Powerful voice for peace and freedom

as posted here

Margaret Holmes, 1909-2009

MARGARET HOLMES was a Christian pacifist who, in 1959, founded the NSW branch of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. With it she tackled Aboriginal rights, apartheid, chemical and biological warfare, prison reform, US bases and the nuclear arms race - but the Vietnam War was her biggest challenge.

When prime minister Robert Menzies addressed a public meeting at Hornsby following the reintroduction of compulsory military service, Holmes, knowing the value of dramatising issues, led a group of league members dressed in black veils as they slowly and silently walked out of the room handing out "We mourn for peace" leaflets. Later she led a delegation to lobby Malcolm Fraser, then minister for the army, asking him not to send conscripts to Vietnam.

The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom worked with Save Our Sons to support draft resistors, demonstrated in Canberra and helped organise protests when the first conscripts set sail to Vietnam in 1966. Holmes was also instrumental in producing the league's booklet about chemical and biological weapons, New Perversions of Science (CBW), which was sold in Australia, New Zealand, Britain and America.

Margaret Joan Read, who has died aged 100, was born in Sydney on January 24, 1909, the first of five children of Dr William Read and his wife, formerly Irene Phillips. In 1915, Dr Read joined the AIF as part of the 2nd Australian General Hospital and Mrs Read followed him to England with Margaret and two younger children. On the trip, Margaret had her first experience of war, having to go to bed fully clothed in case of a U-boat attack.

In England, Mrs Read wangled a passage to Cairo, where Dr Read was stationed. Margaret then accompanied her mother delivering ''comforts'' to the wounded soldiers from Gallipoli in hospital there.

Margaret was an ultra-patriotic mirror of her parents' pro-Empire views when her studies at Sydney University began in 1927, but her world view was challenged and radicalised at the university. She was a member of the university's first Student Representative Council and met Thomas Arthur Glennie (known as Tag) Holmes through the Student Christian Movement. The movement helped to further shape her beliefs, as did voluntary work for the University Settlement in Chippendale. She switched from arts to medicine and graduated in 1933 with a bachelor of science degree.

Margaret and Tag were married in 1933 then spent a year in England, where he did post-graduate study. On their return, Tag went into practice in Mosman alongside his father and later opened his own practice.

When the Holmeses moved into their newly built house, Coolabah, the surgery was part of the building. For the next 44 years, Coolabah welcomed a never-ending stream of visitors, plus live-in help and a growing family - six children by the end of World War II. Holmes balanced domestic demands with a continuing interest in world affairs and Christian Socialism.

In 1939 the Holmeses founded a "50-50 Club" to help refugees and locals get to know each other. Holmes was active in many organisations, including the Mothers' Union, Boy Scouts and the nearby nursery school - the first preschool in Australia. She also joined the Left Book Club and attended events such as the 1937 Australian Congress of Peace and Friendship with Soviet Russia - and thus became a "person of interest" to NSW Special Branch and later ASIO.

There was a resurgence of peace activities at the end of World War II, many of which Holmes supported. She and Tag also joined the New Education Fellowship and took up oil painting. Then, when the younger children were in secondary school, Holmes began her major years of activism.

In 1959, as the Cold War heightened fears of another war, she travelled the world for six months and attended the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom congress in Stockholm. At the invitation of two Russian delegates she visited the Soviet Union on her way home - smuggling bibles to a Baptist minister in Moscow - and later visited India.

Inspired by the women she had met on her travels, on her return Holmes founded the NSW branch of the league. In 1967, the Holmes went abroad again, to South Africa, where they visited the political activist Helen Joseph (then under house arrest), and the US, where they attended anti-war meetings and she spoke on radio explaining that many Australians did not believe they should be in Vietnam.

At 80, Holmes helped to organise the 24th Triennial International Congress of the the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in Sydney. She was still being consulted and addressing audiences about peace well into her nineties.

Always one to see the potential of emerging movements, she was an early protagonist for the environment, Aboriginal co-operatives, the Australian Democrats, ethical investment and the Grameen Bank, as well as giving support to local community concerns from the (Middle) Headland Preservation Group to the Barn at Mosman Bay. She remained a faithful member of St Luke's Anglican Church, Mosman.

Margaret Holmes was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 2001. A biography, Margaret Holmes: The Life and Times of an Australian Peace Campaigner, was published in 2006.

Margaret Holmes is survived by her six children, nine grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren. Tag Holmes died in 1984.

Michelle Cavanagh

as posted here

John Pilger: Australia’s role in the Balibo killings

as posted here

John Pilger
24 September 2009


It is a decade since the people of East Timor defied the genocidal occupiers of their country to take part in a United Nations referendum, voting for their freedom and independence.

A “scorched earth” campaign by the Indonesian dictatorship followed, adding to a toll of carnage that had begun 24 years earlier when Indonesia invaded tiny East Timor with the secret support of Australia, Britain and the United States.

According to a committee of the Australian parliament, “at least 200,000” died under the occupation, a third of the population.

Filming undercover in 1993, I found crosses almost everywhere: great black crosses etched against the sky, crosses on peaks, crosses in tiers on the hillsides, crosses beside the road. They littered the earth and crowded the eye.

A holocaust happened in East Timor, telling us more about rapacious Western power, its propaganda and true aims, than even current colonial adventures.

The historical record is unambiguous that the US, Britain and Australia conspired to accept such a scale of bloodshed as the price of securing Southeast Asia’s “greatest prize” with its “hoard of natural resources”.

Philip Liechty, the senior CIA operations officer in Jakarta at the time of the invasion, told me, “I saw the intelligence. There were people being herded into school buildings by Indonesian soldiers and the buildings set on fire. The place was a free fire zone ...

“We sent them everything that you need to fight a major war against somebody who doesn’t have any guns. None of that got out …

“[The Indonesian dictator] Suharto was given the green light to do what he did.”

Britain supplied Suharto with machine guns and Hawk fighter-bombers that, regardless of fake “assurances”, were used against defenceless East Timorese villages.

The critical role was played by Australia. This was Australia’s region.

During the second world war, the people of East Timor had fought heroically to stop a Japanese invasion of Australia.

Their betrayal was spelt out in a series of leaked cables sent by the Australian ambassador in Jakarta, Richard Woolcott, prior to and during the Indonesian invasion in 1975.

Echoing then-US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, he urged “a pragmatic rather than a principled stand”, reminding his government that it would “more readily” exploit the oil and gas wealth beneath the Timor Sea with Indonesia than with its rightful owners, the East Timorese.

“What Indonesia now looks to from Australia,” he wrote as Suharto’s special forces slaughtered their way across East Timor, “is some understanding of their attitude and possible action to assist public understanding in Australia”.

Two months earlier, Indonesian troops had murdered five newsmen from Australian TV near the East Timorese town of Balibo. On the day after the capital, Dili, was seized, they shot dead a sixth journalist, Roger East, throwing his body into the sea.

Australian intelligence had known 12 hours in advance that the journalists in Balibo faced imminent death, and the government did nothing.

Intercepted at the spy base, Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) near Darwin, which supplies US and British intelligence, the warning was suppressed so that it would not expose Western governments’ part in the conspiracy to invade or the official lie that the journalists had been killed in “crossfire”.

The secretary of the Australian Defence Department, Arthur Tange, a notorious cold warrior, demanded that the government not even inform the journalists’ families of their murders. No minister protested to the Indonesians.

This criminal connivance is documented in Death in Balibo, Lies in Canberra, written by Desmond Ball, a renowned intelligence specialist, and Hamish McDonald.

The Australian government’s complicity in the journalists’ murder and, above all, in a bloodbath greater proportionally than that perpetrated by Pol Pot in Cambodia has been cut almost entirely from a major new film, Balibo.

Claiming to be a “true story”, it is a travesty of omissions. In eight of 16 drafts of his screenplay, David Williamson, the distinguished Australian playwright, graphically depicted the chain of true events that began with the original radio intercepts by Australian intelligence and went all the way to prime minister Gough Whitlam, who believed East Timor should be “integrated” into Indonesia.

This is reduced in the film to a fleeting image of Whitlam and Suharto in a newspaper wrapped around fish and chips.

Williamson’s original script described the effect of the cover up on the families of the murdered journalists, and their anger and frustration at being denied information. It also depicted their despair at Canberra’s scandalous decision to have the journalists’ ashes buried in Jakarta with ambassador Woolcott, the arch apologist, reading the oration.

What the government feared if the ashes came home was public outrage directed at the West’s client in Jakarta.

All this was cut, even though the director, Robert Connolly, reinstated some of the political material in a final draft.

As if to cover the missing history in his film, Connolly appointed an “historical advisor”, Clinton Fernandes, whose distinction is as a former member of Australian military intelligence.

Fernandes claimed the 2007 coronial inquiry into the deaths of the journalists “discredited” the Ball and MacDonald book. This is both curious and untrue.

The DSD intercepts show that Benny Murdani, the Indonesian general commanding the invasion, when asked by an officer in the field what should be done about journalists, had replied, “We can’t have any witnesses”.

The officer subsequently signalled confirmation that the journalists had been executed.

DSD was listening as usual; but in testimony to the coronial inquiry a DSD official claimed that the critical message mysteriously was not translated and circulated until the following afternoon — when the journalists were dead.

The “true story” of the film is, in any case, largely fictitious.

Finely dramatised, acted and located, the film is reminiscent of the genre of Vietnam movies, such as The Deer Hunter, which artistically airbrushed the truth of that atrocious war from popular history.

Not surprisingly, it has been lauded in the Australian media, which took minimal interest in East Timor’s suffering during the long years of Indonesian occupation.

So enamoured of Suharto was the country’s only national daily, The Australian, owned by Rupert Murdoch, that its editor-in-chief, Paul Kelly, led Australia’s principal newspaper editors to Jakarta to shake the tyrant’s hand.

There is a photograph of one of them bowing.

I asked Balibo’s director, Robert Connolly, why he had cut the original Williamson script and omitted all government complicity. He replied that the film had “generated huge discussion in the media and the Australian government” and in that way “Australia would be best held accountable”.

Milan Kundera’s truism comes to mind: “The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

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ASIO Asbestos bound for West Belconen Tip | The RiotACT

<b>ASIO</b> Asbestos bound for West Belconen Tip | The RiotACT: "Looks like the suggestion that this waste was heading for Murrumbateman or Tarago was wide of the mark, with the ABC now reporting that it's heading for."