Corporate Based Killers-Why The Adelaide Professor Died In Iraq

Foreign Affairs, after gagging his family via "security issues", said that incident highlighted the extreme dangers Australians faced in Baghdad.

The fact that an Australian-based mercenary company gunned down an 72 year old Iraqi academic as he drove home from a shopping outing, for fear he might be a suicide bomber, doesn't seem to be a factor in the minds of DFAT's spin-doctors.

For three months of the year Professor Kays Juma lived in the Adelaide suburb of Flagstaff HIll, a couple of miles from a university that had never heard of him. The bulk of his life was spent teaching animal husbandry at the University of Baghdad.

Maybe if the mercenaries who ended his life didn't belong to a company that had lost lives in a car bomb explosion two years back, when they were protecting water and electricity engineers, this tragedy might not have occurred.. All these armed men saw, as they guarded a convoy of contractors, was an old Iraqi getting too close for comfort.

Acting on the policy of "better safe than sorry" they shot him.

The mercenary managers, Unity Resource Management, have as a director the Sydney Olympic's chief of athlete security. He was also head of the SAS' Counter-Terrorism Unit until 1997. Unity Resource (whose motto is "In Strength Lies Unity" appear on the U.S Embassy in Bagdad's website under "Citizen Services" They joined the Iraqi-American Chamber of Commerce last year, and this year are a major sponsor (second on the list only to AEGIS)) at the Iraq Security, Technology and Communications Summit being held in the UAE. No doubt part of their sponsorship will be guarding the Ministers, Deputies and Secretary Generals of the Departments of Interior, Communications, Science and Defence.

This company seems to have strong views on the ethics of the participation of Australian Government representatives. Consider this article review by one of their senior employees:

The argument and thoughts put forward in the abstract are not only interesting however prudent to the evolving question as to whether the Australian Government agencies and defence force need to utilise the
established model that exists in the US and UK with companies such as Dynocorp, Blackwater and the UK firm Control Risks Group.

There are however a number of essential core issues that need to be
estabished and the major concern is the national interest. i.e. the companies involved in Aus gov work would need to be transparent with the other contracted work so that security and conflicts of interest on
a global scale are not raised. I look forward to further reading the remainder of the article.

Regards Shane Irving Unity Resources Group Aus, Asia, Middle East, Latin America

How a company with such ideals and aspirations managed to gun down Kays Juma is an important consideration. That a "legitimate" soldier in a declared war might perpetrate such an action in defence of his life might, however abhorrent the notion, be halfway understandable. That a gun-toting warrior bearing the insignia not of a nation but of a corporation can kill an old man because it's his job to do so is can only be labelled as the epitome of everything that is wrong with Western society.

How many innocent Iraqis, unreported through lack of connection to other countries, have died at the hands of corporate employees from "democratic" nations? Do the compilers of the Rand Corporation's Terrorism Database, who provided the Incident Report for the Unity deaths, keep statistics on civilians blown away by mercenaries?

Is this the active Democracy that Western society is so proud of? We should hang our heads in shame

HALLIBURTON INVITES SOUTH AUSTRALIAN AID PROGRAM PARTICIPATION

The Department of Trade and Economic Development held a forum in Adelaide recentlyy to inform more than 70 SA businesses about multimillion-dollar opportunities in the Official Development Assistance market.

Department chief executive Raymond Garrand said the global official development market was valued at $108 billion last financial year "and still growing".

"Australia allocated $2.3 billion annually to the official development market through AusAid, and is ranked 15th amongst the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries in that market," he said.

Adelaide companies including Austraining International, Sagric International and Halliburton/KBR spoke to businesses attending the forum about their activities overseas and potential opportunities for subcontractor companies.

In September last year, while PM Howard told Iraq about how much increased aid Australia would supply, KBR were advertising internationally for a foreign aid director. At the same time Mr Howard was co-chairing a meeting withPresident Bush and the Prime Minister of India to set up a UN World Democracy Fund. Howard said at a September interview that I think the focus on the expansion of democracy and providing a democratic underpinning to policy is very welcome indeed and to many of us it seems long overdue.

How much of the aid money going to Adelaide industry will be spent according to a nation's compliance with Bush's form of Democracy .

What was the trade-off to get India to engage as a co-chair of George's plain- sale to India of South Australia's uranium, an international migration program to alleviate India's overcrowding and solve SA's population shortage? Perhaps both.

Premier Rann reiterated today that he wouldn't allow uranium sales to India unless it signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. How will Dubya force Rann's compliance.?

FOUR DIE, TWO ON SA ROADS AFTER INDYCAR EVENT

"it's a tragic day and to try and explain it, you just can't" said Elizabeth police chief Kym Zander after witnessing a car split in two by the force of impact.

What do you expect when you spend a three days pumping a culture full of high speed adrenalin. The Clipsal 500 incites the love of speed, thrills, action into the residents of Adelaide and South Australia and then disappears.

Were you suprised that so many people died the day after? Sadly some of us expected a signifigant increase in fatalities. Year after year our police advise responsible driving, and year after year we put on events that glorify high speed racing.
A big psychological difference in the Adelaide event is that it is run on public streets and roads, vindicating similar activity in city-dwellers and country commuters.

The Clipsal 500 will occur again next year. So will the following deaths. Until we match the event with a concurrent driver education campaing South Australian society can hang its head in shame- on our shoulders rests the burden of responsibility for needless death.