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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 4 Hansard (1 April) . . Page.. 1176 ..

MR PRATT (continuing):

very explicit and very tidy in recording all of their events; and film which, of course, has been stolen and smuggled out of the country-of the foul work that they did in Halabja. (Extension of time granted.)

Also, Mr Speaker, I remind the House of the program called Anfal which, in 1988 and 1989, involved the removal by Saddam Hussein of 100,000 men aged between 15 and 50 from the Kurdish areas. They were taken away to be executed, leaving behind a minimum of 30,000 widows and their families. These are the reasons that this country and others decided to end the prevarication-the 12 years of no action and the ongoing death rates-and to therefore intervene and try and sort out this mess.

Mr Speaker, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other respected human rights organisations have chronicled that between 2,000 and 4,000 Iraqis have died every month since the first Gulf War. On a given month, anywhere between 30 per cent and 60 per cent of that number died from summary execution. The remainder died from medical and food neglect because Saddam Hussein did not distribute commodities under the food for oil program to the families which needed them. Those products, of course, went to the Republican Guard divisions and to the Ba'ath Party and the families of its members.

Mr Speaker, I call upon us all to be less emotional about what is happening. It is understandable that we be emotional about war, but I ask that we look at the facts. Remember this: while elements of the Labor Party have no compunction about attacking the United States-led intervention of Iraq without UN backing, they certainly were supportive of a US-led intervention into Kosovo in 1999-a US intervention which did not have UN backing. It seems to me that the aims of the coalition in 1999 and the aims of the coalition in 2003 are exactly the same.

The Chief Minister consistently attacked the United States in his speech today. But he fails to acknowledge that the United States, and the United States alone, pressured the Iraqi regime to allow UNSCOM inspectors back into Iraq six months ago.

The Chief Minister also talks of the sad and regrettable TV footage of Iraqi civilian casualties and deaths. This is unacceptable and it is sad, and we have talked about this before. It is fair enough that the Chief Minister should be raising that issue; it is a very important issue to raise. But, on balance, he has failed to talk of the kilometres of stolen Iraqi government documentary footage demonstrating the deaths of Kurds in Halabja, the summary executions of menfolk of Shi'ite populations in the south, and particularly the graphic footage of the executions of Shi'ite Arabs in Basra after the 1991 failure by the West to support those people. We see in that footage men being dragged like dogs across the sand, to be shot through the back of the head and thrown into mass graves. We see demonstrations of Republican Guard officers enjoying themselves and treating these people like cattle. The Chief Minister has failed to raise those issues.

Mr Speaker, the Chief Minister has failed to talk about the pictures of the Saddam's Fedayeen fighters in the last seven days strafing with machine gun and artillery fire civilians fleeing Basra-fleeing to try and get the assistance and protection that the Fedayeen and the Ba'ath Party do not provide in the city of Basra. He fails to talk about the pictures of British troops who have put themselves in harm's way by stepping forward and intervening between thousands of fleeing civilians and these mongrel, cowardly Fedayeen fighters sitting on the edge of Basra, shooting away at columns of

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