Media reports
Ex-envoy savages boat people drownings, Feb 25, 05 (NT News, pg 9)
Tony Kevin discusses A Certain Maritime Incident – the sinking of the SIEV X.
Public forum hosted by The Darwin Refugee Action Network (NT Museum Theatrette, February 24, 05).
Download speech in Word formatDarwin is a beautiful place, I arrived here yesterday, today I took the bus out around the northern suburbs, to Casuarina then took another bus to Palmerston and back into the city. Fortunately I went at a time when the high school kids were out of class at 3 and 4 o clock and I say fortunately because it gave me an opportunity to see the happiness, the relaxation and the niceness of this diverse crowd of young people from all races from all backgrounds, Aboriginal people, European origin people, Asian origin people all blending in happily together. I just felt really good about the feeling on those city buses going around town today. And that’s something very special about Darwin. I’d read about this and I was very glad to see it for myself. Of course, there’s another side to Darwin too – it’s on the front line of issues of things like fisheries resource protection, border protection against illegal immigrants, fears of possible future invasion from some unspecified country. There’s a kind of national defense, national defense, national security side to Darwin and it’s a very important part of the city’s nature as well. Sovereignty is a big issue here and how to protect it. I could really feel that when I was standing of the headland early this morning looking at the memorials of the Japanese attacks in World War II. You don’t need to apologise for that –it’s part of what you are. You’re both multicultural, generous, warm and welcoming and there’s a kind of hard and resolute edge to your city as well. And of course Northern Command is based in Darwin as, NORCOM. The Australian Defense Northern Command. And NORCOM played a very important role in the SIEV X story because it was out of NORCOM in Darwin that the orders went to the RAAF Orions of what they had to do in terms of surveillance and no order ever went to them, despite the serious intelligence that was coming in from the Australian Federal Police intelligence operations in Indonesia, no order ever went out to conduct a safety–of–life–at–sea search for SIEV X survivors. Was that turning a blind eye? Was that a feeling that we’d better not find these people because if we do it’ll just be another headache for us. Or was it a sense of perhaps just let it happen, it might send a useful signal if a few people drown? Who knows? I don’t know. I can only ask the questions and my book asks those questions and many, many others.
So, most people are very familiar with the phrases children overboard and TAMPA. You hear them all the time don’t you? In the sort of the dialogue of border protection, in dialogue on human rights. Everybody is prepared to talk about children overboard and TAMPA. Strangely enough, people don’t like to talk about SIEV X. It gives them a little queasy feeling running up and down their spine. Why is that? Because SIEV X really touches nerves, it’s about national security. It’s has that sort of national security smell to it. And a lot of people who make a living out of practicing politics or commenting on politics don’t want to go there. And this has been one of the great disappointments to me over the past three years, how many people who I actually admire who have liberal humanitarian reputations have been rather scared to touch SIEV X. It takes courage to touch SIEV X and I’ve been well aware of that over the last three years. Perhaps it takes a certain foolishness a certain willingness to be sort of be reckless and throw personal consequences aside and say this is just too important. But it is a little bit like I guess the Aboriginal massacres, the stolen generations – those sort of issues. If people don’t have the courage to grapple with them and say it’s happened, we have to deal with it, they get swept under the carpet and the sort of the national trauma, the psychological injury continues.
SIEV X was actually front page news for a very brief period in May–June 2002. We may forget that now, but the historians among us who will go back in future years to those newspaper front pages and see that for a few brief weeks it was really important. Let me just read to you some passages from a Canberra Times editorial on the seventeenth of June 2002, which was at the height of the senate inquiry’s concerns about SIEV X.
"The case for a wide–ranging inquiry into what Australian authorities knew and did about SIEV Ten [sic. They got mixed up and called it the SIEV Ten, its actually SIEV Unknown –Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel Unknown] is now unanswerable. Evidence has emerged that the Prime Minister’s people–smuggling taskforce knew a lot more at the time than it had been claiming.
By no means yet does the evidence demonstrate the unthinkable, that Australian authorities stood by and allowed a grossly overloaded vessel to sink. But what is now known means that this possibility must now be seriously examined in an independent forum, as must an alternative, also very unpleasant: that gross negligence led to 353 drownings.
The Senate Committee investigating the children overboard affair has done a good job in dragging from generally reluctant witnesses some of the facts. These have contradicted almost everything which was initially said about the disaster. The senate inquiry is also hamstrung by a lack of access to sensitive intelligence information, and, on the record so far in this inquiry, there can be no certainty that some of the material is being withheld only on national security grounds.
Another curious aspect of the affair is that it is clear many officials must be aware that the community is being misled. The taskforce [this is the taskforce in the Prime Minister’s department], for example, contained representatives from a host of agencies involved in gathering intelligence about the movements of boat people, conducting surveillance, planning interceptions and aggressive deterrence, as well as the reception of those who got through the net. Given the minutes which have been tabled [these were minutes which were tabled in the Senate Committee from that taskforce], they can hardly have failed to recognise that a formal statement that the taskforce had no knowledge of the boat [which was actually a statement made in earlier evidence by Jane Halton who was a senior officer in the Prime Minister’s department who chaired the taskforce] was less than frank. At the least, they are compromised by their silence. That so many agencies are involved, and that statements by ministers and senior defense officials are in question, emphasises the need for an independent inquiry. It should be a judge with unlimited rights to see security material, rather than a internal whitewash. The truth may be unpleasant, for some, but, until it is known, it casts a slur not only on our border protection mechanisms, but on all Australians."
Now that’s a Canberra Times editorial and I can only say I concur with every word of it. But it gives you an idea of that brief moment when SIEV X became a major political issue. Very quickly it became forgotten. The Navy, the Defense Force put out a set of maps that were initially quite plausible. The admiral in charge of the inquiry into what intelligence was available in the defense department about SIEV X reported that we can only speculate as to where the SIEV X sank –that it might not have come into the Operation Relex zone at all. That was a lie and it was proved it was lie. That it was said and that it was believed at the time and the SIEV X basically died as a public issue.
I think you’re all very brave in coming here tonight. Margot Kingston at a SIEV X meeting in Canberra in 2003 suggested that everybody in the room was actually a subversive. And you are all actually quite subversive coming here tonight –so thank–you for having the courage to be subversive.
What I plan to do tonight in my talk is to respond to criticisms that have been made of my position by four people. Senator Brandis; Gerard Henderson of the Sydney Institute; Bishop Tom Frame, the Anglican Bishop to the Australian Defense Force and Jennifer Clark, an Aboriginal rights lawyer who works out of ANU in Canberra. Frame and Clarke in particular have recently published quite lengthy reviews. Frame in two journals –the Defender, the journal of the Australian Defense Association and the same piece with a couple of changes appeared in Public Administration Today, the journal of the Australian Institute of Public Administration, Canberra Branch. So these are quite prestigious journals. Jennifer Clark’s review appeared in the Journal of Australian Studies – a review of Australian books which is quite a prestigious internet publication. I responded to both of them. I responded to the Frame reviews in a piece I wrote for New Matilda –the website journal which is excellent and I responded to Jennifer Clark on the website of the Journal of Australian Studies review of books. So those are available.
First of all, let me summarise what the book is about. It’s in two parts. The first part is an account, an analytical account of what happened to the people who bought passages on SIEV X from the moment to they met Abu Quassey and his team in these little towns in the hills near Jakarta... to the time they went on a bus convey across Indonesia across the Sunda Straight to Sumatra – escorted by police all the way, into a police owned hostel where they were hidden all day... they were hardly hidden, they just rested up a bit I suppose.
The next day they were bussed down to the water, they were loaded onto the boat at gunpoint. When they realized it was only a little 19 meter boat and there were 421 of them, the later people being ferried out to the boat became very scared and the police were then putting them on at gunpoint. Their terrifying journey for 33 hours down the full length of the Sunda Straight, which of course is effectively in internal Indonesian waters, out into the Indian Ocean, 60 miles out to sea where the boat finally lost engine power and sank, foundered. Then the story of their rescue and return to Jakarta, three days later. Having been rescued by fishing boats the day after the boat sank. The survivors, 45 survivors had spent 19 hours in the water –many others of course had not survived.
What I try to do in that part one of the book is to cast a critical eye on the very large wealth of reports we have of those events. From the survivor meeting when the survivors basically had a group therapy session and opened up to each other in their own language. And this was all translated into English by the Australian Muslim Association in Sydney. So that’s a primary source. There were seventeen different accounts from that meeting. And there’s also a wealth of named survivor accounts in reports which were filed by top international journalists who all flooded into Jakarta to cover the story and being conscientious journalists, they all named their sources. And so we have almost a spider’s web of different sources of what different people have said about different episodes in the whole tragedy and what I tried to do is to weave through the spider’s web –see what elements have in common, what the strengths are, what the weaknesses are and I also identified a great deal of information that was known right from the very beginning which couldn’t possibly have come from survivors. Like the boat being 19 meters long – what survivor would have possibly had the opportunity to measure the length of the boat, being taken out to it in the middle of the night. Like 421 people going on board. How would the survivors have known there was 421 people? An exact breakdown of the nationalities involved. An reasonably precise breakdown of genders and age–groups. All this kind of factual information that could have only come from one source –the people with access to the people smuggler organisation. So that was a key thing and there are many other things that this part of the book identifies that show that even if there had never been a senate inquiry there would still have been material for this book to be written because the story did not hang together. There was suss elements in this story from the very beginning.
The second part of the book is quite different – it’s my account of the senate inquiry into what happened and I guess inevitably I am an actor in this because I initiated the inquiry with my questions and I actually gave SIEV X its name. It was always described as the Quassey boat after the people smuggler or it was described in a very lengthy way as the boat that sank on 19th October drowning 353 people. So I said well, the ADF are talking about these twelve SIEVs that came to Australia or were intercepted. This was obviously another SIEV that didn’t make it, let’s call it SIEV X. That was more accurate than I realized at the time because it emerged a few weeks later that it was actually listed in the minutes of this people–smuggling taskforce in the Prime Minster’s Department as SIEV 8. So it was the eighth boat they were expecting in the series. When it didn’t arrive they very neatly transferred the number to another boat and pretended they had never given it a number. But it is actually quite clearly in the minutes of the taskforce and it’s a quite remarkable quote (if I can find it, I should have tagged it, I won’t waste time trying to find it but it was quite significant. You’ll find it when you read the book!)
So that’s really the nature of the book and I’m now going to get on to these critiques. The critiques are really the closest I can find to a government position because the government has absolutely refused to respond to my book –they have treated it with lofty distain as if it didn’t exist. But these critics who’ve written these quite substantive criticism, in particular, Frame and Clark have, have I think, represented what is probably pretty close to a government position.
There are four main elements in these critiques. The first one, and probably the most important is that I haven’t proved my thesis, my case or my theory. So it’s a evidentiary critique. It’s a critique that my evidence basically is unsound and doesn’t stand up. There are different versions of this. Senator Brandis basically said, there’s no case to answer. The senate dealt with it, found it was OK –and that was what he told a worldwide BBC audience. That’s untrue. The senate did not find it was OK. From the very beginning the senate said there’s got to be an inquiry into the disruption element. For a time the senate found the Australia Defense Force/border protection side of things OK, but not for long because as soon as this cable that opens my book was released in February 2003, it became clear, and the chair of the committee, Senator Peter Cook publicly complained in parliament that the evidence which they’d be given and on which they relied on coming to the conclusion that the ADF had done nothing untoward was wrong. We were told that this was the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth and then we found it wasn’t. That’s the effect of what he said in parliament. So both sides are open to question now in terms of what the parliament thinks and I’ll come back to what the senate thinks later, because it is a crucial point.
Henderson, Frame and Clark, they said there were some problems, some inconsistencies in the record –they do go so far as that, so they are a little bit more realistic than Brandis but they say that more benign explanations are possible than the one I came up with. They don’t tell us what these more benign explanations are.
Frame said that we really need to trust the government in the national security area and this is very much Tom Frame’s position. It’s his position on Iraq, it’s his position I think on everything. The government knows best, trust them. But I suppose if you’re the military bishop for the defense force, you can’t have any other position than that, but I don’t find it an intellectually very tenable position.
[interjection: "what’s his position on god?"]
Ah, well you see I agree with him on that, I have a blind faith in God –but I don’t have a blind faith in the Howard government and I think Tom Frame does.
He talks about the need to keep national security secrets in war, which touches on a very important point because we were not at war with these people. They were refugees, they didn’t come bearing arms, they didn’t seek to invade Australia, they simply wanted a place of refuge to rebuild their lives. Yet of course we treated them as a grave threat and behaved as if we were at war with them. So I don’t find that tenable either.
Clark has an interesting point. She says my book is under–researched and overanalyzed. What she means by that is that she says I didn’t talk to enough survivors. I didn’t go around Australia talking to them, taking evidence from them, taking statements I suppose. And I didn’t go to Indonesia to research the story on the ground in Indonesia. Well my response to that are firstly that there were only seven in Australia and they’re all under the pressure, huge pressure of Temporary Protection Visas which means that everything they say they have to think "how is this going to effect my TPV". And on the idea of going to Indonesia &ndash: I mean that’s just crazy because if my story is true, if my questions are true I don’t think I’d survive long in Indonesia to be quite honest because there are many ways in Indonesia where people can simply be disappeared. Not that I’m lacking in personal courage, but I’ve got three young children and I don’t particularly want to leave them fatherless. So what I did was, as I said earlier, I relied on the body of evidence that came through the media, came through survivors immediately after the tragedy and I think that is very strong evidence because these people had no reason at that point in time to lie or to make up stories. I think perhaps that the quality of evidence from survivors declines as time passes because, we all begin to confuse in our minds what we’ve experienced and what we’ve read. And we may be subject to various kinds of pressures so I think the early evidence is the strongest evidence.
The real answer though to that critique that I haven’t proved my case is simply that it wasn’t my job to prove my case. There’s a delightful passage in the book, for those of you who have read it, where Senator Brandis browbeats me on the day I gave evidence trying to make me either, make my allegation or say there was no case to be answered and I simply refused. I said I am not going to allege and I’m not going to say there is no case to be answered. I’m saying there’s a series of inconsistencies and unanswered questions which need to be addressed and he got very cross with me and he said I was willing to wound but afraid to strike and I was cowardly and I was besmirching the reputation of the ADF. It was pretty heavy stuff actually. But is said, no, no senator it’s your job to find the answers to these questions that I am raising. I can’t find the answers to them myself and that remains my position.
Now at this point I want to emphasise that the senate has taken a position very close to mine. They’ve passed four motions on this–five actually if you include the one about Abu Quassey, the people smuggler being bought to justice. Over the last three years, the opposition majority in the senate has passed five motions to do with SIEV X and three of them said quite specifically – we call on the government to set up a full powers independent judicial inquiry into the people smuggling disruption program conducted by Australian authorities in Indonesia and the sinking of SIEV X. That is a fact –it’s actually four facts, four resolutions. And that continues to be ignored by the critiques that are trying to undermine, if you like, the integrity and credibility of my book. But it’s fundamental that this is the Australian senate speaking. But of course they won’t pass any more motions like this after June when the government will have a majority in the senate but we do have that body of resolutions on the record and they cannot be denied.
The second critique is that my book is really basically dull and not a very good read. That was done very well by the Clark critique because in that critique it said, five times, I counted it, that yeh this is a good point that Kevin makes but Marr and Wilkinson have made it already in Dark Victory or Marr and Wilkinson have covered this better. The message that comes through – you don’t need to read this, it’s a peripheral, redundant book –it’s all in Marr and Wilkinson’s Dark Victory. Which is very clever and subtle because of course deservedly Marr and Wilkinson’s Dark Victory has a very high reputation among the sorts of people who care about these issues and I believe it’s a very fine book. However it does not address SIEV X properly, and it’s chapter, The Boat That Sank in the first edition is very deficient and it produced a very deficient conclusion – that Australia did not kill those who drowned on SIEV X but their deaths cannot be ruled out entirely or some such phrase like that. It was a very weak and very unhelpful conclusion. It came right at the time that this cable was produced in the senate and I think its tone of exoneration, because of Marr and Wilkinson have such a high reputation as investigative journalists, was extremely unhelpful to the cause. Interestingly, in the second edition of Dark Victory, which has probably sold about 20 000 copies by now, they quietly took out that sentence and replaced it by a sentence that – mystery continues to swirl around the real truth on SIEV X, or something. There was no author preface to explain the reason for that change, which I find rather unscholarly. So we don’t know why the change was made.
Anyway, Dark Victory somehow didn’t really do the job on SIEV X but we’re being told that it was a better written book than mine and it really says all that needs to be said about SIEV X, so that’s the second one. You’ll just have to judge for yourself on that. Quite a few reviews have said that my book is a thrilling read or an exciting read, so I guess these are subjective judgments.
The third criticism is that my book has distressed honourable public servants and military people and police people. You know decent hard working Australians who are doing their job and are trying to do the right thing in their job. The answer that I have to that is that sometimes you do have to give things a shake. I mean there had to be inquires into police corruption in Australia. There are a lot of good police men and women in Australia but there had to be inquires. There was such a thing as the Nuremberg laws that said that obeying orders is no defense when you are asked to do dishonourable or illegal or immoral things. Sometimes public servants do have to exercise moral judgments and quite a bit of this book is about how military people in particular in Operation Relex were put in a position where they were asked to exercise moral judgments and failed to do so and I cite two examples other than SIEV X. There’s the affair of the children overboard boat where over 200 people were kept on board an un–seaworthy boat for 22 hours and were only taken off when it sank. The risk of loss of life then was very great and that was something that should simply not have happened.
The other one of course was the Palapa –the boat that was eventually rescued by the Norwegian freighter, the TAMPA which had been over flown by Australian Coastwatch aircraft twice the day before and obvious distress signals by the people on board had been ignored –waving their shirts in the air and so on. The boat nearly sank that night in the storm which would have been an earlier SIEV X if it had happened. So public servants, military people and police people are accountable morally for what they do and I don’t apologise for putting on the public record the questions that this story gives rise to. And I think they’ll also feel much better when they eventually come clean.
The fourth argument it that it distresses the survivors and the bereaved to have written this book because it impedes their emotional recovery and it basically confuses them. Well that’s nonsense too. On that argument you should have never had a inquiry into the government’s response to Cyclone Tracy because people were upset over Cyclone Tracy. You should never have had an inquiry into the ACT government handling of the Canberra bushfires because 421 people lost their homes in the bush fires. It’s nonsense. The need for public accountability and the need to respect the distress of people involved in the tragedy can be reconciled if the matters is handled properly.
Indeed I find the argument quite bizarre because the cruelty to these people –to the survivors and the bereaved doesn’t come from the fact that I’m trying to get to the truth of what’s happened, I think they actually welcome that. The cruelty comes from two things above all. Firstly holding back the names of the people who traveled on the boat and the people who died. The victims, the survivors on the boat and the bereaved husbands and fathers in Australia cannot be a hundred percent sure that their relatives were on the boat, that were lost because no final list of the dead has ever been produced. It’s not that the list isn’t available –it’s already been admitted by Senator Ellison, the Minister for Justice in charge of the Australian Federal Police, that the list is available. The Australian federal police and the authorities have it but it comes from a confidential source and it may never, never be release. Now isn’t that utterly disgusting? I mean, can you imagine the survivors of the Bali bombing being told the list of the dead will never be release? Can you imagine the survivors of the World Trade Centre being told the list of the dead will never be released? And yet we think it’s good enough to tell the survivors of this equally appalling tragedy –oh no we’re never going to release the list of names. You’re just going to have to guess or assume that your family has died on that boat. There will never be an official list even though we have it.
The second thing that is disgusting of course, which I’ve already alluded to, is the keeping these people on Temporary Protection Visas when every other country that took SIEV X survivors immediately gave them permanent residence as refugees. Only Australia, took 7 out of the 45, and put them on Temporary Protection Visas. It would have been better if we’d taken none because they could have gone to somewhere like Norway or Sweden or Finland or Canada or New Zealand and started their new lives properly. We actually are prolonging their pain. To me that is one of the most important and urgent public agenda items of the SIEV X story that I’d like to see organizations like your own take up because it’s a terrible cruelty.
So that’s my response to the critique and I hope that you’ve found it interesting because I haven’t really said all those things before.
As Kathy said, the book sold something approaching 3500 copies which I’m very pleased about. I’m pleased about it because it’s breaking this conspiracy of silence to forget the name of SIEV X. With 3500 copies sloshing around Australia it’s going to be fairly hard to forget it I think and that’s why the more copies I’ve sold the better. My publisher Henry Rosenbloom and Scribe has entered it for three literary awards –the NSW Premiers award, the WA Premiers award and one I hadn’t heard of, the Colin Roderick award. So at least that means that some of the literati are going to have to read it and make some sort of judgment on it so I’m very happy about that.
Where does the issue go from here? It really now depends more on other people than on myself because I think I’ve made most of my contribution that I can make in writing this book and I’ve paid the price for that in becoming a bit a pariah around Canberra. I’ll never work in Canberra again as I was saying to Annie Gastin on the ABC today. But that’s alright because I couldn’t have slept straight in my bed if I hadn’t done it. But there are things other people can do like putting in on book lists for courses in law or in political science or in public administration or indeed in defense colleges. There’s no reason that this book shouldn’t be on the book lists in those kind of institutions for students to study and think about and debate. That takes a certain courage of course by university academics to do that, but I think it’s appropriate at this stage.
I’ve been very glad that there are activists who’ve kept the subject of SIEV X alive in different kinds of ways. I am going to close my prepared remarks by just talking about that to just remind you of how much there is going on about SIEV X.
[tape cut out.]
...on SIEV X and Marg and I worked very closely in 2002 and the early part of 2003. Unfortunately we’ve kind of gone our separate ways a bit since then, but I continue to pay great tribute to her work in creating and maintaining that site. Mary Dagmar Davies with her unique website Jannah, the SIEV X memorial –a kind of a on–line condolence book where people from all over Australia can come in with condolence messages to the victims of SIEV X. A wonderful concept. Steve Biddulph and Rob Horsefield and Bett Gibbings from the Uniting Church who developed the idea of a schools memorial project where high school kids and art students in year 10 would submit plans for a SIEV X permanent memorial to be built in Canberra on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin and that exhibition is touring Australia now. That’s not really involved with the criminal accountability side of things. It’s simply about commemorating the tragedy as an Australian tragedy, it’s about owning the tragedy, it’s about saying this is a part of our history, so it’s very important and very valuable. There’s been very fine literature already written sparked off by SIEV X. There’s been stories by Eva Sallis –very powerful stories in a book called Majaf. There’s been stories and accounts by Arnold Zaval who’s been very active in Melbourne. Kate Durham, the wife of Julian Burnside has done wonderful paintings based on SIEV X. There’s a folk group called Those Bloody McKennas who wrote a wonderful song called Swept Away about SIEV X which is a beautiful song. There is a play called A Certain Maritime Incident –which is real black comedy. I saw it in Sydney and in Canberra –put on by the Sydney University Drama Department. Some of you might know about Kate Bernhard and Gordon Thompson – their activity on Christmas Island which was really a trip Kate did up there from Perth to help the Vietnamese boat people imprisoned up there but she and Gordon also found time to dedicate a park bench on the bay looking north from Christmas Island to the victims of SIEV X, which was terrific. There is a similar park bench on a headland somewhere in Hobart which I hope to see in a week or so. And most recently there’s an organisation called the Family of SIEV X which is a unique concept because it actually involves the SIEV X victims –the survivors and the bereaved as active subjects, and not merely as objects. Not that it’s bad that they should be objects of grief and compassion but here they’re actually coming together themselves to form a kind of self–help group to exchange experiences – to try and through solidarity and mutual support give each other greater resources to deal with all of this. One of the bereaved, Mohammed Al Gatih is working with Sue Hoffman and of course this probably means that Mohammed will never get an Australian permanent residents visa –he’ll be a marked man so he shows enormous courage I think in doing this.
The truth will come out on SIEV X. Some skeptical journalists say "oh well, Tony the story’s dead now it’s lost its legs." One journalist told me "Tony, nothing you do now makes any difference, the story’s dead. You’re just putting new layers on a layer cake". Sure, journalists are often cynical, some aren’t, but I believe that there will be disclosures, there’ll be whistleblowers there’ll be death bed disclosures from people who know something but have felt constrained in their lifetime from saying anything about it because of loyalty oaths or whatever. Maybe we need John Howard to retire from the Prime Ministership –I think under Peter Costello things could be a lot different in the Liberal Party. I’m not sure what would happen under Kim Beazley –I’ve asked for a view from him on the SIEV X –I haven’t got it yet.
Meanwhile this book and Marg Hutton’s website continue to bear witness to the story and so I feel that it was worth doing this.
I’ll finish on the same note that I started –thank you all for inviting me to Darwin. I would never have got here otherwise and I’m very grateful for this opportunity to see another important part of my own country. So I’ll be happy to take questions in discussion.