Advance Australia Fair - Building Sustainability, Justice and Peace
Workshop - The 'War on Terror'
Sunday 31st July 2005

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Waleed Kadous and Agnes Chong

Australian Muslim Civil Rights Action Network – AMCRAN

Agnes Chong

First of all I’d like to thank the organisers for inviting us here and for allowing us to contribute to this forum. Waleed and I are from AMCRAN, the Australian Muslim Civil Rights Action Network. I’m going to talk a little bit about what we do, what we have done and what had worked for us. And Waleed is going to focus on the problems that we face and some of the strategies that we’d like to implement to overcome them.

First, a little bit about AMCRAN. We are essentially a volunteer organisation that focuses on contributing to the debate on the anti-terrorist laws from a civil rights perspective, and providing a Muslim voice in that debate. There are really two spheres of activity that we have focused on so far. The first is contributing to this debate from a Muslim perspective and encouraging the community to contribute by writing letters and making submissions. The other part is educating the community about what these laws mean.

In terms of educating the community we produced this booklet, ASIO, Police and You with the UTS Community Law Centre and the NSW Council for Civil Liberties. It goes through what the anti-terrorism laws are and what people’s rights and responsibilities are under these laws. We also hold community education seminars about the laws. We encourage people to come forward and talk about their experiences, which has been very difficult because of the secrecy provisions that Brian talked about earlier. People are reluctant to talk about what has happened to them, if anything has happened to them and what their experiences have been.

What has worked for us so far?

We have heard from many people who support what we do, and say that they’re glad there is a Muslim voice in this space, but 80% of the work that is done is done by 2-3 core people. What we have found that works is establishing links with other organisations like the UTS Community Law Centre, Community Legal Centres in NSW, NSW Council for Civil Liberties. That helps to amplify our efforts. This booklet for example, was produced in three months and we couldn’t have done it without the support and advice from these people. We were able to provide reference group and contacts, but the other groups contributed funding, contacts for legal reference groups and media contacts and advice.

What has worked for us so far is that we have been a Muslim voice in the space, and people are interested to hear that because it is talked about extensively today. The Muslim community is being targeted by these laws and people are interested to hear our stories. People don’t know where to turn to and this is how we have placed ourselves. We have situated ourselves between the Muslim community and the broader community well.

Waleed is now going to talk about some of the problems that we’ve had.

Waleed Kadous

Of course there are the problems inherent in being a volunteer organisation but as Agnes pointed out we can actually get a long way by working with other organisations to amplify our skill sets. We both have full-time jobs and we manage to do it, so everyone in this room has the ability to really make an impact on things like these laws.

One issue that’s been a particular struggle for us and I think for the anti-terrorism movement in Australia locally has been the media. There have been some successes. People like Joo-Cheong have got an article, we had about two op-ed pieces and there’s extensive quoting. But I don’t think we’ve really succeeded in getting a pro-civil rights position put forward in the media extensively and there are a couple of reasons for that. One is that the media is sometimes hard to work with, especially in a post-terror event scenario. If you have done a lot of work and have articles set up, if something like the bombings in London happen everything goes out the window and out of kilter, and the focus is only on the victims. That focus is deserved but it’s very hard to get away from that and say, “yes we understand that this has happened but there’s still the issue of our civil rights and there’s still the question whether all these new laws that are to be introduced would have prevented this in the first place”. It’s very hard to make that case when everyone in the media is focused on individual terrorist acts. That’s something that we have to challenge.

The other thing is that small organisations and to some extent the movement generally has been between two traps in the media. One is being ignored. And the other one is that it’s very easy for pro-civil rights stuff, related to the terrorism laws, to be spun badly. To give you an example, when we launched the booklet, a title of one article read ‘Muslims defend allegations of supporting terrorists by giving them a guide to the laws’. That was the AAP article that went out. Everything that we do there’s always the issue of managing the way that the media spins it. We have to work out how we are going to get that spin right in order to get the message across that people’s rights are being taken away.

The irony of these laws, the particular difficulty, is that at the same time as they take away people’s rights they take away people’s rights to respond to those laws. The Muslim community is so intimidated by these laws we’ve found ourselves in the position of having to defend ASIO. People come up to us and say “ASIO can pin anything on you and if we participate in any kind of dissent or opposition to these laws they’re going to get us for something or other”. We have to respond by saying that ASIO does have a lot of power but there are safeguards there that you can resort to and it’s not like a police state, it’s not like Egypt, or the Internal Security Act in Malaysia, or like the situation in Pakistan. So we have to fight that fight within our own communities, especially the more peak, or senior bodies to overcome the stigma of even addressing the issue of civil rights.

Finally, I want to raise some practical things that all us here can do to fight the anti-terrorism laws. We can still do something about these laws that’s very effective. I’m going to look at it from three different directions, one is political, one is the media and one is legal.

The political situation for the next three years is very difficult and we all know that because of the Howard government’s control of the Senate. One thing that we were given hope for was from appearing in front of one of the Senate Committees with Senator George Brandis, who made a comment about John Howard being a ‘rodent’. In the committee he was chided by the chair-person for making comments that were out of line, for being so strongly opposed to these pieces of legislation. He asked us why we were shy and offering the committee compromises, only minor amendments to the law, when we are opposed to it on principal. We replied that we had to do this, we have to do our best to at least blunt some aspects of the laws. So there are people in the Liberal Party, and there’s some hope by what happened with the Petro Georgio affair, that we can at least take some of the impact of these laws away by going through the Liberal Party. This is a topic that came up in previous discussion a few years ago.

The second is a possible approach to the media work. Not so much on the civil rights issues per se, or the legal issues. We have to face the facts that to most Australians civil rights are not interesting, they’re not sexy. What seems to have an impact is for us is to present cases, show directly how these laws take away people’s rights. Discuss the case of a university student here in Melbourne a few days ago who was questioned by the Australian Federal Police about his library borrowing habits. It turns out that he’s doing a PhD on the terror laws and the concept of martyrdom and Islam and he feels he was targeted because of his Islamic name. The case of the medical student is another, and here in Melbourne of Jack Thomas and the ridiculous things that have gone on with that case. These are cases that we can put forward to the media. When you show miscarriages of justice, things that are unfair then I think that will help us to push the line in the media. And I also should mention that politicians are very eager to hear that when we make submissions before them. We are currently developing a database of these cases.

The third thing is the legal front. The government still has submission processes but these don’t seem to have an impact. The other issue is that the community seems to have lost interest. Let me give you an example. When the first laws were introduced in 2002, my recollection was that there was a total of 438 submissions made. From then, with every little new piece of legislation that has come through, the numbers have decreased, reaching the lowest level of 26. The politicians may get the feeling that the community is slowly accepting these laws. Each one of these new review processes only gets a few more submissions.

It’s up to each one of us to make a contribution whenever the opportunity comes up. When other civil rights organisations go in to present their cases, it helps to make our cases strong. There is a review of the original legislation coming up later this year. I expect every one of you to write in. The civil rights organisations will create pro-forma letters that you can submit, but it's better if you can add your personal comments or feelings.

It’s a difficult time, the politics are not in our favour but I think we can still do our best to get these laws amended and make it clear to politicians that we’re not going to lie down when it comes to this legislation.

NSW Council of Civil Liberties http://www.nswccl.org.au/

Australian Muslim Civil Rights Action Network – AMCRAN http://www.amcran.org/

Liberty Victoria website

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