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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 12 Hansard (13 November) . . Page.. 3561 ..

MR PRATT (continuing):

This behaviour by Saddam was repeated in the south-east marshland areas, in the Arabic Shiite Muslim country, with the removal and disappearance of menfolk of fighting age. These are events matched only by Milosevic a couple of years later in the Balkans.

In my work in northern Iraq, in winter, I often delivered heating fuel and medicines to a village called Halabja-about 10 kilometres inside the Iranian border. Some four years prior, Halabja had been the target of weapons of mass destruction attacks by Saddam's troops. A minimum of 7,000 civilians were killed in those attacks.

When I was wandering through that place, the waterholes, creeks and foliage in the area were still carrying the scars of chemical attacks. The people of Halabja told me how, after those assaults, Iraqi troops turned up wearing their nuclear biological chemical defence war suits, so they could inspect the village to measure the results of that wonderful attack. By the way, many of those weapons carried Soviet markings. So clearly there had been a relationship between Soviet and Iraqi forces in carrying out experiments of these weapons.

This is the sort of man we are talking about-a man who has no value for human life and could not give a toss about his own society. Let us look at his actions during the sanctions. Indeed, he was quite happy not to alleviate the pressure on his own society with the sanctions that had been imposed. It happened to suit him to allow his own people to die. He used those deaths and the suffering of children in hospitals throughout the whole of Iraq to score international political points.

Saddam could have negotiated with the United Nations to have had portions of those sanctions lifted, to allow more of his oil to be sold for the production and delivery of medicines and food to those people. However, he deliberately chose not to do that, because it suited his political purposes for the survival of his regime. That is all that matters to animals such as the Milosevics and the Saddam Husseins-the survival of their regimes. They do not give a toss about their own people. It is against that background that we have to ask serious questions. Where does the world go from here in relation to this guy?

In 1994, an Australian colleague of mine was killed in northern Iraq. He was ambushed by a group of people known as Josh Kurds-Kurdish people bought and sold by Saddam Hussein. In those 15 months, four of my Kurdish staff were killed and eight more were ambushed. In that time, five foreigners from other international NGOs were also killed in ambush by Josh Kurds and Iraqi commandos who had crossed over the line of control into the UN safe haven.

Three of our trucks were blown up at Aski Kalash-the frontier line crossing the border. There the Iraqis would allow the Turkish truck convoys to pass through the frontier into the UN safe haven-but three of those were blown up by limpit mines placed on the bottom of the trucks. All of this was pressure by Saddam-continually applied and held on the UN international community, operating in north Iraq in protection of the Kurdish people.

Fundamentally, Iraqis are very good people. They are some of the warmest people I have worked with and met in my travels though Baghdad and in the south-east marshland areas. They can do nothing to change their regime-the regime is all-pervasive. There

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