Will the Middle East spring come to Syria and Iran?

Mr DANBY (Melbourne Ports) (9.55 pm)- It is appropriate, as revolution sweeps the Middle East, to do a survey of the countries that are contemplating or should be contemplating democratic change. Syria is a country that has not been focused on enough. It is a vicious police state controlled by a 10 percent minority, the Alawis, who hold the population in their hands, monopolising all security and armed services positions. President Bashar al-Assad, is Syria's dictator, and is described by Freedom House as one of the lowest rating countries in terms of liberty in the world. The previous president, Hafez al-Assad, another blood-drenched Ba'athist like Saddam Hussein, is infamous when in 1982 in response to a Muslim Brotherhood uprising in the city of Hama, Syrian artillery surrounded the city and flattened it by grid, killing 20,000 people. This was only discovered a few months after the event, by the Swiss Red Cross.

20,000 killed in bombing by the Baathists in the city of Hama, Syria, 1982

Iran is only a marginally less awful dictatorship according to Freedom House. In my view, Iran's political apparatus it is modelled very closely on the interwar German Nazi state, with the Revolutionary Guards being very similar to the SS, state within a state, and the Basij, the regimes street thugs, very comparable to the Sturmabteilung, the SA, whom the Nazis used to use as their violent enforces. In today's demonstrations of young people in Tehran and Isfahan and all the famous cities of Persia, the Basij go into the crowd disguised as demonstrators to arrest, assault and kill people. This is the Ahmadinejad/Khamenei gang's way of keeping control of Iran and preventing the democratic revolution that is sweeping the Middle East from coming to Iran. Deep divisions exist in Iran not just with the public but even in the ruling circles. Of course, there is now irrefutable proof that Ahmadinijad stole the last election.

Basij: Feared street thugs who protect Iran's ruling Mullah's

Libya used to be a place that some people in Australian society-I can only call them crackpots-20 years ago used to adulate as a society that ought to be imitated by people who wanted social progress. Many of these Australian fellow travellers to the Libya of Colonel Gaddafi-which now machine guns its own citizens in its streets, uses its air force to bomb its own citizens and hires mercenaries from Africa to stab, assault and shoot people in the streets of Tripoli and Benghazi.

As the Foreign Editor of the Australian, Greg Sheridan, accurately portrayed Gaddafi:

"Yet the man is a buffoon, a preening, ludicrous, Evelyn Waugh caricature of an African dictator, not only a scourge but an embarrassment to all Libyans and to the wider Arab culture. The dictator can no longer keep them isolated from the current flowing through the outside world. They know it doesn't have to be like this."

Gaddafi and his all female body guards  

The names of Hartley, Coxedge, McLean and McKinlay, all of who touted for Gaddafi and his Libyan Jamahiriya, and of Claudia Wright, who was the main international advocate for Colonel Gaddafi, are consigned to intellectual infamy given the true nature of what has happened in Libya over the last 43 years. That benighted country, under Gaddafi, was a terrible police state, with a total deprivation of the freedoms that we consider so normal here in Australia. It is a sad indictment of a crazed faction of the Australian that Ghaddafi's Libya was a source of inspiration. Some of them even wore watches with Ghaddafis face.

Events in Egypt fill us with more hope. Of course we all hope, as some have argued that this Arab Spring will cut the ground from underneath Al Qaeda.

Events in Egypt fill us with more hope. I think that President Obama and the Western world could not have opposed the democratic revolution in Egypt. If we had, for strategic reasons, or for fear of the Moslem Brotherhood taking over, the Egyptian people would, quite rightly, have swept aside the Mubarak government, and the Western world would have then been seen to have supported the antidemocratic forces. We hope that the election that will take place in Egypt in a year's time will not be the only election. We hope that civil society gets a chance to establish itself and that other democratic parties apart from the Muslim Brotherhood will have a chance to establish themselves and contest that election. We only wish the Egyptian people well. After all, Australia provides a great deal of food aid to that country and has paid for wheat that helps that society.

Establishing democracy in Egypt after Mubrark is profoundly difficult. Elections alone will not bring democracy to Egypt. Even independence of the judiciary, a free press , transparent, non-corrupt institutions and other democratic transition in Egypt will not be sufficient.

Egypt is a society where 45 percent of women are illiterate. In a recent poll, 70 percent of Egyptian women said they had experienced sexual violence, as had 98 percent of foreign women in Egypt-we saw the terrible incident with the CBS reporter - Lara Logan, where she was pack attacked during the demonstrations in Tahrir Square. The liberation of women, the restoration of civil society, the control by government of the police and the establishment of a proper, independent judiciary, as we have in Australia, are all the kinds of things that Egypt needs to do before it can have a proper, democratic society. We wish them well in the forthcoming democratic elections. We hope unlike Islamist authoritarians in Gaza, Hamas, this will not be the beginning of the end of democracy.