Austrailian Prime Minister on Human Shields

Prime Minister of Austrailia Gov. Website ^ | 03-05-03 | PM of Austrailia, Newsroom

[hippy hate me]

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PRICE: I spoke to an Australian women from Sydney who is in Baghdad, she was there this morning, Donna Mulhearn, 34 year old woman from Sydney. I asked her if she’d have a message for you this morning. If you don't mind, I'll just play this to you. It's very short.

MULHEARN: I'd like to say, Mr Howard please, please, please do what you can to stop a military attack on Iraq. These people do not deserve to be attacked. These are now people with names and faces. These are children I've played with. These are men and women who I have shared my conversations with and eaten meals with and taken me into their homes. They are real people. They just want to get on with their lives. They just want the same as you and I, to raise their families. They're not asking for anything more but to be left alone to get on with their lives. I just ask you, please, do whatever you can to stop this war. It's not our business. Do what you can to maintain the peace. Be a peacemaker. [inaudible], that's what I would ask him. I would plead with him to do what he can to help us.

PRICE: She's a 34 year old Sydney woman. She has been travelling around Europe. She has decided that she wants to go there and put herself in the line of fire. She says she will stay there.

PRIME MINISTER: So, she wants to make herself a human shield.

PRICE: Correct.

PRIME MINISTER: Well I don't think that is good behaviour. I understand the strength of her feelings. She talks about the ordinary people of Iraq, but I worry about the ordinary people of Iraq.

I wonder if she's thought about the million and a half ordinary people who have been killed by this regime over probably a 20-year period. I wonder if she's thought about the ordinary children of Iraq whose parents only crime was to be political opponents of Saddam Hussein, and are now detained in the most appalling conditions in Iraqi gaols. I wonder if she's thought of the ordinary people of neighbouring Iran who died in the Iraq-Iranian war. I wonder if she's thought of the ordinary people of Kurdistan and of the Marshlands who are the victims of poison gas and the most appalling human rights abuses by the Iraqi regime. You see, when you put human suffering into the balance on this issue, quite apart from the challenge of disarming Iraq, there is a very powerful case that human suffering will be greater if Saddam Hussein is left in power.

I wonder if she's read a very evocative piece in the Melbourne Age earlier this week from a British journalist who went there, to northern Iraq, as a sceptic, and whose views are anything but my views I could tell on most issues, who in a very emotional piece said - whatever might be the arguments about other aspects, in the name of human rights, the regime should be removed. Now, that's my answer to that lady. My principal argument is the disarmament of Iraq. It's not regime change. And I have to say in honesty that if there was a way of miraculously Iraq being totally and for sure disarmed, then I wouldn't be arguing for force to be used.

But let's not be under any false illusions. Putting human rights and human suffering into the balance, the removal of Saddam Hussein will be much better and result in less suffering and fewer atrocities and less torture, and fewer arbitrary arrests and executions, than would be the case if he continued.