Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Darfur in the Sudan is another African tragedy. It is another saga in the African tragedy which, increasingly, the Australian community is becoming aware of. In my own electorate of Cook, recently an issue regarding the reuniting of a Sudanese family in the Sutherland shire attracted great local interest and a great deal of local sympathy. As these issues continue, I hope that the Australian community more generally will become more aware of what is taking place and what has been taking place on the African continent literally for centuries.

There has been a 20-year civil war between the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army and the government-backed militia, the Janjaweed: the human cost of this is 200,000 dead at present—what many would describe as yet another genocide—and more than two million people displaced and who knows how many more raped, mutilated and brutalised.

John Prendergast and Don Cheadle, in their book Not on our watch, summarised it well when they said:

Sudan is where all the world’s worst atrocities come together like a perfect storm of horrors. War, slavery. Genocide—you name it. But particularly genocide. Beyond the Sudanese Government and other perpetrators of mass atrocities, however, the bad guys in this story are apathy, ignorance, indifference and inertia.

This is another significant example of the humanitarian tragedy that is Africa.

In 2001, the United States committee for refugees estimated there were 9.5 million refugees in Africa. More than a million people have been slaughtered in conflicts and civil wars. In Rwanda, we know there was a conflict between the rival ethnic groups the Tutsi and Hutus. Civil war culminated in April 1994 with the genocide of roughly 900,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutus in just 100 days. More than two million Hutus fled to neighbouring countries to escape retribution. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly known as Zaire, since August 1998, there have been 3.3 million people killed—mostly women, children and the elderly. In Northern Uganda there was a 20-year civil war involving the Lords Republican Army and the government. There were 1.6 million Ugandans displaced and more than 30,000 children were forced into servitude as child soldiers, which was so effectively highlighted by Sir Bob Geldof.

No less than 28 Sub-Saharan African states have been at war since 1980. The root causes of these problems are: political exclusion; dysfunctional governance; and greed, where there is a lack of preparedness to share national wealth. As Geldof also noted, it is in countries where the resources are greatest that often the conflicts and the human tragedy are most significant. Those with the most tend to have the most grief, and the scourge of corruption that feeds off this greed is equal. There is an impunity for unspeakable crimes, plus no accountability, no rule of law, no penalties, no sanction. And we must acknowledge that there is a legacy of European colonisation and arbitrary nation states; however, we should stress that no way of drawing borders could ever justify people walking around with machetes and hacking off people’s limbs as some sort of colonial legacy. These are acts of evil and should be called as such.

The motion that we are debating talks about what we should be doing here in Australia. I think it is important to note that the United Nations, in handling this issue, significantly dragged their feet in allowing the African Union to deal with the problem for so long and dawdled in making a decision to go in and ensure that there was a proper peacekeeping force in place. This delay cost literally hundreds of thousands of lives and should never have been able to take place.

There is a strong view in the United States, from both sides of politics, that we dawdled in Darfur and, as a result, we encountered a tragedy that never had to be as great as it was. Australia has been doing its bit in relation to Darfur but can do a lot more. As we look at this issue as we go forward, yes, we need to increase aid to Africa. It accounts for 2.9 per cent of our global aid budget. This increase in aid should not be done at the expense of problems closer to home, but the government has indicated they are about to increase aid—so did the previous government indicate they were going to increase aid. So as we increase aid, Africa should be more in our minds, but the thing I would stress above all is the rule of law on issues, in particular relating to corruption and good governance. If we want to make poverty history in Africa then we first have to make corruption history in Africa. To that end, I commend the report From corruption to good governance, released today by the Uniting Church in Australia.

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