Letter to Bill Shorten on Afrin

The Independent: Syria’s war of ethnic cleansing: Kurds threatened with beheading by Turkey’s allies if they don’t convert to extremism

Mr Bill Shorten
Leader of the Opposition
Parliament House
Canberra

Dear Mr Shorten,

Please use your good offices to demand urgently that the Australian Government breaks its silence on the Turkish invasion of Afrin. The Kurdish and other peoples of the canton are going to be slaughtered unless the world demands that Turkey immediately withdraws its troops and its murderous jihadi proxies.

(Please read Patrick Cockburn’s latest article on Afrin at the link below. It is chilling.

I have repeatedly emailed Foreign Minister Bishop to plead with her to act. No doubt others have also done do and they too have not received replies.

Parliament must condemn the invasion. Australia must use its good offices to force the UN to do likewise. The Coalition will not initiate action, so it is up to Labor, the Greens and progressive independents to do so.

We owe the Kurds an enormous debt of gratitude for their part in crushing the so-called Islamic State. We cannot abandon them now and allow them to suffer at the hands of the Turkish Islamist dictatorship and its jihadi allies.

Make no mistake, the people of Afrin are faced with the same kind of situation as the people of Sebrenica in the 1990s. The so-called FSA militias are threatening to butcher the Kurds and Yazidis if they do not conform to their loathsome and perverted version of Islam.

Dictator Erdogan is happy to allow them to do so and has himself threatened “ethnic cleansing”.

Afrin, like the other mainly Kurdish cantons in northern Syria was an oasis of peace and had opened welcomed hundreds of thousands of refugees.

It is now a hell on earth because of the neo-Ottoman designs of Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The hearts of my Kurdish-Australian friends are breaking. Some of them have family members in Afrin. They cannot understand why the world looks the other way and allows this barbarism to continue. We as a supposedly civilised nation have a moral imperative to act.

Regards,

Professor John Tully
Honorary Professor/Educator
College of Arts and Education
Victoria University
Melbourne

Professor John Tully Honorary Professor/Educator College of Arts and Education Victoria University Melbourne