Carmen Lawrence (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1)

notes that, on 7 September 2001, the United Nations General Assembly declared that the International Day of Peace should be observed annually on the fixed date of 21 September, as a day of global ceasefire and non-violence;

(2)

notes that United Nations Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, has repeatedly urged member states of the United Nations to support the observance of global ceasefire on the day, arguing that a global ceasefire would:

(a)

provide a pause for reflection by the international community on the threats and challenges we face;

(b)

offer mediators a building block towards a wider truce, as has been seen in nations such as Ghana and Zambia;

(c)

encourage those involved in violent conflict to reconsider the wisdom of further violence;

(d)

provide relief workers with a safe interlude for the provision of vital services and the supply of essential goods;

(e)

allow freedom of movement and information, which is particularly beneficial to refugees and internally displaced persons; and

(f)

relieve those embroiled in violent conflict of the daily burden of fear for one’s own safety and the safety of others;

(3)

supports the Australian organisations that intend to hold vigils, concerts and walks on 21 September this year, in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Darwin and Brisbane;

(4)

calls on the Australian Government to actively support the observance of a ceasefire in Afghanistan, East Timor, Iraq and the Solomon Islands on 21 September of this year by ensuring that Australia’s armed forces:

(a)

do not engage in hostilities for the duration of 21 September, unless provoked to do so in self-defence;

(b)

promote the observance of a global ceasefire for the duration of 21 September; and

(c)

promote the practice of non-violence for the duration of 21 September; and

(5)

requests that the Australian Government encourage other nation-states to follow its lead.

The terms of that motion indicate the UN General Assembly’s declaration that 21 September should be an international day of peace observed annually as a day of global ceasefire and nonviolence. In my view it is a very important initiative that deserves to be supported by this parliament and by the government.

I will begin by quoting a man who knew war all too well, former US President Dwight D Eisenhower, who said in 1953:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

I think that is the message we should take today.

Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner, surveyed the legacy of the 20th century and labelled it a ‘violent century’; a century which encompassed two world wars, countless civil wars, a senseless chain of assassinations, civilian bloodbaths in many armed conflicts, the inhumanity in the gulags, the tragedy of Hiroshima and the vile stain of the Holocaust. It is impossible to hear that list without shuddering.

But, sadly, the 21st century is shaping up as no less bloody, from both state sanctioned and terrorist violence. Despite near saturation coverage of the continuing violence there is still little public reflection on what actually happens when armed conflict is used to resolve disputes, on who pays the price or on what can be done to avoid war. We should all turn our attention to that last question. It is estimated that during the last century over one hundred million people died in war in over 50 countries around the globe. This figure is a dramatic increase over earlier centuries and is about three-quarters of all the estimated war deaths since 1500 AD; most of the violence and killing has been in the last 100 years. Add to this the lives cut short in the aftermath of war by disease and malnutrition and the many millions more murdered by politically repressive regimes and terrorist attacks, and you arrive at a staggering loss of life.

This loss, sadly, has been sanitised and rendered ‘normal’ at the same time as the way war is conducted effectively removes the distinction between combatants and civilians as targets of war. Indeed, civilians have been deliberately targeted, and not just by terrorists, as they were in Dresden, Cologne, Hiroshima and Nagasaki and in the recent conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Civilians accounted for five per cent of all victims in World War I, 50 per cent in World War II and nearly 90 per cent in recent wars. Much of this increase is the result of large-scale bombing, particularly from the air, described by one commentator as ‘the most barbaric style of warfare imaginable’. Hilter’s bombing of Guernica produced near universal revulsion; such attacks today pass almost without comment, justified as ‘surgical’ or precise despite the ‘collateral damage’ of death, disability and wholesale destruction.

Over the last 50 years we in the developed world have been largely insulated from this suffering since most of the wars have been in the economically impoverished Third World. As memories of the catastrophic reality of the Second World War fade, war is enjoying a resurgence of respectability as an instrument of foreign policy, with no apparent concern by our governments for the devastation it inflicts on so many lives and hopes, and no thought either, it seems, for the potential for revenge and hatred to grow from the seedbed of war. We should not accept the inevitability of war, and that is what is important about this day of global ceasefire and nonviolence. Deadly conflict is not inevitable. It does not emerge inexorably from the human condition. We are not condemned by our natures to settle disputes with violence, and there are no mysteries about why violence erupts. The problem is not that we do not understand the roots of deadly conflict but that we do not act. Such action should be based on the concept of prevention, confronting both the inequalities and intolerances which fuel conflict and the manufacture of weapons which enable deadly conflict.

Instead of signing up to an increasingly deadly expansion of militarism, the Australian government and all governments should be playing their part in ensuring that the international community appreciates the increasingly urgent need to prevent deadly conflict, especially given the increasing availability of weapons of all descriptions. It is our task in this parliament to draw attention to the need for peace, to resolve conflicts without violence and to make sure that the United Nations is in a position to facilitate peace and that on 21 September there is a total global ceasefire so that people can build towards a wider truce in areas where there is conflict and reconsider the wisdom of further violence.

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