There can be little
doubt that Australia's outspoken identification with the US and the UK as
global policemen has placed us at substantially greater risk of terrorist
attack.
Yet in a lengthy speech he made not a
single mention of what is possibly the
primary reason Australia is now viewed as a
terrorist target – our support for an independent East Timor.
In a previous life, Brereton was, of
course, one of many Australians who
attacked the government
for allegedly doing insufficient to support the East Timorese cause.
I have
already written
about the hypocrisy of Australia’s Anglican Primate, Archbishop Peter
Carnley – another who was
calling on
the government to do more for the East Timorese - in trying to blame the
Bali bombing on our support of the US. Tim Blair
has
written about John Pilger’s similar “amazing
world of denial”.
It is worth recalling why the struggle
for East Timorese became such a cause in Australia and elsewhere.
Following its bloody invasion of the
province in 1975, the Indonesian military ruled with a policy of systematic
atrocities.
Torture
and execution centres were established. At least 150,000 people (some
observers put the figure much higher)
died in
warfare or famine, out of a population of around 700,000. Many, many others
were forcibly relocated.
A particular specialty of the soldiers
was the rape of women in front of their husbands. And when international
intervention forced the military to leave, the soldiers destroyed virtually
the entire infrastructure of the province.
It was one of the worst genocides of the
20th century. Who can deny that Australia was right to intervene, to help
the people of East Timor?
Today we see atrocity
after atrocity in Iraq. Is it not right again for Australia to intervene, to
try to relieve the suffering of the Iraqi people? After all, as Labor Party
politician Laurie Brereton himself
noted, when discussing
East Timor, “foreign policy should involve much more than the narrow pursuit
of self-interest”.
January 14th, 2003
