Aggrieved Chileans and Australian community members have attended several rallies outside NSW Parliament calling for Peter Phelps to be discipline and demanding a public apology to aggrieved Latin Americans. The rallies follow on Upper House Whip Peter Phelps’ praise of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet on September 11.

Rodrigo Acuna, PHD candidate from the Faculty of Arts, Department of International Studies, Macquarie University, who addressed the rally on 23.10.13, said: “The comments by Dr Peter Phelps in parliament are repulsive and deeply regrettable considering the harsh past experiences that the Chilean community endured under the dictatorship”

“NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell must discipline Dr Phelps as the communities has been deeply offended by his insensitive remarks. Phelps must be dismissed him from his office of Coalition Whip”.

On September 11, the 40th anniversary of the coup, Dr Phelps told that NSW Upper House that General Pinochet was a “reluctant hero, a morally courageous man”, that we as society “have to accept that sometimes it is necessary to do bad things to prevent terrible things from happening.

Elizabeth Rivera, one of the organisers, said: “Dr Phelps has lied about Allende and he has justified the violent destruction of a democratically elected government. I wonder whether this is legal; can an Australian parliamentarian support violent intervention in foreign countries?” MPs Lynda Voltz, Faruqi Mehreen, John Kaye and Paul Lynch also attended the rally on 23.10.13. Mothers of Chileans who were assassinated during the Pinochet dictatorship and women and men who survived torture were also present.

Paula Sanchez, organiser, said: “We’ll continue rallying here to denounce Mr Phelps’ actions. Australian academics have denounced Phelps as his comments support state terrorism and set a dangerous precedent in Australian democracy. Premier O’Farrell has said that Mr Phelps’ comments don’t represent the view of his government; the Premier must be so embarrassed that he is avoiding meeting with us”

Patricia Saavedra, wife of a Chilean man who is still disappeared, will be attending the rally on Thursday 31.10.13 at 10 am. She will be accompanied by representatives from Latin American and Australian community organisations. They will be handing out a letter to the Australian community denouncing Phelps’ actions. Patricia Saavedra says: “This is an issue that affects the entire community; it is not a problem of the right or left, of Liberals or Labor. No-one can excuse state terrorism and the violation of human rights, even less so a parliamentary representative”.

Contact: Elizabeth Rivera 0402608265, Paula Sanchez 0402709028, Mr Rodrigo Acuña 0450237099.

Background

The “40 years is nothing: History and memory of the 1973 coups d’état in Uruguay and Chile” Seminar, held at the University of New South Wales on Friday 4th October 2013 resolved that:

Considering that: a. On the 11 of September 2013 Dr Peter Phelps, member of the NSW Parliament, made a statement in the State Upper House to the effect that the bloody dictator General Pinochet was a “reluctant hero, a morally courageous man”, that we as society “have to accept that sometimes it is necessary to do bad things to prevent terrible things from happening”, thus unequivocally supporting the use of brutal repression of Chilean people by the Pinochet regime in Chile, b. State terrorism in Chile included systematic arbitrary detentions, torture, rape and murder against the civilian population to govern them using fear and brutal force, c. This and subsequent statements of Dr Phelps defending Pinochet have caused substantial hurt to the Chilean community in New South Wales, including those who suffered at the hands of the Pinochet regime, d. The statements of Dr Phelps have also caused substantial hurt to other Latin-American communities which have suffered under military regimes and dictatorships, such as that by General Pinochet, e. Dr Phelps’ statements have further caused offence to all citizens of New South Wales who are committed to human rights and the rule of law, f. Mr Phelps in his response to many letters, e-mails, articles and twits demanding an apology has continued to justify state terrorism and the use of violence against those who do not share his views, g. Dr Phelps has provided a distorted account of Chilean history to justify the brutal removal of democratically elected President Salvador Allende by calling Allende a communist and asserting the Chilean Congress had a majority to remove Dr Salvador Allende from his position as President when the Chilean constitution did not permit Congress to do so, h. This distortion of history and glorification of terror sets a dangerous precedent in Australian democracy and desensitise our civic society to the tragedy of state terrorism,

The organisers of this seminar, academics from various universities in Australia and overseas, MP from Victoria and other persons attending this conference:

1. Condemn any and all violations of human rights by both contemporary and past repressive regimes in Chile, Latin-American and anywhere else in the world,

2. Condemn Dr Phelps’ justification for state terrorism or the overthrow of democratically elected governments

3. Condemn Dr Phelps’ attempt to legitimise the use of arbitrary detention without independent judicial review, systematic torture and rape, and summary executions without trial, regardless of the context in which same may take place, and

4. Call on the Premier of NSW, Mr O’Farrell, to forthwith:

(i) Discipline Dr Phelps for his remarks,

(ii) Require him to unreservedly apologise to the Chilean and Australian community and unreservedly withdraw his comments, and

(iii) Remove Dr Phelps from the position of Whip of the Liberal Party in State Parliament as Dr Phelps is not a fit and proper person to hold that role.

Signatories:

• The Honourable Telmo Languiller MP, Member for Derrimut, Melbourne, Victoria,
• Dr. James R Levy, Senior Lecturer, School of Humanities and Languages, UNSW; Honorary President of the Chile   Solidarity Committee during the Pinochet dictatorship years,
• Dr Peter Ross, Senior Lecturer, School of Humanities and Languages, UNSW,
• Dr. Pablo Leighton, Macquarie University/Universidad de Santiago, Chile,
• Mario Cortés Santander, Universidad Libre de Bogota, Colombia,
• Andrés Arévalo Robles, Universidad del Pais Vasco, Spain,
• Ladis Sosa, Uruguay,  Fernando Lopez, PhD Candidate, School of Humanities and Language, UNSW,
• Ana Maria Tomaino, PhD Candidate, Macquarie University,
• Cynthia Fernández Roich, PhD candidate, UNSW,
• Dr. Rodrigo Acuña, Macquarie University,
• Oscar Cárdenas Navarro, University of Queensland,  Florencia Melgar, journalist and researcher, Sydney,
• Paula Sanchez, Latin America Social Forum, Sydney,
• Rebecca Paredes Nieto, PhD candidate, UNSW,
• Gustavo Martin Montenegro, Author, Canberra,
• Cristián Leyton, Researcher, Australia,
• Maia Gunn, PhD candidate, UNSW.

In the recent election campaign the Liberal Party insisted they would be better than Labor in managing the economy, and the Labor Party said the same about itself. Both of these often repeated claims are mistaken. In reality, no one central body or organization manages the Australian economy. All of the important economic decisions are made by large corporations and banks based overseas. The major political parties like to pretend to voters they “manage” the economy but their policies have little influence on the day to day reality of economic life in Australia.

The fact that our self-proclaimed economic managers can do nothing is highlighted by the recent decision of the board of Electrolux in Sweden to close its refrigerator plant in Orange, New South Wales. According to the Western Research Institute it contributes over $70 million to the economy and employs around 4% of the local full-time workforce. The plant is due to be closed because Electrolux can “manufacture refrigerators more cheaply in other factories in Asia and Eastern Europe.”

The local NSW MP for Orange, Andrew Gee, a member of the National Party, gave the following blunt assessment of the situation: “This is one of the saddest and darkest days in Orange’s history. It comes down to the fact that our market here is small and Electrolux can make greater profits in Thailand, where labour is $2.50 per hour compared to $25 to $30 in Australia. Electrolux is a foreign company and it has no particular allegiance to Australia.

All levels of government have offered gifts to Electrolux in the form of cuts in payroll tax and rates, as well as a federal clean technology investment grant, but these attempts to “manage” the situation had no effect on the decision. As MP Andrew Gee recognizes, these companies have only one real duty, an obligation to provide maximum return for their investors. These are the real managers of our economy, and they have absolutely no interest in the well-being of people in Australia.

All quotes and information come from: http://www.smh.com.au/business/electrolux-to-shut-last-local-fridge-plant-20131025-2w6g7.html

Ken Sievers

Soon to be ex-Senator Bob Carr, a man who has done in a short time more damage to the Senate than any single roo poo thrower could in an election, is thankfully taking to some other distant, and no doubt corporate pasture.  He has demonstrated how ill fitting he was for an institution that evidently did not pad his populist fantasy.

As he left, he made it clear that Labor should retain its unimaginative, vicious edge in refugee politics.  Scott Morrison, the current immigration minister, has not read the Refugee Convention, but Labor, in its time in office, did a good job of simulating illiteracy on the subject.  Carr was the perfect representative, unflinching in assuming that Australia was being swamped by “economic” refugees. Don’t deviate from this land, he warns, lest Labor sacrifice a chance to win the next election.

The Carr resume is grotesque. He was always going to be the blow drier in a salon, the convenient fit that found a way when Mark Arbib resigned from the Senate mid-term.  Procure him when needed. Shut him away in the drawer otherwise.  He has a retainer in perpetuity with Macquarie Bank, his soul well and truly mortgaged as long as the deposits keep coming in.

On Wednesday, when he announced his resignation, we think immediately of his appointments when Carr was NSW Premier, a carousel of dark decisions and shoddy leanings.  A certain Eddie Obeid springs to mind, that minister for minerals and fisheries in 1999 who thrived in corrupt pastures for years.  Of course, Obeid, being the principled creature that he is, sought damages in a defamation action.  The law, being blind, complied.  The Independent Commission Against Corruption wasn’t quite so enthusiastic, and blotted the Obeid copybook.

Paul Sheehan observed that, “Carr clearly regards himself as too important to serve in opposition, and is bored by the routine of government when it does not involve flying around the world as foreign affairs minister” (Sydney Morning Herald, Oct 23).  Sheehan is also colourful, finding the narrative of antiquity as appropriate: “It was a perfectly bad day for such a cynical revelation, as fired raged across the state, invoking, in his ill-timed absorption, the image of the narcissist emperor Nero playing the lyre while Rome burned.”

Carr was certainly not fiddling. He played the Rudd-Gillard game as well, or as competently, as any.  He conspired when required.  It would seem that his fingers were also well and truly in the fiscal pie, dirtying the greasy tips with glee.  In his “somewhat fleeting” stint, as he himself termed it, he cost $4220 a day.  Yes, the mean spirited should not deprive a minister of the crown from indulging a bit from his retiring chair.  Might these be written off as “sunset” expenses, accumulated at the culmination of a career?

Of course, there was a whiff in the press that Carr had been hard done by, finding his retirement home, politically speaking, in Julia Gillard’s haphazardly cobbled Cabinet.  At least, that is what Tony Wright felt.  The other members of Labor’s NSW right had found glory in Canberra, be it the improbable Leo McLeay as Speaker, branch stacking operator Laurie Brereton in the federal cabinet, Paul Keating as the supremo, finding form in the position of treasurer then prime minister.

Then, for Carr, came the coveted position of foreign minister.  But it was but a brief sojourn, that “chariot and the rose petals” being “no more than a figment of the imagination, the ticket to ride no more than the scent of stale, burned out incense” (Sydney Morning Herald, Oct 23).

Carr was, in general, bored with the sluggish dealings of political process, with that rather withered notion called democracy.  He was perfidious.  He was a demagogue, and any demagogue is centrally hollow, a whisper of substance.   Refugees for him are economic scavengers seeking protection behind weak laws.  Right wing factions sing the appropriate lullabies.  Back stabbing simply accords more in the way of ALP tribalism.  That is Carr to a tee, and representative of the very party that was given the cold shoulder at the elections. But his effect, in all its putrescence, will be felt long after he evacuates.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne and ran with Julian Assange for the WikiLeaks Party as a senate candidate for Victoria.  Email: [email protected]

Time and time again, casualties are the fascination of killing establishments.  Militaries find hope that the more they kill, the more effective they are.  Laws tend to lag, limping behind in battered form till they find a place in a court of law.  General Douglas MacArthur’s dictum holds: there is no substitute for victory.  The problems are compounded by the use of modern technologies touted as all-saving devices. Privileging technology over human principle, it is a form of what the Japanese author Yukio Mishima would have called decadent warfare.  Moral flabbiness is bound to be the outcome.

A transformation has taken place in the US military complex.  Secrecy is now the name of the asymmetrical warfare game.  The era of open, declared wars has ended.  Figures of deaths, rather than being lauded, are not released.  When they are, they are modified, severely curtailed in the name of public relations.  The authorities are particularly tight-lipped over civilian deaths. This has propelled human rights agencies to take the accounts of local activists, political figures and families affected by the drone strikes.

Protest by a Waziristani. He has spread the pictures of his children, killed by US drones, over the roof of his house.

The latest chapter in the drone annals and its conflict with human rights was piqued by an interim report from UN Special Rapporteur Ben Emmerson, who found that the US had created “an almost insurmountable obstacle to transparency.”  In penetrating the veil, he found that some 33 remotely piloted aircraft strikes had “resulted in civilian casualties”.

Emmerson was scathing of the reticence being shown by the military regarding casualty lists.  “The Special Rapporteur does not accept that considerations of national security justify withholding statistical and basic methodological data of this kind.”   Emmerson chose to rely on Pakistani figures on drone casualties – “at least 400 civilians killed as a result of remotely piloted aircraft strikes” with “a further 200 individuals” killed who probably fell into a non-combatant category.

Such figures have been deemed equivocal, as with so much in the field of asymmetrical warfare.  Human calculations are less relevant here than bureaucratic bookkeeping.  One person’s civilian is bound to be another’s combatant.  Al Qaeda operatives taking refuge in a house are fair game for a drone strike, but so is the owner, if one follows US operational practice. Pakistani approaches are different and tend to see such an owner as a non-combatant undeserving of death.

Amnesty International has not retreated from this legal purgatory, claiming that some drone strikes are bound to amount to war crimes.  It has given the US, claims spokeswoman Polly Truscott, “a license to kill beyond the reach of the courts and international standards.”   Truscott points out the case of 68-year-old Mamana Bibi who was picking vegetables in the north Waziristan tribal region when she was slaughtered.

Others, such as those good folks at the Heritage Foundation, simply argue that, in the world of asymmetrical warfare, such calculations are meaningless.  People might have been killed, but we are at war and ground reports as to whether one law or another has been violated have no value.  Steven Groves of the Foundation questions the figures altogether, arguing that what is supplied to human rights groups can’t be trusted.  The suggestion here is none too subtle: that Amnesty International’s first port of call is an al Qaeda spokesman rather than local villagers and families who have suffered.  Such groups “have no interest in reporting factually about what happens on the battlefield”.  That makes al Qaeda and the US drone forces two of a kind.

Lisa Curtis, a Senior Research fellow at the Foundation, has gone further by legitimising the program on the basis of Pakistani naughtiness, for “until Islamabad cracks down more aggressively on groups attacking US interests in the region and beyond, drones will remain an essential tool for fighting global terrorism.”  There are no genuine laws in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in Pakistan, where al Qaeda roams; no codes of legal operation worthy of consideration.  The laws lie, rather, at the end of the executing Hell Fire missile.  And, as Curtis emphasises, the Pakistanis should be grateful.  “It is no secret,” she draws from the fiction manual, “that the drone strikes often benefit the Pakistani state.”

The point Obama has been making are the old theological principles of just war, much of it outlined in his May address on the subject.  The basis of self-defence is present; the attacks with drones are proportionate.  Harm has been minimised. In June 2011, then White House counter-terrorism advisor John Brennan delivered his idyllic vision of balanced killing fields, when the bloodletting was kept to a minimum.  Accordingly, “for nearly the past year, there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency [and] precision” of the strikes.  The numbers did eventually come, and the CIA squeezed about a few to the Senate Intelligence Committee chair Sen. Diane Feinstein, who disclosed in a statement in February this year that the numbers were in “single digits”.

The technological and human realities are different.  The drone wars are creating more armed militants.  The false assumptions that underlie the conflict are that such strikes cripple rather than enhance insurgency groups or “terror” organisations.   It is precisely the obscurity of such killings, and the lack of availability of figures, that makes the claims of the Obama administration questionable. Perversely, in a war when gentleman’s agreements are obsolete, the administration is expecting recipients of its goodwill to take what it does on trust.

What this shows is the remarkable and disturbing faith being placed in the latest killing machines.  Technology displaces the ethical imperative. The latest tendency in this direction is affirmed by efforts to translate “super heroes” in comic form to the battlefield, another product of seeing war as video game, celluloid projection, and trigger happy adolescence.  Research is being conducted on creating an “iron” man suit, an advanced garment involving MIT researchers.  “This involves developing liquid body armour which can transform from “liquid to solid in milliseconds when a magnetic field or electrical current is applied.”  This is not legal constraint in operation but legal desensitising.  The target at the end of the trigger is emptied of any human reference, other than that of a code, a categorisation, a “target”.

The focus, as it is with all these technologies, is minimising the losses incurred by the military.  Sparing civilians is a by-product.  The TALOS project, as it is termed, has prompted US Special Operations Command Chief Adm. William McRaven to make a striking point.  “I’d like that last operator that we lost to be the last operator we lose in the fight or the fight of the future, and I think we can get there.”  Pity the civilians.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  He ran for the Australian Senate with Julian Assange for the WikiLeaks Party.  Email: [email protected]

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