Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I congratulate the member for McMillan on raising this important issue of Darfur, about which I have spoken a number of times in the House. The murder of 200,000 African Muslims in Darfur, principally by their own government, is attested to by the United Nations and that is the central cause of the problem in that area. The Australian government voted in the Security Council on Resolution 1591 in March 2005. We voted to strengthen restrictions on the supply of arms and materials to Darfur in Resolution 1566, we demanded that the Sudanese government cease offensive military flights over Darfur and we imposed travel bans and asset freezes on individuals who impede the peace process. Australia also supported the United Nations Security Council’s adoption of Resolution 1593 of 2004, which referred crimes committed in Darfur to the International Criminal Court.

One of the aspects of this conflict in Darfur that are most distressing is that these mass killings see the government in Khartoum continuing to prosecute this war against its own people. Sudan is principally an Islamic state. The people of Darfur in the west of Sudan are African Muslims and they have been killed in tens of thousands by the Janjaweed militia backed by their own government in Khartoum. One of the people who was referred to the International Criminal Court, like the people in Serbia who undertook the terrible massacres in Kosovo, was a Janjaweed who has been appointed as the Minister for Humanitarian Affairs by Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir—Ahmad Muhammad Harun. When the government of Sudan acts with such insolence, when it fails to take into consideration the humanitarian requirements as outlined by the United Nations and when it consistently refuses to deploy or allow the deployment of the UNAMID force of 20,000-plus people in Darfur, it is clear that the government of Sudan is involved in activities that many in the international community regard as genocide.

It is not just Mia Farrow, George Clooney and Kevin Rudd who have been over there to western Sudan to see what is happening in Darfur. It is clear to the international community that the Janjaweed militia are armed and financed by the government in Sudan and, whatever the proclivities of the rebel groups, the central problem is the intolerance of the government in Sudan for its own people. The world has to stand up and say, ‘Enough is enough.’ One Western country has to step up to the plate and provide the transport assets that will allow the United Nations force, UNAMID, to be deployed all over Darfur. I do not think the people in the Janjaweed militia will take on the principally African troops once they know that the UN can arrive in a village somewhere in Darfur within a few minutes by helicopter.

This is one occasion, just as in Kosovo, where military action of a peacekeeping type can be the most important humanitarian assistance that we can give. The Australian government—as was the previous government—are being generous in the amount of aid that we are giving Darfur. In fact, we even have a number of soldiers, 15 ADF people and 10 AFP people, with the UN mission in Sudan. But one Western country has to step up to the plate and help the United Nations deploy the well-intentioned UNAMID force in Darfur. We must call on the government in Khartoum to cease the persecution of its own people. Even as recently as a couple of weeks ago, 150 people were killed in a village and mass rapes were undertaken to ethnically breed out the African Muslim population. These kinds of events are disgraceful in a modern world. We should not tolerate them after what happened in Cambodia and Rwanda, in Ukraine in the eighties or under Nazism in the forties.

I commend the member for McMillan for raising this crucial issue. The Western world, which has the resources to provide transport for the United Nations, in particular ought to step up and ensure that the United Nations has the wherewithal to do what is necessary to protect the people in Darfur. I conclude with a specific point: the Australian government should consider processing refugees in Cairo who are Darfurian refugees from Sudan. Currently the UNHCR does not permit people to be processed there, because Egypt is sympathetic to Sudan. We should go around that bureaucratic blockage and bring Darfurians to Australia after processing them ourselves.

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