Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Firstly, I want to express my condolences to the families and friends of the many people who have been killed in cold blood in recent months by members of the Islamic State, with their killers revelling in their cowardly, sickening and medieval brutality.

Secondly, I want to agree with and endorse the comments made by Gareth Evans concerning Iraq. He writes:

THE current Western military intervention in Iraq is not 2003 revisited, and Australia is right to be part of it. The action is being taken at the request of the Iraqi government, …

…   …   …

Its objective is explicitly humanitarian, to protect civilian populations immediately at risk of genocide or other mass atrocity crimes from the marauding Islamic State militant forces, who in their march across Iraq have already perpetrated atrocities unrivalled in their savagery.

He goes on to say:

The intervention is not based, as was the attack on Saddam Hussein, on generalised human rights concerns, or beliefs—later proved completely unfounded—about that regime’s possession of weapons of mass destruction or support for terrorist organisations.

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… it is completely consistent, in a way the earlier action was clearly not, with the principles of the international responsibility to protect (R2P) people at risk of mass atrocity crimes that was embraced unanimously by the UN General Assembly in 2005.

He describes the generally-accepted criteria for the responsibility to protect as being five things:

… the atrocities occurring or feared are sufficiently serious to justify, prima facie, a military response; that the response has a primarily humanitarian motive; that no lesser response is likely to be effective in halting or averting the harm; that the proposed response is proportional to the threat; and that the intervention will actually be effective, doing more good than harm.

He continues:

All these bases seem to be covered here. The available evidence is that the many thousands of men, women and children in northern Iraq—Shi’ites, Kurds or those perceived as Sunni apostates—remain at risk of genocidal slaughter by the advancing Islamic State forces.

I also agree—not for the first time, by the way—with the London lord mayor, Boris Johnson, who has written that we have a responsibility to help the Kurds in Iraq. He said:

… it is obvious to most sane and rational people … that one of the results of the end of Saddam and the Ba’athist tyranny has been the power vacuum in Iraq, and the incompetence that has allowed Isis to expand with such horrifying speed.

He says that the Kurds in Iraq:

… have a democratic system; they are pushing forward with women’s rights; they insist on complete mutual respect of all religions.

As he says:

It would be an utter tragedy if we did not do everything in our power to give succour and relief to those who are now facing massacre and persecution, and to help repel the maniacs from one of the few bright spots in the Middle East.

He concludes by saying:

Yes, we have got it wrong before; and yes, we cannot do everything. But that doesn’t mean we should collapse into passivity and quietism in the face of manifest evil. These people need our help.

And I agree with that.

I now want to make some broader remarks, because the problem of violence in our world is by no means confined to Iraq and, frankly, we need to do better. What awful news we hear: the beheading of journalists; the shooting down of the Malaysian civilian plane; and the conflict in Gaza, with Palestinians shooting rockets at Israeli civilians and Israeli bombs killing Palestinian children. These events, and many others, suggest that the world is not becoming a safer place; and I do not think that it is becoming a better place. I believe that making the world safe for civilians is core business for anyone who is involved in public policy. If the world is unsafe then everything else becomes unimportant.

So how can we make the world safer for civilians? I think there should be United Nations peacekeepers in Iraq, in Syria, in Ukraine, in Gaza and around the world wherever there is conflict and wherever there are civilian lives at risk. Australia will hold the United Nations Security Council presidency for a month in November. What should we be doing with this rare and important opportunity? Like others, I am dismayed and often disgusted by events in Iraq, Syria, Gaza, Afghanistan and Ukraine. I know the people of North Korea are brutalised by their leaders and that drug lords in Mexico and Colombia routinely put on public display the bodies of those that they have executed. The antics of Boko Haram, al-Shabaab and other violent fundamentalists make me sick. I do not believe in unilateral action of the Coalition of the Willing kind. As we have seen only too clearly from Vietnam to Iraq, that only makes matters worse with violence begetting violence.

But I do not believe that we can just sit here and shrug our shoulders and say that there is nothing we can do about it. I do believe in collective international action to solve problems, and of course we have the United Nations established precisely to solve international problems and to seek to improve on the abysmal record of the first and second world wars. I know that it does a lot of good, but the level of global violence suggests that it needs to be doing much more. Why does it not do more? That would be because the big powers, members of the UN Security Council, with a veto power over UN action, are prepared to turn a blind eye to cover up the sins and misdeeds of their allies and supporters. No-one has clean hands here—not the United States, not Russia, not China. All three of them are guilty of putting up with outrageous conduct when it is done by one of their supporters and all three are willing to use their veto power in the Security Council to stop the UN from taking meaningful action.

Over my years of political life I have come to realise that a key measure of political integrity is what political leaders are prepared to tolerate by way of misconduct from people in their camp. At present the big powers, instead of working together to put an end to war and political violence, are prepared to tolerate way too much. Of course, getting the big powers to lift their game is no easy matter, but I make three observations that might help. First, people concerned about global conflict should seek to breath new life into the responsibility to protect. This doctrine took a long time to develop and was very quickly put into cold storage after Libya, but it does have the potential to save civilian lives and we should demand that the UN Security Council uses it when outbreaks of violence occur. Some people might think that this will require a lot more resources for the UN, but it is nonsense to think that we do not have these resources readily at hand. The US, Russia and China have massive numbers of troops and equipment at their disposal. All that is required is for some of these resources to be used in the international peacekeeping effort.

Second, we should be wary of the way that trade agreements and global trading arrangements act as a handbrake and make countries reluctant to tell home truths to their trading partners. Countries around the world should not allow their independence and self-sufficiency to become so compromised that they cannot say what needs to be said or do what needs to be done.

Third, our attitude matters. Everyone has to be willing to put the weights on the big powers and demand action from them. It is not good enough to let them blame this or that rogue state or rogue general or rogue religious leader. We should tell the big powers that we know they can fix the problem, if they genuinely want to, or, if they cannot, that the world is willing to help out. It is not an easy road to hoe, to be sure, and often inconvenient, but far superior to Coalition of the Willing type unilateral action, which has proven to be disastrous, and far superior to fatalism and meekly allowing this violence to continue or trying to pick up the refugee pieces. That is an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff when what is needed are more fences at the top. An ounce of prevention is indeed worth a pound of cure and we should use our time in the sun chairing the Security Council to advocate that.

At present we are too fatalistic about the sins of the big powers. We think that there is nothing we can do about them. Many countries, Australia included, attach themselves to one or other of the great powers and rely on that to keep them safe. I am not saying that we should detach ourselves from the US alliance; that is not my position at all. What I am saying is that being part of an alliance does not mean we are obliged to turn a blind eye to misconduct. Indeed, we often do our friends a favour when we point out where they are going wrong.

I have put the focus squarely on the UN and the Security Council, but anyone who thought that in doing so I am trying to put roadblocks in the path of international action or delay international action would be very wrong. As I indicated earlier in my remarks, I believe that international action is absolutely necessary. I note that the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, has said that international action is urgent, and he is right.

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