OPINION: Asylum-seeker shame rises for some political pundits

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall of the United States embassy in Canberra last November. And to be sitting there watching and listening as that unnamed ''key Liberal Party strategist'' that boat people was a politically ''fantastic'' issue with ''the more boats that come the better''. And if, for no other reason, than to know who that imbecile strategist was!

Oh, to now be a fly on the wall of that strategist's office and see his or her face watching images of the Indonesian fishing vessel with 100 Iranian and Iraqi asylum-seekers on board crashing against the coastal rocks of Christmas Island.

Of course, the political logic of the strategist's comment to US diplomats is really quite straightforward. If the boats stop coming, Tony Abbott would look like a right royalist fool by standing up on Manly beach, budgie smugglers and all, and screaming at the top of his voice: ''Stop the boats!'' If there were no boats hitting Christmas Island, how would voters in nearby marginal Queensland seats feel threatened enough to vote for the Liberal National Party?

And of course, this madness is all the result of our obsession with border security. To secure our borders, we go to faraway places and take part in wars against enemies, many of whom have never heard of us. What we don't seem to realise is that when we take part in wars, we have obligations. We have an obligation that is triggered as soon as hostilities cease and our leaders feel triumphant enough to declare ''mission accomplished''. It's an obligation in international law to restore and maintain basic law and order for the lucky citizens not ripped to pieces by our weapons.

Now let's look at the record in Iraq and Afghanistan. Basically it can be summarised like this: we came, we saw, we conquered, we unconquered and we lost control. Any MP or pundit who thinks Iraq and Afghanistan are bastions of stability should spend Christmas with their family in a "holiday house" in Kandahar or Basra.

Many Iraqis don't celebrate Christmas. One of the most important religious festivals in Iraq is Ashura. It isn't easy celebrating when suicide bombers are out to blow themselves, you and your family to pieces on a holy day.

And if you do happen to celebrate Christmas, things aren't much better. A siege of the Our Lady of Deliverance church on October 31 left 52 worshippers dead. In such an environment, is it any wonder so many Iraqis and Afghans are fleeing?

But Andrew Bolt and other allegedly conservative bloggers keep reminding us of the existence of an orderly queue. Everyone should just take a ticket and patiently stand in the queue and wait for their number to be called.

So where does the queue start for Iraqis? We know that many fled to neighbouring Syria, where living conditions were described in a UNHCR survey conducted in July and August at the Waleed border crossing between Syria and Iraq. One extended family of 13 people was living in a one-bedroom unit.

Syria now holds 290,000 Iraqi refugees, more than 70 per cent of whom have lived there for at least four years. And back in May 2007, The New York Times reported that thousands of Iraqi women have been forced to work in prostitution. The report said:

Aid workers say $50 to $70 is considered a good night's wage for an Iraqi prostitute working in Damascus. And some of the Iraqi dancers in the crowded casinos of Damascus suburbs earn much less ... From Damascus it is only about six hours by car, passing through Jordan, to the Saudi border. Syria, where it is relatively easy to buy alcohol and dance with women, is popular as a low-cost weekend destination for groups of Saudi men.

One Iraqi prostitute told the reporter:

The rents here in Syria are too expensive for their families. If they go back to Iraq they'll be slaughtered, and this is the only work available.

This is the orderly queue we hear about. Imagine what evil people would use people smugglers to jump from such a safe and secure environment. Surely the average Aussie, let alone Bolt and Scott Morrison, would happily bring up their families in such circumstances than spend six months in a leaky boat.

If you had to choose between selling one's daughter into prostitution and borrowing thousands to hit the high seas, the choice would be obvious. If Australian voters were more aware of the realities refugees from Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran must face, they would punish politicians who used imbecilic terms like "queue-jumper".

If anything good comes out of the Christmas Island tragedy, it will be that Australian politicians will have received a reality check. Demonising the most vulnerable should now become political suicide. Voters don't have the stomach for images of children smashed against rocks and drowning, even if it means a more humane and sensible asylum- seeker policy.

Finally, here's a Christmas gift idea. Australian-Vietnamese entertainer Ahn Do has just published his memoir The Happiest Refugee: The extraordinary true story of a boy's journey from starvation at sea to becoming one of Australia's best loved comedians.

Irfan Yusuf is a lawyer and author of Once Were Radicals. This article was first published in the Canberra Times on Monday 20 December 2010.

UPDATE I: The following letter to the editor was published in the Canberra Times on 22 December 2010:

Rescue from evil

Good on you Irfan Yusuf for reminding our politicians what drives the Iraqis, Afghans and others to turn their back on their own country and seek refuge in a foreign land ("Asylum-seeker shame rises for some political pundits," Dec 20, p9). These people, who had hoped that the West would rescue them from the clutches of their wicked rulers, now realise that their safety and security was hardly the concern of the armies that dropped in to liberate them. The least we can do for these desperate people is to rescue them from the new evil which our poorly planned mission helped create.

Sam Nona
Burradoo, NSW

COMMENT:So what on earth do we do with Afghanistan?

A British Army doctor named Henry Walter Bellew wrote these words after spending a fair bit of time in Kandahar and Kabul:

Now that our armies are in possession of Kandahar and Kabul ... the question arises, what are we to do with the country heretofore governed from these seats of authority, and latterly in the possession of the Ruler seated at Kabul.

We run the show. What do we do? How do we run it?

The question is one which must before very long be answered by the logic of accomplished facts, consequent on the stern demands of necessity more than of mere policy.

We have to figure this out. It isn't enough to just conquer and hope for the best. We need to have some kind of strategy, some direction that we can develop with (if not impose upon) the people of the country.

For having, as we have now done, completely destroyed the authority and government of the tyrannous and treacherous ... Rulers, whose power it has been our policy to maintain and strengthen during the past quarter of a century, it is now incredible that we shall deliberately abandon the vantage ground gained, ignore the great danger we have now thereby staved off, and leave the country a prey to internal anarchy ...

We put these kinds of people in power in the first place. They were our tyrants. We protected their power. And now?

In case you're wondering, the good doctor was writing from Lahore. In 1880. Yep, some things just don't change.

It's all in a fascinating book entitled The Races Of Afghanistan Being A Brief Account Of The Principal Nations Inhabiting That Country.

Words © 2010 Irfan Yusuf




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CRIKEY: Welcome to the US of Hey, that’s a lot of security

What do you get when you build your intelligence service up to such a size that it occupies three times the floorspace as the main centre of your executive government? When the services employ about150% of the population of your capital city? And when the amount of intelligence reports produced are so huge that a large proportion are just ignored completely?

Surely you’d have some kind of dictatorship or police state on the scale of China or North Korea or some tinpot Arab state. You’d also have the United States of America.

The Washington Post has produced an investigative report called “Top Secret America” (TSA), which has become effectively the fourth of three branches of US government since the September 11 terrorist attacks and has created

... what amounts to an alternative geography.

You’d think something this big would be effective in protecting Americans from terror. But as the Post argues,

... the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

That’s right. The “Land of the Free” has a huge but secretive inner core to protect the freedoms of the free but that the free have little knowledge of. And there is no co-ordinating “American Homeland Security Agency” (AHSA — credits to The Hollowmen.)

All this creates huge opportunities for corrupted or manufactured intelligence to enter the system and lead to bungle after bungle. TSA bungles could lead to the wrong person being indefinitely detained, deported, tortured or even killed. One such person could be Australian citizen David Hicks, who is currently seeking to have his conviction overturned. Another such person would definitely have to be Australian citizen Mamdouh Habib, released from Guantanamo gulag without a single charge being laid.

Most TSA spending went on during the Bush/Cheney administration.

[T]he Bush administration and Congress gave agencies more money than they were capable of responsibly spending ... In all, at least 263 organisations have been created or reorganised as a response to 9/11. Each has required more people, and those people have required more administrative and logistic support ... With so many more employees, units and organisations, the lines of responsibility began to blur.

And this was an allegedly conservative President who believed in small government.

TSA has a strong private industry focus, with about 2000 contractor companies and a staggering 850,000 people with top security clearance. Despite even US Defence Secretary Robert Gates saying that “getting your arms around [the growth of intelligence networks] ... is a challenge”, the response from the intelligence community was a predictable denial.

So much money is now being spent, we are told, to fight violent extremism. Yet some 25 years ago, huge amounts were spent to support the same violent extremism. Much of the money used to fight the Soviet Union, Reagan’s so-called “Evil Empire”, was spent on a group of “freedom fighters” in a tiny country called Afghanistan. Among America’s allies was an Afghan faction that included one Mullah Omar. Also allied to the US was a chap named Usama, a young member of a Saudi business family with close ties to the Bush family.

And now we are back there fighting the forces of Mullah Omar and Usama. And losing. And its costing America more money than anyone in the US government can count. It’s also costing Australia troops.

First published in Crikey on Wednesday 21 July 2010.

Words © 2010 Irfan Yusuf


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OPINION: Refugee Hysteria Suggests Aussies Have Forgotten Their Own Ancestors

YOU can always tell when Australia has entered election mode. Suddenly the really big issues come to the fore - issues that affect the economy, national security, indeed Australia's very survival. Issues like the occasional arrival of a handful of desperate boat people from Afghanistan, Iraq or Sri Lanka via Indonesia.

On Sunday, March 28, Rupert Murdoch's tabloids across Australia ran the front-page story of a mass invasion of asylum seekers. In Brisbane, the headline was THEY'RE HERE.

And who were they? The paper reported that 2000 asylum seekers had made it to Christmas Island, while 425 people were being housed on the mainland. But the real nightmare was seven adults and three children going shopping in Brisbane. They spent an hour and a quarter in a shopping centre, the paper howled.

The group returned with two shopping trolleys loaded with grocery bags. Their purchases included Home Brand Hawaiian pizza, Smith's potato chips and cartons of Coca-Cola.

How selfish of seven adults to share pizza, chips and soft drink. And to think these people claim to be desperate refugees!

Anyway, back to the world of sanity. Readers with even a basic knowledge of Australian history will find the current immigration hysteria ironic. For some reason, non-European illegal immigrants seem to bring out the worst indignation in white Australia. It's as if Aussies have forgotten their own ancestors came here from mother England on boats. And many were here as a result of being sentenced for the kinds of offences for which our migration laws today would bar them from leaving Sydney airport.

Australians are all too quick to forget the key historical role people from Afghanistan played during the mid-19th century. For 60 years, these men and their camels were the only transportation available through the centre of Australia, servicing distant mines and sheep stations as well as being involved in Australia's first overland telegraph line.

With troops fighting in Afghanistan, Australia has an obligation under international law to restore order. Australia and its coalition and Nato partners have singularly failed to do this. Hence, when it comes to accepting Afghan refugees, Australia has a major responsibility. Sadly it is the conservatives, self-declared protectors of Australia's Christian heritage, who show the least Christian attitude towards refugees.

The prejudice in Australia's popular media toward anyone deemed a Middle Eastern migrant is so endemic that one can only hope God in his good sense doesn't send the Son of Man to Australia for the Second Coming.

IN AUGUST last year, on an ABC television chat show, Liberal deputy leader Julie Bishop reminded viewers of the perils posed to Australia by an increase in the number of people arriving by boat.

She shared the panel with conservative American humorist P J O'Rourke. He found all this hysteria about boat people in Australia and some parts of the EU rather amusing.

You know, we in the States have much, much more experience with being all wrong about immigration than you do. I mean, 36,000 you said in Italy? We laugh. That's a day in the United States. And we are so wrong about it. I mean, build a fence on the border with Mexico, give a huge boost to the Mexican ladder industry, you know ...

Ms Bishop tried to rescue her conservative credentials after being showed up by O'Rourke. She recited the usual Liberal Party mantra about people smugglers.

O'Rourke's response?

Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. You know, if you open your borders, you don't have people smugglers ...

These people are assets. One or two of them might not be, but you can sort them out later. Oh, I think conservatives are getting this wrong all over the world, I really do.

The Rudd Labor Government is not much better. Australia's immigration minister recently announced that the processing of new asylum applications from Sri Lanka and Afghanistan would be suspended. The government says circumstances have changed in both countries such that it is now safe enough for asylum applicants to return.

That being the case, one can expect Australian troops in Afghanistan to prepare for their imminent return. Yet the reality is that the US is getting ready to send 17,000 more troops into the country and has requested its allies (including Australia) to increase their troop presence. Canadian Defence Minister Peter MacKay has told Nato and other allies that the military alliance cannot take its foot off the gas in Afghanistan, simply because the US is about to send 17,000 more troops.

And so we have all this fuss over 4500 boat people. Meanwhile, there is little fuss over 50,000 illegal immigrants from Britain and the US.

In the Australian psyche, illegal immigrants must necessarily be non-European and non-white. Either that or some illegal immigrants are more illegal than others.

Irfan Yusuf is a Sydney lawyer and writer. This article was first published in the Dominion-Post in Wellington, New Zealand.

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OPINION: Rising trend of fearmongering on refugees and passports ...

Coalition rhetoric now appears to slipping back to the worst practices of the Howard era, IRFAN YUSUF writes ...

Tony Abbott wasn’t exactly born into the Liberal establishment. His political mentor was none other than Bob Santamaria, the ultraconservative Catholic activist who founded the National Civic Council and who was more concerned with ridding trade unions of communism than supporting what he described as Menzies’ "party of capital".

In his book Battlelines, published shortly before his accession to the Liberal leadership, Abbott affectionately refers to his mentor as "Santa". He admits that Santamaria (who died in 1998) had some concerns about the young Abbott joining the Liberals. Santamaria apparently had a

... prejudice that serious Catholics couldn’t advance in the Liberal Party.

In recent times, followers of other non-Protestant faiths must be wondering whether the same applies to them. Recent comments about asylum seekers, burqas and passport forgeries must surely make us wonder whether the Australian electorate would be ready for "Captain Catholic" to rule over a country where Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam are the fastest growing faiths.

Many wondered during the mid-1990s whether John Howard, the man who suggested that Asian migrants may not make a neat cultural fit, could one day become prime minister of a country located closer to Kuala Lumpur than London.

Coalition rhetoric on these issues today seems a mere continuation of the worst of the Howard era. Former Liberal prime minister (and now former party member) Malcolm Fraser described the party as being more about"fear and reaction".

The recent "real action" advertisement shows the origin of illegal immigrants to Australia. Five red arrows are shown emerging from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Indonesia respectively. The words "Stop illegals now" are shown in the top left corner of the screen.



No red arrow was shown emerging from Britain, even though it provides one of the largest proportions of illegal immigrants in Australia, certainly larger than any of the five Asian and Middle Eastern nations shown in the Liberal advertisement.

Presumably the Coalition strategists regard white-skinned English-speaking Brits as less scary than dark-skinned English-speaking Tamils or olive-complexioned Iraqi Christians.

The Coalition has also announced a return to some form of Pacific solution. This will involve the offshore processing of any asylum seekers arriving “illegally”. We will also see a return to Temporary Protection Visas under a future Coalition government. Yet, as Bernard Keane notes in Crikey, there was "a 50 per cent surge in asylum seekers coming by boat after TPVs were introduced in 1999" by the Howard government.

Furthermore, most TPV holders were eventually granted refugee status. The TPV regime is hardly incentive for “illegals” to avoid boats altogether. Hence the Liberals could once again become the people smugglers’ best friends.

Yet the irony is that so much of the fear-mongering runs directly contrary to Australia’s best interests, let alone liberal and/or conservative fundamentals and common sense. At times, the Howard government showed a complete disdain for Australian citizenship, all the while spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertising campaigns encouraging permanent residents to take up citizenship.

The complete disdain Howard and his ministers showed to Australian citizens David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib, unlawfully detained by the United States, was just one example of how fear-mongering was used to evade the government’s responsibilities to its own citizens.

Recent comments by Julie Bishop show an even greater disdain for the rights of Australian citizens whose passports have been fraudulently used to carry out a terrorist act. Some may baulk at the suggestion that the murder of a Hamas leader could be deemed a terrorist act given that the deceased was himself responsible for acts of terror. Hamas, they will say, was a murderous organisation with a history of bloody retaliation.

And now Hamas will have a large number of Australian passport holders on their retaliation list.

To make matters worse, Bishop indicated (and hastily retracted) that Australian governments had forged other countries’ passports for use by our intelligence services.

One wonders whether Bishop was part of such a government and privy to such a decision, or, if such forgeries existed, whether they were used in assassinations or other forms of terrorism.

Indeed, can Abbott promise that a future Coalition government will not forge overseas passports, including those of permanent residents and citizens? Will he be prepared to put this in writing?

The Coalition has again been caught out placing the interests of foreign countries (albeit allies) above the safety and security of Australian citizens. In government they allowed two Australian citizens to languish in an illegal US prison camp in Cuba at the insistence of the US. Now, in Opposition, the Coalition is showing effective disdain to the security of Australian citizens to protect the sentiments of a nuclear-powered Middle Eastern government that used Australian passports to carry out an assassination.

And to think Bishop was accusing her opponents of appeasing an overseas lobby.

■ Irfan Yusuf is a lawyer, a former federal Liberal candidate and author of Once Were Radicals. This article was first published in the Canberra Times on Friday 28 May 2010.

UPDATE I: Neil James of the self-styled Australian Defence Association wrote this delightful letter to the newspaper.

In what again seems to skate closely to an apologia for Islamist terrorism, and among other polemical claims too numerous to refute, Irfan Yusuf ("Rising trend of fear-mongering on refugees and passports," May 28, p13) incorrectly claims that David Hicks was "unlawfully detained by the United States'' in an "illegal prison camp".

Under the Geneva Convention, as a Taliban combatant captured by the opposite side in a war he chose to fight in, David Hicks was not detained illegally for a single minute at least, perhaps, until his later separate criminal trial and prison sentence by US Military Commission. He was only detained by the US for so long because the war continued, and our then inadequate treachery laws meant he could not be released on prison of war-type parole for criminal trial in Australia (as the US was willing to do).

Fortunately this long-standing and disgraceful legal loophole has been closed so a future Wilfred Burchett or David Hicks can have his day in court. Rightly, since the Security Legislation Amendment (Terrorism) Act, 2002, an Australian citizen anywhere in the world now commits treason if he or she (among other things):

*intentionally assists, by any means whatsoever, an enemy, at war with the Commonwealth;

*intentionally assists, by ''any means whatsoever'', another country or organisation that is engaged in armed hostilities against the Australian Defence Force; or

*forms an intention to do any of the above acts and manifests that intention by an overt act.

In a liberal democracy ruled by law we owe no less to the men and women of the Australian Defence Force. Irfan Yusuf should be prepared to acknowledge this.

Neil James, executive director, Australia Defence Association

What can I say? Unlike you, Mr James, I don't consider myself an expert in public international law. But I find your suggestion that our men and women overseas are fighting and dying so that our liberties can be curtailed by draconian laws you and the small minority of similar mind boast of to be utterly ridiculous and an insult to our armed forces.

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AFGHANISTAN: Rudd government celebrates the changed circumstances ...

Australia's Immigration Minister has unilaterally announced that the situation in Afghanistan is changing for the better. Wonderful. No doubt his staff would have checked news reports and found the following signs of peace and harmony ...

[01] The situation on the ground has certainly improved. Five Afghan civilians were killed by a roadside bomb today. Some 13 were injured.

[02] Canada has announced that its forces will stay in Afghanistan beyond 2011. Here's what the Ottawa Citizen reported:

Defence Minister Peter MacKay warned Canada’s NATO allies Friday the military alliance cannot take its “foot off the gas” in Afghanistan, simply because the United States is about to send 17,000 more troops to the country.

[03] The Yanks are sending in a further 17,000 troops into the country.

[04] Relations between the United States and Afghan President Hamid Karzai are at an all-time low.

[05] Democracy is working so well that the Parliament has had to issue ultimatum to Karzai to fill 11 Cabinet posts within 10 days.

[06] The Taliban is so much on the run that even Hamid Karzai wants to join them.

[07] Far from fighting drugs, the Afghan President might be too busy using them himself! Here's what a former deputy UN envoy to Kabul, Peter Galbraith, has to say:

He's prone to tirades, he can be very emotional, act impulsively," Mr Galbraith said. "In fact some of the palace insiders say that he has a certain fondness for some of Afghanistan's most profitable exports.

Yep, this is a country fast changing for the better. Hence we have every reason to bring our troops home. Speaking of troops ...

VIDEO: Rabiye Kadeer's call to settle remaining Uighur Guantanamo detainees ...

Exiled World Uighur Congress leader Rabiye Kadeer told the National Press Club in Canberra yesterday:

All of the Uighurs in Albania, Bermuda and Palau are living very normal and productive lives -- so we'd be happy if Australia took the four.

Below is a documentary from AlJazeera English showing the experiences of four Uighurs living in Albania.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf






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FILM: Pakistan's first English-language feature movie in 3 decades ...

With all this media frenzy over the Taliban and terrorism in the combined "Af-Pak" territory (as if Afghanistan and Pakistan have no right to be considered sovereign nations if it hinders Western perceptions of security!), it's important for us not to dehumanise the experiences of Pakistanis and Afghans.

The Lifting Of The Veil: Kashf is a new feature film directed by Ayesha Khan, a Pakistani film maker who grew up in Pakistan but is now based in Europe. Here's a brief synopsis of the movie:

Armaghan is born out of an oath his mother makes to a Pir priest she meets at a Sufi Shrine when she was childless. She promises the Pir who blesses her to let her first son “walk the Sufi path” when he grows up. But shortly after his birth in Pakistan, Armaghan is sent off to the US to live with relatives after his father’s death. After 25 years Armaghan returns to Pakistan a young man to discover a lost culture, a mystic religion, and a family secret.

You will find interesting interviews with Khan here and here.



Personally I have a problem with the "government-sponsored Sufism is the solution to all our security woes" analysis. I prefer the approach that Congressman Charlie Wilson called for in Afghanistan - spending money on schools and hospitals and development and creating jobs and hope. Poverty and hopelessness attract people to desperation which terrorists feed off. But I guess it isn't in some people's interest to do that.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf


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OPINION: Repressive rule losing lustre in Iran?

It's not often the leader of the free world publicly acknowledges his country sabotaged the democracy of another country.

Yet this is exactly what United States President Barack Obama did during his speech in Cairo, billed as an address to the Arab and wider Muslim world.

And which country deserved this honourable mention? Why none other than Iran, referred to by Obama's predecessor George W. Bush as one of three nations making up the "Axis of Evil".

For many years, Iran has defined itself in part by its opposition to my country, and there is indeed a tumultuous history between us. In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government. Since the Islamic Revolution, Iran has played a role in acts of hostage-taking and violence against US troops and civilians.

It's little wonder the self-styled Islamic Republic of Iran has defined itself by opposition to the United States.

As Obama states, the US played a key role in the royalist coup that overthrew Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq in August 1953.

US and British agents installed Iran's Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The West resumed its near unfettered access to Iran's oil.

The Shah was at first an enlightened monarch who focused on education and economic development. However, he succumbed to more dictatorial instincts, his ruthless secret police unleashing a brutal crackdown on any opposition, whether from leftist parties or from religious scholars led by the late Ayatollah Khomeini.

Not even the full backing of the United States could keep the Shah in power and he fled Iran in January 1979. Since the establishment of the Islamic Republic, Iran and the US have fought each other using proxies.

America's main agent was former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who began a decade-long war against Iran in September 1980.

I was a teenager in Sydney at the time. The internet was not widely available, and our access to news was limited to whatever we were fed by local media.

We were told it was Iran that had invaded Iraq, and Saddam Hussein was a moderate democrat fighting the good fight against Iranian theocratic extremism.

There were other myths. Iran was just one Islamic hotspot in the world. The other was Afghanistan, where theocratic-minded tribal warlords were battling the military might of the Soviet Union.

America and the West were opposing Islamic theocracy in Iran and yet were supporting it in Afghanistan.

In mosques and Islamic centres across the Western world, including New Zealand and Australia, young Muslims were taught that the Iranian-style Islam was evil and anti-Western.

Meanwhile the Islam of Saudi Arabia and the Afghan mujahideen was presented as good and pro-Western. Iran's main proxies have been various Islamist political movements and militias that have struck US interests both directly and indirectly in various parts of the Middle East.

These include Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Palestinian territories and more recently the dominant faction in the democratically elected Government of Iraq.

The great irony of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime was the power vacuum was soon filled by America's sworn enemy.

American troops maintain security in a country effectively administered by Iranian proxies.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of Iran's Islamic revolution. Iran has become a regional superpower, one of the few Middle Eastern nations with some kind of functioning democracy.

Yet the battle for Iran's future wasn't won by the religious elite in 1979. This week, reformists will battle the eccentric conservative President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.

The reformists want to see a return to the liberal days of former President Mohammad Khatami.

Most Iranians are under 30. They are an educated generation that knows only a repressive revolution whose Basij or morality police regulate their lives.

Iranian Muslim youth aren't the only ones disillusioned with theocratic politics. Many young Muslims in the West like myself, once attracted to political Islam, have now become disillusioned in it.

At the same time, we feel disenchanted with Western attempts to manipulate it, then demonise it when it suits. When politicians attempt to co-opt religion, both religion and politics lose in the end.

* Irfan Yusuf's book, Once Were Radicals: My Years As A Teenage Islamo-Fascist, was published last month by Allen & Unwin. This article was first published in the New Zealand Herald on 11 June 2009.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf

VIDEO: US troops handed out Bibles in both Iraq and Afghanistan ...

What's the big deal with a bit of evangelism? Better a Bible than vicious dogs at your testicles, I say.

Except that handing out Bibles confirms all the stereotypes Arabs and Afghans have of Coalition forces occupying the country just to bring Iraq and Afghanistan into the broader "Christian empire". Taliban propagandists will have an even bigger field day than they are already having with US bombardments on US civilians.

Here is the text accompanying this video:

The highest ranking military officer in the United States says it's not the military's position to ever push any specific form of religion, in response to an exclusive Al Jazeera report that showed a group of US soldiers in Afghanistan in possession of Bibles translated into local languages.

The troops discussed giving the Bibles to Afghans as gifts - despite military directives banning soldiers from spreading religion, as Al Jazeera's James Bays reports.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf




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AFGHANISTAN/VIDEO: US troops caught out evangelising among Afghans?

US troops are caught with resources to convert Afghan locals to Christianity. This is a serious development. The video footage below was taken 12 months ago. Who knows how long all this has been happening?

The sensitivity of religion in this part of the world cannot be over-emphasised. This kind of video footage can and no doubt will be used by Taliban propagandists to undermine the Karzai government. This could well threaten the security of our own troops.

The US army has some explaining to do. So does Kevin Rudd.

The text accompanying the video is reproduced below.

US soldiers in Afghanistan have been filmed with local language Bibles and urged to be "witnesses for Jesus" despite anti-proselytising rules. Al Jazeera's James Bays reports.

COMMENT: Border Insecurity ...

The letters section of the Daily Telegraph of Friday 24 April 2009 has two typical examples of uninformed hysteria concerning the issue of "border security" and asylum seekers. I'm in no way suggesting the Tele shouldn'y be publishing these letters. Everyone's voice should be heard, and it's useful to know just what some people are thinking about such sensitive issues.

The first letter is from one P Cummins. It starts like this ...

The reason we now have a swag of boat people trying to get into Australia is because the Rudd Government last year loosened our border security laws ...

This might possibly be true in the case of Afghan and Iraqi asylum seekers, but the fact is that the conflict in Sri Lanka has only recently escalated to the extent that many Tamil civilians are fleeing directly from Sri Lanka as opposed to via Indonesia.

They need to be tightened for the protection of the citizens of this country, an obligation the Government has to its people.

So Australian citizens need to be protected from weak malnourished asylum seekers fleeing persecution. And what will these poor people bring with them? WMD? Nuclear weapons?

One has to ask why all of these asylum seekers come down to Australia? There are dozens of Muslim countries near Iraq and Afghanistan that are wealthy and not at war, where other Muslims and their families would fit right in and be comfortable.

There are hundreds of thousands of Iraqis living in Syria, which is struggling to accommodate them. Syria is itself not a terribly wealthy nation. Hazara Afghans fleeing the Taliban would hardly want to stick around in Pakistan where elements of the same Taliban have taken over large areas of the country. And using your reasoning, I'm not sure which Muslim-majority country Tamil Sri Lankans will go to given that they're a mixture of Hindu and Christian. In any event, it isn't just about religion. People's identities are not limited to religion. If our identity was solely determined by religion, we should have seen Kevin Rudd and/or Malcolm Turnbull and not John Safran being nailed to a cross in the Philippines. After all, the Philippines is a Catholic country, and both Rudd and Turnbull are Catholic.

So why come many thousands of miles down to Australia, a basically British culture and a Christian country? These are the questions we should be asking.

In that case, I'm sure quite a few of these people would happily convert to Christianity if it meant they and their families would be safe. After all, quite a few asylum seekers such as Kashmiri Peter Qasim converted to Christianity. However, that didn't stop him from being kept in detention by the Howard government even though it drove him into severe depression. And I guess we shouldn't have any problem accepting Tamil Christian asylum seekers. As for being British, I don't think indogenous Aussies were eating with knives and forks 40,000 years ago. Then again, neither were the Poms for that matter.

But why should we be asking such questions? After all, our immigration system does not discriminate on the basis of religion. And anyway, how can we really tell what religion a person subscribes to? Or is it someone we determine based on their racial background? So we assume that an Iraqi must be Muslim because he is Iraqi and has an Arabic-sounding name, even if he could well be a Chaldean or Yazidi or Assyrian Orthodox?

Then there is a letter from one Lynne Cole whose arguments make a similar degree of (non)sense.

The recent boatload of asylum seekers were all male, presumably some of them are or were married, perhaps with children. So they left family behind to cope with the Taliban on their own.

Your point being? That these men just callously left their families behind and left without so much as a goodbye? That their families had no say in the matter? That their family members don't wish to see even one person flee to safety? Or are you saying that their families are all in Afghanistan or Pakistan and not in Indonesia? That the Taliban have made it to Jakarta?

How will the families of the five dead survive?

Are you suggesting you're really concerned about their welfare and would support their migrating to Australia?

Why aren't these brave men standing shoulder-to-shoulder with our young soldiers who are in Afghanistan trying to improve the lot of the Afghan people?

Maybe for the same reason the vast majority of young Australian men and women aren't there - they're not professional soldiers. And maybe because it isn't nice staying in a place where you could be kicked out of your property and/or be murdered at anytime and where you've already seen family members slaughtered. And from a strategic perspective, the last thing Coalition forces and the Afghan National Army needs is severely traumatised people fighting on their side.

Our young men are killed or injured while these people choose to try for an easy life in Australia.

It's so easy being away from one's family and only hearing their voices on the other end of a phone (presuming you can even contact them). It's a piece of cake surviving in a new country where you aren't allowed to work and cannot access any social security and are forced to rely on charity to make some kind of a living. And on top of that, having to deal with the trauma of having just survived life in a warzone and mourning alone over your dead relatives, presuming that you even know that they are dead.

Those we have already admitted no doubt tell those back home that what a soft touch we are.

Pfft. Are you suggesting, Lynne, that we start behaving like al-Qaeda and Taliban and LTTE and the Sri Lankan Army just so that you feel protected from nasty dark-skinned refugees? I'm glad we are a soft touch. If you want to experience a not-so-soft touch, feel free to go join our brave men and women fighting in Afghanistan.

VIDEO/AFGHANISTAN: Alarming rise in Afghan civilian casualties ...

The United States are sending more troops to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban and prop up Afghanistan's Islamist government. But what of ordinary Afghans? What do they think of the troop surge? How does it affect civilians?

The following video from AlJazeera English shows the picture on the ground as rarely shown by international newsagencies that seem unconcerned with civilian casualties. Here is the text that goes with the video.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf

The number of civilians killed in fighting between the Taliban and foreign forces in Afghanistan is rising.

The United Nations says the toll in 2008 was 40 per cent more than in the previous year, and things could get worse with the arrival of more US troops.

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COMMENT: Afghanistan - here's a thought ...

Nadeem Aslam is an English writer of Pakistani heritage. He wrrived with his family in Pakistan when he was just 14 years old. His family had fled the brutal regime of General Mohammad Ziaul Haq, one of a series of Western-backed Pakistani military dictators.

Nadeem Aslam is currently touring Australia. In an interview with the Canberra Times, Aslam made these observations about Afghanistan:

... I thought that Afghanistan had been forgotten. Now this sounds like a very strange thing to say, because Afghanistan is in the news every single day. But it's in the news every day for what it is doing to the rest of the world. So many American soldiers have died there, so many Canadian soldiers, so many NATO soldiers.

But what the world did to Afghanistan over the past 30 years seems to be news to most people.

About writing and the Taliban, Aslam remarks:

For me it's about feeling a certain responsibility toward the world I live in, and if the darkness is there it must be acknowledged." He believes too that he, like all moderate Muslims, must speak up for a moderate Islam.

The Taliban said that only one book was allowed and I wanted to have a house in which the books were nailed to the ceiling, so that there is a constant literary rain throughout the novel, so that when the books fall to the ground and the characters pull out the nails there's a hole through them and then they read whatever it is.

I wanted to say that I don't want to live in a world where the Koran is the only book.

I'd also hate to live in a world where only one book existed, even (indeed especially) if it was one millions believe had been sent from above.

(Thanks to CCN)

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf


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VIDEO/AFGHANISTAN: Secret talks between Karzai government and Taliban ...

While Australian and NATO troops are engaged in fierce fighting against the Taliban, the US-backed Islamist government of Hamid Karzai is secretly negotiating to strike a deal with Taliban leaders. The secret talks have taken place in Saudi Arabia, London and Dubai. The US denies any direct involvement in the secret negotiations.

It seems the deal involves allowing leader of the Hizb-i-Islami jihadi faction, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, to be allowed to eventually return to Afghanistan with full immunity from prosecution. Hekmatyar led one of the larger jihad factions that fought against the Soviet Union during the 1980's, most of his support coming from the US and Saudi Arabia. Following Soviet withdrawal, Hekmatyar served as Prime Minister but was unable to resolve differences with his main jihadi rival, the late Ahmad Shah Masud of the Jamiat-i-Islami faction. The current Karzai government is dominated by Masud loyalists.

But after 9/11, Hekmatyar decuded to support the Taliban. Following the Taliban's defeat, Hekmatyar has been in hiding.

Will the talks succeed? Who knows ...

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf




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CRIKEY: Mafia scandal should make O'Farrell and Turnbull very nervous ...

Well it’s been a bad few weeks for the Federal Parliamentary Liberal Party.

Brendan Nelson decided to POQ, his parting message to many of his more senior colleagues to join him. Julie Bishop was effectively demoted. Former leader John Hewson wrote op-eds in Fairfax papers telling Costello to also POQ. Joe Hockey reckons Costello’s refusal to POQ makes him resemble Prince Charles waiting for Queen Lizzy to kick the bucket or abdicate. Both Phillip Ruddock and Bronwyn Bishop are facing pressure from their branches to POQ. And just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, it now seems the Federal Police have been investigating links between the Liberal Party organisation and a local franchise of the Calabrian mafia.

The Party has seen better days. Who could forget that famous scene when John Howard told a packed hall of Liberal Party faithful on the eve of the 2001 federal election: "We will decide who comes into this country and the circumstances in which they come". If allegations raised in The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald today are anything to go by, it seems the Howard government had decided who (persons with links to organised crime) would entered and remained in Australia and the circumstances (political donations) in which they would come.

It shamelessly lied in accusing asylum seekers of throwing their children overboard. John Howard and Phillip Ruddock, in the name of "border protection", happily took a cue from Saddam Hussein and Donald Rumsfeld by locking up in detention centres ordinary Iraqis and Afghans (including children) fleeing persecution, all the while boasting of a "war on terror" designed to liberate Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yet the Liberal Party Division in both John Howard’s and Malcolm Turnbull’s home state was happy to accept donations from people allegedly close to the Calabrian mafia. Liberal MP’s happily lobbied to keep a man accused of having mafia links in Australia and happily received donations of up to $150,000 from his buddies.

Vanstone denies donations affected her decision to intervene, which she claimed was made on humanitarian grounds. Vanstone had evidence of the person’s links to organised crime. She overruled her Department’s recommendation and exercised her discretion to allow the individual to remain in Australia, overturning the decision of her predecessor. Fairfax also reports that the man was subsequently arrested in relation to his alleged involvement in the world’s largest importation of the illegal drug ecstasy.

This was supposed to be the government which prided itself on its national security credentials. This is the party which wants to form the next State Government in New South Wales. Barry O’Farrell should be more than a little nervous And Malcolm Turnbull must be on the verge of a cardiac arrest.

First published in Crikey on Monday 23 February 2009.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf


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LETTERS/CRIKEY: Exchange of correspondence on Afghanistan and Charlie Wilson's war ...

Some readers might recall a piece I wrote for Crikey last December (reproduced here) about the continuing conflict in Afghanistan and its historical context.

One Crikey reader, Niall Clugston, responded to that piece on 5 January 2009 as follows:

Re: Charlie Wilson's Afghan f*ck-up (19 December). Irfan Yusuf seems to admire Charlie Wilson's War but doesn't seem to recognise the movie as a masterpiece of unconscious irony, including an uncanny prediction of the Bhutto assassination. Bizarrely enough, the movie proceeds as if September 11 never happened and never mentions Osama bin Laden. And, no, I don't think the result of scrupulous historical accuracy by Hollywood! Yusuf approvingly quotes the movie's conclusion. Never mind that it asserts that the "crazies" only arrived after the well-meaning Americans left. Why can't we just be told the truth?

My response to Niall's letter, published in Crikey on 6 January 2008, is as follows:

Niall Clugston "Comments" claims that Congressman Charlie Wilson suggested that the crazies "only arrived after the well-meaning Americans left". I'm not so sure about that. And even if he did claim this, the fact is that the Afghan mujahideen and their supporters consisted of some pretty crazy people. I suggest he might consult Peter Bergen's oral history of Osama bin Laden, especially the sections where Bergen deals with bin-Laden's Arab faction and his dealings with Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri. He might also do some research on the inter-factional wars that took place after the Soviets withdrew and before the Taleban took charge. Some of these crazies occupy seats in the current Afghanistan Parliament and are even ministers in the Karzai government. There are no clear goodies and badies in this war -- just lots of crazies.

CRIKEY: Charlie Wilson's prophecy comes true ...

Our military campaign in Afghanistan involves allying ourselves with thugs who may be tomorrow’s bin-Ladins, writes Irfan Yusuf ...

In the movie Charlie Wilson's War, Tom Hanks plays the role of the Democratic Congressman from Texas who embroiled the United States in the last hot conflict of the Cold War. In real life, Wilson appeared on American 60 Minutes explained how he saw the Afghanistan conflict as being not just about defeating the Soviet Union, but also about making real and lasting change to the lives of ordinary Afghans, millions of whom were displaced in refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran.

In 1993, Wilson described the jihad in these terms ...

... the Afghan freedom fighters ... probably the most heroic response to tyranny in modern history.

The US and its jihadist allies (including an all-Arab militia led by Osama bin Ladin) defeated the Soviet Union, which withdraw its troops from Afghanistan in 1989. The Americans abandoned Afghanistan to tribal warlords and then to the Taliban. Wilson tried in vain to convince his colleagues in Congress and the President that the US now needed to rescue and repair Afghanistan in much the same way as it did Western Europe after the Second World War. They ignored his pleas. Congressman Wilson tld his colleagues:

We always go in with our ideals. Then we leave. But the ball keeps bouncing.

At the conclusion of the film, a quote from Wilson appears on the screen:

These things happened and they changed the world. Then we f-cked up the end game.

The grand Afghanistan f-ck-up continues, with President Hamid Karzai telling the Chicago Tribune that the United States policy of empowering allegedly friendly militias will prove disastrous in the long term. Karzai describes them as:

... thugs or warlords... those people who have no limits to misbehaviour.

In his Christmas visit to Australian troops in Afghanistan, Kevin Rudd told troops he had been to too many funerals. Our troops are involved in both fighting insurgents and building essential community infrastructure in Oruzgan province, including schools and hospitals. Young soldiers like Stuart Nash die doing work Congressman Charlie Wilson insisted America needed to do back in 1989. Meanwhile, Osama bin Ladin and Mullah Omar still haven't been captured. Our military campaign involves allying ourselves with thugs who may be tomorrow's bin-Ladins.

They call this madness "The War on Terror".

First published in Crikey on Friday 19 December 2008.




Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf


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