Transcript of Proceedings: Andrew Vincent, Geoffrey Hawker, Q&A, Closing Statements

Opening statement:
Dr Andrew Vincent, Director, Centre for Middle East Studies, Macquarie University

As you know, we’re looking at terrorism, at the current war against terrorism.  Terrorism’s an enormously big subject.  My colleague Geoffrey Hawker is going to look more closely at Australia’s responses to terrorism and at the problems these responses are causing for our civil liberties and our freedoms.  As a Middle East specialist I thought I’d try to narrow my presentation down to look not so much at the big picture approach but I want to look at Islamic terrorism and especially at suicide bombing, because I think this is a particularly relevant topic in view of the current events in Iraq.  And indeed in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, suicide bombing has become one of the most frightening weapons in the arsenal of the terrorists and of the current war against terrorism.  So I’ll try and look at some of the antecedents of suicide bombing.  And then range more broadly around the topic in general to prepare the way for a more fruitful discussion.

The media like to suggest that suicide bombing is a uniquely Islamic phenomenon, with poor misguided patsies thinking they’re going to be propelled into an Islamic paradise peopled by 47 virgins, and other earthly delights.  But Islam, just like Judaism and Christianity, prohibits suicide.  So how does this gel?  I don’t accept this simplistic press view at all.  It’s not just Muslims who are suicide bombers.  In WW2 at the time my parents were married in this church, Japanese kamikaze pilots were suicide bombers, and they were neither Muslims nor patsies.  In fact they’re now seen as heroes.  Sri Lanka has seen Buddhist suicide bombers who killed up to 500 people, including Rajiv Gandhi.

So I think we need to look at other causes for this phenomenon.  It’s not uniquely Islamic, because suicide is prohibited by Islam, although Muslims do seem to figure quite largely among today’s suicide bombers.  So I think we’ve also got to look at grievances.  But even before we do that, I think it’s relevant to look at suicide bombing as a kind of phenomenon and to look at where it may have come from.  The Assassins in the Middle Ages were perhaps the first Islamic suicide bombers, a medieval Shiite sect who quite literally have given us the word assassin, and the successors of the Assassins still live quite peacefully in Syria, which is almost a member of the Axis of Evil these days.  

The Iranian revolution and more particularly the Iran-Iraq war that followed the Iranian revolution led to human wave-type Iranian attacks, to young boys used literally as mine detectors, wearing funeral shrouds and going out ahead of the troops to explode mines.  Shiite Islam - and Iranians are Shiites - has a particular propensity for martyrdom which perhaps we could explore a bit more in the discussion.  But this Iran-Iraq war, which was a hideous war, revived the WW1 images of human slaughter.  And what happened in Iraq has clearly inspired Sunni Muslims as well.  Iran is looming back into prominence right now in view of last Friday’s election of a new hardline president, and it too is seen by President Bush as a foundation member of the Axis of Evil.  

The Shiite community in Lebanon, assisted by the Revolutionary Guards from Iran, were the next cab off the rank when it comes to Islamic suicide bombing.  First began suicide attacks against the Israeli occupying forces following the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.  In fact the first attacks were against Israeli targets in the south.  I was in Lebanon at the time.  These were described as gas explosions.  But then it wasn’t long before Shiite suicide bombers began attacking American targets.  First of all the American embassy in April 1983, then October 1983 the Marine barracks, where in a  single attack, more Marines were killed in a single day than at any time since the battle of Iwo Jima.  Which led to the withdrawal of US forces from Lebanon.

And then in 2000, many years later, it finally led to the withdrawal of Israeli forces as well.

Afghanistan under the Soviet occupation in the 1980s saw suicide attacks as well against the Soviet occupiers, by Mujahideen forces who were ably assisted at the time by the United States, Pakistan and by men such as Osama bin Laden, who certainly believed that they and they alone defeated the mighty Soviet Union.  If we had Osama bin Laden here, as well as claiming the reward, I think he would say to us, “Look, we defeated communism, and now we want to defeat the US.”  And it shouldn’t come as a surprise to find that these Mujahideen had turned their tactics against the one remaining superpower. 

In Turkey, Kurds, under the PKK, have used suicide attacks against the Turks.  Sri Lanka  I’ve already mentioned with the suicide bombers of the Tamil Tigers, the assassination of an Indian prime minister in 1991.  Kashmir has seen suicide attacks against Indian forces in a rather one-sided struggle against Indian occupation.  And of course in Palestine we’ve seen the emergence of Hamas and Islamic Jihad attacking Israeli targets, perhaps another example of blowback because in the 1970s the Israeli authorities were fostering Islamic militancy in an attempt to deligitimise the rather secular PLO. 

Al Qaeda, which I’ve already referred to, emerged and made attacks in Saudi Arabia and East Africa, Yemen, and Al Qaeda’s campaign obviously culminated in the September 11 attacks against the US heartland. 

But it’s not only there.  In Chechnya there’s been a litany of suicide attacks on Russian targets, culminating in last year’s school massacre at Beslan.  In Indonesia we’ve seen the Bali bombing, the Marriott bombing, the Australian embassy bombing, and quite possibly there are more problems in store there.  And of course looming in the background is Iraq, with the steadily mounting death toll and the number of suicide attacks.

Like all terrorist attacks, suicide bombings are often undertaken with a bit of an eye to the audience - the video testimonies of candidates before they carry out their tasks.  The financial rewards that are often lavished on their families can be fairly heady stuff, and these suicide bombers are often described as martyrs.  Are they martyrs, are they murderers, or are they something else?  I tend to think that martyrdom is very much in the eye of the beholder, and I think this is something we should look at again in the discussion. 

Most of the suicide bombers today are invoking Islam, so I think that maybe we should look at this Islam that inspires them.  Then we need to look at their grievances, because I think the grievances of these people are the key to what they’re doing, not the theology.  

After the 1967 war and the defeat of the Arabs, this signalled the failure of secular Arab nationalism as represented by President Nasser of Egypt and led to a kind of anomie in the Arab world.  And this anomie has increasingly been replaced by a non-secular stream of consciousness rooted in Islam.  This emerged first in the 19^th century which for Islam represented a massive challenge.  Islam is a younger religion than Christianity and yet by the 19th century it was apparent that the West had superiority, militarily, technologically, economically, administratively, and Islam was inferior.  How could Muslims explain this loss of grace?  This has been the quintessential problem exercising Muslim minds for nearly 200 years. 

Islam has responded to this challenge in a whole variety of ways, not just in suicide bombing.  The 20th century has seen a revival of Islamic mysticism, it’s seen modernist attempts to reinterpret Islam and bring to more in line with secular rationalism. But it’s also seen the rise of a more literalist, fundamentalist interpretation of Islam.  That can be traced back to the 1920s and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.  Social scientists were rather slow in recognising this.  They lagged behind because for a long time they believed in the secularisation of societies, a bit like President Bush, that everyone wants freedom and democracy and a Californian lifestyle.  But I think a lot’s changed in the last 25 years.  Obviously the Iranian revolution was a clarion call, but the rise of Al Qaeda, the Sept 11 attacks.  There have been a lot of other indications as well.  The holding of US hostages in Tehran for over a year.  The assassination of President Sadat, the fierce resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda cut its teeth.  Syria itself witnessed a Muslim rebellion in 1982 which was ruthlessly suppressed.  The rise of Islamic militancy in Lebanon with Hamas and Hezbollah, the first suicide attacks, the Palestinian intifada, and culminating of course in September 11. 

These events all put Islam, Islamic attitudes, Islamic values and grievances back onto the international agenda.  But in most cases these suicide operations, these terrorist operations are much more specific, they’re tied to particular causes.

Who are today’s Muslim activists, Muslim suicide bombers, terrorists?  What kind of person is attracted to this kind of Islamic militancy and suicide bombing?  There have been a number of studies done.  By and large they’re urban rather than rural people.  They tend to be lower middle-class Muslims, often recent immigrants to the city from the countryside, who couldn’t aspire to secular Western lifestyles anyway.  But also young and semi-educated Muslims seem to be attracted to Islamic militancy.  It’s particularly powerful in some of the universities in the Middle East.  You find the staff academics are all old leftists dating back to the 60s who think that Nasser was the best thing since sliced bread, and a lot of their students are Islamic militants.  Suicide bombers include not just young men, but women.  And interestingly there have been Christian suicide bombers, particularly in Lebanon and Israel-Palestine. 

Islamic militancy has also developed a growing following among the large Islamic immigrant communities living in the West.  I think the reasons are fairly simple.  Many Muslims, and you find this here in Australia, feel marginalised, feel discriminated against, they occupy subordinate positions in society, and a human response to this marginalisation is to seek one’s roots and to become perhaps more militant than one would ever have been back in Iraq or Afghanistan.  Militancy has also gained followers among the Muslim student population in the West.  Students are often middle class, and some of them have become very militant indeed.  The attacks of Sept 11 were planned and executed by a group of students living in Hamburg.  I was visiting professor in Hamburg about 2 years ago.  In fact I spent an afternoon with the supervisor of Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the hijackers who flew the planes into the buildings.  The supervisor was a German, an urban planning person.  He showed me Atta’s thesis, his essays, some of the work he’d done.  And this was a very smart student, no no-hoper at all. 

But the greatest successes of this kind of Islamic militancy have been in the chaos-torn areas of the Middle East, where the movement can provide material aid to the families as well as a sort of military support, and where the suicide bombers are seen as martyrs, and also where there seems to be no other avenue of protest.  What happened in Afghanistan, then was repeated in Algeria, in Sudan, in Yemen, in the north Caucasus, in the Balkans, and is now happening in Iraq. 

To conclude I just want to talk about terrorism and the war against it.  Is terrorism particularly Islamic?  Obviously it’s not, but the present war against terrorism seems to me solely directed against Islamic militants.  We no longer hear about the IRA or ETA or the Japanese Red Army, they don’t figure in the war against terrorism.  It’s just Muslims or people with Arab names, Muslim names. 

How do you define terrorism?  The definition I use at university is “the use of force by non-state actors to achieve political ends.”  One of the big questions is, can states be terrorists?  I think the answer has to be no because one of the definitions of a state is that it has a monopoly on violence anyway.  Can states sponsor terrorism?  Yes they can and they’re often accused of doing so, but again the question of an agenda arises.   Were French people fighting against the German occupation of France in the 1940s terrorists or the French resistance?  The Germans thought they were, but we don’t.  I see them as the French Resistance.  What about Lebanese fighting against the Israeli occupation of south Lebanon?  Are they terrorists as the Israelis saw them or are they resistance?  

There are no real answers to questions like that, it just depends where our sympathies lie.  Back in the Reagan presidency, Reagan saw the Contras in Nicaragua as freedom fighters, the equivalent of the American founding fathers, whereas most of the rest of the world saw them as terrorists.  But one of the motivations behind this is obviously power.  And how else can non-state actors achieve power?  Terrorism does work.  We’re constantly told “we won’t negotiate with terrorists, we’ll have nothing to do with terrorists.”  There’s not much doubt that back in the 1960s, the PLO was a terrorist organisation and it put the question of Palestine on the international agenda.  People now talk about Palestine and the Palestinians.  If you look back at newspapers from the 50s, that word never appeared.  People talked about “the Arab refugees”.  Terrorism worked for them, and it’s worked for people like Israeli leaders. Yitzhak Shamir was a terrorist.  Menachim Begin was a terrorist, Jomo Kenyatta, Archbishop Makarios, they were all seen as terrorists, and they were elevated to head of state.  Nelson Mandela, you name it. 

One of the questions I often put to my students is why haven’t we seen terrorism among the Australian aborigines, clearly a marginalised group with significant grievances?  Or among the American Indians?  I think the answer to that is because these groups, although marginalised and discriminated against, have various mechanisms through which they can try and have their grievances redressed.  They can go to the courts, they can run for election.  But if the group is totally excluded from power, if there’s no way they can go to a high court, or go to international opinion – and the Palestinians are a case in point – then I think the only option is acts of violence.  I think it was Jean-Paul Sartre who many years ago defined terrorism as a cry for help.  But whether it’s a cry for help or not, it’s become THE issue of the 21^st century.  It’s a term of political abuse, there’s a whole academic industry devoted to the study of it.  And we’re at war with it.

I do think that suicide bombers have very specific aims.  They cloak their political acts in the rhetoric of Islam.  I also think these attacks are the weapon of the weak and the desperate, and they’re an indication of the human condition in a way, that people ultimately will not submit to the kind of oppression that many of these people feel they’re subject to.  And until we begin to address some of their grievances, and their grievances are well known, this phenomenon is going to continue, it’s going to escalate.  I think the US is going to be defeated in Iraq, and in Afghanistan, because the grievances are not being addressed.  I think in fact we can look forward to more suicide attacks because the war against terror is a war we can’t win, it’s like the war on poverty.  Ultimately we’re going to have to negotiate, maybe not with Osama bin Laden, who’s an international criminal, but we have to negotiate over some of the issues he’s raised.  And until we do, I think we’re going to see a steady erosion of our own liberties here in Australia, here in Mosman, as Dr Hawker is going to point out.

Are these suicide bombers martyrs or not?  Martyrdom like beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  If their communities, their families, their comrades see them as martyrs, well, martyrs is what they are.

Opening statement:
Dr Geoffrey Hawker, Politics & International Relations, Macquarie University

I’m going to follow on from some of Andrew’s remarks, differ with him on a couple of points, but specifically I want to bring the subject back home to Australian shores.  I think generally we do indeed risk losing the so-called war on terror, not on a foreign field, but we may lose it at home, because of the changes it is making to our society, and the things we are losing because of those changes.  I certainly don’t think that’s inevitable but I think the danger signs are there.

I’m going to address briefly three headings:  context, consequences, and perhaps even more mysteriously, confession.  So first of all, context.  And here I suggest the word to use is not terrorism.  I can’t help using it because it’s in such currency, but a better term I think is the term “political violence”.  Terrorism rather implies there’s something outside, nothing to do with us, mysterious, sinister, it may strike us in some way that we don’t know and don’t understand.  “Political violence” is perhaps more nebulous but it has the virtue of pointing to the political context of violence, and the fact that it has a cause and a consequence and some of the cause, I’m going to say, is us. 

I’m not going to do the glib cliché of one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter because I think that’s a little bit too morally relative.  And I don’t want to make light of the subject, to call it violence or terrorism, because the violent deaths we’ve seen particularly in our part of the world in recent years are not to be taken lightly.  I don’t just mean 9/11 and the relatively small number of Australians that were killed there, but also the events in Bali in particular nearly 3 years ago now, when so many died.  I think it’s impossible to make light of that.  One feels for those victims and their families, whatever the causes and consequences.  And I just want to put that on record because that does have to be said. 

But having said that, I want to make my first substantive point, that Australia is in many ways a violent society in its very nature.  It always has been and still is.  The most mundane of violence, but terrible for all of us, and I’ll try to show you the political connections of this, are simple car crashes and deaths.  Not just a random manner, I will argue and try to show.  There were 88 Australians died in Bali in October 02.  Last year 1760 people died in car crashes.  In America there were 1440 American nationals died on 9/11.  Last year 40 times that number died in car crashes.  It’s not very political, except it is, actually.  What about murders?  In Australia 350 people lost their lives to murder, that’s 4 times the number that died in the Bali bombing.  WHO records show that last year 4300 Americans died from malnutrition, that’s 3 times the number that died in the 9/11 attacks.

I could go on in this vein, but if I could just encapsulate it in a single well-known statistic that’s still our national shame, the life expectancy of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.  An average middle-aged male Aboriginal can survive to about the age of 58.  Those others of us like myself have nearly another 20 years, about 76 years currently of life expectancy.  We’re not equal in this society, and some of us are very much more likely to die in an untoward way than others.  Properly understood, we can see inequalities, unfairness and oppression in our society causing that.

That might be what we could call social terror.  I disagree with Andrew, I think there is such a thing as state terrorism.  But just to start off with, there’s certainly something called social terror.  It’s said that democracies don’t go to war against one another, and that’s the great invention of the postwar era, that era of unprecedented peace, where the democracies of the first world have learned happily to live together.  Well, that’s a very partial truth, isn’t it?  It’s first of all not true that the so-called democracies are at peace within themselves, and the statistics I’ve given are some measure of that.  But more important for our theme tonight, the so-called democracies are not at peace with the non-democracies.  Very far from it.  It seems to me that in our efforts to keep ourselves safe, we inflict some of the worst characteristics of our society on other societies, those that we call non-democratic, the lesser nations of the world.  I’m not going to talk about Iraq but it would be an obvious point to make.

I’m going to say a few words about Australia’s relationships in this region, how we’ve exported violence to the region, how we’ve supported unequal societies that have fallen to bits not least because we have helped to make it so.  We have a responsibility, and when it comes back to bite us I don’t think we should be surprised. 

Let’s just look at Indonesia and East Timor, and here I think state terrorism is a reasonable term to use.  Sure, we’re the bit players, aren’t we, and so often in Australia we say, what a small country this is, we’re not very big players in the world, we don’t influence events very much.  Don’t blame us, we’re too small.  Blame the big boys, blame Britain, blame America, blame those big European nations.  But of course that’s untrue, Australia is a substantial nation with a substantial economy and it carries a substantial responsibility in the world and we shouldn’t downgrade it.  That’s just a way of avoiding our responsibility.  Of course the Americans and Hiroshima and I could go on, but our state terrorism, let’s look at the case of Indonesia 40 years ago, the mid 60s, the takeover by Suharto and the military dictatorship that followed.  And the role of the Australian government of the day in those events, not unconnected with current relationships with Indonesia, not unconnected with the chauvinism that exists in Australia towards that near neighbour. 

Remember the Aust prime minister of the time, caught, recorded, as the events took place, the massacres took place, the PKI was exterminated and many other non-PKI members with it.  And I quote: “With 500,000 to a million communist sympathisers knocked off, I think it’s safe to assume a reorientation has taken place.”  That was our Australian government 40 years ago.  The officials don’t get off.  The Australian embassy in Jakarta at the time described the massacres as “a cleansing process”.  In Canberra, officials in the prime minister’s department expressed support for “any measures to assist the Indonesian army cope with the internal situation.”  What of the years since?  Australia supported that dictatorship as long as it possibly could, until it had no room to manoeuvre, in East Timor, and oh so reluctantly did what we might say was the right thing.  And in the years since, the economic interests of Australian companies in Indonesia, and I could  in Irian Jaya and other parts of this region, where our rich little country, or at least some sections of our rich little country, have done extremely well from our support for such regimes.  Australians, voters, they had nice houses, not far from here. 

So I call that something of the context because we as a nation have responsibilities for how we have behaved in our region.  And when we say we see degraded, broken-down states that have difficulty becoming democratic in the way we so easily express it, with our happy history – happy for some – then I think we have to see what we have done to make it so.  Because if we can’t see it, plenty of others can.  They see it very clearly indeed.  And they must be part of the reason for the assaults we have seen.  We are a target, but that’s in part because we’ve made ourselves that target.

So I come to consequences.  And here I rely on what the Australian govt itself says.  We’ve drifted into a situation of a war against terror in which our govt claims it’s protecting us.  It’s hoodwinking us, it’s pulling the wool over our eyes.  It’s seeking to brainwash us, is more closely the truth.  I rely on this for the document now nearly a year old, the Aust govt’s “Protecting Australia against terrorism.”  It’s the rationalised version of the fridge magnet.  This seeks to set out the Australian national counter-terrorism policy and arrangements, on a vast range of matters, infrastructure, transport, security, responses to terrorist incidents and the like.  I don’t have time to go through it, but I just want to give the flavour of how a new world is being constructed.  And for those of us, particularly the youth, the children being educated, who may not have a historical memory, not brought to their attention, it’s a worrying matter that this context is the world they’re growing up in, and it shapes their perceptions, and they may not be able to see the alternatives unless they try very hard.

So the very first sentence of the executive summary says “the primary responsibility of the Australian government is to protect Australia, its people and its interests.”  Fine words, but how limited that is.  To think that the primary responsibility of a government is that fearful statement that government is about protecting us from threats from outside.  And to assume incidentally that we are one people with common interests.  Far too easy an assumption.  And of course this whole document is framed on that premise, that the business of government has shrunk.  We might once have said education, welfare, but now we say “Save us from the bombers.” That’s the business of government.  And if a government can do that, we’ll forgive it anything.  It can get away with blue murder, in terms of slash, cut and burn all those other matters that we might have thought were the business of government.  And John Howard is showing what an effective tactic – I don’t believe it’s a strategy – that is.  They give us what feels good, a sense of safety, where we feel scared, and they want us to feel scared so that they can tell us they will make us safe, and no questions asked.

“We’ve seen much change since 9/11”, the document goes on in the 2^nd paragraph to boast that an additional 3.1 billion has been allocated in the last couple of budgets to strengthen our ability to protect us against the terrorist threat.  Now I know 3.1 billion’s not much.  It’s only about a month’s trade deficit, after all, as matters stand at the moment, but in another sense it’s quite a lot or money, and it’s had an impact immediately in strengthening what are called the agencies, ASIO, ASIS and the like.  The size of ASIO in particular, its staff between 01 and 05 has doubled in size to just under 1000 currently.  It’s also gone to “enhance” electronic surveillance.  Our electronic surveillance is running at 27 times the rate of the US currently.  Last year, in terms of population ratios, there were 2514 phone-taps officially in place.  That’s a tenfold increase over the decade, and a 16% increase over the last 12 months.  And I imagine, though we won’t know till later, that that figure is continuing to trend upwards.  That’s where some of the 3 billion dollars is going.

Now I just want to quote a few more words from this.  That’s the tenor of it, if you like.  The intellectual content, I just want to say a word about, and I’ll quote from further down the document.  “While poverty, social disadvantage and perceptions of injustice perpetrated by Israel, the US and its allies, may well be factors in the decision of some individuals to take up arms and links with Al Qaeda, such issues are not central to Al Qaeda’s belief system.”  And reading on to the next sentence.  What is it then?  All is silence.  There is no better answer given.  All we have is a gesture in order to dispose of it, that poverty, social disadvantage and perceptions of injustice could have something to do with it.  Oh no, they don’t actually, we’re told in this document, which quickly moves on.

The third point I’ll draw from this is that this rests upon something that’s meant to make us feel happy - our emphasis on national security, our indifference to analysing the causes of the situation we find ourselves in, because we happily have security in the form of what is said here to be our most critical bilateral relationship.  No surprise here, it is “with the US, the global leader in the fight against terrorism.  The US provides essential military, intelligence, law enforcement and economic resources in the fight against terrorism.  Our access to these resources…” makes us feel safe.  Not our own resources, not our own ability, not our own analysis, but our reliance on the global leader.  Of course one could turn that around and say the reason we’re not safe is precisely because of our reliance on the global leader. 

Just a side remark here, that the document does pay one tribute to internal Australian substance in talking about the government’s wish to “strengthen its partnerships with business in the protection of national critical infrastructure.”  One doesn’t necessarily have anything against business, but one can see a certain sop, a certain political incentive being held out there to conservative elements in our community, that if this whole business goes well, they will get fatter and richer with the government contracts that are entailed.  None of this is questioned in the document, there is no sense of independence, there is no sense of Australia as an independent nation needing to make its own arrangements, to win trust in the region, to build relationships.  And I have to say to undo much of our history, though of course there are good things in our history which do provide a foundation for growth and better relationships in our region.  The worry of all this is that it makes us fearful, it makes us a less open society, it makes us frightened of orthodoxy and difference.

I don’t actually think the Australian people are as foolish and ill-informed as this document assumes them to be.  The Lowy Institute’s recent survey showed that a mass of Australians were highly critical and suspicious of US leadership, no surprise to us I’m sure, but it’s interesting that it is widespread in Australian society.  I’m not sure that the relatively high levels of confidence shown in Chinese political leadership in that same survey would survive events of recent weeks, but it doesn’t detract from what was found about Australians’ scepticism to current American leadership, which suggests that something can be built on that and there are alternative ways to go.

But just to make the point about the negative consequences for our society of handling of refugees, but also the extension of the refugee category to include those like Cornelia Rau and Vivienne Solon who are not indeed refugees at all but who are caught up in that method of handling individuals, and the surveillance I previously referred to, must cause concern to those of us normal law-abiding citizens who can be swept up in this also.  There’s also the possibility of the incitement of racial hatred, particularly affecting Muslims, and there I think there is evidence for optimism, that Australians are not so easily brought into xenophobia, despite our history, and I think we have won a certain maturity, and there’s not as much of that evident as might have been expected.

The problem is that this is all playing reasonably politically well for the Liberal-National coalition.  It has won a series of elections by playing on these themes, by emphasising dependence, by emphasising our insecurity, by refusing to acknowledge the strengths and independence that’s possible in Australian society, and it has been able to win elections.  And it’s a bad and sad thing for me to have to say, but it is true currently in the other mainstream alternative government we have almost no alternative in terms of these policies.  And that’s an extremely serious situation.

I turn now to the confession.  At Macquarie University, and that involves Andrew and myself and a number of other people, we’re actively involved in devising an educational program, a residential program of education for none other than the spooks and spies that I’ve briefly alluded to.  We have a 12 week program where our aim is to educate the officials in the Australian security, police and military agencies about the history of political violence, the different currents in it.  And we hope we can give a broader and a critical perspective.  Now that might seem a rather forlorn hope, a bit like supping with the Devil and we’d better have a long spoon.  But I must admit that I find myself surprised to find myself to be in this situation, doing such work.  A generation ago I, like other people in this room, were jostled by the police and ASIO and we still are sometimes at demonstrations and mass mobilisations, and now we find ourselves almost in the position of teaching their descendants about the theorists of violence and some of the alternatives to it.  I suppose I’m admitting a bit of ambivalence there, but it does seem to me that it’s very important for educational institutions to, with caution, have an engagement with the Australian organisations of intelligence and security.  We don’t want them out there doing their own thing without links to the rest of us, it contains dangers and problems for us both. 

I do think that in a better world and a better Australia, where we were independent of the US, where we were our own nation, it would of course still be true that we would have a police and military services, and there are legitimate reasons for defending ourselves under certain circumstances.  And I think it’s important for universities in particular to try and contribute to that better way of doing matters.  And I could take slight heart from one Brigadier Kelly, reported in the newspaper a few weeks ago – he’s a serving officer – who declared in a speech which I’m sure he never thought would be reported, that the Iraq war and the war on terrorism is all about politics and “terrorism is merely a tactic.”  He suggested that the proposition that you can bomb someone into thinking as we do has been found to be untrue.  He denied many comments made by the prime minister and he called for a different approach.  It wasn’t entirely clear what different approach he was talking about, but he seemed to be saying that it’s necessary to understand the terrorist, what motivates them, where they come from, and to deal with the matter politically and socially rather than by the bomb or the bullet.  And that gives me some heart that as we go about our new centre, that maybe Brigadier Kelly is not alone, there may be others like him.

I might conclude by extending from just the military to the rest of the public service.  Although I haven’t said it, this document was drafted by the meek public servants of today, oh so obediently following their masters, and we expect public servants to do that.  We also expect them to give frank and fearless advice, or at least we used to.  And there’s a real issue there about giving our public servants the spine and the intellectual capital to give different answers and options to the govt of the day.  And the history of what’s happened in Britain, here and in America, the way in which the public service bureaucracy has been prepared to go along, to gloss the truth, let’s face it, to tell outright lies, knowing they’re lies, is the most worrying aspect perhaps. 

That’s a deep corruption in our society and it’s one that takes place away from the gaze of most of us.  We see the political figures, we don’t see the brow-beaten advisers beneath.  I’ll quote Anthony Samson talking about England, but I think it applies here.  That the domination of the marketplace over government means that public servants have been keeping their heads below the parapet, while the values of public interest and public service have been eroded.  That’s a crucial issue we have to deal with, and all of us in our own ways, particularly those of us in teaching roles need to push that as much as we can.

So in conclusion, I’m saying that political violence has been given a particular spin by our government, it doesn’t acknowledge our own histories and our responsibilities.  It seals us off from that, it makes us dependent upon a so-called mighty power.  The fruit is ripest when it’s about to fall, and one doesn’t imagine the American empire continuing to behave as it is behaving can long survive.  The future holds the answer to that.  All we know is that in Australia we need to find our own course.  This is a country that could be independent, that should be independent.  And in order to do that we need to reform our society from within.  It needs to be a fair, egalitarian society where road deaths, suicides and malnutrition are not things that hit the lower socio-economic orders and where the rest of us are relatively safe from those things and feel quite okay about supporting an imperial power in its attempts to extend what it calls democracy to what it calls the broken states of the world.  Our task begins at home.  It begins with making this a democratic, multicultural society that has nothing to fear from our neighbours in the region and has an honest, good basis for dealing with them.  If we can do that, I think we’ll see the so-called war on terror for what it is, an attempt to hoodwink us, blind us, keep us in subjection and make us less than the citizens we should be.  Thanks.

Questions, comments and answers

To come

Closing statements

To come

© NSPD 2005. Last modified 4/7/05.