Australia - humane or not?

It might be an exaggeration to say that the case of a 9 year old asylum seeker is probing the conscience of a nation. It is probably a too-optimistic assumption to even think most people are paying attention... but it IS front page news, and people are asking the hard questions.

Last December a shipwreck on the coast of Christmas Island of a boat carrying Iranian asylum seekers killed still undetermined scores of people, among them parents of a boy known to us as 'Seena'.

Illegal arrivals by sea has served as the number one wedge issue for the conservative coalition, now serving in opposition after coming as close to winning an election as is possible without actually gaining government.

It's all smoke and mirrors of course, illegal immigration by plane vastly outnumbers so called "boat people", but like any other population, Australians can be swayed by symbolism and vague atavistic fears exploited by ruthless and - it has to be said - Right-leaning politicians.

Seena among others was flown to Sydney for the funeral of bodies recovered from the shipwreck, and the opposition immediately blithered about the expense, were promptly called out on their lack of compassion, and forced to retreat and, to some extent, recant.

Then the government came under fire for putting Seena back behind barbed wire.... Christmas Island is in the Indian Ocean and is Australia's offshore processing centre for illegal arrivals by sea. It's about as Santa Claus as Alcatraz, with tropical zone malaria to make the place feel homey.

Seena has since been released into the care of relatives residing in Australia - either too quickly or not quickly enough depending on at what stage people want to sledge the Department of Immigration.

But then the scene shifts back to December again when the Liberal Party (the Liberals are our conservatives here in Australia) had a little meeting wherein opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison is alleged to say something to the effect of "hey, let's scare the voters shitless with the spectre of Muslim hordes taking over the country and use it as a wedge issue against the Labor Party!".

That is not exactly what he said nor meant, in all probability... but suspicion is not eased by refusal to discuss the detail of the meeting.

The issue in this then, I think, is not what Morrison said, but the split within the Liberal Party about what he can be interpreted to have said, and - just quietly - how to approach the M word - multiculturalism.

I find the absence of this word in discussions is quite interesting, if one seeks context from Howard's culture wars. Opposition Leader Tony Abbott merely said that the Coalition ''will always have a non-discriminatory immigration policy''. He didn't use the M word either, and Labor knows better than to step that landmine by looking to do anything than get Morrison's scalp.

It's like watching an ideological cold war that neither side has the honesty to admit to nor the will to fight.

Meanwhile, the Australian Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young has called for an independent review of the Migration Act, aimed at stopping children being put in detention. Over a thousand are in detention. There is constant talk about ending it, but the wedge issue is too valuable to the coalition and too dangerous to Labor for anything to happen while government and opposition stare across a parliament split with diamond-cutting precision down the exact middle.

Long after Morrison sees his name come off the front page, he may realise that wedge issues are not, ultimately, things you can choose or not choose to have, after all.

Little wedges everywhere... within Labor caucus, within shadow cabinet... everyone trying to look tough and compassionate at the same time (never an easy trick), ambitious Liberals looking to walk over political corpses, leaders looking to define themselves... and a country wondering how the hell we have kids in what can only be called prisons.

Little wedges... like little boats, coming unbidden and testing what it is you really stand for.

The Lord's Resistance Army

Ever heard of the LRA, the Lord's Resistance Army?

They represent a face of violent religious insurgency in Uganda, southern Sudan and the eastern Congo. Apocalyptic Christians, their leader claims he is the spokesman of God, and seeks to establish a theocracy based on the ten commandments, with elements of the mystic traditions of the Acholi ethnic group.

Somehow this translates in practice into sexual slavery, child slave-soldiers, kidnapping, mutilation and murder. And against obvious proof of the contrary, painting a cross on your chest makes you bullet proof, if you believe their current leader, Joseph Kony.

Kony is now thought to be hiding in southern Darfur.

The LRA began in 1986, and since then has been responsible 30,000 abducted children.
Maybe 40,000 - no-one can count them all.
Over 2 million displaced people. One investigation found a child slave-soldier bearing arms at age 5. The second youngest was 6.

Kony has been described, optimistically in my opinion, as "Africa's last warlord". He's been hunted for years.
According to Jendayi Frazer, the then US assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Dubbya would rant ""How can this guy call himself a soldier of the Lord? He's just a murderer."

But the hunt for Kony has never gone well....
In 2006, the United Nations did something it doesn't usually do: They sent a hit team. American-trained Guatemalan Special Ops soldiers. They were all killed and the LRA had some new heavy machine guns and grenade launchers to play with.

Then in December 2008 came Operation Lightening Thunder. Reporter Scott Johnson, in an article for Newsweek, writes:

Shortly after dawn last Dec. 14, four Ugandan Mi-24 helicopters banked low over the thick forest canopy of Congo's Garamba National Park. A dense fog had rolled in overnight, and the weather had turned nasty. Earlier that morning at a forward staging area in Uganda, a team of American military advisers equipped with large-scale US government maps and Google Earth technology had shown the helicopter pilots what to look for—four distinct "fishhook shape" camps spread out in cleared areas of the park. In one of these camps, they believed, was Joseph Kony, the professed mystic who leads Africa's longest-lived insurgent group, the Lord's Resistance Army. Find Kony, the pilots' commander had said, and kill him.

Descending through the fog bank and hovering just above the tree line, the pilots spotted what looked like a rebel council meeting in the largest cluster of shelters, code-named Camp K. The gunships immediately unleashed a barrage of rockets and chain-gun fire. Reports from the helicopter crews later stated that several dozen people, including women and children, had been caught in the open. "I saw the helicopters come—they were black, and they were bombing us," recalls George Komagun, 16, one of the hundreds of child soldiers in the Lord's Resistance Army. "I ran. We tried to fight the helicopters, but could not."

Two days after Operation Lightning Thunder began, Ugandan commandos finally reached Camp K. They found bloody trails heading into the jungle in all directions. Hastily dug graves dotted the site's periphery. Kony had been on the run for more than two decades, but this place had the look of a settled homestead. Acres had been cultivated with sorghum, cassava and maize. Stashes of sugar, rice and water in large plastic containers were buried all around.

....

Eight days later Kony retaliated, as usual by attacking helpless civilians. Within a few days, LRA fighters had slaughtered more than 1,000 Congolese villagers, beating them to death with clubs, rifle butts and machetes, and burning entire villages to the ground. Hundreds of children were kidnapped, and roughly a quarter of a million people fled their homes in Congo and south Sudan.

According to George Komagun, mentioned above, Kony would say 'Now you killed them, you must drink their blood and eat their liver." Komagun claims to have eaten 20 livers. In his dreams the people he has killed come to him begging for mercy.

In Southern Sudan there is a militia called the Arrow Boys who defend their village against the LRA. They fight with anything they have, including bows and poison darts.

On of their fighters, Emmanuel Samuel, joined the Arrow Boys in July.

In a report today by Jason Koutsoukis, a journalist with Fairfax Media, he says "The village elders told me to stay in the village but I wanted to stay and follow my father... I have fired my weapon [a bow and arrow] just once"

Emmanuel Samuel is 10 years old.

Fighting disease / Fighting for the Rights of Children

Positive action in Mogadishu, one of the worst places on the planet:

"10 February 2010 – Despite fighting that has displaced hundreds of thousands of people in Mogadishu, health workers have fanned out across the war-torn capital of Somalia in a three-month United Nations-backed campaign that has immunized nearly 300,000 women of child-bearing age and 288,000 children.

The children were vaccinated against polio, measles, diphtheria, whooping cough and tetanus and provided with vitamin A supplements, de-worming tablets and nutritional screening, while the women were immunized against tetanus in the Child Health Days campaign, supported by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the UN World Health Organization (WHO) as part of a nationwide effort to provide life-saving health and nutrition services to every Somali child under the age of five and every woman of child-bearing age."

Rest of article here.

Incidentally, the Somali cabinet - such as it is - promised to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child last November, which would leave the United States has the only country in the world which has not.

Long a contentious issue, US conservatives love their "war" rhetoric:
"On February 14, 1995, war was declared on parental rights in America", splutters the Home School Legal Defense Association in a 'special report' in 1999, " On that day, the Clinton Administration announced that the United States would sign the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and send it to the U.S. Senate for ratification." Rest of that here.

And note this bit:
"If the United States ratifies the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the U.S. government will be obligated to “ensure” the following ... That every child shall receive the highest attainable level of health care services. Article 24 (1). In Chapter 11 of the American Bar Association book by Davidson and Cohen, they state that this provision indicates that a mandatory federal health insurance plan would be necessary to comply with the Treaty."

Oh dear... well they can't have THAT, can they?

And is it just me... or is any one else sick to death of conservatives stamping "declared war" over everyone who does not agree with them or give them what they want - even those in their own government?
What if I said to one of them "no, you can't drink my coffee"...? Have I "declared war" on their drinking habits...?

Among the other 'warlike' things the Convention does is... forbid executing juveniles.

Roper v. Simmons 2005 (one of those U.S. Supreme Court decisions that Sarah Palin can't think of other than Roe v. Wade) forbids this now anyway, but putting them away for life without parole is another thing you can't do under the Convention, and Roper v. Simmons does not cover this.

The book pictured is a children's book designed to encourage creative thinking. More about it here on the US AID East Africa site