OPINION: Aussies still fighting other people's wars

In the early hours of April 25, 1915, Australia and New Zealand entered World War 1.

Neither country was being directly invaded or even threatened.

The Anzac troops were offloaded on the beaches of Gelibolu (or Gallipoli as we know it) at the Cannakale peninsula of western Turkey. The landing was part of a disastrous war strategy developed by their British war commanders.

The young men were part of an imperial army, fighting for King more than their own country. As if to underscore just how much this battle was the war for foreign powers, one of the most characteristically Australian symbols of the campaign was the image of Simpson and his donkey trudging through the hills above Anzac Cove rescuing the war wounded.

The reality, of course, is that John Simpson Kirkpatrick was an English illegal immigrant who joined the war effort in Australia by accident when he boarded a ship carrying Anzac troops to the frontline. Kirkpatrick was not seeking to fight but rather just a free ride back home to Mother England.

Yet for many non-Irish diggers, being British did not make you any less Australian. In fact, even using Australian symbols to the exclusion of British ones was regarded as extremely provocative. In a recent book review published in The Canberra Times, Frank O'Shea writes about Irish returned soldiers causing major controversy when they marched in 1920 under the Australian flag, not the Union Jack. In doing so, they effectively declared that they had fought for Australia rather than for Britain The Irish in Australia were Australians as well as Irish, whereas the loyalists were British first and Australian second.

Try telling the drunken racist rioters at Cronulla that they should also be holding up the Union Jack!

Few Australians know that New Zealand lost a much higher proportion of troops than Australia. Over 85 per cent of Kiwi troops were killed or wounded, compared to 50% of the Aussies.

The comparatively lesser Australian war losses may explain why Australians are still much keener to participate in other people's wars than their cousins across the Tasman. The largest New Zealand force in the Vietnam War was hardly 540 men, although over 3000 Kiwis did volunteer to join the war effort.

Since then, New Zealand has been far more circumspect about its military and even broader security relations with the United States. In a 2003 paper published by the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College, Dr Andrew Scobell notes that New Zealand had made its involvement in the war conditional on it receiving the imprimatur of the United Nations. Even then, New Zealand's involvement would be limited to providing logistical and humanitarian assistance and specialised military forces such as medical, engineering and mine clearance units.

Compare this to the government of then Prime Minister John Howard. Scobell notes that Howard, apart from former British PM Blair, was the staunchest supporter of a US-led military action against Iraq. Moreover, Australia is one of the few countries ready and willing to provide combat forces for a conflict with Iraq. In doing so, of course, Australia has also placed itself in the firing line of a variety of international terrorist groups.

Iraq is not the only foreign military adventure in which Australians are involved and which is going rather pear-shaped. How many Australians expected the Taliban to successfully regroup and fight so hard after their crushing defeat in 2001? Australia's new Defence Minister, Joel Fitzgibbon, has been calling on Nato commanders to reconsider military strategies in Afghanistan that are clearly failing and have already cost Australian lives. Not to mention that terrorists now have two reasons to eye Australia.

Perhaps the most shameful aspect of Australia's military history is its mistreatment of indigenous servicemen and women. Thousands of indigenous Australians fought overseas, with many hundreds giving the ultimate sacrifice to defend their nation. Yet the dead were buried in unmarked graves whilst the survivors were ineligible for returned servicemen land grants or even membership of Returned Services League (RSL) clubs.

Until recently, Aboriginal ex-servicemen were forced to march at the back of Anzac Day parades organised by the RSL. As the National Indigenous Times newspaper editorialised on Anzac Day in 2005:

So blackfellas were good enough to fight alongside white Australia, but that's where the new-found equality ended. How could this happen in a nation that defines itself by the noble digger? The technical answer is because Aboriginal people weren't considered Australian citizens until the referendum of 1967, so they didn't qualify for all the benefits that comes with being an Aussie.

So until 40 years ago, indigenous Australians were certainly fighting the wars of a country that did not recognise them as its own. What difference exists between this and fighting for a foreign power?

And thanks to the compulsory quarantining of pensions as part of the Northern Territory Intervention in Aboriginal communities, many indigenous ex-servicemen are having their pensions compulsorily quarantined.

With bigger battles against profound indigenous disadvantage to fight at home, why does my government continue to fight others' wars overseas.

Irfan Yusuf is a Sydney lawyer and writer. This article was first published in The Press of Christchurch on ANZAC Day, Friday 25 April 2008.



Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf


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OPINION: Pakistan has a key role in Middle East conflict

Pakistan must get Israel and Palestine to talk, writes IRFAN YUSUF

Here's a short history quiz. Name a country founded in the late 1940s from British-administered lands and established on the basis of ethno-religious identity for a group who regarded themselves as a nation separate to their host nation.

Believe it or not, there are two correct answers. Stranger still, these two countries declared their independence exactly nine months apart. The parallels aren't exact, but the exercise can suggest interesting conclusions.

Israel, the world's only modern Jewish state, declared its independence on May 14, 1948. Exactly nine months earlier, the new nation of Pakistan, founded as a homeland for Indian Muslims (or "Mussalmanoh" in Urdu/Hindi) declared its independence.

Pakistan was created out of those regions of India (save Kashmir) which had Muslim majorities. One could argue that the political mythology underlying Pakistan's creation almost exactly matches that of Israel. Pakistan's founders promoted a kind of Indian Muslim Zionism, claiming Indian Muslims were a nation separate from the rest of India.

The respective political mythologies of Pakistan and India run deep in the psyche of most South Asian migrants. The result for the children of both sets of migrants is often boring Sunday afternoon lunches where kids are forced to watch their parents trying to reinvent history. A gathering of Indian and Pakistani Muslims almost always involves a heated discussion on whether Pakistan should have been created.

Indian Muslim expats question Pakistan's political mythologies, while Pakistani expats express outrage at Muslims expressing such virtual sacrilege. Strangely enough, such sacrilege manages to find its way into newspaper columns and TV talkshows inside Pakistan. It seems the expats have greater resistance to such debates than the relatives left behind.

Israel and its diaspora supporters are also into their second and third generations. For these children and grandchildren of independence, the political mythology used to justify the creation and continued existence of their nation is no longer so sacred as to be beyond question.

Still, I can (at least try to) understand why so many Jews feel strongly about Israel.

The fact is that Israel has become central to Jewish identity, especially in Australia, which has the highest proportion of Holocaust survivors outside Israel. For many such survivors, Israel represents a kind of emotional insurance policy.

Yet, just as more Muslims live in India than Pakistan, more Jews live in the United States than in all of Israel.

The views of younger Jews critical of Israel may be uncomfortable for Israel's older supporters. Yet such arguments are happening inside Israel itself. Inevitably they will filter into the diaspora communities.

In the years leading up to 1947, many prominent Indian Muslims opposed partition. They argued Indian Muslims were not a separate nation needing a homeland separate from India and believed the idea of Pakistan was an attempt to impose ethno-religious nationalism on the region.

Similar arguments were used by Jewish opponents of Israel. Indeed Australia's first Australian-born Governor-General, Sir Isaac Isaacs, was opposed to the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. He argued that such a state could not be created without displacement of hundreds of thousands of indigenous peoples and would cause unnecessary tension between the Jewish and Islamic worlds.

In mentioning this, my purpose is not to re-visit the issue of Israel's right to exist.

Muslims who insist Israel has no right to exist are deluding themselves. Such claims enter the realm of hypocrisy when expressed by Pakistani Muslims.

If real and lasting peace is to occur in the Middle East, both Jews and Muslims need to re-assess their respective political theologies.

Jewish spokesmen insistent on defending each and every Israeli action in Gaza and other areas where the Israeli Defence Forces have been occupied are beginning to increasingly resemble my irrational Pakistani uncles who refuse to acknowledge the excesses of the Pakistani Army in East Bengal.

At the same time, it baffles me why so many Muslim countries refuse to recognise Israel's existence. Many use the issue of Palestinian human rights and sovereignty to justify their position. Of all Muslim countries, Pakistan should be at the forefront of encouraging dialogue with Israel and its diaspora supporters. Pakistanis understand at least some of the insecurities that lead a community to insist on separate nationhood based upon ethno-religious identity.

I hope it doesn't sound too simplistic to suggest that support for Palestinian nationhood and human rights need not involve refusing to recognise the reality of Israel's existence. If anything, dialogue should be founded on mutual recognition. A saying common to Arabic and Hebrew can be roughly translated as: you can't clap with one hand. Those who refuse to recognise the rights of both Israel and Palestine to exist are just not serious about peace.

(Irfan Yusuf is a Sydney lawyer and recipient of the 2007 Allen & Unwin Iremonger prize for public interest writing. This article was first publihed in The Press of Christchurch, New Zealand, on 30 April 2008.)

UPDATEI: Reader WS provided this feedback on the article ...

I can't resist a couple of comments. What you say about Australian Jews is at least as true of of American Jews. I have long held that Israel is the only thing that holds American Jews together; it is the only thing almost all of them can agree on. As for the current generation questioning the myths, that is true within Israel but not in the diaspora in my experience.

Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf

OPINION: Try Kiwi values, mate!

New Zealand has a crucial advantage over Australia when it comes to trying to define its values for newcomers, writes IRFAN YUSUF.

Both Australia and New Zealand are young nations built by indigenous people and migrants. Both are former British colonies. Both are English-speaking liberal democracies with legal systems based on the English common law.

But unlike Australia, New Zealand's early European settlers entered into some kind of treaty recognising the special association of indigenous people to the land. The cultural tang of Waitangi is absent from Australia, where indigenous peoples, by and large, live in a state of institutionalised disadvantage.

For an outsider like myself, it seems the influence of Maori culture on all New Zealanders is far more apparent than the influence of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders on mainstream Australian culture. Further, Maori culture is shown a greater degree of both official and unofficial respect than Australia's indigenous cultures.

Hence, it doesn't come as a surprise that recent moves to educate migrants on New Zealand values include a strong emphasis on Maori culture. What will make New Zealand values more meaningful is that New Zealand doesn't pretend it is a Western cultural monolith sitting awkwardly in the Asia- Pacific region.

If multiculturalism in Australia had one big failing it was its emphasis on migrant cultures and its lack of emphasis on indigenous cultures. The Howard Government has now abandoned multiculturalism as an official Government policy, replacing it with policies based on "integration" and "Australian values" which have largely emphasised Australia's alleged "Judeo-Christian" heritage.

I say "alleged" because the whole notion of Judaism playing a key role in the development of Western European culture seems strange when one considers that it is only in the last 60 years, following the horrors of the Holocaust, that Western Christendom has finally faced up to the reality of anti-Semitism.

Australia's own values debate was also hampered by the Howard Government's inability to articulate distinctly Australian values.

Instead, when pressed on the issue, proponents of Australian values (such as Howard) have provided motherhood statements about "a fair go" and "mateship". It's as if only "Judeo-Christian" Australians understand fairness and friendship. The Australian push toward integration and adoption of "Aussie" values has also come as a result of an abandonment of multiculturalism. Unfortunately, this abandonment has been couched using divisive monoculturalist rhetoric, and has been especially targeted at Australia's nominally Muslim communities.

As if to add credence to this rhetoric, Australian Muslim religious leaders have also behaved irresponsibly. Recent sexist and racist comments by Sheik Tajeddine Hilaly, who continues to claim the mantle of Mufti of Australia and New Zealand (despite New Zealand's peak Muslim body rejecting his claim), haven't done Muslims any favours.

Australia's Muslims largely find themselves in this predicament because they have placed more emphasis on culture and language and less on adopting Islam's universal values which encourage cultural and linguistic integration.

New Zealand Muslims would do well to heed the warnings of the Mufti of Bosnia Herzegovina, Dr Mustafa Ceric, who warned that Muslim communities who insisted on behaving like tribal or ethnic communes within Western countries will only bring harm and resentment upon themselves.

As one young Australian Muslim told me:

These uncles think they can say whatever they like and get away with it. If things go bad, they can always go back to Suva or Karachi. But where will I go?

New Zealanders of all faiths can be grateful for the sensible approach taken thus far by their Government. Unlike the Howard Government, whose rhetoric has been divisive, New Zealand's Social Development Minister David Benson-Pope has used the language of inclusion when he reiterated that a

... sense of inclusiveness and an acceptance of difference has always been a part of New Zealand's national identity.

That sense of inclusiveness will be on display in May when Waitangi hosts the Third Asia-Pacific Inter-faith Dialogue, in the place where Maori and European entered into a treaty of peace and security based on mutual respect.

Australians love to take the best of New Zealand and pretend it's their own. I hope Australian political leaders can see if there is something they can adopt from what appears to be a more inclusive Kiwi values debate.

*Irfan Yusuf is a Canberra lawyer and associate editor of AltMuslim.com. This article was first published in The Press of Christchurch on Monday 2 April 2007.

Words © 2007 Irfan Yusuf

SPORT: Saving Pakistani cricket from the jaws of victory ...

Back in the mid-80’s, when I was still in high school, a record company executive turned comic named Billy Birmingham produced his first parody of TV cricket commentators. Calling himself “The 12th Man”, Birmingham’s CD’s featured legends like Ritchie Benaud and Tony Greig using language unfit for reproduction here, not to mention some excellent spoofs of Pakistani cricketers’ names (Wasim Akram was “Was-he a-Crim” and Javed Miandad was alternately “I-broke-me-hand-dad” and “Jar-vegemite-for-me-and-dad”).

The recordings were hugely popular on both sides of the Tasman. Birmingham even won an Australian Music award, beating such big Aussie music names as Midnight Oil and Crowded House.

In receiving his award, Birmingham mused:

The fact that someone like me could receive this award and beat all those big names really says something about Australia. Though exactly what it says, I’m not exactly sure of!

And seeing photos of Pakistanis burning effigies of an Australian empire appearing in Australian newspapers certainly says a lot about Pakistan. Though at this stage, I’m not sure what.

Of course, this isn’t the first time effigies and flags have been burnt in Pakistani streets. In February, at the height of the Danish cartoon controversy, I wrote in the New Zealand paper The Dominion-Post (which published all 12 cartoons):

In my birthplace of Karachi, frenzied Pakistanis hit the streets with protests that did more damage to the Pakistani economy than to anyone in Denmark … Then again, some of these men … will protest each time they think a Pakistani batsman is given out “lbw” unfairly.

Not much has changed. Except that this time the burnings and protests concern the religion that people across the Indian sub-Continent are passionate about – cricket.

No amount of religious or political controversy can captivate the people of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka more than a game of cricket. Particularly if their home side is playing. I’ve seen this on numerous trips visiting relatives and family friends in Bombay, Karachi and Lahore.

Indians and Pakistanis are known for their hospitality. Uncles, aunts and cousins line up to take you shopping or site seeing or even to check out potential marriage partners. (Yes, having an Aussie passport gives you that instant edge in the marriage market!)

But when the “kirkit” is on, good luck if any relative sets their eyes off the TV set and offers you a cup of tea.

A journalist friend told me she did some freelance work in Peshawar and Islamabad following September 11 2001 and in the days leading upto the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. She witnessed Western journalists almost tripping over themselves covering a few thousand pro-Taliban rioters or attending the latest press conference from the Taliban ambassador.

A few thousand pro-Taliban protestors? In Pakistani cities like Karachi with a population in excess of 11 million? Yeah right. Sounds as significant as one of Imran Khan’s ex-girlfriends.

And what were my friend’s Pakistani journalist colleagues doing? They were too busy glued to their TV screens watching and admiring the fine form of the touring South African side. She later told me:

The way they spoke about Alan Donald, I almost thought he was a Western convert who’d joined al-Qaida!

Cricket really is an obsession among Pakistanis. Virtually all my Indo-Pakistani uncles, from Sydney to Christchurch, are obsessed with the game. Discussions and even full-scale arguments happen over the performance of a batsman, with overweight and middle-aged men who look like they’ve never set foot on a field suddenly speaking with the authority of expert coaches and selectors.

Almost as funny as watching Pakistan’s not-exactly-underweight cricket captain Inzamam-ul-Haq saving his team from the dangerous clutches of certain victory to the relative safety of the dressing room and defeat by forfeiture. But hang on - did I just hear someone scream out “bookies”?

And if Pakistan’s cricketing fundamentalism had a Grand Mufti or Ayatollah, it would have to be former fast bowling legend (and playboy) turned conservative politician Imran Khan. Describing Aussie Umpire Darrell Hair as a “mini-Hitler”, Imran is now quoted in London’s Daily Telegraph calling upon Pakistani players to sue.

And if they pay me enough, I’d be happy to represent them.

Still, I guess it’s better than Imran calling for the Australian High Commission in Islamabad to be burnt down. His litigious suggestion might have had legs but for a joint statement endorsed by the Pakistan Cricket Board which reads: “In accordance with the laws of cricket it was noted that the umpires had correctly deemed that Pakistan had forfeited the match and awarded the Test to England.”

But will that stop Pakistan’s cricket mullahs from their wild protests? Will it stop the burning of Hairy effigies? And will it stop my uncles from issuing instant cricket fatwas at dinner parties? As if.

A Jewish friend once joked with me that Israel is a nation of 4 million Prime Ministers and 1 citizen. Pakistan, a nation also built on the basis of ethno-religious heritage, is a case of having 179,999,988 coaches and selectors and 12 players. And so my advice to Kiwistani cricket fans who, like me, find themselves unable to understand this typically Pakistani dummy-spit is simple - go figure!

(The author is a Karachi-born and Sydney-based lawyer and proud owner of a full set of “12th Man” CD’s. A version of this article was first published in the Christchurch Press on 25 August 2006.)