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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Tuesday, 2 March 2004) . . Page.. 459 ..

comment of the President of the United Nations Association of Australia on this hilarious turn of events? “It is a case the UN will take seriously,” she said. Of course, she must have been speaking tongue in cheek because any normal person would have seen it for the joke that it is.

Another aspect of this requires comment. In a press release on this matter the Chief Minister made a link between this proposed bill and the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. I could not believe I saw that. Let me take a moment to comment on the matter of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay because I think the agitation on their behalf is misguided. Take David Hicks, who many, without any reference to facts, or with deliberate avoidance of facts, claim to be an innocent misguided lad who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yet his father, who was sponsored by the ABC to retrace the steps of his son’s odyssey in search of himself, confirmed in a radio interview from the cage that he had set up in New York after that trip that his son had trained with al Qaeda. I heard the interview myself. So, if we are to keep the debate honest, the quibbling over whether Hicks had a link with al Qaeda should stop now. Al Qaeda is not a boy scout jamboree. It’s members are in a direct line of descent from the assassin sect of Islam whose terrorism seethed through the Middle East during the 12th and 13th centuries. Surely we are not so naive that we are incapable of recognising the true evil of that and the obvious unacceptability of such a relationship to the fundamental values of this community that the Chief Minister says is a human rights backwater.

What about Mamdouh Habib? Remember what a different angry man he had been in his business dealings, in his fanaticism that alienated acquaintances to the point where the members of his mosque community distanced themselves from him. Then he went away. His wife, Maha, later took up the story with the press. She told how he said there were too many infidels in this country and that he was going to Pakistan to find an Islamic school for his children to attend in a pure Islamic environment away from the infidels. He was gone a long time; his wife had no news. She worried and wrote to the Pakistani government to seek approval to migrate to that country because she said there were too many infidels in Australia. She received no answer from the Pakistani government. She set in train through DFAT a search for her husband. DFAT eventually learnt that Pakistan authorities had nabbed Habib when he was crossing the border from Afghanistan into Pakistan and handed him over to Egypt because he is an Egyptian citizen. DFAT tried for quite some time to get information about him from the Egyptian government without much luck, learning finally that he had been returned from Egypt back into custody in Pakistan and then handed over by the Pakistanis to the US authorities.

Interesting little story, isn’t it? Arrested by Pakistan authorities and no doubt questioned, sent to his country of citizenship, Egypt, whose authorities apparently wanted nothing to do with him after holding him there for some considerable time and no doubt asking him a lot of questions. Finally he was returned to Pakistan for handing over to the US for further interrogation. According to his dedicated supporters, who do not possess a shred of evidence, this is all because of some simple misunderstanding. Maybe that is so. But obviously Pakistan and his home country of Egypt don’t think so. The truth will emerge in time through prolonged questioning, which will basically depend on how co-operative this fanatical hater chooses to be. At this stage I for one agree with the governments of both countries whose citizenship he holds and I’m not ready to look on him as a victim without evidence to that effect.

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