Page 2474 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 6 August 1991
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I believe that our community is acting, to a certain extent, overly cautiously in relation to those matters. I have been corresponding with the Foreign Minister, Senator Gareth Evans, asking him to get Australia and the new world more actively involved in having an international peacekeeping force put together in the same manner in which our country has supported those moves in the Sinai, Kashmir, Cyprus and other places.
I believe that the Assembly should, in proper order and to a proper extent, let that important element of the ACT community know how desirous we are of seeing that conflict resolved, that the combatants be separated and that there be no short-term attempts to gain territorial advantage whilst the European Community wanders and wavers in its attempts to find a peacekeeping role. My view is that the European Community will not solve this matter and it is up to the new world to come in and support those people in what is surely going to become a most bitter and bloody struggle.
Yugoslav Community
MRS GRASSBY (9.54): I rise to congratulate the members of the Yugoslav community who live in Canberra - which consists of many groups from Croatians to Slovenians - on the fact that they, who must be suffering very much over what is happening in their country today, have tried to keep the community here very much together. I congratulate this community on what they have done, because it must be painful for them and their families. This morning we heard a gentleman who had to watch a news broadcast to find that his brother had been killed. Otherwise he would not have known. He does not know where his father is, and he is very worried about how his whole family has been spread all over the place through this war. It must be very hard for these people.
I think we, as a community, should be helping them, maybe by prayers. This is the way I have been asked to help, and I will do so. And we must also accept the pain that they will be going through. But, as a wonderful community, as one of our large group of ethnic communities in this city, they want to see the end of this, as painlessly as can be, and not see their country and their people ripped apart. My heart goes out to them, and I fully support them in the pain they are going through at the moment.
Question resolved in the affirmative.
Assembly adjourned at 9.56 pm
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