by John Howard
It was a sad and emotional occasion, but essential to a national expression of compassion and understanding. Janette and I invited all of the families and friends to the PM’s suite for morning tea before the service began. John Anderson and Simon Crean and their wives joined us. The service itself was deeply moving. Family groups came forward to light candles for their murdered loved ones. The haunting sound of a lone piper, as always, stirred the emotions of us all. Both Simon Crean and I spoke. There was an Islamic contribution, in recognition of Indonesia’s majority faith, as well as a Hindu component, given the religious provenance of the Balinese.
In my address I referred to what I would later call the duality of the Australian character. We could be compassionate and caring but, where necessary, as tough as tungsten. I ended my remarks by saying to the grieving relatives present, ‘I hope you go from this gathering thinking that in every corner of 191/2 million Australian hearts, there is a place for you and for the person you have lost.’
Tom Frame was the right person for these occasions. He was sensitive, without being maudlin. From mingling with family members as they left Parliament House, it was clear that the service had meant a lot to them.
In all the contact I had with the relatives and friends, on only one occasion was there a reference to the possibility that the Bali attack might have been because Australia was too closely identified with America in the fight against terrorism. That reference had been muted, more a question than an accusation. An Adelaide magistrate, Brian Deegan (who I had not met), whose son, Josh, had died in the attack, became the lightning rod for that line of argument. He wrote me an open letter which contained plenty of criticism of my Government’s foreign policy. He directly criticised our close alliance with the United States and attacked some of the activities of ASIO. I replied promptly and publicly, being careful to show proper respect for his evident grief. Brian Deegan continued to be a periodic and public critic of the Government. In the 2004 federal election, he ran against Alexander Downer in his seat of Mayo. Some of those who had lost relatives and friends in the Bali attack may have shared Deegan’s views, but I doubt that it would have been widespread.
To Islamic extremists, influenced by JI and the poisonous doctrines of al Qaeda, Bali was a symbol of what they saw as Western depravity; the alcohol, the scantily dressed women and the partying. It was all there. Therefore they felt justified in attacking the decadent Westerners. It was a way of life, as much if not more than a defined set of political opinions, which was their target. The testimony of Mukhlas Samudra and Amrozi, the principal participants in the Bali atrocity, bore this out.
The idea that Australia should wind back its opposition to terrorism because the Bali attack represented retaliation for our stance gained virtually no traction with the Australian community. There was hostility to the notion that Australia’s foreign policy should be adjusted to threats from foreigners — and worse still, terrorists. The Australian people openly supported my Government’s actions on both East Timor and Afghanistan, the very two actions which had won the ire of Islamic extremists. To many, this was almost a badge of honour and they were not in the mood to apologise for what their country had done.
Australians did not blame Indonesia for the Bali attack. On the contrary they sympathised with our neighbour, and especially the Balinese, for what had happened. They knew what damage had been inflicted on the Balinese economy. If one of the motives for the attack had been to drive a wedge between Australia and Indonesia, that failed totally. The post-Bali cooperation between the agencies of the two nations was a catalyst for improved relations generally.
Out of this tragedy came an inter-faith dialogue, inaugurated by Australia but enthusiastically picked up by the Indonesians and some others in the region. This involved clerics, scholars and others in the two countries coming together to better understand each other and their respective beliefs. It was a priceless antidote to the vile hatred which the terrorists had hoped to spread. The first inter-faith dialogue took place on 6–7 December 2004 at Yogyakarta, in Indonesia. It was opened by President Yudhoyono. The Australian delegation included Cardinal George Pell as well as representatives of other Christian churches and Islamic, Jewish and Buddhist leaders.
Australia and Indonesia also signed a memorandum of understanding on security, which further cemented the already close relations between the security agencies of the two countries. This arrangement was to be replicated with other countries in the region.
The highlight of the post-Bali cooperation was, however, that between the two police forces which resulted in the capture and later conviction of those responsible for the Bali atrocity. The lasting advantage of this was that it added value to the relationship at the popular level. To the average Australian, inter-faith dialogues and security memoranda were fine, but catching those terrorists who had killed 88 other Australians was what really mattered. When this happened courtesy of a partnership with the Indonesian police, Australian regard for Indonesia rose accordingly. That was not what the terrorists had wanted.
The first real breakthrough came when the nightwatchman at a mosque reported two men having parked a motorbike outside the mosque just after the attacks. With the help of explosive residue on the bike, the link was established to the attacks, and the sale of the bike was traced to a local dealer who clearly remembered the three men who had bought it two days earlier. They had not haggled over the price; that’s what made them memorable. Face-fit experts from the Victoria Police interviewed witnesses for hours and produced images of three men — Amrozi, Idris, and Ali Imron. According to those on the spot, the images turned out to be ‘uncannily correct’. This was a case study in cooperation between local witnesses and foreign experts.
Pastika’s patience was rewarded in relation to the Mitsubishi van. The engine and chassis numbers had been filed away, but he told his men to keep looking. They did and finally found, beneath a welded plate, a number used to register the van as a bus some 15 years earlier.
The first of the suspects, Amrozi, went on trial in May 2003. In June 2003 separate trials began for Samudra and Mukhlas. They were convicted and then executed by firing squad on 8 November 2008.
There had been the odd hair-raising glitch, such as when Ric Smith, our ambassador, found himself standing in front of bulldozers which had been directed by civic authorities to raze the wreckage of the Sari Club, just days after the attack, so as to expunge evil spirits, thus enabling tourists to safely return. It might have satisfied local folklore, but would have created a nightmare scenario for forensic experts who wanted to scour the ruined site for clues. Smith’s direct action saved the day.
In the eyes of most Australians, the Indonesian justice system had prevailed. Whatever generic views may have been held about capital punishment, there was little doubt, as I said on 12 October 2007, that the Australian people would have felt let down if the sentences of death, handed down in relation to the three of them, were not carried out.
The first anniversary of the attack was an occasion which focused heavily not only on the continued grieving of relatives and friends, but also on the effective cooperation between Australia and Indonesia. A special commemoration was held in Bali which I attended, along with the senior minister, and future Indonesian President, Bambang Yudhoyono, whose passionate attack on terrorism drew admiration from those present. That day it was announced that both General Bachtiar and General Pastika would receive honorary awards in the Order of Australia in recognition of their work in bringing to justice those responsible for the Bali attacks.
Bali, October 2002 was not the last that Indonesia was to experience of terrorism, but it was the worst. There was another attack in Bali, which took four Australian lives, the attack on the Australian embassy on the eve of the 2004 election, and the 2009 bomb attack at the Marriott Hotel, where four Australians died.
The Bali tragedy brought Australia and Indonesia closer together. Citizens of our countries had died in the same attack at t
he hands of evil people, who were hunted down, tried and convicted, and then put to death for their crimes. The Indonesian security system, albeit with much Australian help, had been equal to the task of pursuing and punishing those who had killed 88 of our citizens. If one of the goals of the murderers had been to drive our two nations further apart, that had not happened.
34
IRAQ
Speaking to the General Assembly on 12 September 2002, George Bush not only recited Iraq’s long record of defying the demands of the United Nations, but made it clear that if the United Nations did not act, the United States would. In one sentence he encapsulated the primeval fear of the Americans. ‘And our greatest fear is that terrorists will find a short cut to their mad ambitions when an outlaw regime supplies them with the technologies to kill on a massive scale.’1 Almost eight years later, President Obama echoed that primeval fear when he said, ‘The greatest threat to US and global security is no longer a nuclear exchange between nations but nuclear terrorism by violent extremists.’2 All along that was at the heart of the American anxiety about Iraq. Iraq, under Saddam, was an outlaw regime; the United States believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), and feared that Saddam might supply terrorists with deadly weapons for use against America. Having experienced 9/11, who could blame Americans for thinking that the next time a hijacked plane headed for a tall building, it might contain a chemical, biological or even nuclear weapon.
Understanding that is essential to a proper appreciation of America’s action against Iraq and is fundamental to an evaluation of my view that Australia did the right thing in backing the Americans. It should be the constant touchstone as I recount the events and tribulations of those turbulent months in 2002 and 2003.
Joining the Americans and the British in the military operation against Saddam Hussein in March 2003 was the most controversial foreign affairs action of my Government. Military action is always the agonising, last-resort option. Those who think that democratically elected leaders enter military conflicts lightly have no idea of the emotional and other conflicting pressures involved.
Worst of all, there is the dread of casualties. There is the near certainty of casualties in any conflict. Incredibly, Australia did not suffer battle casualties in Iraq. Most of our forces were withdrawn after the initial combat phase, but the merciful outcome of no battle casualties was due, also, to a combination of good fortune, superior training and the pre-positioning of forces, which allowed the maximum feasible time for acclimatisation.
On two earlier occasions, namely East Timor and Afghanistan, I had as Prime Minister involved the ADF in military action. Both decisions involved strong popular support, especially East Timor. Iraq was, in that sense also, much harder. Our decision to go into Iraq was against the weight of public opinion.
The most regular popular criticism was that our action increased the likelihood of a terrorist attack involving Australians. That was not our assessment, no matter how intuitive the notion was for many people. Now, seven years on, the weight of evidence remains that Australia was a target for terrorism much earlier.
Australia had first attracted critical attention from al Qaeda long before Iraq because of our action in East Timor. On 3 November 2001, Al Jazeera satellite television broadcast a message from Bin Laden in which he said that ‘crusading Australian forces were on the Indonesian shores and they actually went in to separate East Timor, [which] is part of the countries of the Islamic world’.3 The major terrorist attack claiming Australian lives was in Bali, in October 2002, five months before the invasion of Iraq.
No self-respecting nation should, in any instance, allow its foreign policy to be dictated by terrorist threats. Most Australians support this proposition but will still judge each situation in which the principle is at stake according to its merits.
The terrorist attacks of 11 September had radically changed the world in which we lived. It was a paradigm shift of historic magnitude. A new enemy, unrestrained by borders, had arrived on the international stage. That enemy was lethal and efficient. Its dagger was aimed at the heart of a way of life which would forever be ours. The terrorists were staring straight at us; no amount of metaphorical averting of our eyes would shake their resolve to injure us and punish our way of life.
Along with moderate Muslims around the world, who were so often targets and victims too, nations such as the United States, Britain and Australia were in this together. We were exemplars of things which Islamic extremism despised: freedom of expression, equality of men and women, freedom of religion and the core value of an individual conscience. In our history we had given these values more than passive endorsement. We had defended them repeatedly, often at a painful cost.
Supporting the United States in Afghanistan, and later in Iraq, was more than giving expression to our most important alliance relationship; it signalled a determination on our part to participate in an aggregate response to the terrorist threat. Al Qaeda, operating out of Afghanistan, had been responsible for the attacks on New York and Washington. Saddam had not been involved in September 11, but his regime was listed by the US State Department as a state sponsor of terrorism because of support for other terrorist groups. He had the potential to facilitate a future terrorist outrage.
The decision to go into Iraq was right for a variety of reasons. It was right for the Americans to do so, not only because of Iraq’s continued defiance of previous UN resolutions. It was also right to act on a reasonably entertained belief that Iraq did possess WMDs. Even more importantly, it was a legitimate act of anticipatory self-defence against future terrorist facilitations by a regime which had a track record both of regional aggression and support for terrorist activities. Saddam had paid $25,000 to the family of each Palestinian suicide bomber who had carried out an attack on Israel. He had used poisoned gas against his own people as well as the Iranians.
Within hours of the attack on 11 September 2001, Michael Thawley, our ambassador in Washington, said to me that as a result of the attack, Iraq would be back on the agenda for the Americans. This was because of continued American suspicion about the willingness of Iraq to support, facilitate or promote terrorist activities by others as well as the general view in the United States that Iraq and, in particular, the removal of Saddam Hussein remained unfinished business. This was a sentiment of Democrats as well as Republicans.
It was neither unreasonable nor implausible of the Americans to believe that WMDs possessed by Iraq might, at some time in the future, be handed to a terrorist group for use against the United States or others, with horrific consequences.
The overwhelming preoccupation of the United States in the months, and indeed for several years, following the attacks of September 2001 was when and from whom might the next attack come. The attacks of 11 September had a deep and lasting impact on the American psyche. To many, they were worse than Pearl Harbor. They involved assaults on the American mainland and hit the economic and military heart of the nation.
The passage of more than nine years since those attacks has produced complacency. It is easy now to feel that past trepidation about another terrorist assault was an overreaction, although the near miss of Christmas Day 2009, involving a Detroit-bound flight, would have been a reality check. Complacency was the last description to match the mood of Americans in the wake of 11 September.
The first responsibility of any head of government is the protection of his or her country from attack. America had been violated on 11 September in an unprovoked, unjustified fashion by a ruthless enemy which had declared war on the United States and had previously been responsible for a series of deadly outrages against its citizens. There was a legitimate concern that there would be another attack. The dominant responsibility of the President of the United States, at that time, was to do all in his power to deny the enemies of the United States another opportunity to bring destruction to his country.
As the early months of 2002 passed, it became more and more obvious from the publ
ic statements of George Bush and other members of the Administration that Iraq was very much back on the American agenda. Media speculation that military action would be taken continued to grow. The case against Iraq built by the Americans and also, increasingly, the British led by Tony Blair, was that Iraq had failed to comply fully with existing resolutions of the United Nations concerning WMDs.
After the first Gulf War, UN Security Council (SC) resolution 687 required Iraq to declare and remove, destroy or render harmless her remaining WMDs and related production infrastructure under UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) or International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) supervision. Saddam Hussein played a cat and mouse game with both the UN weapons inspectors and the IAEA. There would be weeks of non-compliance and subterfuge behaviour by Iraq in relation to the inspections authorised under the UN resolution, only to be followed by last-minute agreements to either let inspectors in or allow them to examine hitherto prohibited areas. The suspicion was that Saddam was engaged in an elaborate game of put and take with the international community, in which he always stayed one step ahead of the UN inspectors.
According to UNSCOM, Iraq had failed to properly account for more than 30,000 special munitions for the delivery of chemical and biological agents, and up to several hundred tonnes of bulk chemical agent, including 1.5 tonnes of deadly VX nerve agent. UNSCOM could not confirm Iraq’s claim to have destroyed all its artillery shells filled with chemical agent and aerial bombs for the delivery of chemical agent.
UNSCOM found no credible evidence to support Iraq’s claim to have unilaterally destroyed all its biological-weapon holdings. It assessed that Iraq could have produced twice as much botulinum toxin and three times as much anthrax as it had declared.