Locke Keith: Ministerial Statements — Iraq—New Zealand Assistance 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Locke Keith: Ministerial Statements — Iraq—New Zealand Assistance 
[Sitting date: 10 June 2003. Volume:609;Page:6044. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 Let us be clear: this announcement is not primarily about increasing our aid to Iraq; it is all about scoring more brownie points in London and Washington. We could easily have spent exactly the same amount of money on Iraqi aid and reconstruction—about $12 million worth—without putting our army people in a unit of the British occupation force. Our army people are already doing good work in the UN-run demining unit and that could have been expanded. Kiwis are already doing good work in the Red Cross and other civilian non-governmental organisations. We could have put more resources into that area. There is no doubt that we could have become involved in several civilian engineering reconstruction projects. Bush and Blair might not have liked it if we had said yes we will do more to help Iraq but we will not do anything that could be seen as legitimising the war and the current British and American occupation. The Iraqis who increasingly hate the occupation of their land by British and American troops would have cheered. People around the world who admired New Zealand’s anti-war stand would also have applauded. 
Of course we should help the Iraqi people reconstruct their country after the devastation caused by years of Saddam’s brutal rule two US-led wars and a decade of economic sanctions. However we should not do that as part of the British occupation force—at a time when America and Britain are increasingly discredited for having launched the war on the lie that they “knew” Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Now they are doling out reconstruction and oil contracts to their own companies and they are becoming increasingly discredited for continuing to mistreat the Iraqi people and promoting their own puppets as the new rulers of the country. Just last Saturday 2000 people demonstrated in Basra against the British demanding their withdrawal from the city. That is the very area where our Kiwi army people are likely to be based. Do we really want to see our army people being demonstrated against by the Iraqi people? 
There is one thing in the announcement that we do support—the $1 million being given to repair the agricultural ministry building and the agricultural scholarships that are being made available to Iraqis. However we are totally against sending up to 100 soldiers to participate in the continuing dirty war in Afghanistan. Our contribution is being prettied up to make it appear that all our soldiers will be doing is helping rebuild communities. In fact they will be part of a continuing war which today is not primarily against the Taliban or al-Qaeda but is the American troops siding with one set of warlords—those allied with the Karzai Government—against other warlords. Murderous fundamentalist anti-women warlords like Ishmael Khan who runs Herat in the west are being supported by American troops. Afghans have another term for the American-led provincial reconstruction teams the Kiwis will be joining. They call them “provincial rambo teams”. 
The umbrella group of 70 non-governmental organisations working in Afghanistan has also criticised those teams because they could put aid workers at risk. As Raphael Robillard the head of the agency coordinating Afghanistan relief says: “The PRTs blur the lines between who is a gentle aid worker and who was a combatant collecting intelligence.” The American war in Afghanistan has been a very dirty war with many civilians being killed in the bombing admitted cases of suspects being tortured to death by American officers at Baghram air base and hundreds of people shipped off to Guantanamo base and deprived of any legal and human rights. That is not something that we should continue to be involved in. 
There is also a huge cost to us as a nation to fall in militarily behind the Americans and British in Iraq or Afghanistan.