Page 3188 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 18 August 2009
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was focused very much on the Geneva conventions and on making sure that when the next generation of Papua New Guinea defence force recruits entered their defence force, and if they went to Bougainville, they would make sure that they treated the civilian population with respect. I hope that, by doing that, we perhaps prevented any further atrocities occurring.
In East Timor in 2000, I was in a place called Suai where only a couple of months before there had been a massacre of some 200 civilians in the church. And that certainly served to me as a very pointed example of where things can go wrong. Militias supported by the Indonesian defence force, or certainly members of the Indonesian defence force, had massacred a number of civilians. And to stand in that church where that had occurred and see the blackened area in the car park of the church where bodies had been burned certainly made me realise the importance of adherence to the Geneva conventions and the laws of armed conflict.
In East Timor, though, we did see some great success stories where the Geneva conventions were put into play. We saw civilians coming back. Refugees that had fled East Timor when the initial troubles had begun came back in their tens of thousands and were assisted by the United Nations, by the ADF, by the Indonesian defence force, by the International Committee of the Red Cross. To see people coming back from the horrors that they had been suffering for months to their homes was really quite moving.
A more recent example was in Iraq. I talked about that double standard before and the difficulty that causes for nations who are dealing with a double standard when they are fighting wars. But the experience I had there was where the militias of al-Qaeda and the Shiite militias would move into civilian areas and bombard the bases where we were. On many occasions I recall sitting in a bunker while we were being bombed and there was simply nothing we could do about it because the enemy combatants or terrorists were using civilian areas to do that from.
They are just a few examples. I commend Mr Corbell for bringing this motion forward. I would ask that the Assembly also note the very important role played by our own ADF in the implementation of the Geneva conventions and the extremely good standard that I think they set for the world in their implementation and remember, as we move forward, that wars do have laws.
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (11.27): It is with significant pride and respect that I rise today to speak about one of the most important legal documents of the modern era. There genuinely are few documents whose impacts have been so widespread, whose positive influence has been so widely recognised and whose longevity has been so confirmed by the importance of their influence.
The Magna Carta—a document that still influences Westminster-style parliaments such as this very Assembly—is one of only a few such documents. It is important not only because of the specific articles contained within it, which can now seem archaic and anachronistic, but because of the notions it introduced and the influence it has produced.
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