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APC-SA NEWSLETTER JAN/FEB 2004Aborigines still seek their placeArticle by Patrick Dodson in the Age, January 26, 2004. Bomb in my backyardFrom Donna Mulhearn in Baghdad. About 8 o'clock this morning I was trying to decide what to do: should I have a shower now or go down to the street and fetch some milk first? I quickly jumped in the shower. I usually can't function in the morning without one. That decision may have saved my life. A few minutes later, as I stood with wet hair in the kitchen of our apartment, the force of a bomb blast knocked me off my feet. The sound of the bomb and then of a thousand plates of glass shattering, hit my ears like a cricket bat across the head. I screamed as I hit the floor. Down on the street near our apartment, a roadside bomb had detonated as a US military convoy passed. It blew the head off an Iraqi man and maimed the bodies of two others. We quickly ran down to the streets as a large crowd of locals gathered. I saw the body of the man killed as it lay on the road, it was still but for the fingers twitching every now and then. A sheet was quickly thrown over him but a thick trail of blood flowed from under the sheet. It slithered like a fat snake through the mud and settled in a puddle of rainwater. I also heard the groans of the man whose right arm was blown off and I saw the flesh of his left arm as it hung off his body. Mayhem settled in. People were yelling and screaming. Questions. Confusion. Journalists and cameras arrived. The American soldiers, scared and nervous, barked out orders that didn't seem to make any sense. I stood there with my hands shaking so much I couldn't hold my camera still. As a westerner, a journalist, perhaps I should have been stronger, but as people ran around me here and there I just stood back and watched the scene. I started to cry. I put my head down so that nobody would see me. No one else was crying, foreigners anyway. They were busy taking pictures, hearing the story, talking. I kept crying. I couldn't talk. The sight of the body, the blood, the tanks, the soldiers, the guns, the yelling, the broken glass strewn across the street, the chaos that had overtaken my otherwise safe Kerrada neighbourhood - it struck me speechless. I watched the children as they watched the chaos unfold and I cursed it all under my breath. The soldiers got angrier. They aimed their guns at the crowd. More journalists arrived. More cameras. I wondered if this would make in onto the news at home, but with no American soldiers killed, I figured it was unlikely to rate a mention. "There's no story here", one soldier yelled at me when I approached him to ask what happened. The people disagreed. The man killed was a well known local who was on his way to the bank. He stopped at a cigarette stall and was hit by flying shrapnel as he bought a packet of smokes. He had a wife and family. The people also disagreed on who was to blame. "They are terrorists, those who planted this bomb," one told a journalist. "The Americans are the terrorists," a man next to him said. "They've brought nothing with them but death. They are responsible for this." Most of the crowd agreed and a group started chanting anti-American slogans up and down the street. I tried to talk to the soldiers, to ask them how they felt, but they didn't want to chat with me. They responded angrily prompting one bystander (who looked and sounded remarkably like me) to challenge their presence here... One soldier responded in no uncertain terms: "We don't want to be here! I have a wife and a daughter at home, do you think I want to be here?" So the soldiers don't want to be here. The Iraqi's don't want them here. It seems one point on which both sides here agree! It's just a few politicians sitting behind desks on the other side of the world who want these young kids to risks their lives for a mission they admit they don't understand. I asked a fresh-faced soldier, only 22 years old, why he was here in Iraq and not back at college studying to be an accountant? "For the excitement", he said. "Like today, this is exciting!" As the crowd gently lifted the body of the Kerrada father of two into a wooden coffin and into a nearby mosque the mood was far from exciting. The shopkeepers of Kerrada Street started to sweep up the glass of the smashed shopfronts from the footpaths. It's a busy street, with colourful fruitshops, felafel stores, vegetable carts, bakeries, gift stores, furniture shops. It's bustling and cosmopolitan - reminds me of King Street, Newton. Today dozens of shops with smashed windows were forced to close. Who knows when they'll be back in business? I looked up to the shop top apartment buildings that line the road - every second window smashed. Tonight the fresh winter air will be an uninvited guest into many family homes, all the more bitter with no electricity to power heaters. But there'll be no insurance claims or compensation payouts for these hard-working business people and residents of Kerrada Street. All this is just part of life in "liberated" Iraq. But remarkably as the cameras start to leave, the fruit vendors unpacked their bananas and the furniture shop swept up it's glass and then put its lamps and lounges out onto the footpath as usual. Kerrada Street in inner city Baghdad - today it saw tanks, blood, guns, angry crowds and grief. It also saw Iraqi people determined to get on with life with a resilient spirit. Today I was going to write home about Christmas. About the kids. About other aspects of life here in Baghdad. I'm sorry that I've had to write about bombs and death. But I guess it's an aspect of life here in Baghdad. Life under occupation. But so is resilience and hope. And there's one girl here who's grateful that she can't leave the house without a shower, and she's extremely grateful that she didn't today. Your pilgrim - Donna.
Written UK ministerial statement: FylingdalesUK government agree to a US request to upgrade the early warning
radar at RAF Fylingdales as part of the US Missile Defense programme. US eyes space as possible battlegroundarticle by Jim Wolfe from The Mirror, (UK) 20 January 2004.
Missile defence program "will lead to arms race"http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1026315.htm
No end to story as A-bomb fall out goes onStory from The Advertiser by Colin James printed Friday January 16, 2004
Mars: profitable business? Halliburton working on Mars drilling technologyhttp://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9774
Study finds link between Agent Orange, cancerhttp://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4037340/
On the Edge of LunacyBy George Monbiot January 18, 2004. http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2004-01/17monbiot.cfm
Libya ratifies Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban TreatyVienna, 13 January 2004:The Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya
has deposited its instrument of ratification of the Comprehensive
Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) with the United Nations Secretary-General on 6
January 2004. Libya’s ratification brings the total number of Treaty
ratifications to 109. Of the 53 States in the Africa geographical region, 20
have now ratified the Treaty.
Missile defence or offence?Letter to the Canberra Times by President of the Medical
Association for the Prevention of War, Dr Sue Wareham. Doctors approve of ALP policy against missile defence
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