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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 12 Hansard (13 November) . . Page.. 3560 ..

MR PRATT (continuing):

a dangerous, intractable issue, endangering the peace and wellbeing of the world-including my country-I have no choice but to rise to speak against it.

Hopefully there will be no war. As an old soldier, I know the consequences of that. I do not like to see people going to war. Nobody wants a war, but war is the last instrument of foreign and international political policy, if it is needed-it is a legitimate instrument of policy. History is replete with examples of where it has been justified for the United Nations, individual nations or alliances, to go to war.

Whilst we in the developed world may aspire to-often naively-and pursue a wide range of peaceful initiatives, there are those in this world who have no respect for, and could not give a toss about, the sanctity of life or the sanctity of peace-loving nations which simply want to get on with life. That includes terrorists and terrorist regimes.

In the past decade, Milosovic fitted that frame, and so has Saddam Hussein. They are perhaps two of the largest monsters the world has seen in the past 20 years. Seventeen times, over about 11 years, Saddam Hussein has ignored UN resolution 687. After running an incredibly debilitating war against Iran which wrecked his country, which he started, and then undertaking some of the world's worst crimes against humanity in his own country, he invaded a peaceful sovereign state-Kuwait.

Ironically, Kuwait was then one of the Middle East's most flourishing democracies. Saddam simply could not tolerate its existence on his doorstep, in terms of the domestic political threat to his own country. Saddam Hussein's obligations under resolution 687 have required, since the end of the Gulf war, that he disarm. That is an obligation. He lost a war-a war he started. Over 11 years, he has played cat and mouse on this issue with the United Nations and the international community.

Mr Deputy Speaker, whatever we may think of the United States and its foreign policy-I am critical of their sometimes less than subtle foreign policy-we must respect the fact that, against the background of Saddam Hussein's intransigence, the United States has taken action.

I want to speak a little of my own experience in Iraq. In 1994, I spent 15 months in Iraq-mainly northern Iraq. I can tell you about some of the human rights abuses and the state of the place under Saddam's tutelage.

Let me talk about Anfal. Anfal is an Arabic term for an incredibly vast array of human rights abusers. In a program undertaken in 1989-91, 100,000 Kurdish men from the north were removed from their families. They were taken away, never to be seen again. Nobody-at least when I last checked-had found out where those poor men had gone.

In the 15 months I was in northern Iraq, I was responsible for delivering a number of humanitarian emergency programs to the widows of those people. We had a number of programs in support of about a million displaced Kurdish people. One of the major programs we ran was for the 40,000-odd widows, many with children, living in the mountains of Iraq, along the Iranian border, who had been left by their menfolk. It was a program we struggled with, to try to bring some measure of domestic and homeland security to those people.

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