BY ADRIAN D'HAGE
On August 29, I was tuned in to Sandy McCutcheon's Australia Talks Back, on the ABC's Radio National, when the subject of asylum seekers came up and a somewhat agitated lady with a very cultured voice rang in from Perth. "This country", she opined, "is a Christian country, founded by Christians, and we are proud of our Christian values. And these other people [asylum seekers] are not Christians and have no place in a Christian country. And they come here having caused nothing but problems in their own country."
Now McCutcheon is scrupulously fair in giving all points of view a go, but by then even he had had enough and mercifully applied the override button to "Lady Ponsonby-Smythe" and we moved on.
I want to examine two issues that are impacting on the incredible practice of incarcerating children in Australia: the government's policy on the war against terror; and the view espoused by our fellow Australian in Perth, intolerance in religion.
I speak to you tonight as both a soldier and a theologian. Because as I see it, these things are, at least in part, impeding a just solution for asylum seekers in this country.
Of course, politicians will publicly and loudly distance themselves from any suggestion that the current policy against asylum seekers is a policy against Muslims or Islam. But, in practice, neither they nor our church leaders, with some notable exceptions, provide the leadership necessary to address the religious intolerance espoused by our Australian in Perth.
Religious intolerance
Religious intolerance is part of the fear factor of difference that has been so brilliantly exploited by the present federal government.
A few years back, I was a committed Christian, and to the bemusement of my colleagues, I completed two degrees in theology. Perhaps I am a slow learner, but at the end of eight years of study of dogma and doctrine that often didn't stand too much scrutiny, I lost my Christianity, but I came to have a deep respect for anyone's right to follow a particular path of faith. I also came to the conclusion that religion is largely an accident of birth. If any of you here tonight were born in Baghdad, you would likely be Sunni. Or more likely, you would be part of the majority of oppressed and downtrodden Iraqi Shiites.
And it may be somewhat of a revelation to our lady in Perth, but if any of us were born in Booraloola in the NT, we would have a 99% chance of being part of the wonders of the dreaming. Yet the Christian founders to whom our Perth colleague refers ordered Aboriginal people to renounce the rainbow serpent whilst demanding they take a lot of notice of a talking snake.
More than ever, in the global village, tolerance of beliefs, tolerance of origin, tolerance in fact more than tolerance for difference and diversity is required. Diversity is the great underlying strength of Australia. Rather than formulate policy for asylum seekers that is based on opinions expressed on talk-back radio, driven by ignorance and a fear of difference, real leadership would seek to promote the strengths of diversity that have made this country what it is.
Some of you may have read a somewhat chilling article in the Weekend Australian magazine about a course at the Columbia International University in South Carolina that trains Christian missionaries on the techniques of going undercover to destroy Islam. About a year ago, two Australians were accused of doing this in Afghanistan.
One of the Columbia International University professors expressed the fear "that Muslims are having babies faster than we are". There are also fundamentalist Muslims, none more notorious than the recently deposed Taliban, who seek to see the crescent triumph over the cross in a sort of reversal of the savagery of the crusades. Neither side has won in the past. Neither side will win in the future, but tens of thousands of our sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters will get killed in the process.
Which brings me to the second issue of the war against terror and Prime Minister John Howard and foreign minister Alexander Downer's desire to be first into Iraq with US President George Bush.
Howard and Downer's stance is strongly allied to their policy of keeping our borders secure and fear of difference. Have you noticed how many world leaders, as soon as there is an uprising within their borders, make it part of George W's war against terror?
In this country, before the last election we had those full-page advertisements with the words "We decide who comes to this country, and the circumstances in which they come" emblazoned under a photograph of Howard clenching his fists. Howard also announced that Australians had no way of being certain terrorists were not among asylum seekers seeking to enter the country by boat.
Howard knows well that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein do not spend huge amounts of time and money training airline pilots, only to put them aboard leaking boats to Australia. But our politicians have been eminently successful in making ordinary Australians fearful that asylum seekers will lock up our women, make beards and burqas compulsory and somehow imperil the family barbecue.
And now, as part of this war against terror and keeping us and our borders safe, they want us to attack Iraq.
Saddam and the Iraqis are the enemy, and by implication, Iraqi asylum seekers are conveniently tainted with the same brush. The irony is that any war in Iraq will produce tens of thousands more refugees.
Refugees are people, not 'problems'
We should never forget the reality pictures of those three Iraqi children who were wrenched from the arms of their mother and drowned along with 350 others when the so-called SIEV-X went down, prompting a previous premier of New South Wales to remark: "I don't know about you, but when I saw those three little girls on the front page of all the papers this morning, suddenly it told me that Mr Ruddock was wrong. We're not dealing with problems, we're dealing with people."
There is one thing that ought give our political leaders pause for thought before we head off to Iraq, and that is the number of US Marine Corps generals urging caution. Despite the undoubted valour of those under their command, when it comes to diplomacy, many marine generals are incapable of grasping anything more subtle than a sledge hammer.
As usual, Australians are not being told the full story before they are asked to sign up for Alexander's ragtime band in downtown Baghdad. This will not be like the war on Afghanistan. Saddam Hussein still has a 400,000-strong army, 6000 armoured vehicles and 2500 artillery pieces. Iraq is a very complex country of very oppressed people. The minority Sunnis dominate the centre, the Shias the south and the Kurds the north. Many Iraqis are decent hard-working citizens.
Australians are not told the real reason behind US policy in the Middle East, yet our government stands firmly beside the USA. We will have forgotten, if we were ever told, that at the end of the 1991 Gulf War the oppressed Shiite soldiers in the south rebelled against Saddam Hussein and their Sunni officers. As Shiite soldiers in a tank retreating from the bloodbath of Kuwait rolled into Saad square in Basra, at the junction of the Tigris and the Euphrates, they stopped and blasted a portrait of Saddam with a high explosive round. Further north, the long-suffering and gassed Kurds rebelled. But ever eager for stability, the US allowed the Sunnis to regroup around Saddam, using the well-paid and well-equipped Sunni republican guards.
Silence at Iraqi crimes
Australia, ever at the beck and call of the US, said nothing. At that point, the allies lost the plot and the Gulf War. The US alliance did not lift a finger to help either the oppressed Shias in the south or the Kurds in the north.
Why? The US reasoned that although Hussein had been disobedient (and was a murderous thug), he offered the best chance for "stability". With 100 billion barrels of oil in reserves, Iraq is second only to Saudi Arabia, also ruled by a despotic regime, and also backed by and protected by US troops. This is one of the reasons we have al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.
And finally, we have Israel. In May 1973, the US Senate's leading specialist on oil and the Middle East, Democrat hawk Henry Jackson, commented that the US dominance of the region is safeguarded by the strength of Israel. The plight of the Palestinians is now demonstrably worse, something that by aligning ourselves with the US policy, Australia tacitly supports. Saddam Hussein has vowed to fight for Palestinian rights in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. We would do well to ponder the legitimacy that now gives him in the eyes of many Arabs.
We should ask ourselves: if those Iraqi kids were our three small daughters, would we find the money, sell everything we had and risk everything to give them a chance at life? Even if they beat all the odds, the Australian government, supported by 71% of us, will do everything to deny them that chance. We can change that. We must change that. And with the help of organisations like ChilOut (Children Out of Detention) and Racial Respect, we will.
[Adrian D'Hage served 37 years in the Australian army, including as a platoon commander in Vietnam, six years as head of the defence force's public relations department, and was head of defence security during the 2000 Olympics. This is an abridged version of a talk given to a ChilOut public meeting in Sydney on September 2.]
From Green Left Weekly, September 11, 2002.
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