BY PETER BOYLE
There is a painful image from East Timor that remains engraved in my mind. It is the footage of Timorese throwing their children over the razor wire fence of the UN compound, then scrambling up the side of a hill dragging their crying children in a desperate flight from the Indonesian army's paramilitary thugs.
It makes me choke with emotion every time it is replayed. I don't think it is just because, as a parent, I immediately recognise my most fearful nightmare. Anyone with an ounce of human solidarity feels the same.
The horrible flight from war, captured in that TV footage, is being experienced by hundreds of thousands of people around the world — in Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Liberia, Aceh, West Papua, Indonesia and many other places. According to the World Refugees Survey, recently released by the US Committee for Refugees, some 36.9 million people in 133 countries have fled their homes, 14.9 million have left their countries. Refugee numbers are at a six-year high.
US President George Bush on June 1 announced a new military doctrine of “pre-emptive strike”. He told West Point military graduates that the US “must uncover terror cells in 60 or more countries” (roughly one-third of the world) and “confront regimes that sponsor terror”. Bush pledged to “take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge ... The only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act”.
The US administration is leaking stories like a sieve that it might use nuclear weapons.
On June 11 in Washington, Bush replayed the speech before his puffed-up deputy sheriff of the Asia-Pacific, Prime Minister John Howard. The applause from Howard and the room full of right-wing politicians from the mis-named International Democratic Union was deafening.
It is a nightmarish prospect. When the world's biggest arms-dealer and terrorist-trainer announces a recipe for even more and terrible wars, it instantly bounces around the globe. Ariel Sharon is listening, his tanks already have Yasser Arafat besieged yet again.
The ears of India's and Pakistan's generals prick up. They've got a million troops or more mobilised on their borders. Some have been casually talking about a seizing narrow “window of opportunity” for a snappy two-week war before the monsoon season makes it too boggy for the tanks. An Indian officer assured a journalist from the London Telegraph that there is only the “slimmest chance” of a nuclear war. “We'll call Pakistan's bluff”, he added.
While the politicians and generals excitedly discuss pre-emptive strikes, thousands of ordinary folk are already on the move, fleeing a frontline that could blow with the wind.
Flash to the party congress of Austria's far-right Freedom Party, where the party's chief Susanne Riess-Passer congratulated the British and Danish governments for “following our example” and restricting the rights of asylum seekers.
Pauline Hanson would be celebrating too if she wasn't too busy fighting fraud charges. Britain and Denmark still have a way to go to catch up with Australia's policy of indefinite detention without trial of women, men and children seeking asylum.
Australia now has a magical border that retreats as leaky refugee boats approach but quickly advances to snaffle up East Timor's oil and gas reserves. Refugees bound for the “lucky country” languish in refugee detention centres in Papua New Guinea and Nauru.
Howard, immigration minister Philip Ruddock and foreign minister Alexander Downer's speech-writers have purloined the dusty drafts of speeches made and unmade by Pauline Hanson to launch verbal assaults at bleeding hearts, retired politicians with rediscovered consciences and judges who don't know their place.
They've launched ambitious and expensive renovations on the walls of “Fortress Australia” even as they cheer Marshall Bush's plans of more and more war — and more and more refugees. They've voted for Bush's next war on Iraq even while locking up and locking out Iraqi refugees fleeing Saddam Hussein's regime.
More war, more refugees, higher walls. It might be good news for corporate profits, but it's bad news for humanity.
[Peter Boyle is a national executive member of the Democratic Socialist Party.]
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, June 19, 2002.
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