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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 1 Hansard (19 February) . . Page.. 234 ..

MR PRATT (continuing):

I want to refer to a newspaper article about two very recent UN reports which starkly illustrate the magnitude of this disaster. The article points out that the former UN rapporteur for human rights and Iraq, Max Van der Stoel, found that Saddam Hussein's regime was "of an exceptionally grave character-so grave that it has few parallels in the years that have passed since World War II". The article went on to say:

Iraq is dominated by an apparatus of terror that has touched most families. US specialist Ken Pollack estimates that 1.3 million people serve in the security, police and military with another 2-4 million being informants out of a population of 23 million.

The article also stated:

In April 2002, the UN Commission on Human Rights condemned "an all-pervasive repression and oppression sustained by broad-based discrimination and terror; summary and arbitrary executions including political killings and the continued so-called clean-out of prisons, the use of rape as a political tool, as well as enforced or involuntary disappearances, routinely practised arbitrary arrests and detention; widespread systematic torture and the maintaining of decrees prescribing cruel and inhuman punishment".

That is not a right-wing or a left-wing think tank report. It is a UN report. How much more evidence do people need that the Saddam disaster is just about the most pressing problem in the world right now? How can you not see that? How can you continue to give sustenance to Saddam Hussein?

Mr Speaker, I challenge anybody in this place to argue that what I have just said about the severe oppression of Iraq's people is wrong in terms of the history, the magnitude of the killing and oppression, and the fact that it is continuing and will continue. Challenge me. Challenge me that I am wrong. Prove that what I saw with my own eyes and what my Iraqi colleagues and friends here and abroad continue to tell me is wrong.

Mr Speaker, it is natural and entirely acceptable for Australians to call for peace and to march against war. While I believe they are wrong in fact, I support them in spirit and do not seek to criticise them. We need that balance in society and it is something that hardened realists should acknowledge. This sentiment applies to some of the speakers in this place who reflect that dynamic.

Mr Speaker, I would like to address my next comments to the naive and irresponsible pacifists-some of them political hardliners-in our community and in this place, with respect to their desire to allow the status quo in Iraq to continue; their desire to see the political exercise of "containment"going on ad infinitum and, indeed, even to call for an end to sanctions. To them I say: look my Kurdish and Iraqi Arab friends fully in the face, then justify why you see fit to condemn these poor people to more years of so-called "containment"-that energy-sapping exercise which is in fact mindless appeasement. When you talk eloquently and loudly about wanting to save Iraqis from war, you are in fact locking them back into murderous oppression and the starvation of a collapsed economy.

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