Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Russell Broadbent (McMillan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker Sidebottom, I caught a part of your address to the parliament today in which you mentioned your late parents and your desire that they might have been with you for your re-entry into the parliament. I identify with you, along with many other members of parliament, who might also have liked their mum and dad to have been part of their re-entry into this place. I congratulate you on your re-entry and your elevation to the position that you hold at the moment.

Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You are a legend yourself. Thank you.

Russell Broadbent (McMillan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In his Faithworks blog in the Sunday Herald Sun on 16 March 2008, Bryan Patterson writes:

About 1.3 billion people now live in war zones. A child will die as the direct result of war in the time it takes you to read this sentence. Think about that. A child with a name and a personality. A child whose hope has been extinguished. About 26,500 of these children die every day from the effects of poverty and war. Meanwhile, the wise leaders of the world collectively spend $1.1 trillion on weapons. It might make you empathise with the words of Martin Luther. ‘If I was God, I’d kick this world to pieces,’ he said. Fortunately, God doesn’t do that.

The purpose of this motion is to draw attention to the desperate situation in Sudan’s Darfur region and to consider what Australia can do to help alleviate the situation. More than four years of armed conflict involving rebel groups, armed militia and government forces has resulted in an estimated 200,000 civilian deaths. Millions have fled their destroyed villages, many of them fleeing across the border into neighbouring Chad. More than 240,000 refugees from Darfur are being cared for by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and other agencies in camps along Sudan’s western border with Chad. The UNHCR is at present in the process of transferring another 13,000 refugees who crossed the border in recent weeks to escape an upsurge in fighting.

These camps are located in arid and remote areas which the UNHCR says would normally support no more than 20,000 people. Food aid has to be brought in to the landlocked Darfur region by overland convoys from Tripoli in Libya. The treacherous roads become inaccessible during the annual rainy season, which is rapidly approaching. If these natural hazards were not enough, armed rebel groups have taken to attacking the vehicles of the relief organisations. The UN’s World Food Program says that, as a result, it is transporting only half the food relief it normally would at this time of the year. Truck drivers are unwilling to risk making deliveries on the dangerous roads. Since the beginning of this year 45 trucks have been hijacked and 23 drivers are unaccounted for. This places greater reliance on the delivery of food aid by air. The World Food Program announced last week that this operation was also at risk because of lack of funds. Operations could not be guaranteed beyond the end of March. The operation has been temporarily reprieved by a contribution from Hollywood celebrities, led by actor George Clooney, but the World Food Program remains in urgent need of confirmed contributions from donor countries.

It has become abundantly clear that the only way of addressing this humanitarian tragedy is by an end to the fighting, but there appears to be little prospect of this given the recent upsurge of rebel activity. The situation is complicated by the unrest in Chad, where armed rebels have also tried to overthrow the government. There are also tensions between the Sudanese and Chadian governments, which have each accused the other of allowing rebel bases on their territory. There was a glimmer of hope last week when the two governments signed a peace agreement, but this has been dismissed by rebel factions and there is now a real concern that fighting in Darfur has entered a new and more deadly phase.

When African rebels launched their uprising against the Arab central government four years ago, there were two main rebel groups. The government responded by arming and supporting the Arab militia. Both the African rebel groups and the militia have since splintered and there are now as many as 16 competing factions involved in the violence. Agreement has been reached on the deployment of a combined United Nations African Union peacekeeping force of 26,000 in Darfur, but to date just over 9,000 have been deployed. In just over three months 800,000 members of the ethnic Tutsi community were slaughtered by rival Hutus. Already, 200,000 people have died in Darfur. We must act as part of the international community now to see that the bloodbath that was Rwanda is not repeated.

Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to 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.

Judi Moylan (Pearce, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

May I first take the opportunity to thank my good colleague the member for McMillan for bringing this motion to the House and for the opportunity to speak to it. His concern for humanitarian work, both domestically and internationally, is well known and respected in this place and beyond. In his opening remarks he gave some very sobering statistics on the impact of war, particularly on children, and it is indeed sobering to reflect on that.

It is a matter of record that an immense tragedy has been unfolding in the Darfur region since 2003. As the member for Melbourne Ports has just indicated, this is a civil conflict, largely driven by a government against its own people. They put a British king, Charles I, to death for waging war on his own people. It is a pretty terrible situation when you have to kill thousands of your own to make some kind of political statement. This conflict has taken a terrible toll on human life and it has caused untold misery to thousands of citizens of Darfur. The conflict began in Sudan’s western region but has now spread to Chad and will undoubtedly lead to continuing conflict on a wider front. It has been estimated that between 200,000 and 400,000 people have died from war, malnutrition and disease. This makes the delivery of aid perhaps more crucial and critical than it otherwise would be. Three million people have been displaced and four million are now entirely dependent on humanitarian assistance.

This conflict has been said to be the site of the world’s worst humanitarian disaster—and that is really saying something, because we have seen some appalling tragedies unfold, in this last decade in particular. Any escalation in the conflict will make it increasingly difficult to support the vast number of people so desperately needing humanitarian care. It will also increase the risk to those courageous and generous people endeavouring to deliver the aid. My colleague the member for McMillan has pointed out the incredible risk to the convoys of trucks taking aid into the region. There have been increasing attacks on humanitarian aid workers and there have been many abductions. This has understandably led to agencies winding down the delivery of humanitarian aid.

Most of the 20,000 peacekeepers who form the United Nations African Union Mission in Darfur force have been pledged by African states. The United Nations has expressed concern at the lack of key military capability, particularly air assets, to deliver aid and medical supplies. If peace is to be restored in Darfur and if there is to be an easing of human suffering and misery, Darfur will need a much more rigorous peacekeeping operation than currently exists. It will require skilled, high-level intervention to negotiate a political settlement between the various militia groups that is lasting. We know that our Australian peacekeepers have the skills, and they have already made a significant contribution to resolving conflicts in many parts of the globe. We are proud of those efforts.

While the Australian government has made a significant contribution of $20 million and limited personnel to the peacekeeping operation in Darfur, there has not been a commitment to provide the much-needed air support and additional personnel. Somebody once told me, ‘If it has got to be, it has got to be me.’ I think that if we want to see peace restored in the region—and it is in everyone’s interest that that happens—we need to consider providing more peacekeeping support. A recent report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute concluded that, while the Australian Defence Force is busy, it is not overstretched. Given the real risk of escalating violence, further destabilisation in the region and the level of human suffering, it would be a positive move for the Australian government to consider the request, for air support in particular. This would be a commitment that I am pretty sure that everyone here would welcome.

Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker Sidebottom, I commend you today on your second maiden speech in the House, and I hope it is the last time we have to hear one of those! I am pleased to speak to the motion put before the House by the member for McMillan, and I commend him on the initiative. Sudan is a country that knows severe famine, disease, environmental crisis and war. As we have already heard in such graphic detail from the previous speakers, the country is experiencing rapid and unsustainable population growth, which is further straining already depleted resources.

Along with the other reasons mentioned by the previous speakers, the effects of climate change and overpopulation have pushed the country to the brink and led to the conflict that has crippled Darfur. There is no doubt that the civil war has impacted on millions of lives. I have seen the results of this in the suburb where I live, where there is a significant refugee population from Sudan.

Concentrated in the western region of Sudan, the war is predominantly an ethnic and tribal struggle for useful pastoral land and scarce natural resources—land and resources that are being impacted on by climate change. On one side you have the Sudanese military and a militia group known as the Janjaweed, which, I think, literally means ‘devils on horseback’. On the other side are rebel groups like the Sudan Liberation Movement and the Justice and Equality Movement. As a result of the civil war, many hundreds of thousands have been killed. Millions of families have been forced from their homes and scattered all over the world and all over Africa. It is one of those occasions in history where humanity must stand up for humanity.

The plight of the people of Darfur is neither forgotten nor ignored by Australia. Australia has strongly supported the actions taken by the UN Security Council to address the conflict. Through resolution 1591, the Australian government helped to ensure that the UN Security Council strengthened binding restrictions on the supply of arms to Darfur, demanded the government of Sudan cease offensive military flights over Darfur and imposed travel bans and asset freezes on individuals who oppose peace.

Australia continues to urge all parties to the conflict in Darfur to facilitate the deployment of the United Nations African Union Mission and work towards a comprehensive peace settlement. We are directing funds towards alleviating the humanitarian crisis. Australia has provided more than $71 million in humanitarian aid to Sudan since May 2004, including $57 million for Darfur and $13 million for southern Sudan. A further $11 million has been provided to help neighbouring countries deal with many of the spillover effects. I commend the initiative put forward by the member for Melbourne Ports to process visa applications outside the region. These financial contributions have funded water and sanitation projects, mine clearance and road maintenance, food aid, logistics and communications. Australia has also provided 15 Australian Defence Force personnel and 10 Federal Police.

Australia has also opened its doors to more than 23,000 Sudanese refugees who have resettled in Australia since 2001. As I said, many hundreds of them now call the suburbs in my electorate of Moreton—such as Moorooka, Annerley, Yeronga and Salisbury—home. I have heard firsthand from many residents in my electorate of the crisis that is facing humanity and the individual struggles to survive in Darfur. That is why I was particularly disgusted with the remarks of the former Minister for Immigration and Citizenship late last year slandering these Sudanese refugees. He made an accusation that Sudanese people are not integrating into the Australian way of life. That is certainly not my experience in Moreton at all. These kinds of divisive statements are unhelpful. Instead, as the member for McMillan, who moved this motion, said, we should be directing our attention towards lasting peace and humanitarian aid in Sudan.

The biggest diaspora in my electorate is not the Sudanese community; it is actually the Chinese community. As China is a major trading partner with Sudan, we would all recognise that China must step up to its responsibility to aid the war-torn country. I have been informed that China is already engaged in some diplomatic efforts and providing aid to Darfur. The Chinese President met the Sudanese President twice in 2007 and appointed a special envoy to attempt to ameliorate the dreadful circumstances in Sudan. China has taken an active part but more can be done to help with practical humanitarian aid. All countries must step up to help relieve human suffering in the Darfur region.

Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to 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.

Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The situation in Darfur is and has been appalling since 2003, when the government of Sudan began its counterinsurgency campaign against the newly active rebel groups in Darfur. Hundreds of thousands have been killed, more than a million people have been displaced and the atrocities, the indiscriminate slaughter, the gruesome injuries and the sexual violence perpetrated, in many cases against women and children, are from the very deepest sump of human behaviour.

Sadly, the Darfur peace agreement signed in May 2006 by the Sudanese government and one of the main rebel groups has long since broken down. The African Union Mission in Sudan, AMIS, which performed quite effectively in the early days of its operation, has proved unable to deal with the scale of the disaster and was supplanted late last year by the United Nations African Union Mission in Darfur, UNAMID, effectively a hybrid UN-AU force under UN control. This is a new development and it goes without saying that the success of the UN-AU operation cannot be judged now. In fact, it is critical at this point that member states, including Australia, renew their financial and practical support for the UN efforts in Darfur.

The UN Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, Jean-Marie Guehenno, visited the new operation in January this year and reported to the UN Security Council on 8 February. He noted that the number of troops and police and their enabling capabilities currently in the mission area were simply not sufficient to provide protection for Darfur’s civilians in the current hostile environment. He also noted that continuing hostilities were evidence that parties to the conflict on all sides were simply not prepared to put aside violence in favour of dialogue.

The tensions that work to resist a political process upon which a lasting ceasefire could be based are numerous, but they certainly include insufficient commitment by the Sudanese government to such a process and a similar lack of commitment by some rebel groups, in addition to the splintering of those groups into subgroups whose political objectives often present new obstacles or demands as conditions precedent to negotiation. While the focus in Darfur is understandably on bringing the armed groups to the table, it is important to remember that the armed groups themselves, whether it be the government and the Janjaweed militias on the one side or the rebel armies on the other, are not natural or complete representatives of the people in Sudan. For there to be effective peacekeeping there needs to be, firstly, a basis for that peace even if it is limited to a program of negotiations. Otherwise, in the absence of that political foundation for peace, or its imminent prospect, the only way to stop the violence in Darfur would be through the military imposition of that oxymoron, the ‘enforced peace’. History shows that an enforced peace is often just a pause in the carnage, especially when the enforcement is supplied from the outside.

The situation in Darfur has been given many names. It is without doubt a humanitarian crisis or tragedy, as the member for McMillan has described it in his notice of motion. It has also been described variously as a civil war, a conflict between insurgents and counterinsurgents, a case of ethnic cleansing or even as genocide. These descriptions involve a degree of simplification. Several commentators have chosen to characterise Darfur as a conflict between Arab perpetrators and African victims, partly at least because this fits into a larger geopolitical template and its related agenda. The UN Security Council’s Commission of Inquiry on Darfur report, released in February 2005, declared that violence perpetrated by the Sudanese government against civilians, either directly or through the Janjaweed militias, amounted to crimes against humanity. But it also found that sections of the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement were responsible for serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law which may amount to war crimes. I do not make that point in order to move from a position in which Darfur is seen in the black-and-white terms of a perpetrator and a victim to a position in which Darfur is hopelessly complex and everyone or else no-one is to blame. I make the point in order to reiterate the essence of the problem: that without acknowledging that the violence in Darfur arises from underlying political and material conditions there can be no progress towards a stable peace.

The issue that the member for McMillan puts quite plainly in his notice of motion is about what action should be taken by the Australian government. It needs to be recognised that Australia has been directly and significantly involved in supporting international efforts in Darfur. The Australian government has strongly supported the action taken by the UN Security Council and has fully implemented all operative sanctions into domestic law. Furthermore, the previous and current governments are to be commended for practical contributions which include more than $71 million in humanitarian aid to Sudan since 2004; approximately $11 million to cope with the spillover effects in neighbouring countries; contributions to the World Food Program that made Australia the fourth largest bilateral donor to the WFP’s emergency operation in Sudan in 2006; and the provision of 15 ADF personnel and 10 AFP personnel to the UN mission in Sudan. (Time expired)

Sid Sidebottom (Braddon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The time allotted for this debate has expired. I thank all those members who made a contribution to it, and I thank the member for McMillan for moving the motion. The debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.