"National Question" 21 Comrades in Alms

Apart from Project Waitangi, one of the Workers Communist League's main channels of influence on the racial front was the "aid agency" CORSO.

Always under socialist influence, CORSO, was by the early '80s, heavily infiltrated by the WCL. Experts at spending other peoples money for revolutionary causes, the Weasels used CORSO's Aoteoroa Fund to channel donor's money to radical Maori groups

As the Fund's first appeal mailer stated "In Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Pacific, CORSO identifies colonialism as the origin of oppression and exploitation. Maori people have also been victims of colonisation . . . Land is central."

In line with Maoist dogma, strong emphasis was placed on rural radicalism, building up tribalist/nationalist/revolutionary ideas amongst the Maori "peasantry."

A 1986 Fund leaflet stated;

"Funding is currently limited to Maori rural development projects which benefit a community or tribe rather than an individual..."

The Aoteoroa fund was, run by a series of radicals including;

Hilda Halkyard-Harawira; Ex Bastion Point, a member of the Waitangi Action Committee and wife of Maori Party MP, Hone Harawira.

Heta Te Hemara; Ex Te Matakite o Aoteoroa, a Labourer's Union official and also involved in the Federation of Labour's Maori and Pacific Islands Advisory Committee.

Tame Iti; Ex Nga Tamatoa, a member of the Communist Party and a leader of Nga Tamariki o the Kohu, a Bay of Plenty based "land rights" group.

Milton Hohaia; A WCL associate and Taranaki land rights activist. Hohaia also had strong links with Filipino socialists and was a member of the Asia-Pacific Task Force for the Communist Party of the Philippines influenced, Philippines Peasant Movement.

Hohaia wrote in Corso's Overview of August 1987 on the purpose of the Aoteoroa Fund,

"the reacquiring of land to be held for tribal purposes . . . take up any issue pertaining to the retention of and control of Maori resources (being land, water, fisheries, forestries, etc) . . . it is absolutely vital that we strengthen our people and ourselves with a political ideology conducive to our cultural ideology and based as with the cultural, on our people as opposed to capital."

The Aoteoroa Fund doled donor's money to many fine charitable causes, such as
a grant to Tame Iti's, Nga Tamariki o te Kohu, to help stop forestry plans at Taiarahia in the Bay of Plenty and $1,500 to Te Roopu Rawakore (A WCL front) to help produce film on unemployed Maori.

In 1988 the Fund was a focus of a major Corso campaign;

"Under the theme "Tangata Whenua Appeal"," Corso regional groups and supporters will be promoting Maori struggles and perspectives . . . Corso's international section will also be participating through making links with indigenous people's struggles worldwide."

Barely existing today, CORSO;

supports the return of Tino Rangatiratanga to Maori people as guaranteed in the Treaty of Waitangi, as the first step towards the liberation of all the people of Aotearoa. This process is inseparable from Corso's work for a just world.

Every time a member of the public used to give a couple of dollars to CORSO's street appeals, they were helping the WCL to fund the Maori "Revolution."