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The Palestine Question remains the Centrepiece 

The Utegate affair dominated our media last week, diverting attention from events beyond Australia’s borders. Events in the Middle East remind us that that region remains the most threatening of the world’s trouble spots, from Australia’s point of view. North Korea, despite its paranoid and unpredictable regime, is in reality less worrying that it might seem, not least because the North is today more isolated that ever before, and despite its blustering threats its power options are very limited, if it wants to survive.

Middle East crises, on the other hand, impact on a wide range of relationships, including relations between the West and the Islamic world, and on the delivery of much of the world’s oil. There are three main centres of concern in the Middle East – the Palestine question, Iran and, of course, Afghanistan-Pakistan, inextricably entangled in conflict with the Taliban. There Australian troops are involved in a conflict with no end in sight.  The most serious aspect right now is the threat to Obama’s attempt at reconciliation with the world of Islam. This new approach was well received in the region, but it will founder if the present crises are mishandled.

First the long-running Palestine question. Obama’s strong support for a Palestinian state and his demand that housing development on those disputed settlement areas stop, are facing serious tests. The new right-wing Prime Minister, Benyamin Netanyahu, though making some concessions on the Palestinian state, seems ready to defy Israel’s crucial ally. If the US fails to budge the Israeli leader, Washington’s strategy to develop a new American image in the Islamic world in general, will be in tatters. The impasse will continue over Gaza, there will be new tensions with neighbouring Arab states, and at some point conflict will erupt again in the neighbourhood. So it is of fundamental importance that real progress be made on the Palestinian question.  It is also a matter of fundamental human rights for the long-suffering Palestinians who have spent decades in temporary residence in Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt.

The second crisis point is the post-election situation in Iran, which reveals the growing gap between fundamentalists loyal to the status quo, and those favouring democratic reform. Iranians have now been subjected to the stifling theocratic system since the fall of the Shah. In the circumstances it would appear to be mounting disillusionment with that oppressive style of government rather than a fraudulent election that is at stake. At least some experienced observers have concluded that, however distasteful and disappointing the outcome and the extent of voting irregularities, the old regime probably won the election. Hence Western leaders are reacting cautiously on the election outcome. I see the popular protest as yet another example of that urban-based disillusionment with old regimes, which began in the Philippines with the overthrow of President Marcos.  

Today it is involving a large Middle East state. Iran has a population of over 80 million, and is roughly the size of Queensland. Exploiting media and internet outlets that Iranians now have access to, the protesters are able to publicise their cause as never before, but at this point their pressure for democratic reform is being effectively resisted.

The brutal treatment of peaceful demonstrators has shocked us but there is not a lot the international community can do to help at this juncture, other than lodge protests over the brutal crack-down, and give moral support to the campaign for democratic reform. While the opposition seems determined not to give in, President Ahmadinejad has a formidable repressive apparatus at his disposal. International reaction will be tempered by Iran’s status as a major oil producer, and by Russian and Chinese opposition to any intrusive UN action. The best we can do here in Australia is to protest at excesses and give sanctuary to Iranians who now have well founded fears of persecution.

There is not a lot more to say about the third problem area, the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In Pakistan the Army has made progress on the ground, but just how far the Taliban influence has been permanently set back is not clear. There are suggestions that most of the Taliban have slipped away, to prepare for a future counter-attack. In Afghanistan the war goes on, with gloomy predictions as to when it might end. The new US commander has a refreshingly different approach, but a new broom is also needed in Humid Karzai’s Afghan government, if progress is to be made towards real democratic change.

To return to Palestine, there a solution is achievable, but it does call for a clearer Israeli recognition of the injustices suffered by the Palestinians, when forced to give up their land and flee to neighbouring states. A formal Israeli recognition of the injustice is surely a key to real progress.  President Obama’s plan for a new creative relationship with the nations of the Middle East is surely conditional on formal US recognition of how the Arab Palestinians were denied their fundamental human rights. 

The debate over whether we should have a human right charter, or, like the British, a legislated Ball of Rights, is now at a critical stage with the deadline for submissions on the subject. Not surprisingly the debate has recently been intensifying, with strong opposition now coming from leading politicians who should really be championing the move not undermining it if they are taking human rights seriously.

Establishing a charter, or bill of rights, is fundamental to the full implementation of those human rights standards our governments ratified years ago. It is necessary in order to project these humanitarian standards before the community at large as well as our politicians. The present debate exposes a disturbing fact – some of those with responsibility for the implementation of human rights appear to fail to understand their purpose and are out to diminish their importance.  

Based on many years experience as a political adviser to the Federal Parliament I was able to observe how we took on board our international human rights obligations in a quite superficial way. Australia ignored the fact that political will and community enlightenment are absolutely essential to the full implementation of the obligations we accepted when we ratified the UN instruments. Some of our politicians, not to speak of the public at large, simply do not fully understand the fundamental importance of human rights to every aspect of our lives. Human rights are not as an intrusion into our traditional Australian democracy but a more precise and more extensive application of those principles dear to us.  They are really essential to the proper functioning of our democracy, some aspects of which may be severely tested if the present economic crisis deepens. In general the extent to which human rights standards are implemented is today a litmus test of the state of the state of our democratic system.

For this reason I am dismayed at the strong opposition coming from former premier Bob Carr and the present NSW Attorney General, who have come up with the astonishing argument that the presence of a bill or charter would somehow weaken our parliamentary democracy and the role of our judiciary. Does this mean that we should depend on our politicians for human rights protection? Like a gift from the Emperor? This view should be rejected.

Our democracy has impressive qualities, but it is vulnerable to the kind of political manipulation that may deny human rights to sections of our community. We need a counter to the prejudices that can surface in any democracy, whether of governments or of influential sections of the community. In this respect democracies like ours and are in fact strengthened by human rights constraints. As for the constitutional factor, our Constitution offers little protection to ordinary citizens. Nor should the presence of a Bill of Rights affect the independence of the judiciary. Indeed, are critics suggesting that our formal human rights commitment should not be taken into account in relation to the cases before them?  This carefully considered international process is not only designed to eliminate those abuses that have led to devastating abuses. Its aim is to establish truly universal standards based largely on the cruel experiences of the past century, both in times of war and peace.

The most basic of these are set out in the five main conventions that make up the International Bill of Rights. Far from threatening democratic practices they in fact serve to strengthen democracy protecting it against its own frailties with what is a virtual code of conduct for all.  We are justifiably proud of Australia’s democratic record, but here there are dark chapters, even in the recent past, where political decisions and public ignorance  have led to abuses of human rights – e.g. our treatment of refugees, aborigines, and in foreign affairs our failure to oppose devastating human rights abuses, such as the East Timor experience.  

What Australians have yet to fully understand is that human rights instruments are not only about our rights: essentially they also spell out our obligations as citizens to uphold the rights of others. Taken together, they should inspire us as a code of conduct for all, for individuals as well as state and other agencies, an essential counter to the kind of political and other prejudices that surface in our communities from time to time. Hence in the past when Australia was considered an outstanding democracy, we discriminated against our indigenous people, against our women, and at times against non-Europeans.  Internationally, our governments often in the guise of protecting the national interest virtually dignified human rights abuses abroad. We detained like criminals refugees whose right ‘to seek in another country refuge from well-founded fears of persecution’ is clearly spelt out in human rights instruments. 

What the Bill or Charter will do, over time, is strengthen our democracy not undermine it - establishing firmly in the community at large, as well as in our political culture, the essential relevance of these humanitarian standards to the issues that crop up  daily. It is these standards we need to invoke, for example, when dealing with violence involving our ethnic minorities and within the community at large.  

Finally, there are those who would argue that human rights are an alien intrusion. That is quite wrong Australians from the outset played a strong role in the drafting of these human rights standards, starting from the time of Dr. Evatt. Australia was, for example, one of the eight-member preparatory committee, led by Eleanor Roosevelt, that drafted the Universal Declaration itself. And Australians have played important roles in the formulation of some of the key conventions.  Sadly, however, when it comes to implementation we have been lagging behind some of the world’s leading democracies. We are part of arguably the Twentieth Century outstanding contribution to human civilization, and we should be a leader not a reluctant follower.              

A Time for Quiet Diplomacy

 North Korea, this curious remnant of Cold War architecture, is again in the news, though somewhat obscured behind media focus on our growing swine-flu risks. North Korea’s underground nuclear test and its subsequent series of missile tests were one thing. Now Pyongyang has issued veiled threats of an attack against the south if the international community dares to implement sanctions.

The present crisis is a sad reminder that after nearly sixty years, although the Soviet Union has long been dismantled, the Korean problem it helped create is still there, posing a serious threat to the North’s immediate neighbours, namely Japan and South Korea, and is causing discomfort to China, its closest friend without whose help in the past it would probably not now exist. The crisis is causing some anxiety in Japan and the South, but does not, of course, pose any threat to Australia, other than its impact on our major trading partners.

I well remember the beginning of the Korean crisis, for  I was still in the Army and impetuously volunteered to join the Australian contingent, an offer that was not taken up because I was then serving in a classified electronic intelligence unit. The war only lasted three years, but it was intense and enormously costly in humanitarian and material terms, taking in all well over two million lives, mostly Koreans and Chinese, but including about 340 Australians and 33,000 Americans. In a sense it was more destructive than the Vietnam War, which lasted much longer.

Unfortunately the 1953 armistice resolved nothing. Korea was left sharply divided politically, with the South under a right-wing authoritarian regime, which later developed into a democracy.  The North, however, remained politically intransigent, its leadership, now under , Kim Jong Il, son of the founder, Kim-il Sung, clinging to a form of Stalinism that had long been rejected by the Soviet Union. The regime remained defiantly unresponsive to the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s shift towards a more liberal state.  

Today the international community are dealing with leaders who have, as it were, barricaded themselves behind a huge military, with the development of nuclear weapons and missiles their only concession to technological and political change. With the political situation in the North barely changed, until recently the regime has been more of a historical curiosity than a threat. Its emergence as a nuclear power is now a different matter.Behind all the bravado coming out of Pyongyang, the fact is that North Korea has never been more isolated, as shown by last week’s Security Council resolution, which strongly criticised the nuclear test. It was supported by China and Russia, whose massive military help prevented the reunification of the Korean peninsula back in the early fifties.  All the North can expect from China and Russia are moves to restrain the US and its allies.

The big question right now is - what does Kim Jong Il’s regime want? Its surging military power is denying the economic development it so desperately needs to become a respected regional power. If it were to launch an attack on the South or Japan quick US intervention would inevitably bring devastating consequences.

We should therefore contain our fears and urge the keeping open of negotiations. I don’t believe that all options have been exhausted.  Hopefully we will eventually be able to end Pyongyang’s isolation and paranoia. In the meantime the people of the North deserve our sympathy. The Japanese, of course, are understandably nervous, but there is no point in encouraging them to spend billions more on a risky expansion of their Self Defence Force at a time when their economy is in serious recession.

A Note on Srilanka 

After some 90,000 deaths the end of violence in Sri Lanka is to be welcomed, but  there is more to the situation than a triumph of government forces over the Tamil Tigers. Although the Tigers’ extremist agenda contributed to the huge humanitarian of the conflict, the underlying causes that drove the Tamil rebellion must be acknowledged. Since 1956 there has been serious discrimination against the Tamils of the north, which led to support for the radical agenda of the LTTE. What is really important now is a genuine reconciliation process aimed at healing the wounds, and if violence is not to resurface the Government must address those underlying grievances, and bring an end to the discriminatory policies that have in the past fuelled the armed resistance.  The Tamils have suffered enough.

 The outcome of two recent Asian elections is reassuring, in terms of their impact on our security and on the development of democracy in the region. In India the Congress Party has won a decisive victory over the BJP, the Hindu nationalist party, whose victory could have added to tensions with the 400 million or so Muslims in the sub-continent.

Of more immediate concern, however, are the election results for the Indonesian Parliament, which have made Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono the clear favourite to win Indonesia’s most important political contest, the presidential election in July. The conduct of the Indonesian election was widely praised by foreign observers as an exercise in democracy, but the counting process conducted by the election committee, the KPU, left much to be desired, and has come in for strong criticism.

The counting was painfully slow and there were allegations of fraud and incompetence, but what softened the dispute was the fact that the outcome corresponded to expectations based on opinion polls, reflecting the national political mood.   However, the count left many questions unanswered with a gap of more than 50 million between the list of registered voters and the final tally, leading to calls for a recount. In the event, SBY’s Democratic Party emerged as the biggest party in the House of Representatives, with more than 20 percent of seats, a radical change from its previous status as a minor party. Suharto’s old party, Golkar, and Megawati’s PDI-P gained about 14% of the seats each. What was interesting, though, was the poor performance of the Islamic parties which altogether gained only about 8 % of seats, confirming the desire of Indonesians to keep their nation secular.

Though the political outcome was encouraging the real challenge lies ahead when, in July, Indonesians will again go to the polls to choose a president. The  recent election result set the stage for the selection of presidential candidates. SBY is of course the front-running contender, and a few days ago he chose as his running mate, Budiono, the head of Indonesia’s central bank. The choice has delighted Australian observers, for Budiono is a secular figure who spent years in Australia as a student in the early seventies. He also studied in the US, and therefore his emergence as a major political player is being welcomed by political establishments in both Washington and Canberra.SBY will face at least two contenders, Megawati Sukarnoputri, who has now chosen Prabowo Subianto as her running mate, and Kalla, the current vice president, who looks like having retired General Wiranto, ABRI chief back in 1999, as his choice for the vice-presidency.

I find these selections rather worrying, for there are dark clouds over the roles of both Prabowo and Wiranto in relation to past human rights abuses. In most other national situations they would have been tried and, if found guilty, at least discredited,  if not imprisoned for their responsibility for very serious violations. That outcome they managed to escape, thanks to the lack of support from countries like ours for an international tribunal. All they had to deal with was an enquiry without teeth, whose probings were easily averted.

I have already referred to Prabowo’s background in past columns. He has been accused of playing a command role in one of the worst atrocities committed during Indonesia’s 24 year occupation of East Timor – a reprisal killing of as many as 1000 villagers, including women and children. He was also one of the unit commanders of the operation in which East Timor’s revered resistance leader, Nicolau Lobato, was killed near Maubisse in December 1978, along with a dozen or so of his comrades. The unanswered question has long been – were they killed in action or after their surrender?

Wiranto was the Defence Force commander in 1999 when the TNI played a key role behind the major atrocities that year - at Dili, Liquica, Suai, Maliana and Passabe, a year in which some 1500 non-combatant Timorese were killed. It has been argued that he was unaware of what was going on the ground, but that is difficult to believe, for these atrocities were spread over several months, and were widely reported.

I am concerned at the growing political prominence of Prabowo, who was head of Kopassus (Suharto’s KGB) in the last years of Suharto’s dictatorship, and has also been accused of complicity in very serious abuses, including killings, in Indonesia. It is now up to Indonesians to bring these officers before a tribunal of some kind in order to establish their roles in incidents that surely present an affront to the citizens of democratic Indonesia who now take human rights seriously.    

  A Humanitarian Perspective

 As one who spent years in our Defence Department before moving to the foreign affairs area, I have followed with interest and growing concern the comments on the Defence White Paper’s assessment of our strategic security situation.  The Paper itself really worries me, for it appears to be moving us in the wrong direction, and cost. The proposed massive development of our air and naval forces is surely quite out of proportion to the report’s assessment of the present situation, especially in the nearby region where the security situation has improved significantly in recent years, both in terms of shifts to democracy and levels of violence and terrorist threats. 

We cannot predict what lies ahead, but let’s focus on threats we can realistically deal with, and, more importantly, intensify our efforts to make multilateral peace-keeping arrangements more effective, as both Mr. Rudd and President Obama have at various times urged. We cannot match the military power of the big powers, so in the unlikely event of a threat coming from that direction, the effectiveness of bodies like the UN Security Council or regional bodies would surely be our best defence. Let’s not try to match the military capabilities of China, India, Russia or the United States.

There is currently alarm about Pakistan, with its significant military and nuclear capability, but that capacity is more than matched by India’s greater military power.  The realistic foreseeable threat is manageable without the development of a powerful strike force, which will merely serve to provoke regional fears that we are claiming the right to launch pre-emptive strikes, a concept that caused alarm when Howard was in office.

The development of a force of 12 submarines and 100 strike aircraft will not only involve a huge cost: it could easily provoke a regional arms race that would increase rather than diminish the risk to Australia’s security.  As for the boat people issue, we do not need submarines, cruise missiles or powerful frigates to deal with them. In the first instance that problem is essentially humanitarian and we should deal with it accordingly.  Already our military capability is the most powerful in the Southeast Asia region.

If the Government goes ahead with this plan it could do more to increase tensions and suspicions that to secure peace in our immediate neighbourhood, with right-wing generals returning to political power on the basis of  fears of Australia’s intentions. It would play into the hands of those Indonesian generals who are still smarting from the Interfet intrusion that they found humiliating. But with democracy taking root in the region, where are these threats likely to come from? India has a much larger military capability, but it is really inconceivable that a military conflict would develop between our two countries. China, for all its power and undemocratic rule, unlike European powers, has never been expansionist. Japanese governments are restrained by the strong anti-war sentiments of its people, as well as constitutional restraints.

It takes us back to Indonesia, long been regarded as a potential threat, but the present direction of Indonesian politics has surely reduced that danger. At the recent election the orthodox Islamic parties polled badly, and moderate President Yudhoyono has emerged as the most popular leader. Former Kopassus commander, retired general Prabowo Subianto, may have gained some popularity, but it is precisely this sudden move by Australia to establish military hegemony that could help a suspect war criminal into office.  

What is absent from the discussion is the alternative; how to improve our security by non-military means. Firstly, we should move to strengthen the UN Security Council, including pressing for those reforms Kofi Annan had recommended (and which the Bush Administration blocked), in order to improve its capacity to prevent conflicts and deter aggressive attentions. And let us look at ways of improving regional security; bringing it into line with the situation in Western Europe. I would like to see Australia convene a regional security forum, aimed at containing, or even reducing, military expenditure, enabling billions of dollars to be spent on improving health services, and on poverty elimination. Such a regional arrangement could in turn seek non-aggression treaties with China, Japan, India and Pakistan. This kind of multilateral approach is the humanitarian alternative to military responses that seem so inappropriate at this point in our history. Such responses are bound to lead to wasteful expenditures on measures that risk setting back efforts to bring democracy and better living conditions, and a durable peace, to the region.

The climate change factor keeps creeping into this debate, but surely in the event of a natural disaster in our neighbourhood we don’t see ourselves repelling the fleeing victims with naval power? In such an event, our best security response, as well as our moral obligation, is surely massive and prompt humanitarian assistance, reminding ourselves, in the words of Mahatma Ghandi, that ‘all men are brothers’(and sisters, to bring it up to date)..