God help the Cypriots
Alan Austin
Melbourne-based freelance journalist
Has Alexander Downer really got a part-time UN job related to Cyprus?
Doing what? Reporting to whom? For what period?
It is not partisan politics to express dismay at this appointment, if it is real. Downer’s foreign policy failures are notorious.
His ineptitude has not diminished since losing office. In May this year when Western naval vessels were positioned off Burma to help disaster victims, Downer called for regime change. According to a furious Malcolm Fraser this justified the junta refusing assistance, costing thousands of lives.
Blunders in government include:
· slashing aid to Indonesia at the depths of its recession by $22 million in the 1996 budget, then by another $11 million in 1997, costing tens of thousands of lives;
· offending Indonesia through other inept actions, including the infamous 1998 letter from PM Howard to President Habibie on East Timor, regarded as triggering the 1999 massacres;
· falsely accusing Indonesian police of complicity in the 2004 bombing of the Australian embassy which killed 10 and injured hundreds. Later Downer lamely claimed that if he hadn’t repeated a baseless rumour he might have been criticised;
· dealing so ineptly with the Solomon Islands that our ambassador was expelled in 2006;
· damaging relations with Papua New Guinea to the point where PM Michael Somare threatened in 2006 to recall our high commissioner and suspend official visits;
· hindering global efforts on climate by not ratifying the Kyoto protocol;
· forcing asylum seekers into offshore detention centres;
· announcing that refugees at sea had thrown their children overboard when the government knew they hadn’t;
· diverting overseas aid funds to detention centres, embassy buildings, security and promoting trade;
· paying $300 million of aid money illegally to Saddam Hussein through the Australian Wheat Board;
· claiming aid money diverted to Nauru was for ‘humanitarian refugee resettlement’ while refusing refugee status to those eligible;
· reducing real overseas aid, after rorts, from 0.34 per cent of GNI to an all-time low of 0.19 per cent during a period of record surpluses;
· with the US, illegally invading Iraq on the pretext that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction;
· continuing to support the invasion after the false pretext had been exposed, killing more than a million Iraqis;
· allowing US agents to torture Australians Mamdouh Habib and David Hicks;
· allowing Hicks to be jailed without trial for five years, then obliging him to avoid further torture in jail by pleading guilty to charges without trial;
· illegally deporting Vivian Alvarez Solon to the Philippines in 2001;
· illegally detaining Cornelia Rau for 10 months in 2004-05 in Baxter detention centre;
· wrongly accusing Dr Mohamed Haneef of terrorism and then jailing him after he was granted bail;
· ridiculing 43 former defence chiefs, diplomats and departmental heads when they expressed dismay in 2004 at Australia’s foreign policy. Downer’s colleague Dee-Anne Kelly called them ‘doddering daiquiri diplomats’;
There are others.
God help the Cypriots.