Letter to the Editor: We must work for peace and justice

DEAR News Of The Area,

Tuesday, 11 November is Remembrance Day.

It is also the 50^th anniversary of the sacking of the Whitlam government but I digress.

I remember my father who joined the air force, learnt to fly Spitfires, and got shot down over Italy.

Two weeks later, in a Bologna hospital, after having shards of perspex removed from his face and eyes, he celebrated his 21^st birthday.

Everyone in the hospital, the Italians, Germans, and fellow prisoners, gave him something.
An orange, a crust of bread, a cigarette.

He was left thinking, “What the hell are we fighting each other for?”.

He spent a very cold, hungry winter in a German POW camp.

When Germany was liberated in 1945 people were appalled when they saw the pictures from the death camps in Poland and Germany.

We came to realise that the ideology of the Nazis had led to a situation in which the majority of German citizens basically consented to the systematic persecution and murder of Jews, gays, trade unionists and Roma people.

Australia played a prominent role in the establishment of the United Nations.

The world took up the slogan “Never Again!”.

For all its faults, and there are many shortcomings, the UN bodies have tried to educate, cajole, help, and sometimes shame member states into acting in a collaborative manner without descending into armed conflict.

The UN has no army and has no way to enforce any decisions apart from the force of moral argument.

As a former UN Weapons Inspector, Hans Blix, once noted, “The UN is not there to take us to Heaven, but to stop us descending into Hell”.

The ability of Australia to influence acts of genocide in places like Gaza, Sudan, the Congo, or Myanmar may be limited but our moral voice is diminished when we conduct human rights abuses in our own country.

The Government continues to deport, sometimes stateless, people to Nauru in violation of our responsibilities to the UN Refugee Convention, to which we are a signatory.

I will remember my father this Remembrance Day. I will also remember the lessons learned from the conflagration of WWII and the development of a framework of human rights.

There is no glory in war, and nor is war inevitable.

But if we want peace and justice we have to collaborate and work for it.

Peter SOBEY,
Valla.