AUSTRALIA: Howard warns of possible pre-emptive anti-terror strikes
Australia's relationship with Asia, has grown more complicated, after comments by Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, that he'd be prepared to launch a pre-emptive strike in such a case. The Philippines and Thailand have voiced concern .. as has Indonesia. The Jakarta Post is reporting an Indonesian Government warning to Australia not to flout international law and rejected any suggestion that Australia has the right to take military action in other countries.
Presenter/Interviewer: Catherine McGrath, Canberra
Speakers: John Howard, Australian PM; Kevin Rudd, Shadow Foreign Affairs
MCGRATH: National security has become the number one priority for the Government since the Bali attacks and yesterday John Howard raised the stakes again. Asked if he would launch a pre-emptive strike against terrorists in another country if he had evidence they were about to attack Australia, the Prime Minister answered:
HOWARD: Oh yes. I think any Australian Prime Minister would. It stands to reason that if you believed that somebody was going to launch an attack against your country, either of a conventional kind or of a terrorist kind, and you had a capacity to stop it and there was no alternative other than to use that capacity, then of course you would have to use it.
MCGRATH: Mr Howard was speaking on the Sunday program and there is a background to his comments. In the last week, Defence Minister Robert Hill has been arguing that new international laws are needed to allow countries to launch pre-emptive strikes.
If the moves to rewrite the laws go ahead, it will not be without a great deal of controversy around the world. It could lead to a redefinition of the United Nations. Yesterday Mr. Howard outlined his case.
HOWARD: When the United Nations Charter was written, the idea of attack was defined by the history that had gone before and that is idea of an army rolling across the border of a neighbouring country, or in the case of the Japanese in Pearl Harbour, bombing a base.
Now that's different now, you don't get that now. What you're getting is this non-state terrorism which is just as devastating and potentially even more so and all I'm saying, I think many people are saying, is that maybe the body of international law has to catch up with that new reality.
That stands to reason.
MCGRATH: Mr Howard said any prime minister who had the capacity to prevent an attack against his country, would fail the most basic test of office if he didn't utilise that capacity if there was no other alternative.
The Prime Minister's comments have been criticised this morning by the Federal Opposition.
Shadow Foreign Affairs Spokesman, Kevin Rudd.
RUDD: I think the Prime Minister is engaged with language which is designed to make him look hairy chested to his domestic audience, but I really question the wisdom of the Prime Minister using this language in terms of how it is read from our friends and neighbours in the region.
Because as it is being read, it is seen as Australia, under John Howard, contemplating the possibility of an attack on the territory of our neighbours in Southeast Asia.
MCGRATH: Now the Prime Minister has made the point that it is his belief that the UN laws were drawn up in the post-World War Two era, they're out of date now, that they need to be rewritten.
RUDD: Well the United Nations Charter has served the international community by and large well for more than half a century. The problem the Prime Minister faces is this: he's trying to make the UN rules fit his interest in justifying, legally, a first strike against Iraq with Australian military contribution within that first strike. And that lies at the heart of what he is now saying about pre-emption against terrorism in the region.
What John Howard is trying to do is merge the two arguments. Merge the argument about terrorism on the one hand, about which all Australians are united, with an argument in support of an Australian military contribution to a US first strike against Iraq on another.
These are quite separate matters. John Howard is actually, clever politician that he is, trying to merge the arguments of one into the other.
02/12/2002
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