@SenatorLudlum 26th anniv. #Chernobyl – nuclear power continues to kill also #australia #uranium in #Fukushima fallout
Senator Scott Ludlum on the 26th anniversary of Chernobyl – nuclear power continues to kill – also uranium from australia continues to kill in the wake of Fukushima – and Australia’s Government continues to leave australian journalists Julian Assange and Austin Mackell in harm’s way.
Scott joined me on Perth Talkback Radio 882 6PR on Sunday April 29 – runs 17 minutes 32 seconds
Read Senator Ludlam’s blog on Nuclear power and Aussie Uranium -click here
Chernobyl disaster (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The levels of radioactivity in the lava under the Chernobyl number four reactor (1986, avg. values) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Entrance to the zone of alienation around Chernobyl. Italiano: L'entrata alla "zona di alienazione" attorno a Chernobyl. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
April 30, 2012
tony serve
) thank you
and we have them camped halfway up the valley on the threshold of terrible violence, training up the Afghan National Army to take over when we leave. The helos are back, shooting us across to FOB Hadrian with this goggle-eyed Western Australian anti-war campaigner pressing his nose against the window. Razorblade mountains, helicopter pilots with their beetle helmets and cyberspace feeds, children in bomb vests, shredded for the guy from Queensland to piece together. Full moon tonight. I can’t see the mountains from here because the air is full of shit and fine, powdered dust, but I bet the mountains in the Chora Valley are as sharp as knives in the cold light. Here is somewhere liminal, perched between mundane horror and violent hope, the worst nightmares of different centuries colliding with satellite imagery and homemade pipes full of ball bearings. We’ll see what tomorrow serves up. I’m thinking that if KAF disappeared off the map and everyone was instantly teleported home, never to return, the world would be a measurably better place. Day 5 – Kandahar I guess the place is starting to make an evil kind of sense. The Australian contingent here is smaller and more focused, a tighter cog in a larger machine. And what a machine. Today we went from the storeman and movements people, keeping meticulous track of a whirlwind of gear, to the Heron unit flying drones all over southern Afghanistan. Two teenagers in a shipping container fly the vehicle, entirely immersed in its extended nervous system. Next door, intelligence officers call what they see, helping the ‘pilots’ steer the cameras and relaying their interpretation to the field. While we’re there, they’re soaking up the ‘pattern of life’ in two compounds 6km west of TK – suspected weapons caches with a convoy of Australian soldiers on the way toward them. From up here, all of the tiny black figures moving between the orchards and the courtyards look suspicious. Look like targets. The dusty terrain below is an abstracted field of pixels and possible threats – not a cultivated river valley, but a clinical battlespace. The Afghans below are ‘LNs’ – Local Nationals – and some of them may die when the convoy arrives. In the meantime, they smudge their way around slow pans at various resolutions, awaiting deletion or passing over, their unthinking fate transmitted to these kids intently watching them from the safety of big Samsung monitors. Their unit commander is affable and very competent, and the Israeli-built drone in the hangar is streamlined and clean. It can hang in the air for 20 hours. Anything it sees can be incinerated in very short order by any number of capabilities called in by the people we’ve met over the last few days. To lighten the mood I’ve been photographing graffiti – some of it very good – stencilled mainly on the concrete blast walls. Zero Six, whoever you are, you’ve provided the only humanising touches to a thoroughly dehumanising place. We spend the afternoon at the boardwalk – a piece of pure Americana transplanted into the sands south of Kandahar city. Fried Chicken, steaks at TGI Friday, stalls and shops, a football pitch, and tides of troops and contractors ambling along with their mates and their weapons. A small piece of the Midwest grafted uneasily into a war zone; as we arrive, to complete the weird, a predator drone is lifting away behind the rooftops. Kandahar is fucking weird. The sightlines are long and dusty, the roads clogged with traffic, and the air grey with diesel fumes and the thunder of air movements. Last night in Afghanistan. Just spent a great hour playing cards with Simon, Alex, Steven and Alex – they’ve been good company. But my god. What is to become of all this? Drawdown? Transition? People just laugh at that. KAF is here to stay, until something major forces a change. The dust has got into everything, including perhaps my sense of clarity. It’s time to go. Day 6 – Kandahar – AMAB (AKA Camp Cupcake) The air at KAF today is a fine grained blend of hydrocarbons, dust and fecal matter. You can smell it – shit rising from the ponds on the edge of camp, diesel fumes, powdery dust. We visit the rotary wing group and learn about flying Chinooks in and out of situations – a visit out to the hangar, but the choppers are in the field. It’s our last few hours in Afghanistan. By now the weather is closing in – a foul curtain of brown haze sweeping toward this benighted place. We wait an hour – every imaginable kind of aircraft flying in and out of the smog. It’s actually raining shit – a few drops wrench from the tortured air, and somehow it just adds to the immense dusty sadness of the place. Occupied Kandahar. We wait, in the company of blackhawks hanging like malignant wasps, monstrous cargo planes and a tiny passenger plane carrying a senior US military official. On the flight line, a ceaseless procession of spyplanes, jet fighters, passenger aircraft; further back again, the dusty forms of Chinooks and Russian heavy lift helos. This is all in the service of the people of Afghanistan, is it? Really? Our Hercules arrives and parks in front of us – visibility is now appalling, but at no time does the pace of activity cease. We struggle back into the air, strapped in and dazed, aftertaste of shitful Kandahar air coating the back of the throat. Half an hour in Tarin Kot, the air relatively clean and fresh. Imagine: the valley in rain – great columns of grey stalking the south west, mountains zig zag shapes against a soft sky – when the thunder hits the base moments after the flash of lightning, it’s like the final word on this hideous ‘war’. Then we’re away again – flying into turbulence with the messy but disciplined chaos of TK falling behind, no doubt to reappear in dreams. Most of the way through the flight we’re invited up to the front. Two cheerful pilots are bringing us back to AMAB, the sun dead ahead, and sheets of soft cloud fleeing away below. Beautiful. Sit in the jumpseat and watch as this grey behemoth makes its way back to Al Minhad, Dubai’s alien profile rising through a horizon of smog, the airfield taking shape up ahead and the pilots’ coded banter. It’s a spellbinding way to leave the country: in the cockpit of a C130 Hercules, with the imprint of six big days just starting to settle. Day 7 – AMAB Last full day here and a quiet one. Debrief in the morning with our group and a quick hello to Minister Stephen Smith, to whom the ADF have taken a dislike over his handling of the skype scandal – although a couple admitted quietly that the extra transparency demanded by the Minister may have been good for Defence. A quick look around AMAB – this quiet and orderly cube farm is dismissed as ‘camp cupcake’ by those further forward, but it’s an essential staging point for Australia’s interventions across the MEAO. We meet the comms people, fire crews and force support unit running base. By now our team is probably feeling a bit jaded and powerpointed out. The afternoon is long and quiet – the guys with blue passports are going to Dubai – having not been asked to bring it I’m stuck behind the wire and strangely ok with that. Sleep through the heat and then there’s time to think about the future of this war and the relationship between Parliament and the military. If this was about Al Qaeda then it’s been over for years. There are no AQ in Uruzgan and only a handful left in Afghanistan it seems. So we’re done? Unless we only do occupations after horrific attacks, we now need to invade Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and probably a few others. One thing is pretty clear. The ADF will do what they’re asked – this is a focussed, professional, task-driven organisation and the people at the sharpest end of it spent their lives training to be sent into harm’s way. They are completely, unambiguously aware of the risk – they’ve all attended ramp ceremonies where their mates’ casket is repatriated to family back into Australia. All the same, there’s an eagerness to prove themselves. The further forward you get, the happier crew are to be there and the less interested in being pulled back into safety. Having spent years training, most of them really, really want to be in theatre. “This is a great battle lab for us.” “Al Qaeda has been removed from the battlespace.” “This is mostly about the US alliance.” “I’d do this whether you paid me or not.” At what point does the ethic of service combine with institutional inertia to simply keep us there no matter how far sideways the mission creeps? This is indeed a great battle lab for us, the United States and the parasitic encrustation of contractors, mercenaries, middlemen and arms suppliers who have turned Kandahar Air Field into a city larger than Kalgoorlie. Was it also a battle lab for the twelve year old who blew himself apart in the Chora Valley? “What’s the definition of an insurgent?” “Someone who takes a shot at us.” Leaving, by this erudite definition, will end the insurgency. Will that tip Afghanistan back into a misogynistic, feudal hell hole? No-one here seems to know. If we leave in 2014? What about 2020? 2030? When exactly, will this stable and compliant Afghan liberal democracy be properly baked? They. Don’t. Know. The military don’t get to decide whether they stay or go. They get a signal from the executive, which right now is taking nearly all its cues from the United States. Nearly. The decisions then, the real ones, are taken by people who never get shot at. Who never smell the blood and shit. Us – the politicians who, if we’re lucky, get to spend a week there under heavy protection so we can go home and say we saw it, we get it, we support the troops. Funny word this. Support. Classy sleight of hand there, as if supporting the people in the line of fire was ever the question. Having met them, eaten with them, shared bunkrooms with them, ‘supporting’ them is so remarkably the wrong question to ask. What kind of supporter would leave them in there indefinitely, another dozen or two to die between now and 2014, training an army to serve a democracy and a civil society that is nowhere in evidence? That’s the calculated blind spot in this remarkable trip – the only Afghans I spoke to were serving coffee and selling gemstones, the only ones I saw were running up the firing range toward the razor wire. We’ve been in a perfect cocoon. “If we did a poll of the people I suspect the coalition would be asked to leave”. But of course no-one has done a poll. All this in Uruzgan, an area three times the size of the ACT, with most of the blood spilled in Helmand and parts east. I think we’ve been played. All of us. Scott Ludlam April 18, 2012
