Accountability

Sam Watson

We had a very tragic event in the Brisbane Aboriginal community last Saturday [March 11] and a lot of us didn’t feel like coming here today. But because of what the families of Iraq go through each and every day we felt that we should be here, in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Iraq.

The world’s mass media regularly publish information on allied troops’ losses: the number of US soldiers dead; the number of British soldiers dead; etcetera. But there is never any mention of civilian deaths in Iraq, the ordinary Iraqi people: mums, dads, little children. Each and every day they are being murdered on the streets of their own land by US military hardware.

The political leaders — Bush, Blair, Howard — are not being held accountable for those terrible murders. We, the ordinary people, must start to hold these political leaders accountable.

We have to take back control of our political agenda. We have to stay committed to the global war against terror — and the three most dangerous, most violent terrorists on the globe today are George W. Bush, Anthony Blair and John Winston Howard.

Since John Howard has been in parliament [as PM], he has totally dominated the political processes and controlled the politics of language. When he was first elected, he mounted an all-out assault on the Aboriginal people of Australia. The pet phrase he used was “accountability”.

We saw this hijacking of language again in 2001 with the so-called “Tampa election”. Howard went into the 2001 election with the argument that “we” would make the decision about who would come onto Australian soil, and under what circumstances.

In recent days, when the Australian government announced that more Australian troops are going to be sent to Iraq, it has become “we must stay there until the job is done”. To this very day neither Howard nor his ministers have defined what exactly that job is.

We do know that the Iraqi people don’t want those troops on their soil. Iraq is a sovereign nation. They deserve the right to shape and determine their own destiny, without Australian soldiers, without US soldiers, without British soldiers.

Each and every day the people of Iraq awaken to the sound of US military machines moving through their neighbourhood. And US troops have made no secret about their tactics. As soon as they are under fire they just cut loose. They don’t care who they hit, what lives they snuff out with their massive weaponry. They just shoot, shoot, shoot.

The average US solider on the streets of Iraq is not there to serve Bush’s political agenda, regardless of what Bush thinks. The average US soldier comes back home and says that their greatest horror is just surviving over there. They have no sympathy for the political leadership that has been placed in Iraq.

Australian soldiers are there to supply security. Again, they have no clear idea of why they’re there or what their true role is.

Three years and we still have not been given any preview of an exit strategy. We do know that Iraqi people need foreign troops off their soil. We do know that foreign troops want to come out of there. We have a right to be told when Australian troops are going to be withdrawn from Iraq.

We, the Australian people, respect the right of the people of Iraq to determine their own destiny, to make their own decisions. And the most significant contribution we can make towards acknowledging that right is to go to our federal member’s office each and every week, stand in front of that member and demand answers: When are Australian troops going to be withdrawn from Iraq? When are the Iraqi people going to be given the freedom and the right to make their own decisions?

That’s the challenge before us. We don’t want to come back here next year with troops still in Iraq committing crimes against humanity. This war, this occupation must stop and it must stop now.

[Sam Watson is an Indigenous activist and a member of the Socialist Alliance national executive. This is abridged from his speech to the March 18 “Troops out of Iraq” rally in Brisbane.]

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