MELBOURNE — On August 17, a range of speakers addressed a public forum organised by the Darebin Ethnic Communities Council on the humanitarian crisis unfolding in the Darfur region of Sudan.
Malcolm Witton, Victorian manager of World Vision, stressed the difficulties facing aid agencies in trying to deliver aid to Darfur, which is similar in size to France, but has only 500 kilometres of sealed roads. The onset of the rainy season has halted much aid distribution, on account of the small number of aircraft available to the aid operation.
Pamela Bone, a journalist for the Melbourne Age, made a veiled call for Western military intervention in Sudan. She described the situation as "Rwanda in slow motion". She went on to justify intervention with an appeal to human rights. "Do we respect national sovereignty? Or does sovereignty belong to the people?", she rhetorically asked.
Sudanese community speakers on the night emphasised that the humanitarian crisis in Darfur was part of a broader economic and political crisis within Sudan, flowing from the problems institutionalised by colonial rule.
Graham Matthews
Military invests in assassination technology
The Australian defence department announced on August 17 that "new technology developed by the Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) will help military surveillance analysts to locate hard-to-find moving targets". In plain English, assassination technology.
In a press release provocatively titled "You can run but you cannot hide", defence minister Robert Hill bragged that "thanks to a new computer processing method, analysts will improve their ability to detect previously inconspicuous moving targets on airborne surveillance video of a land battlefield".
DSTO scientist Robert Caprari said that the "Video Moving Target Indication" technology, when applied to surveillance video, effectively highlights moving targets.
"Aircraft undertaking surveillance often operate over cluttered environments which are generally covered in vegetation or man-made features that can obscure vision of a moving target", Caprari explained in the press release. "We have developed a technique that enables us to turn what are hard-to-see targets into ones that are highly conspicuous to a human surveillance analyst."
"If the DSTO system is developed for operational use, it would significantly help military aircraft on tactical missions to prosecute or defend against hostile ground vehicles", Dr Caprari said.
Norm Dixon
Socialists, Greens protest Labor election launch
SYDNEY — On August 16, members of the Socialist Alliance and the Greens protested outside the election launch for Anthony Albanese, the sitting Labor MP for the federal seat of Grayndler.
Albanese was joined on the stage of the Leichhardt Town Hall by federal ALP president Carmen Lawrence and former Australian Conservation Foundation president Peter Garrett, who is the Labor candidate for Kingsford-Smith.
Garrett spoke first and the Greens/Socialist contingent greeted him with shouts of "Save the forests" and "You're a sell-out!". Garrett ignored the issue of the destruction of Tasmania's old-growth forests while uttering vague platitudes about Labor's commitment to "accountability in government", "environmental preservation" and "social responsibility".
Lawrence raised the ire of the dissenters in the audience when she paid tribute to Albanese's support for equal rights for gay men and lesbians, while staying silent on Labor support for the Coalition government's ban on same-sex marriage.
Albanese's speech was perhaps the most vacuous of all. Following his motherhood statements about "addressing family and work issues", he was moved to thank the protesters for turning up to Labor's "community event".
Albanese said he was certain that Labor would be such a progressive government that one day "We won't have to protest".
The Socialist Alliance and the Greens will both be fielding candidates in this year's federal election to try to break Labor's long stranglehold on seats in the Sydney's inner-west.
Lachlan Malloch
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, August 25, 2004.
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