Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In June I spoke in favour of a motion which included support for the Australian government’s condemnation of Aung San Suu Kyi’s detention, calling for her immediate release and supporting continued financial sanctions targeting senior members of the Burma regime, their immediate families and their associates. Since that time and since I lodged this motion, there have been significant but not positive developments.

As members will be aware, the Burmese democracy leader was convicted on 10 August under the so-called ‘law protecting the state against the dangers of subversive elements’. This Orwellian sounding act is used to silence any political dissent in Burma. Aung San Suu Kyi was sentenced to three years detention with labour, later reduced to 1½ years home detention. This removes any prospect of her taking part in the proposed Burmese 2010 elections and will further detract from the credibility of those elections.

Aung San Suu Kyi now faces a further period in detention, having spent almost 14 of the last 20 years in detention. I condemn this verdict and this sentence. I deplore the Myanmar military regime for pressing these spurious charges against Aung San Suu Kyi and I deplore her ongoing detention and persecution. Like many of my fellow Australians, and in common with many parliamentary colleagues, I demand that the Myanmar regime quash the conviction recorded against Aung San Suu Kyi and immediately and unconditionally release her from detention.

There has been a strong and immediate international reaction to the sentencing. The United Nations Secretary-General issued a statement saying he was deeply disappointed and deplored the verdict. The European Union was strongly critical of Aung San Suu Kyi’s continued detention. In a statement issued by Sweden, the current EU chair, the European Union stated it was ready to impose targeted sanctions against those involved. The EU Council have added members of Burma’s judiciary responsible for the verdict to a list of some 500 government officials whose assets in the EU are frozen and who are banned from travel to the EU’s 27-member bloc. The European Union has indicated that its existing assets freeze would now also cover businesses owned and controlled by members of the military regime and their associates.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has called on the United Nations Security Council to impose a global prohibition on arms sales to Myanmar, action which Australia is actively working with other countries to support. Many members of the Association of South-East Asian Nations, the regional grouping to which Burma belongs, have indicated that the verdict is unacceptable. The Australian government has called upon the Burmese regime to release Aung San Suu Kyi as well as the other 2,000 political prisoners from detention. This should be done unconditionally and immediately.

In addition to supporting international measures, Australia has for some time taken autonomous measures. We have autonomous financial sanctions, introduced in 2007 and updated in 2008, that target senior members of the regime, their associates and their families’ members. As a result of Aung San Suu Kyi’s trial, conviction and sentencing, when these sanctions are updated the government will give consideration to including senior members of the judiciary as being subject to these sanctions. The Prime Minister has announced that, in solidarity with Aung San Suu Kyi and the Burmese people, the government and Radio Australia have agreed to establish a Burmese language service to open up a new channel of international contact for the people of Burma. And Australia will consult further with the international community, including the United Nations and Australia’s ASEAN partners, on the need to put even more pressure on the Burmese regime to move down the path of democracy.

Australia has a longstanding arms embargo against Burma and I urge other countries to do the same. The arms embargo and other sanctions applied by the United States, the European Union and other countries have been undermined by a failure of a number of countries—China, Russia and India—to support collective international action. I was disappointed to read last week that China had called on the international community to ‘respect Burma’s judicial sovereignty’. If China wants to be respected internationally it needs to respect international standards, and Burma’s judicial system does not meet—I repeat, does not meet—international standards. I was also disappointed that India had had nothing to say about Aung San Suu Kyi’s conviction and sentence. China and India should not compete for influence in Burma at the expense of the human rights of Burmese people. Burma is a country of some 56 million people, 90 per cent of whom live on less than a dollar a day. It deserves better. It deserves support from the whole of the international community.

John Forrest (Mallee, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Development) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I commence my remarks by commending the member for Wills for bringing this motion to the attention of the House. Dr Aung San Suu Kyi has become quite symbolic in our modern era, representing the struggle for freedom and democracy. In fact, in the Australian last week there was a beautiful photographic portrait of her with a headline saying ‘Defying the despots’. Her treatment by the oppressive Myanmar regime is an appalling abuse of human rights and Australians who enjoy the freedom of democracy our wonderful nation offers are appalled. So I am more than enthusiastic to support the member for Wills in his motion here on behalf of the fair-minded and decent citizens who make up the constituency of Mallee.

The motion quite rightly condemns the Myanmar military regime for its ongoing persecution of Dr Aung San Suu Kyi and calls upon it to implement the democratic election that it as a regime proposed for next year. This oppressive military regime stands condemned, not just by this parliament but by the rest of the world. There have been countless examples of its cruelty and oppression beyond the treatment of Dr Suu Kyi, but she has become symbolic of the struggle that hundreds of thousands of Burmese citizens have endured under the crushing foot of this despotic regime.

Earlier this year I was privileged to undertake a study visit to the north-west of Thailand, right next to the Burmese border, in a little village called Maei Suai. The visit was the subject of my own private member’s motion, which we debated in this chamber in May. In a report that I tabled in this parliament I was not game to repeat all of the horror stories of those people belonging to the Akha tribe who have had to escape across the border because of the oppression in Burma and of the children attending the training centre that I visited at Maei Suai. There were many horror stories, and they remain untold by me for fear of retribution within Burma against surviving members of their families. As I said in that report I tabled in the parliament, in the case of one particular family, the father of the child staying at the training centre gave a horrendous report of their escape from the Myanmar regime and of the many atrocities committed just on that one particular group of people, the Akha. There are something like a dozen of these mountain tribes scattered right through the mountains in South-East Asia, and the ones in Burma are particularly oppressed, more so than those in other countries such as China, Vietnam and Laos and in Thailand itself. I heard the story of another family who fled on foot across the mountains, chased by army regulars firing guns at them. They ran through the night with nothing but the clothes on their backs, hungry and tired.

This is a despotic regime which must be brought to account and the international community needs to keep up its efforts to succeed in this outcome. I would like to complete my remarks by commending this resolution to the member for Hinkler and the member for Canberra who, I am delighted to see, is present in the chamber. Both these members will be representing all of us in the General Assembly of the United Nations from September through to December, and I would like them to take the strength of this resolution into account, as they represent not just us as members of the parliament but Australians who are generally appalled at the treatment of Dr Suu Kyi. As bad as this is, she is just so symbolic of so many other hundreds of thousands of Burmese citizens who are being oppressed, suppressed, persecuted and even murdered. The members for Hinkler and Canberra can carry this resolution confident that it has the energetic support of this chamber on behalf of the Australian people, and whilst at the United Nations they can confidently carry the will of Australia to the debate which that assembly has been conducting over some time now to do what it can to expose this deplorable regime in what was once the proud country of Burma. I commend this resolution to the House and to those two members in particular to carry the strength of this resolution forward in the United Nations.

Sharon Grierson (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I, too, rise in support of the member for Wills’s private member’s motion deploring the Myanmar regime for pressing new and spurious charges against Dr Aung San Suu Kyi, for her ongoing detention and persecution and condemning the regime for continuing to deny her fundamental human rights, notably those which prohibit arbitrary arrest and detention, guarantee the right to a fair trial and guarantee the right to freedom of opinion and expression. Her incarceration is a gross injustice of the most serious kind, an incarceration by a regime that is afraid of Dr Suu Kyi’s ability to organise and unite the people of her country against its authoritarian rule.

Dr Suu Kyi’s credentials and her international reputation are undoubted. Winner of the Nobel Prize Peace Prize in 1991, Dr Suu Kyi has received vocal support from many countries in the world, including Australia. In 2007, at a vote of 400 to nil she was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by the United States Congress, the US House of Representatives, receiving the medal in 2008. She was the first person in history to receive the prize while imprisoned and that is the tragedy of it all. So how is it that an individual of such prestige and such honour can continue to be imprisoned on such spurious charges? In the 1990 general elections Suu Kyi was elected to be Prime Minister as leader of the winning National League for Democracy party which won 59 per cent of the vote and 394 of the 492 seats. Her subsequent detention by the military junta prevented her from assuming office. Certainly, should she face another election, she would undoubtedly win but she has instead been under house arrest for 14 of the last 20 years. Her latest charges and detention stem from an incident in May of this year when an American citizen, John William Yettaw, swam across to her private compound. Protesting exhaustion, he stayed at her residence for two days, supposedly, before making the return swim when he was subsequently arrested. Dr Suu Kyi was arrested for violating the terms of her house arrest under Burma’s so-called Law Protecting the State Against the Dangers of Subversive Elements.

Last week Aung San Suu Kyi was sentenced to three years with labour, but the sentence was reduced to 1½ years home detention. The sentence removes any prospect of Aung San Suu Kyi participating in Burma’s elections, no doubt elections that would have seen her as the people’s choice to lead the country to freedom and democracy. The Australian government has since condemned her most recent arrest. Dr Suu Kyi’s situation is one of only thousands of similar incarcerations in Myanmar. It is estimated that in the last 18 months alone, the period leading up to the next elections, the number of political prisoners in Myanmar has doubled. Her detention is symptomatic of the ongoing internal situation in Burma. Unless significant political, economic and social reforms occur, the threat the regime poses to its people and to the region surrounding it will only continue to increase. I join my government in repeating its call for the regime to release Aung Sang Suu Kyi immediately and unconditionally and to release the more than 2,000 political prisoners in Myanmar.

Australia maintains financial sanctions against the Burmese regime. The government will now move to update these, as we have heard from the member for Wills, looking at the senior members of the judiciary, and to keep them focused for maximum impact. I strongly support these sanctions knowing full well that the majority of the Myanmar people will suffer continuously while the privileged few of the junta still live very well, and that is who the sanctions will hurt the most. It is still not too late to set aside the conviction and the sentence, release Aung San Suu Kyi and move the regime down the path of national reconciliation. I applaud Dr Suu Kyi for her courage in peacefully protesting the democratic rights of the people of Myanmar over all these years with great dignity and civility. I finish with an excerpt from one of Dr Suu Kyi’s most famous speeches, ‘Freedom from fear’. It begins:

It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.

Luke Simpkins (Cowan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to begin by congratulating the member for Wills for bringing this motion before the chamber. I have always thought that he walks in no former member’s shadow. Well done, mate. I also congratulate my colleagues on both sides who have chosen to speak on Aung San Suu Kyi tonight. She was born in 1945, the daughter of the famous revolutionary Aung San, who is credited with being one of main people in unifying Burma and taking Burma away from the colonial days into nationhood. Unfortunately, he met his death by way of assassination just six months before Burma officially became a union and a nation. That occurred when Aung San Suu Kyi was just two years old.

Given that background, given that she was the daughter of someone who was widely credited with bringing the nation away from the colonial past, it seems almost natural that she should rise to this position, a great leader, a great icon for freedom in South-East Asia. It has not come at no cost; it has been a difficult road that she has chosen to take, a road of great sacrifice. She met her husband, Michael Aris, I believe in the 1970s, and whilst married to him she was called back to Burma in 1988 when her mother became sick. From 1988 to 1990 she took up the gauntlet for the NLD, the National League for Democracy, and became their leader for the free election in 1990. Unfortunately, that was the election that the military junta overturned and imposed their will on the nation, becoming an autocratic regime rejecting democracy. Sadly, that has been the history of Burma ever since. Obviously we live for the day when democracy returns to Burma and the result of the 1990 election is honoured.

I mentioned before that Aung San Suu Kyi’s path has been a difficult one and one of sacrifice. She has chosen to remain in that country as a leader, as the symbol of democracy, at great personal cost. I believe it was in 1999 that her husband was dying of cancer and he petitioned the regime to allow him to return to Burma. Of course, they refused. Aung San Suu Kyi chose to sacrifice those last days of time with her husband by remaining in Burma because she knew that they would never let her back in. She sacrificed that time with her husband for the sake of democracy, to remain there as that symbol for people who continue to resist until this day.

With the death of her husband and almost permanent house arrest ever since, it has come to this point that the military junta has managed to create the circumstances with their autocratic laws which have ensured that she has been found guilty of pathetic charges by a pathetic corrupt government. They have created the circumstances whereby it will be impossible for her to stand in the next elections. This is a government with no legitimacy. It is corrupt. It stands against democracy in every respect. It stands only for the individuals, the powerful elites, of a country that has no commitment to the people and has no interest apart from oppression and maintenance of their power. The sooner they fall, it will be a great day and the sooner Aung San Suu Kyi is released and becomes the true leader of that country, it will be better.

Janelle Saffin (Page, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to support the motion moved by the member for Wills and to associate myself with all of the comments of the other members who have spoken before. I would like to share a few things that I know and some of my experience of the country we call Burma and that the generals changed the name of in 1989 to Myanmar. I know Aung San Suu Kyi; I knew Dr Michael Aris, her husband. In 1997 when he gave a speech on Suu’s behalf at the university of technology where she received an honorary doctorate in her speech—which she had prepared and he gave—she asked that Australia broadcast Radio Australia into Burma.

Even though it has been quite a few years, and I have been one of the advocates involved in that along with other people, I am pleased that the Prime Minister announced that new channel last week as a show of solidarity. I know that all members across both chambers support that action. In standing in solidarity with Aung San Suu Kyi, it is standing in solidarity with the people of Burma. It is the people of Burma that she has in her heart and in her mind and they return that. The generals are actually scared of the people and they moved holus bolus from Rangoon, the capital, up to Naypyidaw. They moved because they are actually fearful. Burma is a land of many peoples and lots of ethnic nationality peoples and the generals fear them as well as fearing those desiring democracy.

There is a whole range of things that have happened. In the 1990 election, as we heard here tonight, the National League for Democracy won 392 seats of the 485 contested. There are 492 seats but seven were deemed too unstable to run the election. Therefore the National League for Democracy won the election. Aung San Suu Kyi was barred from running by the law and she was under house arrest but her party by convention would have taken over government. Then they passed a whole series of laws starting with declaration 1/90 which changed the nature of the election. The election law at that time in order 5/89 actually stated who would be elected and what they would be elected for, which was to the parliament to draw up the constitution. Declaration 1/90 retrospectively changed that, but it still recognised that those people elected at that time had the right to draw up the constitution. They then set about changing that and those people were excluded, so that by the time the draft constitution was done, many, many years later, there was under one per cent of the people attending the national convention who had legitimacy according to the law at the time—order 5/89 and declaration 1/90.

In a show of goodwill people like the NLD and others agreed to work with even that declaration 1/90 to try to get the constitution up—they did not manage it. We then saw that the generals went to a referendum and they claimed a huge mandate for this constitution. You may not be aware that the constitution gives an amnesty to the generals and no-one else. When you have a country that has had a series of conflicts and civil wars raging for a long time against the centre and the generals, then that is just madness. The key thing that I wanted to say tonight was that the 2010 elections, based as they will be on that flawed and fraudulent constitution, will not aim at settlement.

Alby Schultz (Hume, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The time allotted for this debate has expired. The debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.