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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 1 Hansard (19 February) . . Page.. 233 ..

Ms Tucker: You can't-

MR SPEAKER: Order, members! Mr Pratt has the floor.

MR PRATT: Are these people afraid to hear the truth? Mr Speaker, my motive for speaking and certainly for debunking the myths generated by those who purport to speak against war is that I am deeply concerned by two things. Firstly, I am deeply disturbed by the plight of Kurdish and other Iraqis who are recklessly neglected by the ignorant calling for no firm action against Iraq under any circumstances-an action which further condemns the Iraqis to suffocating and horrible oppression. Secondly, I am deeply disturbed by the frighteningly real potential for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to fall into terrorist hands. This is a soberingly realistic scenario which has an urgency about it. It is a realism which is recklessly ignored or naively not believed by those here who seek only the easy populous way, but who in fact may be committing this country to increased dangers.

Mr Speaker, to put this debate back onto a cold, clear realistic plane, I am going to speak a little more about my personal experiences in Iraq. I left behind in 1994 hundreds of Iraqi Kurds and Arab staff who were fearful of their future. I left behind grievously wounded colleagues, Kurdish and European, deliberately shot by Saddam's commandos and agents. Saddam's people regularly infiltrated the UN safe haven to continue with their program of murdering Iraqis and killing westerners, or at least disrupting our emergency humanitarian programs.

I have spoken before in this place about the tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurdish widows, Christian and Muslim, and their children to whom my organisation provided emergency relief. This was in the towns and mountain villages, from Dohuk, through Eebil to Sulamaniya. Because of the content of the motion that has been thrust upon us, it is necessary to speak about them again.

You might remember, Ms Tucker, that I have spoken about the "Anfal"of the early 1990s and the estimated minimum 100,000 men, aged 15 to 50, rounded up in the villages and towns and dragged off by Saddam's Republican Guard Division forces and secret police to be shot like dogs and then buried somewhere, it is thought, out in the windswept great western desert.

Look at the reputable facts instead of the propaganda and you will determine that the pattern of murderous oppression was repeated over and over with the Madans and other Shia Arabs in the south and Sunni Arabs in the central provinces. Look at the facts rather than the emotional anti-western political misinformation about Iraq and you must agree that these massive crimes against humanity place Saddam in the same league as Milosevic, Pol Pot and the Hutu extremists in recent times, and Hitler and Stalin in earlier times. The great tragedy is that this state-sponsored killing has continued for 12 years, perhaps at a reduced rate thanks to some international monitoring presence. But it is going on now as I speak and it will continue down through the years. It will continue if we let it.

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