Reflections on a difficult year – Christmas message by Tony Kevin, 22December 2004

I’ve been wondering what to say to my www.tonykevin.com website readers as 2004 draws to a close …. Not easy, for such an action-packed but ultimately, seemingly, not very politically productive year.

First, thank you for continuing regularly to read this now seriously dissident, though fully law-abiding ( and it will remain so), samizdat site. Your visits here may possibly be monitored. This does not worry me, but if it worries you, rent time in internet cafés to read this site in privacy .

It has had 9200-odd visits since it opened in November 2003, and is now running at around 200-300 visits a week. Please keep spreading the word around among your friends and contacts – the more that stories on this site are read and copied, and occasionally hotlinked to other more prominent alternative news websites, the more I will feel that my own effort in contributing to a public conversation about issues that matter to Australians is worthwhile. When we hit 10,000 visits soon, I’ll crack open a bottle of bubbly !

I’ve been quite hard on parts of the mainstream media (print and electronic) at times this year. My apologies to anyone I have wrongfully offended. It is a fine line to walk, between calling the failures that need to be called in our mainstream media as an embattled news institution subject to all kinds of pressures to censor or spin the news, and bad-mouthing individuals who are doing their best to keep readers in touch with real news and analysis of issues, in increasingly adverse circumstances.

This situation makes it all the more important to support alternative news and analysis websites especially our own growing Australian sites like newmatilda.com, crikey.com, and the various state-based Indymedia sites; and Margo Kingston’s linked sites. These sites matter a great deal to our democracy now . We need to read them and subscribe to them.

I cannot join in the latest welter of praise, fulsome or grudging, for John Howard. A lot of Australians admire winners simply for the reason that they are winners. We need to look a lot deeper than that. Politics is not sport – people die as a result of bad unethical politics. And people can be conned by state regimes that are in effective control of media, to think that all is well. When "Uncle Joe" Stalin died, the Russians were so well-indoctrinated by then in what to think, that they wept for him - it was only much later that they came to realise what an evil and destructive ruler he had been.

To me, Howard is a malign and ungenerous man, and a Prime Minister who has blood on his hands. To have continued to impose and protect an official cover-up of the truth about the deaths of 353 people on SIEV X who drowned in a border protection maritime zone where Australia had a duty of care, puts him for me beyond contempt, as someone who has vandalised and mocked our most important values of ethical governance.

And I don’t know how many Iraqis have died at Australian hands in the past 21 months, who should have been alive today. Howard’s foreign policies damage our national security, our individual personal security, and our nation’s prospects for continued economic welfare and sovereign independence. Whatever the current perception of his "success" as a national leader, this man’s Prime Ministership degrades me as a loyal and moral Australian. I pray for his early departure from the post. But I have said all this before, and I only have one vote.

This year my book A Certain Maritime Incident – the sinking of SIEV X was published by Scribe, in August. If I was expecting from it a sudden outbreak of due judicial process, an epiphany of justice, I was to be sadly disappointed. Little has yet happened as a result of the book.

I have no idea yet how many copies the book has sold – I hope, enough for a second printing in due course ! It has had a good number of mostly favourable reviews, mostly by academics and journalists – including in the Sydney Sun-Herald (Antony Loewenstein), The Sydney Morning Herald (Louise Dodson), The Canberra Times (Pat Weller) , The Age (Scott Burchill), the Australian Book Review (Damien Kingsbury), Online Opinion (Gavin Mooney), Australian Catholics Online (Ed Campion), and Green Left Weekly (Sarah Stephen). The ABC gave it a very good run on radio including excellent Phillip Adams and Jon Faine discussions.

To this point, neither The Australian nor the Australian Financial Review have reviewed the book. It was notably unfavourably reviewed recently by Bishop Tom Frame (Anglican Bishop to the ADF). Frame got a double dip in Defender (journal of the Australian Defence Association) and Public Administration Today (journal of the Institute of Public Administration of Australia, Canberra Branch).

Though eminent lawyers including Julian Burnside, Terry O’Gorman and Brian Deegan launched the book in Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide, it has not yet been reviewed in any professional law journal. I hope it will be. I hope also that it will get onto law, public administration and public ethics courses as a textbook or casework teaching material. That will take courage by individuals – such decisions are trackable.

It is important to keep a civilised public debate going on what the book contains, by way of weight of public evidence of criminal wrongdoing and cover-up, and questions about our nation’s governance arising from that evidence. My book is now the main vehicle for keeping the SIEV X story alive – our mainstream media will not do so, this is now clear, nor will our public accoutability watchdog agencies - and for supporting those brave Senators who do not want to forget this blot on Australia’s conscience. They need your encouragement and practical help. Buy copies of the book, send it around to colleagues, talk about it professionally and academically ….

Somewhat to my surprise, I found myself increasingly drawn this year into difficult debates on the ethics of the conduct of the ADF in Iraq. I was little involved in the initial stage of prewar protest – my hands were very full with SIEV X advocacy work at that time. But later, as I came to see the shameful ways in which serving members of our ADF had been ordered to fight this war and take part in the cruelly coercive armed occupation of Iraq that has followed, I had no alternative but to speak out.

There seems no end to the grave scandals that are being uncovered – not just in terms of misuse of prewar intelligence, but also: how the initial secret illegal war was waged by our SAS in Western Iraq without our parliament’s knowledge, the subsequent outsourcing deployment of trained ADF soldiers to the US occupation forces and to mercenary roles where they were not accountable under the laws of war Australia is bound to observe, our seconded officers’ ambiguous roles in helping the US Army to cover up the truth of sanctioned tortures in Abu Ghraib, above all our admitted involvement in the planning and execution of the war crime that was the destruction of Fallujah and creation of 1/4 of a million refugees.

Australia is, sadly, now so heavily implicated in the ongoing atrocities of Iraq, that the only ray of hope I can see there is the brave lonely work of Donna Mulhearn, as reported on her "Pilgrim" email newsletter which needs to be widely re-copied.

I have on this website suggested ways forward on SIEV X using my book as a resource, ways to try to get SIEV X under the purview of the International Criminal Court prosecutor. But this will require the active participation and leadership of lawyers, in particular of criminal lawyers and international human rights lawyers.

The forthcoming trial of Khaled Daoed, one of Abu Quassey’s alleged assistants, needs to be closely monitored as to due process and legality, but who will do it ?

The latest shocking news I have had is that a SIEV X bereaved father who has been in Australia for five years, may now be deported from Australia as his TPV runs out, because he has not been able to prove that he had family who drowned on SIEV X, where there are no passenger lists being made available by Australian agencies that possess them, even now. This shocking story shows how the injustice of SIEV X is being perpetuated, as long as it is not seriously challenged by groups with the power and influence to make a difference to how the Howard government treats the living victims of SIEV X.

In the end, my book may have been no more than a silent witness on public and private library shelves around Australia to gross and lethal official criminality here. It is up to others now to take SIEV X to the next stage of public consideration. I cannot do this alone. We may have to await deathbed confessions or post-retirement whistleblowers. . But pending those, it is important to maintain an active public memory of SIEV X .

My hands were fairly full these recent months defending myself. I’ve already mentioned the Frame review of my SIEV X book, that damned with faint praise but was actually deeply prejudiced against the book, and which requires considered responses on the merits of the arguments put forward by Frame, and on facts ignored by Frame.

There was also a no-holds-barred personal attack on my views on the destruction of Fallujah by Janet Albrechtsen in The Australian – an attack to which I was not given opportunity to respond fairly in The Australian. I am now taking this complaint to the Australian Press Council mediation and arbitration processes. The principle here matters – are we to be allowed to read the real news from Iraq in all its horror and shame, or are we to see just a sugar-coated and carefully sanitised version of it ?

Odd things happened to me in 2004 involving the right to freedom of speech and of broadcasting, on the BBC (regarding SIEV X) and on CNN (regarding Fallujah). I will continue to report the facts of such incidents as they happen – not because I am looking for any sympathy or personal publicity, but because as Adam Michnik said in Communist Poland, the best way to strengthen one’s freedom in an unfree society is to behave as though it is a free society. If we don’t follow that action rule in Australia today, we risk losing the contracting area of freedom that we still have.

For it is going to get worse in Australia before it gets better. With a weakened Senate, political dissidents are going to have to give one another private and public support on crux issues, because if we do not, we will be abused, intimidated and picked off separately and silenced, one by one. The difficulty as always is in deciding what are the crux issues ? – many of us are grossly overloaded already with our own causes. When is the latest salami slice attack on someone else more or less important, than what one is working on oneself? These are hard decisions, not made lightly.

Fluid and fast information exchange is really vital now. We need to tell one another what is happening. Even if we do not help in particular contested situations, we at least read about them and keep across issues. That is why the work of Garry Bickley’s email list, Jack Smit’s Project Safecom site and Matt Hamon’s

Hopecaravan site is so important.

And we still need to keep lines open to mainstream Australia. I refuse to be pigeon-holed as someone whose opinions and knowledge are of interest only to a small dissident fringe of Australians. I will go on saying to the mainstream and to its media organs - these issues are about you and the future of your kids, too ! And I hope there will be many with me adopting such broad communication strategies.

We have to go on believing in Australia and in the ultimate bedrock decency of our fellow Australians, even if it is sometimes hard to see this now - it is certainly hard to see it in either of the major political parties’ executive leaderships now. Mike Moore has to go on believing in the ultimate basic decency of Americans even though they just reelected Bush. We have to go on believing in the integrity and ultimate public acceptance of our views and of our values as to how people should treat one another with decency and compassion.

These can be lonely battles – let’s try in 2005 to make them a bit less lonely.

A happy Christmas to you all and to your families, large or small !

Tony Kevin, Canberra 22 December 2004