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REJECTED ASYLUM SEEKERS MURDERED ON RETURN TO AFGHANISTAN
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[news.com, August 8, 2006]
NINE rejected asylum seekers forcibly repatriated by Australia to Afghanistan are believed to have been killed upon their return, and others were arrested or had family members killed, researchers who investigated the fate of the deportees say.
In one harrowing account, a Hazara Afghan deported after 16 months on Christmas Island and Nauru -- despite his pleas that he and his family would be killed -- lost his two children, aged six and nine. A grenade was dropped on their house four months after they returned to Afghanistan.
"My children died so that John Howard could win an election," Abdul is quoted as telling the Edmund Rice Centre, which has spent the past three years interviewing more than 80 rejected asylum seekers in 18 countries. It has released its findings to coincide with the Government's migration bill, which has divided the Coalition. The bill would ensure all asylum seekers landing on the mainland were processed offshore, out of reach of Australia's legal system.
Abdul, 31, whose surname cannot be released because he fears for his safety, now lives illegally in Pakistan. He told the researchers: "We got caught up in Australian politics. It was easy for the Australian Government after September 11 to say that the people fleeing from the Taliban were the Taliban."
Phil Glendenning, a director of the Edmund Rice Centre, said the nine deaths, during 2002 and 2003, were reported in interviews with rejected asylum seekers and were supported by church and health workers. The centre confirmed two of the names of dead asylum seekers, Mohammed Moussa Nazaree and Yacoub Baklri, with their families. It had to cut short its investigation in Afghanistan into the other deaths because Mr Glendenning and his two researchers were arrested by security police, and bandits later threatened their lives.
Common were accounts of poor conditions on Nauru -- no power for months, insufficient water to wash, and outbreaks of skin disease, depression and worms.
Many of the Hazara asylum seekers -- a persecuted minority in Afghanistan -- said the translators who assisted with their claims on Nauru were Pashtuns, despite the great mistrust between the two ethnic groups. A 30-year-old Hazara, Ghulam, said that upon his return a warlord arrested him and he was jailed for three months. He was tortured and had a tooth punched out. He now lived in Pakistan, with no legal status. "We thought Australia was the humanitarian country," he said. "The truth is the absolute opposite."
Mohammed, 32, is a Hazara with four children who arrived on the Tampa. He was deported from Nauru in 2002 after Immigration officials told him he would be safe in Kabul and would be assisted in finding a job and a house. That did not happen, and Mohammed, who said he received death threats, fled to Pakistan, where he was jailed because he had no visa. He was freed and remains illegally in Pakistan, where his illiterate children cannot go to school.
Another Hazara, Mohammed, 30, lost his mother and six-year-old son while he was held on Nauru.
Mr Glendenning said the migration bill - expected to be discussed in the Coalition joint party room today -- would in effect excise the mainland from Australia's migration zone. "The concerns that were raised by Coalition backbenchers have been confirmed by what our experience in Afghanistan was. People were sent back and were killed, children have been killed, and the 'Pacific solution' on Nauru is flawed."
Last night, the Immigration Minister, Amanda Vanstone, said the centre had made similar claims before, but had refused to provide enough details to allow her office to investigate. Asked if she would investigate the cases of the two named people said to have died, she told the ABC's Lateline: "I'll have a think about that."
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FARMERS ENCOURAGED TO STAY -- HOWARD
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[SMH, October 17, 2006]
PM John Howard has quashed any suggestion that farmers could be paid to leave land rendered unproductive by climate change, saying fewer farmers would damage Australia's psyche.
The Prime Minister yesterday announced an extra $350 million to help farmers cover the costs of the drought and predicted the bill for an increasingly hot and dry climate is likely to grow as the Government considers further support for people on the land.
"It is part of the psyche of this country, it is part of the essence of Australia to have a rural community," Mr Howard said. "Not only would we lose massively from an economic point of view [but] we would lose something of our character. We would lose something of our identification as Australians if we ever allowed the number of farms in our nation to fall below a critical mass."
Despite the Government's largesse, farmers will not be protected from another interest rate rise, which banks intend to pass on in full despite offering some other minor concessions. However, the Australian Bankers Association said farming foreclosures were at historic lows. Rather, farmers were making their own plans to leave the land.
Professor Peter Cullen, a water ecologist, member of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists and a board member of the National Water Commission, said the increasingly generous support payments ignored a changing climate that was making some land unsuitable for farming.
"Some parts of our farming land have been marginal for a long time, and appear to be getting much more marginal," he said. "These drought stories have been on the front pages of our papers for a decade or so, and there are some places where I think we've just got to accept that we aren't able to farm and we need to help people off the land."
Instead of paying farmers to see them through the drought, it would be better to pay them to use the land less intensively and instead perform repair work such as tree planting and revegetating river banks.
"Drip-feeding money to maintain the status quo doesn't let agriculture readjust to the new realities of the climate that we're now seeing," Professor Cullen said. He declined to name areas that should no longer be farmed.
But Mr Howard said it was important "not to overdo the link" between the drought and climate change.
The new measures mean farmers can continue to receive exceptional circumstances payments and interest rate subsidies until the end of March 2008. There will no longer be any distinction between types of farmers who can receive payments.
Other changes will be considered, including relaxing conditions under which areas can be declared as drought-affected, and extending the duration of payments. But Mr Howard rejected a suggestion by the NSW Liberal senator Bill Heffernan that farmers be paid to move to high-rain areas in Australia's north.
The drought has slashed GrainCorp's earnings outlook, as the grain handler predicts a loss of $20 million to $30 million. The Government has paid $1.2 billion in special payments to 53,000 families since 2001.
The Opposition Leader, Kim Beazley, welcomed the increased help, but said the drought should force serious action on climate change. "We clearly have to take a stand on dealing with the issues of global warming," he said.
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Brigadier Maurie McNarn
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AUSTRALIA VETOED "ILLEGAL" BOMBINGS BY THE US IN IRAQ
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[The Australian, July 29, 2006]
Australia intervened to stop key US military strikes against Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, fearing they might constitute a war crime.
Major General Maurie McNarn, then a brigadier and commander of Australian forces in Iraq, on several occasions played a "red card" against the American plans, which included hits on individuals. His objections drew anger from some senior US military figures.
In one instance, Major General McNarn vetoed a US plan to drop a range of huge non-precision bombs on Baghdad, causing one angry US Air Force general to call the Australian a "pencil dick." However, US military command accepted Major General McNarn's objection and the US plans were scrapped.
The revelation of how Australia actively and successfully used its veto power in the 2003 invasion of Iraq is contained in a new book on the US-Australian alliance, “The Partnership,” by The Weekend Australian's foreign editor, Greg Sheridan.
The book reveals that Australia, as a member of the so-called coalition of the willing in Iraq, was given a power known as a "red card" that allowed Major General McNarn to veto US military actions, including individual targets and the types of weapons used. Australia's proactive use of the veto power -- on strategic, military and ethical grounds -- helped the Americans produce a more effective and ethical targeting policy during the war.
The book reveals that Major General McNarn -- now the head of the Defence Intelligence Organisation -- delivered a "great shock" to the US when he first used the red card and then put his objections to the proposed US military strike in writing.
"Shit," exclaimed one American when he saw the document. "What if this leaks?" Major General McNarn replied that if the US did not take the illegal action, it would not matter.
As coalition forces prepared plans to take Baghdad, Major General McNarn vetoed three of five proposed US Air Force weapon systems - mostly huge bombs - on the grounds that they were not accurate for a radius of less than 16m and, as a result, were unsuitable for use in a built-up area. On one occasion, Australia, along with fellow coalition partner Britain, successfully whittled down a list of proposed individuals the US considered legitimate targets.
The book also reveals that before the war, which started in March 2003, Australia made repeated efforts to get the US to focus on post-conflict planning in a more coherent way.
The lack of early US planning for the post-war phase in Iraq is seen to have contributed substantially to the violent disorder now being experienced there.
Australia also argued for the US to try to involve the UN as much as possible after the war. However, in a frank conversation with Foreign Minister Alexander Downer on April 1, 2003, US President George W.Bush said the US would get the blame for destroying Iraq and he did not want others coming to rebuild it.
"The UN can't manage a damn thing," Mr Bush told Mr Downer, recalling his visit to Kosovo, where the President found the UN personnel to be "a bunch of drunks."
The book also reveals that immediately after the fall of Baghdad, Mr Downer told Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, that the coalition should leave as soon as it could, while Iraq was in a decent state.
Since then, the Howard Government has argued it would be wrong to "cut and run" from Iraq and says Australian troops will remain there for as long as they are needed.
The book also reveals how close and frank the bilateral relationship became in the months leading up to and during the war in Iraq. It includes an account of a conversation between Mr Downer and Mr Bush in April 2003 in which the President likened North Korea's erratic leader, Kim Jong-il, to "a child who throws his food on the floor and expects all the adults to rush over and pick it up."
At the same meeting, Mr Bush warned Mr Downer that Australia was likely to suffer casualties on the ground in Iraq, but he expressed unqualified admiration for the "brave, skilled fighters" of Australia's elite SAS.
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PETER COSGROVE SAYS IRAQ WAR HAS BOOSTED GLOBAL TERRORISM
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[Sunday Telegraph, October 15, 2006]
Former Defence chief General Peter Cosgrove has apologised to Federal Police boss Mick Keelty and now admits that the Iraq war has boosted global terrorism.
Just days before the launch of his autobiography “My Story,” General Cosgrove told The Sunday Telegraph that his comments criticising Mr Keelty's view that the Iraq war had inspired terrorist attacks in Spain, were made just days after the event.
"At that time I just felt that call could not be made," he said. "Things have moved on. I have got no reason to argue the weighty assessments that I am seeing. If people say that there has been an energising of the jihadist movement through the protracted war in Iraq -- well that's pretty obvious."
General Cosgrove was accused of playing politics after senior government figures, such as Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, queried the Federal Police Commissioner's patriotism.
In his book General Cosgrove says he was right to make his remarks "at the time," but he describes Mr Keelty as an "outstanding Australian." He said he was offended by claims that he was "wheeled out" by the Government to support its position. "People making this claim did not appear to even contemplate the thought that I might have acted reluctantly and independently," he wrote.
General Cosgrove said he was not a politician and he flatly ruled out a political career although he did admire politicians on both sides.
"The very nature of politics is that it is a puzzle wrapped in an enigma ... deal-making, compromising. The military ethos conditions you totally the other way. To always seek to understand profoundly what your colleagues are doing, what they are saying, to mean what you say and to accept that they mean what they say, every time.
"In no area of politics, no level of politics ... is politics like that."
However his admiration for Prime Minister John Howard comes through loud and clear in “My Story,” Which is published by Harper Collins and will be launched by Mr Howard in Sydney this Friday.
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