Nobel author sees parallel in terror laws

The Australian ^ | 24 Oct 05 | Matt Price

[Fair Go]

Nobel author sees parallel in terror laws Matt Price 24oct05

NOBEL Prize-winning author JM Coetzee yesterday launched a thinly veiled attack on Australia's proposed anti-terrorism laws, likening the Howard Government's controversial reforms to human rights abuses under apartheid in his native South Africa.

Coetzee, who moved to Adelaide in 2002 after a long and distinguished literary career, opened a public reading at the National Library in Canberra yesterday with an unsubtle jibe at the new anti-terror laws. "I used to think that the people who created (South Africa's) laws that effectively suspended the rule of law were moral barbarians. Now I know they were just pioneers ahead of their time," he told the Australian Book Review function.

Preparing to read from Waiting for the Barbarians, Coetzee's breakthrough 1980 anti-apartheid novel, the author explained how the book "emerged from the South Africa of the 1970s, when the security police could come in and out and barnstorm and handcuff you without explaining why, and take you away to an unspecified site and do what they wanted to you".

Coetzee said the South African police "could do what they wanted because there was no real recourse against them because special provisions of the legislation indemnified them in advance".

He went on to tell the packed auditorium: "If somebody telephoned a reporter and said, 'Tell the world -- some men came last night, took my husband, my son, my father away, I don't know who they were, they didn't give names, they had guns', the next thing that happened would be that you and the reporter in question would be brought into custody for furthering the aims of the proscribed organisation endangering the security of the state."

The 2003 Nobel laureate ended his introduction with: "All of this, and much more during apartheid in South Africa, was done in the name of the fight against terror."

While Coetzee did not specifically refer to the Howard Government, there was no question his pointed speech was directed at anti-terror laws due to be introduced into federal and state parliaments next month.

The reforms, championed by John Howard after consultation with state and territory leaders, allow for detention without explanation, broaden police powers to use lethal force and extend existing sedition laws making it a crime to speak or write in ways deemed supportive of Australia's enemies.

The Prime Minister, who will speak with some Labor premiers this week to smooth concerns about police shoot-to-kill provisions, yesterday defended the proposed reforms expected to pass through parliament by Christmas. "I am confident the legislation has all the right balances and the right protections and the right safeguards," Mr Howard said. "These laws are needed because we live in a different age than the pre-terrorism age."

It's understood the latest draft of the contentious laws was sent by the commonwealth to state and territory leaders late last week. All Labor leaders are baulking at federal proposals to provide legal cover for police officers who shoot-to-kill terror suspects and people thought to have knowledge of terrorists or terror acts.

John Michael Coetzee was born in Cape Town and many of his early books and essays deal with apartheid in South Africa. The notoriously media-shy dual Booker Prize winning author, whose new novel Slow Man was released last month, refused to elaborate on his comments when approached by The Australian after yesterday's reading.

[Fair Go]

Perhaps JM Coetzee should abandon the good life in Oz and return to his native South Africa.

[pennboricua]

The Africans have fared much worse now, controlling their own destiny i would love to see a side by side comparison of crimes, poverty, enrollment in Education, etc pre and post Apartheid.

[furquhart]

Quiet, or you'll be dragged away by the racial equality police.

In all seriousness, I know a large number of South Africans and all of them (most white, but one black) agree that, overall, life was better in South Africa before.

[pennboricua]

Yes you are right about the racial equality police. or at least their minions.
However I would love to have an influential white person, tired of being portrayed as racist and the cause of all the woes facing African American, put out a similar study.
I would venture to say that the divorce rate, unemployment rate, dropout rate, prison rate etc. would be quite dramatic and much less during segregation.

[furquhart]

Like I said, I'm from an area full of South African emigres. The stories they tell about what happened.

Well, modern South Africa is already a sort of Hell, and I have no doubt that, ultimately, it will follow the path of Rhodesia.

[LauraleeBraswell]

Power should have been gradually transfered back to the South Africans. It should have been a process. Instead it was done all at once- and you had people who had no idea how to run anything running the government.

[Larry Lucido]

Give a man a Nobel prize and he becomes insufferable.

[furquhart]

Bingo.

Also, the transfer was done without any real regard for the rights of white South Africans. Many of them, more or less, simply gave up what they had and headed abroad.

[popdonnelly]

It's a false analogy. Something intellectuals are outstanding at. A society following a policy of forced racial separation and a society trying to defend its population from terrorism are not the same thing.

[TypeZoNegative]

Agreed as well. You can't make a free society overnight, and that's what exactly SA did. They tried to make a free society overnight. You get what you pay for.

[TypeZoNegative]

Let's see his veiws on anti-terror laws when he comes down with a disease that nobody has heard of on the subway from a conspicuously dropped vial.