Page 1046 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 20 April 1994
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GORAZDE
Motion of Sympathy
MR WESTENDE (12.14): Mr Deputy Speaker, I seek leave to move a motion concerning the plight of the people of Gorazde.
Leave granted.
MR WESTENDE: I move:
That this Assembly expresses its sympathy for the people of Gorazde and all those suffering from conflict in the region, and hopes for reconciliation between all groups and individuals involved.
Having my origins in Europe, I still take a great deal of interest in that part of the world, although I consider myself to be an Australian first. While the rest of Europe is moving very rapidly and very efficiently to European union, it pains me to witness the destruction in the Balkans. Countries and people are tearing themselves apart, to the ruination of the countryside, and it is a beautiful countryside, as those of us who have been there know. But nowhere is the destruction as vivid as that we have seen of late in the area surrounding Gorazde.
The Balkans have a long history of instability. In moving this motion, I hope and pray that the people will wake up to the slaughter that is going on and that they will see for themselves the senselessness of all this destruction. The sooner the governments and the people of that area realise that no useful purpose is being served by this wholesale destruction, the better.
MR BERRY (12.16): Mr Deputy Speaker, the Government supports this motion. Labor is opposed to all wars; there are no good wars. The innocent victims - the women, the children - are the centrepiece of some of the terrible pictures we have seen of this conflict between human beings. We also see that across the world there are many people who make their fortunes from wars, and the pressure from the sellers of weapons and the machinery of war is on those areas. We see awful pictures of conflict between ordinary men and women, but usually it is the women and the children and other innocent bystanders who suffer most. There is no excuse for it, but often there is no easy solution.
I see in press reports calls for various extensions of violence as some sort of solution to wars, and I note that as part of the motion there is a call for reconciliation. It is difficult to think about those concepts together. On the one hand, people are saying that we ought to extend the violence by way of air strikes, say, and then they talk about reconciliation. It does not seem to work together. In Australia, I suppose, there is a sense of frustration about those issues because it is not something that many of us could comprehend.
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