NSW WRITERS CENTRE, ROZELLE – “WRITING HISTORY CONFERENCE”, 24 SEPTEMBER 2005:

“DECLINING TO LIVE IN CREATED REALITIES” , by Tony Kevin

My thanks to the organisers at the NSW Writers’ Centre at Rozelle (Executive Director, Irina Dunne) for inviting me to take part in a panel together with Cheikh Kone, Denise Leith and Andrea Durbach, and chaired by Caroline Lurie, at the History Writing Festival on 24 September 2005. The event focus was on the nature of writing history, whether for more traditional non-fiction historical writing, or for the purpose of using historical material in fiction. Other speakers at the conference included Kate Grenville, Frank Moorhouse, Siobhan McHugh, Peter Manning, and Irina Dunne. I spoke from the following notes. TK, Canberra 26 September 2005.

George Orwell’s classic fables “1984” and “Animal Farm” remind us that tyranny wins, when people lose the capacity to distinguish between truth and lies. Remember his haunting ideas – like “Who are we at war with this week in the never-ending world war - is it Eurasia, or Eastasia?”, and “Now Winston finally could see that 2 and 2 indeed make 5”.

Orwell understood how easily facts and history can be manipulated by those in power, to suit their current agendas. When I first read these books some 50 years ago, I took them to be satires on fascism and communism. Only recently have I come to see how relevant they also are to us. You might recognise this now famous account by a New York Times journalist, of a conversation he had last year with a senior staffer to President Bush. Ron Suskind recalled it thus:

“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That's not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality … we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’ ”

This argument is frightening. It is not just that governments lie about what they do: we have known that for a long time. It is the idea that governments create new realities, which we then as citizens must inhabit.

Two great British novelists Graham Greene and John Le Carre have deepened our understanding of what happens when democratic societies lose their belief in objective truth. The infamous Pyle, the CIA agent in Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American”, organizes a terrorist bombing in a town square in Vietnam, that he knows will kill a lot of innocent people but can plausibly be blamed on the Communists. He is an agent of provocation. More bluntly, he is a state terrorist – a state agent who uses terror as a political weapon. Pyle justifies his crime, which he doesn’t even see as a crime, thus:

“They were only war casualties. It was a pity, but you can’t always hit your target. Anyway, they died in the right cause. In a way, you could say they died for Democracy.”

Pyle has created his own alternative reality to live within. There are many like him, working for governments and political parties, who happily leave their moral consciences at the door.

It is this callousness – that the end justifies the means, and that human life is unimportant collateral damage - that Greene exposes in this and some of his other novels, eg “The Third Man”.

John Le Carre explores similar territory in his great cycle of political thrillers. His latest, in 2003, “Absolute Friends”, builds to a stunning climax - I trust you’ve all read it by now, skip the rest of this paragraph if not – in which former US security agents construct a phony terrorist conspiracy, and put two innocent men into the frame scenario. They kill these two innocent men in a staged mock attack, arranging the public evidence afterwards to create a belief that this was indeed a terrorist cell that had been discovered and destroyed just in time. This final chapter of “Absolute Friends” is the most chilling and brilliant thing I have read for a long time. It has a ring of truth about it: this is how it can be done, Le Carre tells us This is how unscrupulous people in a security agency could create something out of nothing, could create a plausible new reality.

The Harvard political philosopher Michael Ignatieff in his brave and important 2004 book “The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror” discusses how terrorism and counter-terrorism feed off one another. He suggests that agents of a democratic state may be driven by the horror of terror, to torture, to assassinate, to kill innocent civilians, all in the name of rights and democracy.

As I read his words, I saw again the bullets being pumped into the young Brazilian, slain by security agents on the London subway in the aftermath of the London tube terrorist bombings.

Ignatieff suggests our democratic values may actually blind democratic agents to the moral reality of their actions. The nobility of ends is no guarantee against resort to evil means. Indeed the more noble they are, the more ruthlessness they can endorse. That, he says, is why democracy depends on distrust, why freedom’s defense requires submitting even noble intentions to the test of adversarial review.

He describes how a mood of nihilism can come to dominate both a terrorist campaign and a war on terror. The shedding of blood creates opposed communities in which loyalty to the group prevails over institutional accountability or individual principles. The terrorists listen only to themselves. And the counter-terrorist agencies bond with each other, view their civilian supervisors as spineless libertarians, chafe under operational restrictions on the use of force, seek to evade these wherever possible, covering up as they do, and seek to fight the terrorists on their own terms. At the end of this downward spiral, it becomes a tragic duel between the two sides, the police forces and counterterrorism units behaving no better than the terrorist cells.

And I thought here of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

But do the people thus being protected want to know? No, they do not, generally speaking. Whistleblowers are not thanked for their courage. In the movie “A Few Good Men”, the US Marine Colonel at Guantanamo Bay (played by Jack Nicholson) mocks the court that is trying him for ordering cruel disciplinary procedures leading to the death of a young trainee marine: Jessop says “You want the truth ? You can’t handle the truth.” You need us to protect your freedoms and comforts, but you really don’t want to know how we do it.

**

Australia’s border protection war against asylum-seekers coming in small boats from Indonesia was a war in which we lost our moral bearings. It was a precursor of the current war on terror, but it was waged against innocent people, against men women and children who sought only a safe haven from persecution and homelessness. Yet they were deemed by major Australian political parties and national security agencies to be a serious violation of Australian sovereignty, that had to be deterred by systematic state cruelty.

As David Marr commented recently about the Cornelia Rau case:

“And if the result was cruel, what does that matter? Isn't having an Immigration Department that's known to be nasty, dilatory and inflexible as much part of the deterrence system as putting the navy into the Indian Ocean and building detention prisons in the desert? Isn't this how Australia sends a message to refugees and would-be illegal immigrants across the world: don't try it on?”

We are in similar moral territory here to what I was describing earlier: created realities far away from objective truth, innocent victims, collateral damage in a higher national security cause. I have a deeper understanding now of this wider context, one year after my book “A Certain Maritime Incident: the Sinking of SIEV X” was published.

Starting in 2000, the Howard government created a mostly false reality of a growing boat people invasion of Australia that was becoming, it claimed, a real national security threat. It invented the myth of a massive global people smuggling industry dominated by organized crime, second in size only to the international drug trade. A compliant press ran with these government-fed stories. Do you remember all those big front-page news features during 2000-2001 with names like Fortress Australia and Boat People Invasion? Not just the public, but Australian police, public servants and defence personnel were being indoctrinated to think of combating boat people incursions, by violent force if necessary, as the equivalent of fighting real criminals or defending against real military invaders. Many of us came to inhabit that false reality. Some of us still do.

People smuggling disruption became the noble cause in which our police and other government agencies were vigorously engaged. It functioned under tight security as to its detail. We, the Australian people, knew almost nothing about it.

In 2002, thanks to the work of the Senate Committee into a Certain Maritime Incident, when I raised questions there about the sunken asylum-seeker boat I named SIEV X, (suspected illegal entry vessel, unknown), Australia slowly started to learn some of the truth.

Deb Whitmont’s brilliant ABC Four Corners documentary “To Deter and Deny” exposed the cruelty and illegality of Defence’s border protection Operation Relex in international waters between Indonesia and Australia. Ross Coulthart on Channel Nine Sunday exposed how the AFP were paying an Australian people smuggler Kevin Enniss for people smuggling intelligence, a man who by his own admission organized unsafe bogus voyages, took money from refugees under false pretences, and even sank boats.

Through my and Marg Hutton’s investigative work, we came to know how SIEV X had sunk in the Australian Operation Relex border protection zone, after its preparation had been monitored for weeks by Australian intelligence in Indonesia. We learned how 353 people mostly women and children had drowned, who could and should have been saved, if blind eyes had not been turned. We learned how the truth about what Australian agencies knew about SIEV X, and when they knew it, had been systematically covered up from the Senate investigation in 2002, only to be let out in reluctant dribs and drabs much later – with important parts of the truth even now obscured.

My book is exact historical scholarship. It does not put forward conspiracy theories. It proceeds from known facts and asks reasonable questions based on those facts. The SIEV X story has also inspired many fine creative works of the imagination – stories, plays, art, music. The story will live now.

Some close to government have vehemently rejected my book. But they have not offered plausible alternative explanations. Instead, they appeal to a deeply held public presumption of regularity about Australian official conduct:

“We are not like that, we don’t do things like that in Australia. Anyone who thinks that we might, must not be given any credence.”

But as Orwell, Greene, and Le Carre, showed in their great novels, good people under pressure can do bad things. And as others like Ignatieff, Hannah Arendt, and Zygmunt Bauman show, good or average people in organised state bureaucracies can do terrible things. And what was our convict system, if not this? What was our history of stolen and abused aboriginal children, if not this?

Operation Relex and SIEV X happened only four years ago. Yet many of us are already shrugging it off, silently moving on. We really don’t want to know what might have been done to defend us.

But I’m glad that some of us do want to know. The people who bought my book want to know. The book is there, as a resource to historians. It can be bought and read in libraries and discussed.

Some critics definitely don’t want it discussed. Critics like Gerard Henderson and Tom Frame find it difficult to understand my premise: that in any decent society that values human life, there is a public-interest coronial obligation to explore the unexplained deaths of 353 people in Australia’s maritime border protection zone, at the time of an admitted Australian people-smuggling disruption and intelligence-gathering program aimed at deterring such voyages.

Nor do such critics ever recall the public history of the Senate’s repeated motions in 2002-2004, demanding a judicial enquiry into the sinking of SIEV X and the disruption program. It is easier just to dismiss me as a conspiracy theorist, and pretend those Senate motions and major speeches by people like Senators Faulkner and Bartlett and Brown never happened. They hope we might just forget about SIEV X.

But I think we won’t forget. For those of us who decline to live in John Howard’s created reality, it is part of our history now.

To conclude, here is what Howard said in introducing Operation Relex to the Australian people on 1 September 2001 – just a few weeks before SIEV X sank:

“We don't in this nation sink boats. We don't ignore pleas for help but we seek, consistent with our decency, and within the law, to deter people from coming to this country in these boats, against the background that at present they are not deterred from leaving Indonesia. And we have to - well, just let me finish - and we therefore have to within those constraints, we have to demonstrate within the law and consistent with humane behaviour, we have to demonstrate our determination. And whatever we have on occasions done in the past, we will do more intensely in the future.”

Knowing what I do now, I read a great deal into those carefully constructed words.

Tony Kevin, 24 September 2005.