It is the second of these, and the activities surrounding it, which came to a head in the sentencing of the four remaining defendants last week.
The subsequent long-running trial of Tame Iti, Te Rangikaiwhiria Kemara, Urs Signer and Emily Bailey on reduced charges of participating in a criminal group and firearms charges, including one charge of possession of Molotov cocktails, ended with the jury unable to decide on the more serious of these. A retrial was contemplated but subsequently dropped. All that remained, with the quartet having been found guilty on the lesser firearms charges, was sentencing.
Last Thursday, in the High Court at Auckland, Justice Rodney Hansen handed down prison terms of two and a-half years each to Iti and Kemara, and sentenced Signer and Bailey to nine months' home detention.
On Monday, Iti's lawyer lodged an appeal against his sentence.
Notwithstanding the fact that there may yet be further chapters in the matter, and while the deliverance of justice may have been delayed, the system has, for the time being, delivered its verdict. Its overall thrust is the rule of law must prevail.
In consideration of such matters, it is tempting to stray into the history of Tuhoe and its relationship with the Crown.
There are historical grievances, and these must be addressed.
The extent to which this is true was irrelevant to the trial. This was not the business of the High Court on this occasion; nor, if indeed this was the intention, was a quasi-armed insurrection ever going to achieve for the iwi what its proponents have long argued. Precisely the opposite in fact. Power may grow from the barrel of a gun in the epithets of Mao Tse Tung, and in the romantic imaginations of would-be revolutionaries, but the antics of the gang of four, and others, in the Urewera undergrowth ensured only a setback to the Tuhoe cause.
Those antics may have been amateurish and inflated with delusional rhetoric, but on observing and intercepting these, the police were left with no choice but to act decisively.
As Justice Hansen said at sentencing: "In effect, a private militia was being established ...
"that is a frightening prospect in our society, undermining our democratic institutions ..."
For those who claim special insight into the character and mind of Iti, calling him a showman and a harmless hothead, and suggesting he would never have intended to carry out acts of extreme violence, this imbroglio should be an eye-opener.
Would the public of New Zealand have been happy if the police, confronted by evidence of, say, disaffected white supremacists running around in the bush, armed and dangerous, boasting hatred and violence, simply ignored them?
It is naive of any group to think it can carry out military-style manoeuvres accompanied by threats of lawlessness and expect forces of law and order to turn a blind eye. The police had to act, and the justice system had to follow through.
Present Police Commissioner Peter Marshall and former chief Howard Broad have rightly expressed some regret at the evident terror experienced by some Tuhoe residents in Ruatoki; and that it has been not made clearer throughout the proceedings that this action was far from exclusively aimed at members of the iwi.
But they have correctly also resiled from an outright apology, pending the outcome of an Independent Police Conduct Authority report. Bridges do need to be mended, but the police should not be required to kowtow for upholding the law, however amateurish or ham-fisted its contraventions.
