One father’s fight against his country’s (Australia) endorsement of the US-led so-called war on terror. The father, incidentally, lost his son Josh in the Bali bombing.
One man’s stand against Australia’s war on terror, Rod Liddle
The Guardian, 10 December 2002
The Australian government is having a rough time at the moment. The newspapers are full of calamitous bush fires, a crippling drought which has reduced the crop yield by 40% this year and giant jellyfish a metre in diameter lurking just offshore, with poisonous mischief on their monocellular minds.
As if that wasn’t enough, there’s also Brian Deegan to deal with. Deegan is currently causing more trouble than certainly the jellyfish and probably, in the end, the bush fires. He has set about the politicians with fervour and intelligence. The politicians patronise him and are condescending to him, but he’s not having it - he just keeps right on causing trouble.
The thing is, the politicians can’t be nasty to him because he is bereaved, and being nasty to the bereaved is not on, if you have been elected to public office. Especially if the person who is bereaved blames you, at least indirectly, for his bereavement.
And that is precisely why Deegan is on the warpath. His son, Josh, was blown to smithereens in the Bali bombing and he wants the Australian government to accept a degree of culpability. The Australian government is, understandably, reluctant to do so. And so we have an impasse.
Josh was drinking and dancing in a bar that took the full force of the second blast. If you remember, local Balinese people were not allowed the dubious pleasure of drinking and dancing with him or, indeed, anyone else in this particular place; it was a bar for comparatively rich, white, foreigners only. Now, I think that’s a grotesque arrangement. The sort of humiliating thing which perhaps makes terrorism more likely, if no more justifiable. But that’s not the point.
What Deegan is complaining about is the Australian government’s response to the bombing. They ring him up from time to time to tell him about various procedures they are going to undertake with Josh’s body and Deegan gets irritated because he is, as it happens, a deputy coroner and knows very well all about the tortuous bureaucratic rigmarole for the dead. They have also called a couple of times to ask him if he needs his lawn cutting, which is the sort of surreal stuff that happens when bureaucracies need to show people they really, really, care, in order to cover their backs with people who think they actually couldn’t give a toss.
What Deegan wants is for the government to say that one of the reasons Josh was killed was because of Australia’s support for the policies of George Bush. In fact, if Australia had renounced the policies of Bush, Josh would still be alive today.
Al-Qaida likes its symbolism. The twin World Trade Centre towers were icons of American capitalism; the nightclub in Bali no less iconic of Australian hedonism. Bali is Australia’s September 11; it still dominates the front pages of the national newspapers. But the public reaction has been very different and it might be that the politicians have been caught off guard. While the prime minister, John Howard, seems to suggest that his country will invade any Asian country it suspects of harbouring terrorists - a fatuous idea greeted with howls of anger, incredulity and hilarity in Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Bangkok and Manila - the public seems to be saying: hang on, aren’t we an Asian country? Should we be pinning our colours to the mast of a distant superpower reviled or at best resented among our closest geographical allies?
Howard and his ministers have not yet responded to Deegan’s request. They remain first lieutenants in the coalition against terror, whatever that may be. They remain supportive of attempts to kick the hell out of Iraq, a country that had no involvement in September 11 and none in the Bali bomb outrage. But the public may be ahead of them; as indeed, may be the leaders of those countries in south-east Asia that have been fighting Muslim fundamentalist insurgencies for the best part of 25 years and look on bemused as the US and its allies issue threats and warnings and tell people not to visit the area.
In his speech on Hari Raya (the equivalent of our Christmas Day), Mohamad Mahathir, the prime minister of Malaysia, suggested that the “developed” world, as he put it, had become “unhinged” by September 11 and that everything it did in mitigation seemed to make matters far worse. My guess is that Mahathir is right; I think Deegan agrees. And I have the suspicion that the people of Australia and, for that matter, the UK, France, Germany and Canada are probably in agreement, too.