Dalziel pointed to Unity Week as another initiative which could be nationalised.

“My view always is that the wishes of the community, the families in particular, that really has to be the driver for what we do going forward. A group of them have come up with this concept of a Unity Week where we come together to actually talk about the issues but also more broadly within the community come together to share food and to explore each other’s relationships with each other,” she said.

“It’s not huge, but I would love to see New Zealand pick it up. I think that would make it real for everyone. If people were commemorating Unity Week every year, starting on the 15th of March, then I think we would have the basis for a national conversation about what we gain from unity.”

The thesis of Unity Week is, in some ways, to capture that big outpouring of love and support and unity that followed the attack and carry it forward. It is an effort to build social cohesion – one of the key recommendations of the Royal Commission into the attack – and cultivate “a society where we all feel included, respected and that we belong”.

The event allows for remembrance of the loss in a public manner, while still affording affected communities their private space. But it also seeks to build on that, to move towards a society where tragedies like this no longer occur.

That was part of the sentiment at the centre of the national mood in the direct aftermath of the attack. In her first public comments on March 15, then-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said, “Many of those who will have been directly affected by this shooting may be migrants to New Zealand, they may even be refugees here. They have chosen to make New Zealand their home, and it is their home.

“They are us. The person who has perpetuated this violence against us is not. They have no place in New Zealand. There is no place in New Zealand for such acts of extreme and unprecedented violence, which it is clear this act was.”

Or, perhaps we should remember the faith in shared humanity that many of the shaheed held all of their lives. The last words of Haji-Daoud Nabi, spoken to the terrorist as he approached the mosque to begin his attack, are emblematic of this: “Hello Brother”.