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APC SA Newsletter Jan-Feb 2006
NOWAR public meeting with Zaki
Chehab
The event will be held on 21 February, with the time and venue
still to be announced. Some of Mr Chehab's history : Zaki Chehab is one of the
Arab world's leading journalists. He is the political editor of the London-based
Al Hayat and of the Arabic TV Channel LBC. For over 25 years he has covered
Middle Eastern conflicts and has contributed to The Guardian, CNN, Channel 4,
and the BBC. He was the first journalist to broadcast interviews with the Iraq
resistance. He is touring to promote his book: Iraq Ablaze: Inside the Iraqi
Insurgency. For information about the time and place of the event, please
contact NOWAR nearer the date. 
Anangu Backyard
A new exhibition is beginning at the Adelaide Festival Centre,
Artspace. The exhibition will provide an opportunity to experience the culture
of the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Lands of South Australia. It will promote
interaction between Anangu artists, artworks, storytelling and language and will
include new works for sale from 5 art centres of far north South Australia by;
Kaltjiti Arts (Fregon), Minymaku (Armata), Mimili Maku (Mimili), Iniwintji (Indulkana)
and Ernabella Arts (Ernabella). It will be an opportunity to experience, learn
and respect the diversity of culture in our state.
EVENTS IN JANUARY
Visiting Minymaku Arts artists (Amata)
14/15/16 January 2-4pm each day
Trevor Jamieson - Ngapartji Ngapartji Pitjantjatjara storyteller -- 14/15
January 3-4pm
Bush Foods by Ku -- 15 January 1-3pm - sample cooking with bush foods on the
Artspace Plaza
Visiting Kaltjiti Arts artists (Amata)
21/22/23 January 2-4pm each day
ARTSPACE: 17 December 2005 - 19 February 2006
Upper level, Dunstan Playhouse -- 12 noon to 5 pm Wednesday - Sunday FREE
Groups welcome at other times, but bookings essential
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Adelaide Fringe 2006 - ATSI Program
The 2006 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSI) Arts Program will reveal
the wealth and intensity of Indigenous Arts and cultures. Various contemporary
and traditional Art forms will be featured. Which are sure to exhilarate and
astound you, so come and explore the profound depth of the Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander Cultures.
Telling it like it isn't
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1227-24.htm
Los Angeles Times, Dec 27, 2005
I first realized the enormous pressures on American journalists in the Middle
East when I went some years ago to say goodbye to a colleague from the Boston
Globe. I expressed my sorrow that he was leaving a region where he had obviously
enjoyed reporting. I could save my sorrows for someone else, he said. One of the
joys of leaving was that he would no longer have to alter the truth to suit his
paper's more vociferous readers.
"I used to call the Israeli Likud Party 'right wing,' " he said.
"But recently, my editors have been telling me not to use the phrase. A lot
of our readers objected." And so now, I asked? "We just don't call it
'right wing' anymore."
Ouch. I knew at once that these "readers" were viewed at his newspaper
as Israel's friends, but I also knew that the Likud under Benjamin Netanyahu was
as right wing as it had ever been.
This is only the tip of the semantic iceberg that has crashed into American
journalism in the Middle East. Illegal Jewish settlements for Jews and Jews only
on Arab land are clearly "colonies," and we used to call them that. I
cannot trace the moment when we started using the word "settlements."
But I can remember the moment around two years ago when the word
"settlements" was replaced by "Jewish neighborhoods" - or
even, in some cases, "outposts."
Similarly, "occupied" Palestinian land was softened in many American
media reports into "disputed" Palestinian land - just after
then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, in 2001, instructed U.S. embassies in the
Middle East to refer to the West Bank as "disputed" rather than
"occupied" territory.
Then there is the "wall," the massive concrete obstruction whose
purpose, according to the Israeli authorities, is to prevent Palestinian suicide
bombers from killing innocent Israelis. In this, it seems to have had some
success. But it does not follow the line of Israel's 1967 border and cuts deeply
into Arab land. And all too often these days, journalists call it a
"fence" rather than a "wall." Or a "security
barrier," which is what Israel prefers them to say. For some of its length,
we are told, it is not a wall at all - so we cannot call it a "wall,"
even though the vast snake of concrete and steel that runs east of Jerusalem is
higher than the old Berlin Wall.
The semantic effect of this journalistic obfuscation is clear. If Palestinian
land is not occupied but merely part of a legal dispute that might be resolved
in law courts or discussions over tea, then a Palestinian child who throws a
stone at an Israeli soldier in this territory is clearly acting insanely.
If a Jewish colony built illegally on Arab land is simply a nice friendly "neighborhood,"
then any Palestinian who attacks it must be carrying out a mindless terrorist
act.
And surely there is no reason to protest a "fence" or a "security
barrier" - words that conjure up the fence around a garden or the gate arm
at the entrance to a private housing complex. For Palestinians to object
violently to any of these phenomena thus marks them as a generically vicious
people. By our use of language, we condemn them. We follow these unwritten rules
elsewhere in the region. American journalists frequently used the words of U.S.
officials in the early days of the Iraqi insurgency - referring to those who
attacked American troops as "rebels" or "terrorists" or
"remnants" of the former regime. The language of the second U.S.
pro-consul in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, was taken up obediently - and
grotesquely - by American journalists.
American television, meanwhile, continues to present war as a bloodless sandpit
in which the horrors of conflict - the mutilated bodies of the victims of aerial
bombing, torn apart in the desert by wild dogs - are kept off the screen.
Editors in New York and London make sure that viewers' "sensitivities"
don't suffer, that we don't indulge in the "pornography" of death
(which is exactly what war is) or "dishonor" the dead whom we have
just killed.
Our prudish video coverage makes war easier to support, and journalists long ago
became complicit with governments in making conflict and death more acceptable
to viewers. Television journalism has thus become a lethal adjunct to war.
Back in the old days, we used to believe - did we not? - that journalists should
"tell it how it is." Read the great journalism of World War II and
you'll see what I mean. The Ed Murrows and Richard Dimblebys, the Howard K.
Smiths and Alan Moorheads didn't mince their words or change their descriptions
or run mealy-mouthed from the truth because listeners or readers didn't want to
know or preferred a different version.
So let's call a colony a colony, let's call occupation what it is, let's call a
wall a wall. And maybe express the reality of war by showing that it represents
not, primarily, victory or defeat, but the total failure of the human spirit.
Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent for the London Independent and the
author, most recently, of "The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of
the Middle East," published last month by Knopf. [Available in Australia
through Harper Collins. $39.95 ]
© 2005 Los Angeles Times
War without End
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article334912.ece
The Independent, UK - Dec 30 2005 War without end : only
justice, not bombs, can make our dangerous world a safer place by Robert Fisk
This was the year the "war on terror" - an obnoxious expression which
we all parroted after 11 September 2001 - appeared to be almost as endless as
George Bush once claimed it would be. And unsuccessful. For, after all the
bombing of Afghanistan, the overthrow of the Taliban, the invasion of Iraq and
its appallingly tragic aftermath, can anyone claim today that they feel safer
than they did a year ago? We have gone on smashing away at the human rights we
trumpeted at the Russians - and the Arabs - during the Cold War. We have perhaps
fatally weakened all those provisions that were written into our treaties and
conventions in the aftermath of the Second World War to make the world a safer
place. And we claim we are winning.
Where, for example, is the terror? In the streets of Baghdad, to be sure. And
perhaps again in our glorious West if we go on with this folly. But terror is
also in the prisons and torture chambers of the Middle East. It is in the very
jails to which we have been merrily sending out trussed-up prisoners these past
three years.
For Jack Straw to claim that men are not being sent on their way to torture is
surely one of the most extraordinary - perhaps absurd is closer to the mark -
statements to have been made in the "war on terror". If they are not
going to be tortured - like the luckless Canadian shipped off to Damascus from
New York - then what is the purpose of sending them anywhere? And how are we
supposed to "win" this war by ignoring all the injustices we are
inflicting on that part of the world from which the hijackers of September 11
originally came?
How many times have Messrs Bush and Blair talked about "democracy"?
How few times have they talked about "justice", the righting of
historic wrongs, the ending of torture? Our principal victims of the "war
on terror", of course, have been in Iraq (where we have done quite a bit of
torturing ourselves). But, strange to say, we are silent about the horrors the
people of Iraq are now enduring. We do not even know - are not allowed to know -
how many of them have died.
We know that 1,100 Iraqis died by violence in Baghdad in July alone. That's
terror. But how many died in the other cities of Iraq, in Mosul and Kirkuk and
Irbil, and in Amara and Fallujah and Ramadi and Najaf and Kerbala and Basra?
Three thousand in July? Or four thousand? And if those projections are accurate,
we are talking about 36,000 or 48,000 over the year - which makes that projected
post-April 2003 figure of 100,000 dead, which Blair ridiculed, rather
conservative, doesn't it?
It's not so long ago, I recall, that Bush explained to us that all the Arabs
would one day wish to have the freedoms of Iraq. I cannot think of an Arab today
who would wish to contemplate such ill fortune, not least because of the
increasingly sectarian nature of the authorities, elected though they are. The
year did allow Ariel Sharon to achieve his aim of turning his colonial war into
part of the "war on terror". It also allowed al-Qa'ida's violence to
embrace more Arab countries. Jordan was added to Egypt. Woe betide those of us
who are now locked into the huge military machine that embraces the Middle East.
Why, Iraqis sometimes ask me, are American forces - aerial or land - in
Uzbekistan? And Kazakhstan and Afghanistan, in Turkey and Jordan (and Iraq) and
in Kuwait and Qatar and Bahrain and Oman and Yemen and Egypt and Algeria (there
is a US special forces unit based near Tamanrasset, co-operating with the same
Algerian army that was involved in the massacre of civilians the 1990s)?
In fact, just look at the map and you can see the Americans in Greenland and
Iceland and Britain and Germany and ex-Yugoslavia and Greece - where we join up
with Turkey.
How did this iron curtain from the ice cap to the borders of Sudan emerge? What
is its purpose? These are the key questions that should engage anyone trying to
understand the "war on terror". And what of the bombers? Where are
they coming from, these armies of suiciders?
Still we are obsessed with Osama bin Laden. Is he alive? Yes. But does he
matter? Quite possibly not. For he has created al-Qa'ida. The monster has been
born. To squander our millions searching for people like Bin Laden is about as
useless as arresting nuclear scientists after the invention of the atom bomb.
It is with us. Alas, as long as we are not attending to the real problems of the
Middle East, of its record of suffering and injustice, it - al-Qa'ida - will
still be with us.
My year began with a massive explosion in Beirut, just 400 metres from me, as a
bomb killed the ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri. It continued on 7 July when a
bomb blew up two trains back from me on the Piccadilly line.
Oh, the dangerous world we live in now. I suppose we all have to make our
personal choices these days. Mine is that I am not going to allow 11 September
2001 to change my world. Bush may believe that 19 Arab murderers changed his
world. But I'm not going to let them change mine. I hope I'm right. -- © 2005
Independent News and Media Ltd.
The Death of Freedom
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0107-29.htm
[Aimed at a readership primarily in the UK, there is no mention
of events, people and repression in Australia mirroring those described in
Britain and the USA. It's a great pity we don't have someone doing Pilger's job
for us here, too.]
January 7, 2006 - New Statesman/UK
The rights of ordinary people to speak out against an unjust war and atrocities
unleashed in their name are being crushed. Fascism is at the door. Who else will
fight it? - by John Pilger
On Christmas Eve, I dropped in on Brian Haw, whose hunched, pacing figure was
just visible through the freezing fog. For four and a half years, Brian has
camped in Parliament Square with a graphic display of photographs that show the
terror and suffering imposed on Iraqi children by British policies. The
effectiveness of his action was demonstrated last April when the Blair
government banned any expression of opposition within a kilometre of parliament.
The high court subsequently ruled that, because his presence preceded the ban,
Brian was an exception.
Day after day, night after night, season upon season, he remains a beacon,
illuminating the great crime of Iraq and the cowardice of the House of Commons.
As we talked, two women brought him a Christmas meal and mulled wine. They
thanked him, shook his hand and hurried on. He had never seen them before.
"That's typical of the public," he said. A man in a pinstriped suit
and tie emerged from the fog, carrying a small wreath. "I intend to place
this at the Cenotaph and read out the names of the dead in Iraq," he said
to Brian, who cautioned him: "You'll spend the night in the cells,
mate." We watched him stride off and lay his wreath. His head bowed, he
appeared to be whispering. Thirty years ago, I watched dissidents do something
similar outside the walls of the Kremlin.
As the night had covered him, he was lucky. On December 7th, Maya Evans, a vegan
chef aged 25, was convicted of breaching the new Serious Organized Crime and
Police Act by reading aloud at the Cenotaph the names of 97 British soldiers
killed in Iraq. So serious was her crime that it required 14 policemen in two
vans to arrest her. She was fined and given a criminal record for the rest of
her life.
Freedom is dying.
Eighty-year-old John Catt served with the RAF in the Second World War. Last
September, he was stopped by police in Brighton for wearing an
"offensive" T-shirt which suggested that Bush and Blair be tried for
war crimes. He was arrested under the Terrorism Act and handcuffed, with his
arms held behind his back. The official record of the arrest says the
"purpose" of searching him was "terrorism" and the
"grounds for intervention" were "carrying plackard and T-shirt
with anti-Blair info" (sic).
He is awaiting trial.
Such cases compare with others that remain secret and beyond any form of
justice: those of the foreign nationals held at Belmarsh Prison who have never
been charged, let alone put on trial. They are held "on suspicion".
Some of the "evidence" against them, whatever it is, the government
has now admitted, could have been extracted under torture at Guantanamo and Abu
Ghraib. They are political prisoners in all but name. They face the prospect of
being spirited out of the country and into the arms of a regime which may
torture them to death. Their isolated families, including children, are quietly
going mad.
And for what?
Between 11 September 2001 and 30 September 2005, 895 people in total were
arrested under the Terrorism Act. Only 23 have been convicted of offences
covered by the act. As for real terrorists, the identities of two of the 7 July
bombers, including the suspected mastermind, were known to MI5, yet nothing was
done. And Blair wants to give the security services more power. Having helped to
devastate Iraq, he is now killing freedom in his own country.
Consider parallel events in the United States. Last October, an American doctor,
loved by his patients, was punished with 22 years in prison for founding a
charity, Help the Needy, which helped children in Iraq stricken by an economic
and humanitarian blockade imposed by America and Britain. In raising money for
infants dying from diarrhoea, Dr Rafil Dhafir broke a siege which, according to
Unicef, had caused the deaths of half a million under the age of five. John
Ashcroft, the then US attorney general, called Dr Dhafir, a Muslim, a
"terrorist", a description mocked by even the judge in a politically
motivated travesty of a trial.
The Dhafir case is not extraordinary. In the same month, three US circuit court
judges ruled in favour of the Bush regime's "right" to imprison an
American citizen "indefinitely" without charging him with a crime.
This was the case of Jose Padilla, a petty criminal who allegedly visited
Pakistan before he was arrested at Chicago airport three and a half years ago.
He was never charged and no evidence has ever been presented against him. Now
mired in legal complexity, the case puts George Bush above the law and outlaws
the Bill of Rights. Indeed, on November 14th, the US Senate in effect voted to
ban habeas corpus by passing an amendment that overturned a Supreme Court ruling
allowing Guantanamo prisoners access to a federal court. Thus, the touchstone of
America's most celebrated freedom was scrapped. Without habeas corpus, a
government can simply lock away its opponents and implement a dictatorship.
A related, insidious tyranny is being imposed across the world. For all his
troubles in Iraq, Bush has carried out the recommendations of a Messianic
conspiracy theory called the "Project for the New American Century".
Written by his ideological sponsors shortly before he came to power, it foresaw
his administration as a military dictatorship behind a democratic facade:
"the cavalry on the new American frontier," guided by a blend of
paranoia and megalomania. More than 700 American bases are now placed
strategically in compliant countries, notably at gateways to sources of fossil
fuels and encircling the Middle East and central Asia. "Pre-emptive"
aggression is policy, including the use of nuclear weapons. The chemical warfare
industry has been reinvigorated. Missile treaties have been torn up. Space has
been militarized. Global warming has been embraced. The powers of the president
have never been greater. The judicial system has been subverted, along with
civil liberties. The former senior CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who once prepared
the daily White House briefing, told me that the authors of the PNAC and those
now occupying positions of executive power used to be known in Washington as
"the crazies". He said: "We should now be very worried about
fascism."
In his epic acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Literature on December 7th, Harold
Pinter spoke of "a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed". He
asked why "the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the
ruthless suppression of independent thought" of Stalinist Russia were well
known in the west while US state crimes were merely "superficially
recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged".
A silence has reigned. Across the world, the extinction and suffering of
countless human beings can be attributed to rampant American power, "But
you wouldn't know it," said Pinter. "It never happened. Nothing ever
happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It
was of no interest."
To its credit, the Guardian published every word of Pinter's warning. To its
shame, though unsurprising, the state television broadcaster ignored it. All
that Newsnight flatulence about the arts, all that recycled preening for the
cameras at Booker Prize-giving events, yet the BBC could not make room for
Britain's greatest living dramatist, so honoured, to tell the truth.
For the BBC, it simply never happened, just as the killing of half a million
children by America's medieval siege of Iraq during the 1990s never happened,
just as the Dhafir and Padilla trials and the Senate vote banning freedom never
happened. The political prisoners of Belmarsh barely exist; and a big, brave
posse of Metropolitan police never swept away Maya Evans as she publicly grieved
for British soldiers killed in the cause of nothing except rotten power.
Bereft of irony, but with a snigger, the newsreader Fiona Bruce introduced, as
news, a Christmas propaganda film about Bush's dogs. That happened.
Now imagine Bruce reading the following: "Here is delayed news, just in.
From 1945 to 2005, the United States attempted to overthrow 50 governments, many
of them democracies, and to crush 30 popular movements fighting tyrannical
regimes. In the process, 25 countries were bombed, causing the loss of several
million lives and the despair of millions more." (Thanks to William Blum's
Rogue State, published by Common Courage Press.)
The icon of horror of Saddam Hussein's rule is a 1988 film of petrified bodies
of people in the Kurdish town of Halabja, killed in a chemical weapons attack.
The attack has been referred to a great deal by Bush and Blair and the film
shown a great deal by the BBC. At the time, as I know from personal experience,
the Foreign Office tried to cover up the crime at Halabja. The Americans tried
to blame it on Iran. Today, in an age of images, there are no images of the
chemical weapons attack on Fallujah in November 2004. This allowed the Americans
to deny it until they were caught out recently by investigators using the
internet. For the BBC, American atrocities simply do not happen.
In 1999, while filming in Washington and Iraq, I learned the true scale of
bombing in what the Americans and British then called Iraq's "no-fly
zones". During the 18 months to 14 January 1999, US aircraft flew 24,000
combat missions over Iraq; almost every mission was bombing or strafing.
"We're down to the last outhouse," a US official protested.
"There are still some things left [to bomb], but not many." That was
seven years ago. In recent months, the air assault on Iraq has multiplied; the
effect on the ground cannot be imagined. For the BBC, it has not happened.
The black farce extends to those pseudo-humanitarians in the media and
elsewhere, who themselves have never seen the effects of cluster bombs and
air-burst shells, yet continue to invoke the crimes of Saddam to justify the
nightmare in Iraq and to protect a quisling prime minister who has sold out his
country and made the world more dangerous. Curiously, some of them insist on
describing themselves as "liberals" and "left of center",
even "anti-fascists". They want some respectability, I suppose. This
is understandable, given that the league table of carnage by Saddam Hussein was
overtaken long ago by that of their hero in Downing Street, who will now support
an attack on Iran.
This cannot change until we, in the west, look in the mirror and confront the
true aims and narcissism of the power applied in our name, its extremes and
terrorism. The usual double standard no longer works; there are now millions
like Brian Haw, Maya Evans, John Catt and the man in the pinstriped suit, with
his wreath. Looking in the mirror means understanding that a violent and
undemocratic order is being imposed by those whose actions are little different
from the actions of fascists. The difference used to be distance. Now they are
bringing it home.
John Pilger's new book, Freedom Next Time, will be published in June by Bantam
Press. © New Statesman 2006
Tsunami God's Revenge, women told
Religious extremists are using last year's storm to oppress the
survivors.
Marluddin Jalil, a Sharia judge who has ordered the punishment of women for not
wearing headscarves, was uncompromising: 'The tsunami was because of the sins of
the people of Aceh.' Thundering into a microphone at a gathering of wives, he
made clear where he felt the fault lay: 'The Holy Koran says that if women are
good, then a country is good.'
A year after the disaster which many see as a divine punishment, emboldened
Islamic hardliners are doing their best to eradicate sin - and women are their
prime targets.
With reconstruction slow, irrational fears of a second tsunami high, and nearly
500,000 still homeless along 500 miles of coastline, the stern message falls on
fertile ground. A Sharia police force modelled on Saudi moral enforcers
enthusiastically seeks out female wrong doers for public humiliation.
The Wilayatul Hisbah, which loosely translates as 'Control Team', has arrested
women, lopped off their hair, and paraded them in tears through the streets
while broadcasting their sins over a megaphone. More than 100 gamblers and
drinkers - men and women - have been caned in public and some clerics are
calling for thieves' hands to be amputated.
The Islamic law introduced without popular enthusiasm in 2002 has been
implemented rigorously since the tsunami, especially in towns such as
Lhokseumawe, where Fatimah Syam, of Indonesian Women for Legal Justice, knows of
20 women who have fallen foul of it. She said: 'They seek out women without
headscarves or unmarried girls meeting boys in private and parade them through
the streets in an open car. I've seen the police laughing and boasting, and the
girls in tears. The Sharia police say the tsunami happened because women ignored
religion. We never heard of this parading before the tsunami.'
The poor, powerless and female have borne the brunt of the moral enforcers'
righteousness. Mrs Syam claimed the wife of an official caught without a
headscarf on a scooter was let off last month and a prostitute who was paraded
through the town won the sympathy of passers-by because of the hypocrisy of her
persecutors: the woman's client was allowed quietly to disappear.
The religious police have not always had it their own way. In one incident on
the island of Sabang, attempts to humiliate a bareheaded girl backfired when
angry villagers turned on them. By the time the civil police arrived to rescue
the enforcers they were surrounded by an angry mob flicking lighted cigarettes
at them.
But such setbacks and public unease have not dampened the zeal of Dr Jalil, a
small, neat man with a trimmed moustache whose particular concerns are
headscarves, gambling, alcohol, and girls meeting boys. 'Sin starts small and
gets bigger,' he said. His next target is a displaced persons' camp outside
Lhokseumawe where he has heard of young men and women freely mixing. 'Another
tsunami is possible,' he said. 'The Holy Koran says that if humans don't listen
to Allah they will be punished.' He was not sure whether there was more or less
sin since the disasteralthough he believes that the Acehnese are more
God-fearing now. In the tent camps and temporary wooden barracks where desperate
survivors endure grim conditions, Dr Jalil¹s views are often well received.
There are 67,000 survivors still living in tents and a further 75,000 are in the
slum barracks, which are taking on a semipermanent air. Only half of those who
lost their jobs in the disaster are back at work and drug abuse among the young
is growing.
Although Aceh province is now a giant building site, the sheer scale of
destruction has slowed work. A third of government servants died and 1,000 miles
of roads were wiped out, making the logistics of recovery extremely difficult.
The Government says it has built 12,000 of the 80,000 permanent homes it aims
for and that housing will be its top priority next year. But some aid workers
think there could still be families under canvas in three years' time. Surnyati
Alian, five months pregnant, is a typical survivor, squeezed with her family of
four into a 12ft square tent beside a stinking ditch among the ruins of Meulaboh
on the west coast. Like many Acehnese women she is desperate for a new family.
Her four-year-old daughter was torn from her grasp as the wave crashed down on
them. The child's body was never found. Now she faces the prospect of nursing a
new baby in a tent that is black with mould.
In such conditions wild theories about the tsunami thrive. In a version of Pop
Idol organised by the American and Indonesian Red Cross in Barak Lampaseh camp
in Banda Aceh, the winner was 12-year-old Sheila Mentari, whose song told how
God sent the wave as punishment for sin. She said her father, who died in the
wave, would have approved.
A fellow villager Marzuki Lidan, 46, who lost his wife and children, was among
the enthusiastic audience. He said: 'The Sharia police are good Muslims doing an
excellent job. We must listen to them and follow God's rules. Otherwise the
tsunami will happen again.'
-- The Times Dec. 22, 2005 from Nick Meo in Aceh.
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Radio Adelaide 101.5FM every Sunday at 12.30.
Ron Gray
Human Rights Foundation
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