Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I seek leave to make a brief statement, following the passing of my motion, on the current situation in Egypt.

Leave granted.

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. Firstly, I would like to acknowledge the presence in the Gallery today of His Grace Bishop Suriel of the Coptic Church, Rev. Father Jonathan Issac, Rev. Father Gabriel Yassa, and my good friend and former Sutherland Shire councillor Magdi Mikhail.

Our motion recently noted that Egypt is currently experiencing a period of unprecedented transition, the success of which hinges on full respect for the rule of law and compliance with international human rights standards, including freedom of religion. The motion that was just passed could not have been more timely, as it comes just days after we saw the shocking military violence against the Coptic Christians in Egypt. During the recent debate we noticed that it was only on 1 January this year that a bomb was detonated in front of a Coptic Church, the Two Saints Church, in Alexandria, killing 23 people and injuring more than 97. We noted that this was the most deadly act of violence against Egypt's Christian Coptic minority for more than a decade, when a massacre in 2000 left 21 Coptic Christians dead.

However, it is very sad to say that the latest attacks on the Coptic Christians have left 24 dead and over 270 injured. And what we have seen on video of these recent attacks is armoured military vehicles driving at high speed, ploughing into unarmed Christian protesters. For members of this House who have not seen these videos, although they are graphic and horrific I suggest that you do to understand the gravity of the situation.

Medical staff at Cairo's hospital have told Amnesty International that the casualties resulted from bullet wounds and crushed body parts resulting from people deliberately being run over by army vehicles. A young Christian, Vivian Magdi, whose fiance was killed when an armoured vehicle ran over him, gave a tearful account to Egyptian TV. She said:

His body was in the middle of the wheels. His legs were torn. His head hit the pavement, breaking his skull. Soldiers gathered around us and started to beat him up. I begged them to leave him.

She told the soldiers he was not breathing. She continued her account:

Then a soldier with a red cap came, shouting, cursing and hitting me with a stick then tried to beat him up. I threw my body on him (her fiance) … and the soldier said to me: 'You infidel, why are you here?'

Let us be clear: when military forces open fire on unarmed civilians and drive armoured vehicles at high speed into crowds and kill at least 25 it is not only murder; it is mass murder.

Egyptian state television must accept some responsibility for this latest violence, for they called on so-called honest Egyptians to rush to the defence of the military, which they said was under siege from Copts. This resulted in vigilante attacks against Coptic Christian protesters who were merely fleeing the army's bullets and armour.

The fate of Egypt will be determined by how Christians are treated in that country in the future. The situation could not be more serious, not only for Egypt but for the world. The Coptic Christians are the largest non-Muslim minority in the Middle East. The Copts have been the intellectual entrepreneurs in Egypt, and the country will continue to decline without a strong Christian minority. We have already seen this year the collapse of the Egyptian tourist industry, and since January their share market has collapsed by 45 per cent in value, pushing the economy to the verge of abyss. The country is fast running out of financial reserves. Growing hunger in the streets is a reality. And the latest piece of madness has pushed the country closer to the edge. This risks people becoming more radicalised, pushing Egypt and the entire Middle East into a downward spiral.

Now is not the time for silence or appeasement from the international community, for as the Copts go so may go the entire Middle East. If a Christian minority cannot live in a country with a Muslim majority population without suffering persecution and institutionalised discrimination our future looks bleak. However, calls by world leaders after these latest atrocities merely for restraint from both sides naively fail to understand the situation. The Coptic Christians do not have a militia ready to engage the army. The moderate voices in Egypt must be put on notice in the strongest terms to root out any anti-Christian element in the army and to give equal rights to all Coptic Christians and to ensure their protection.

Our US allies generously support the military in Egypt. The Americans should be warning the moderate Egyptian voices that if they fail to protect the Christian minority their military aid will be cut back. There is a real danger of this Arab spring falling into dark Islamic winter. Religious extremism must have no place in a modern society anywhere in the world, including Egypt.

I thank all members of the House for supporting this motion as it helps send an urgent message through to Cairo that to persist on the present course is to court catastrophe. It will also greatly galvanise much needed broader international attention to the issue of looming Egyptian catastrophe. I thank all members.

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—I very much want, on behalf of the Australian government, to express our outrage at the attacks that have occurred on Coptic Christians in Egypt.

The resolution that was just carried unanimously by the House had an action component to it. The government has already acted on each and every one of those action components. The Prime Minister and the foreign minister issued a strong statement. The foreign minister, I know, raised these issues in discussions at the highest levels at the United Nations when he was recently in New York. The immigration minister, I know, has had a number of discussions with the bishop and leaders of the Coptic community to ensure that there are appropriate understandings with regard to the circumstances in which Coptic Christians have found themselves.

The Australian government will continue to make the strongest representations that the Egyptian government provide equal rights and protection for all Egyptian citizens, regardless of their race or religion. This is a fundamental human right. As the federal member for Grayndler I can say that I have received strong representations, including from my local mayor, Morris Hanna—the Mayor of Marrickville—and from others in the community who have very strong ties.

Historically the first Coptic church in Australia was at Sydenham in my electorate. Indeed, my association with the bishop goes back many years, to the Marrickville District Hardcourt Tennis Club, when we were both very much younger. It is an association that goes back 35 years—that gives away our ages—in terms of our friendship and our dialogue.

I can say this on behalf of the government: we will not be shy about putting forward these principles in terms of human rights, which we regard as universal. We have not been shy up to now; we will continue with this course. I am very pleased that this is a position which unites everyone in this House of Representatives. I congratulate the member for Hughes on his initiative in putting forward this motion that was unanimously agreed to and I assure the members of the community that this is an issue which continues to be discussed and acted upon at the highest level of the Australian government.

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—Arguably the most famous comment in the last century was that made by Mikhail Gorbachev when he was appointed First Secretary. He chose as his first statement to the rest of the world that the important thing for all of us to remember is that when we go on our knees at night to pray we all pray to the same God. I was brought up in a generation where we lived a hair trigger away from nuclear holocaust. I remember as a 12th grader in school, with the transistor radio in my ear, listening to the speech of John F Kennedy over the missile crisis and I could feel the hair on the back on my neck standing up because it was going to be on. There was no way that a tough guy like Nikita Khrushchev was going to back down and, if you listened to Kennedy, there was no way that he was going to back down. So it was going to be on and we were going to be the children of a nuclear war. Good things prevailed, but that situation continued up to the advent of the most wonderful man, Mikhail Gorbachev, whose family have preserved Christianity through 80 years of persecution where it was effectively illegal to practise religion.

I think it is reasonable to say that I have had my life saved twice by two wonderful doctors. Both, judging from their names, were of the Islamic faith and both great men tirelessly worked extremely hard to save my life. I would not be here without those wonderful people.

When the ethnic cleansing was taking place in central Europe, NATO stepped in. The Christian countries stepped in to protect those Islamic people who were being persecuted. The NATO countries have pursued the architects of that oppression fairly ruthlessly. It is very much to their credit. But if you are a Christian you are supposed to love your neighbours, turn the other cheek and do good to those that hate you. That is the very essence of our religious beliefs in this country. For some people they might be philosophical beliefs but, for the vast bulk of us, they are our religious beliefs.

It gives me no joy to recall recent history on our planet where over one million Armenians were murdered. In Spain, 55,000 Catholics were taken out into the streets and shot dead, including 6,000 priests and 13,000 nuns. I quote from Simon Beevor's book on the Spanish Civil War. It seems interesting that they always talk about Franco. Franco said, 'For everyone you kill, I will kill 10.' I do not think he got up to 10, but he did a fairly good job. But that was payback. The original decision was to murder people because of their Christian faith and 54,000 of them were just taken out onto the streets and shot dead. Read the book.

One of the great blemishes upon the soul of our nation was that we participated in the Boer War for Mr Rothschild, Mr Barney Barnato and Cecil Rhodes—it is a disgrace that there is such a thing as a Rhodes scholarship. They wiped out half the Matabele nation. They murdered them. Then they proceeded to murder 200,000 Boers, including 28,000 women and children in the concentration camps. Hitler was able to say, 'Don't worry about it because the Turks got away with it in Armenia and the British got away with it in South Africa; we can go ahead and murder six million Jews as well.'

This sort of thing has to stop. I very much praise the member for bringing it forward and the members of the Coptic Church, being from a related breakaway, the Western Christians. The original Christians are sitting up there today. In the little Christian group of Ross Cameron we had going here at Parliament House, of which Kevin Rudd was a prominent member, we had a person with a big silver cross who had served in Saddam Hussein's cabinet. I asked him, 'How long has your family been Christian?' He said, 'Since 72 AD.' We praise these people that have stood on the ramparts and kept the Christian faith for 2,000 years, 1,500 years of that being persecution. I think we should serve very clear notice in this place that we are not going to stand aside and see our fellow Christians and the fathers of Christianity continue to be murdered. That is not going to happen. Please God, our nation will grow over the next 20 or 30 years—as I think it must for its survival—to 60 million people and we will be a rich, prosperous and powerful nation. We will put up a defence if persecution takes place. If I can inject a personal note into my speech, the brother of my great grandfather was the patriarch of the Maronite Church. They were people very familiar with the sort of persecution that is taking place. He came to Australia in 1870, so I do not really have a great deal of memories of him!

All the same, I think that an awful lot of Australians will feel very great kinship with the Coptic Christians of Egypt. Even if we did not feel a great kinship, as fellow Christians we will not stand idly by and see fellow Christians murdered—just as we did not stand idly by and watch as fellow believers in the good Lord were murdered in those countries in central Europe. We hope that we will carry those principles forward into the future. I highly praise the member for Hughes for putting this motion forward and I highly praise those people who have kept the faith through millennia of prosecution.

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

I want to strongly associate myself with this motion and commend the member for Hughes and all the others who have spoken on this issue, particularly the member for Grayndler, who has such a long association with the Coptic community in Sydney. This situation has worsened, not just in recent days but also over the Christmas season, when Coptic Christians in Egypt faced attack. When 23 people were murdered, we knew the situation had gotten a lot worse. Egyptian society is in turmoil at the moment because of the country's move towards democracy, but that is no excuse, as I am sure the Coptic community will agree, for the Egyptian military and the current Egyptian government to ignore the rights of such an important minority in Egypt. The security and religious freedom of Coptic Christians must be respected, and we call on the Egyptian government to respect those rights and to guarantee those rights.

Let us remember where the events of the last few days began. It is not, as portrayed by some in the media, a fight between militant Christians and Islamic fundamentalists. This began with the burning down of a Coptic church, which led to people making peaceful demonstrations that were then attacked by the Egyptian army. I regret to say I have read reports that, in provincial areas of Egypt, parts of the Egyptian provincial government and even parts of the Egyptian military have participated in these attacks on Coptic churches. It is outrageous. I remember the words of his Holiness the Pope, who expressed his solidarity with the Christian people of Egypt by calling on world leaders to speak out against attacks on Christians in the Middle East. This is the sharpest point of those tensions, and it is not an excuse to say, 'Society is out of control; we're in transition,' and that the Egyptian military cannot guarantee the safety of people practising an ancient religion in their own country. The world is looking at how the Egyptian government behaves. As various members have said, the Egyptian economy, Egyptian tourism, all of those things, are at risk. It is in Egypt's interest to protect its own citizens, its Coptic citizens.

I commend the member for Hughes for moving the motion. I am particularly pleased as a member of the government to have worked with ministers like the member for Grayndler and the member for Batman, who had a large delegation of which I was part that met Bishop Suriel in January, along with some of the Coptic fathers, in Melbourne at the federal government offices. We will continue to concentrate on this issue, and the Coptic community in Australia should know that the Egyptian government will hear the united voice of this parliament, showing the Christian people of the Middle East that we are fully behind them.

Bruce Scott (Maranoa, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank all those who have participated in the debate. I was privileged to be able to grant leave for additional contributions to be made on this motion, which was unanimously agreed to by the parliament this morning.