Tim Flannery has just been named Australian of the Year by the official body established to perform this task -- and an excellent choice it was. Dr Flannery has done an invaluable job in alerting people around the world to the threat of global warming; and his book on the subject, The Weather Makers, has been a deservedly huge success for Michael Heyward at Text and the publishers around the world to whom he sold the rights.
But, for my money, David Hicks is our alternative Australian of the Year. Hicks has put up with five years of torture and persecution at Guantanamo Bay, courtesy of his own government's indifference and its craven subservience to its US master. Imprisoned for years without a charge, oppressed without a qualm, he has been a living symbol of post-9/11 realpolitik. With almost no help from outside, and against the massive power of the US state, he has endured. So far.
It originally took two-and-a-half years for Hicks to be charged, after he'd been caught in Afghanistan in December 2001. His alleged crimes: conspiracy, attempted murder, and aiding the enemy. The US claimed that he'd trained in al-Qaeda camps, guarded a Taliban tank at Kandahar airport, and travelled to Konduz in northern Afghanistan to join Taliban forces engaged in combat against US-led forces. They said he intended to kill coalition combatants in Afghanistan between September and December 2001, and that he aided al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the context of an armed conflict with the United States. Other reports have indicated that Hicks is anti-Semitic -- which, to me, as the son of Holocaust survivors, is particularly offensive.
But if Hicks did indeed think or do any or all of these things, I'd say he was a dickhead or a ratbag at best, and a vicious little bastard at worst. But what are we really talking about? Anybody who signed up to support the Taliban is a lunatic, but so what? There's a lot of nasty intent asserted here, but no violent action. And it should be noted that none of this alleged behaviour was illegal in Australia at the time. Yet even these relatively modest charges (for someone who was deemed to be amongst 'the worst of the worst' held at Guantanamo) had, of course, to be abandoned under the since-discredited military commission process. And any replacement charges that Hicks faces will still rely on evidence that was gathered under torture, and will be laid under a modified process that has few of the safeguards that Australians associate with 'a fair go'. And then the new process will presumably be subject to constitutional challenge as well.
And so it has gone on, year after year. Throughout his living hell -- the solitary confinement, the interrogations, the long imprisonment, the denial of hope and contact with the outside world -- Hicks' own government has behaved with unspeakable indecency. For most of the time, they've ignored him. Some of the time, they've defamed him. And lately, as a public campaign to have him either treated decently or repatriated has got under way, the government has tried to act as though it cares.
The prime minister, John Howard, has pretended that he's given the Americans a deadline to charge Hicks (without explaining what the 'or else' implied in his 'threat' might be, and only after the Yanks told him they'd beat the date). Alexander Downer, the most undeservedly self-satisfied foreign minister in Australia's history, recently went out of his way to claim that Hicks' mental state was fine (and then had the gall to be irritated because people were appalled to hear that his unacknowledged source was a US consular official who'd spent a few minutes in Hicks' company without talking to him).
The fact is that Hicks' treatment is unconscionable by any standards -- whether you're a conservative who believes in due process and the rule of law, or a liberal who believes that torture is unacceptable in any situation. Hicks may have been mad, bad, and dangerous to know, but nothing that he is alleged to have done or thought or said could justify what has been done to him.
Enough is enough. The long delays, the psychological and physical torture, and the tainted process have all added up to an intolerable situation that can only be remedied by Hicks being sent home.
Ironically, Hicks looks better as the Australian government's treatment of him looks worse; that's what happens when you abandon principle and decency for a higher political cause. The result is that powerless, voiceless David Hicks has proven he is a genuine little Aussie battler (and not the ersatz kind that the Australian government pretends to represent). If Howard wants a martyr to a lost US–Australia cause, he's going about it the right way. In the meantime, we should all drink to the alternative Australian of the Year.
Henry Rosenbloom