No, not very comprehensible to outsiders. Has to be seen within the context that some militant Maoris - claiming to represent the true owners of New Zealand, the Maori tribes - were setting up guerilla camps back in the boondocks of the Urawera Hills, where their converts would undertake military-style training, trekking through the bush waving AK47's (and occasionally shooting them off) preparing for the day of the armed uprising when whitey will be thrown out of New Zealand altogether.

Well, of course we can't have that, not in this day and age, can we?

So the plods (who, of course had known about these clowns all along) took it into their heads to mount a big "shock and awe"-style quasi-military operation, and banged in complete with helicopter gunships, dawn raids, cellphone intercepts and all the apparatus of homeland security, and arrested lots of people.

Except that, this being New Zealand, where human rights are important and the judiciary is independent, it soon emerged that the police had somehow omitted to ensure that everything they had done was completely kosher, legally speaking. So most of the cases got thrown out of court and the four who did get charged were the ringleaders and those found with illegal weapons in circumstances where the evidence had been obtained in legally admissible ways.

While I hold no strong opinions one way or another about the history which underlies the seemingly perpetual Maori sense of grievance, I don't think (and neither does most modern Maori political opinion) that armed uprising based on racial violence is the way of choice to move forward into the 21st century. So I don't believe that there is any great lesson to be learned from all of this.