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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 4 Hansard (1 April) . . Page.. 1162 ..
MR STANHOPE (continuing):
Under the glow of a single kerosene lamp, three rough-hewn wooden caskets containing the bodies of the male children of the al-Hamdani family, aged 20, 18 and 12, lay on the floor.
Neighbours said they were killed when a bomb or missile struck a crowded, open-air market about 15 metres away from their home.
The article ends with the following:
Dr Ahmed Sufian, a resident at al-Noor Hospital, said he had been treating "severe"injuries, describing a 1-year-old girl who suffered open intestinal wounds in the blast. "I'm a doctor and I can't understand this. They come to free us? This is freedom?"
No-this is not freedom-it is not the freedom that our forefathers, who went to fight the war to end all wars last century, sought to defend and maintain. This is not a war that will be judged kindly by history.
In the words of Mahatma Gandhi:
What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?
Through the media we are also confronted with the chilling words of our allies, proudly claiming to have killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Iraqi soldiers, who are described as the enemy. We must remember, however, that our enemies in this war are almost all young men-much younger than those of us here-who are most likely impoverished, undernourished and uneducated.
Did they too choose war over peace, or is it just possible that they were conscripted into this conflict-called like all our soldiers to defend someone else's vision of freedom, justice or what is right? Are they, in obeying the laws of their country and their military superiors, justifiably slaughtered? Are these thousands of young Iraqi conscripts not also innocent? By what right do we define them as the enemy and seek them out and kill them with the overwhelming superiority of our arms and technology? They are not Australia's enemy. They are not my enemy.
As Bob Ellis said in today's Canberra Times:
We're in a war where no-one bad gets killed, because our targeted smart bombs miss the innocent. We only kill the chambermaids and cooks and butlers and gardeners of Saddam's palaces, the office cleaners and late-working bureaucrats and typists of his ministries, the cameramen and boom-swingers and make-up girls of his television studios. Bad people like that. And, in their hundreds, teenage conscripts defending bombarded cities in the south.
This conflict has introduced into our thinking and our lexicon a hierarchy of human life. All humans have certain inalienable rights-it is just that the right to life of some is more valuable than that of anyone we call our enemy.
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