Mike Kelly (Eden-Monaro, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm very pleased to speak on this motion moved by my good friend and colleague the member for Canberra, who I know has been a passionate advocate in this space, ably supported, as I have been for many years, by Susan Hutchinson, who has been a wonderful worker in the overall space of peacekeeping and stabilisation issues. In fact, when we established our Asia-Pacific centre for civil-military cooperation, she was also involved in the development of our women, peace and security initiative, which has been so well received in the United Nations and across the globe in UN circles. It really was a reflection of the sorts of issues that we've seen emerging in conflicts in recent times.

It doesn't begin just with the situation in northern Iraq and Syria. I confronted this in my service in Bosnia, where there was a situation of sexual warfare on a massive scale. We don't know the exact figures, but somewhere between 12,000 and 50,000 women were sexually abused, raped and mistreated in what was effectively a systematic policy of warfare in that conflict of extreme ethnic cleansing. Names like Trnopolje, Omarska and Karaman's house are now etched in my mind as examples of the extremes of that circumstance. It was the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia that helped carry us forward, at least in the legal space on this issue, by designating sexual violence like this as a crime against humanity. And we had the landmark case in 1996 of Dragan Zelenovic, who was convicted of those crimes. That has contributed to our body of work going forward.

But the situation in Iraq and Syria has been absolutely horrendous. Of course, the Yazidi people have been suffering from attacks going way back to the periods of 2007 when al-Qaeda was conducting mass bombing exercises—car bombing, suicide bombing—against that community and causing hundreds of deaths. That went to extreme levels from 2014 onwards. We have heard the stories of people kidnapping women and children and turning them into sexual slaves. The figures are not known completely, but we're talking about upwards of 7,000 women and children in this situation. The circumstances as they've been described are absolutely horrendous. We're talking about ISIS actually having gynaecologists on service to examine women and children to determine whether they were virgins but also if they were pregnant. If they were, they were then subjected to forced abortions being performed on them, in what the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and Senator John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, determined were crimes of genocide because of the intent that the ISIS forces had at that time to eliminate the entire culture and people of the Yazidi community.

Some of these things don't bear fuller description, but the treating of women and children as cattle in this was the most reprehensible aspect of it. There were values, dollar figures, placed on particular circumstances. For example, a virgin was worth around $10,000 in this trading market. They even utilised the possibilities of social media to facilitate this trading regime. They were using apps like Telegram and WhatsApp and using Facebook to facilitate the marketplace of this horrendous trade in women and girls.

The situation in Iraq and Syria has been something that we haven't seen since Bosnia, but it has taken to a whole new level attempts to justify these actions on a religious basis. The trading of these people—the commerce—is something that defies belief. It really does take us back centuries to the old days of the slave trade. So we have to come to grips with defining what's gone on there as genocide. We have to do that work and join with the rest of the international community in calling this what it was. We also have to look more broadly at the status of women in the Middle East—and, of course, the LGBTI community. We have heard references to the fact that they were also routinely persecuted and executed by ISIS, and we know that in places like the Gaza Strip LGBTI people are routinely executed by the Hamas organisation in that way—by being thrown off roofs et cetera. We also know of the persecution and poor status of women right through that region, including, of course, in Iran, Saudi Arabia and other places where the rights of women are not what we would want them to be.

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